Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.
What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
BETTER EVERY DAY
1% worse every day for one year.
0.99365 = 00.03
1% better every day for one year.
1.01365 = 37.78
This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment.
If you save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines.
when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there— that eventually leads to a problem.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations!
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up.
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.
habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. / It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
Mastery requires patience.
All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger.
Forget about goals, focus on system instead
What’s the difference between systems and goals?
- Goals are about the results you want to achieve.
Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
Example:
If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a milliondollar business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
Are goals completely useless?
- Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best formaking progress.
A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
Problem #1:
Winners and losers have the same goals.
Problem #2:
Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
Problem #3:
Goals restrict your happiness.
The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone
For years, happiness was always something for my future self to enjoy.
A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.
Problem #4:
Goals are at odds with long-term progress. a goal oriented mind-set can create a “yo-yo” effect. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it?
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.
A SYSTEM OF ATOMIC HABITS
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.
Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.
Habits are like the atoms of ourblives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement.
How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
WHY is it so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones?
Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.
THREE LAYERS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE
Outcomes are about what you get.
Processes are about what you do.
Identity is about what you believe.
When it comes to building habits that last—when it comes to building a system of 1 percent improvements — the problem is not that one level is “better” or “worse” than another. All levels of change are useful in their own way. The problem is the direction of change
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
It’s hard to change yournhabits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.
Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
Example: The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
THE TWO-STEP PROCESS TO CHANGING YOUR IDENTITY
This is a gradual evolution. We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
Each experience in life modifies your self-image Each habit is like a suggestion: “Hey, maybe this is who I am.
The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
It is a simple two-step process:
1.Decide the type of person you want to be.
2.Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. It’s a two-way street.
fundamentally habits are not about having something.
They are about becoming someone.
How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. The process of habit formation begins with trial and error.
Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly. As behavioral scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are,
simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn,
try differently.
As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases.
When a similar situation arises in the future, you know exactly what to look for. There is no longer a need to analyze every angle of a situation. Your brain skips the process of trial and error and creates a mental rule: if this, then that.
Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. In a sense, a habit is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past.
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.
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.
THE SCIENCE OF HOW HABITS WORK The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps:
cue, craving, response, and reward.
odds of survival and reproduction,
which is the deeper motive behind everything we do
Your mind is continuously analyzing your internal and external environment for hints of where rewards are located. Because the cue is the first indication that we’re close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving.
Cravings are the second step, and they are the motivational force behind every habit.
The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. It is a bit of information that predicts a reward.
Cues are meaningless until they are interpreted.
The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving.
Finally, the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.
The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your craving. Yes, rewards provide benefits on their own
Second, rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward detector. As you go about your life,
your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure.
In summary, the cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response,
which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and, ultimately,
becomes associated with the cue. Together, these four steps form a neurological feedback loop—cue, craving, response, reward; cue,
craving, response, reward—that ultimately allows you to create automatic habits. This cycle is known as the habit loop.
We can split these four steps into two phases: the problem phase and the solution phase. The problem phase includes the cue and the craving, and it is when you realize that something needs to change. The solution phase includes the response and the reward, and it is when you take action and achieve the change you desire.
All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem.
By the time we become adults, we rarely notice the habits that are running our lives.
THE FOUR LAWS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE
The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious.
The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive.
The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy.
The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.
The human brain is a prediction machine. It is continuously taking in your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across.
The more automatic a behavior becomes, the less likely we are to consciously think about it.Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing.
we must begin the process of behavior change with awareness.
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them. If you feel like you need extra help, then you can try Pointingand-Calling in your own life. Say out loud the action that you are thinking of taking and what the outcome will be.
This approach is useful even if you’re simply trying to remember a task on your to-do list. Just saying out loud, “Tomorrow, I need to go to the post office after lunch,” increases the odds that you’ll actually do it.
THE HABITS SCORECARD
You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.
The punch line is clear: people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
the format for creating an implementation intention is:
“When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead.
The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence:
I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
Studying. I will study Spanish for twenty minutes at 6 p.m. in my bedroom.
HABIT STACKING: A SIMPLE PLAN TO OVERHAUL YOUR HABITS
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention.
Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location,
you pair it with a current habit.
In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect.
No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
The habit stacking formula is:
“After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
Meditation. After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.
The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day.
habit stacking allows you to create a set of simple rules that guide your future behavior. It’s like you always have a game plan for which action should come next.
Minimalism. When I buy a new item, I will give something away.
(“One in, one out.”) Mood. When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering.
Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable.
Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.
People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
the most common form of change is not internal, but external: we are changed by the world around us. Every habit is context dependent.
The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision.
The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors.
Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight
For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do.
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P,E).
When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room.
HOW TO DESIGN YOUR ENVIRONMENT FOR SUCCESS
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.
If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house.
We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occur:
the home, the office, the gym. Each location develops a connection to certain habits and routines.
THE CONTEXT IS THE CUE
The good news? You can train yourself to link a particular habit with a particular context.
The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment.
Go to a new place—a different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use—and create a new routine there.
Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room. Take a break from the space where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought patterns.
Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is “One space, one use.”
You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task.
Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another.
If your space is limited, divide your room into activity zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating.
A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.
How to Make a Habit Irresistible
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.
One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive.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.
The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
Once a habit is formed, it is unlikely to be forgotten.
We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them. We follow the script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school,
our local community and society at large.
“A geniusisnotborn,butiseducatedandtrained.”ThePolgarsistersgrewupinaculturethat prioritized chessabove allelse—praisedthem forit, rewardedthemforit. Intheirworld, an obsessionwithchesswasnormal.
Wedon’tchooseourearliesthabits,weimitate them.Wefollow the scripthandeddownbyourfriendsandfamily,ourchurchorschool, our localcommunityandsociety at large.
Ifall ofyourfriendsaresharinganinsidejokeorusinganewphrase,you’ll wanttodoit,too,sotheyknowthatyou“getit.”Behaviorsare attractive when they help usfitin.
In manyways,thesesocial norms aretheinvisible rules thatguideyourbehavioreachday.Often,youfollowthe habitsof your culture withoutthinking,withoutquestioning, and sometimeswithoutremembering.
IfindthatIoftenimitatethebehaviorofthosearoundmewithout realizingit.Whentravelingtoothercountries,Iunconsciously imitatethelocal accentdespitereminding myselftostop.
Weimitatethehabitsofthreegroupsinparticular:
1.Theclose.
2.Themany.
3.Thepowerful.
Ourfriendsand familyprovideasortofinvisiblepeerpressurethatpullsusintheir direction.Your culturesetsyourexpectationforwhatis“normal.”Surroundyourself withpeoplewhohavethehabitsyouwanttohaveyourself.You’llrise together.
Oneofthemosteffectivethingsyoucandotobuildbetterhabitsis tojoinaculturewhereyourdesiredbehavioristhenormalbehavior.
Newhabitsseemachievablewhenyouseeothersdoingthemevery day.
Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.
Becoming an Early Riser Phase 1: Be home by 10 p.m. every night.
Phase 2: Have all devices (TV, phone, etc.) turned off by 10 p.m. every night.
Phase 3: Be in bed by 10 p.m. every night (reading a book, talking with your partner).
Phase 4: Lights off by 10 p.m. every night.
Phase 5: Wake up at 6 a.m. every day.
It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
The problem wasn’t knowledge. The problem was consistency.
The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change:
What is rewarded is repeated.
What is punished is avoided.
Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.
We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.
success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.
The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.
The habit stacking + habit tracking formula is:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].
there is a straightforward way to add an immediate cost to any bad habit: create a habit contract.
Nevermiss twice. If you miss one day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible.
The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg.
The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time.”
What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
Each habit unlocks the next level of performance. It’s an endless cycle.
A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
“I’m the CEO” translates to “I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.”
The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.
Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything.
a craving can only occur after you have noticed an opportunity.
Awareness comes before desire.
Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.”
The primary mode of the brain is to feel; the secondary mode is to think.
Our expectations determine our satisfaction.
Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance.