Atomic Habits is one of the most comprehensive and practical guides on how to create good habits and break bad ones. With convincing arguments, the book preaches a one-step-at-a-time approach to habit formation, as opposed to a quick-fix approach that focuses solely on goals. For what it's worth, here is a detailed review and a free download link.
While reading, I highlighted certain areas of the book, which I believe to be a summary of the most important messages of Atomic Habits.
However concise, this summary may not provide the in-depth knowledge required to drive a massive and sustainable habit change; as such, reading the book is still very much important.
Recommended reading: How to review a book in 6 simple steps
ATOMIC HABITS SUMMARY (IN 71 LIFE-CHANGING QUOTES)
#1
Maybe there are people who can achieve incredible success overnight. I don’t know any of them, and I’m certainly not one of them. There wasn’t one defining moment on my journey from medically induced coma to Academic All-American; there were many. It was a gradual evolution, a long series of small wins and tiny breakthroughs. The only way I made progress—the only choice I had—was to start small.
#2
To write a great book, you must first become the book --- Naval Ravikant
#3
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.
#4
The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
#5
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.
#6
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
#7
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.
#8
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
#9
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it.
#10
Your habits can compound for you or against you.
#11
People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you
#12
The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way. You get trapped in a thought loop. The same is true for how you think about others. Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere.
#13
This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through the Plateau of Latent Potential.
#14
Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.
#15
When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building all the while. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great. An earthquake erupts. Change can take years—before it happens all at once.
#16
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.
#17
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.
#18
Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
#19
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
#20
Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.
#21
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
#22
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.
#23
True long-term thinking is goalless 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.
#24
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.
#25
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
#26
Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.
#27
Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
#28
Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are—either consciously or unconsciously.
#29
Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
#30
Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”
#31
The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
#32
Meaningful change does not require radical change.
#33
The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
#34
Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.
#35
The formation of all habits is a feedback loop, but it’s important to let your values, principles, and identity drive the loop rather than your results. The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.
#36
Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night or taking a cold shower each morning or wearing the same outfit each day. It’s not about achieving external measures of success like earning more money, losing weight, or reducing stress. Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
#37
Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience.
#38
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.
#39
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.
#40
The human brain is a prediction machine. It is continuously taking in your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across.
#41
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
#42
One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing.
#43
The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.
#44
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity
#45
No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
#46
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
#47
Every habit is context dependent.
#48
Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
#49
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.
#50
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes your health even worse and soon you’re feeling more anxious. It’s a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.
#51
It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions
#52
This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
#53
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
#54
Our friends and family provide a sort of invisible peer pressure that pulls us in their direction
#55
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
#56
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.
#57
It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
#58
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
#59
Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more energy required, the less likely it is to occur. If your goal is to do a hundred pushups per day, that’s a lot of energy! In the beginning, when you’re motivated and excited, you can muster the strength to get started. But after a few days, such a massive effort feels exhausting. Meanwhile, sticking to the habit of doing one push-up per day requires almost no energy to get started. And the less energy a habit requires, the more likely it is to occur.
#60
The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
#61
Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
#62
Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.
#63
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
#64
Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing.
#65
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
#66
Play a game that favors your strengths. If you can’t find a game that favors you, create one.
#67
Habits are easier when they align with your natural abilities. Choose the habits that best suit you.
#68
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
#69
Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice. Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
#70
Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.
#71
Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.