PNTV: Atomic Habits by James Clear (#383)

hi this is Brian welcome back to another philosophers notes TV today another great book atomic habits by James clear the Tomic habits subtitle tiny changes remarkable results subtitle - an easy improvement way to build good habits and break bad ones I'm a huge fan of the science of building habits science of optimizing your life in general particularly habits we've got classes on willpower 101 habits 101 optimizing algorithms 101 we've done a ton of notes on Charles Duhigg power of habit Twyla Tharp's the creative habits superhuman by habit many habits a bunch of different books on how to create habits this one in my opinion is the best one I don't often say that it's you know books or must-reads this one comes as close as it's going to get to a must-read habits are essential to creating an optimized life in this book is a phenomenal look at the science of what we know in terms of how to create effective habits and how to apply that science to our lives on a day-to-day basis James Clare a very cool guy he and I connected several months ago I've been looking forward to this book a bunch of people have asked me to do one of these episodes and the note on it it's phenomenal he's super popular millions of people visit James clear.com every month he's got hundreds of thousands of newsletter subscribers there's a reason why he's a great writer really enjoyed it highly recommended philosopher's note a bunch of my favorite big ideas we've got five of them we're gonna talk about today we'll start at the top tiny equals Mighty atomic habits what are atomic habits well think of the building blocks of our bodies of the world atoms make up molecules which make up our existence we need to go small but then think about it in terms of a system and he says that well he starts kicks the book off with a story on Brailsford and how he turned around the British Cycling Team which we've talked about a number of times marginal games tiny little improvements and one of the things I loved was he actually quantified what happened when you aggregate in compound 1% games tiny little games if you get 1% better to that you think you can get 1% better today I think you can get 1% better today now if you get 1% better today and then you get 1% better tomorrow and you do that for 365 days in a row how much better do you think you are at the end of this year or that year then you are today start at 1 how much better would you be at the end of that year answer is 37 times better right 37 times better just by getting 1% better these tiny little games wind up having mighty results now I love that because we talk about our plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 optimize plus 1 every day we send out another plus 1 to our our members just get a little bit better today but hadn't done the math I love the fact 4 that equals 37 times better after one year and then I said well ok what would happen after two years three years five years ten years because James makes the point that to really see the benefits you need to stretch an even longer horizon five ten years out how much better would you be so I busted open a Google spreadsheet and I ran the math one percent better 365 or 37 times better okay well how about another year you get one percent better for another year after that first year for 37 times better after one year how much better are you after - you're not twice as great right this is compounding we're talking about so you don't go from 37 to seventy four times better you're fourteen hundred times better at the end of the second year so then I do that I'm like that's pretty cool what if you go out three years four years five years after five years of just tiny little 1% games aggregated and compounded how much better are you five years over 1,500 days right you're 76 million times better or something ridiculous like that then how about 10 years how about if you go all the way through to 10 years 1% better stack that up alright no one's gonna do it perfectly right you're gonna have some slips but you don't want to give up your compound games by the way an important point 10 years out how much better are you 1% at a time your own two quadrillion times better I literally broke the Google spreadsheet it couldn't calculate the number of zeros by the time we arrived at day number 3650 it's crazy tiny equals mighty keep that in mind another little fun distinction so if you had a plane an airplane here's the Ark by the way that's you getting better it takes time and then you get better and then it just goes crazy up to the quadrillion right but he says you can imagine an airplane another metaphor to bring the point home imagine an airplane in la LAX and it wants to get to the pilots want to take it to New York City right but they point the nose just three and a half degrees 90 inches south more south and it should be now those 90 inches at the beginning of that trip that's supposed to be from LA to New York City will wind up taking them to DC washington DC 90 inches leads to hundreds of miles when you give it a sufficient amount of time so you can go up or you can go down you're making a choice day in and day out moment to moment to moment you're either going forward or you're going down right and again it's kind of fun to imagine LAX I wanted to go to New York City oops I wound up in DC and it was a tiny little change in the beginning the compounded led to a big change over an extended period of time keep that in mind tiny equals mighty it's a long first big idea the second one is the plateau of latent potential this is a really cool idea as well we're still in the first chapter by the way this book is ridiculously packed with big ideas which makes it very difficult to distill into a six minute six page PDF for the philosophers note in one of these quick episodes but he says okay look compound interest is huge in finance and it's the secret sauce and habit creation but why don't more people do it and the reason is there's a delay between the time that you start engaging in this behavior and when you see the results so let's say that your results wind up being just crazy up here right literally the arc goes nuts over time people still extend but that now you might have expectations that look like that right so you want it cross this up here right so it crosses at some point around here and there's a delay where you're not seeing it's in this little slow part here you're not seeing any gains for quite a while and in that period of time we would use whatever example you want you change your diet you don't see results tomorrow or the next day although you might actually if you eliminate sugar and some stuff that's not working for your energy might actually improve very quickly but you do a push-up today you're not gonna see results tomorrow you got to give it some time right most people don't give it enough time they get disillusioned during that plateau of latent potential is what he calls it which i think is a great phrase there's latent potential building and he uses a couple of metaphors to bring the point home one of them is the stonecutter so imagine a stonecutter a stonecutter hits a rock again and again and again and again hundred times they hit the rock nothing happens the hundred and first time they hit the rock what happens it cracks now what was happening before then right all this latent potential was being built and it took all of that effort for that last strike to actually create results well it's the same thing with our habits we've got to endure that period where we're not seeing the results we want but know that we're building up this latent potential super powerful idea worth keeping in mind if you've ever bailed on a certain habit before you've seen results which we all have check in the path of the Masters to embrace the plateau and know that these things take time third big idea is identity James presents a really cool integration of a number of different scientific models and I love his perspective on identity he says you can create outcome based habits or identity based habits they're not the space to go into detail on that but the basic idea says look we're not looking to create one big life hacking party we're looking to become the best version of ourselves we possibly can so before he talks about the what and the how of habit creation he says we need to think about the who who do you aspire to be when you imagine yourself in your absolute best in general and specifically in your energy your work your love to use the model we talked about in our big three who are you we want to let that identity drive our behavior and then let the outcomes be a byproduct of that identity and the processes or the systems or the habits that we build right that's the secret sauce he talks about Scott Adams and goals piece of these systems etc check out our notes on how to fail it almost everything and still win big for more on that but the basic idea is identity and then he ties it to the Latin etymology which I thought was amazing in ancient Latin the word identity is actually formed the word identity we use is formed from a couple of different words in Latin that basically mean what does it mean it means repeated beingness repeated beingness is what the word identity literally means you repeatedly being a certain version of you creates your identity your habits literally create your sense of who you are if you consistently do one thing perhaps going this way you can have a pretty good identity in that area if you consistently do that you're gonna have a not-so-great identity now that's exciting because we can shift our identity and we can shift our habits and the to work together to create the results we want to see in our lives so again who do you aspire to be act like that version of you now create the habits that a person who is that version of you would engage in on a consistent basis and voila you're gonna find yourself experiencing more of the results you want in your life all which leads us to the heart of the book the four laws of behavior change this is where James extends Charles Duhigg zai Diaz so for loss let's quickly look at them one two two three four first we've got four aspects of the habit loop as he describes it one cue to craving three response and then for reward so these are the four areas of creating habits right and he says we need to boil these down into four laws of habit creation which you can use to create habits or get rid of bad habits here's the quick look first your cue which kind of kicks off you engaging in a habit needs to be super obvious right so if I want to do deep work in the morning write my cue is I know exactly what I'm gonna do on my desk I've got the book I'm gonna work on or the note I'm gonna write or whatever it is I'm going to do the cues right there boom I know what I'm gonna do if I want to create a meditation practice I put my meditation cushion in between my bed and the off in the bathroom so I know after I go to the bathroom I'm meditating you want to work out put your workout clothes in a very obvious place such that you have the cue that's there we can talk about that for a while I'll leave it at that for now then the craving needs to be a your cue needs to be attractive and the habit needs to be attractive right so you need to think about the benefits that you're going to get from engaging in that activity right the habit that you want to create he also talks about the fact that this actually might be in the easy section so I'll all go here the response needs to be easy right so your behavior what you want to do needs to be easy to engage in he's got a bunch of great tips here if you make it hard to do something obviously you're less likely to build a habit he says you got to start small kind of like the mini habits idea we talked about he's got a two minute rule when you're creating a new habit you got to be able to do it in two minutes it can't be hard so meditation to use that as an example again you're committed to meditating for two minutes you trip over the obvious cue in route to the bathroom in the morning oh yeah I'm supposed to meditate in the morning okay let me remember why I'm gonna have a calm mind I'm gonna get balanced have more equanimity in my life all the research says it's awesome I'm gonna do it for two minutes not 20 minutes or two hours two minutes right and then you can build on that but make it easy to to get the habit going that's our third law the fourth one is you need to make the reward satisfying you need to feel good after you do it right you got to feel the the rewards of doing it such that you want to do it again the next day he gives a bunch of ideas on that as well you can feel the calmness and equanimity after sitting in meditation for example or after training you can connect it to another behavior perhaps you like tea or coffee in the morning awesome will connect your meditation right after you meditate you get your cup of coffee and tea you connected to the two another habit that makes you feel satisfied after you do it Q craving response rewards law number one make it obvious make it attractive as to easy and satisfying obviously longer chat check out the book etc but you can also apply the inverse of those laws to break bad habits so if you want to break a bad habit for example maybe you want to stop eating junk food well okay don't make it obvious if you've got junk food laying around your house or your office that's an obvious cue that's going to lead to behavior you don't want you want to make it invisible he says well the best way to make junk food and visible is by your willpower at the store scientists say don't buy it don't bring it in your house what do you do with food that's obvious and sitting on your counter or even in your pantry you eat it in the moments when you least can afford to or want to when you're tired and all this stuff right so make it invisible don't have it in your house that's a great hack and wah to engage to break a bad habit now you need to make the your craving unattractive you need to make a connection between your bad nutritional habits of eating all that sugar and refined junk food and realize that's making me feel a certain way that I don't want to feel you got to make that craving unattractive after making it invisible and then you got to make it hard to engage in the behavior so rather than opening your pantry and getting your junk food you got it drive to the grocery store and you actually got to go through multiple steps to engage in that behavior that's a great way to break a bad habit and then you need to make it unsatisfying again make the connection between how you feel the morning after you and eat all that junk food or engage in whatever other behavior you don't enjoy and when you do not super oversimplified look at his four laws they're awesome again why I recommend the book thoughtful analysis of some complex ideas to make it easy to apply to our lives fifth idea for us is the Soraya's paradox which is awesome this is how he concludes the book so the sorites paradox Greek idea the Greek paradox varieties in Greek means heap or pile right and they say look if someone has ten coins are they wealthy ten coins is gonna make him wealthy but let's say you give them another coin are they wealthy then well no they only have one more coin but if you give them another coin are they wealthy then what about another coin and another coin and another coin at some point they will accumulate enough coins that they're wealthy so you have to conclude that a single coin can make them wealthy right there's a little paradox there one coin doesn't make them wealthy but yet if you continue to aggregate and compound those coins yeah you get wealthy well the same thing with habits is one habit going to change your life want dinner you actually could but there's one 1% gain gonna change your life in huge huge dynamic ways no that's the whole point of the book is it's not about massive changes it's about the tiny tiny atomic habits that you could build but we're not talking about one 1% change we're talking about a thousand 1% changes when you aggregate and compound those over an extended period of time you start talking about a quadrillion times increase in who you are you're a quadrillion times better if you actually run the math out which again is absurd right but the point being you have an infinite potential the way to get there is via via the very very small atomic habits the tiny equals mighty remember that remember our trip from LAX to New York City or DC a few inches in the beginning leads to hundreds of miles at the end our plateau of latent potential give it time for your work to show up and give results demonstrate results that you want to see identity right what a great item ology repeated beingness who you are repeatedly as who you are so be the best version of you that's like you to do the right thing consistently again longer chav we'll leave it at that and then we had our four laws q craving response rewards obvious attractive easy satisfying bacon the habits you want to create the habits you want to break in that model and then remember the sorites paradox there's one coin make you wealthy well you know yes and no right but there's one habit change your life one percent increase is that gonna do it well no and yes if you aggregate and compound a thousand of those and you're thinking throughout your day what marginal gain you can get how can you get a little bit better today and a little bit better tomorrow not giving away those gains it gets me fired up to imagine who you can be in that model hope you enjoyed here's to finding the power in your atomic habits make today another awesome day see it you

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Rating: 4.8390708 out of 5

Keywords: Algorithms, Habits, Purpose, Willpower, essence of habit formation, incremental improvements, Plateau of Latent Potential, impotance of ouur identity, 4 Laws of Behavior Change, Sorites Paradox, Atomic Habits, James Clear, Atomic Habits Book Summary, Atomic Habits Summary, Atomic Habits Book Review, Atomic Habits Review, Optimize, Brian Johnson, personal development, self help, self help books, philosophy books, philosophy, philosophers notes

Id: PybcxH-0bJQ

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018