Introduction — The Case for Tiny Changes
Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks, but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. With better habits, anything is possible.
The backbone of this book is a four-step model of habits — cue, craving, response, and reward — and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps. The strategies here are relevant to anyone looking for a step-by-step system for improvement, whether your goals center on health, money, productivity, relationships, or all of the above.
The Fundamentals — Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference
Chapter 1 — The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.” That was Dave Brailsford explaining the philosophy that turned British Cycling into the dominant force on the road. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether the goal is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or anything else, 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 long run. The math is striking. 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.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. 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.
That delay is exactly what makes small changes so easy to dismiss in the moment. If you 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, the results never seem to come quickly, and 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, 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. 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 toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. 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.
Compounding runs in every direction. Productivity compounds: the more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas. Knowledge compounds too — as Warren Buffett puts it, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.” Relationships compound, because people reflect your behavior back to you; the more you help others, the more others want to help you, and being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time. But stress compounds. Negative thoughts compound. Outrage compounds. The same mechanism that builds empires can quietly erode them.
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 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. Twenty-nine. 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. 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. Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
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. The work was not wasted; it is being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two. 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 you weren’t making any progress — that makes the jump today possible. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building all the while; then, one day, they rub against 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.
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 produces what feels like a “valley of disappointment” — a period when people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. But the work was not wasted. It was being stored.
Which leads to the most important distinction in the book. Clear set goals for the grades he wanted in school, the weights he wanted to lift in the gym, the profits he wanted to earn in business. He succeeded at a few and failed at a lot of them. Eventually he began to realize that his results had very little to do with the goals he set and nearly everything to do with the systems he followed. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? If you were a basketball coach and ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, you would still get results. The 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. Goals are good for setting a direction. Systems are best for making progress.
A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about goals and not enough time designing systems. The first is that winners and losers have the same goals. Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates them. 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. The second problem is that achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Imagine you have a messy room and set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, you’ll have a clean room — for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy habits that created the mess, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause. The third problem is that goals restrict your happiness. The implicit assumption behind any goal is: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” A goals-first mentality means you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. Goals also create an either-or conflict — either you achieve your goal and are successful, or you fail and are a disappointment. The fourth problem is that goals are at odds with long-term progress. A goal-oriented mind aims for a finish line, while real change asks for a way of living.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
James Clear
Chapter 2 — How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: we try to change the wrong thing, and we try to change it in the wrong way. To see what that means, picture behavior change as three concentric layers. The outer layer is your outcomes — the results you get, like losing weight, publishing a book, or winning a championship. The middle layer is your processes — the habits and systems behind the outcomes, such as a new gym routine, a tidied desk, or a daily meditation practice. The deepest layer is your identity — your beliefs, your worldview, your self-image, the judgments you hold about yourself and others. Most of the assumptions and biases you carry around live at this third level.
Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe. None of these levels is “better” than another; the trouble is the direction of change. Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. That leads to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits, where you start by focusing on who you wish to become.
Picture 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 is a small difference in language, and a complete difference in identity.
Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to improve. They just think, “I want to be skinny, and if I stick to this diet then I’ll be skinny.” They set goals and determine the actions to take without considering the beliefs that drive those actions. They never shift the way they look at themselves, and they don’t realize that their old identity can sabotage their new plans. You may want more money, but if your identity is someone who consumes rather than creates, 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 is 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 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 another thing entirely to say I’m the type of person who is this. The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated 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. 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.
So 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. What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are — either consciously or non-consciously. And once you’ve repeated a story to yourself for years — “I’m terrible with directions,” “I’m not a morning person,” “I’m bad at remembering people’s names,” “I’m always late,” “I’m not good with technology,” “I’m horrible at math” — it is easy to slide into those mental grooves and accept them as fact. There is internal pressure to maintain your self-image and behave in a way that is consistent with your beliefs. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
The process for changing your identity comes down to two steps. First, decide the type of person you want to be. Second, prove it to yourself with small wins. Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity.
Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night, taking a cold shower each morning, or wearing the same outfit each day. It’s not about achieving external measures of success like earning more money, losing weight, or reducing stress. Habits can help you accomplish all of those things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
Chapter 3 — How to Build Better Habits in Four Simple Steps
Habits do not restrict freedom; they create it. The people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks — when to work out, where to write, when to pay the bills — then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. The craving is the motivational force behind every habit — but what you crave is not the habit itself, it’s the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette; you crave the feeling of relief it provides. You are not motivated by brushing your teeth, but by the feeling of a clean mouth. You do not want to turn on the television; you want to be entertained. Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state. The response is the actual habit you perform. And the reward is the end goal of the whole sequence.
We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: they satisfy us, and they teach us what is worth remembering and repeating. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting it. The response is about obtaining it. If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Eliminate the cue and the habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future.
From this loop emerge the four laws of behavior change. To create a good habit: make the cue obvious, make the craving attractive, make the response easy, and make the reward satisfying. To break a bad one, invert each law — make the cue invisible, make the craving unattractive, make the response difficult, and make the reward unsatisfying. The rest of this book is a tour through these eight commands: a practical map for designing the behaviors that, repeated daily, become the architecture of who you are.
The First Law — Make It Obvious
Chapter 4 — The Man Who Didn’t Look Right
On the Japanese rail system, conductors and operators perform a peculiar-looking ritual called Pointing-and-Calling. As a train approaches a signal, the operator points at it and calls out its status aloud. As the train pulls into the station, he points to the speedometer and calls out the exact speed. Each detail is identified, pointed at, and named out loud. The technique is so effective because it raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious one. Because the train operators must use their eyes, hands, mouth, and ears, they are far more likely to notice problems before something goes wrong. Clear’s wife does something similar. Whenever they are preparing to walk out the door for a trip, she verbally calls out the most essential items in her packing list. “I’ve got my keys. I’ve got my wallet. I’ve got my glasses. I’ve got my husband.”
The same trick works in reverse, against habits you’d rather lose. If you want to cut back on junk food and notice yourself reaching for another cookie, say it out loud: “I’m about to eat this cookie, but I don’t need it. Eating it will cause me to gain weight and hurt my health.” Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes their consequences seem more real. Most habits fail in the dark — in the unexamined moment between cue and response. Naming the moment is the first move toward changing it.
Chapter 5 — The Best Way to Start a New Habit
In one study, 91 percent of people in a particular group exercised at least once per week — more than double the normal rate. The difference wasn’t motivation. It was the sentence they had filled out beforehand, what researchers call an implementation intention: a plan you make in advance about when and where to act. Cues that trigger habits come in many forms — the buzz of your phone in your pocket, the smell of chocolate-chip cookies, the wail of an ambulance — but the two most common are time and location. Implementation intentions leverage both. Broadly speaking, the format is: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
The punch line is clear. People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. Too many people try to change their habits without these basic details figured out. We tell ourselves, “I’m going to eat healthier” or “I’m going to write more,” but we never say when and where these habits are going to happen. We leave it up to chance and hope that we will “just remember to do it” or feel motivated at the right time. Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
The simple way to apply this strategy is to fill out a single sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen. I will study Spanish for twenty minutes at 6 p.m. in my bedroom. I will exercise for one hour at 5 p.m. in my local gym. I will make my partner a cup of tea at 8 a.m. in the kitchen. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.
There’s an even more powerful trick built on the same insight. The tendency for one purchase to lead to another has a name: the Diderot Effect, which states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases. You can spot this pattern everywhere. You buy a dress and have to get new shoes and earrings to match. You buy a couch and suddenly question the layout of your entire living room. You buy a toy for your child and soon find yourself purchasing all of the accessories that go with it. Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing. No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next.
You can use that connectedness to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking, and it is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute. After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes. After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened today. After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.
You can stack onto events as well as routines. When I see a set of stairs, I will take them instead of the elevator. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet. When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing. When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first. When I buy a new item, I will give something away — one in, one out. When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering. When I leave a public place, I will check the table and chairs to make sure I don’t leave anything behind.
Consider when you are most likely to be successful, and don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else. One way to find the right trigger for your stack is to brainstorm a list of the habits you already do without fail — get out of bed, take a shower, brush your teeth, get dressed, brew a cup of coffee, eat breakfast, take the kids to school, start the workday, eat lunch, end the workday, change out of work clothes, sit down for dinner, turn off the lights, get into bed. Then list the things that happen to you each day without fail: the sun rises, you get a text message, the song you are listening to ends, the sun sets. Armed with these two columns, you can begin searching for the best place to layer your new habit into your lifestyle. Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable. The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious, and implementation intentions and habit stacking are among the most practical ways to create obvious cues and design a clear plan for when and where to take action.
Chapter 6 — Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
Every habit is context dependent. The psychologist Kurt Lewin captured it in a deceptively simple equation: behavior is a function of the person in their environment, or B = f(P,E). You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room. It’s easy not to take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry. When the cue is hidden, the habit rarely happens.
Clear discovered this firsthand with apples. He kept buying them, kept letting them rot in the crisper drawer, and kept feeling guilty about it. Eventually he took his own advice, bought a large display bowl, and placed it in the middle of the kitchen counter. The next time he bought apples, that was where they went — out in the open where he could see them. Almost like magic, he began eating a few apples each day simply because they were obvious rather than out of sight.
The same logic transfers everywhere. If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter. If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room. If you want to remember to send more thank-you notes, keep a stack of stationery on your desk. If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house. If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues. Be the designer of your world, not merely the consumer of it.
The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits. Go to a new place — a different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use — and create a new routine there. Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room, a rooftop patio, or a building with expansive architecture. Take a break from the space where you do your daily work, since that space is also linked to your current thought patterns. Trying to eat healthier? You probably shop on autopilot at your regular supermarket. Try a new grocery store. You may find it easier to avoid unhealthy food when your brain doesn’t automatically know where it is located in the store.
One device deserves a special warning, because it has become a cue for nearly everything. You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which is part of what makes it so powerful. But when you can use it to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and play video games whenever you open your phone. It’s a mishmash of cues. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose. If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
Chapter 7 — The Secret to Self-Control
If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that the problem is a lack of self-control — and maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea that a little discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture. Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, those individuals turn out not to be all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower. They spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. Perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve them is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person — it’s by creating a more disciplined environment.
This matters because bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the very feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes your health even worse and leaves you feeling more anxious. It is a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits. In the short run, you can overpower temptation. In the long run, we become a product of the environment we live in. Clear puts it bluntly: he has never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.
So the move is to subtract the cues, not strengthen the will. If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room for a few hours. If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following the social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy. If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV out of the bedroom. If you’re spending too much money on electronics, quit reading reviews of the latest tech gear. If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and put it in a closet after each use. Make the cues of your good habits obvious, and the cues of your bad habits invisible. Self-control isn’t a muscle you bulk up; it’s a room you redecorate.
The Second Law — Make It Attractive
Chapter 8 — How to Make a Habit Irresistible
Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win. Cocaine addicts get a surge of dopamine when they see the powder, not after they take it. Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act. Scientists refer to this as the difference between “wanting” and “liking.” As an adult, daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. The brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers are vast — the brain stem, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, the dorsal striatum, the amygdala, and portions of the prefrontal cortex. By comparison, the liking centers are much smaller. Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
This asymmetry points toward a powerful strategy: temptation bundling, which works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. The habit stacking plus temptation bundling formula runs like this — after your current habit, do the habit you need; after the habit you need, do the habit you want. After I get my morning coffee, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened yesterday. After I say one thing I’m grateful for, I will read the news. Or: after I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees. After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook. Doing the thing you need to do means you get to do the thing you want to do. The want becomes the reward that pulls you through the need.
Chapter 9 — The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits
Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in. We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: the close, the many, and the powerful. We pick up habits from the people around us almost without noticing. We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with one another, the way our coworkers get results. When your friends smoke pot, you give it a try too. When your wife has a habit of double-checking that the door is locked before going to bed, you pick it up as well. The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us, and one of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.
When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists. When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
We are also drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status. We want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups, or the musician who can play the hardest chord progressions, or the parent with the most accomplished children, because these things separate us from the crowd. Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out. And just as powerfully, we are motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status. We trim our hedges and mow our lawn because we don’t want to be the slob of the neighborhood. When our mother comes to visit, we clean up the house because we don’t want to be judged. We are continually wondering “What will others think of me?” and altering our behavior based on the answer.
Chapter 10 — How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits
Every habit, however specific it looks on the surface, is rooted in a small set of underlying motives that are as old as the species: conserve energy, obtain food and water, find love and reproduce, connect and bond with others, win social acceptance and approval, reduce uncertainty, achieve status and prestige. A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. The brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status and prestige. Your habits are modern solutions to ancient desires.
Here is the powerful part: there are many different ways to address the same underlying motive. One person learns to reduce stress by smoking a cigarette. Another learns to ease their anxiety by going for a run. Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it. And your behavior is heavily dependent on how you interpret the events that happen to you, not necessarily the objective reality of those events themselves. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat, light up, or scroll through social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a string of likes. What you really want is to feel different.
Sometimes all you need is a slight mind-set shift. We often talk about everything we “have to” do in a given day. You have to wake up early for work. You have to make another sales call for your business. You have to cook dinner for your family. Now, imagine changing just one word: you don’t “have to” — you “get to.” You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales call. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. Both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mind-set we choose.
The reframe applies everywhere. Many people associate exercise with being a challenging task that drains energy. You can just as easily view it as a way to develop skills and build yourself up. Instead of telling yourself “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast.” Saving money is often associated with sacrifice, but you can associate it with freedom instead — living below your current means increases your future means, and the money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month. When it comes to pregame jitters before a big presentation or an important competition, the quicker breathing and faster heart rate are real, but the interpretation is yours. If you interpret those feelings negatively, you feel threatened and tense up. If you interpret them positively, you can respond with fluidity and grace. You can reframe “I am nervous” to “I am excited and I’m getting an adrenaline rush to help me concentrate.” And association can work in your favor intentionally: if you always play the same song before a particular activity, you’ll begin to link the music with the act. Whenever you want to trigger the right state of mind, just press play.
The Third Law — Make It Easy
Chapter 11 — Walk Slowly, but Never Backward
There is a crucial difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If you outline twenty ideas for articles you want to write, that’s motion. If you actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If you search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If you actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action. Motion can be useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn’t matter how many times you talk to the personal trainer — that conversation will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out produces the result.
So why do we stay in motion? Sometimes we genuinely need to plan or learn more. But more often, motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing. If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it. You just need to get your reps in.
This is why repetition is a form of change — not metaphorically, but physically. Neuroscientists have a principle known as Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain. In musicians, the cerebellum — critical for physical movements like plucking a guitar string or pulling a violin bow — is larger than it is in non-musicians. Mathematicians, meanwhile, have increased gray matter in the inferior parietal lobule, which plays a key role in computation and calculation, and its size is directly correlated with the amount of time spent in the field. Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. Simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit. The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.
Chapter 12 — The Law of Least Effort
Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change — maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity bestseller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible. It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.
The idea behind making it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that pay off in the long run. Imagine you are holding a garden hose that is bent in the middle. Some water can flow through, but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options. You can crank up the valve and force more water out, or you can simply remove the bend and let water flow through naturally. Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. Making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.
Think of this as addition by subtraction. Japanese manufacturing companies looked for every point of friction in the production process and eliminated it. As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue. Similarly, when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort — which is one reason tidying up can feel so good: we are simultaneously moving forward and lightening the cognitive load our environment places on us. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with good behaviors and increase the friction associated with bad ones.
One practical expression of this is what designer Ryan Nuckols calls “resetting the room.” When he finishes watching television, he places the remote back on the TV stand, arranges the pillows on the couch, and folds the blanket. When he leaves his car, he throws any trash away. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the shower is warming up — noting that the perfect time to clean the toilet is right before you wash yourself in the shower anyway. The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next one. Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy. Clear’s wife keeps a box of greeting cards that are presorted by occasion — birthday, sympathy, wedding, graduation — and whenever necessary, she grabs an appropriate card and sends it off. She is remarkably good at remembering to send cards because she has reduced the friction of doing so.
You can prime your environment for almost any habit. If you want to cook a healthy breakfast, place the skillet on the stove, set the cooking spray on the counter, and lay out the plates and utensils the night before. If you want to draw more, put your pencils, pens, notebooks, and drawing tools on top of your desk within easy reach. If you want to exercise, set out your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag, and water bottle ahead of time. If you want to improve your diet, chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers so you have easy access to healthy options during the week. And to increase friction against bad habits: if you find yourself watching too much television, unplug it after each use and only plug it back in if you can say out loud the name of the show you want to watch. If that isn’t enough, also take the batteries out of the remote — it takes an extra ten seconds to turn it back on, and that small delay is often all it takes. It is remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behavior.
Chapter 13 — How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule
Every day there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. Call them decisive moments — the moment you decide between ordering takeout or cooking dinner, the moment you choose between driving your car or riding your bike, the moment you decide between starting your homework or grabbing the video game controller. These choices are forks in the road. The difference between a good day and a bad day is often just a few productive and healthy decisions made at these decisive moments. Each one is like a fork in the road, and they stack up throughout the day and can ultimately lead to very different outcomes.
The most effective way to counteract the pull toward the wrong fork is to use the Two-Minute Rule: when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. Nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version. “Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.” “Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.” “Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.” “Fold the laundry” becomes “Fold one pair of socks.” “Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.” What you want is a gateway habit that naturally leads you down a more productive path.
If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, you have little hope of mastering the finer details. 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. As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine. Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle. The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. A phased approach works for larger behavior shifts too. Becoming an early riser doesn’t happen in a single leap — it begins with being home by 10 p.m., then having all devices off by 10 p.m., then being in bed by 10 p.m. reading or talking, then lights off by 10 p.m., and finally waking up at 6 a.m. Each phase is its own two-minute version of the larger goal.
Chapter 14 — How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible
If you find yourself continually struggling to follow through on your plans, you can take a page from Victor Hugo and make your bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists call a commitment device — a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones. Some athletes who have to “make weight” for a competition choose to leave their wallets at home during the week before weigh-in so they won’t be tempted to buy fast food. Clear’s friend and fellow habits expert Nir Eyal purchased an outlet timer — an adapter he plugged in between his internet router and the power outlet. At 10 p.m. each night, the outlet timer cuts off the power to the router. When the internet goes off, everyone knows it is time to go to bed.
Commitment devices work because they shift the decision to a moment when your intentions are strong. When Clear is looking to cut calories, he asks the waiter to split his meal and box half of it to go before the meal is even served. If he waited until the meal came out and told himself he’d just eat half, it would never work. If you’re feeling motivated to get in shape, schedule a yoga session and pay ahead of time. Locking in future behavior while motivation is high is one of the most reliable forces available to you.
Some of the most powerful commitment devices are one-time actions that automate good behavior going forward. For sleep: buy a good mattress, get blackout curtains, remove the television from your bedroom. For productivity: unsubscribe from distracting emails, turn off notifications, mute group chats, set your phone to silent, use email filters to clear up your inbox, delete games and social media apps. For happiness: get a dog, move to a friendly and social neighborhood. For general health: get vaccinated, buy good shoes to avoid back pain, invest in a supportive chair or standing desk. For finance: enroll in an automatic savings plan, set up automatic bill pay, cut cable service, ask service providers to lower your bills. The average person spends over two hours per day on social media — that’s more than six hundred hours per year. What could you do with that time? During the year Clear was writing this book, he had his assistant reset the passwords on all his social media accounts every Monday, logging him out on every device. All week he worked without distraction. On Friday, she sent him the new passwords. He had the entire weekend to enjoy social media, and then Monday morning the process began again. If you don’t have an assistant, team up with a friend or family member and reset each other’s passwords each week.
The Fourth Law — Make It Satisfying
Chapter 15 — The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change
We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. This is entirely logical. Feelings of pleasure — even minor ones like washing your hands with soap that smells nice and lathers well — are signals that tell the brain: “This feels good. Do this again, next time.” Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating. Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, there is little reason to repeat it. The story is told of a woman with a narcissistic relative who drove her nuts. In an attempt to spend less time with him, she acted as dull and as boring as possible whenever he was around. Within a few encounters, he started avoiding her because he found her so uninteresting. The unsatisfying experience reshaped his behavior without a single confrontation.
The first three laws of behavior change — make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy — increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law — make it satisfying — increases the odds that it will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop. The challenge is that we live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment. In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you exercise today, perhaps you won’t be overweight next year. If you save money now, maybe you’ll have enough for retirement decades from now. Our ancient ancestors lived in an immediate-return environment, where actions delivered clear and immediate outcomes. That wiring hasn’t changed — but the world has. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
Thankfully, it’s possible to train yourself to delay gratification — but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. The best way to do this is to 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. Make avoidance visible. Open a savings account and label it for something you want — maybe “Leather Jacket.” Whenever you pass on a purchase, put the same amount of money you would have spent into the account. Skip your morning latte? Transfer five dollars. Pass on another month of a streaming service? Move ten dollars over. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself. One of Clear’s readers and his wife wanted to stop eating out so much and start cooking together more. They labeled their savings account “Trip to Europe.” Whenever they skipped going out to eat, they transferred fifty dollars into the account. At the end of the year, they put the money toward the vacation. The immediate reward of seeing progress feels far better than simple deprivation. You are making it satisfying to do nothing.
Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains one. It takes time for the evidence to accumulate and a new identity to emerge, and immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.
Chapter 16 — How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day
When Trent Dyrsmid was a young stockbroker in Abbotsford, British Columbia, he began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty. As soon as he settled in each day, he would make a sales call. Immediately after, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar and the process would begin again. “Every morning I would start with 120 paper clips in one jar and I would keep dialing the phone until I had moved them all to the second jar,” he said. Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures — like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles — provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity. Visual measurement comes in many forms: food journals, workout logs, loyalty punch cards, the progress bar on a software download, even the page numbers in a book. But perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
Countless people have tracked their habits, but perhaps the most famous was Benjamin Franklin. Beginning at age twenty, Franklin carried a small booklet everywhere he went and used it to track thirteen personal virtues. This list included goals like “Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful” and “Avoid trifling conversation.” At the end of each day, Franklin would open his booklet and record his progress. Recording your last action creates a trigger that can initiate your next one. Habit tracking naturally builds a series of visual cues — the streak of X’s on your calendar, the list of meals in your food log — and when you look at that streak, you’ll be reminded to act again. One study of more than sixteen hundred people found that those who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not. The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it. When the evidence is right in front of you, you’re less likely to lie to yourself. Whenever possible, measurement should be automated.
No matter how consistent you are, life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up — you get sick, you have to travel, your family needs more of your time. Whenever this happens, hold to a simple rule: never miss twice. If you miss one day, get back into it as quickly as possible. Missing one workout happens, but don’t miss two in a row. Maybe you eat an entire pizza, but follow it up with a healthy meal. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, you shouldn’t do it at all. As Charlie Munger says, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.” This is why the bad workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and half-hearted sessions maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something — ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything — is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding. Furthermore, it’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
One trap worth naming: we optimize for what we measure, and if we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior. We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting ten thousand steps than we do about being healthy. We teach for standardized tests instead of emphasizing learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. Non-scale victories can be effective for weight loss precisely because they resist this trap. The number on the scale may be stubborn, but you may notice that your skin looks better, you wake up earlier, or your energy has lifted. All of these are valid signals of progress. If one measurement stops motivating you, it may be time to focus on a different one — one that gives you more evidence that you are moving in the right direction.
Chapter 17 — How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything
The fourth law of behavior change is to make it satisfying. The inversion is equally powerful: make it immediately unsatisfying. The more global, intangible, vague, and delayed the consequence of a bad habit, the less likely it is to influence behavior. A straightforward way to add an immediate cost to any bad habit is to create a habit contract — a written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment you will face if you fail to hold up your end.
Bryan Harris, an entrepreneur in Nashville, used exactly this approach. He wrote out each of the daily habits that would get him to his goal — writing down all food consumed each day and weighing himself each day — and then listed the punishment if he failed: if he missed those two items, he would have to dress up each workday and each Sunday morning for the rest of the quarter, no jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, or shorts, and he would give his trainer Joey two hundred dollars to use as he saw fit. At the bottom of the page, Harris, his wife, and his trainer all signed the contract. Clear’s initial reaction was that a contract like this seemed overly formal and unnecessary, especially the signatures. But Harris convinced him otherwise. “Anytime I skip this part,” Harris said, “I start slacking almost immediately.” When you sign a contract, you are no longer only failing to uphold your promises to yourself — you are failing to uphold your promises to others. The social cost of breaking a written commitment is immediate and real.
You can even automate the accountability. Thomas Frank, an entrepreneur in Boulder, Colorado, wakes up at 5:55 each morning. And if he doesn’t, he has a tweet automatically scheduled for 6:10 that reads: “It’s 6:10 and I’m not up because I’m lazy! Reply to this for $5 via PayPal (limit 5), assuming my alarm didn’t malfunction.” The financial penalty is real. The public embarrassment is real. Both arrive instantly. An accountability partner raises the immediate cost of inaction, and knowing that someone else is watching changes behavior in ways that private intentions alone rarely can.
Advanced Tactics — How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great
Chapter 18 — The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)
Genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity. As physician Gabor Maté notes, “Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.” The areas where you are genetically predisposed to success are the areas where habits are more likely to be satisfying. The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills — to align your ambition with your ability. People who are talented in a particular area tend to be more competent at that task and are then praised for doing a good job. They stay energized because they are making progress where others have failed, and because they get rewarded with better pay and bigger opportunities, which not only makes them happier but also propels them to produce even higher-quality work. It is a virtuous cycle, and it begins with choosing the right arena.
The question is how to find that arena. The most common approach is trial and error, but life is short. You don’t have time to try every career, date every eligible bachelor, or play every musical instrument. A more efficient method is the explore-and-exploit trade-off. At the beginning of any new activity, there should be a period of exploration — in relationships, it’s called dating; in college, it’s called the liberal arts; in business, it’s called split testing. The goal is to try out many possibilities, research a broad range of ideas, and cast a wide net. After this initial period, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found, but keep experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you’re winning or losing: if you are currently winning, exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, continue to explore, explore, explore. Google famously asks employees to spend 80 percent of the workweek on their official job and 20 percent on projects of their choice — a policy that led to the creation of AdWords and Gmail.
To find your own right area, ask yourself four questions. What feels like fun to me, but work to others? What makes me lose track of time? Where do I get greater returns than the average person? What comes naturally to me? Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, put it plainly: “Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.” When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.
Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it’s better to be hard or soft. If you can find a more favorable environment, you can transform a situation where the odds are against you into one where they are in your favor. Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on. Once we realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy, 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. One of the best ways to ensure your habits remain satisfying over the long run is to pick behaviors that align with your personality and skills. Work hard on the things that come easy.
Chapter 19 — The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work
Why is it that some people stick with their habits — whether practicing jokes or drawing cartoons or lifting weights — while most of us struggle to stay motivated? One of the most consistent findings in the science of motivation is that the way to maintain desire and achieve peak performance is to work on tasks of just manageable difficulty. The human brain loves a challenge, but only when it falls within an optimal zone. If you love tennis and try to play a serious match against a four-year-old, you will quickly become bored — you win every point without trying. If you play against a professional like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you will quickly lose motivation because the match is too difficult. But play against someone who is your equal, where you win a few points and lose a few, and you have a genuine chance of winning if you really try — that’s where engagement lives.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right. In psychology, this is known as the Yerkes-Dodson law, which describes the optimal level of arousal as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety. When you’re starting a new habit, keep the behavior as easy as possible so you can stick with it even when conditions aren’t perfect. Once a habit is established, it becomes important to continue advancing in small ways. These little improvements and new challenges keep you engaged, and if you hit the Goldilocks Zone just right, you can achieve a flow state.
Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement. “At some point,” one elite coach observed, “it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.” We hear people say things like “It all comes down to passion” or “You have to really want it,” and as a result many of us feel depressed when we lose focus, because we assume that successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion that we lack. But what this coach was saying is that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty — jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. Machiavelli observed it centuries ago: “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.” Many of the most habit-forming products in the modern world exploit this precisely. Video games provide visual novelty. The most addictive feeds provide variable rewards — content that arrives at unpredictable intervals in unpredictable forms, producing the greatest spike of dopamine, enhancing memory recall, and accelerating compulsion. Variable rewards can’t create a craving from nothing, but they powerfully amplify cravings we already experience by reducing boredom. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom. Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.
Chapter 20 — The Downside of Creating Good Habits
As a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. The upside of habits is that you can do things without thinking. The downside is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to small errors. You stop noticing what is working and what isn’t. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice. Habits plus deliberate practice equals mastery. The process of mastery requires that you progressively layer improvements on top of one another, each habit building upon the last, until a new level of performance has been reached and a higher range of skills has been internalized. The solution is to establish a system for reflection and review.
Clear employs two primary modes. Each December he performs an Annual Review, reflecting on the previous year by tallying his habits — how many articles he published, how many workouts he completed, how many new places he visited — and then answering three questions: What went well this year? What didn’t go so well? What did I learn? Six months later, in the summer, he conducts an Integrity Report. Like everyone, he makes a lot of mistakes, and the Integrity Report helps him realize where he went wrong and motivates him to get back on course. It is a time to revisit core values and consider whether he has been living in accordance with them — a time to reflect on identity and how to work toward being the type of person he wishes to become. The Integrity Report answers three 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? These two reports don’t take very long — just a few hours per year — but they are crucial periods of refinement that prevent the gradual slide that happens when he doesn’t pay close attention.
Worrying too much about every daily choice is like looking at yourself in the mirror from an inch away. You can see every imperfection and lose sight of the bigger picture. There is too much feedback. Conversely, never reviewing your habits is like never looking in the mirror. Periodic reflection and review is like viewing yourself from a conversational distance — you can see the important changes you should make without losing sight of the whole.
Reflection and review also offers an ideal moment to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity. The key to navigating any shift in role or circumstance is to redefine yourself in a way that preserves what matters most even if the particular position changes. “I’m an athlete” becomes “I’m the type of person who is mentally tough and loves a physical challenge.” “I’m a great soldier” transforms into “I’m the type of person who is disciplined, reliable, and great on a team.” “I’m the CEO” translates to “I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.” Habits deliver enormous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into previous patterns of thinking and acting — even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, and you need to periodically check in to see whether your old habits and beliefs are still serving you. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
Conclusion — The Secret to Results That Last
There is an ancient Greek puzzle known as the Sorites Paradox, which asks about the effect one small action can have when repeated enough times. One formulation goes like this: can one coin make a person rich? If you give a person a pile of ten coins, you wouldn’t call them rich. But what if you add another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make them so. The same logic applies to atomic habits. Can one tiny change transform your life? Probably not, you would say. But what if you made another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change. The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them — a collection of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
Every person, team, and organization we have examined in these pages has faced different circumstances, but ultimately progressed in the same way: through a commitment to tiny, sustainable, unrelenting improvements. Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine. If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.
A few final truths worth carrying. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state — but happiness is fleeting because a new desire always forms. As Caed Budris puts it, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.” With a big enough why, you can overcome any how. Being curious is better than being smart. Emotions drive behavior. Suffering drives progress. Your actions reveal how badly you want something: if you keep saying something is a priority but never act on it, you don’t really want it. Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.
Our expectations determine our satisfaction. The gap between our cravings and our rewards determines how satisfied we feel after taking action. When the mismatch is positive — surprise and delight — we are more likely to repeat a behavior. When the mismatch is negative — disappointment and frustration — we are less likely. Expect ten dollars and receive a hundred: you feel great. Expect a hundred and receive ten: you feel let down. As the saying goes, “Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.” Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance. The first time an opportunity arises, there is hope of what could be — expectation based solely on promise. The second time around, expectation is grounded in reality. You begin to understand how the process works, and hope is gradually traded for a more accurate prediction and a quieter, more durable acceptance of the likely outcome. Build the system. Trust the process. The results will come.