The Downside of Creating Good Habits

• Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
• Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it’s better to be hard or soft. 
• Habits a...

Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing the same every day.

• People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It's easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
• One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
• Self-control is a short-term strategy, not...

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

• Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making that habits hard.
• Using technology to automate your habits is the most reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behaviour.

What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.

• Overeating is harmful in the long run but appetizing in the moment.
• Sex - safe or not - provides pleasure right away. Disease and infection won't show up for days or weeks, even years.
• Without bad habi...

• One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.
• A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit - like marking an X on a calendar.
• Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
• Anyone can have a bad p...

• 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. It’s remarkable the body you can build if you don’t stop training.
• Small habits don’t add up. They compound.
• That’s the power of atomic hab...

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 .

• If you can make your good habits more convenient, you'll be more likely to follow through on them.
• We try to follow a strict diet while we're out to dinner with friends. We try to concentrate while using a smartphone filled with distractions.
• Idea is to create an environmen...

• The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
•  One positive change like meditating for one minute or reading one page each day is unlikely to ...

If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

• The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.
• As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored.
• Anyone can work hard when they feel motivat...

• The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
• Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition.
• The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have p...

• People often think it's very hard to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up.
• As you master the art of showing up , the first two minutes simply becom...