Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results - Atomic Habits by James Clear

if we want to change our lives we're often told that we need to think big make drastic changes or perhaps even move across continents but what if we could achieve major transformations just through small tweaks to our daily routines we all tend to overestimate the importance of single actions and underestimate the power of making small improvements repetitively over a longer period of time real change comes from the compound effects of hundreds of small decisions or small habits that over time accumulate to produce remarkable results changing the lifestyles behaviors and identities hey friends welcome back to the channel in to the second episode of book club a new series where I summarize the key insights and ideas from some of my favorite books and today we're talking about atomic habits by James clear which is all about the power and process of building good habits and breaking bad ones through examples from sports business and education along with evidence from psychology and neuroscience the book explains the science and practical implications of how tiny habits and minuscule changes can grow into life-altering outcomes and help us lead healthier happier and more productive lives so there's basically four key insights from this book that we're going to talk about in turn first thing we'll talk about the power of 1% changes over time secondly why we should screw goals and focus on systems instead thirdly why it's all about identities rather than outcomes and finally we'll look at what our boy James calls the four fundamental laws of behavior change so firstly why does 1% matter well it's all about the power of compounding compounding can be amazingly powerful both positively and negatively if we leave it to develop over a period of time if we can get 1% better each day for a year we'll end up 37 times better by the time we're done but if we get 1% worse each day for one year we'll go down nearly to zero as James says in his book habits are the compound interest of self-improvement habits don't seem to make much difference on a given day but the impact over months or years can be absolutely enormous we don't often think about these small changes just because it takes so long to see the result like this is something that I really struggle with and I think this probably applies to everyone like we're so attuned in modern society to try and seek instant gratification that it's actually really hard to focus on things that have long-term benefits equally the slow rate of transformation also means that it's really easy to let bad habits creep in like competing badly and not exercise and when we repeat these 1% errors a day after day they'll accumulate into larger problems as James says in the book time magnifies the margin between success and failure it will multiply whatever you feed it in good habits make time your ally and bad habits make time your enemy one of the other key points from our boi Jameses analysis of habits is what he calls the plateau of latent potential which sounds all very fancy habits often don't seem to make a difference until we cross a critical threshold we expect progress to be linear but the key aspect of any compounding process is that the outcomes are delayed this leads to an initial valley of disappointment where we don't feel like we're making progress as the results don't follow the linear trajectory that we expect and so we just give up because we're not getting the results we wanted but as we can see from the graph it does take time to build a habit to allow the compound interest of self-improvement to have take hold and give us amazing results over time key point number two from the book is to screw goals and focus on systems instead James identifies four main problems with goal-setting firstly winners and losers have the same goals every Olympian wants the gold medal every candidate wants the job and so it can't be the goal that actually differentiates people secondly achieving a goal is only a momentary change sure I might be able to pluck up the activation energy too and bring myself to clean my room but if I continue my waste man-- habits and systems that led to the room getting messy in the first place I'm just gonna be left with a messy room again in a few days time in the same way when we achieve a goal we only change a life for the moment we get these temporary results instead what we really need to change is the systems that cause those results in the first place thirdly James argues that goals restrict our happiness there's an implicit assumption behind any goal and that's once I reach my goal then I'll be happy and so we end up continuously putting off happiness until the next milestone finally goals are our odds with long-term progress there's another really nice quote here the purpose of setting goals is to win the game the purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game like for me when this YouTube channel I deliberately don't have any goals for it because like what's the point I mean I might say to myself oh it would be and you know my goal is to hit a million subscribers by next year or whatever but like I'm not trying to win the YouTube by hitting a certain subscriber count' I just love the process of making these videos and it's fun and it's great and it makes my it sustainable that's just like I want to continue playing the game I don't want to try to win the game is this idea between the system and the goal and you know like say you're playing a sport in every sport the goal is to have the best score on the scoreboard at the end of the game but it would be ridiculous to spend all game looking at the scoreboard because they wouldn't help you in any way so in fact if you just ignored the score the entire time and just focus on a better process or playing a better way or a better scheme or strategy then you probably would end up with the best score I think Bill Walsh II was the Super Bowl winning head coach for the San Francisco 49ers he had this quote was like the score takes care of itself and that I think that probably applies to a lot of tracking and measurement so now that we've seen wisest Ammar so important key point number three is another quote from the book and that is identity change is the North Star of habit change we've got outcomes on the outside concerned we're changing the results and then processes related to our habits and systems and finally our identity which is related to our beliefs most of us work from outcome to identity rather than identity to outcome but as our boy James says the ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of our identity when we solve problems in terms of outcomes and results we only solve them temporarily but to solve problems in the longer term at the system's level we need to change our identity at this point really resonated with me when I first read the book like I've been struggling personally with a eating healthfully and beat going to the gym for the last several years and before I used to have an outcomes-based way of looking at it so I used to think I want to get rid of my belly fat but therefore I'm gonna follow Tim Ferriss it's low-carb diet therefore I'll be a healthy person but since reading the book I now have more of a identity based approach to looking at this so I think I try to think in my head I am a healthy person therefore as a healthy person I will eat wholesome food and exercise regularly and then one day maybe I'll look like Zac Efron we'll see how that goes and finally point number four at this point we're thinking okay cool I'm sold on the idea of building useful habits I'm sold on the idea that it's all about tiny improvements over a very long time and there's all about systems rather than goals but how do we actually build those habits in the first place how do we overcome the difficulty well I'm glad you asked because we can actually split up the process of building habits into four stages cue craving response and would the cue triggers the brain to initiate an action the craving provides the motivational force the response is the action or habit that we perform and the reward is the end goal and it's these four things cue craving response and reward which lead to what James Thayer calls the four laws of behavior change the first law is make it obvious and it relates to designing our environment around our cues I applied this to my life just the other day actually so for the last year plus I've been taking a tablet called finasteride to combat my hair loss and in fact people have been committing the videos that other your hair looks thicker so thank you but recently I realized I was a vitamin D deficient as well because I spent way too much time in front of a computer and don't ever leave the house and so I got these vitamin D tablets but I kept on forgetting to take them and I realized the reason I kept forgetting to take them is because they were on the other side of the kitchen to my finasteride that take every day as a habit and so all I did was I moved the vitamin D tablets over to the other side of the kitchen and now I see them in front of my finasteride and therefore I take both tablets every night so just a little change that has now built that habit almost immediately kind of the the principle of environment design in general which is you want to put fewer steps between you and good behaviors and more steps between you and the bad ones and imagine the cumulative impact of living an environment that exposes you to the cues of your positive habits and reduces the cues of your negative habits it's kind of like you're just gently being nudged in the right direction each day but the second law is make it attractive which relates to the craving aspect of the habit loop and tries to take advantage of what we know about dopamine as humans were all motivated by the anticipation of reward so making habits attractive will help us stick to them and in fact one of the make it attractive things that I did before going to the gym is that I started listening to fantasy audio books on audible and this would be the perfect time to do an audible plug but sadly no one is sponsoring this video so I hope you enjoy this ad free experience the third law is make it easy and the main aim here is to reduce the friction and to prime our environment for the habits that we'd like to develop there's a phrase that I like that I think I came up with but I'm probably actually read it somewhere and then just forgot to cite the source anyway the phrase is that friction is the most powerful force in the universe I've seen this so many times in my own life like anything I can do to reduce the friction to make doing a good thing slightly easier will pay in the long run like having a piano right next to me having guitar next to my desk means that my default procrastination when I'm you know when I can't be bothered to do any work or for my video is that I will play the guitar practice some stuff on the piano like reducing the friction makes it far more likely for me to do the thing and the fourth law is make it immediately satisfying our brains have evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards and the cardinal rule of behavior change is what is immediately rewarded is repeated and what is immediately punished is avoided we get short-term bursts of dopamine from going through the McDonald's drive-through or scrolling aimlessly through Instagram making us more likely to repeat these bad habits to develop better habits James says that we should try to attach some form of immediate gratification so that we can make the habit immediately satisfying after reading the book I realized that I needed to make this going to the gym thing more immediately satisfying sometimes if I'm going to the gym after work I'll do my workout and then I will jump in the swimming pool do you like a length or two just for fun and then go into the spa and just kind of read a book for like 20 minutes and this sounds really privileged and spoiled but like the fact that I've got those activities lined up after going to the gym makes the whole process of going to the gym more immediately satisfying which means I'm far more likely to do it so by combining these laws and their opposites we've got this diagram that comes from the book we want to ensure that our good habits are positioned towards the left side of the spectrum to make them obvious attractive easy and satisfying and we want to work to make our bad habits more difficult by making the cues invisible the action unattractive and hard and the reward unsatisfying in an ideal world we rarely stop to think about our own habits or plan for long-term change when we start a new regime like going to the gym the great power of atomic habits is the emphasis that it places on systems rather than goals identity rather than outcomes and small habits rather than drastic change there isn't a precise answer to how long it takes to build a habit because habits are not a finish line to cross but a lifestyle to live the key part to remember is that small habits compound atomic habits maybe individually small but collectively and given time they can hold remarkable power to bring remarkable change to our lives thank you so much for watching

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 2,214,732

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, book club, Book Club, Atomic Habits, atomic habits, reading, read, books, james clear, atomic habits book, james clear interview, change your life, how to change your life, life changing habits, james clear atomic habits, atomic habits book summary, atomic habits book review, atomic habits summary, personal growth, atomic habits by james clear, atomic habits review, james clear habits, atomic habits james clear, atomic habits by james clear summary

Id: YT7tQzmGRLA

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020

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[u/Hope365]

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[u/Naruto8410]

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