In One Sentence

To get shit done, you need to build good systems instead of just relying on discipline.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. A habit is a reliable solution to a recurring problem that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.
   • The four stages of a habit
     1. Cue: a trigger, a tiny bit of information that predicts a reward.
     2. Craving: the motivational force. Without some level of motivation or desire – without craving a change – we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
     3. Response: the actual habit you perform, a thought or an action.
     4. Reward: end goal of every habit, we chase rewards because they satisfy the craving (and in turn us) and because they teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future.
     • Example: Being stuck at work
       1. Cue: you hit a stumbling block on a project at work.
       2. Craving: you feel stuck and want to relieve your frustration.
       3. Response: you pull out your phone and check social media.
       4. Reward: you satisfy your craving to feel relieved. Checking social media becomes associated with feeling stalled at work.
   • Behaviors and Habits are
     • Effortless, when they are Obvious, Attractive, Easy, Satisfying
     • Difficult, when they are Invisible, Unattractive, Hard, Unsatisfying
2. Habits and behaviors are tied to your identity and they are a wish to change how you currently feel.
   • True behavior change is identity change:
     • The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
     • The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
     • The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.
   • A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.
     • When you binge-eat or doom-scroll on social media or put in your headphones to listen to music you do not necessarily want to do the action itself. You want to do it because it makes you feel different from how you feel at the current moment. You want to change your internal state.
3. Actionable tips to start a new habit or stop an existing one:
   • Make the new habit a part of your identity. Your goal is not to run but to be healthy and to have good endurance, therefore you are a sporty person now.
   • Reframe your habits to highlight their benefits. This is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.
   • If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.
   • Make use of “habit stacking” where you connect your desired habit to an existing one.
     • “After I {CURRENT HABIT}, I will {NEW HABIT}.”
     • “After I brush my teeth, I will read 10 pages.”
   • A big part of what you do is influenced by the people you spend time with. If you want to start running, join a run club. If you want to stop gambling, maybe spend a bit less time around your casino friends.
   • Building a habit is about repetition and consistency. If you really don’t feel about doing your habit, try to at least do it in the most minimalist way possible. Better to show up and half-ass it rather than not doing it at all.
   • Make sure to reward yourself somehow when you have done the work. Finding a (non-destructive) way to make the ending of your habit satisfying helps to reinforce it and make it stick.
   • Track your habits to make them obvious and visible at all times. Bonus points if it’s in a public way where you feel a bit outside pressure because someone could be checking in on your habit.
   • To stop doing a habit, try to reverse everything you just learned about building a new habit.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for everyone that wants to change something in their life.
If you are chaotic and struggle to keep your life together, or if you have an ambitious goal that you want to reach, you will find something useful in this book.

It is in general a really nicely written book. It is well structured, has chapter summaries (awesome!), a collection of tips and tricks for different life scenarios and is practical and action-oriented.

How The Book Impacted Me

It made me reflect on my actions and how I spend my limited hours every day. I thought a lot about why I am always behaving in a certain way and how I can change to be more like the person I strive to be.

I started to put things where I need or notice them in the future. For example I put my running shoes out where I can see them when I come home from work.

I started an experiment in my environment: I removed my second monitor from my office-setup. For about 15 years I have always had a second monitor. But when I thought about what I do on the computer, I noticed that it’s a lot more tempting to have some video or news page running on the second display or something else that just distracts from what I actually want to do.
In some situations, I expect just having one monitor to be a little bit inconvenient, but my thesis is that I will be much more focused on doing what I care about and that I am not switching between tasks as often as before.

Best Quotes

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way – even the bad ones – which is why you repeat them.

One of the deepest human desires is to belong.
And this ancient preference exerts a powerful influence on our modern behavior.
Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering.

When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.

If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

The average person spends over two hours per day on social media. What could you do with an extra six hundred hours per year?

No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

Summary & Notes

DISCLAIMER:
The following notes are my raw notes for each chapter in the book. Read them as a quick overview and not as fully fleshed-out and thought-out sentences. The titles are the same as the book's chapter titles.

Introduction: My Story

Science supports the claims and methods in this book, but it’s not a research paper, it’s an operating manual.

The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

1 – The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

Small habits have a big impact on your life, since you repeat them daily multiple times. A habit that makes your life 1% worse everyday vs. a habit that makes your life 1% better every day will drastically change how happy you are in life.

Don’t think about goals, focus on how to improve your systems.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

2 – How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

Established seem to stick around forever – especially the bad ones. Changing them can be challenging because people often try to change the wrong thing and do it the wrong way.

Layers to behavioral change

The author uses a three-layer example for behavioral change:

1. Changing your outcomes: this is about your results and most of the goals you set fall into this layer e.g. losing weight, writing a book, winning a competition etc.
2. Changing your process: this is about your habits and systems e.g. a plan to go to the gym, a morning routine, a system for decluttering your home etc.
3. Changing your identity: this is about you and your beliefs e.g. your worldview, your self image, your biases etc.

The most popular but ineffective way is to try to go from outcomes (1) to a new identity (3):

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.

Example:

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette.
When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs.
The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.

Your old identity sabotages you

Your “old” identity sabotages your new plans for changing if you don’t let it go.
That is because behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.

True behavior change is identity change:

• The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
• The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
• The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

Another big blocker that sabotages people is when they repeat the same stories to themselves everyday for their whole life:

• “I’m terrible with directions.”
• “I’m not a morning person.”
• “I’m bad at remembering people’s names.”
• “I’m always late”
• “I’m not good with technology.”
• “I’m horrible at math.”
  When you blindly follow these identity-norms, your self will accept them as a fact that you cannot change.

How to change (for the better)

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

The best way to change who you are is to change what you do.
Remember: if nothing changes, nothing is going to change.

1. Figure out who you want to be and why.
2. In small steps, behave more and more like your desired identity
   1. Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”
   2. Ask yourself, “What would that person do in situation xyz?”

Example: “I am not complaining about going for a run. I am a fit person and therefore I like to go running. And also of course I take the stairs instead of the elevator, that’s what a fit person does.” etc.

3 – How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

Definition of a habit:

A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.

or

Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.

A habit is naturally formed by the feedback loop that guides all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently.
They are useful for us, because we face thousands of small decisions in everyday life and habits help the mind to automate certain behaviors to save energy.

Thinking about your habits may seem nerdy, unnecessary and restricting but:

Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks – when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills – then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.

The four stages of a habit

1. Cue
   1. A trigger, a tiny bit of information that predicts a reward.
2. Craving
   1. The motivational force. Without some level of motivation or desire – without craving a change – we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
3. Response
   1. The actual habit you perform, a thought or an action.
4. Reward
   1. End goal of every habit, we chase rewards because they satisfy the craving (and in turn us) and because they teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future.

Habit examples with the four stages

Stuck at work:

1. Cue
   1. You hit a stumbling block on a project at work.
2. Craving
   1. You feel stuck and want to relieve your frustration.
3. Response
   1. You pull out your phone and check social media.
4. Reward
   1. You satisfy your craving to feel relieved. Checking social media becomes associated with feeling stalled at work.

Turning on the light:

1. Cue
   1. You walk into a dark room.
2. Craving
   1. You want to be able to see.
3. Response
   1. You flip the light switch.
4. Reward
   1. You satisfy your craving to see. Turning on the light switch becomes associated with being in a dark room.

The 1st Law – Make It Obvious

4 – The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

The human brain is a prediction machine. It is continuously taking in your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across. With time this process happens automatically without thinking about it.
That is why you do not need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin.
This is what makes habits useful.
This is also what makes them dangerous.

Because you can behave like a robot that is controlled by a program and not know why you do some things, you must begin the process of behavior change with awareness.

One method would be to take a process you want to improve and write down everything you do and then label it with a + (good habit), – (bad habit) or = (neutral habit).

But beware about labelling habits:

The labels “good habit” and “bad habit” are slightly inaccurate. There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way – even the bad ones – which is why you repeat them.

5 – The Best Way to Start a New Habit

Implementation intention

The most common cues that trigger a habit are time and location.
We can use these cues by writing down what the author calls an “implementation intention”:

• “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
• or
• “I will {BEHAVIOR} at {TIME} in {LOCATION}.”

For example:
“When I lay down into my bed, I will grab my book and read a chapter.”
“I will go running at 17:15 when I get home from work in the forest.”

This works because having something written down in a specific plan will make it easy for you to just do what you have written down. You don’t have to think and debate with yourselves every time if you should go running or not. You don’t need to be motivated at the right time.

Habit stacking

The “Diderot Effect”:

Obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.

Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing.
We can make a positive use of the Diderot Effect by connecting habits to one another. This is what the author calls “habit stacking”.

• “After I {CURRENT HABIT}, I will {NEW HABIT}.”

For example:
“After I finish my coffee each morning, I clear out the dishwasher if necessary.”

6 – Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

[[Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior]].

For example in stores, people often choose a product not because of what it is, but of where (how conveniently placed) it is.

The environment where we live and work and spend most of our time daily is often made to not lead to certain behaviors, because there is no trigger for that behavior.
Example: when your home is all tidy and cleaned up, you never stumble upon your running shoes and do not think about going for a run.

When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.

Habits are also tied to contexts and environments. If you do not change the environment of a bad habit, it’s hard to not follow through with that habit. For good habits that have no place in your daily environment it is a challenge to cause a triggering cue in you to make you do them.

…each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose. Sleep comes quickly when it is the only thing that happens in your bedroom.
If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.

7 – The Secret to Self-Control

People that seem to have more self-control or discipline are often just good at structuring their lives so they don’t need to rely on heroic willpower. They spend less time in tempting environments.

You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.

That’s why it is a bad idea to just rely on discipline to not follow through with bad habits. Sooner or later you will be caught in a weak moment where your discipline-tank is empty and you will fall back to your unwanted habit.

A better idea is to reduce your exposure to the cue that triggers your bad habits. For good habits, you want to make the cues obvious, for bad habits, you want to make them invisible.

Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.

The 2nd Law – Make It Attractive

8 – How to Make a Habit Irresistible

Supernormal Stimuli

There are hugely exaggerated cues that make our brain light up like a Christmas tree and trigger its underlying habit with tremendous power. These attractive cues are called supernormal stimuli.
Example: Junk food makes your reward system for calories go crazy.

The more attractive a cue and the opportunity behind it are, the more likely they lead to building a habit.
This of course gets exploited by our modern systems. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.

We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.

The interesting thing is, that the dopamine that gets released by doing a seemingly positive habit is not only release when you experience the pleasure from the habit’s reward, but also before doing it when you are only anticipating the rewards. This dopamine spike makes us do whatever will lead us to this predicted rewards.

Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.

Desire is the engine that drives behavior.

To make your habits stick, you need to make them as attractive as possible.

Temptation Bundling

Linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

Example:
You want to watch Netflix, you need to exercise to be fit.
Temptation bundling: you only watch Netflix while you are on your stationary bike pedaling.

You can also combine “Habit Stacking” and “Temptation Bundling”.

1. After I {CURRENT HABIT}, I will {HABIT I NEED}.
2. After {HABIT I NEED}, I will {HABIT I WANT}.

9 – The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

One of the deepest human desires is to belong.
And this ancient preference exerts a powerful influence on our modern behavior.
Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering.

We imitate habits of three groups the most:

The close

Our friends and family apply a kind of an invisible peer-pressure upon us that makes us do the same things.

Saying: “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

The best way to build good habits is to hang around people that have that habit. New behavior seems much more achievable when you see others do it every day.

The many

We like to fit in and start doing what everyone else is doing.
It’s hard to stand your ground and go against societal norms.

When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

The powerful

We are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration and status.

Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.

10 – How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

Predicting the future

Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
There are many different ways to address the same underlying motive. One person might learn to reduce stress by smoking a cigarette. Another person learns to ease their anxiety by going for a run. Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.

In chapter 8 we learned that there is a dopamine spike in anticipation of a reward for doing a certain habit. This tells us that the brain runs on predictions.
When we perceive a cue, our brain runs a prediction to figure out what could be made out of that cue.
We predict what a specific response to a situation could be and how it best satisfies our desires. We are constantly predicting what will happen in the next moment.

Feelings, emotions, cravings

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.

When you binge-eat or doom-scroll on social media or put in your headphones to listen to music you do not necessarily want to do the action for what it is. You want to do it because it makes you feel different from how you feel at the current moment.
You want to change your internal state.

Reframing

Habits are more attractive if we can associate them with positive emotions.
One way of doing this is to “reframe” how we think about them.

Change “I have to” to “I get to”.

I have to cook dinner. –> I get to cook dinner.
I have to clean my room. –> I get to clean my room.
etc.

Reframing allows us to see these behaviors not as burdens but as opportunities. You can also combine it with gratitude practice.

I have to go to my friend’s house and help him move all his furniture.
–>
I get to help my friend move and I am thankful I have such a close friend.

Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.

The 3rd Law – Make It Easy

11 – Walk Slowly, but Never Backward

Sometimes we procrastinate by doing seemingly productive things when we just plan out the perfect approach forever but never take any action.
This is what the author calls being in motion. You are planning and strategizing and learning.

But this does not produce a result.
You want to take action. This is the type of behavior that actually leads to an outcome.

If motion doesn’t lead us to results, why do we do it?
We do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.

If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

–> habits form based on how often you do them, not on how long you do them.

12 – The Law of Least Effort

Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient.

In Physics, there is the “Principle of Least Effort”. Our behavior works in the same way. By default, we choose the action with the best value-effort-ratio. We are motivated to do what is easy.

The 3rd law that says we should make our habits easy is not meant in the sense that we should only do easy things. The idea is that we design our environments and habits in a way that makes it as easy as possible to do the desired habit in any given moment, whether it is a hard or easy.

On the other side, try to make undesired habits as hard as possible to do.

Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce friction associated with our good habits and increase friction associated with our bad ones.

Resetting the room

A strategy for our home is to “reset the room” after we finished whatever we do in that room. It basically boils down to “clean up after yourself”.

• After watching TV and eating a bowl of popcorn, put the TV remote back where it belongs and wash the popcorn bowl
• When you get out of your car, take any trash you have with you
• When you take a bath, quickly wipe down the mirror or clean the toilet while the water is filling up
• When you want to exercise after work, put out your gym clothes and water bottle in the hallway where they will be the first thing you see when you come home from work

The idea is to always use small chunks of time and do lots of small cleaning actions instead of letting everything pile up and then have to clean up for 2 hours straight. You are also always ready to do what you want to do, since everything is nice and tidy and in the place where you expect it.

The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action.

This can also be used to make bad habits more difficult and to add more friction.
For example if you watch too much TV and would like to spend your time with something more productive, each time after you watched TV, unplug it and move it into a different room or storage closet.
If you have to have a long and hard setup before you can watch TV each time, you will only do it if you really want to do it. It’s not just a quick easy default option anymore.

These tricks are unlikely to curb a true addiction, but for many of us, a little bit of friction can be the difference between sticking with good habits or sliding into a bad one.

13 – How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

Decisive moments

Even though a habit can sometimes be completed in just a few seconds, it can determine the actions we take for minutes or hours afterwards.

Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway. They lead you down a path and, before you know it, you’re speeding toward the next behavior. It seems to be easier to continue what you are already doing than to start doing something different. You sit through a bad movie for two hours. You keep snacking even when you’re already full. You check your phone for “just a second” and soon you have spent twenty minutes staring at the screen. In this way, the habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking.

These moments that are like a crossroads that lead to good or bad behavior for a while are referred to by the author as decisive moments.

The Two-Minute Rule

When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.

Starting a new habit can feel exciting and you have lots of motivation, which makes us go too hard too fast very easily.
But it is more important to be consistent rather than intense when trying to instill a new habit.
Go small, do your new habit only for a short while, rather than not do it at all.

Once you have started with your habit, it is much easier to continue doing it.

The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved.

You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.

14 – How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

Commitment Devices

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.
Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.

Automate what you can so you do not need to choose what to do every time and you already pick the good choice (because you automated it).

But automation can sometimes work against us.
For example when binge-watching or scrolling social media it’s hard to stop, since the next episode just automatically starts when you do not interrupt it, and the social media feeds just goes on forever and automatically shows you new posts.

The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding work.

The average person spends over two hours per day on social media. What could you do with an extra six hundred hours per year?

See Digital Minimalism

The 4th Law – Make It Satisfying

15 – The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

Our brain is made for an environment where our actions give instant rewards for good behavior. I am hungry -> I eat something -> good. The sun goes down and I am tired -> I go to sleep -> good.
This is an immediate-return environment.

But in modern society, with our ancient brain we live in a delayed-return environment.
A lot of good actions today lead to good returns only later in life.
I work for a day -> I get my paycheck at the end of the month.
I go running -> I am healthy next year or when I am old.
I save money each month -> I have enough money when I retire.

Time Inconsistency

The difference between the way our society works today and the way our brain is working is emphasised by us placing a high value on instant gratification.
This tendency is called time inconsistency or hyperbolic discounting.

Your brain evaluates rewards inconsistent across time. You value the present more than the future.

The consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.
Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

How to Turn Instant Gratification to Your Advantage

The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful – even if it’s in a small way. The feeling of success is a signal that your habit paid off and that the work was worth the effort.

–> Get your instant gratification by making your good habits satisfying.

In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself.
In the real world, good habits tend to feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with something. Early on, it’s all sacrifice.

Giving yourself small, satisfying, immediate rewards is important because then you keep on with the good habit. When you do that, the real, delayed rewards can accumulate in the background.
Specifically, the ending of your habit should be satisfying, since it makes up most of our lasting impression of what we have done.

16 – How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

Making progress is satisfying. When we can tick off a day from our workout calendar or have the page number on the book go up it makes us feel good.
We can use this feeling of progress to makes us stick to our habits by using a habit tracker.

Habit Tracker

The most basic habit tracker is just a calendar where you tick off each day if you have done the habit.

A good goal is to “never break the chain”, which means that you never miss a day of your habit, but the quality of the habit must not always be perfect. You put most of your focus on showing up to your habit, not the quality.

Why a Habit Tracker Works

• When you see your habit tracker, you are reminded to do your habit
• It is satisfying and rewarding to progress your habit tracker
• It keeps you honest since your habit is materialized in the real world and not just a thought in a brain where you think you know how often you did it. Normally, we think we act better than we do.
• You focus more on the process and showing up rather than on a result

Recovering From a Habit Breakdown

No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible.

Try to live after the rule “never miss twice”, which means that you can skip or miss one day of your habit, but never twice in a row.

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

I think this principle is so important that I’ll stick to it even if I can’t do a habit as well or as completely as I would like. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all. –> Don’t put up a zero.

17 – How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

We avoid an experience when failing it is painful. When the failure is relatively painless, it gets ignored.

The more immediate and more costly a mistake is, the faster you will learn from it.

Habit Contract

A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through. Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.

Example:
For each week in the next three months where I have not been to the gym four times, I will give my accountability partner $100.

Now you have someone else to uphold your promises to and you are more motivated since someone else is “watching over you”.

Advanced Tactics – How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

18 – The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)

Something something motivational bro science.

19 – The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

Flow theory says that you are most focused and productive when a task is just a little bit harder (~4%) than what you are able to do.
Start your habits easy so you can stick with it even when the conditions aren’t perfect.
But when your habit is established, it’s important to slowly advance it and make it harder in small steps.
These improvements and challenges keep you engaged and lead to actually growing whatever goal you have with your habit.

Overcoming boredom makes success

Successful people that constantly fulfil their habits also feel a lack of motivation from time to time. But they find a way to keep it up during rough time despite the feeling of boredom.

Machiavelli:

“Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”

Try to vary the way you do your habits, change small things to not get bored and lose motivation.

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.

20 – The Downside of Creating Good Habits

When your habits finally gets automatic you can fall into a trap of not really paying attention how you do things and not improving anymore. It becomes easier to let mistakes slide since you do it in the same way every time that you don’t pay the same amount of attention as when you were just building up the habit.
You fall into mindless repetition.

Reflection

Reflection and review enables long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvements.

• Decision Journal
  • Keep a journal of your major decisions you make each week. Why you made that decision and what you expected to come out of the decision. At the end of the month, review if your assumptions where correct and where they went wrong.
• Annual Review and Integrity Report
  • In Winter, make an annual review of your habits, run the numbers for some stats and answer…
    • What went well this year?
    • What didn’t go so well this year?
    • What did I learn?
  • In Summer, make an Integrity Report where you check in to how your habits are going and where you lost track or are doing something in the wrong way. Think about the type of person you want to become and ask yourself…
    • What are the core values that drive my life and work?
    • How am I living and working with integrity right now?
    • How can I set a higher standard in the future?
• Beliefs that hold you back
  “The more sacred an idea is to us – that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity – the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
  The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.”
• Keep being flexible and adapt

Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

Lao Tzu

A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.