Knowing that someone else is watching you can be a powerful motivator.
To be productive, the cost of procrastination must be greater than the cost of action.
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.
Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, we have little reason to repeat it.
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.
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.
If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll more likely to follow through on them.
Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done.
It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
While it is not possible to transform every habit into a supernormal stimulus, we can make any habit more enticing.
This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
In the long run, we become a product of the environment we live in.
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.
In this way, the process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
It is hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.