Atomic Habits
James Clear
Summary
James gives great actionable advice you can implement and use to shift your mindset to conquer your goals. It's all about small things done every day and eventually, with the value of compounding, you'll be able to accomplish more than you could imagine
Rating: 5/5
Notes
If you get 1% better every day for a year, you will end up 37x better
A 1% decline here and there compounds over time
Success is the product of daily habits
The most powerful outcomes are delayed and you will facer a valley of disappointment
Forget about the goals, focus on the systems
- Achieving a goal is only a momentary change
- When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy
- You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the levels of your systems.
Don’t focus on what you want to achieve but focus on who you wish to become
True behaviour change is identity change
Progress requires unlearning
You will become your habits
Decide on the person you want to be and prove it to yourself with small wins
Habits are built in 4 steps: cue, craving, response, reward
Creating good habits: make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying
Breaking bad habits: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying
Say out loud what you’re doing to make the unconscious conscious when in a bad habit
People who make a plan for what and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through
Dident effect: obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases
Habit stacking: stack a new habit on top of another one
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour
Avoid mixing the context/environment of one habit with another
One of the best ways to remove a bad habit is reduce exposure tot he cue that causes it
It is the anticipation of a reward - not the fulfillment of it - that gets us to take action
Temptation bundling: link an action you want to do with an action you need to do
Join a culture where your desired behaviour is normal and you have something in common with people
A craving is a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive
Reframe your habits to highlight benefits rather than drawbacks
To master a habit, start with repetition, not perfection
Focus on taking action, not being in motion
Make your habits easy to accomplish. Add by subtraction, make it convenient
When you start a new habit, it should take less than 2 mins to do so
Master the habit of showing up
Success is sometimes less about making good habits easy than bad habits hard
Use commitment devices which reduce the change you get caught up in a bad habit
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
Incentives can start a habit, identity sustains it
Visual measures like moving a marble provide clear signs of progress
Don’t let losses eat into your compound. Never miss 2 days in a row
The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behaviour
Find an accountability partner or create a habit contract
Genes don’t determine your destiny, they determine your areas of opportunity
Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular
Work on things that come easy to you
Professionals stick to a schedule, amateurs let life get in the way
The greatest threat to success is not failure, it’s boredom
Habits + Deliberate Practice = mastery
Annual review: what went well this year? What didn’t go well this year? What did I learn?
Keep your identity small
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Free E-book download here
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
Summary
The life of Steve Jobs in his own words
Rating: 5/5
Notes
Make something wonderful and put it out there
‘You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear’
When you’re a stranger in a place, you notice thing you don’t otherwise (Jobs after India trip)
Whenever you start with nothing, always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose.
You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times
Never be afraid to fail. You never achieve what you want without falling flat on your face a few times
We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture them. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true
Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights others don’t see
Believe that some of what you follow with your heart will come back and make your life richer. And it will. And you will gain even firmer trust on your instincts and intuitions
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. The reward isn’t in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s in crossing the rainbow
To find A+ talent, if experienced, look at their track record and results
The world we know is a human creation and we can push it forward
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do (read whole ad ‘here’s to the crazy ones)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit - Aristotle
Hire people better than you are
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life
It’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but they make sense looking backwards so you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you
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Free E-book download here
