Tyler Roberts

✍️ Summary of Themes

1. There are four laws of habit creation: Make It Obvious, Make It Attractive, Make It Easy, Make It Satisfying. These can be inverted to break a bad habit: Make It Invisible, Make It Unattractive, Make It Difficult, Make It Unsatisfying. Using this framework you can identify the reasons behind your current habits, and what you need to change to better build or break them.

2. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit. Rather than setting a really ambitious goal to begin with, break the habit down into tiny steps such as ‘do one press-up per day’ or ‘read one page before bed’. Once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to keep doing it. Anyone can do one rep or read one page, but once you’ve started exercising – or once you’ve started reading – you may find that you’re more likely to continue the behaviour you’re trying to habitualise.

3. A habit is only as strong as the system put in place to reinforce it. It is commitment to the process that will determine your progress. Organise your environment so that the visual cues that you’re surrounded by reinforce your positive behaviours and increase the friction between you and your bad habits. Want to watch less TV? Unplug it every time you finish watching. This extra layer of friction and effort may reduce your watch time. If that doesn’t work, why not move the TV to a different room that you don’t often visit? Still not working? Sell the damn thing! Try watching TV when you don’t have one in the house. The same principle can be applied to building positive habits by adding visual cues that act as clues to perform good behaviours. Getting your gym clothes out and placing them beside your bed may remind you to exercise when you wake up.

📷 Snapshot Review

Most self-help books focus on one core concept and then spread it out across 300 pages; recycling the concept in numerous examples. With books like this you could probably read a page-long summary and still understand the general idea the author is trying to communicate. Atomic Habits is not like most self-help books.

James Clear dedicates each section of the book to his four laws of behaviour change – Make It Obvious, Make It Attractive, Make It Easy, Make It Satisfying. These read like a handbook, providing a framework to analyse existing habits and helping to identify at which stage of the habit loop positive behaviours are breaking down and bad habits are being reinforced (and inevitably repeated).

This should be required reading for anyone interested in self development.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Who Should Read It?

Everyone. Required reading for anyone interested in building good habits and breaking bad habits.

💡 How Can I Apply This In My Life?

• Use James Clear’s framework to help build better habits and break bad ones, not only for my own habit formation, but also for those around me who seek advice.

💬 My Top 3 Quotes

• Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. “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 it – but all that had gone before.” – Jacob Riis
• it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
• A small change in what you see can lead to a big change in what you do.

📒 Notes & Highlights

if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.

“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 it – but all that had gone before.” – Jacob Riis

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.

The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible.

The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence: I Will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]

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 behaviour on top. This is called habit stacking.

The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

The Diderot Effect

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour

The truth, however, is that many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.

A small change in what you see can lead to a big change in what you do.

Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely – even if they go unused for quite a while

Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.

Simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.

When we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort.

Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit.

Habits are the entry point, not the end point. They are the cab (car journey), not the gym.

Once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.

Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.

We are not looking for just any type of satisfaction. We are looking for immediate satisfaction.

The last mile is always the least crowded.

Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.

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

Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.