Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias.Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.If you want better results, then forget about setting goals.Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Goals are about the results you want to achieve.Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.Be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.In the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.These are just some passages from the book that stood out for me. James does that himself by giving very succinct summaries at the end of each chapter. Here are my highlights from reading “Atomic Habits”. ![]() Thinking Fast, and Slow is a better book for those who want a deeper study of the mind. The book is essentially a “practitioner’s guide” of the many years James has spent learning and talking about the subject. There are no really new or groundbreaking ideas here. Even so, I came away from the book without the feeling of having “learnt” anything. I realized that this was the wrong expectation only after I a long way into the book. I was looking to learn more deeply about how habits work with respect to the human mind and psychology. My problem with the book is actually what I mentioned above – there are no new ideas in this book. ![]() It is full of directly actionable advice. James reiterates these points many, many times in the book, and cautions against the big-bang success narratives riddled with survivorship bias.Ītomic Habits is a great book if you are looking for something prescriptive which will lay out a bunch of do’s and dont’s for creating new habits and breaking old ones. ![]() Neither of these are new ideas by any means – the agile process is essentially the former and compound interest the latter – but somehow neither is very intuitive to us and they are where I think most people fail over the long term.
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