Since last year, I have been hearing people recommend Atomic Habits (原子習慣) in different podcasts and articles. Many of its ideas felt fresh to me, so I bought the book and read it. I recently finished it, and here are my notes.

The book opens with the legendary story of the British cycling team:

For 110 years since 1908, no British rider had won the Tour de France, the biggest race in world cycling. Bike manufacturers did not even want to sell bikes to the team, worried it would damage their reputations.

In 2003, Dave Brailsford became the head coach of the British national cycling team. What set him apart from the previous coaches was his extreme commitment to what he called “the aggregation of marginal gains”: a philosophy whose whole point is to find a tiny margin for improvement in everything you do.

When hundreds of these tiny improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone expected.

In 2008, the British team won sixty percent of the gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, and at the 2012 London Olympics they set nine Olympic records and seven world records. British riders then went on to win the Tour de France five times in six years.

Your Outcomes Are a Lagging Measure of Your Habits

The tiny behaviors we keep doing every day accumulate, day after day, into our achievements. As the book puts it: “Success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.” Everything you have right now is a lagging reflection of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits, your weight of your eating habits, your knowledge of your learning habits, and your clutter of your cleaning habits. What you get in the moment is simply the result of the habit you have been repeating all along.

Do Not Rely on Willpower; Build a System

We set goals and assume we can surely reach them by willpower, but the truth is that willpower alone cannot get you to the destination every time. We need a habit, a system, that lets us approach our ideal state naturally.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” You do not rise to the goals you set; you always fall to the level of the system you keep running.

Take a salesperson. Their goal might be 1 million a month in sales. But from an execution standpoint, they might break it down: 250,000 a week, which means 50,000 a day. If their phone call success rate is only 5 percent, then to reach that goal, their system might be to make 100 calls a day. Whether or not they have already passed their target that day, they make exactly those 100 calls, no more and no less. The habit cultivated by 100 calls a day, accumulated over time, is what actually lets this salesperson reach the sales they want.

Identity: Become That Kind of Person First

Identity is also an important factor in how habits accumulate. New year, new hopes: every January, everyone sets grand, ambitious goals, but they often do not last long. Why? The author says you should aim your goal at becoming a certain kind of person, not just at an outcome. The book’s example: two people are both quitting smoking. When a friend offers them another cigarette, one says, “No, I am in the middle of quitting,” and the other says, “No, I don’t smoke” (in the original, “I’m not a smoker”). Which of them do you think is more likely to quit successfully? Picturing yourself as the person you want to become is more effective for building habits.

The Four Steps That Form a Habit

A habit is mainly formed through a pattern of four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. Suppose every day on your way to work you pass a donut shop. The sweet aroma gives you a cue, which makes your body crave something sweet, so you go in and buy one, and in the end the satisfaction of eating the dessert gives your brain a reward, completing this loop of behavior. After several repetitions, it becomes one of your habits.

Because habits form this way, the author says that to build a good habit, we should work along the tracks of this loop:

1. Make it obvious. For example, to build a fruit-eating habit, put the fruit in the most obvious spot in your home.

2. Make it attractive. For example, buy your favorite fruit, so that just seeing it makes you want to eat it.

3. Make it easy. For example, pick fruit that is easy to eat, like bananas or blueberries, which do not need peeling.

4. Make it satisfying. After eating fruit you like, you also feel happy and satisfied because it is healthy.

Start With Two Minutes

The most important technique of all: when we try a new habit, we can start with a behavior so small and so simple that it counts as completing the goal. To build a gym habit, for instance, you can start by requiring yourself to go for 2 minutes a day, and leave as soon as the time is up. Within those 2 minutes you can do any exercise you like. Once the habit accumulates, and going to the gym every day takes no resistance at all, you can gradually adjust the time and what you do there. “A habit must be established before it can be improved.”

Summary

In summary, the book makes a few key points:

  1. Habits are the compounding of every tiny change. Every state we are in is simply a lagging measure of our habits.
  2. If you want to reach a goal, forget about setting goals and focus on your system. Set the system up well and act according to it, and the goal often gets reached along the way.
  3. The most effective way to change your habits is not to focus on the goal you want to achieve, but on what kind of person you want to become. Identity lets your self-image, at the level of cognition, influence your actual behavior.
  4. Behavior change has four laws: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.

Last December I wrote a post, How Do You Set Goals for Your Career and Your Life?, when I was somewhat lost and could not decide on my medium- and long-term goals. After reading Atomic Habits, I feel I have found some answers. I should build my systems from the identity I want to become, shape them starting from what is easy, go slowly, and build up the substance of my life over time, moving toward the self-realization I hope to reach along the way.

The book has many more scientific methods, examples, and detailed explanations. I recommend reading Atomic Habits and savoring it slowly:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3eMLeZ7

博客來 (Chinese edition): http://bit.ly/3cTuj6l

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on March 13, 2020. The blog is now offline, and the text is preserved via the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.