Atomic Habits: How to Get 1% Better Every Day - James Clear

[Music] one way to think about it is just kind of basic math like if you just look at the numbers if you were able to improve by 1% each day for an entire year and those games compound you would end up 37 times better at the end of the year and if you were to get 1% worse you would widdle yourself almost all the way down to zero what's interesting here is that everybody wants a transformation right everybody wants a radical improvement one rapid success but we fail to realize that small habits and little choices

are transforming us every day already so the rest of this talk there are four stages of habit formation I'm going to take you through each of those four so the four stages are noticing wanting doing and liking noticing wanting doing and liking one of my favorite things about noticing when my favorite strategy is for discussing it it's called implementation intentions many people think that they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity they think that they need to get more motivated that they need willpower in order to execute on a habit if I just

felt like writing if I just felt like meditating I felt like working out then I would do it but in fact they don't have a plan for it so they wake up each day thinking I wonder if I'll feel motivated to write today wonder if I'll feel motivated to workout today but instead you can take the decision-making out of it by explicitly stating when where and how you want to implement the habit it sounds easy to say let's just start a plan let's you know write down exactly what you should do and then maybe you'll

fall through on it but of course we all know that there are challenges that arise it's not quite that easy so here's a little strategy that I like to use to make sure you can come up with a better plan of action and it's called a failure pre-mortem so the way that it works is you think about the habit the project the goal whatever the most important thing is that you want to work on and I want you to imagine fast forward six months from now and you failed and then tell the story of why

you failed what happened what challenges did you encounter what was it that took you off course once you have all that stuff laid out on the table in front of you you can start to make better choices about how to develop a plan you can start to have if-then plans so not only do I want to exercise for 20 minutes on Monday at 5 p.m. but also if I do not exercise because I have to take my kid to practice or whatever then it's Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. I will go in right you're gonna

have ways to adjust for these challenges stage 2 wanting one of the most overlooked drivers of habits and human behavior is our physical environment and this is an interesting insight about our desires your environment often influences them we want things simply simply because they are an option right simply because they are in front of us at the time thankfully you don't have to be the victim of your environment you can also be the architect of it you can decide to design something to make your good behaviors easier and your bad behaviors harder so when it

comes to habits if you want to practice your guitar more frequently put it right in the middle of your living room so you run across this all the time you want to read more when you make your bed in the morning take the book you want to read put it on top of the pillow when you come back that night pick it up read a few pages go to sleep many of our desires are simply shaped because we have an environment that shapes us in that way so the moral of the stories I've never seen

someone stick to positive habits in a consistent fashion in a negative environment maybe you can overpower it once or twice maybe you can have the willpower to do the right thing on one day but if you're constantly fighting against those forces it's gonna be very hard to follow through stage 3 doing the important inside here especially for habits is that in the beginning the most important thing is just to shut up and put your reps in just make sure that you hone the skill right and you can start to think of it the way that

I like to think of it is that any outcome that you wish to achieve is just a point along the spectrum of repetitions so if you have a few reps two more reps and you can imagine an easy goal moderate goal a hard goal the more reps that you put in the more that you more like you you are to achieve that goal now what I like to say is you should optimize for the starting line not the finish line right so often when we think about habits goals routines achievements it's all about the milestone

we think about how much weight we want to lose how much money we learn our want to earn how many subscribers we want to have it's all fixed on the finish line but instead if you can optimize for the starting line and make it as easy as possible to get started and get your reps in often the outcomes just come as a natural result okay Stage four liking the only reason that we repeat behaviors is because we enjoy them because we like the reward if we don't enjoy the experience along the way we're unlikely to

stick with it and that means that you need to figure out ways to bring a reward into the present moment because good habits have a problem and that problem is that for good habits the immediate consequence is there there's a cost that happens in the moment but the reward is often delayed so you need to figure out how to bring the reward into the present moment to stick to a good habit and someone else who's going to be speaking here Seth Godin had a very nice little quote about this or is the best way to

change long-term behavior is a short-term feedback and one way to think about that is that long-term behaviors sticking with writing for years on end or going to the gym and so on they they have those delayed consequences so you need a way to enjoy it in the moment so here's I think you should do get a wall calendar or you can see every day of the year mapped out on it and then any day that you do your task of writing jokes for 15 minutes I want you just put an X on that day and

you'll have a couple false starts here and there but at some point you're gonna get a little bit of a chain going right you get four or five six seven eight days in a row and at that point your only goal becomes to don't break the chain doesn't matter how good or how bad the jokes are doesn't matter if it makes it into your material just don't break the chain what's interesting about this is that by measuring your progress you get an immediate reward in the moment right the reward of like having a great stand-up

routine forty you know forty days from now or 40 weeks from now or whatever is not it's so delayed that you need something in the moment that makes you feel good so if you do those 15 minutes you can cross that off that's a way to get an immediate hit a little bit of a reward by tracking it we often fear that in order to achieve something new to become someone new we have to abandon everything that we are but in fact that's not how it works change can happen plank by plank board by board

habit by habit and gradually you can become someone new with consistency and repetition you can actually change not only your results but actually your identity is because the more evidence that we have for a belief the more likely we are to believe it so if you go to church every Sunday for 20 years you believe that you were religious if you study Spanish every Thursday night for 20 minutes you believe that you are studious the actions that you take provide evidence for who you are and it's not that habits matter more necessarily on an individual

basis each moment in life matters but what ends up happening is that over the broad span of time things that you do once or twice fade away and things that you do time after time day after day week after week accumulate the bulk of the evidence for what you believe about yourself and so every action that you take is actually a vote but type of person that you want to become if you want to become someone new then you can take a new action and begin to accumulate evidence for that identity for that belief about

yourself and that the more votes that you cast the more likely you are to win the election you don't need to be unanimous you don't have to be perfect all the time you just need to have the body of work so true change is actually not behavior change it's not results change it's not process change its identity change the goal is not to become do the goal is not to read a book it's to become a reader goals not to write a book or write an article it's to become a writer goals not to run

a marathon it's to become a runner to become a type of person to develop an identity and the way to being something or becoming someone is through doing something so every time you sit down to write every time you practice that habit you are being a writer every time you play a sport you're being an athlete every time you practice painting or music or whatever you're being an artist and habits are not only the method through which we achieve external measures of success like losing weight or gaining more earning more money or meditating and reducing

stress they are also the path through which we achieve internal change and actually become someone new they're the path through which we forge the identity that we have the deepest beliefs we have about ourselves our sense of self and so if you can change your habits you can change your life thank you