- Processed?
Note steps
- This note should be created using the Citations plugin which links with Zotero to pull in its meta and bibliographic information.
- If you’re making a literature note in obsidian, it’s because you’ve already annotated and read it or you’re just about to.
- Import the annotations you make from Zotero into this literature note.
- Ensure that all imported annotations have fixed typos and do some minor formatting and sectioning out if necessary.
- Once complete, click the checkbox above.
Notes @clearAtomicHabitsEasy2018 taken from physical book
- four step model of habits - cue craving response reward. Page 9.
systems not goals
- aggregation of marginal gains - page 13
- habits are the compound interest of self improvement - page 16.
- repeating 1% errors every day and replicating poor decisions compounds into toxic results - page 17.
- it’s important to win the tiny battles - page 18
- ”good habits make time your ally, bad habits make time your enemy”, page 18
- habits can be considered as a build up of potential energy for a breakthrough to something great. At first though, you often won’t see the effects of progress a good or even a bad habit has made, page 20
- don’t have goals, use systems because they rely less on motivation and other depletable resources and winners and losers have the same goals, page 23-24
identity and habits
- habits that have lifelong changes are often brought about through a change in belief system (i.e a change or adoption of identity), pages 30-31. ^b72a4f
- can identity even be changed?
- can views or beliefs be adopted, if so how?
- a habit can form an identity when you are able to take pride in its processes or outcomes. It becomes a form of intrinsic motivation, page 33. This is because pride is a good motivator, page 34. ^60393b
- do people commit actions that align with their sense of identity? Exceptions?
- identity can be formed by self-evident repeated actions of the desired identity. So, it’s desirable to repeat and keep ongoing habits which move you closer to your desired identity. Overtime, a sense of pride will develop in this identity, page 37.
- for these reasons, James Clear proposes asking yourself “who is the type of person who would achieve these goals?” The answer being a person whom habits can be drawn from and actions can be referenced, page 39. For example, “what would a healthy person do”. It reinforces you to become this type of person.
- James Clear emphasises that this step in achieving a goal of any kind is the first and most crucial step that must be taken. Without reference to the necessary identity that needs to be adopted to bring about the desired change, no meaningful long-term change can occur, page 41.
build better habits
- there are 4 steps to producing a habit. Cue, craving, response and reward. Each quite self explanatory, a cue causes a pattern recognisition, we start to have a craving based individually and our brain attempts the most frictionless, we get a reward associated with that cue, pages 49-51
- all behaviour is driven by the desire to solve a problem, page 51
- all 4 stages of a habit can be moved through in a fraction of a second, page 51
4 laws of behavioural change
Page 54 Following the sequence of a habit with cue, craving, response and reward, to make a good habit:
- make it obvious.
- make it attractive.
- make it easy.
- make it satisfying And to break a bad one:
- make it invisible
- make it unattractive
- make it difficult
- make it unsatisfying
Every goal is doomed to fail if it goes against the grain of human nature, page 55.
being conscious of habits in general are one of the most important steps to changing them, page 67
A method of increasingly likelihood of a habit being activated is to use Implementation intentions which is where you write down the time and place of a given action. This is a manipulation of cues. Follows the general format of “when situation X arises, I will perform Y”, page 70
People who make a specific plan on when, how and where they will perform a new habit have a higher likelihood of following through, page 71
A good way to build habits is to identify a current habit and include the new habit immediately after the current one. This is called habit stacking. For example, “after i pour my cup of coffee in the morning, ill meditate for X minutes”, page 74
Habit stacking uses an already known psychological behaviour to our advantage called the Diderot effect, page 75
The tightly bound a new habit is to a specific cue, the more likely you’ll notice when it’s time to act on it, page 79
”environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour”, page 82
It is important to live and work in environments that contain as much productive cues as possible, page 84
Make the cues for good habits visually more obvious, page 86
James Clear asserts that our behaviours are not defined by objects in our environments but more so our relationships to them, page 87