Atomic Habits

High-Level Thoughts

This book will no doubt become a classic in the realm of self-improvement. Habits are a way we solve reoccurring problems, and so they become the operating system our lives are run on. So many valuable lessons and insights were gained from reading this book. My life no doubt has been affected positively by applying the tactics outlined in the book. This is the type of book your gonna want to read multiple times, almost like a manual for how to live a productive well rounded life.

Atomic Habits Summary and Notes

4 laws: Make it obvious (cue), Make it attractive (craving), Make it easy (response), make it satisfying (reward)

You can invert the four to break a habit. These are tool box for thinking what we can practically do on a daily basis for building good habits and breaking bad ones.

1) Forget about goals, focus on systems instead

• If you're an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million dollar business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
• The score takes of itself
• It wasn't the goal it was the system
• Commitment to progress not success

2) How Your Habits Shape Your Identity

• We Try To Change the wrong thing
• Identity, Progress, Outcomes
• Not a smoker (identity)
• Habits become part of your identity
• Once ur pride gets invloved you'll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
• What is the type of person that could run a succesful startup?
• Cue,craving, response, reward loop eliminate any of these any the loop won't be done
• Habit formation: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying
• Break Habit: Make it invisible, make it ugly, make it difficult, make it unsatiisfying

5) The Best Way To Start a New Habit

• -Implemtation Intention is "When situation X arises, I will perform response Y".
• -Make specific plan on when and where u will execute the habit.
• -Habit stacking, Diderot Effect: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]. take advantage of natural momentum. #science #law

8) How to Make a Habit Irresistible

• Red dots on cardboard box make baby birds go crazy = supernormal stimuli. Junk food is example of this.
• 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.
• Premark Principle -> is a theory of reinforcement that states that a less desired behavior can be reinforced by the opportunity to engage in a more desired behavior. For example, gamifiying education something that Khan Academydoes well.

9) The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Who You Become

• Lazlo Polgar made his children chess prodigies by running a life long experiment on his daughters. Every
• Interesting note: Oldest child was the worst, the middle was in between and the youngest was best. Probably because the older ones taught the younger ones their mistakes.

10) Craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.

• Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.
• Change you have to, to you get to

11) Walk Slowly, but Never Backward

• -We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
• -The difference between being in motion and taking action.

12) The Law of Least Effort

• Agriculture spread twice as fast in Asia and Europe because the climate varied much less compared to a vertical country like America.
• Example: Japan Lean production methadology
• Looked for every point of friction and eliminated it
• Similar to funnel, make it easy
• Proactively lazy, example: If you have a bad habit of watching tv unplug your tv and place it inside your closet so next time you want to watch there will be a lot of friction.

13) 2 minute rule

• Each choice is like a fork in a road, with the ones going up in the brackets leading to a good day, while each subsequent bad decision leading you down to an overall bad day. #Insight #mindset
• 2 mins of habit = gateway habit
• Make the habit of showing up
• Casting new votes for your identity

14)How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

• Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.

15) Make it Satisfying

• Cardinal rule: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
• The sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits.
• The costs of good habits are in the present, costs for bad habits are in the future.
• Your doing it because its who you are and it feels good to be you
• Optimizing for what we measure is dangerous, Goodhart's Law . When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

16) The Truth about talent

• Optimize for your personality type
• explore/exploit
• When you cant win by being better, you can win by being different. Dilbert artist says he's not the greatest artist, or greatest comedian, or greatest businessman. Combine all 3 and very few have it. #Insight #generalist
• A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.
• The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
• In chess, it is only after the basic movement of the pieces have become automated that a player can focus on the next level of the game.
• Habit + Deliiberate practice = mastery
• Relection and improvement
• Paul Grahm "keep your identity small" the more you let a single belief define you, less capable of adapting.