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Who Is James Clear?
James Clear is an entrepreneur, photographer, and the best-selling author of “Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Habits,” which catapulted him to a self-help celebrity.
James expresses clearly the benefits of habit building on your path to success. As well as the significance of the process over the end goal. On Twitter and in his newsletters, he is recognized for delivering bite-sized quips with morsels of knowledge.
James Clear Quotes
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.
- You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
- All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.
- All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.
- When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.
- Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
- Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
- The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. 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.
- Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
- When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
- You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
- 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. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
- Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
- Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
- The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
- Professionals stick to the schedule;
amateurs let life get in the way. - We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.
- When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
- The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
- With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.
- Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.
- In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption
- Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.
- The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
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