I just finished reading Atomic Habits. This book is the most insightful and actionable book I’ve read about developing and maintaining positive habits. I had read the book twice before and I felt that not much stuck with me; the book makes so much sense that it’s easy to concur with everything it says, and then promptly forget it. For this reason, this time I read it taking detailed notes from it.

If you are interested in improving your habits, I recommend you read this book in detail, also making notes on how to apply its ideas to your life.

Here are my notes:

• Chapter 1
• “A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly – and, in many cases, automatically.”
• “I believe I accomplished something just as rare: I fulfilled my potential. And I believe the concepts in this book can help you fulfill your potential as well.”
• “changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results ifyou’re willing to stick with them for years.”
• “in the long run, th equality of our livse often depends on the quality of our habits.”
• “with better results, anything is possible.”
• “this book is not an academic research paper; it’s an operating manual. (…) What I offer you is a synthesis of the best ideas smart people figured out a long time ago as well as the most compelling discoveries scientists have made recently.”
• “The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits – cue, craving, response, and reward – and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps.”
• “the framework I offer is (…) one of the first models of human behavior to accurately account for both the influence of external stimuli and internal emotions on our habits.”
• Note: would this be applicable at an institutional level?
• “this book is about what doesn’t change. It’s about the fundamentals of human behavior. (…) As long as human behavior is involved, this book will be your guide.”
• “his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains””.
• Note: how could this be related to whole system design, but faced incrementally? At first sight, it is completely at odds.
• “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything that you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant incrase when you put them all together.”
• “too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.”
• “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.”
• “habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”
• “A single decision is easy to dismiss. But when we repeat 1 perent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions (…), our small choices compound into toxic reults.”
• “Success is the product of daily habits – not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
• “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
• “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.”
• “Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it.”
• Productivity compounds: an extra task per day over a career makes a huge difference. And automating a task or mastering a new skill can have an even greater effect, because it frees your brain to do other things.
• Knowledge compounds.
• Relatinships compound.
• Stress compounds. “little stresses compound into serious health issues.”
• Negative thoughts compound.
• Outrage compounds.
• Bamboo sets roots for five years and then grows 27 meters in six weeks.
• “habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.”
• Progress is not linear. “It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.”
• “habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau – what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.”
• “WHen you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success.”
• “Change can take years – before it happens all at once.”
• Forget about goals, focus on systems instead.
• “I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.”
• “Ssytems are about the processes that lead to those results.”
• Can you ignore goals and still succeed by focusing on your processes?
• “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”
• “Winners and losers have the same goals”: survivorship bias.
• “Achieving a goal only changes your life or the moment.”
• “Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.”
• “Goals restrict your happiness.”
• “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.”
• “The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.”
• “If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.
• “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
• Atomic habits: “a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power”
• Chapter 2
• “once your habits are established, they seem to stick around forever”
• Obstacles to habit change: we try to change the wrong thing; and we try to change our habits in the wrong way.
• Layers, outside in: outcome, process, identity. Focus on identity change. “Behavior that is inongruent with the self will not last.”
• “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.”
• “Improvements are only temporary until they become part of 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.”
• “Your habits is how you embody your identity.”
• “Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness”.”
• “the process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.”
• “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
• “The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.”
• “1. Decide the type of person you want to be. 2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.”
• “The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.”
• “Identity change is the North Star of habit change.”
• “You have the power to change your beliefs about yorself.”
• “Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be.”
• “Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
• Chapter 3
• Thorndike: “behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.”
• “A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.”
• In the face of a new situation, the brain uses a lot of resources to try to face it properly. But once satisfactory responses are found, those are used instead. “Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate the process of solving it.”
• “Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time.”
• “Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.”
• “It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.”
• Four step pattern of habit: cue, craving, response, reward.
• Cues hint of reward.
• Cravings trigger action. “Cravings differ from person to person.”
• “Cues are meaningless until they are interpreted.”
• “Whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior. (…) Your response also depends on your ability.”
• “Rewards are the end goal of every habit.” Cue: notice the reward. Craving: want the reward. Response: obtain the reward.
• Rewards both satisfy and teach. “Your brain is a reward detector.”
• “If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.” Cue starts action, craving sparks action, energy and ability enable action, reward satisfies desire. “Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated.”
• Problem phase is first two, solution phase is the last two.
• “After decades of mental programming, we automatically slip into these patterns of thinking and acting.”
• Four Laws of Behavior Change:
• 1st: Make it obvious
• 2nd: Make it attractive
• 3rd: Make it easy
• 4th: Make it satisfying
• Inversions:
• 1st: Make it invisible
• 2nd: Make it unattractive
• 3rd: Make it difficult
• 4th: Make it unsatisfying
• Chapter 4
• “The human brain is a prediction machine.”
• “We underestimate how much our brains and bodies can do without thinking.”
• “you don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin.”
• “Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones.”
• “Pointing-and-Calling is so effective because it raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level.”
• “Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.”
• Habits scorecard: make a list of your current habits and assign a positive, neutral or negative value.
• “There are no no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. (…) All habits serve you in some way – even the bad ones”
• “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be?”
• “Hearing your bad habits sopken aloud makes the consequences seem more real.”
• Chapter 5
• Implementation intention is the how you will implement a habit, and it vastly increases the odds of it happening consistently.
• “When situation X rises, I will perform response Y.”
• “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.”
• Having implementation intentions help say no to requests that can consume the time where you should be doing your habits.
• “Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world.”
• Habit stacking: “yOne of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top.”
• “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
• “Overall, habit stacking allows you to create a set of simple rules that guide your future behavior.”
• “the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off.”
• “habit stacking implicitly has the time and location built into it.”
• “Be specific and clear”
• “The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious.” -> implementation intentions, habit stacking.
• “The two most common cues are time and location.”
• Chapter 6
• “People often chose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are. (…) Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”
• “Some experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision.”
• “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”
• “When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.”
• “If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.”
• “Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”
• “The context is the cue.”
• “Think [of the environment] as filled with relationships.”
• “It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.”
• “One space, one use.”
• “Every habit should have a home.”
• Chapter 7
• About 90% of US soldiers addicted to heroin in Vietnam “eliminated their addiction nearly overnight”. “When the context changed, so did the habit.”
• “The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.”
• “The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least.” The environment is key.
• “Bad habits are autocatalytic: (…) they foster the feelings they try to numb.”
• “You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.”
• “I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment. A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source.”
• Inversion of the 1st Law: make it invisible.
• “Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.”
• “This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.”
• Chapter 8
• “It’s like the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule, it lights up like a Christmas tree.”: supernormal stimuli
• “When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, eating as much as possible is an excellent strategy for survival. (…) [Nowadays] food is abundant, but your brain continues to crave it like it is scarce.”
• “foods that are high in dynaic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting”
• Bliss point: “the precise combination of salt, sugar and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more.”
• “The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.”
• “Compared to nature, these pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.”
• “If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive. (…) our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible.”
• Without dopamine, rats lost the will to live.
• Dopamine is not about liking, but about wanting. “And without desire, action stopped.”
• “Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.”
• “dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.”
• “the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward.”
• “Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.”
• “Desire is the engine that drives behavior.”
• “We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.”
• “Temptation bundline works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.”
• “You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.”
• Premack’s Principle: “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
• “It is the anticipation of a reward – not the fulfillment of it – that gets us to take action.”
• Chapter 9
• “whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.”
• “those who collaborated and bonded with others enjoyed increased safety, mating opportunities and access to resources.”
• “We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.”
• Montaigne: “The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.”
• We imitate the close, the many and the powerful.
• “peer pressure is bad only if you’re surrounded by bad influences.”
• “join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. (…) Y ou’ll rise together.”
• “The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity.”
• “The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.”
• “The human mind (…) wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. (…) Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.”
• “We try to copy the behavior of successful people bec ause we desire success ourselves. (…) We imitate people we envy.”
• “We are also motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status.”
• Chapter 10
• Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking: “It frees you from the mental burden of smoking (…) You start to realize that you don’t need to smoke.”
• “By the time you get to the end of the book, s oking seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world to do.”
• Make it unattractive.
• “A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.”
• “Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices.”
• “There are many different ways to address the same underlying motive. (…) Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face;”
• “Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not.”
• “Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. (…) You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.”
• “The same cue can spark a good habit or a bad habit depending on your prediction. The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. These predictions lead to feelings”
• “A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.”
• “This gap (…) provides a reason to act.”
• “When you binge-eat (…) What you want is to feel different.”
• “Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change.”
• “You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.”
• Associate hard habits with their benefits rather than their drawbacks.
• Motivation ritual: “practice associating your habits with something you enjoy, then you can use that cue whenever you need a bit of motivation.”
• “The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them.”
• Chapter 11
• Being in motion (planning/thinking) vs taking action. Motion vs action.
• We choose motion over action because we want to delay failure.
• “You don’t want to merely be planning. Yu want to be practicing.”
• “If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. (…) you just need to get your reps in.”
• Long-term potentiation: “the more you reeat an activty, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity.”
• Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
• “In musicians, the cerebellum – critical for physical movements (…) – is larger than it is in nonmusicians.”
• “the hippocampus decreased in size when a driver retired.”
• “repetition is a form of change.”
• “All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity.”
• “habits form based on frequency, not time. (…) What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior.”
• “You need to string together enough successful attempts until the behavior is firmly embedded in your mind and you cross the Habit Line.”
• Note: I do think automaticity is important because willpower and mindshare are limited. But it’s true that the important thing is to get the habit going.
• “To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effctive way to make practice happen is (…) make it easy.”
• Chapter 12
• [As a result of different spatial orientations], agriculture spread two to three times faster across Asia and Europe than it did up and down the Americas. Over the span of centuries, this small difference had a very big impact.”
• “Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change.”
• “Energy is precious and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.”
• Law of Least Effort: when deciding between two similar options, people tend to choose the one that takes the less work.
• “We are motivated t do what is easy.”
• “Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more energy required, the less likely it is to occur.”
• Behaviors that take little effort are convenient and can fill up our lives.
• “You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcom the habit delivers.”
• “This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.”
• “On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible”
• Make it as easy as possible.
• Remove sources of friction from your habits. Addition by substraction.
• “successful companies design their products to automate, eliminate, or simplify as many steps as possible.”
• “The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action.”
• You can also increase the friction for bad behaviors.
• “The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.”
• “It is remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behavior.”
• “How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?”
• Chapter 13
• “40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit.”
• An habit “can also shape the actions tha tyou take for minutes or hours afterward. Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway.”
• “It seems to be easier to continue what you are already doing than to start doing something different.”
• “If I change clothes, I know the workout will happen.”
• “Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments. (…) These choices are a fork in the road.”
• “Decisive moments set the options available to your future self.”
• “Habits are the entry point, not the end point. They are the cab, not the gym.”
• Two minute rule: “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
• What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.”
• “The point is to master the habit of showing up. (…) You have to standardize before you can optimize. (…) This is not merely a hack to make habits easier but actually the ideal way to master a difficult skill. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.”
• “The secret is to always stay below th epoint where it feels like work.”
• Hemingway: “The best way is to always stop when you are going good.”
• “You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.”
• habit shaping: as you progress, make the habit more advanced gradually.
• “Nearly any alrger life goal can be transformed into a two-minute behavior.”
• “The more you ritualize the beignning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.”
• “Standarize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.”
• Chapter 14
• “Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.”
• “A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.”
• “The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.”
• “The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.”
• One time ideas to improve habits: use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake; blockout curtains; unsubscribe form emails; turn off notifications and mute group chats; set your phoe to silent; get vaccinated; enroll in an automatic savings plan; set up automatic bill pay.
• “Each habit that we hand over to the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth.”
• “The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making tim efor more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.”
• “The average person spends over two hours per day on social media. What could you do with an extra six hundred hours per year?”
• “The ultimate way to lock in future behavior is to automate your habits.”
• Chapter 15
• In 1998, over 60 percent of the population of Karachi lived in slums.
• “in an environment with poor sanitation, the simple habit of washing your hands could make a real difference in the health of the residents. But they soon discovered that many peopple were already aware that handwashing was important. And yet, despite this knowledge, many residents were washing their hands in a haphazard fashion. (…)”
• “The problem wasn’t knowledge. The problem was consistency.”
• 95% of the households that had received the soap had five years later still a handwashing station with soap.
• “We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. (…) Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.”
• “Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, we have little reaso to repeat it.”
• “Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.”
• “The first three laws of behavior change (…) increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change – *make it satisfyin * increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.”
• “We are looking for immediate satisfaction.”
• Immediate-return environment (nature) vs delayed-return environment (human society). “The human brain did not evolve for life in a delayed-return environment.”
• “our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones.”
• time inconsistency/hyperbolic discounting: “You value the present more than the future (…) But occasionally, our bias toward instant gratification causes problems.”
• “the consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.” The opposite usually happens with good habits.
• “the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.”
• “when the moment of decision arrives, instant gratification usually wins.”
• “The brain overestimates the danger of anything that seems like an immediate threat but has almost no likelihood of actually occurring”
• “What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.”
• “If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less compteition and often get a bigger payoff. (…) At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.”
• “The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful”
• “[Immediate rewards] keep you excited while the delayed rewards accumulate in the background.”
• “You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying.”
• “Reinforcement ties your habit to an immediate reward, which makes it satisfying when you finish.”
• Eventually, “The identity itself becomes the reinforcer.”
• “Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.”
• “In summary, a habit needs to be enjoyable for it to last. (…) And change is easy when it is enjoyable.”
• “To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful”
• Chapter 16
• “Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures – like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles – provide clear evidence of your progress.”
• “But perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.”
• “A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit.”
• “”Don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra.”
• “Habit tracking is powerful because it (…) simultaneously makes a behavior obvious, attractive, and satisfying.”
• “those who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not.”
• “The most effective form of motivation is progress.”
• “habit tracking can have an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire.”
• “Tracking can become its own form of reward.”
• “Habit tracking also helps keep your eye on the ball: you’re focused on the process rather than the result.”
• Tracking is cue, motivation (see your progress and act on not losing it) and satisfaction.
• Tracking can be perceived as draining, since it does entail extra work.
• To make tracking easier: automate it. Only track important habits. And do it right after the habit occurs.
• “Perfection is not possible.”
• Simple rule: “never miss twice”.
• “The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.”
• “The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.”
• “Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you. (…) Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.”
• “Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.”
• “The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it. (…) The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played.”
• “we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.”
• Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• Chapter 17
• Inversion of the fourth law: Make it immediately unsatisfying.
• “Pain is an effective teacher. If a failure is painful, it gets fixed. If a failure is relatively painless, it gets ignored.
• Reaction to a mistake is a function of both its immediacy and cost.
• “When the consequences are severe, people learn quickly.”
• “adding an instant cost to the action is a great way to reduce their odds. (…) increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior. There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences.”
• “We’ll jump through a lot of hoops to avoid a little bit of immediate pain.”
• “In general, the more local, tangible, concrete, and immediate the consequence, the more likely it is to influence individual behavior.”
• Habit contract: “Just as governments use laws to hold citizens accountable, you can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable.”
• “To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment.”
• Alternative: accountability partner.
• Chapter 18
• “Phelps has won more Olympic medals not only than any swimmer but also more than any Olympian in any sport.”
• “The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. This is just as true with habit change (…) Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they ali gn with your natural inclinations and abilities.”
• “Competence is highly dependent on context.”
• “The people at the top of any competitive field are not only well trained, they are also well suited to the task. And this is why, if you want to be truly great, selecting the right place to focus is crucial.”
• “The key is (…) to align your ambition with your ability.”
• “Bundled together, your unique cluster of genetic traits predispose you to a particular personality.” Your personality is the set of characteristics that is consistent from situation to situation.”
• Five main traits of personality: openness to experience; conscientiousness; extroversion; agreeableness; neuroticism.
• Build habits that work with your personality.
• “Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.”
• “There is a version of every habit that can bring you joy and satisfaction. Find it.”
• “People who are talented in a particular area tend to be more competent at that task and are then praised for doing a good job.”
• “Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.”
• Explore/exploit trade-off: explore at the beginning of an activity. As you advance, start focusing, but keep experimenting occasionally. In the long run, exploit 80-90% of the time, explore 10-20%.
• Questions:
• “What feels like fun to me, but work to others?” Can you handle the pain of the task easier?
• “What makes me lose track of time?” Flow.
• “Where do I get greater returns than the average person?”
• “What comes naturally to me?” “Just feelings of engagement and enjoyment. Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.”
• “When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.”
• Note: rather than standing out or competing, what about doing something different that is valuable? It’s equivalent, but the focus would go on the contribution, not the reward.
• “A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.”
• “The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you.”
• “Our genes (…) tell us what to work hard on.”
• “People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.”
• “Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.”
• “Work hard on the things that come easy.”
• Chapter 19
• “10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success.” — Steve Martin
• “How do we design habits that pull us in rather than ones that fade away?
• “the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty”.”
• “The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.”
• Goldilocks rule: a challenge that’s just hard enough provides peak motivation.
• “There were just enough victories to keep him motivated and just enough mistakes to keep him working hard.”
• “A flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” and fuily immersed in an activity.”
• “boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.”
• “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
• “this coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.”
• “Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more voring and routine it becomes.”
• “The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.”
• “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.” — Machiavelli
• Variable reward: if there’s vaariance in rewards, when the rewards are high, you get more dopamine that if you were getting a consistent response.
• Variable rewards do not create cravings but they amplify them, because they reduce boredom.
• “The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure.”
• “everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.”
• “if you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.”
• “Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.”
• “When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.”
• “I’ve never regretted doing the workout.”
• “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.”
• Chapter 20
• “Each chunk of information that is memorized opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking. (…) In this way, habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence.”
• Note: fundamental connection here between memorization and internalization/automatization. By internalizing behaviors that work, space is freed up for higher level action. Echoes of Foer and of Whitehead (“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”)
• “However, the benefits of habits come at a cost. (…) as a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. You fall into mindless repetition. It becomes easier to let mistakes slide.”
• “The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.”
• “once a skill has been mastered there is usually a slight decline in performance over time.”
• Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
• “Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development. (…) Each habit unlocks the next level of performance.”
• “It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill (…) that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.”
• “the Lakers sought peak performance by getting slightly better each day.”
• “Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time.” — Pat Riley
• “Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement.”
• Annual review: What went well this year? What didn’t go so well this year? What did I learn?
• Integrity report: What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future?
• “They indicate when I should upgrade my habits and take on new challenges and when I should dial my efforts back and focus on the fundamentals.”
• “Daily habits are powerful because of how they compound, but worrying too much about every daily choice is like looking at yourself in the mirror from an inch away.”
• “When working against you, your identity creates a kind of “pride” that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing. This is one of the greatest downsides of building habits.”
• “The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. (…) When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle.”
• Redefine yourself so “that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.”
• “The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.” — Lao Tzu
• “Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.”
• Conclusion
• “The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them.”
• “as you continue to layer small changes on top of one another, the scales of life start to move.”
• “Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, and endless process to refine.”
• Hard to remember? Make it obvious.
• Hard to start? Make it attractive.
• Hard to do? Make it easy.
• Hard to stick with it? Make it satisfying.
• Converses, for bad habits: invisible, unattractive, hard, unsatisfying.
• “The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.”
• “Small habits don’t add up. They compound.”
• Appendix: Little Lessons from the Four Laws
• “This framework not only teaches how to create new habits but also reveals some interesting insights about human behavior.”
• “Awareness comes before desire. (…) a cracing can only occur after you have noticed an opportunity.”
• “Happiness is simply the absence of desire.”
• “It is the idea of pleasure that we chase.”
• “Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems.”
• “With a bit enough why you can overcome any how.”
• “Great craving can power great action – even when friction is high.”
• “Being curious is better than being smart. (…) It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.”
• “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.” — Naval Ravikant
• “Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level.”
• “The feeling comes first, and then the behavior.”
• “We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional. The primary mode of the brain is to feel; the secondary mode is to think.”
• “Your response tends to follow your emotions.”
• “To approach a situation from a more neutral emotional position allows you to base your response on the data rather than the emotion.”
• “Suffering drives progress. The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state. This is also the source of all progress.”
• “Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.”
• “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.”
• “Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.”
• “Self-control is difficult because it is not satisfying.”
• “Resisting temptation does not satisfy your craving; it just ignores it. It creates space for the craving to pass. Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy it.”
• “Our expectations determine our satisfaction.”
• Satisfaction = liking – wanting
• “Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.” — Seneca
• “The pain of failure correlates to the height of expectation. When desire is high, it hurts to not like the outcome.”
• “Feelings come both before and after the behavior.”
• “Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains. (…) Feeling motivated gets you to act. Feeling successful gets you to repeat.”
• “Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance.”
• “New plans offer hope because we don’t have any experiences to ground our expectations.”
• “As Aristotle noted, “Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.” Perhaps this can be revised to “Youth is easily deceived because it only hopes.” There is no experience to root the expectation in. In the beginning, hope is all you have.”
• Appendix: How to apply these ideas to business
• “As a user, this can be incredibly annoying: companies often appear to be in a race to the bottom to grab your attention and the app who interrupts you the most wins.”
• “When an item or an action is invisible, it is often forgotten.”
• “Additionally, whenever possible you want to make anything that could distract the user from the desired behavior invisible.”
• Note: earn that place, don’t try to shove your app into it.
• “The customer does not buy your product; they buy the prediction it creates in their mind.”
• “For many products, “making it attractive” comes down to explaining the benefits in a clear and compelling way.”
• “Everyone is “selling” something, even if it doesn’t feel like sales.”
• “It becomes very attractive to spend money on Amazon because customers are always seeing what is relevant to them.”
• “If you can show a customer that other people like them use your product (…) they will be more likely to find it attractive themselves.”
• “If people think the behavior your product requires is common, then frame those who don’t do it in a negative light (deviating from the norm)”
• “Behaviors are more likely to be performed when they are easy – that is, when they can be accomplished with ease.”
• “map out the chain of behaviors that a customer must perform to purchase your product or use your service, and then search for any possible area where you can reduce the friction associated with the task.”
• “Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.”
• “The idea is to make every phase of the process as convenient as possible. (…) Great businesses remove every point of friction they can think of to make the desired behavior as easy as possible.”
• “It is the fourth stage that closes the loop and encourages your customers to use your product or service habitually.”
• “The speed of the reward is a crucial factor in the 4th Law of Behavior Change. Customers need to feel immediately successful – even if it’s just in some small way – each time they use a product or service. At a minimum, the product should solve the problem (i.e. resolve the craving they experienced in Law 2) and, if possible, it should do so with some surprise or delight as well.”
• Must balance 2nd and 4th law: 2nd law promises, 4th law delivers. If there’s a negative gap between the two, that will impact the product negatively. “The danger of making too big a promise is that you’ll get people to buy once, but they won’t have a reason to buy again.”
• “Behaviors can be reinforced by offering small bits of praise and encouragement throughout the work day.”
• “Behaviors that make you feel good – that is, behaviors that are followed by an immediate sense of satisfaction or praise or encouragement or pleasure – are exactly the kind of behaviors you want to repeat in the future.”
• “That “almost” feeling tricks your brain into predicting the reward is now closer than before. With a little more work, you might be able to get it. After a near-miss, the reward system in your brain will light up with anticipation.”
• [In the US] “Casino patrons bet more than $37 billion annually—more than Americans spend to attend sporting events ($17.8 billion), go to the movies ($10.7 billion), and buy music ($6.8 billion) combined.”
• “This is the kind of effect you get when you employ all four laws of behavior changes at once. When all the levers are pointed in the same direction, the likelihood of a given behavior goes through the roof.”
• “Not only can you make your products more attractive (2nd Law) and satisfying (4th Law), your competitors can invert these laws to make your offerings less attractive and less satisfying. To build a solid business you need to do the first and defend against the second.”< /li>
• “After all, a competing product, if it is never tried, can’t act as a reward creating a conflicting habit. Every spouse knows that.”
• “Business, like all pursuits of continuous improvement, is a never-ending cycle of revisiting the four laws of behavior change: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.”
• “The best way to avoid envy, recognized by Aristotle, is to plainly deserve the success we get.” — Charlie Munger
• Appendix: How to apply these ideas to parenting
• “Kindergarten classrooms are designed to make it very obvious where things go and what to do with them. According to Morgenstern, there are five primary features:

1. Room is divided into activity zones.
2. It’s easy to focus on one activity at a time.
3. Items are stored at their point of use.
4. It’s fun to put things away – everything has a home.
5. Visual menu of everything that’s important.”

• “Interestingly, one of the best ways to motivate your children to act a certain way is to act that way yourself. Humans are master imitators. (…) Hold yourself to a higher standard, and they will often follow suit.”
• “Two of the biggest influences parents have on their children over time are (1) the genes they pass along to their kids and (2) the social environments they select for their kids.”
• “The key is to continue to encourage his autonomy and give him options so that he doesn’t feel bossed around. Be effortlessly in charge.” — Janet Lansbury
• “The same habit can go from unattractive to attractive depending on who is in control.”
• “Rather than doing the work for your child, you can make it easy for them to do the work themselves.”
• “If you want your children to develop certain habits, then make that habit the convenient and easy option within the environment. It’s a lot easier to build a reading habit when there are no television sets around.”
• “In order for any habit to stick, your children must find it satisfying or enjoyable in some way. Here’s the good news for parents: praise is naturally satisfying, and parents are in a perfect position to offer it.”
• “Kids are much more likely to forget that word and stop whining or screaming if we disempower the behavior by ignoring it (which doesn’t mean intentionally ignoring our child) or giving a ho-hum, nonchalant direction like “That’s a bit too loud” or “That’s an ugly word. Please don’t use it.”: — Janet Lansbury
• “Whenever possible, you want to use positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement.”
• “Ultimately, the idea is to make it satisfying to do the right thing.”