James Clear's work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, and
Entrepreneur, and on CBS This Morning, and is taught in colleges around
the world. His website, jamesclear.com, receives millions of visitors each
month, and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his email newsletter. He is
the creator of The Habits Academy, the premier training platform for
organizations and individuals that are interested in building better habits in
life and work.
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Interested readers can learn more at habitsacademy.com.
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As this book was going to print, new information about the British
Cycling team has come out. You can see my thoughts at
atomichabits.com/cycling
.
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I geeked out and actually calculated this. Washington, D.C., is about 225
miles from New York City. Assuming you are flying on a 747 or an Airbus
A380, changing the heading by 3.5 degrees as you leave Los Angeles likely
causes the nose of the airplane to shift between 7.2 to 7.6 feet, or about 86
to 92 inches. A very small shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful
change in destination.
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The terms unconscious, nonconscious, and subconscious can all be used
to describe the absence of awareness or thought. Even in academic circles,
these words are often used interchangeably without much nitpicking (for
once). Nonconscious is the term I’m going to use because it is broad enough
to encompass both the processes of the mind we could never consciously
access and the moments when we are simply not paying attention to what
surrounds us. Nonconscious is a description of anything you are not
consciously thinking about.
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Certainly, there are some aspects of your identity that tend to remain
unchanged over time—like identifying as someone who is tall or short. But
even for more fixed qualities and characteristics, whether you view them in
a positive or negative light is determined by your experiences throughout
life.
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Readers of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg will recognize these
terms. Duhigg wrote a great book and my intention is to pick up where he
left off by integrating these stages into four simple laws you can apply to
build better habits in life and work.
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Charles Duhigg and Nir Eyal deserve special recognition for their
influence on this image. This representation of the habit loop is a
combination of language that was popularized by Duhigg’s book, The
Power of Habit, and a design that was popularized by Eyal’s book, Hooked.
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When I visited Japan, I saw this strategy save a woman’s life. Her young
son stepped onto the Shinkansen, one of Japan’s famous bullet trains that
travel at over two hundred miles per hour, just as the doors were closing.
She was left outside on the platform and jammed her arm through the door
to grab him. With her arm stuck in the door, the train was about to take off,
but right before it pulled away an employee performed a safety check by
Pointing-and-Calling up and down the platform. In less than five seconds,
he noticed the woman and managed to stop the train from leaving. The door
opened, the woman—now in tears—ran to her son, and a minute later the
train departed safely.
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Interested readers can get a template to create their own Habits Scorecard
at
atomichabits.com/scorecard
.
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In addition to her payment for the library, Catherine the Great asked
Diderot to keep the books until she needed them and offered to pay him a
yearly salary to act as her librarian.
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Fogg refers to this strategy as the “Tiny Habits recipe,” but I'll call it the
habit stacking formula throughout the book.
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If you’re looking for more examples and guidance, you can download a
Habit Stacking template at
atomichabits.com/habitstacking
.
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Dopamine is not the only chemical that influences your habits. Every
behavior involves multiple brain regions and neurochemicals, and anyone
who claims that “habits are all about dopamine” is skipping over major
portions of the process. It is just one of the important role players in habit
formation. However, I will single out the dopamine circuit in this chapter
because it provides a window into the biological underpinnings of desire,
craving, and motivation that are behind every habit.
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I’m so happy I was able to fit a Game of Thrones reference into this book.
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This is just a partial list of underlying motives. I offer a more complete
list and more examples of how to apply them to business at
atomichabits.com/business
.
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A similar story is told in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted
Orland. It has been adapted here with permission. See the endnotes for a
full explanation.
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This is a foundational principle in physics, where it is known as the
Principle of Least Action. It states that the path followed between any two
points will always be the path requiring the least energy. This simple
principle underpins the laws of the universe. From this one idea, you can
describe the laws of motion and relativity.
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The phrase addition by subtraction is also used by teams and businesses
to describe removing people from a group in order to make the team
stronger overall.
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To be fair, this still sounds like an amazing night.
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I designed a habit journal specifically to make journaling easier. It
includes a “One Line Per Day” section where you simply write one
sentence about your day. You can learn more at
atomichabits.com/journal
.
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The irony of how closely this story matches my process of writing this
book is not lost on me. Although my publisher was much more
accommodating, and my closet remained full, I did feel like I had to place
myself on house arrest to finish the manuscript.
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This is also referred to as a “Ulysses pact” or a “Ulysses contract.”
Named after Ulysses, the hero of The Odyssey, who told his sailors to tie
him to the mast of the ship so that he could hear the enchanting song of the
Sirens but wouldn’t be able to steer the ship toward them and crash on the
rocks. Ulysses realized the benefits of locking in your future actions while
your mind is in the right place rather than waiting to see where your desires
take you in the moment.
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The shift to a delayed-return environment likely began around the advent
of agriculture ten thousand years ago when farmers began planting crops in
anticipation of a harvest months later. However, it was not until recent
centuries that our lives became filled with delayed-return choices: career
planning, retirement planning, vacation planning, and everything else that
occupies our calendars.
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Time inconsistency is also referred to as hyperbolic discounting.
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This can derail our decision making as well. The brain overestimates the
danger of anything that seems like an immediate threat but has almost no
likelihood of actually occurring: your plane crashing during a bit of
turbulence, a burglar breaking in while you’re home alone, a terrorist
blowing up the bus you’re on. Meanwhile, it underestimates what appears
to be a distant threat but is actually very likely: the steady accumulation of
fat from eating unhealthy food, the gradual decay of your muscles from
sitting at a desk, the slow creep of clutter when you fail to tidy up.
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Interested readers can find a habit tracker template at
atomichabits.com/tracker
.
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You can see the actual Habit Contracts used by Bryan Harris and get a
blank template at
atomichabits.com/contract
.
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If you are interested in taking a personality test, you can find links to the
most reliable tests here:
atomichabits.com/personality
.
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If it’s Harry Potter on repeat, I feel you.
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I have a pet theory about what happens when we achieve a flow state.
This isn’t confirmed. It’s just my guess. Psychologists commonly refer to
the brain as operating in two modes: System 1 and System 2. System 1 is
fast and instinctual. Generally speaking, processes you can perform very
quickly (like habits) are governed by System 1. Meanwhile, System 2
controls thinking processes that are more effortful and slow—like
calculating the answer to a difficult math problem. With regard to flow, I
like to imagine System 1 and System 2 as residing on opposite ends of the
spectrum of thinking. The more automatic a cognitive process is, the more
it slides toward the System 1 side of the spectrum. The more effortful a task
is, the more it slides toward System 2. Flow, I believe, resides on the razor’s
edge between System 1 and System 2. You are fully using all of your
automatic and implicit knowledge related to the task while also working
hard to rise to a challenge beyond your ability. Both brain modes are fully
engaged. The conscious and nonconscious are working perfectly in sync.
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The discovery of variable rewards happened by accident. One day in the
lab, the famous Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner was running low on
food pellets during one experiment and making more was a time-consuming
process because he had to manually press the pellets in a machine. This
situation led him to “ask myself why every press of the lever had to be
reinforced.” He decided to only give treats to the rats intermittently and, to
his surprise, varying the delivery of food did not decrease behavior, but
actually increased it.
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I created a template for readers interested in keeping a decision journal. It
is included as part of the habit journal at
atomichabits.com/journal
.
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You can see my previous Annual Reviews at
jamesclear.com/annual-
review
.
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You can see my previous Integrity Reports at
jamesclear.com/integrity
.
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Sorites is derived from the Greek word sorós, which means heap or pile.
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