let's time to build our habits

Part 3 untold story which help to build your habits

WHY SMALL HABITS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and

underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too

often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.

Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a

championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to

make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it

isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the longrun. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding.

Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one

year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline

nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates

into something much more.

1% BETTER EVERY DAY

1% worse every day for one year. 0.99

365 = 00.03

1% better every day for one year. 1.01

365 = 37.78

FIGURE 1: The effects of small habits compound over time. For example, if you can get just 1 percent better each day, you’ll end up with results that are nearly 37 times better after one

year.

Habits are the compound interest of selfimprovement. 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 and yet

the impact they deliver over the 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 can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss

small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment. Ifyou save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym

three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour

tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We make a few changes, but the

results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous

routines.

Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad

habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If

you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you

procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time

to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss.

But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor

decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small

choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a

1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.

The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of

shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying

from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the

heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of

New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the

airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United

States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.*

Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very

different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse

seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a

lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who

you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime

transformations.

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 toward success.

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your

current results. If you’re a millionaire but you spend more than you earn each

month, then you’re on a bad trajectory. If your spending habits don’t change, it’s

not going to end well. Conversely, if you’re broke, but you save a little bit every

month, then you’re on the path toward financial freedom—even if you’re

moving slower than you’d like.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a

lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of

your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.

Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what yourepeat.

If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow

the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will

compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less than you

earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading

books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones

that will define your future self.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply

whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time

your enemy.

Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily

as good habits can build you up, which is why understanding the details is

crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your

liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.

YOUR HABITS CAN COMPOUND FOR YOU OR AGAINST YOU

Positive Compounding

Productivity compounds. Accomplishing one extra task is a small feat on any given day, but it counts for a lot over an entire career. The effect of automating an old task or mastering a new

skill can be even greater. The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.

Knowledge compounds. Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can be transformative. Furthermore, each book you read not only teaches

you something new but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. As Warren Buffett says, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”

Relationships compound. People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a

network of broad and strong connections over time.

Negative Compounding

Stress compounds. The frustration of a traffic jam. The weight of parenting responsibilities. The worry of making ends meet. The strain of slightly high blood pressure. By themselves, these

common causes of stress are manageable. But when they persist for years, little stresses compound into serious health issues.

Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way. You get trapped in a thought loop. The

same is true for how you think about others. Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere.

Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one

event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire.

WHAT PROGRESS IS REALLY LIKE

Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room

is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so

slowly, the room begins to heat up.

Twenty-six degrees.

Twenty-seven.

Twenty-eight.

The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you.

Twenty-nine degrees.Thirty.

Thirty-one.

Still, nothing has happened.

Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift,

seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a

huge change.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which

build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up

everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over

the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it

builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the

air within six weeks.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical

threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages

of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make

progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem

during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going

anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful

outcomes are delayed.

This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last.

People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop.

You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any

change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good

habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits

need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the

Plateau of Latent Potential.

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is

not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have

not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving

success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting

when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not

wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.

When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will

call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event

rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago

—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump

today possible.

It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can

grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building allwhile. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion

they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great. An earthquake erupts.

Change can take years—before it happens all at once.

Mastery requires patience. The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful

teams in NBA history, have a quote from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in

their locker room: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter

hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a

crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I

know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

THE PLATEAU OF LATENT POTENTIAL

FIGURE 2: We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later

that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a “valley of disappointment” where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work

without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.

All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a

single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows

stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a

bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a

good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.

But what determines whether we stick with a habit long enough to survive the

Plateau of Latent Potential and break through to the other side? What is it thatcauses some people to slide into unwanted habits and enables others to enjoy the

compounding effects of good ones?

FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD

Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—

getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and

worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific,

actionable goals.

For many years, this was how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a

goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the

weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I

succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize

that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to

do with the systems I followed.

What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first

learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are

about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead

to those results.

If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your

system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches,

and conduct practice.

If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar

business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees,

and run marketing campaigns.

If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your

system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle

difficult measures, and your method for receiving feedback from your

instructor.

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and

focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were

a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and

focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get

results?

I think you wouldThe goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous

to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win

is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill

Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If

you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system

instead.

What do I mean by this? Are goals completely useless? Of course not. 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 your

goals and not enough time designing your systems.

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on

the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that

ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had

the same objective but didn’t succeed.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the

job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the

goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the goal

of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the

sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like

every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when

they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved

a different outcome.

Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.

Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon

the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. But if you

maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first

place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst

of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed

the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.

Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the

counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our

results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are

the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the resultslevel, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need

to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix

themselves.

Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.

The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll

be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually

putting happiness off until the next milestone. I’ve slipped into this trap so many

times I’ve lost count. For years, happiness was always something for my future

self to enjoy. I promised myself that once I gained twenty pounds of muscle or

after my business was featured in the New York Times, then I could finally relax.

Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal

and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box

yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that

your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when

you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when

there are many paths to success.

A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. 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. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.

And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you

first envision.

Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

Finally, a goal-oriented mind-set can create a “yo-yo” effect. Many runners work

hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. The

race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard work is focused

on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is

why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after

accomplishing a goal.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building

systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less

thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of

endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your

commitment to the process that will determine your progressA SYSTEM OF ATOMIC HABITS

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The

problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not

because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for

change.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your

systems.

Focusing on the overall system, rather than a single goal, is one of the core

themes of this book. It is also one of the deeper meanings behind the word

atomic. By now, you’ve probably realized that an atomic habit refers to a tiny

change, a marginal gain, a 1 percent improvement. But atomic habits are not just

any old habits, however small. They are little habits that are part of a larger

system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the

building blocks of remarkable results.

Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that

contributes to your overall improvement. At first, these tiny routines seem

insignificant, but soon they build on each other and fuel bigger wins that

multiply to a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment. They

are both small and mighty. This is the meaning of the phrase atomic habits—a

regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the

source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.

How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice

Versa)

WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones? Few things

can have a more powerful impact on your life than improving your daily habits.

And yet it is likely that this time next year you’ll be doing the same thing rather

than something better.

It often feels difficult to keep good habits going for more than a few days,

even with sincere effort and the occasional burst of motivation. Habits like

exercise, meditation, journaling, and cooking are reasonable for a day or two and

then become a hassle.

However, once your habits are established, they seem to stick around forever

—especially the unwanted ones. Despite our best intentions, unhealthy habits

like eating junk food, watching too much television, procrastinating, and

smoking can feel impossible to break.

Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the

wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way. In this

chapter, I’ll address the first point. In the chapters that follow, I’ll answer the

second.

Our first mistake is that we try to change the wrong thing. To understand what

I mean, consider that there are three levels at which change can occur. You can

imagine them like the layers of an onion.

THREE LAYERS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGEThe first layer is changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with

changing your results: losing weight, publishing a book, winning a

championship. Most of the goals you set are associated with this level of change.

The second layer is changing your process. This level is concerned with

changing your habits and systems: implementing a new routine at the gym,

decluttering your desk for better workflow, developing a meditation practice.

Most of the habits you build are associated with this level.

The third and deepest layer is changing your identity. This level is

concerned with changing your beliefs: your worldview, your self-image, your

judgments about yourself and others. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and

biases you hold are associated with this level.

Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is

about what you believe. When it comes to building habits that last—when it

comes to building a system of 1 percent improvements—the problem is not that

one level is “better” or “worse” than another. All levels of change are useful in

their own way. The problem is the direction of change.

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what

they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to

build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we

wish to become.

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first

person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable

response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be

something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying

around the same beliefs.

The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a

small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part

of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone

who smokes.

Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to

improve. They just think, “I want to be skinny (outcome) and if I stick to this

diet, then I’ll be skinny (process).” They set goals and determine the actions theyshould take to achieve those goals without considering the beliefs that drive their

actions. They never shift the way they look at themselves, and they don’t realize

that their old identity can sabotage their new plans for change.

Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs. The system of a

democracy is founded on beliefs like freedom, majority rule, and social equality.

The system of a dictatorship has a very different set of beliefs like absolute

authority and strict obedience. You can imagine many ways to try to get more

people to vote in a democracy, but such behavior change would never get off the

ground in a dictatorship. That’s not the identity of the system. Voting is a

behavior that is impossible under a certain set of beliefs.

A similar pattern exists whether we are discussing individuals, organizations,

or societies. There are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an

identity behind the habits.

Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last. You may want more

money, but if your identity is someone who consumes rather than creates, then

you’ll continue to be pulled toward spending rather than earning. You may want

better health, but if you continue to 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. You have

a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.

The story of Brian Clark, an entrepreneur from Boulder, Colorado, provides a

good example. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve chewed my fingernails,”

Clark told me. “It started as a nervous habit when I was young, and then

morphed into an undesirable grooming ritual. One day, I resolved to stop

chewing my nails until they grew out a bit. Through mindful willpower alone, I

managed to do it.”

Then, Clark did something surprising.

“I asked my wife to schedule my first-ever manicure,” he said. “My thought

was that if I started paying to maintain my nails, I wouldn’t chew them. And it

worked, but not for the monetary reason. What happened was the manicure made

my fingers look really nice for the first time. The manicurist even said that—

other than the chewing—I had really healthy, attractive nails. Suddenly, I was

proud of my fingernails. And even though that’s something I had never aspired

to, it made all the difference. I’ve never chewed my nails since; not even a single

close call. And it’s because I now take pride in properly caring for them.”

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your

identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s

something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.

The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the moremotivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. If you’re proud

of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain

it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an

upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more

likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll

fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.

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. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy

once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard

to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they

become part of who you are.

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.

Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an

indication of the type of person you believe that you are—either consciously or

nonconsciously.* Research has shown that once a person believes in a particular

aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief.

For example, people who identified as “being a voter” were more

To be continued in part 4