Best Quotes from Atomic Habits by James Clear with Page Numbers

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 improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure.

You get what you repeat.

All big things come from small beginnings.

The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.

Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Few things can have a more powerful impact on your life than improving your daily habits.

Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.

True behavior change is identity change.

Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes.

Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

New identities require new evidence.

The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.

Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s about becoming someone.

"A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic."

"The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible."

"Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment."

"Your habits are shaped by the systems in your life."

"Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks."

"It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity."

"The key to creating good habits and breaking bad ones is to understand these fundamental laws and how to alter them to your specifications."

"Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle."

"Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?"

"Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy."

The human brain is a prediction machine.

We underestimate how much our brains and bodies can do without thinking.

You do not tell your hair to grow, your heart to pump, your lungs to breathe, or your stomach to digest.

You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it.

Unless someone points it out, you may not notice that you cover your mouth with your hand whenever you laugh.

As the psychologist Carl Jung said, 'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.'

Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.

The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.

You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.

Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real.

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.

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.

The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Once an implementation intention has been set, you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike.

Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world.

No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.

The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day.

Creating an implementation intention is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a specific time and location.

The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious.

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

We don’t have to be the victim of our environment. We can also be the architect of it.

Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.

Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships.

Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out.

The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues.

Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time.

Habits thrive under predictable circumstances.

If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.

A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.

When the context changed, so did the habit.

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.

Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.

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.

This is the secret to self-control: Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.

You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.

Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.

The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.

It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.

Desire is the engine that drives behavior.

If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive.

Temptation bundling is one way to create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want.

The brain's reward centers have not changed for approximately fifty thousand years.

The primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers.

We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.

Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it.

Doing the thing you need to do means you get to do the thing you want to do.

A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.

Whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.

The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.

Your culture sets your expectation for what is 'normal.'

Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.

Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists.

The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.

If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

You think you are quitting something, but you’re not quitting anything because cigarettes do nothing for you.

You think smoking is something you need to do to be social, but it’s not. You can be social without smoking at all.

You think smoking is about relieving stress, but it’s not. Smoking does not relieve your nerves, it destroys them.

You are losing nothing and you are making marvelous positive gains not only in health, energy and money but also in confidence, self-respect, freedom and, most important of all, in the length and quality of your future life.

Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use.

You don’t 'have' to. You 'get' to.

This shift in perspective completely transformed how he lived each day.

Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind.

Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings.

The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them.

"The best is the enemy of the good."

"You just need to get your reps in."

"When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something."

"If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it?"

"Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome."

"You want to be practicing."

"Repetition is a form of change."

"Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit."

"It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days or thirty days or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior."

"The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning."

Our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient.

Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more energy required, the less likely it is to occur.

The idea behind make 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.

Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.

The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.

When friction is low, habits are easy.

When friction is high, habits are difficult.

You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers.

The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state.

Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway.

Each day is made up of many moments, but it is really a few habitual choices that determine the path you take.

Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.

The point is to master the habit of showing up.

It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.

One push-up is better than not exercising.

Strategies like this work for another reason, too: they reinforce the identity you want to build.

When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.

You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.

“Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.”

“A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.”

“Commitment devices increase the odds that you’ll do the right thing in the future by making bad habits difficult in the present.”

“The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.”

“Each habit that we hand over to the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth.”

“Automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet.”

“When you automate your habits, you create an environment of inevitability—a space where good habits are not just an outcome you hope for but an outcome that is virtually guaranteed.”

“It is fascinating that a single choice can deliver returns again and again.”

“If you find yourself continually struggling to follow through on your plans, then you can take a page from Victor Hugo and make your bad habits more difficult.”

“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

What is rewarded is repeated.

Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.

To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful—even if it’s in a small way.

The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards.

What is immediately rewarded is repeated.

Take the road less traveled of delayed gratification.

Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.

A habit needs to be enjoyable for it to last.

Change is easy when it is enjoyable.

You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying.

"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."

"Don’t break the chain" is a powerful mantra.

"Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit."

"You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days."

"Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge. Don’t put up a zero."

"The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows."

"The all-or-nothing cycle of behavior change is just one pitfall that can derail your habits."

"When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path."

"Each measurement provides a little bit of evidence that you’re moving in the right direction and a brief moment of immediate pleasure for a job well done."

"Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing."

Pain is an effective teacher.

If a failure is painful, it gets fixed.

The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behavior.

The best way I know to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior.

Actions incur an immediate consequence, behavior begins to change.

To be productive, the cost of procrastination must be greater than the cost of action.

Creating a habit contract is a straightforward way to do exactly that.

Knowing that someone is watching can be a powerful motivator.

We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.

An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction.

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.

Genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.

If you want to be truly great, selecting the right place to focus is crucial.

You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.

Find a version of every habit that can bring you joy and satisfaction.

Your unique cluster of genetic traits predispose you to a particular personality.

The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.

If you can’t find a game where the odds are stacked in your favor, create one.

You can win by being different.

Focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential rather than comparing yourself to someone else.

10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success.

Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.

If you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.

You have to fall in love with boredom.

You need just enough 'winning' to experience satisfaction and just enough 'wanting' to experience desire.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.

When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.

Habits create the foundation for mastery.

The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking.

The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.

Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery.

Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success.

Old tasks become easier the second time around, but it doesn't get easier overall because now you're pouring your energy into the next challenge.

Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits.

Improvement is not just about learning habits, it's also about fine-tuning them.

A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.

The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.