Atomic habits

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.”

1 Your Habits Can Compound For You or Against You

1.1 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

1.2 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.”

1.2.1 The Plateau of Latent Potential

• All big things come from small beginnings.

1.2.2 Forget About Goals, Focus on Systems Instead

• Three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh: “The score takes care of itself.”
• Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1.2.3 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.

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Updated by Fatma on April 04, 2023