Atomic Habits

Key Concepts

Habits shape your identity (and vice versa)

The Three Layers of Behavior Change

• “The first layer is changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with changing your results: losing weight, publishing a book, winning a championship. Most of the goals you set are associated with this level of change.” (p. 30)

• “The second layer is changing your process. This level is concerned with changing your habits and systems….” (p. 30)

• “The third and deepest layer is changing your identity. This level is concerned with changing your beliefs: your worldview, your self-image, your judgments about yourself and others.” (p. 30)

The Two-step Process to Changing Your Identity

• 1. Decide the type of person you want to be. (p. 39)

• 2. Prove it to yourself with small wins. (p. 39)

The steps to build a habit

“The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.” (p. 47)

How to Create a Good Habit 

• “The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. 

• The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. 

• The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. 

• The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.” (p. 54)

How to Break a Bad Habit 

• “Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. 

• Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. 

• Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. 

• Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.” (p. 54)

Create a Habits Scorecard to identify your existing habits

“To create your own, make a list of your daily habits. Here’s a sample of where your list might start: 

• Wake up 

• Turn off alarm 

• Check my phone 

• Go to the bathroom 

• Weigh myself 

• Take a shower 

• Brush my teeth 

• Floss my teeth 

• Put on deodorant 

• Hang up towel to dry

•  Get dressed 

• Make a cup of tea” (p. 64)

“. . . and so on. Once you have a full list, look at each behavior, and ask yourself, ‘Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit?’ If it is a good habit, write ‘+’ next to it. If it is a bad habit, write ‘–’. If it is a neutral habit, write “=’.” (p. 64)

Use existing habits to start new ones

“When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.” (p. 74)

“Fogg’s habit stacking formula is: ‘After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].’” (p. 74)

“No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off.” (p. 77)

Design your environment to help you form the right habits

“In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = ⨍ (P,E).” (p. 83)

“Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.” (p. 87)

“Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is ‘One space, one use.’” (p. 89)

“When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, ‘disciplined’ people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.” (p. 92)

“A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.” (p. 94)

“I like to refer to this strategy as addition by subtraction. The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it. As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue. Similarly, when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort.” (p. 154)

Bundle what you need to do in what you want to do

“Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.” (p. 109)

“Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that ‘more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.’ In other words, even if you don’t really want to process overdue work emails, you’ll become conditioned to do it if it means you get to do something you really want to do along the way.” (p. 110)

Identify the underlying craving as the first step to fixing bad habits

“Some of our underlying motives include:

• Conserve energy 

• Obtain food and water 

• Find love and reproduce 

• Connect and bond with others 

• Win social acceptance and approval 

• Reduce uncertainty 

• Achieve status and prestige” (p. 127)

“Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.” (p. 128)

“A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. When the temperature falls, there is a gap between what your body is currently sensing and what it wants to be sensing. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act.” (p. 129)

Two-Minute Rule

“When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” (p. 162)

“At some point, once you’ve established the habit and you’re showing up each day, you can combine the Two-Minute Rule with a technique we call habit shaping to scale your habit back up toward your ultimate goal. Start by mastering the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behavior. Then, advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process—focusing on just the first two minutes and mastering that stage before moving on to the next level. Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build while still keeping your focus where it should be: on the first two minutes of the behavior.” (p. 165)

Use commitment devices and reinforcement to support habit formation

“A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.” (p. 170)

“...Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.” (p. 189)

“You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying. The best approach is to use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of a behavior.” (p. 191)

Use reflection processes to make sure that habits don’t plateau progress 

“Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.” (p. 240)

“The solution? Establish a system for reflection and review.” (p. 242)

Quotables

“We all face challenges in life. This injury was one of mine, and the experience taught me a critical lesson: changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.” (p. 6)

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” (p. 16)

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.” (p. 18)

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.” (p. 24)

“Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.” (p. 32)

“A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.” (p. 44)

“There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way—even the bad ones—which is why you repeat them.” (p. 65)

“Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.” (p. 94)

“If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit.” (p. 143)

“One of the most common questions I hear is, ‘How long does it take to build a new habit?’ But what people really should be asking is, ‘How many does it take to form a new habit?’” (p. 146)

“You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult. If you find yourself watching too much television, for example, then unplug it after each use. Only plug it back in if you can say out loud the name of the show you want to watch.” (p. 157)

“Dyrsmid began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty. As soon as he settled in each day, he would make a sales call. Immediately after, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar and the process would begin again.” (p. 195)

“In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.” (p. 219)

“Biological differences matter. Even so, it’s more productive to focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential than comparing yourself to someone else.” (p. 226)

“The more sacred an idea is to us—that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity—the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.” (p. 247)

“One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, ‘keep your identity small.’” (p. 247)

“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.” (p. 251)