Atomic Habits Summary

Here are all of my highlights from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.

• To often we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.
• That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path towards success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
• Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
• In any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
• Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
• Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
• Make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it.
• 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.
• It’s better to do less than you hoped than nothing at all.
• Build habits that work for your personality.
• In many cases, when people pick the wrong habit, it simply means they picked a habit that was too difficult.
• If you have a lot of time—like someone at the beginning of their career—it makes more sense to explore because once you find the right thing, you still have a good amount of time to exploit it.
• At some point, it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training everyday, doing the same things over and over and over.