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Every year, millions of people try to build new habits.

Some adopt new exercise programs,

others pick up that instrument

they've been meaning to learn,

and still others decide to finally get serious

about reading every day.

And some of these people will succeed

in getting their new habit to stick,

while others well quickly give up and fail.

But all of them will learn the same lesson,

building a new habit is hard.

Whether you wanna chuck it up to laziness,

or our overly busy schedules, or the fact that our phones

tend to suck up a ton of our time,

tempting us in much the same way

that a slot machine temps a gambler,

the conclusion is the same.

If you wanna adopt a new habit,

you better prepare yourself for an uphill battle.

Luckily, one of the things that you can always count on

in our market-driven economy is that when there's a problem,

people will inevitably try to create solutions for it.

Necessity is the mother of all invention

as people like to say.

And our publishing industry is no exception here.

Having pumped out more than a handful of books

aimed at helping you build better habits.

But of all these books,

my absolute favorite one is James Clear's, Atomic Habits.

And that's not just because it mentions

my Twitter wake-up system on page 210 that is pretty cool,

but seriously, more than any other book

that I've read on habits,

I found the ideas in Atomic Habits to be incredibly helpful

for adopting the mindset required

to actually stick to habits over the longterm.

So I would absolutely recommend reading this book

in its entirety if you have the time.

Today, what I wanna do is share three of those key ideas,

starting with the principle

that Clear calls 1% better every day.

This idea has its roots in the compounding effect,

which you'll probably recognize most readily

if we're talking about compound interest.

Albert Einstein once called compound interest

the eighth wonder of the world,

and for a pretty good reason,

given a good amount of time,

the interest on your interest can result in huge returns.

Compound interest is why you can invest $100 a month,

and if we assume a modest 7% return of the stock market,

you'll end up with over $122,000 after 30 years,

even though during that time,

you only contributed $36,000 of your money into that fund.

And it turns out that this compounding effect

also applies to the world

of skill building and habit formation.

If you pick a skill

and you focus on just getting 1% better at it each day,

your cumulative skill growth

and the rewards you read from it

accelerate faster and faster over time.

Atomic Habits illustrates this idea

using a metaphorical graph,

which shows the difference between small daily actions

in both positive and negative directions.

At first, the results are minuscule,

but over time, they ramp up

just like that investment balance.

Now, this all sounds great in theory, but unfortunately,

as you probably well know, the level of consistency required

to maintain this growth over time

is really difficult to maintain, especially in the beginning

when you're just starting to build a habit.

Big dramatic changes, as overwhelming and as unsustainable

as you and I know they could be, are exciting

because they seem to propel us forward really quickly.

And our mammalian brains

really love short-term exciting rewards.

And meanwhile, the much more reasonable 1% role

simply doesn't do a whole lot for us in the short term,

which is what we're often concerned with,

even if we don't like to be.

For example, let's say you wanna learn how to produce music.

And you decide to do that by spending at least some time

every single day learning and practicing and making songs.

If you start this new goal on January 1st,

then by the end of the first month using Clear's model,

your daily 1% gains only result in a 37% gain overall.

And that's progress to be sure, but it's nothing dramatic,

and you're still producing music

that was only barely outside of your grasp before,

and that to the average listener,

it sounds like it was made on like a preschool piano thing

from Walmart.

After six months of effort,

you're now doing a bit more than six times better

than when you started

when you have those numbers seem to line up.

Now, this is actually pretty good progress,

but we are not done yet

because of the company pounding effect

has only just begun to show how powerful it can be.

Keep pushing on and suddenly,

a 1% improvement every day since you started,

gets interesting because at the end of the year,

you've somehow reached a mind bending 37 times better

than when you started.

The first six months gets you to six times better,

but the second six months adds an extra 31 times.

Now, obviously we cannot literally measure out

1% skill changes in most cases,

but the concept still works here and the results still come.

As Clear writes in the book,

"These small improvements or declines compound

and suddenly you find a very big gap

between the people who make slightly better decisions

on a daily basis and those who don't."

Of course, this is all easy to agree with in theory,

but as we mentioned before,

longterm consistency is a lot easier planned

than maintained.

As you well know,

most new year's resolutions don't even make it to February,

so they can't even go through the example

that we put out here.

Just as many people fail to remain disciplined enough

to keep investing for 30 years,

and hence will never see those amazing returns.

Now, part of this might be straight up difficulty,

or life circumstances, or simply boredom,

but even an incredibly simple, easy habit

can be difficult to stick to longterm

if it goes too far against how we view ourselves.

So if we wanna make longterm change,

that change has to become part of who we are.

We'll have to build up sense

of what I'm going to call identity habit harmony.

Picture yourself out for a run,

and imagine that it's really hot outside,

or maybe it's really cold,

or maybe it's a torrential downpour,

whichever of those is the one that you like the least.

And now picture you're only halfway

through a particularly difficult last mile,

and you're now feeling the desperate urge to quit.

In that moment ask yourself, who are you?

Well, if you consider yourself to be a runner,

then this scenario is not a big deal.

The occasional hard mile is part of the territory.

In fact, it only reinforces your strength

and your pride as a runner, as an athlete,

so as a result, you push through.

But on the other hand,

if you see yourself not as an athlete or a runner,

but as more of a homebody

just trying to get in shape because you're supposed to

or because you have this light desire to do it,

then you're gonna start questioning

why you're doing what you're doing

when things get difficult.

You're gonna ask, "Why am I doing this to myself?

This isn't who I am."

And one day, you're gonna decide to quit.

I think this is one of the biggest reasons

why people fail in building habits,

they don't build a harmony between their identity

and the habit they're trying to make stick longterm.

That's one of the biggest ideas in this book.

See, people will go to great lengths

to protect their self image.

It's part of this consistency principle,

which is also talked about

in Robert Cialdini's book, "Influence."

Just try arguing with somebody

about a dearly held belief they have,

and you're gonna find just how hard we all work

to keep our self image intact,

even if it's to our own detriment,

even if we argue against what would be good for us.

And it's because of this,

that Clear suggests we pay closer attention

to what that image is

when we're trying to change something about our lives.

As he says in the book,

"Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity.

Whatever you do is an indication

of the type of person you believe that you are,

either consciously or non-consciously."

But there's also a bit of a feedback loop here.

As he says just a bit later on,

"Whatever your identity is right now,

you only believe it because you have proof of it."

In short, longterm habit changes

come more easily with longterm identity changes.

And to get those,

you'll have to give yourself as much evidence as you can

that your new identity is really who you're becoming.

So if you wanna run that 5k someday,

take a second to think about the kind of person

who might do that sort of thing automatically, or naturally,

that person would be a runner or an athlete.

Then whenever an opportunity to reinforce that identity

in yourself comes up, ask yourself,

"What would a runner do in this situation?"

Eventually by acting like a runner, you become one.

And if that identity makes you feel good,

then you won't wanna lose it,

and you'll work that much harder to keep it.

The longer you fight for it, true that identity becomes,

and the harder it is to go back to who you were before.

And I've personally found this whole philosophy

and mindset change to be extremely helpful

for taking side projects more seriously as well.

Let's take guitar, for example.

If I don't think of myself as a musician,

then whenever I get busy with work,

or if I have something stressful pop up

surprisingly in my life,

then I'm gonna tend to let guitar practice

go by the wayside because it's just a hobby, right?

So it's important it gets overshadowed

by whatever urgent thing has come up in my life.

But if being a musician is part of my identity,

then I'm gonna see guitar practice

as something much more important.

I'll be a lot less likely to throw it by the wayside

when something does come up.

In other words, I won't make time for it

because that is what a musician would do.

Of course, this process of assuming a new identity

and taking it seriously isn't always easy.

When you start a new habit,

you often have that novelty factor,

that initial surge of motivation and energy working for you,

but those two things inevitably run out pretty quickly.

And when that happens,

you're probably gonna have to deal with your first failure

some point soon after.

And it can be hard to get over that when it happens,

especially if you tend to have perfectionist tendencies

like I do.

And dealing with just this situation

is where the third big idea from Atomic Habits comes in.