These are excerpts from Atomic Habits by James Clear chosen by what stood out to me. I have inserted my own comments in block quotes.

Goals and Systems

Results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed. What's the difference between systems and goals? It's a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results? I think you would. The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, "The score takes care of itself" The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then for get about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

This part resonates with another book I read this year titled Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald Wheeler. Most people instinctively focus too much on some arbitrary goals without really focusing on the underlying systems that drive the behavior. If you instead focus on how to improve your system each day, week, month, etc., the goals will eventually take care of themselves.

Problems with goal centered thinking:

1. Winners and losers have the same goals
2. Achieving a goal is only a momentary change
3. Goals restrict your happiness
4. Goals are at odds with long term progress

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking.

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

Love these two lines. Let's throw goals out the window.

True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you'll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

One time in my life, I ran a half-marathon. With very little upfront training, I barely made it through. It occurs to me that people who rank high in these distance run competitions pretty much make these runs on a regular basis. It's not a big deal for them to complete the run; they are more interested in how fast they do it.

Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself

1. How can I make it obvious?

2. How can I make it attractive?

3. How can I make it easy?

4. How can I make it satisfying?

Conversely for bad habits you want to cut, ask

1. How can I make it invisible?
2. How can I make it unattractive?
3. How can I make it difficult?
4. How can I make it unsatisfying?

Starting a new habit

The habit loop

1. Cue
2. Craving
3. Response
4. Reward

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.

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

Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. "After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]."

The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day. Once you have mastered this basic structure, you can begin to create larger stacks by chaining small habits together.

Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

The habit stacking + temptation bundling formula is:

1. After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED].

2. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].

There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we'd rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves. The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it- you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think-but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.

This is an example of how Trump masterfully manipulated the Republican party. Repeating the lies and getting others to repeat the lies until others start to agree with the lies in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary.

We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, "The best is the enemy of the good." This is the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they're not the same. When you're in motion, you're planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don't produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.

More often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we're making progress without running the risk of failure. That's the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.

It's easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you're still making progress. Motion makes you feel like you're getting things done. But really, you're just preparing to get something done. If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

One of my top 5 Clifton Strengths is Learner because I do spend a large amount of time reading, researching whatever peaks my interest. But sometimes that strength inhibits me from actually getting things done, which is exactly what Clear is describing here. I spend a lot of time "in motion", and it gives me a sense of productivity, but in the end I usually have nothing to show for it. I need to contentiously make an effort to work on repetition of desired actions and not so much time learning the right way to do the actions.

The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.

People think I work hard but I'm actually really lazy. I'm just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back. When you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy. Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

This is a concept I think about a lot when it comes to managing my team at work. How do I reduce the number of steps in a process? How do we lift away the mundane, repetitive, error prone steps and allow them to focus on the more valuable thinking work?

Start small

Use the Two-Minute Rule, which states, "When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do."

The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. A new habit should not feel like a challenge. What you want is a gateway habit that naturally leads you down a more productive path. The point is to master the habit of showing up.

The habit behind all habits: consistency. This reminded me of all the habits I have failed to implement over the years. I would start off the first few days with good intentions, then fall back into my old behaviors and let them slip. Usually because I couldn't carve out the time for them.

You have to standardize before you can optimize. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

I think this is a good idea. Thinking of how to define a type of ritual that kicks off your new habit.

If you are struggling to follow through on your plans, then make your bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don't even have the option to act. Make the preferred behavior automatic. Some actions pay off again and again. These onetime choices require a little bit of effort upfront but create increasing value over time.

Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and simple. It is the most reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behavior.

The best approach is to use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of a behavior. Immediate reinforcement can be especially helpful when dealing with habits of avoidance, which are behaviors you want to stop doing. It is worth noting that it is important to select short-term rewards that reinforce your identity rather than ones that conflict with it. If your reward for exercising is eating a bowl of ice cream then you are casting votes for conflicting identities. That said, it takes time for the evidence to accumulate and a new identity to emerge. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you're waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive. In summary, a habit needs to be enjoyable for it to last.

Habit Tracking

Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures provide clear evidence of your progress. The best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker. A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit. The most basic format is to get a calendar and cross off each day you stick with your routine. "Don't break the chain" is a powerful mantra, often attributed to Jerry Seinfeld. Habit tracking is powerful because it leverages multiple Laws of Behavior Change. It simultaneously makes a behavior obvious, attractive, and satisfying.

In summary, habit tracking (1) creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, (2) is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don't want to lose it, and (3) feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit.

See https://atomichabits.com/tracker

No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice. If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you. This is why the "bad" workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. You don't realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days.

Don't put up a zero. Don't let losses eat into your compounding.

This has happened to me so many times, and it connects back to the idea of just showing up.

Habit Contracts

We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon. The best way I know to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior. There can't be a gap between the action and the consequences. You can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable. A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement [with another person] in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don't follow through.

Mastering a Habit

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

When you're starting a new habit, it's important to keep the behavior as easy as possible so you can stick with it even when conditions aren't perfect. Once a habit has been established, however, it's important to continue to advance in small ways.

Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Once the beginner gains have been made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade. The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.

At one point, I started a habit of playing Sudoku each day as a way to keep my mind sharp. After a few weeks, I got so good that I could complete the expert challenges within 20 minutes. I got bored and stopped.

If you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. When it's time to write, there will be days that you don't feel like typing. But stepping up when it's annoying or painful or draining to do so, that's what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

Mastery requires a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.

Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development. Each habit unlocks the next level of performance.

My kids like to play basketball, and I think about this idea when I watch them practice. They and their friends are always trying to act like the pros, shooting threes, trick shots, and dribbling through their legs or around their back. But they don't often reinforce the fundamentals of just plain dribbling while running, shooting close shots, layups, and rebounds.

Reviewing Progress

Conduct an Annual review

1. What went well this year?

2. What didn't go so well this year?

3. What did I learn?

Mid-way into the year conduct an Integrity Report, where you ask yourself these three questions:

1. What are the core values that drive my life and work?

2. How am I living and working with integrity right now?

3. How can I set a higher standard in the future?