I recently returned from an anniversary vacation with my wife, where I was finally able to read Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I highly recommend purchasing the book and reading it for yourself.

In the meantime, below is a collection of what I found to be the best quotes from this powerful work—a book some have dubbed the behavior change bible. I hope you find them insightful and encouraging as you journey to better health.

“Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.”

“Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits.”

“You get what you repeat.”

“Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.”

“Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.”

“Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the process that leads to those results.”

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”

“When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.”

“If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.”

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

“Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.”

“Behind every system of actions is a system of beliefs.”

“Behavior that is incongruent with self will not last.”

“You may want better health, but if you continue to prioritize comfort over accomplishment, you’ll be drawn to relaxing rather than training.”

“The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.”

“True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.”

“Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are—either consciously or nonconsciously.”

“[W]hen your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.”

“Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.”

“Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

“If nothing changes, nothing is going to change.”

“Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.”

“Identity change is the North Star of habit change.”

“Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be… Quote literally, you become your habits.”

“A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.”

“Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate the process of solving it. Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly.”

“Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.”

“What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.”

“There are no good or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way—even the bad ones—which is why you repeat them.”

“The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.”

“One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top.”

“Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”

“[M]any of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.”

“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”

“Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”

“Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships.”

“[Y]es, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.”

“One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.”

“Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.”

“If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive.”

“We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.”

“Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.”

“One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.”

“Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.”

“Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.”

“When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.”

“When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.”

“If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.”

“Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition.”

“[H]abits form based on frequency, not time.”

“In practice, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes for a habit to become automatic. What matters is that you take the actions you need to take to make progress.”

“[I]t is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.”

“The idea behind male it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.”

“Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.”

“Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.”

“Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscience decisions that follow. Yes, a habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions that you take for minutes or hours afterward.”

“A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a ‘gateway habit’ that naturally leads you down a more productive path.”

“[A] habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details.”

“Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.”

“The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.”

“You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.”

“With our bad habits, the immediate outcome usually feels good, but the ultimate outcome feels bad. With good habits, it is the reverse: the immediate outcome is unenjoyable, but the ultimate outcome feels good.”

“[T]he costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.”

“Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.”

“Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.”

“[C]hange is easy when it is enjoyable.”

“[P]erhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.”

“Habit tracking also keeps you honest. Most of us have a distorted view of our own behavior. We think we act better than we do. Measurement offers one way to overcome our blindness to our own behavior and notice what’s really going on each day.”

“The most effective form of motivation is progress.”

“Habit tracking also helps keep your eyes on the ball: you’re focused on the process rather than the result.”

“Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.”

“If you’re not feeling motivated by the number on the scale, perhaps it’s time to focus on a different measurement—one that gives you more signals of progress.”

“We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon.”

“To be healthy, the cost of laziness must be greater than the cost of action.”

“A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through. Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.”

“Even if you don’t want to create a full-blown habit contract, simply having an accountability partner is useful.”

“You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.”

“Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.”

“You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated.”

“The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.”

“The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.”

“Habits create the foundation for mastery.”

“Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.”

“Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.”

“The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.”

“Gradually… as you continue to layer small changes on top of one another, the scales of life start to move. Each improvement is like adding a grain of sand to the positive side of the scale, slowly tilting things in your favor. Eventually, if you stick with it, you hit a tipping point. Suddenly, it feels easier to stick with good habits. The weight of the system is working for you rather than against you.”

“Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.”

“The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.”

Questions?

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