Finding Identity Through “Atomic Habits”

High-Level Overview:

Habits are the bedrock of personal development, and over time these marginal gains make for incredible results. Understanding the process of cue, craving, response, and reward will allow you to optimize the completion and follow through of these habits. Realizing your desired identity and coupling that with a system of atomic habits will put you on the path to realizing your true potential.

My Personal Reaction:

The theme of this book is the idea that small changes lead to big results. It’s our job to cultivate a system of atomic habits that push us towards our desired identity. Before reading this book I had one thought it mind, “How am I going to fulfill the potential and purpose in my life?” I had recently graduated college with a bachelor’s and landed a solid job in finance. But as I started working and transitioning into this new phase of life, my routine was lagging. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my free time, or simply what type of person I was becoming based on my current trajectory. I came across this book and started reading it in order to give myself the push I needed to start doing the things I needed to be doing. A goal of simply taking that first step in getting my life together post-grad. I can’t give James Clear enough credit for giving me the tools to solve this dilemma, and helping me understand how my habits are directly correlated with my desired identity.

Even more than knowledge I feel like I gained a newfound purpose and direction through this book. The first big change came when the idea of systems over goals was presented. “Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.” This concept rocked me. Up to this point I had a tab in my notes simply labeled ‘Goals’ and just as James outlined, it was purely a compiled list of ending positions, not how to get there! I sifted through these goals, and as I did, I couldn’t help but think, these are my aspirations for my life, these goals are a direct link to who I want to become. After this epiphany, I attempted to group my goals into sections or ‘Identity Drivers.’ This process of uncovering the vision of my life was incredibly useful in the future creation of my system of habit. The hardest part of creating the system of habit was determining what tool would be best to house it. After some research I stumbled upon Trello, a masterfully created tool originally made for lists. I utilized this list tool, and a downloadable module called ‘Habit Tracker’ to form the basis of my system. I had the foundation for tracking what would be a life-altering system of marginal gains. This felt like a great start. But only the beginning of a plethora of applicable knowledge pieces sprinkled throughout the book.

Important Quotes and Ideas:

• Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. 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.
• Remember the Plateau of Latent Potential when you think of giving up.
• 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.
• The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say that 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. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
• Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become more of the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
• Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of a habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely — even if they go unused for a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In the short-run you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become the product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment. A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent on optimizing your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
• It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
• Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change. They help us decide the best course of action. Neurologists have discovered that when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions. We have no signal of what to pursue and what to avoid. As the neurologist Damasio explains, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”
• Reprogram your brain: imagine changing just one word from a statement: you don’t “have” to. You “get” to. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens and turn them into opportunities.
• Win the decisive moments.
• Learn to scale the habits you want to learn. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved.
• The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
• Automate your life as much as you possibly can. Technology helps with this.
• We all want better lives for our future selves. However, when the moment of decision arrives, instant gratification usually wins.
• People who are better at delaying gratification have higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, and superior social skills … At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward. This concept goes against our nature. To train your brain against it, do this: 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 the ones that don’t.
• Change is easy when it is enjoyable.
• When successful people fail, they rebound quickly.
• In our data-driven world, we tend to overvalue numbers and undervalue anything ephemeral, soft, and difficult to quantify. We mistakenly think the factors we can measure are the only factors that exist. But just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing. And just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.
• The more immediate and more costly a mistake is, the faster you will learn from it.
• When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
• Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on. Once you get realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy. We know which types of opportunities to look for and which types of challenges to avoid. The better we understand our nature, the better our strategy can be.
• Work hard on the things that come easy.
• Have just enough victories to keep you motivated, and just enough mistakes to keep you working hard. The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50–50 split between success and failure. Half of the time you get what you want. Half of the time you don’t. You need just enough winning to experience satisfaction and just enough wanting to experience desire. This is one of the benefits of following the Goldilocks rule. If you are interested in a habit, working on challenges of just manageable difficulty is a good way to keep things interesting. You have to fall in love with boredom (the process).
• Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
• When you know the simple movements so well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay attention to more advanced details. In this way, habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence.

Action-Steps:

• Perform an ‘annual review’ of your year. Answer 3 questions: What went well this year? What didn’t go so well this year? What did I learn? These questions provide an annual reminder to revisit your desired identity and consider how your habits are helping you become the type of person you wish to be.
• Perform an ‘integrity report’ every 6 months or so. Answer 3 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?
• I know lots of executives and investors who keep a ‘decision journal’ in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of the each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.
• A good strategy for building a habit is simply writing a 2 minute strategy for kickstarting that behavior.
• An effective way to actually follow through on what you set out to do is by employing this tactic. Fill out this sentence, I will [HABIT] on [DAY] at [TIME] in [PLACE].
• Understanding the chemistry of your habits is also very useful for building behaviors that last. List out the constraints you face when it comes to building your habit. And then think of at least 3 ways you can simplify your habit and overcome those constraints.
• Try mastering just one thing at a time. First list ideas for habits you want to build. Then rank those habits by order of importance.
• Try the overlap principle. This is where you list at least 3 ways that you can approach the same habit and make your habit more resilient.
• Always get back on track after slipping up. Write at least 5 IF/THEN statements for your habit.
• Set up a chain reaction of small wins. What do you do on your best days? Are there any commonalities? Come up with a few ideas for keystone habits that seem to ripple through and positively impact multiple areas of your life. Spend a few minutes journaling about this.
• This will make things effortless. Write the habit you’re looking to achieve, along with a list of barriers that might keep you from achieving that habit. Take a look at your list, and ask yourself: Is this more of an environmental battle or a genetic battle?
• This will aid in automating your habits. List 10 examples of how you can step into the flow of your normal day and place a reminder or hot trigger that will help you stick with the habit you’re looking to perform.
• This will help if your willpower is weak. Write out a few examples of how you could design your environment to promote your habit. You want more steps between you and a negative behavior, and fewer steps between you and a positive behavior.
• Set up anchor tasks that will then allow you to fit in smaller tasks that fit with the flow of your day. Create a table of current habits you do, and habits that could be related to that anchor that you want to start. Fill out this sentence: After/Before [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].