10 BEST IDEAS | Atomic Habits | James Clear | Book Summary

you ever heard the saying that we only use 10 of our brain what is that that's because the other 90 is subconscious you're not conscious of it and if you go deeper than that the subconscious programming that you have is just like the software on the hardware of a computer you don't even realize it's working until you try to change it that programming has one word it's called habits and they literally control your entire life and so in this video we're going over the 10 big ideas from james clear atomic habits how you can actually break bad ones and install new ones and change your life man there's one book that kept coming up in the comments you guys kept telling me clark read atomic habits can you review atomic habits and i hadn't read it yet so first and foremost thank you for the recommendation this book was fantastic and i can't wait to give you these 10 big ideas second thing these videos take a bit more work than usual so if you could obliterate and aggressively smash that like button break your mouse smash it as hard as you can subscribe with those bell notifications set to on if you're stoked and also last thing you can get this for free by downloading a free trial to audible which i'll link below i listened to about two-thirds of this on audible when i was walking around and it stuck with me a lot more here we go psychologist edward thorndike did an experiment he was obsessed with cat kind of like the crazy cat lady but he was a dude he placed cats in a pitch black box each cat did what you would expect they scramble around for minutes freaking out clawing at the walls what they didn't know is there was a lever placed inside that box that when they hit the door would open as you guessed the cats found it and got out thorndike was a bit of a maniac he said one time wasn't good enough let's keep this experiment going here's what happened as he placed the same cats in over and over again their escape time went from 60 minutes 90 minutes for some of the start down to 20 30 minutes and eventually after 20 or 30 times the average cat could escape in only six seconds it became habitual for the kitty to look for the switch and get out what that study illustrates is at first when we're trying things new it's really hard but in order to conserve energy to conserve the panic conserve the scratching at the walls and freaking out our brains pick up on habits oh i've done this before and pretty soon the response becomes automatic and you escape the cats learn the power of atomic habits a tomcat habits i guess you could say now before we go any further let's first break down the thing we're all probably thinking and i was thinking this too that is won't habits and routines make my life dull boring routine where's the spontaneity where's the freedom i get from just going with the flow a little production for you but there's freedom in discipline there's freedom when your brain doesn't have to search search search okay how am i going to do this it's new it's new that's the cat scrambling inside quick personal story i literally tried to do extreme self-development schedule day habits routines be disciplined and it didn't work it was the opposite end of the spectrum right over here you have no habit no routine so you're overthinking all day you're stressed out you don't get anything done you procrastinate well then over here you have the other extreme of too many habits too regimented too much structure you have no freaking freedom okay and i literally was like hey let me try out this camp so what i did for a month i kid you not i tracked in a spreadsheet every single 30 minutes throughout my entire day for a month and i was trying to see patterns and habits and it was one of the most stressful things i ever did so i would not recommend that if you literally just sat and thought all day and you over thought your life you would be exhausted by the end of the day that's how your brain uses a majority of your glucose right and that's why so many people who have trouble with anxiety or overthinking they feel what low energy fatigue because they're just using that machine just throughout the day that's scratching at the wall of course they're exhausted so my point for number two there's discipline and that equals freedom that habits give structure to your life i want to do something really different now for this next point instead of just giving you more theory i want to have you take some action okay you're down to do a little experiment here i want you to either in the comments below or you can pull out your phone and do this in your notes app if you got a piece of paper write this down in your journal i want you to answer these two questions okay the first one is i want you to think about the 2.0 you like the ultimate vision of you you know you could be there you know you should be doing stuff you know it's possible but for some reason you're not what is one habit that you want to incorporate in your life is this working out more is this not checking your phone first thing in the morning is this filming content is this doing something spiritually like meditating that you know you could do one thing you know you could be doing okay i want you to write that down so the one thing to start doing the second question these are very important for what we're about to do in this video together or just get it in your mind clearly okay the second question what is the one thing you could stop doing that you know it's kind of holding you back is this eating super late at night is this drinking multiple times a week is this smoking weed a lot is this you know just procrastinating instead of taking massive action on something you know we all watch netflix i'm not saying that's necessarily bad but what is the one thing here no judgment that you want to stop doing in here james clear talks about that winners and losers have the same goals every olympian who trains for the olympics wants to go to the olympics and then obviously when they're there they all want to win the gold medal but only a few do and we normally just hear about the people who win and that's survivorship bias which is a cognitive bias that we won't get into but he talks about it in the book that you only hear about the winners you never talk about the losers and when you look at the winners and losers that have the same goal it's not the goal it's the systems and that's a massive point that you don't rise to the level of your training you fall to the level of your systems the goal is not to read one book the goal is to become a reader the goal is not to reduce your cigarette smoking the goal is to be a non-smoker the goal is not to make a hundred thousand dollars a year million dollars a year five hundred thousand dollars a year the goal is to be financially free i believe the goal is not to sit all day on a dating app and swipe right swipe right swipe right message message message the goal is to find a relationship where you feel enough and you can build something together but welcome to 2020 right modern dating the goal is to ghost people apparently so knowing that we have those goals what is it that keeps us in these habit loops let's go a little further the next point is that we are addicted to a chemical it's a very bad chemical and you can't help but produce it but it might be holding you back it's naturally good but an over consumption you're just like a freaking you know attic gotta get it gotta get a fix on this thing it's dopamine dopamine is life that is what we live one study is crazy here it is in 1954 two neuroscientists ran an experiment testing desire they used electrodes that blocked the release of dopamine and rats the pleasure chemical you know what happened were they less motivated were they lazy were they fat even worse they died they had no desire to eat to drink to move because they already had the thing that motivates us to do the action it's not crazy that if you literally had this hit of dopamine this hit of a drug that's so powerful you would lose motivation altogether so why is this important because we have to understand that every single negative habit we have or that one you wrote down earlier has a positive intent it does and it's not to like get rid of something because that's trying to remove something and that causes a lot of pain you're trying to do something to get dopaminer to get pleasure so that's a positive intent right there but you're skipping the process a lot of times we all are because now with technology with social media i was watching uh the social dilemma i think it was called on netflix super good documentary about how these companies tech companies right they literally program this stuff to hit and hijack our dopamine systems so that's why you can't stop picking up your phone you can't stop swiping you can't stop scrolling right because it's literally chemically addicted and then we wonder why we're so lazy all the time when we procrastinate on stuff but because that stuff's not getting us the dopamine hit so we're just like those rats who literally had all their needs matter one need met and they didn't need to freaking eat sleep or do any of that and they died scary scary stuff you're wondering what the heck is the point clark well let's break this down a little further on the handy dandy whiteboard and i'll drop this system and how it's running your scripts if you've studied habit or behavior change you know that the first step is always a what a cue but what i like is in the book james clear says there's actually a second step before the third and fourth it's this a craving then there's response reward these all go like this and influence each other example your phone buzzes with the text the craving is you want to check it and see what your friend sent you the response is you check it and the reward is the dopamine hit from you and them texting back and forth example you wake up craving you want to feel alert you got that morning feeling your groggy response you drink a cup of coffee reward you satisfy that morning feeling and then coffee gets associated with waking up knowing this cycle runs us let's keep going and show you how to use it before it uses you james clear spends a lot of the book going over the four laws of building habits so let's talk about incorporating that first habit that you want to incorporate okay the thing in your head that you wrote down earlier before the next point is we'll talk about the four laws of breaking habits of removing stuff first make it obvious second make it attractive third make it easy and fourth make it satisfying these all go in cue craving routine reward they pair up with each example make it obvious so the first step let's just take the cliche example of someone trying to lose weight build that habit in we know it's hard because 80 of people by the second week of february fall off their new year's resolution we have a population who's what 66 obese are overweight so clearly that's a hard habit for everyone make it obvious this might be buying a gym membership the second make it attractive well one thing you could consider doing is make a vision board of all the bodies the ideal body types that you like this doesn't have to be like some dude on stage posing but just people who are the same body fat percentage you want to be so it's attractive it's like once i get there i get that that's very powerful i've done that in the past i've had it on my phone and i've i've literally looked at men's bodies when i'm working out you get the point it motivated me it pumped me up it's like looking at arnold schwarzenegger yeah me too third make it easy when i did this i said i want to go to the gym multiple times a week but i'll only go for 20 minutes literally 20 minutes because i came from college with those arnold days right and i was in decent shape there and i would have to do like an hour and a half long workout and just be so exhausted and every time i thought of it i was like an hour and a half i'll skip the gym right so i just said no 20 minutes it's easy lastly make it satisfying this is your reward okay so after you do the thing maybe you could give yourself for me it was a protein shake from the smoothie bar so i didn't have to make it at home and it was way better there four laws of breaking habits what about this think about that thing you wanted to change earlier okay and use this as the example and ask yourself okay how can i use those to break that habit okay make it invisible make it unattractive make it difficult and make it unsatisfying i had a friend who was addicted to porn okay and he was raised in a christian household and was still a practicing christian so not only did he have all this guilt about it but he was getting married and he didn't want to bring that into a marriage so what did he do let's use these for make it invisible he deleted everything and blocked the sites he was like okay out of sight out of mind he didn't sleep with his computer when he was living alone in his bedroom he didn't sleep with his phone in there too because that would be a trigger to pull it up and you know the rest of story the second was make it unattractive i asked him the question i'm like one thing that helps me man is when i think about a habit that i had that i don't like i say do i want to be doing this when i'm 50 40 30 60. and that to me is very unattractive i had a you know off topic but i had an addiction to e-cigarettes and julie and there's a whole video about that if you if you struggle with that i i posted a huge vlog on that um but you know i was like do i want to be smoking an e-cigarette when i'm 40 years old and raising kids and i've got to go vape man gotta go hit this vape no so it was super unattractive and i just played that up in my mind and that was huge motivator to quit but that's not enough you need the two other steps which is what make it difficult okay so what my friend did is he said hey man i'm gonna install this software on my computer and my phone i think it was called x church or something like that he learned about it through his church for a lot of men who struggle with porn addiction and so he installed it and what that does is that you can set up an accountability partner and so anytime you try to disable it block it go to a site that's suspicious it will email them or text them hey this person's doing it so you can reach out almost like a sponsor in like a recovery program and so he did that for me so it was super difficult for him to do it and then the last one is make it unsatisfying okay and he agreed that every time he did slip up or when he would slip up it would be so unsatisfying because he would have to have that conversation with his fiance all right and that you know you don't want to open that bag of worms if that's what you commit to in a relationship and look here it's important to note that some things like addictions or things that really get hardwired into us from an early age like 14 or whatever onward that we've been doing for 10 years it's going to require maybe even years of change and but awareness is always the first step so some habits are way easier to break you know you want a quick coffee okay switch to tea pop a caffeine pill until it lowers and then eventually wean yourself off other habits like my friend's porn addiction you know that can be very difficult to break or smoking or drinking or anything that's really hard wired in or overthinking or judging people right so just keep that in mind when you're doing a habit change and be gentle on yourself don't beat yourself up because the last thing i'll say and then i'll shut up and move on is guilt and shame are the lowest vibrational emotions you can feel when you look at a chart they're at the bottom these are the anchors that latch onto you these are the demons that grab your feet and try to hold you back in the past in depression and overthinking and get to you anything that you do you could argue has a positive intent right you're trying to hit dopamine or anything like that you're trying to feel not bored you're trying to feel energized whatever so the real reason it's bad is the guilt and shame you feel because then that turns it around and makes you feel bad about yourself does that make sense i'll end with this point right here and it's a bit different i don't think he talks about it in the book but i've personally geeked out on self-development now for over 10 years and experimented on myself and whatnot i find consistently the biggest way to change a habit is to shake things up drastically okay and so last year i was going through a rut in my business i was dissatisfied with the marketing business i was running and i felt no passion for content i felt burnt out i was mailing it in i'd turn on the camera just blah blah dancing monkey and i was like i want to get back to the root of how i felt when i started this the passion the authenticity all of that and i realized there was a lot of other things i was just mailing it in my subconscious mind my habits didn't like where i was living and gloomy seattle was cold didn't like i didn't have that many close friends that i could you know hang out with or have deep conversations with they were all different around the world that i met through masterminds i didn't like the apartment i was living in i was always punk rock right so i'd always it was like 800 a month i had a roommate who was great but you know super small and grungy it was like by section 8 housing even though my business was killing it and i was making all this money i just never felt worthy enough to have like this nice place so anyway i'm telling you that because i decided to make a fundamental shift i decided to not just go small i wanted to go big so what i did is my girlfriend and i talked about it we decided to move here to scottsdale arizona huge shift change everything and man since making that shift i felt like a different person i felt like a 2.0 me i'm doing all the things i wanted to do i have this course coming out that i'm obsessed with right i feel like on fire to make content again i feel like the directions changed and it's finally taking off the way i've always envisioned it and so where i'm going with that is sometimes it's not enough to have your current life and make little changes here and there here and there maybe it's time for you to make some massive change i don't know if that's moving across the country or whatever i don't know if that's switching jobs i don't know if that's just moving in general but i find that when you shake things up in your environment like that it's kind of a reset button and you're able to create this new identity for yourself so i just want to throw that out there that if you're feeling like you're in a funk or you're just looking at your life and you're super dissatisfied when you shake things up when you're ready to make a change it's so much easier because you're changing everything to have those changes cascade to the life you want so maybe it's time for you to make the 2.0 version of you and if you want to we dropped a video on the first couple sections of this book is all about identity and stepping into that 2.0 which is at the core of like every single thing we do habits stem from the identity you have and if you don't fix that i mean good luck with just the action alone it's not going to do it because then otherwise people would be where they want to be so if you want those first two chapters i didn't put in this video so it wouldn't be redundant i'll link up our identity video down below that goes over that super powerful i think and you can geek out way more on that and of course if you want this feel free to grab it on audible support the channel down below if you made it to the end of this video smash that like button aggressively like break your mouse or something and subscribe with those bell notifications set to on i'm clark thank you so much for watching i'll see you in the next video stop settling start living see ya

Channel: Clark Kegley

Views: 79,996

Keywords: atomic habits, atomic habits james clear, james clear, atomic habits book summary, book summary, atomic habits book, james clear atomic habits, atomic habits summary, how to build good habits, atomic habits review, atomic habits audiobook, power of habit

Id: 9OFWBerI0_c

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020