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Tiny Changes,


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An Easy & Proven Way to


Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones


James Clear





ATOMIC
HABITS


An Easy & Proven Way
to Build Good Habits &
Break Bad Ones


JAMES CLEAR


Tiny Changes,
Remarkable
Results


AVERY
an imprint of Penguin Random House


New York


AVERY
AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC


375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014


Copyright © 2018 by James Clear
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for
complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books
for every reader.


Ebook ISBN 9780735211308


While the author has made every effort to provide accurate Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur
after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.


Version_1


atomic


ə'tämik
an extremely small amount of a thing; the single irreducible unit of a larger system.


the source of immense energy or power.


hab-it


'habət


a routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation.


Contents


Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction: My Story


The Fundamentals
Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference


1 The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits





2 How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)





3 How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps





The 1st Law
Make It Obvious


4 The Man Who Didn’t Look Right





5 The Best Way to Start a New Habit





6 Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More





7 The Secret to Self-Control


The 2nd Law
Make It Attractive


8 How to Make a Habit Irresistible





9 The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits





10 How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits





The 3rd Law
Make It Easy


11 Walk Slowly, but Never Backward





12 The Law of Least Effort


13 How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule





14 How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible








he Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change





16 How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day





17 How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything








18 The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)





19 The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work





20 The Downside of Creating Good Habits





Conclusion: The Secret to Results That Last












Little Lessons from the Four Law:
How to Apply These Ideas to Bu
How to Apply These Ideas to Parenting



























Advanced Tactics
; act


Ap pendix


Introduction


My Story


O... sna. day of my sophomore year of high school, I was hit in the face with a


baseball bat. As my classmate took a full swing, the bat slipped out of his hands
and came flying toward me before striking me directly between the eyes. I have
no memory of the moment of impact.

The bat smashed into my face with such force that it crushed my nose into a
distorted U-shape. The collision sent the soft tissue of my brain slamming into
the inside of my skull. Immediately, a wave of swelling surged throughout my
head. In a fraction of a second, I had a broken nose, multiple skull fractures, and
two shattered eye sockets.

When I opened my eyes, I saw people staring at me and running over to help.
I looked down and noticed spots of red on my clothes. One of my classmates
took the shirt off his back and handed it to me. I used it to plug the stream of
blood rushing from my broken nose. Shocked and confused, I was unaware of
how seriously I had been injured.

My teacher looped his arm around my shoulder and we began the long walk to
the nurse’s office: across the field, down the hill, and back into school. Random
hands touched my sides, holding me upright. We took our time and walked
slowly. Nobody realized that every minute mattered.

When we arrived at the nurse’s office, she asked me a series of questions.

“What year is it?”

“1998,” I answered. It was actually 2002.

“Who is the president of the United States?”

“Bill Clinton,” I said. The correct answer was George W. Bush.

“What is your mom’s name?”

“Uh. Um.” I stalled. Ten seconds passed.

“Patti,” I said casually, ignoring the fact that it had taken me ten seconds to
remember my own mother’s name.

That is the last question I remember. My body was unable to handle the rapid
swelling in my brain and I lost consciousness before the ambulance arrived.
Minutes later, I was carried out of school and taken to the local hospital.

Shortly after arriving, my body began shutting down. I struggled with basic
functions like swallowing and breathing. I had my first seizure of the day. Then I


stopped breathing entirely. As the doctors hurried to supply me with oxygen,
they also decided the local hospital was unequipped to handle the situation and
ordered a helicopter to fly me to a larger hospital in Cincinnati.

I was rolled out of the emergency room doors and toward the helipad across
the street. The stretcher rattled on a bumpy sidewalk as one nurse pushed me
along while another pumped each breath into me by hand. My mother, who had
arrived at the hospital a few moments before, climbed into the helicopter beside
me. I remained unconscious and unable to breathe on my own as she held my
hand during the flight.

While my mother rode with me in the helicopter, my father went home to
check on my brother and sister and break the news to them. He choked back
tears as he explained to my sister that he would miss her eighth-grade graduation
ceremony that night. After passing my siblings off to family and friends, he
drove to Cincinnati to meet my mother.

When my mom and I landed on the roof of the hospital, a team of nearly
twenty doctors and nurses sprinted onto the helipad and wheeled me into the
trauma unit. By this time, the swelling in my brain had become so severe that I
was having repeated post-traumatic seizures. My broken bones needed to be
fixed, but I was in no condition to undergo surgery. After yet another seizure—
my third of the day—I was put into a medically induced coma and placed on a
ventilator.

My parents were no strangers to this hospital. Ten years earlier, they had
entered the same building on the ground floor after my sister was diagnosed with
leukemia at age three. I was five at the time. My brother was just six months old.
After two and a half years of chemotherapy treatments, spinal taps, and bone
marrow biopsies, my little sister finally walked out of the hospital happy,
healthy, and cancer free. And now, after ten years of normal life, my parents
found themselves back in the same place with a different child.

While I slipped into a coma, the hospital sent a priest and a social worker to
comfort my parents. It was the same priest who had met with them a decade
earlier on the evening they found out my sister had cancer.

As day faded into night, a series of machines kept me alive. My parents slept
restlessly on a hospital mattress—one moment they would collapse from fatigue,
the next they would be wide awake with worry. My mother would tell me later,
“Tt was one of the worst nights I’ve ever had.”


MY RECOVERY


Mercifully, by the next morning my breathing had rebounded to the point where
the doctors felt comfortable releasing me from the coma. When I finally
regained consciousness, I discovered that I had lost my ability to smell. As a test,
a nurse asked me to blow my nose and sniff an apple juice box. My sense of
smell returned, but—to everyone’s surprise—the act of blowing my nose forced
air through the fractures in my eye socket and pushed my left eye outward. My
eyeball bulged out of the socket, held precariously in place by my eyelid and the
optic nerve attaching my eye to my brain.

The ophthalmologist said my eye would gradually slide back into place as the
air seeped out, but it was hard to tell how long this would take. I was scheduled
for surgery one week later, which would allow me some additional time to heal.
I looked like I had been on the wrong end of a boxing match, but I was cleared
to leave the hospital. I returned home with a broken nose, half a dozen facial
fractures, and a bulging left eye.

The following months were hard. It felt like everything in my life was on
pause. I had double vision for weeks; I literally couldn’t see straight. It took
more than a month, but my eyeball did eventually return to its normal location.
Between the seizures and my vision problems, it was eight months before I could
drive a car again. At physical therapy, I practiced basic motor patterns like
walking in a straight line. I was determined not to let my injury get me down, but
there were more than a few moments when I felt depressed and overwhelmed.

I became painfully aware of how far I had to go when I returned to the
baseball field one year later. Baseball had always been a major part of my life.
My dad had played minor league baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, and I had a
dream of playing professionally, too. After months of rehabilitation, what I
wanted more than anything was to get back on the field.

But my return to baseball was not smooth. When the season rolled around, I
was the only junior to be cut from the varsity baseball team. I was sent down to
play with the sophomores on junior varsity. I had been playing since age four,
and for someone who had spent so much time and effort on the sport, getting cut
was humiliating. I vividly remember the day it happened. I sat in my car and
cried as I flipped through the radio, desperately searching for a song that would
make me feel better.

After a year of self-doubt, I managed to make the varsity team as a senior, but
I rarely made it on the field. In total, I played eleven innings of high school
varsity baseball, barely more than a single game.

Despite my lackluster high school career, I still believed I could become a
great player. And I knew that if things were going to improve, I was the one
responsible for making it happen. The turning point came two years after my


injury, when I began college at Denison University. It was a new beginning, and
it was the place where I would discover the surprising power of small habits for
the first time.


HOW I LEARNED ABOUT HABITS


Attending Denison was one of the best decisions of my life. I earned a spot on
the baseball team and, although I was at the bottom of the roster as a freshman, I
was thrilled. Despite the chaos of my high school years, I had managed to
become a college athlete.

I wasn’t going to be starting on the baseball team anytime soon, so I focused
on getting my life in order. While my peers stayed up late and played video
games, I built good sleep habits and went to bed early each night. In the messy
world of a college dorm, I made a point to keep my room neat and tidy. These
improvements were minor, but they gave me a sense of control over my life. I
started to feel confident again. And this growing belief in myself rippled into the
classroom as I improved my study habits and managed to earn straight A’s
during my first year.

A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many
cases, automatically. As each semester passed, I accumulated small but
consistent habits that ultimately led to results that were unimaginable to me
when I started. For example, for the first time in my life, I made it a habit to lift
weights multiple times per week, and in the years that followed, my six-foot-
four-inch frame bulked up from a featherweight 170 to a lean 200 pounds.

When my sophomore season arrived, I earned a starting role on the pitching
staff. By my junior year, I was voted team captain and at the end of the season, I
was selected for the all-conference team. But it was not until my senior season
that my sleep habits, study habits, and strength-training habits really began to
pay off.

Six years after I had been hit in the face with a baseball bat, flown to the
hospital, and placed into a coma, I was selected as the top male athlete at
Denison University and named to the ESPN Academic All-America Team—an
honor given to just thirty-three players across the country. By the time I
graduated, I was listed in the school record books in eight different categories.
That same year, I was awarded the university’s highest academic honor, the
President’s Medal.

I hope you’ll forgive me if this sounds boastful. To be honest, there was
nothing legendary or historic about my athletic career. I never ended up playing


professionally. However, looking back on those years, I believe I accomplished
something just as rare: I fulfilled my potential. And I believe the concepts in this
book can help you fulfill your potential as well.

We all face challenges in life. This injury was one of mine, and the experience
taught me a critical lesson: changes that seem small and unimportant at first will
compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often
depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with
the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.

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
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