Top highlights from Atomic Habits
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.
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You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
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You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
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When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you dont have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
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Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
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Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement
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All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.
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When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did itbut all that had gone before.
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Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
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Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
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Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
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Success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
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The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. Its not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
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When you cant win by being better, you can win by being different.
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Professionals stick to the schedule;amateurs let life get in the way.
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The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. If youre proud of how your hair looks, youll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain it. If youre proud of the size of your biceps, youll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If youre proud of the scarves you knit, youll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, youll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
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Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.
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You dont have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.
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Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you dont really want it. Its time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.
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In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption
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If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
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Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That's the paradox of making small improvements.
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The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. Its one thing to say Im the type of person who wants this. Its something very different to say Im the type of person who is this.
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We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.
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When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals arent 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.
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The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
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With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.
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The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
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Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why you can't get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
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It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, The best is the enemy of the good.
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Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.
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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.
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True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. Its not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
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What comes naturally to me? For just a moment, ignore what you have been taught. Ignore what society has told you. Ignore what others expect of you. Look inside yourself and ask, What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When have I felt like the real me? No internal judgments or people-pleasing. No second-guessing or self-criticism. Just feelings of engagement and enjoyment. Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.
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Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.
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Happiness is simply the absence of desire.- When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure, but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.As Caed Budris says, Happiness is the space between on desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.
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You do it because its who you are and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
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Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks. Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and its frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesnt feel like you are going anywhere. Its a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes
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When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you dont have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.
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Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
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Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?
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Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isnt particularly notablesometimes it isnt even noticeablebut it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Heres how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, youll end up thirty-seven times better by the time youre done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, youll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
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Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. This is a distinguishing feature between winners and losers. Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesnt matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. I think this principle is so important that Ill stick to it even if I cant do a habit as well or as completely as I would like. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle.
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Focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential than comparing yourself to someone else. The fact that you have a natural limit to any specific ability has nothing too do with whether you are reaching the ceiling of your capabilities. People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.Genes can not make you successful if youre not doing the work. Until you work as hard as those you admire, dont explain away their success as luck.
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Once your pride gets involved, youll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
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In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
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Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.
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Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level. Whatever your logical reasons are for taking action, you only feel compelled to act on them because of emotion. In fact, people with damage to emotional centers of the brain can list many reasons for taking action but still will not act because they do not have emotions to drive them. This is why craving comes before response. The feeling comes first, and then the behavior.
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never miss twice.
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In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
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Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.10
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As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.
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We rarely think about change this way because everyone is consumed by the end goal. But one push-up is better than not exercising. One minute of guitar practice is better than none at all. One minute of reading is better than never picking up a book. Its better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
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The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If youre willing to wait for the rewards, youll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
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Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. Its the ability to keep going when work isnt exciting that makes the difference.
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Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
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You get what you repeat.
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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.
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This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. Its friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
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We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
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