Atomic habits

Synopsis

Thoughts

Aggregation of Marginal Gains

The general idea of this is that many small percentage improvements are not additive in nature, though instead are multiplicative. ie that $1.05^{10} = 1.63$ or, in other words, ten 5% improvements create a 63% improvement, rather than the expected 50% improvement. When scaled up across many changes, for instance a 1% improvement to something each day of the year this becomes evidently powerful - resulting in a 37x improvement.

Habits as Identity

The book proposes that identity feeds you processes and processes feed your goals. When setting a habit, people often start with a goal and then alter the process to meet that goal. This comes with the caveat that once the goal is completed, there is no guarantee it will be continued. Instead the book proposes that you use the identity to feed the process. Ie, you are going for a walk because you are a fit person.

Evidence and Voting

The book goes on to propose that identity, and thus building a habit (altering process) requires evidence to propogate. This brings with it the idea that you can use each piece of evidence as a ‘vote’ for or against opposing identities and that to take upon an identity is not to be perfect, but to instead gather more votes for it than against it.

Action vs Motion

Much like in Every Tools A Hammer, the author speaks of requiring a momentum to build a habit. Instead of trying to have motion, which is planning something, the author proposes that many actions will outweigh planning one perfect action.

Resetting the Room

Again, similarly to Every Tools A Hammer, where Adam will spend time at the end of the day no matter what resetting his shop space to keep momentum. The author suggests that after each activity the room is ‘reset’ to the state it was before the action was taken.

#book/non-fiction #book/self-improvement