Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results - Atomic Habits by James Clear (1)
- 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, behaviours, and identities.
Hey friends, welcome back to the channel
and to the second episode of Book Club,
a new series where I summarise the key insights and ideas
from some of my favourite 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.
There's basically four key insights from this book
that we're gonna talk about in turn.
Firstly we'll talk about the power of
one percent 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 behaviour change.
So firstly, why does one percent 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 period of time.
If we can get one percent better each day for a year,
we'll end up 37 times better by the time we're done
but if we get one percent 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,
this is something that I really struggle with
and I think this probably applies to everyone.
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 eating badly and not exercising,
and when we repeat these one percent errors 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.
"Good habits make time your ally,
"and bad habits make time your enemy."
One of the other key points from our boy, James',
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 key compounding process
is that the outcomes are delayed.
This leads to an initial value 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 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
to bring myself to clean my room,
but if I continue my waste mad 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 our 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 at 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, with this YouTube channel,
I deliberately don't have any goals for it
because what's the point?
I might say to myself,
"my goal is to hit a million subscribers by next year,"
or whatever, but I'm not trying to win 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 money and it's sustainable
and I want to continue playing the game,
I don't want to try to win the game.
- It's this idea between the system and the goal
and 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 it wouldn't help you in any way.
So in fact, if you just ignored the score the entire time,
and just focused 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, he was the Super Bowl winning
head coach for the San Francisco 49ers,
he had this quote, "the score takes care of itself."
I think that probably applies
to a lot of tracking and measuring.
So now that we've seen why systems are 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 with 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 systems level we need to change our identity.
This point really resonates with me
when I first read the book.
I've been struggling personally
with A, eating healthily,
and B, going to the gym for the last several years,
and before I used to have an outcomes-based way
of looking at this.
So I used to think, I want to get rid of my belly fat,
therefore I'm gonna follow Tim Ferriss' low-carb diet.
Therefore I'll be a healthy person.
But since reading the book,
I know have more of an identity-based approach
to looking at this.
So I try to think in my head,
I'm 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 that it'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 reward.
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 leads to what James Clear calls,
the four laws of behaviour 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 commenting on the videos,
Ali, your hair looks thicker.
So thank you.
But recently I realised I was 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 all these vitamin D tablets,
but I kept on forgetting to take them,
and I realised, the reason I kept forgetting to take them
is because they were on the other side of the kitchen,
to my Finasteride that I 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 principle of environment design, in general,
which is, you want to put fewer steps
between you and the good behaviours,
and more steps between you and the bad ones.
And imagine the cumulative impact
of living in an environment that exposes you
to the cues of the 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.
- 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, we're 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 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 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 dividends in the long run,
like having a piano right next to me,
