ON IDENTITY & BELIEF
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity
- The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become
- The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this
- Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized
- 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
- Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe
- Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs
- It’s hard to change your habits 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
- Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity
- The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it
- Over the long run, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way
- Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action
- Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are
- Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it
- Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins
ON SYSTEMS VS GOALS
- You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems
- Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress
- If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead
- The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking
- The implicit assumption behind any goal is: “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
- New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome
- If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you, the problem is your system
- Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals
- Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves
ON THE PROCESS & COMPOUND GROWTH
- 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. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running
- Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement
- Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations
- 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
- Small habits don’t add up. They compound. That’s the power of Atomic Habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results
- This is the meaning of the phrase atomic habits — a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power
- All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision
- Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold
- The task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time
- Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide
- It’s the accumulation of many missteps, a 1% decline here and there, that eventually leads to a problem
- The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them
- It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop
- The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements
ON TRAJECTORY & RESULTS
- You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results
- Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits
- Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits
- 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
- 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 that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before
ON TAKING ACTION
- Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it
- The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do
- Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement
- You don’t need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started
- Start with the thing you are most motivated to do…after the first domino falls, you can use the momentum to do a little more
- It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all
- Make your habits as easy as possible to start. Anyone can meditate for one minute, read one page, or put one item of clothing away
- The two-minute rule states: When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do
- If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection
- You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist
- The cost of procrastination is the life you could have lived
- The best is the enemy of the good
ON ENVIRONMENT & DISCIPLINE
- In the long-run (and often in the short-run), your willpower will never beat your environment. The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be
- When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower
- Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior
- Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it
ON MOTIVATION & CLARITY
- Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity
- The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us
- Once you’ve committed, pessimism becomes useful. Question things. Find holes in your plan
- What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers
ON AWARENESS & MISTAKES
- The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you change them
- A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote
- Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you
- The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows
ON SOCIAL INFLUENCE
- We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful
- It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run
- Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior
- The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual
- Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves
- The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us
ON CONSISTENCY & PROFESSIONALISM
- Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way
- Leadership begins with your behavior. People gravitate toward the standard you set, not the standard you request
ON MEANING & PURPOSE
- The secret is not to find the meaning of life, but to use your life to make things that are meaningful
- When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different
ON MENTAL TOUGHNESS
- My favorite type of mental toughness is not forcing one path, but being open to many paths: Whatever comes my way, I can handle it. Whatever resources I have, I can make it work. Whatever the day brings, I can thrive
ABOUT JAMES CLEAR: Author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits (25+ million copies sold, translated into 60+ languages). His work focuses on habit formation, decision making, and continuous improvement through small, consistent changes.
Leave a Reply