Atomic Habits Book Note

Good stuff on habit formation with some motivational pushes.

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. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.

It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success.

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.

People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.

Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating.

Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.

Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

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.

Habits form based on frequency, not time.

It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.

The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful—even if it’s in a small way. The feeling of success is a signal that your habit paid off and that the work was worth the effort.

You start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain.

One of the most consistent findings is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”

They found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability. In real life it’s typically not feasible to quantify the difficulty of an action in this way, but the core idea of the Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just manageable difficulty—something on the perimeter of your ability—seems crucial for maintaining motivation.

As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working.