summary of Atomic habits by James Clear

summary of ATOMIC HABITS by JAMES CLEAR:

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

This breakthrough book from James Clear is the most comprehensive guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day.

=>You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

Atomic Habits  - James Clear

Summary

1. It’s all about the system. Your system is what determines what you’ll become.
2. Serious people stick to the system and the plan and don’t make excuses for life getting in the way. 
3. Habits are compound interest in the outcome of your life
4. Habit stacking is where you connect a new, desired habit with something you have to do every day anyway.
5. Time and location are the biggest triggers.
6. We tend to mimic the habits of people close to us, the masses, and the powerful.
7. Bad is attractive when we associate them with something positive. So that’s the thing we have to break.
8. Focus on action, not motion.
9. It’s more important to do a habit often than it is to have been doing it for a long time.
10. It’s far worse to miss days in your system than it is to continue them.
11. If you want to see your future, just imagine behaving exactly as you have in the last period of time.
12. Breakthroughs come suddenly after repeating a system, not all at once while chasing a goal.
13. Improving by 1% a week, or even per month, adds up massively over time.
14. There are three tiers of penetration for behavior changes: the outermost is outcomes, the next one in the process, and the bullseye is identity.
15. It’s not about goals, it’s about systems.
16. The way to change outcomes is to focus on identity changes; so it’s not about eating less, or eating more healthy, as a behavior—but rather that you are now the type of person who eats better.
17. Habits are the compound interest of improvement, and that works in both directions. If you owe it, it digs you a grave, and if it’s accruing for you, you’re doing really well.
18. The four laws of behavior change are: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.
19. The trick isn’t to have unbelievable willpower; the trick is to craft an environment where it’s easier to make the right choices, and that’s part of the system.


Every action is a vote for the person you wish to become.

Atomic Habits - James Clear

Observations

• This is a lot like Infinite Games, which talks about the difference between having long, meaning-based and sustainable goals that you accomplish through a system, vs. short, aggressive goals that don’t necessarily point in the right direction and require constant resetting.

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. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.

Atomic Habits  - James Clear

ABOUT THE JAMES CLEAR:

James Clear is a writer and speaker focused on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. His work has appeared in Entrepreneur magazine, Time magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CBS This Morning.
His website, jamesclear.com, receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by coaches and players in the NFL, NBA, and MLB.