Notes On Habits

Table of Contents

References

http://jamesclear.com

Notes For Atomic Habits By James Clear

I believe that you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
The model - stimulus, response, reward by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s.
Stimulus aka cue and craving
Forget about goals, focus on systems.
The goal is not to learn instrument. But to become musician. Change your identitiy first so that the change of habits will stick.
Reinforcement learning really helps to form good habits.
The 4 stages:
- Cue - Reward detecting actions. e.g. Interviews of champions.
- Craving - Craving for the reward.
- Response - Actual habit that you perform
- Reward - End goal.
Rewards (a) satisfies us and (b) teaches us. (Reinforcement learning). Hence it is important to close the loop to cement the learning even if you are not interested enough in the minor reward itself.
Rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward detector. As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure. Feelings of pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism that helps your brain distinguish useful actions from useless ones. Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.
If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future. Without the first three steps, a behavior will not occur. Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated.
How to Create a Good Habit:
- The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious.
- The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive.
- The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy.
- The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.
Associate breathe-and-smile routine with being in a good mood. Behaviour influences mood similar to mood influences behaviour.
Neurons that fire together wire together
One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress. A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit—like marking an X on a calendar.
Don’t break the chain. Try to keep your habit streak alive. Good habits does not kill your creativity. Instead, it makes you more creative and alive. Otherwise you can slowly die
Never miss twice. If you miss one day, get back on track asap.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.

Subtle Art of Not giving f*ck

There is a subtle art to not giving a fuck. And though the concept may sound ridiculous and I may sound like an asshole, what I’m talking about here is essentially learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively—how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values. This is incredibly difficult. It takes a lifetime of practice and discipline to achieve. And you will regularly fail. But it is perhaps the most worthy struggle one can undertake in one’s life. It is perhaps the only struggle in one’s life.

Because when you give too many fucks—when you give a fuck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.