Atomic Habits: How to Get 1% Better

Every Day - James Clear

One way to think about it is just kind of basic math. Like, if you just look at the
numbers, if you were able to improve by 1% each day for an entire year and those
gains compound, you would end up 37 times better at the end of the year. And if you
were to get 1% worse, you would whittle yourself almost all the way down to zero.
What's interesting here is that everybody wants a transformation, right? Everybody
wants a radical improvement, a rapid success, but we fail to realize that small habits
and little choices are transforming us every day already.

For the rest of this talk, there are four stages of habit formation. I'm going to take you
through each of those four. So the four stages are:

Noticing

Wanting

Doing

Liking

Noticing, wanting, doing, and liking. One of my favorite things about noticing, one of
my favorite strategies for discussing it, it's called implementation intentions. Many
people think that they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. They think
that they need to get more motivated, that they need willpower in order to execute on a
habit. If I just felt like writing, if I just felt like meditating, if I felt like working out,
then I would do it. But in fact, they don't have a plan for it, and so they wake up each
day thinking, I wonder if I'll feel motivated to write today. I wonder if I'll feel
motivated to work out today. But instead, you can take the decision making out of it by
explicitly stating when, where, and how you want to implement the habit.

It sounds easy to say, let's just start a plan, let's write down exactly what you should
do, and then maybe you'll fall through on it. But of course, we all know that there are
challenges that arise, it's not quite that easy. So here's a little strategy that I like to use
to make sure you can come up with a better plan of action, and it's called a failure
premortem. So the way that it works is you think about the habit, the project, the goal,
whatever the most important thing is that you want to work on, and I want you to
imagine, fast forward six months from now, and you failed. And then tell the story of
why you failed. What happened? What challenges did you encounter? What was it that
took you off course? Once you have all that stuff laid out on the table in front of you,
you can start to make better choices about how to develop a plan. You can start to have
if-then plans. So not only do I want to exercise for 20 minutes on Monday at 5 p.m.,
but also if I do not exercise because I have to take my kid to practice or whatever, then
Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. I will go in, right? You can have ways to adjust for these
challenges.

Stage two, wanting. One of the most overlooked drivers of habits and human behavior
is our physical environment. And this is an interesting insight about our desires. Your
environment often influences them. We want things simply because they are an option,
right? Simply because they are in front of us at the time. Thankfully, you don't have to
be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. You can decide
to design something to make your good behaviors easier and your bad behaviors
harder. So when it comes to habits, if you want to practice your guitar more frequently,
put it right in the middle of your living room so you run across it all the time. If you
want to read more, when you make your bed in the morning, take the book you want to
read, put it on top of the pillow. When you come back that night, pick it up, read a few
pages, go to sleep. Many of our desires are simply shaped because we have an
environment that shapes us in that way. So the moral of the story is I've never seen
someone stick to positive habits in a consistent fashion in a negative environment.
Maybe you can overpower it once or twice. Maybe you can have the willpower to do
the right thing on one day. But if you're constantly fighting against those forces, it's
going to be very hard to follow through.

Stage three, doing. The important insight here, especially for habits, is that in the
beginning, the most important thing is just to shut up and put your reps in. Just make
sure that you hone the skill, right? And you can start to think of it. The way that I like
to think of it is that any outcome that you wish to achieve is just a point along the
spectrum of repetitions. So if you have few reps to more reps, and you can imagine an
easy goal, a moderate goal, a hard goal, the more reps that you put in, the more likely
you are to achieve that goal. Now, what I like to say is you should optimize for the
starting line, not the finish line, right? So often when we think about habits, goals,
routines, achievements, it's all about the milestone. We think about how much weight
we want to lose, how much money we want to earn, how many subscribers we want to
have. It's all fixed on the finish line. But instead, if you can optimize for the starting
line and make it as easy as possible to get started and get your reps in, often the
outcomes just come as a natural result.
Okay, stage four, liking. The only reason that we repeat behaviors is because we
enjoy them, because we like the reward. If we don't enjoy the experience along the
way, we're unlikely to stick with it. And that means that you need to figure out ways to
bring a reward into the present moment because good habits have a problem. And that
problem is that for good habits, the immediate consequences there, there's a cost that
happens in the moment, but the reward is often delayed. So you need to figure out how
to bring the reward into the present moment to stick to a good habit. And someone else
who's going to be speaking here, Seth Godin, had a very nice little quote about this.
The best way to change long-term behavior is with short-term feedback. And one way
to think about that is that long-term behaviors, sticking with writing for years on end
or going to the gym and so on, they have those delayedconsequences. So you need a
way to enjoy it in the moment. So here's what I think you should do. Get a wall
calendar where you can see every day of the year mapped out on it, and then any day
that you do your task of writing jokes for 15 minutes, I want you to just put an X on
that day. And you'll have a couple false starts here and there, but at some point you're
gonna get a little bit of a chain going, right? You get four or five, six, seven, eight days
in a row. And at that point, your only goal becomes to don't break the chain. It doesn't
matter how good or how bad the jokes are, it doesn't matter if it makes it into your
material, just don't break the chain.

What's interesting about this is that by measuring your progress, you get an immediate
reward in the moment, right? The reward of having a great stand-up routine 40 days
from now or 40 weeks from now or whatever, it's so delayed that you need something
in the moment that makes you feel good. So if you do those 15 minutes, you can cross
that off. That's a way to get an immediate hit, a little bit of a reward by tracking it.

We often fear that in order to achieve something new, to become someone new, we
have to abandon everything that we are. But in fact, that's not how it works. Change
can happen plank by plank, board by board, habit by habit. And gradually, you can
become someone new. With consistency and repetition, you can actually change not
only your results, but actually your identity. It's because the more evidence that we
have for a belief, the more likely we are to believe it. So if you go to church every
Sunday for 20 years, you believe that you are religious. If you study Spanish every
Thursday night for 20 minutes, you believe that you are studious. The actions that you
take provide evidence for who you are. And it's not that habits matter more necessarily
on an individual basis. Each moment in life matters. But what ends up happening is
that over the broad span of time, things that you do once or twice fade away, and
things that you do time after time, day after day, week after week, accumulate the bulk
of the evidence for what you believe about yourself. And so every action that you take
is actually a vote for the type of person that you want to become. If you want to
become someone new, then you can take a new action and begin to accumulate
evidence for that identity, for that belief about yourself. And that the more votes that
you cast, the more likely you are to win the election. You don't need to be unanimous.
You don't have to be perfect all the time. You just need to have the body of work.

So true change is actually not behavior change. It's not results change. It's not process
change. It's identity change. The goal is not to read a book. It's to become a reader. The
goal is not to write a book or write an article. It's to become a writer. The goal is not to
run a marathon. It's to become a runner, to become a type of person, to develop an
identity. And the way to being something or becoming someone is through doing
something. So every time you sit down to write, every time you practice that habit, you
are being a writer. Every time you play a sport, you're being an athlete. Every time you
practice painting or music or whatever, you're being an artist.

And habits are not only the method through which we achieve external measures of
success, like losing weight or earning more money or meditating and reducing stress.
They are also the path through which we achieve internal change and actually become
someone new. They're the path through which we forge the identity that we have, the
deepest beliefs we have about ourselves, our sense of self. And so if you can change
your habits, you can change your life. Thank you.