An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
Tiny changes, remarkable results — a practical system for behavior that actually sticks.
Clear's real insight isn't about goals — it's that lasting change comes from becoming a different person, not chasing a different result. Every small action is a vote for the identity you're building.
Everything Clear wants you to walk away with
The effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day, yet the impact over months and years is enormous. A tiny shift in trajectory lands you hundreds of miles apart.
Winners and losers have the same goals. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved different outcomes. Goals set direction; systems make progress.
The smoker who says 'I'm not a smoker' is in a fundamentally different position than the one who says 'I'm trying to quit.' Every action is a vote for the type of person you want to become. The real reason habits matter is not what you get but who you become.
To break a bad habit, invert the laws: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. These four laws give you a practical framework for designing any habit, not through willpower but through system design.
People who seem to have tremendous self-control aren't exerting more willpower — they spend less time in tempting situations. Redesign your environment so the cues for good habits are visible and the cues for bad ones are removed.
Bamboo is barely visible for five years while building root systems, then explodes ninety feet in six weeks. Complaining about no results is like complaining about ice not melting at 31 degrees. All the action happens at 32. The outside world only sees the breakthrough.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. The all-or-nothing approach is the enemy. Getting back on track immediately is more important than the size of each individual effort.
The Two-Minute Rule: scale any habit down to something that takes two minutes or less. A new habit should feel effortless at the beginning. Once the ritual is established, you can improve and expand it.
Productivity compounds when you automate old tasks. Relationships compound when you help others. But 1% errors repeated daily compound into toxic results too. A single unhealthy meal doesn't change the scale, but the accumulation does.
The implicit assumption behind any goal is 'once I reach it, then I'll be happy.' You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of success. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don't have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.
These notes are inspired by direct excerpts and woven together into a readable guide you can follow from start to finish.
By James Clear
Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks, but in the long run, the quality of your life often depends on the quality of your habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results — but with better habits, anything is possible.
The backbone of this book is a four-step model of habits — cue, craving, response, and reward — and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps. The strategies covered are relevant to anyone looking for a step-by-step system for improvement, whether your goals center on health, money, productivity, relationships, or all of the above.
The core principle behind atomic habits is simple: if you break down everything you can think of that goes into a given pursuit and improve each piece by just 1 percent, you get a significant increase when you put them all together. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. We pressure ourselves to make earth-shattering improvements when, in reality, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly noticeable on any given day — but it can be far more meaningful in the long run. If you get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
Figure: The effects of small habits compound over time.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day, yet the impact they deliver over months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
This compounding works in both positive and negative directions. Productivity compounds: the more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas. Knowledge compounds — it builds up like compound interest. Relationships compound: being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a broad network of strong connections over time. But the dark side is equally real: stress compounds, negative thoughts compound, and outrage compounds. Habits are a double-edged sword, which is why understanding their mechanics is crucial.
The problem is that we often expect progress to be linear. In reality, results are delayed. Consider an ice cube sitting on a table at twenty-five degrees. The room heats up — twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one — and still nothing happens. Then, at thirty-two degrees, the ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from every increase before it, unlocks a huge change. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable before taking over the body in months. Bamboo spends five years building root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air in six weeks. Habits work the same way: they often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold.
Figure: The Plateau of Latent Potential: results lag behind effort, creating a “Valley of Disappointment.”
This gap between expectation and reality is what creates a “Valley of Disappointment” — the period where you put in weeks or months of work without visible results. When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, the outside world calls it an overnight success. But you know it was the work you did long ago, when it seemed like you weren’t making progress, that made the breakthrough possible. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of years before an earthquake erupts. Change can take years — before it happens all at once.
Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. What matters is not your current results, but whether your habits are putting you on the right trajectory.
This leads to the most important distinction in the book: the difference between goals and systems. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, you would still succeed. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about goals and not enough time designing systems.
Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals. Every Olympian wants gold. Every candidate wants the job. The goal cannot be what differentiates winners from losers — it was only when a system of continuous small improvements was implemented that a different outcome was achieved.
Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. If you have a messy room and set a goal to clean it, you’ll have a clean room — for now. But if you never change the sloppy habits behind the mess, you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter soon. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.
Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness. The implicit assumption behind any goal is “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” You continually put happiness off until the next milestone. Furthermore, goals create an either-or conflict: you either achieve your goal and succeed, or you fail and are a disappointment. You box yourself into a narrow version of happiness.
Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Changing your habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) you try to change the wrong thing, and (2) you try to change your habits in the wrong way. To understand what this means, consider that there are three layers of behavior change.
Figure: Three Layers of Behavior Change — effective change works from the inside out.
The first layer is changing your outcomes — what you get. The second layer is changing your processes — your habits and systems, like implementing a new gym routine or developing a meditation practice. The third and deepest layer is changing your identity — your beliefs, your worldview, your self-image. All levels of change are useful, but the problem is the direction of change. Many people begin by focusing on what they want to achieve (outcome-based habits). The alternative is to start by focusing on who you wish to become (identity-based habits).
Consider two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” This person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. The second declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference in language, but it signals a shift in identity.
Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to improve. They think, “I want to be skinny (outcome) and if I stick to this diet, then I’ll be skinny (process).” They never shift the way they look at themselves, and their old identity can sabotage their new plans. You may want more money, but if your identity is someone who consumes rather than creates, you’ll continue to be pulled toward spending rather than earning. You may want better health, but if you prioritize comfort over accomplishment, you’ll be drawn to relaxing rather than training. It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. The goal is not to read a book — the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon — the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument — the goal is to become a musician.
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 you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip an upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll spend hours knitting each week. True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are — either consciously or non-consciously. When you have repeated a story to yourself for years (“I’m terrible with directions,” “I’m not a morning person,” “I’m bad at math”), it is easy to slide into those mental grooves and accept them as fact. There is internal pressure to maintain your self-image and behave consistently with your beliefs. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs and upgrade your identity.
Step 1: Decide the type of person you want to be. Step 2: Prove it to yourself with small wins.
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.
Building better habits isn’t about life hacks. They are not fundamentally about having something — they are about becoming someone.
Habits do not restrict freedom — they create it. The people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you’ll always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you’ll always be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you’ll always feel behind. If you’re always forced to make decisions about simple tasks — when to work out, where to write, when to pay the bills — you have less time for free thinking and creativity. It is only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you create the mental space needed for freedom.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette — you crave the feeling of relief it provides. You are not motivated by brushing your teeth — you crave the feeling of a clean mouth. Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.
Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. Rewards serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy you and (2) they teach you. If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, you’ll have no reason to do it again.
| How to Create a Good Habit | How to Break a Bad Habit |
|---|---|
| 1st Law (Cue): Make it obvious | Inversion: Make it invisible |
| 2nd Law (Craving): Make it attractive | Inversion: Make it unattractive |
| 3rd Law (Response): Make it easy | Inversion: Make it difficult |
| 4th Law (Reward): Make it satisfying | Inversion: Make it unsatisfying |
Pointing-and-Calling is a technique used by Japanese train operators in which they physically point at signals and verbally call out what they see. It is so effective because it raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level. Because the operators must use their eyes, hands, mouth, and ears, they are more likely to notice problems before something goes wrong.
You can apply the same principle to your own habits. If you want to cut back on junk food but notice yourself grabbing another cookie, say out loud, “I’m about to eat this cookie, but I don’t need it. Eating it will cause me to gain weight and hurt my health.” Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real.
Research shows that people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. This plan is called an implementation intention — a decision made beforehand about how you intend to implement a particular habit. The two most common cues that can trigger a habit are time and location, and implementation intentions leverage both. The format is straightforward: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do.
Fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing. No behavior happens in isolation — each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior. This connectedness is related to the Diderot Effect, which states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption leading to additional purchases. The same chaining happens with habits.
Habit stacking is a special form of implementation intention in which you pair a new behavior with a current habit rather than a specific time and location. The formula: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].
Examples of habit stacking: After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute. After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes. After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened today. After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.
You can also link habits to situational cues: When I see a set of stairs, I will take them instead of the elevator. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know. When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing. When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first. When I buy a new item, I will give something away (“One in, one out”). When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering. When I leave a public place, I will check the table and chairs to make sure I don’t leave anything behind.
To find the right trigger for your habit stack, brainstorm a list of your current habits. In one column, write down the habits you do each day without fail (get out of bed, take a shower, brew coffee, etc.). In a second column, write down things that happen to you each day without fail (the sun rises, you get a text message, a song ends). Armed with these two lists, you can search for the best place to layer your new habit into your lifestyle. Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable. Consider when you are most likely to be successful — don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else.
Every habit is context dependent. Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f(P, E). You don’t have to be the victim of your environment — you can also be the architect of it.
It’s easy not to practice guitar when it’s tucked away in a closet. It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room. It’s easy not to take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry. The solution is to make the cues for your desired habits obvious in your environment.
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
The power of context also reveals another strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. Go to a different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use, and create a new routine there. Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room or a building with expansive architecture. Trying to eat healthier? Try a new grocery store where your brain doesn’t automatically know where the unhealthy food is located.
One space, one use. When you use your phone for all sorts of tasks, it becomes hard to associate it with one purpose — you want to be productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and play video games. Whenever possible, avoid mixing the contexts of your habits. If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture. Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t 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. They spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. The way to improve perseverance, grit, and willpower is not by wishing you were more disciplined, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you anxious, which causes you to smoke, which makes your health worse, which makes you more anxious. It’s a downward spiral.
In the short run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long run, you become a product of the environment you live in. You cannot consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.
Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win. Cocaine addicts get a surge of dopamine when they see the powder, not after they take it. Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation, and whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act. As an adult, daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. Scientists refer to this as the difference between “wanting” and “liking.”
Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers — the brain stem, nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area, dorsal striatum, amygdala, and portions of the prefrontal cortex — are large, while the liking centers are much smaller. Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. Combined with habit stacking, the formula becomes:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].
For example: After I get my morning coffee, I will say one thing I’m grateful for (need). After I say one thing I’m grateful for, I will read the news (want). Or: After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need). After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want). Doing the thing you need to do means you get to do the thing you want to do.
Behaviors are attractive when they help you fit in. You imitate the habits of three groups in particular: the close, the many, and the powerful. You pick up habits from the people around you — the way your parents handle arguments, the way your peers flirt, the way your coworkers get results. When your friends engage in a behavior, you give it a try, too.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day. When you join a book club or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit — “We are readers. We are cyclists.”
When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
You are also drawn to behaviors that earn respect, approval, admiration, and status. You want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups or the musician who can play the hardest progressions, because these things separate you from the crowd. Once you fit in, you start looking for ways to stand out. Conversely, you are motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower your status — you trim your hedges, clean up before guests visit, and continually wonder “What will others think of me?”
Some of your underlying motives include: conserve energy, obtain food and water, find love and reproduce, connect and bond with others, win social acceptance and approval, reduce uncertainty, and achieve status and prestige. A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or check Instagram or play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty, relieve anxiety, win social acceptance, or achieve status.
There are many different ways to address the same underlying motive. One person learns to reduce stress by smoking; another eases their anxiety by going for a run. Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face — they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with a problem, you keep coming back to it. Your behavior is heavily dependent on how you interpret events, not necessarily on their objective reality. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes — what you really want is to feel different.
Sometimes all you need is a slight mind-set shift. Instead of “I have to wake up early for work,” try “I get to wake up early for work.” Both versions of reality are true — you have to do those things, and you also get to do them. You can find evidence for whatever mind-set you choose.
You can apply this reframing broadly. Many people associate exercise with being a challenging task that drains energy. You can just as easily view it as a way to develop skills and build you up — instead of “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast.” Saving money is often associated with sacrifice, but you can associate it with freedom: living below your current means increases your future means. Pregame jitters — quicker breathing, a faster heart rate — can be interpreted as threatening or as excitement. You can reframe “I am nervous” to “I am excited and getting an adrenaline rush to help me concentrate.”
You can also create associations that make a desired behavior more attractive. For instance, if you always play the same song before a particular activity, you’ll begin to link the music with the act, and whenever you want to get in the mood, just press play.
There is an important difference between being in motion and taking action. When you’re in motion, you’re planning, strategizing, and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If you outline twenty ideas for articles, that’s motion. If you actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If you search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If you actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.
Why do we default to motion? Sometimes we genuinely need to plan or learn more. But more often, motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. We are experts at avoiding criticism, so we tend to avoid situations where we might be judged. That’s the biggest reason you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning — you want to be practicing. If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You just need to get your reps in.
This is backed by neuroscience. Hebb’s Law states that “neurons that fire together wire together.” Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain. Musicians have a larger cerebellum; mathematicians have increased gray matter in the inferior parietal lobule, directly correlated with time spent in the field. Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change. Each time you repeat an action, you activate a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.
Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change — that if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible. The Law of Least Effort states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.
The idea behind “make it easy” is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that pay off in the long run. Think of a garden hose bent in the middle. You could crank up the valve and force more water out, or you could simply remove the bend and let water flow naturally. Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like forcing water through a bent hose — it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. Making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend.
When you remove the points of friction that sap your time and energy, you can achieve more with less effort. This is one reason tidying up can feel so good: you are simultaneously moving forward and lightening the cognitive load your environment places on you.
Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with your good habits and increase the friction associated with your bad ones. One useful strategy is “resetting the room”: when you finish an activity, you prepare the space for the next action. Place the remote back on the TV stand, arrange the pillows, fold the blanket. Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.
You can also increase friction for bad habits. If you watch too much television, unplug it after each use — only plug it back in if you can say out loud the name of the show you want to watch. Take it further: remove the batteries from the remote after each use so it takes an extra ten seconds to turn it on. If your phone is a problem, have a friend or family member hide it from you for a few hours, or ask a coworker to keep it at their desk until lunch. It is remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behavior.
Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact — decisive moments. The moment you decide between ordering takeout or cooking dinner. The moment you choose between driving or riding your bike. The moment you decide between starting homework or grabbing the video game controller. Each one is like a fork in the road, and these choices stack up throughout the day, ultimately leading to very different outcomes. The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at these decisive moments.
When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. Nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version:
“Read before bed each night” → “Read one page.” “Do thirty minutes of yoga” → “Take out my yoga mat.” “Study for class” → “Open my notes.” “Fold the laundry” → “Fold one pair of socks.” “Run three miles” → “Tie my running shoes.”
What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize. As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.
The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. One leadership consultant built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle.
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.
Examples of commitment devices abound. Athletes who need to “make weight” for a competition leave their wallets at home during the week before weigh-in to avoid fast-food temptation. An outlet timer plugged between an internet router and the power outlet can cut the power at 10 p.m. each night — when the internet goes off, everyone knows it is time for bed. When cutting calories, you can ask the waiter to split your meal and box half before it’s served. If you waited until the meal arrived and told yourself “I’ll just eat half,” it would never work. If you’re feeling motivated to get in shape, schedule a yoga session and pay ahead of time.
You can also use technology as an enforcement mechanism. One approach: every Monday, have someone reset the passwords on all your social media accounts, logging you out on every device. Work all week without distraction. On Friday, get the new passwords and enjoy social media for the weekend. If you don’t have an assistant, team up with a friend or family member and reset each other’s passwords each week.
You are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. Feelings of pleasure — even minor ones like washing your hands with soap that smells nice and lathers well — are signals that tell the brain: “This feels good. Do this again, next time.” Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, you have little reason to repeat it.
The first three laws of behavior change — make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy — increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law — make it satisfying — increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.
The challenge is that we live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment. Many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. A good job at work yields a paycheck in a few weeks. Exercise today might prevent being overweight next year. Saving money now might be enough for retirement decades from now. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
The best way to train yourself to delay gratification is to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. Add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.
One way to make avoidance visible is to open a savings account labeled for something you want — maybe “Leather Jacket.” Whenever you pass on a purchase, put the same amount of money in the account. Skip your morning latte? Transfer $5. Pass on another month of Netflix? Move $10 over. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself. The immediate reward of seeing yourself save money feels a lot better than being deprived. You are making it satisfying to do nothing. One couple used a similar setup: they labeled their savings account “Trip to Europe,” and whenever they skipped going out to eat, they transferred $50 into the account. At the end of the year, they put the money toward the vacation.
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. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.
Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures provide clear evidence of your progress. They reinforce your behavior and add a bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity. Visual measurement comes in many forms: food journals, workout logs, loyalty punch cards, the progress bar on a software download, even the page numbers in a book. But perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
Habit tracking naturally builds a series of visual cues — like the streak of X’s on your calendar or the list of meals in your food log. When you look at your streak, you’re reminded to act again. Recording your last action creates a trigger that can initiate your next one. One study of more than sixteen hundred people found that those who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not. The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it. When the evidence is right in front of you, you’re less likely to lie to yourself. Whenever possible, measurement should be automated.
No matter how consistent you are, life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Whenever this happens, remember: never miss twice. If you miss one day, get back into it as quickly as possible. Missing one workout happens, but don’t miss two in a row. The problem is not slipping up — the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, you shouldn’t do it at all.
The “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something — ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything — is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding. And it’s not always about what happens during the workout — it’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
There is a cautionary note, however. We optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior. We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting ten thousand steps than we do about being healthy. We teach for standardized tests instead of emphasizing learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. This is why non-scale victories can be effective for weight loss. If the number on the scale is stubborn, focus on a different measurement — better skin, waking up earlier, increased energy — that gives you more signals of progress.
This chapter is an inversion of the 4th Law: make it immediately unsatisfying. The more global, intangible, vague, and delayed a consequence is, the less likely it is to influence behavior. A straightforward way to add an immediate cost to any bad habit is to create a habit contract.
A habit contract makes the consequences of violating your promises real and public. One person wrote out the daily habits that would move him toward his goal — writing down all food consumed each day and weighing himself each day — and then listed the punishment for failure: he would have to dress up each workday and each Sunday morning for the rest of the quarter (no jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, or shorts) and give his trainer $200 to use as he saw fit if he missed even one day of logging food. He, his wife, and his trainer all signed the contract at the bottom. Signing was an indication of seriousness — whenever that part was skipped, slacking began almost immediately. With an accountability partner, you are not only failing to uphold your promises to yourself but also failing to uphold your promises to others.
You can even automate this process. One entrepreneur scheduled an automatic tweet for 6:10 a.m. that would say he was still in bed because he was lazy, with a $5 PayPal payout to anyone who replied — unless he was up at 5:55 a.m. to cancel it.
Genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity. The areas where you are genetically predisposed to success are the areas where habits are more likely to be satisfying. The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills — to align your ambition with your ability.
People who are talented in a particular area tend to be more competent at that task, and they are praised for doing a good job. They stay energized because they are making progress where others have failed, and because they get rewarded with better pay and bigger opportunities, which propels them to produce even higher-quality work. It’s a virtuous cycle.
The most common approach to finding the right fit is trial and error, but life is short. The explore/exploit trade-off offers a better framework. In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration: try out many possibilities, research a broad range of ideas, cast a wide net. After this initial period, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found — but keep experimenting occasionally. If you are currently winning, exploit. If you are currently losing, continue to explore.
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out. Specialization is a powerful way to overcome the “accident” of bad genetics. The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you.
You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it’s better to be hard or soft. If you can find a more favorable environment, you can transform the situation from one where the odds are against you to one where they are in your favor.
Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell you what to work hard on. The better you understand your nature, the better your strategy can be. One of the best ways to ensure your habits remain satisfying over the long run is to pick behaviors that align with your personality and skills. Work hard on the things that come easy.
One of the most consistent findings in motivation research is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.” The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone. If you play tennis against a four-year-old, you’ll quickly become bored — it’s too easy. If you play against a professional like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you’ll quickly lose motivation — it’s too difficult. But if you play against someone who is your equal, the game becomes engrossing. You win a few points and lose a few. You have a good chance of winning, but only if you really try.
Figure: The Goldilocks Rule: maximum motivation occurs at the edge of your current abilities (Yerkes–Dodson law).
When you’re starting a new habit, keep the behavior as easy as possible so you can stick with it even when conditions aren’t perfect (the 3rd Law). But once a habit has been established, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways. These little improvements and new challenges keep you engaged. If you hit the Goldilocks Zone just right, you can achieve a flow state.
Improvement requires a delicate balance: you need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, you get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. As habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge: you have to fall in love with boredom. Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right.
This is why many of the most habit-forming products provide continuous forms of novelty — video games provide visual novelty, for instance. In psychology, variable rewards are a powerful amplifier of cravings. Slot machines are the most common real-world example: a gambler hits the jackpot every now and then but not at any predictable interval. This variance leads to the greatest spike of dopamine, enhances memory recall, and accelerates habit formation. Variable rewards won’t create a craving from nothing, but they are a powerful way to amplify the cravings you already experience because they reduce boredom.
As a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. The upside of habits is that you can do things without thinking. The downside is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery. The process of mastery requires that you progressively layer improvements on top of one another, each habit building upon the last until a new level of performance has been reached and a higher range of skills has been internalized.
Figure: Mastery is a process of layering habits with deliberate practice — each plateau is automated before the next level begins.
The solution is to establish a system for reflection and review. Two modes work well. First, an Annual Review each December: tally your habits for the year (articles published, workouts logged, new places visited), then answer three questions: What went well this year? What didn’t go so well this year? What did I learn? Second, an Integrity Report each summer to revisit your core values and assess whether you are living in accordance with them. It answers three questions: What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future?
These reports don’t take long — just a few hours per year — but they are crucial periods of refinement. They prevent the gradual slide that happens when you don’t pay close attention. Worrying too much about every daily choice is like looking at yourself in the mirror from an inch away — too much feedback. Never reviewing your habits is like never looking in the mirror. Periodic reflection and review is like viewing yourself from a conversational distance: you can see the important changes you should make without losing sight of the bigger picture.
Finally, reflection and review offer an ideal time to revisit identity. The key to mitigating losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you keep important aspects even if your particular role changes. “I’m an athlete” becomes “I’m the type of person who is mentally tough and loves a physical challenge.” “I’m a great soldier” becomes “I’m the type of person who is disciplined, reliable, and great on a team.” “I’m the CEO” becomes “I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.”
Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
There is an ancient Greek parable known as the Sorites Paradox: Can one coin make a person rich? If you give someone a pile of ten coins, you wouldn’t claim they are rich. But what if you add another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make them so. The same is true of atomic habits. The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them — a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
Each person, team, and company covered in this book faced different circumstances, but ultimately progressed the same way: through a commitment to tiny, sustainable, unrelenting improvements. Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine. If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.
With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Being curious is better than being smart. Emotions drive behavior. Suffering drives progress. Your actions reveal how badly you want something — if you keep saying something is a priority but never act on it, you don’t really want it. Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.
Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state — but it is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming. Your expectations determine your satisfaction: the gap between cravings and rewards determines how satisfied you feel. If you expect to get $10 and get $100, you feel great. If you expect $100 and get $10, you feel disappointed.
Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance. The first time an opportunity arises, there is hope of what could be — your expectation is based solely on promise. The second time around, your expectation is grounded in reality. You begin to understand how the process works, and your hope is gradually traded for a more accurate prediction and acceptance of the likely outcome.