James Clear - Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

James Clear's work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, and
Entrepreneur, and on CBS This Morning, and is taught in colleges around
the world. His website, jamesclear.com, receives millions of visitors each
month, and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his email newsletter. He is
the creator of The Habits Academy, the premier training platform for
organizations and individuals that are interested in building better habits in
life and work.
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Interested readers can learn more at habitsacademy.com.
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As this book was going to print, new information about the
British Cycling team has come out. You can see my thoughts at
atomichabits.com/cycling
.
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I geeked out and actually calculated this. Washington, D.C., is
about 225 miles from New York City. Assuming you are flying on
a 747 or an Airbus A380, changing the heading by 3.5 degrees as
you leave Los Angeles likely causes the nose of the airplane to
shift between 7.2 to 7.6 feet, or about 86 to 92 inches. A very small
shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful change in
destination.
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The terms unconscious, nonconscious, and subconscious can all
be used to describe the absence of awareness or thought. Even in
academic circles, these words are often used interchangeably
without much nitpicking (for once). Nonconscious is the term I’m
going to use because it is broad enough to encompass both the
processes of the mind we could never consciously access and the
moments when we are simply not paying attention to what
surrounds us. Nonconscious is a description of anything you are not
consciously thinking about.
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Certainly, there are some aspects of your identity that tend to
remain unchanged over time—like identifying as someone who is
tall or short. But even for more fixed qualities and characteristics,
whether you view them in a positive or negative light is determined
by your experiences throughout life.
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Readers of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg will recognize
these terms. Duhigg wrote a great book and my intention is to pick
up where he left off by integrating these stages into four simple
laws you can apply to build better habits in life and work.
Charles Duhigg and Nir Eyal deserve special recognition for their
influence on this image. This representation of the habit loop is a
combination of language that was popularized by Duhigg’s book,
The Power of Habit, and a design that was popularized by Eyal’s
book, Hooked.
When I visited Japan, I saw this strategy save a woman’s life. Her
young son stepped onto the Shinkansen, one of Japan’s famous
bullet trains that travel at over two hundred miles per hour, just as
the doors were closing. She was left outside on the platform and
jammed her arm through the door to grab him. With her arm stuck
in the door, the train was about to take off, but right before it pulled
away an employee performed a safety check by Pointing-and-
Calling up and down the platform. In less than five seconds, he
noticed the woman and managed to stop the train from leaving. The
door opened, the woman—now in tears—ran to her son, and a
minute later the train departed safely.
Interested readers can get a template to create their own Habits
Scorecard at
atomichabits.com/scorecard
.
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In addition to her payment for the library, Catherine the Great
asked Diderot to keep the books until she needed them and offered
to pay him a yearly salary to act as her librarian.
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Fogg refers to this strategy as the “Tiny Habits recipe,” but I'll
call it the habit stacking formula throughout the book.
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If you’re looking for more examples and guidance, you can
download a Habit Stacking template at
atomichabits.com/habitstacking
.
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Dopamine is not the only chemical that influences your habits.
Every behavior involves multiple brain regions and
neurochemicals, and anyone who claims that “habits are all about
dopamine” is skipping over major portions of the process. It is just
one of the important role players in habit formation. However, I
will single out the dopamine circuit in this chapter because it
provides a window into the biological underpinnings of desire,
craving, and motivation that are behind every habit.
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I’m so happy I was able to fit a Game of Thrones reference into
this book.
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This is just a partial list of underlying motives. I offer a more
complete list and more examples of how to apply them to business
at
atomichabits.com/business
.
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A similar story is told in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles
and Ted Orland. It has been adapted here with permission. See the
endnotes for a full explanation.
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This is a foundational principle in physics, where it is known as
the Principle of Least Action. It states that the path followed
between any two points will always be the path requiring the least
energy. This simple principle underpins the laws of the universe.
From this one idea, you can describe the laws of motion and
relativity.
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The phrase addition by subtraction is also used by teams and
businesses to describe removing people from a group in order to
make the team stronger overall.
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To be fair, this still sounds like an amazing night.
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I designed a habit journal specifically to make journaling easier.
It includes a “One Line Per Day” section where you simply write
one sentence about your day. You can learn more at
atomichabits.com/journal
.
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The irony of how closely this story matches my process of
writing this book is not lost on me. Although my publisher was
much more accommodating, and my closet remained full, I did feel
like I had to place myself on house arrest to finish the manuscript.
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This is also referred to as a “Ulysses pact” or a “Ulysses
contract.” Named after Ulysses, the hero of The Odyssey, who told
his sailors to tie him to the mast of the ship so that he could hear
the enchanting song of the Sirens but wouldn’t be able to steer the
ship toward them and crash on the rocks. Ulysses realized the
benefits of locking in your future actions while your mind is in the
right place rather than waiting to see where your desires take you in
the moment.
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The shift to a delayed-return environment likely began around the
advent of agriculture ten thousand years ago when farmers began
planting crops in anticipation of a harvest months later. However, it
was not until recent centuries that our lives became filled with
delayed-return choices: career planning, retirement planning,
vacation planning, and everything else that occupies our calendars.
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Time inconsistency is also referred to as hyperbolic discounting.
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This can derail our decision making as well. The brain
overestimates the danger of anything that seems like an immediate
threat but has almost no likelihood of actually occurring: your
plane crashing during a bit of turbulence, a burglar breaking in
while you’re home alone, a terrorist blowing up the bus you’re on.
Meanwhile, it underestimates what appears to be a distant threat
but is actually very likely: the steady accumulation of fat from
eating unhealthy food, the gradual decay of your muscles from
sitting at a desk, the slow creep of clutter when you fail to tidy up.
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Interested readers can find a habit tracker template at
atomichabits.com/tracker
.
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You can see the actual Habit Contracts used by Bryan Harris and
get a blank template at
atomichabits.com/contract
.
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If you are interested in taking a personality test, you can find
links to the most reliable tests here:
atomichabits.com/personality
.
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If it’s Harry Potter on repeat, I feel you.
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I have a pet theory about what happens when we achieve a flow
state. This isn’t confirmed. It’s just my guess. Psychologists
commonly refer to the brain as operating in two modes: System 1
and System 2. System 1 is fast and instinctual. Generally speaking,
processes you can perform very quickly (like habits) are governed
by System 1. Meanwhile, System 2 controls thinking processes that
are more effortful and slow—like calculating the answer to a
difficult math problem. With regard to flow, I like to imagine
System 1 and System 2 as residing on opposite ends of the
spectrum of thinking. The more automatic a cognitive process is,
the more it slides toward the System 1 side of the spectrum. The
more effortful a task is, the more it slides toward System 2. Flow, I
believe, resides on the razor’s edge between System 1 and System
2. You are fully using all of your automatic and implicit knowledge
related to the task while also working hard to rise to a challenge
beyond your ability. Both brain modes are fully engaged. The
conscious and nonconscious are working perfectly in sync.
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The discovery of variable rewards happened by accident. One
day in the lab, the famous Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner was
running low on food pellets during one experiment and making
more was a time-consuming process because he had to manually
press the pellets in a machine. This situation led him to “ask myself
why every press of the lever had to be reinforced.” He decided to
only give treats to the rats intermittently and, to his surprise,
varying the delivery of food did not decrease behavior, but actually
increased it.
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I created a template for readers interested in keeping a decision
journal. It is included as part of the habit journal at
atomichabits.com/journal
.
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You can see my previous Annual Reviews at
jamesclear.com/annual-review
.
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You can see my previous Integrity Reports at
jamesclear.com/integrity
.
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Sorites is derived from the Greek word sorós, which means heap
or pile.
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