Atomic Habits

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Atomic: An extremely small amount of a thing; the single irreducible unit of a larger system.

Habit: A routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation.

Importance of small habits

Contrary to popular beliefs massive success doesn't need massive changes. You need to change everything about your life right now to get successful overnight. And there are no overnight successes. If you get 1% better every day by the end of the year you would be 37 times better whereas if you get 1% worse every day you will decline to nearly zero by the end of the year.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement, the effect of your habits multiply as you repeat them over time.

Progress is slow-paced, especially, at the start. In the beginning, you don't see any results, but over time they come together and start showing results.

Goals Vs Systems

Goals are the results you want to achieve. Systems are the processes that lead you to your goals. For example, if you are a coach of a team. Your goal is to win the championship. Systems are how you recruit your players, how you train and practice, etc.

Systems are much more helpful in being successful and building habits than having goals.

There are four major problems regarding goals, and they are:

1. Winners and losers have the same goal: People focus only on the winners and think that the reason they won was that they wanted to achieve their goal of winning. But in reality, both winners and losers have the same goal but the way they work to achieve their goals i.e. system differs.

2. Achieving goal in a momentary change: Let's say your goal is to clean your room. You will achieve it with some effort but if you don't change your habits over time you will have your room messy again. Fix the inputs and outputs will fix themselves.

3. Goals restrict your happiness: People often tie their happiness with goals. They have the mentality that if you don't achieve your goal then you are a failure and you have no right to be happy. Fall in love with the process rather than the product, then you don't have to wait to achieve your goal to be happy.

4. Goals are at odds with the long term progress: A lot of people revert to their old habits because their goal is not there to motivate them further. With systems, it is an endless cycle of refinement and improvement.

Changing your habits

Changing habits is challenging because of 2 reasons:

1. We try to change the wrong things.

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

A lot of people try to their habits on what they wish to achieve. These kinds of habits are called outcome-based habits. The alternative to this is to focus on changing who we want to become. These kinds of habits are called identity-based habits. For eg. To start the habit of reading, reading a book is an outcome-based habit approach while the better alternative for this is to identify yourself as a reader and become one.

To change your identity in two steps. First, think and focus on what kind of person you want to be and then you win small wins to reinforce that identity to yourself. For eg., if you want to start the habit of writing daily, think of yourself as a writer who writes every day. So, every time you write one page your mind reinforces itself in believing that you are a writer.

How habits form

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

Every habit is formed in 4 steps. Cue, cravings, reward and response. The cue is the triggering point. Cue gives rise to craving. Getting this newsletter was a cue, wanting to know what's the book of the month this time is craving. When you get a craving you think of a reward, what would you get in reward, in our case reward is learning something new. And to get this reward, the action you take is called response. Response, in this case, is reading the newsletter.

Four laws of behaviour change

Here I will write how to make good habits and break bad habits. How to make good habits is written normally while how to break bad habits is written in italics.

First law: Make it obvious

Once you keep repeating a habit over and over it becomes part of your subconscious and sometimes it is not a good thing because the force of habit makes you do weird things. To tackle this and avoid making mistakes, the use of pointing and calling is a very good thing, you look at things, point and say their name. This is inspired by the Japanese Train Management system. A day to day example for this is when you are leaving your house, you put your keys in your pocket and say "I have kept keys", take your wallet and say "I have taken wallet", and repeat this for all the necessary things and every time you leave your house.

When you want to start a new habit, you declare what will you do when and where you will do it. This is called Implementation Intention. For eg, if you want to start working out, you say this out loud "I will workout today at 7 pm."

One more way is that you stick your new habit to another well-established habit. Like you can announce you will read a book after you drink your milk and go back to your bed. This is called habit stacking, it is inspired by the Diderot Effect. Diderot Effect is when you buy one possession but to accommodate that purchase you purchase other things and get stuck in this spiral.

Design your environment so that you see these cues to remind you of you to do new habits more obvious. Keeping a book on your pillow is one example.

To break your habits, you make the cues invisible. You hide them and stay away from them as much as you can. If you have the habit of checking your phone first thing in the morning and want to change that habit. You keep your phone in another room before you sleep so you can't check it first thing in the morning.

Second law: Make it attractive

Good habits are hard to stick because they are not very attractive. They give returns in long term. So, you will like quitting. This involves dopamine. Dopamine is a neuro-chemical that influences habits, pleasures, motivation and punishment. Your brain spikes in dopamine just before you get the reward. This makes the task more appealing to you. Give yourself an appropriate treat after doing the behaviour you want to do. You can apply habit stacking here too. You do a habit you want to include along with a habit you need to do.

3 groups that influence your habits the most are:

1. The close: The people you are close to your family, your friends, etc. Surround yourself with the people whom you want to be like.

2. The many: A large group of people influence your habits for eg your culture etc. This has downsides when it comes to personal identity. Because going against the group is hard and looked down upon too.

3. The powerful: The successful people of the society. People try to take up their habits to get success too.

All habits have an underlying craving. Your craving to eat junk food is your craving to eat food. To break your bad habits. You make your habits as repulsive as possible. You look at all the drawbacks and downsides of your bad habits and think are they worth it. The small-term pleasure they give you. And you proceed to break that bad habit.

Third law: Make it easy

Humans have a tendency that when deciding between two similar options, they tend to gravitate towards the option that requires less least effort because our brain is wired to conserve energy. So, you make your habits easier for you. For this, you practice repeatedly. The author here gives Jerry Uelsmann of the University of Florida did an experiment and divided his class into two groups. The first group would take as many photos as they could and they would be graded on the quantity of the photos they take. The second one would be graded on the quality and just had to click one almost perfect photo. In the end, the first group had better photos because they took more photos and did different experimentations and over time started learning from their mistakes to make better photos whereas the second group was just waiting and sitting for that one perfect photo. The more you repeat an activity the more structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity. This is called long-term potentiation, with each repetition cell to cell, signalling improves and neural connections tighten.

Neurons that fire together wire together - Hebb's law

You also don't need to start a new habit by doing it for hours the first time. Follow the two minutes rule, i.e. whenever you start a new you don't do it for more than 2 minutes and when you do this after some time your brain doesn't just let you stop after doing it just for two minutes and you would do it for more than two minutes.

Instead of asking how much time does it take to form a new habit, you should be asking how many times do you need to practice it.

If you want to break your bad habits, make them as hard as possible. For eg, if you want to break the habit of watching too much TV. You can unplug the TV after you finish watching it. You can step this up by keeping your TV in a closet so that you need to put more effort to watch TV and your brain will tend not to do it.

Fourth law: Make it satisfying

What is rewarded is repeated, what is punished is avoided.

The first three laws of behaviour change increase the odds that a behaviour will be repeated this time, the fourth law increases the odds that a behaviour will be repeated next time.

Immediate return environment when the actions instantly deliver clear and immediate outcomes. For eg eating winning a game, pressing a button to receive candy, etc. Delayed return environment when the actions you do now give the outcome later on. For eg, working for a whole month to receive a salary at the end of the month. Our brain has evolved to prefer quick payoffs to delayed ones because at that time uncertainty of life was much more than it is.

Bad habits feel good in the short term but costs in the future good habits cost now but feel good in the long term. So, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long term goals or not.

What is immediately rewarded is repeated and what is immediately punished is avoided.

So, to make good habits you give yourself small rewards so that they are satisfying to you. You can even make it satisfying by keeping a track of your habits so you can see the progress which makes you do them more. You can do this by using calendar markings, different phone apps, or even other creative visual trackers like 2 jars one empty and one with paper clips. Every time you do the good thing you move one paper clip.

To break your bad habits, make them as uncomfortable as possible. You can do this by making a habit contract. You commit that you won't do something and if you do it, you do a punishment that is pre-decided. It can be, not using your phone for a whole day, doing 10 push-ups every time you miss it, etc. You can find a contract template at atomichabits.com/contract

Advanced tactics to take you from good to great

Most proven scientific analysis of personality traits also known as big five, which break down into 5 spectra of behaviour

1. Openness to experience: from curious and inventive on one end to cautious and consistent on the other.

2. Conscientiousness: organised and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.

3. Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved (you likely know them as extroverts vs. introverts).

4. Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.

5. Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.

Choose habits that are best for you, don't do it because they are popular and everyone is doing it. To figure out which habit is best for you is trial and error. You can also use an alternative to this called Experimentation and Exploitation. You experiment with something for a limited period of time, if that thing is good for you and works with you, you do it more and more, basically exploiting it. And if even after that period of time, it doesn't work with you, you skip that and experiment with something new.

Your genes can help you in this. Genes don't determine your destiny but they determine your areas of opportunity. To check this you can ask yourself the following questions to narrow down the habits that would be helpful to you.

1. What feels like fun to me but is work to others? The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do

2. What makes you lose track of time? The blend of happiness and peak performance which people refer to as being in the zone.

3. Where do I get greater returns than the average person? Good results keep you motivated

4. What naturally comes to me? Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction

If your current skills aren't enough to make you stand out from the crowd, you can combine different skills to stand out. For eg, if you can draw good enough and can make good enough jokes, combine them to make funny comic strips.

Goldilocks Rule: Motivation is there for manageable difficulty. not too easy or too hard else you lose motivation.

Make things just the right amount of difficulty. Not too hard or too easy.

When you are working on a habit and keep repeating the same thing over and over, at some point it becomes boring. But you should work despite it being boring. This is what separates successful people from not successful people. Consistency is the key.

The bad side of habits

Once you get habitual of something, your brain becomes insensitive to new information and when things on autopilot are good enough, you stop trying to become better. This is what stops you from achieving mastery. Habits are necessary for mastery but are not enough.

Habit + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

Quotes:

1. Habits can help you have and become a lot of great things but habit is not about having something they are about becoming someone.

2. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

3. Whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviours you'll find.

4. 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.

5. Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

6. Distractions are a good thing because you need a distraction to practice meditation.

7. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of mistakes that follows.

8. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

9. When you can't win by being better, win by being different

10. Work hard on things that come easy to you.

11. Boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.

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

13. 13 Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

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