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Atomic Habits

• The backbone is the four-step model of habits are cue, craving, response, and reward.

• Behavioral scientists realized that if you offered the right reward or punishment, you could get people to act in a certain way.

• It explains how our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs impact our behavior because our moods and emotions matter too.

• If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you will end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

• If you can get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you will decline nearly down to zero.

• Success is the product of daily habits.

• Time magnifies the margin between success and failure.

• Warren Buffet: “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”

Your Habits Can Compound For You or Against You

Positive Compounding

• Productivity compounds: Automating an old task & Mastering a new skill

• Knowledge compounds: Learning one new idea

Relationships compounds

+ Being a little bit nicer in each interaction

Negative Compounding

• Stress compounds

  • The frustration of a traffic jam
  • The weight of parenting responsibilities
  • The worry of making ends meet
  • The strain of slightly high blood pressure

• Negative thoughts compounds

  • The more you think yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way.
  • Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere.

• Outrage compounds

  • Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely result of single event. Instead, a long series of microagressions.

• The San Antonio Spurs is one of the most successful teams in NBA history:
  • “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it-but all that had gone before.”

The Plateau of Latent Potential

• All big things come from small beginnings.

Forget About Goals, Focus on Systems Instead

• Three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh: “The score takes care of itself.”

1. Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
2. Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. - You need to solve the problems at the systems level. - Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
3. Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness. - Goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you succeed or failed. - You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
4. Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress. - True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It is not about any single accomplishment.

A System of Atomic Habits

• Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold.
• The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.

2. How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

• Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons:

1. We try to change the wrong thing.

   Three layers of behavior change

   i. Changing your outcomes: Changing your results. Most of the goals are at this level. i.e. losing weight.

   ii. Changing your processes: Changing your habits and systems. Most of the habits are at this level. i.e. developing a meditation practice.

   iii. Changing your identity: Changing your beliefs. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and biases you hold are at this level. i.e. your worldview.

2. We try to change our habits in the wrong way.

• Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.

• The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.

• Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg.

• Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work.

Atomic Habits: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

Deep Work

https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

Updated by Fatma on March 24, 2021