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. 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.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up to potential required to unleash a major change.

We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe.

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed what James calls, "Plateau of Latent Potential." When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success.

When successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn't matter if the reclaiming of it is fast…Too often, we fall into an all or nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up - the problem is thinking that if you can't do something perfectly, then you shouldn't do it all. You don't realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad or busy days. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It's the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows.

The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can not do something perfectly, then you shouldn't do it at all...

I can guarantee that if you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. When you start a business, there will be days when you don't feel like showing up. When you're at the gym, there will be sets that you don't feel like finishing. When it's time to write, there will be days that you don't feel like typing. But stepping up when it's annoying or painful or draining to do so, that's what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.

Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-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.

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is a desire to change your internal state. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act.
Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge eat or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

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. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy - even if the old one was still working. As Machiavelli noted, "Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.

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.

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

Motivation is overrated, environment often matters more.

Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards.

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes.

Research has shown that people who track their progress on goals like losing weight, quitting smoking, and lowering blood pressure are all more likely to improve than those who don't. One study . . . found that those who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not. The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it.

A very small shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful change in destination

Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time. As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the non conscious mind to do automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed. Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention other tasks.