Atomic Habits

By James Clear

The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make Big Differences

The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

• Ex: Brailsford and British cycling team. He had a philosophy called aggregation of marginal gains: if you were to improve each part of cycling by 1%, output is a significant increase.
  • Found areas to improve cycling team performance: bike, clothes, massage,
  • Britain did amazing after these small changes
• We often overestimate the importance of defining moments, but small incremental gains can lead to huge success (think of exponential growth). Habits are those that enable these incremental gains.
• Similarly, accumulation of tiny losses and error can lead to huge problems later on
• Success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime transformation
• This is the reason why you should be more concerned over your trajectory vs. your current results, because trajectory can influence a lot. Outcomes are lagging measures of habits
• Beware of compounding effects of everything
• Breakthrough moments are also a product of many previous actins that are built through habits. Think of it like a critical threshold
  • This is one of the reasons why building habits that last is so hard: changes don’t come fast enough for human brain to notice. You may be stuck in the plateau of latent potential but you will break out
• Start focusing on the systems you are using to reach your goal
• Problems arise when we don’t think enough about the systems that we are using to reach your goal
  • Winners and loses have the same goals: remember that success has survivorship bias - we don’t get to hear about losers who had the same goals as winners
  • Achieving a goal is only a momentary change: to solve problems for good, you need an air tight system
  • Goals restrict happiness: happiness becomes tied to goals, which are rare to achieve anyways
  • Goals are at odds with long-term progress: if you only maintain your system to get a goal, then you will be back at square one after the goal has passed
• You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems
• Atomic habit: a tiny change or incremental improvement

How Your Habits Shape Your Identity and Vice Versa

• Changing our habits is challenging because either we try to change the wrong thing or we try to change the habit in the wrong way