Focus on ⚙️ systems, not 🎯 goals. While goals are the outcomes we want, systems are about the daily processes that will eventually lead to those outcomes.

📖 For example, your goal may be to write a book, but your system would be sitting down to write for one hour every day. With a systems focus, you would be thinking about how to make your daily writing sessions 1% better every day – such as by minimizing distractions to work more deeply.

More key points:

• 📊 Systems are better for making progress. With systems, we become more focused on getting 1% better every day, rather than taking massive action towards a goal once in a while, which generally fails. James Clear also points out that winners and losers both have the same goals, therefore having goals can’t make the difference between our success and failure.
  • 🚴 A striking example – The British cycling team transformed from losers into Olympic gold medalists and Tour de France winners not by setting bigger goals, but by focusing on tiny improvements. They focused on becoming 1% better daily in everything from what they ate to how they slept to how they tuned their bikes.
• 😌 Systems provide sustainable motivation and satisfaction. With a goal, there is a finish line. But with systems there is no finish line, and that’s actually a good thing. You can simply focus on becoming a little bit better than you were yesterday.
  • 🏃‍♂️ For example, let’s say your goal is to run a marathon. Then you do it. What happens after? You’ll probably lose motivation to continue running. But if you focus on becoming a 1% better runner every day, then you will continue to have motivation to exercise and stay in shape.

• Focus on systems over goals, those daily processes you follow to reach your goals. This approach provides more sure progress and lasting motivation.

🔄 3. The Four Laws of Behaviour Change: Make your good habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying

So, what is a habit exactly? A habit is a behavior that is repeated often enough that it becomes automatic. Habits are useful because they help us take action while saving mental energy. In this section, we’ll break habits down into 4 parts and then show you how to ‘hack’ each of these parts to gain greater control of your behaviour.

Every habit follows a 4-step habit loop that reinforces it:

1. 🔔 Cue. The initial trigger for a habit, coming from anything around you like an object, environment, time of day, or even a person. Example: Hearing your phone beep causes your hand to immediately reach for it to check it for new notifications.
2. 🤤 Craving. The feeling that motivates you to perform the habit. Example: Feeling stuck for a moment while studying causes you to check social media for updates to feel less frustrated.
3. 🏃‍♂️ Response. The actual habit, or repeated behavior. Example: Picking up your phone and starting to scroll through social media or messages.
4. 😊 Reward. Feeling better after, which reinforces the habit. The reward is what teaches us to remember and repeat this habit loop in the future. Example: Seeing a funny video or receiving a message from a friend, which makes you feel happy and connected.

This brings us to The 4 Laws of Behavior Change, which we can use to make good habits stick. Each law is based on one part of the habit loop. Here’s a fast overview:

• 🔍 Make it obvious. (Cue) Make the cues that triggers the good habit more visible in your environment. The more obvious they are, the more likely you are to notice them and initiate the habit loop. Example: Placing water bottles on your bedside table, kitchen table, and work desk so you remember to drink enough water.
• 🌟 Make it attractive. (Craving) Strengthen the craving, the motivation to act, by associating the habit with positive feelings and appealing rewards. Example: Working out to your favourite music or podcast to make exercise more enjoyable.
• 🎉 Make it easy. (Response) Increase your likelihood of taking action by reducing the effort required and making the habit simpler to do. Example: Preparing a week’s worth of healthy meals in advance to eliminate daily cooking decisions.
• 😋 Make it satisfying. (Reward) Make sure the habit provides an immediate and satisfying reward, making it more likely you’ll repeat the habit loop. Example: Treating yourself to a relaxing shower or a favourite snack after exercising, making the effort feel worthwhile.

• 🔄 To break bad habits, just flip the laws. Make the bad habit invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. For example, keeping unhealthy snacks not on the table, but in a place that is hidden and difficult to reach.

Next, we’ll be diving much deeper into each one of these laws. We’ll be learning about some advanced tactics for each law, so you can more effectively form good habits and break bad habits.

• A habit is a behavior we’ve learned to repeat for a reliable reward. Each one follows a habit loop of cue-craving-response-reward, which reinforces the habit.
• The 4 Laws of Behavior Change correspond to these – we can make good habits stick by making cues more obvious, cravings more attractive, responses easier, and rewards more satisfying.

🔍 4. Make it Obvious: Make the cues for good habits more visible, and hide bad habits

Cues play a crucial role in forming good habits and breaking bad ones. By making the cue for a good habit more prominent and noticeable, we can increase the likelihood that we perform that habit. On the other hand, we can hide triggers for bad habits to help us break them.

Some key points:

• 📝 Habits scorecard. The first tool is to write down all of your daily habits on one page, from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep. Then label each habit as positive, negative, or neutral – based on whether it helps you be the person you want to be. This habit scorecard is important because our daily habits are so automatic, so we must first become aware of them. Think about what cue may trigger each habit.
• 🏠 Environment beats motivation. James Clear says that motivation and willpower are overrated – our surroundings tend to have a stronger influence on our behavior. We can design our environment to make the cues for good habits more obvious, making us more likely to repeat them.
  • 🎸 Example: Keep your guitar in your living room, right where you’ll always see it, if you’d like to practice more often. If it is hidden away in a closet or the garage, then it’s easy to forget about it. As they say, out of sight means out of mind.
• 🥞 Habit stacking. You can use an existing habit as the cue for a new habit that you want to adopt. Use this formula: “After [current habit], I will do [new habit].” You can even chain multiple good habits together like this to create a positive routine. For example, “after turning off my morning alarm, I will do 10 push-ups, then read one page of a book.”
• 📅 Implementations intentions. Most people have vague goals about what they want to achieve, such as “get in shape.” Research shows that being clear about when we will perform a new habit makes it far more likely that we will actually do it. Use this formula “I will do [this behaviour] at [this time] in [this location].” For example, “I will stop by the gym and work out for 30 minutes when I’m driving home from work.”
• 🚫 Make bad habits invisible. The inverse, or flip side, of this law is to make bad habits less obvious in your environment. Rather than relying on willpower, it’s a lot easier to avoid a bad habit by making the cue for it invisible. For example, if you’re getting distracted by social media notifications, then it may be a good idea to put your phone in another room while working.

• The first rule for changing habits is “Make it Obvious.” It teaches us to keep reminders of good habits where we can see them and hide the cues that lead to bad habits.
• We can make a new good habit stick better without relying on willpower through: deliberately planning our environment, using a current habit as the cue for a new one, and being clear about when and where we will do it.

🌟 5. Make it Attractive: Strengthen your motivation with the power of dopamine and community

The next part of hacking your habit loop is all about the craving, which is your anticipation of a reward after completing the habit. We can have stronger and more sustained motivation towards positive habits by making them more attractive. How? By tapping into our brains built-in reward system.

Key points:

• 🧠 Dopamine fuels motivation. Your brain contains dopamine, a neurotransmitter, which basically means it is a chemical signal in your brain. Dopamine is often called the pleasure molecule, but it can be more about anticipation of pleasure. Our dopamine levels rise when we begin craving the reward of some action, and we become motivated to act to get the reward. For example, we get dopamine spikes in our brains before and while we use social media, eat junk food, or take drugs, which is why all those activities are so habit-forming.
• 👥 Core human drives. If you want to understand why some bad habits hook us so strongly, it’s because they tap into core human drives. We all have some basic motivators that we have been programmed to respond to through millions of years of evolution, such as getting food and water, finding love and reproducing, feeling social connection and belonging. So our brain did not evolve with the desire to spend hours on social media, but to feel connected.
• 🤝 Temptation bundling. This is a technique where you can make a habit more attractive by pairing it with something that you want to do. For example, one engineer connected his stationary bike to his TV, so he could only watch Netflix while he was exercising. You can also do the activity you want to do as an immediate reward after the activity you need to do, such as eating a tasty protein bar after working out.
• 🌐 Community influence. We have a strong need to belong, and that means our habits are greatly influenced by the groups we are part of. So one of the best ways to adopt a new habit is to join a group where doing that activity is considered normal. For example, if you want to read more, then join a book club.
• 😊 Positive associations. Finally, if you want to make a habit more attractive, focus on associating it with a positive experience. For example, think of cleaning your room as bringing mental clarity, rather than wasting time.
• 🚫 Make bad habits unattractive. Link your bad habit with negative experiences. For example, the book “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” by Allen Carr talks a lot about the negatives of smoking, such as bad breath. When people focus more on those downsides, it becomes less attractive and they are less likely to continue.

• Make your good habits more appealing by leveraging the brain’s dopamine system for motivation and surrounding yourself with a supportive community.
• Key tactics include temptation bundling to pair desirable activities with necessary habits, creating positive associations to make habits more attractive, and consciously making bad habits seem less appealing by focusing on their negative aspects.

🎉 6. Make it Easy: Reduce the effort needed to start and maintain habits

The next part of “Atomic Habits” deals with the third part of the habit loop called the response – the sequence of actions you do during the habit. This is all about the question: How can we increase the likelihood that we will continue with our habits? The answer? Make it easy.

Key points:

• 🛌 The Law of Least Effort. People naturally gravitate to the path of least resistance. That’s not called laziness, that’s simple part of human nature, a smart strategy of saving energy. But it means the easier you can make it for you to start and repeat a new habit, the more likely it is you’ll stick with it.
• 🔁 Repetition over perfection. When it comes to building habits, consistency is king. How long it takes to form a new habit is based more on the number of repetitions you have done, than on how many days since you started.
• 🛠️ Reducing friction. Anything you can do to make starting your habit feel smoother will increase your likelihood of success. Here are some good strategies.
  • ⏱ 2-Minute Rule. To overcome procrastination, start a new habit with the smallest version of that habit, find an action that takes almost no effort. For example, instead of trying to read 10 pages a day, begin with reading for 2 minutes each day. Then slowly, over time, as the habit loop becomes solid, you can increase to 2 pages, then 3, 5 and 10.
  • 🏠 Prepare your surroundings. Arrange your home so that good habits require no planning to complete. For example, if you wanted to run in the morning, then make sure your running shoes and clothes are ready to go beside your bed.
  • ⚙️ Use one-time automation. When you can, then it’s best to set up good actions to happen automatically, so that good habits no longer require willpower. A perfect example is saving money – banks allow you to set up automatic deposits into your retirement and investing accounts.
• 🚫 Make bad habits difficult. The reverse of this is to increase the effort needed to engage in bad habits. Unplugging the video game console from the TV and putting it into a closet after each use makes it impractical to play games compulsively.

• Start and keep habits by making them super simple. Use the 2-minute rule: if it’s a habit that takes just two minutes to do, start with that. Organize your space so it’s easier to do your habit every day without thinking too much. And if you can, make your good habits automatic so you don’t even need to use willpower.

😋 7. Make it Satisfying: Add immediate rewards to make sticking to your habits more enjoyable

if you want to make your good habits stick then Atomic Habits says you should make them immediately rewarding.

This is James Clear’s golden rule of behaviour change: immediately reward the behaviours you want to be repeated, and immediately punish the ones you don’t.

You see, in almost everything you want to do, there’s a big mismatch between instant and delayed rewards. Most good habits feel kinda difficult right now, but we do them because they make us feel great later on. Well bad habits are the opposite – they give us pleasure now, but have a longer term cost we usually want to avoid. A simple example: studying feels hard, but makes a smarter.

Key strategies to make habits satisfying include:

• 🍭 Add instant gratification. When a habit is good for you in the long-term, it is very useful to add immediate pleasure after doing it. This reinforces the habit with strong mental conditioning, making it more likely to stick. For example, eating a tasty snack after doing meditation.
• 📊 Visual Habit Tracker. Use visual tools like wall charts or journals to mark your progress with milestones. This gives a tangible feeling of achievement that can be very motivating. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger got hooked on lifting weights by marking down his reps and sets on a blackboard, in a small gym in Austria.
• 🔗 Don’t Break the Chain Method. Show up for the habit every single day, at least a little bit. Even on tough days, do an easier version of your habit to keep the streak alive. It’s all about avoiding those “zero” days when we do nothing – too many of those in a row will kill a habit. And if you miss one day, make sure you never miss two days in a row. Example: If you’re too tired to go to the gym, do 10 minutes of light exercise at home.
• 📝 Punishment contract. Plan punishments in advance for skipping your most important habits. Find an accountability partner, you’ll often continue the habit to avoid disappointing someone. You can also add a monetary consequence, like giving them $10 for every day you skip reading.

• To make habits stick, make them immediately rewarding. This helps balance that mismatch between instant and delayed gratification of good habits. Key strategies include: tracking your progress visually, maintaining your habit streak, and setting up punishments for missed habits – all to ensure consistency and motivation.

🦸 8. Identity-Based Habits: Focus on who you want to become to drive lasting change

Most personal development books emphasize goals, outcomes, and processes. But James Clear argues the deepest and most lasting form of change happens when we shift our identity, who we believe we are.

There are 🥞 3 Layers of Behavior Change:

1. 🎯 Outcomes: The first, most superficial layer of change is about the results you aim for, like losing weight or finishing a book.
2. 🛠️ Process: The deeper middle layer is about the actions you take, such as your workout routine or daily writing habit.
3. 🦸 Identity: Finally, the deepest layer of change is about your beliefs and self-perception that guide your actions and thoughts.

So instead of making it your goal to run a marathon, make it your aim to become a runner. When a behavior becomes part of your identity, then your habits will naturally align with it, leading to more sustainable progress.

• Behavior change has 3 layers: outcomes, process, and identity. Changing how we see ourselves tends to provide the strongest transformation.

1. Identify Small Improvements: Pick one minor habit to get 1% better at today, like drinking one more glass of water.
2. Focus on Daily Systems: Instead of aiming to lose 15 pounds, plan daily nutritious meals and enjoyable exercise.
3. Place Habit Reminders: Keep visual cues for your new habit in sight, such as placing a book on your pillow to read before sleep.
4. Combine Habits with Pleasures: Link a desired habit with a favourite activity, like listening to audiobooks while cleaning.
5. Simplify Habit Initiation: Prepare for your habits in advance, like setting out gym clothes for the morning workout.
6. Reward After Habits: Give yourself a small reward immediately after a habit, like a piece of dark chocolate after studying.
7. Reframe Your Identity: Write “I am” statements related to your new desired habits, such as “I am a musician.” Then make decisions based on this identity: what would a musician do daily?