How to enjoy hard habits

1. Changing your outcomes. This means changing your results: losing weight, publishing a book, etc.
2. Changing your process. This means changing your habits and systems: for example, developing a meditation practice.
3. C...

A better method is to cut bad habits off at the source.

You may be able to resist temptation once, but you will most likely not be able to have the willpower to control your desires each time they appear. Thus, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment....

• Make them evident.
• Make them attractive.
• Make them effortless.
• Make them satisfying.

A habit is a routine or behavior that is carried out repeatedly and most of the time automatically.

When you are faced with a problem repeatedly, your brain starts to automate the process of solving it. Your habits are sets of automatic solutions that solve the pro...

The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.

You could do something three times in thirty days, or three hundred times. The frequency will always make the difference.

Goals are good for establishing a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

Goals are about the results you hope to reach. Systems are about the mechanisms that lead to those results.

We imitate the habits of three groups:

• The close. Proximity has a powerful and impressive effect on the way we behave.
• The many. We feel the pressure to comply with the rules of the groups we're part of. Being accepted is the greatest reward...

What is instantly rewarded is done again. What is instantly punished is ditched.

To get a habit to stick you need to feel instantly successful, even if it’s in a small way.

• Make them invisible.
• Make them unappealing.
• Make them hard to perform.
• Make them frustrating.

You could choose and start a habit because of motivation, but you'll stick with it only if it becomes part of your identity.

To change your identity:

1. Establish the kind of person you want to be.
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

We will instinctively choose the path that requires the least amount of work.

Diminish the friction associated with positive actions. When friction is reduced, habits become easy. Increase the friction associated with negative behaviors. This way, habits become hard.

We experience peak motivation when we are performing actions that are right on the edge our current abilities.

Not too difficult, not too easy.