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Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

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By focusing on your habits you can improve your abilities.

A habit will often only pay out the desired outcome but the payback is overtime.  You may well not seeing any improvement until further down the line.

When changing (for the better) make prompts visible.

Argues goals are not the key, it is instead a system in place that allows improvements to occur, but you need to take action.

Achieve intention by motivating yourself internally.  Identify yourself as the person you are wanting to be.

Makes good habit(s) obvious by putting it clearly in front of you.  Make the bad habit(s) you are trying to stop harder to do by making them invisible so they are not prompted. Spend time improving your environment to prompt you to do the thing you want to do.

Make a good habit attractive.  Surround yourself by people who display in the habits that you want. Often it’s society that leads you.

Suggests a different word for ‘must’, instead call this ‘get’.  Either way you need to do it but you are framing this more positively. Prior to the habit have a good thing that is associated with it or if it’s a negative a bad thing.

Perform repetitive actions and actually take action, even if you are aware the result will not be perfect. In addition note the path of least resistance and use this to your advantage.

For example if TV watching is the habit you want to reduce suggests removing batteries from remote control or even put the whole TV into cupboard to make it harder to watch! For habits you want to promote, such as going to the gym take your gym clothes with you to reduce resistance.

Goodhart’s law when a something your tracking or measuring becomes a target therefore fails to become a good measure.  Although this law was first thought up regarding economics it mentions this principle so you are aware of it.  Suggests you try to measure the thing you are working on to assess progress.

Try to stack habits so you prompt more by doing them in sequence. Embrace the benefit of compound gains – sometimes the challenges are performing on the bad days.

Remember that a 50% gain (once made) is then only a 33% loss. So on the bad days do the thing anyway to maintain your compound improvement and not regress.

When life has its inevitable challenges simply it aim to keep going, don’t break the chain if you miss it once fair enough but don’t miss it again!

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