Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
It is hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
Small habits don’t add up. They compound. That’s the power of Atomic Habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results.
We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon.
Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.
Simply doing something – ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really – is huge.
Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
But one push-up is better than not exercising. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis.
Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose.
When deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.
If you no longer expect smoking to bring you any benefits, you have no reason to smoke.
Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire.
Your culture sets your expectation for what is ‘normal.’
The closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
Here’s the punchline: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them.
You need to know who you want to be. Otherwise, your quest for change is like a boat without a rudder.