Atomic Habits

The Habits Cheat Sheet

Problems with goal-oriented mindset

• Winners and losers have the same goals.
• Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
• Goals restrict your happiness.
• Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

Forget about goals

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.

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

• Point-And-Call
  • We need to engage our consciousness to break/build a habit.
• Habit Scorecard
  • List the all the habits you commit through out the day.
  • Rate them as ”=”, ”+”, or ”-”, based on how they contribute to your ideal identity.
• Implementation Intention
  • “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it a fate.” — Carl Jung
  • Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
  • “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
• Habit Stacking
  • Diderot Effect - a new possession will lead to a series of purchases.
  • “After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
  • The habit to be paired should have similar frequencies.
• Environment is more important than motivation
  • A substantial percent of resources of our brain is used to process visual information. What we see affects what we do.

Design your environment

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.

• “cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
• Inversion of the 1st Law: make it invisible

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had

to face.

• Temptation bundling
  • We already experience surge of dopamine when craving things. aka mistaking the wanting and the liking
  • Much more neural circuitry is allocated for the wanting instead of for liking
  • The anticipation of the reward is the key!
• We imitate three groups of people
  • The close
  • The many
  • The powerful
• Join the culture where your desired behavior is the norm, and you already have something in common with the group.
• When changing habits means challenging the tribe, it can be very unattractive, and vice versa.
• Cravings and habits are always associated with fundamental motivations.
• Create motivation ritual by doing something enjoyable immediately before hard tasks.

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

• Motions are good, but only Actions make good things happen.
• Start with repetition instead of perfection.
• Long-term potentiation = strengthening of connections between neurons in the brain based on recent pattern of activities.
• Hebb’s Law = neurons that fire together wire together.
• Reduce friction for good actions, increase friction for bad ones.
• Master the decisive moments.

Each day is made up of many moments, but it is really a few habitual

choices that determine the path you take.

• Two-Minute Rule = When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
• Habits Shaping = Divide habits into phases.
• Commitment Device = Lock our future actions into present thinking,

Civilization advanced by extending the number of operations we can

perform without thinking about them.

-- Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher

The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying

• Making handwashing enjoyable by using Safeguard soap.
• What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
• Immediate vs delayed return environment. Our neocortex developed to fit into the former one.
• There is a time-inconsistency of evaluating the rewards.
• ==Best way to cultivate delayed gratification is to add a bit of instant pleasure.==
• Use instant pleasure to stay on track, while the delayed pleasure is accumulating in the background. Eventually, intrinsic motivation may take over.
• ==The best motivation is progress.== Habit tracking helps.