Atomic Habits

Chapter 1 - The surprising power of atomic habits

• Habits are compound interest of self-improvement
• Sadly, the feedback look of habit is slow paced, makes easier to have bad habits
• Put your eye in the process (and where it will lead you) than in the current result.
  • It’s hard to have good habits that last, cause we fail to see tangible results, and in a weak moment we decide to stop
  • But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through the Plateu of Latent Potential
• Time magnifies the margin between success and failure, having small good habit is going to make time your ally.

Chapter 2 - How your habits shape your identity

Why is changing habits so hard? Cause we try to change for an outcome.

There is 3 levels of change that can occur

1. Outcome: ex. losing weight, publishing a book
2. Processes: changing your habits and systems, ex. decluttering your desk
3. Identity: changing your beliefs, how you see the world, yourself and others

There is a duality between identity and habits

• Your identity emerges from your habits. You are a type of person, cause the things you do, and habits are things that you do very often. If you are don’t go much to a gym and normally don’t care what are you eating => can you say you are a healthy type of person?
• The good news, is that you can change your habits, but for doing that, you need to change your identity.
• Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become, that’s why habits are so important.

If you want to change your habits, you need first to change your identity.

Chapter 11 - Walk slowly but never backward

Being in motion or taking action

• Experiment in the school 2 evaluations,
  • 1. “quantity group” evaluated by the number of work produced,
  • 2. “quality group” evaluated by the excelence of their work.
• Result, the quantity group made had way better performance. Why? Cause people who try more, experiment more and learn from their mistakes (#feedback-loop)

The best is the enemy of the good – Voltaire

Why is hard to take action? -> cause we want failure -> preparation becomes a form of procrastination

To master an habit, the key is to start with repetition not perfection

Automaticity: Is the ability to perform a behaviour without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over.

To build an habit you need to practice it. To practice it you need to make it easy.

chapter 12 - The law of least effort

Law of least effort -> if there is two similar options, people will gravitate toward the one that requires less energy/effort.

Our real motivation is to be lazy (brain love to be lazy) -> let’s exploit this!