A good book about habit formation.
起因
时钟滴答滴答作响…月上枝头，夜已近深，一天的时间也快要流尽。我的心中突然充满无限的自责和懊悔，陷入莫名的焦虑。我这一天都做了些什么呢？为什么我每天忙东忙西，但自我感觉却没有什么收获呢？日子一天一天浑浑噩噩的的过去，虽然一直都有在做一些事情，但我的内心却一刻也没有那种被填满或者是充足的感觉。
这时，一本叫做《Atomic Habbits》的书走入了我的视线。这本书是我最近花了一个月去读了个大概，还没读完，但如今回忆起来内容已然忘记大半。
改变，从现在开始。
People think when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of smalldecisions – doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, orholding a single short phone call. Author of this book calls them Atomic Habits.
概要
The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits—cue, craving, response, and reward—and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps. Readers with a psychology background may recognize someof these terms from operant conditioning, which was first proposed as“stimulus, response, reward” by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s and has beenpopularized more recently as “cue, routine, reward” in The Power of HabitbyCharles Duhigg.
Behavioral scientists like Skinner realized that if you offered the rightreward or punishment, you could get people to act in a certain way. But while Skinner’s model did an excellent job of explaining how external stimuli influenced our habits, it lacked a good explanation for how our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs impact our behavior. Internal states—our moods and emotions—matter, too.
Pre
Why Tiny Change can affect your life?
Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.
Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
Positive Compounding:
- Productivity compounds
The more tasks you can handle without thinking,the more your brain is free to focus on other areas. - Knowledge compounds
each book youread not only teaches you something new but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. - Relationships compound.
Negative Compounding:
- Stress compounds
- Negative thoughts compound
- Outrage compounds
We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment.
Waht Progress is really like?
a bits often appear to make no difference until you cross acritical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop.
FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD
Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
- Winners and losers have the same goals.
- Achieving a goal is only a momentary change
- Goals restrict your happiness.
- Goals are at odds with long-termprogress
The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.
The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.”
goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness.
A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy
When all of your hardwork is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward afteryou achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to theirold habits after accomplishing a goal.
True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
A system of Atomic Habits
Focusing on the overall system, rather than a single goal, is one of the core themes of this book. It is also one of the deeper meanings behind the word atomic.
我的心得1：
作者在开篇首先提出一个问题，为什么习惯能改变我们的生活？
众所周知，习惯犹如一把双刃剑，好的习惯能极大的提升自己，但坏的习惯对生活也会造成影响。这些习惯无时无刻不在对我们的生活造成影响。那这些习惯又是如何改变我们的日常生活的？在一个可以控制温度的房间放置一块冰块，房间里的温度一点一点的上升，直到温度到达某一刻前，冰块依然完好无损。直到到了某个温度。冰块开始融化了。
习惯对生活的影响也是如此。看似微不足道的行为，常年累月的重复就是一个巨大的变化。
形成好的习惯更是如此，因此我们需要保持耐性，直到发送变化那一刻的到来。最后，作者又告诉我们，塑造好的习惯并不是为了实现某个“目标”，而是为了实现目标背后起支撑作用的“行为系统”。每一个微小的习惯都是我们“行为系统”的一个unit。
How your habits shape your identity
Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.
you have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.
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. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior,then it is hard to stick with long-term changes.
when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply actinglike the type of person you already believe yourself to be.
Like all aspects of habit formation, this, too, is a double-edged sword. When working for you, identity change can be a powerful force for self-improvement. When working against you, though, identity change can be acurse. Once you have adopted an identity, it can be easy to let your allegiance to it impact your ability to change. Many people walk through life in acognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.
The biggest barrier to positive change at anylevel—individual, team, society—is identity conflict. Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.
On any given day, you may struggle with your habits because you’re too busy or too tired or too overwhelmed or hundreds of other reasons. Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that yourself-image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
How is your identy formed ?
Every belief, including those about yourself, is learned and conditioned through experience.
Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
And how can you emphasize new aspects of your identy that servers you ?
- Decide the type of person you want to be.
- Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?
You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in every moment.
Habitscan help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not abouthavingsomething. They are about becomingsomeone.
我的心得2：
这一部分主要是讲习惯可以分为三个层次：最外层的outcomes,中间层的process,内层的identity。就我自身的经验来说，当想去培养一个习惯的时候，我们心里面想的都是这个习惯的outcomes，然而我的identity没有任何实质性的改变，所以在自身做出该改变时，与Identity对立的改变（习惯）阻力很大。所以往往在自己很累的时候，或者遇上一些别的事，容易放弃，半途而废。正如作者所说，you have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.，改变往往是在和自己的identity做斗争。那么如何让我们能够内在的Identity改变呢？作者提供了一个方法。先想想自己想成为什么样的人，而不是outcomes；再通过一些（成为那个人的）行为加强，使得我们的identity产生改变。
4 Steps of building better habits
From his studies, Thorndike described the learning process by stating, “behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.”
Hiswork provides the perfect starting point for discussing how habits form in our own lives. It also provides answers to some fundamental questions like: What are habits? And why does the brain bother building them at all?
Why you brain builds habits
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to becomeautomatic. The process of habit formation begins with trial and error. Whenever you encounter a new situation in life, your brain has to make adecision. How do I respond to this?
This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, trydifferently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the usefulactions get reinforced. That’s a habit forming.
Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automatethe process of solving it. Your habits are just a series of automatic solutionsthat solve the problems and stresses you face regularly. As behavioralscientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions torecurring problems in our environment.”
主要方法
词组用法
- earth-shattering 惊天动地
we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. - occasional burst of motivation 偶发的动机
- get off the ground 取得进展（落地）
- in time 最终/及时
- stumble upon 偶然发现
句子用法
- 比起什么，没有什么
few things can have a more powerful impact on your life than improving yourdaily habits. - 只要我记得
as long as I can remember, - 它是双向的
It’s a two-way street