Farha Naaz's Key Ideas from Atomic Habits
by James Clear

Let's say you have little money in the bank. But you are saving something each month. Your current results might not be that great – your nest egg is still pretty small. But you can be confident that your trajectory is right. Keep going in this direction and, in a few months or a few years, you will notice a major improvement. When the lack of perceived progress gets you down, remember that you're doing the right things and that you're moving in the right direction.

But how do you get yourself on the right trajectory? You need to develop habits. I

When you walk into a dark room, you don't think about what to do next; you instinctively reach for a light switch. Reaching for a light switch is a habit – it's a behavior that you've repeated so many times that it now happens automatically.

Habits like this dominate our lives, from brushing our teeth to driving our car. They are immensely powerful. 

In the nineteenth century, a psychologist named Edward Thorndike tried to answer this question. First, he placed some cats inside a black box. Then, he timed how long it took them to escape. To start with, each cat behaved exactly as you'd expect when placed inside a box. It desperately looked for a way of escape. It sniffed and pawed at the corners; it clawed at the walls. Eventually, the cat would find a lever that, when pressed, would open a door, enabling it to escape.

With his experiment, Thorndike had discovered something important: behaviors that give satisfying consequences – in this case, gaining freedom – tend to be repeated until they become automatic.

Every habit follows the same process. Do you drink coffee every morning? Waking up is your cue, triggering a craving to feel alert. Your response is to drag yourself out of bed and make a cup of joe.

Your reward is feeling wide awake and ready to face the world.

OK, now that you have an idea of how habits work, let's look at how you can develop good habits that can change your life for the better.

So, we have just discovered how habits are formed. Let's briefly recap. A habit consists of four things: a cue – a trigger that gets you to act; a craving – a desire you want to achieve; a response – the action of the habit itself; and a reward – the positive feeling you get from completing the habit. 

Once you know how they work, you can start to hack the habit-forming process to get good, productive habits to stick. 

Let's say you're desperate to learn the guitar. You've got your instrument, you've picked up the basics, but you struggle to keep up with practice. Each morning, you tell yourself that you'll play later on, but the end of the day soon comes, and you haven't picked up your guitar once.

But now that you know the secrets to building a habit, you can use it to your advantage. In this case, you want to make the cue to pick up your guitar impossible to miss. Instead of keeping your instrument in the cupboard or in the corner of your spare room, leave it right in the middle of your living room – in full view. Make your cue visible and unmissable; this will make it easier to turn your desire to practice into a habit.

Changing your environment to put your cues front and center will help, but if you want to perfect your triggers even more, you can use as implementation intentions.

When it comes to setting good habits, most of us tend to be too vague about our intentions. We say, "I'm going to eat better," or "I'm going to learn guitar." And we simply hope that we'll follow through.

An implementation intention can help us move beyond the vague intention. Implementation intentions introduce a clear plan of action; they help you set out when and where you'll carry out the habit you'd like to cultivate.

So you might be wondering, this all sounds quite plausible, but does it really work? Can I actually tweak my environment and make it easy to form positive habits? Sounds good on paper, right? But in practice?

Anne Thorndike and her colleagues designed a test. As part of the experiment, she had the hospital cafeteria rearranged. The soda in the refrigerators next to the cash registers was replaced with bottled water, and baskets of bottled water were placed all around the cafeteria. Dr. Thorndike and the team then watched to see what would happen.

And what do you think happened? Well, over three months, soda sales fell by 11 percent, and water sales shot up by over 25 percent. Simply by creating more cues for people to drink water, Dr. Thorndike and her team were able to get people to make the healthier choice.

In other words, they were able to help people build better habits, without forcing them to make a conscious decision to do so. Clear evidence that altering your environment can help you adopt better habits.

Well, we don't actually have to do the pleasurable activity to get the hit of dopamine. The mere anticipation of doing something pleasurable is enough to get the dopamine flowing. In the brain's reward system, desiring something is on par with getting something!

We can turn this to our advantage. When building our new habit, if we make it something we look forward to, we'll be much more likely to follow through and actually do it. 

Here's where I'd like to introduce you to the concept of temptation bundling. Temptation bundling is where you take a behavior that you think of as important but unappealing and link it to a behavior that you're drawn to. This is how you can use dopamine to your advantage when building a new habit.

Just find a way of making those unattractive but important tasks enjoyable, and you'll be surfing a wave of dopamine, and creating positive habits, at the same time.

Making a habit pleasurable is a surefire way to make it stick. Another way we can hack the habit-building process is to make it easy. 

Easy behaviors dominate our lives. We scroll through social media or munch through a bag of potato chips because these are easy things to do. On the other hand, doing a hundred push-ups or studying Mandarin are both pretty tough and take a lot of effort. This is why we don't find ourselves drawn to intensive exercise or language learning in our spare time.   

By making our desired behaviors as easy as possible, we stand the best chance of turning them into a habit. And the good news is, there are various ways we can make this happen.

The first way is by reducing friction.

So that's friction. The second trick for making a habit easier in the long term is what's known as the two-minute rule. This is a way to make any new activity feel manageable. The principle is that any behavior can be distilled into a habit that is doable within two minutes. So, if you want to read more, don't commit to reading one book every week. Instead, make a habit of reading two pages per night. 

Or, if you want to run a marathon, commit to simply putting on your running gear every day after work.

The two-minute rule is a way to build easily achievable habits – small accomplishments that can lead you to greater things. Once you've pulled on your running shoes, you'll probably head out for a run. Once you've read two pages, you'll likely continue. Simply getting started is the first and most important step toward doing something.

Making good behaviors satisfying can be difficult. This is due to human evolution. Today, we live in what is known as a delayed-return environment. You turn up at the office today, but the return – a paycheck – doesn't come until the end of the month. You go to the gym in the morning, but you don't lose weight overnight. 

Unfortunately, our brains evolved to cope with an immediate-return environment. Our distant ancestors weren't thinking about long-term returns like saving for retirement or sticking to a diet. They were focused on immediate concerns like finding their next meal, seeking shelter, and staying alert enough to escape any nearby saber-toothed tigers.

This focus on immediate returns can encourage bad habits. Smoking may give you lung cancer in 20 years, but, in the moment, it relieves your stress and the craving for nicotine. The immediate hit from your cigarette will likely override the long-term costs to your health.

All this means is that when pursuing habits with a delayed return, you need to try to attach some immediate gratification to them.

One simple trick for making new habits stick is called habit tracking.

So why not set yourself a habit contract? Even if it isn't as detailed as Bryan Harris's, consider making a commitment to your partner, your best friend, or one of your coworkers. If you agree upon a set of consequences for failing to follow through, you'll be much more likely to stick to your habits. And as we've seen, sticking to a positive habit, however small, is a surefire way to achieve big things in life.