Atomic Habits
Start from Identity
Do not wrestle the craving
Atomic Habits, chapter two
Anything given up by willpower usually comes back. Whether there is a route that does not need the fight.
What actually happened?
Clear's central swap is from I am trying to quit smoking to I am not a smoker. The first is a head-on fight with a craving that costs something every time. The second lets behaviour follow self-description and needs no fight at all. His formulation: every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Collect enough votes and the behaviour no longer needs willpower to hold it up. The other half is environment design: drop the starting cost of what you want, raise it for what you do not. Both point the same way. Use as little willpower as possible, because it runs out.
Identity leads, behaviour follows
An outcome goal, lose ten pounds, loses its engine the moment it is met. An identity goal, I am someone who moves every day, has no finish line. And the identity can start very small: five minutes is still a vote. What matters is who the vote went to.
To start writing, do not set a hundred thousand words a year. Set I am someone who writes a few lines daily. The count grows itself.
Make the good thing cheap and the bad thing expensive
Of the four stages, environment is the most workable. Kit by the bed the night before, phone in another room: changes that cost no willpower and directly alter the price of starting. Far more reliable than cultivating grit.
To use the phone less, delete the app rather than control yourself. Reinstalling takes two minutes, and two minutes stops the impulse.
Two minutes to start
Shrink the new habit to a version that finishes in two minutes: read becomes read one page. The point is not the yield of those two minutes, it is clearing the doorway. Once started, most people carry on. The doorway is where the resistance sits.
Change go to the gym into put on trainers and step outside. Very few people put the trainers on and then stay home.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a habit you hold up with willpower, failing again and again.
Ask first: can I turn this into an identity instead of a number? Where in my surroundings could it be made cheaper?
Where it goes wrong: talking about identity and changing nothing around you. I am a disciplined person alters no starting cost by itself.
Lines to keep
Every action is a vote for the type of person you become.
True behavior change is identity change.
Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.
Same situation, other people are asking
"After this stretch is over" — I have said that so many times.I've quit a dozen times and broken every one.It's fine until night, and then it isn't.I know it's bad for me and I can't stop.I keep trying to quit · all 7 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.