AI Summary of 7 key ideas
1、Small habits can have a surprisingly powerful impact on your life.
To kick things off, I want you to imagine a plane preparing to take off from Los Angeles. The plane's destination is New York City. The pilot enters all the correct information into the plane's computer, and the plane takes off heading in the right direction. But now imagine that, not long after takeoff, the pilot accidentally changes the flight path slightly. He only changes it by 3.5 degrees – which is nearly nothing, just a few feet. The plane's nose shifts slightly to one side, and no one – not the pilot, not the passengers – notices anything.
But over the journey across the United States, the impact of this slight change would be considerable. At the end of their journey, the confused passengers – and even more confused pilot – would find themselves landing in Washington DC, not New York City.
So, why am I telling you this?
It's because – just like the confused pilot – we don't notice tiny changes in our lives. Small changes leave a negligible immediate impact. If you are out of shape today, and go for a 20-minute jog, you'll still be out of shape tomorrow. If you eat a family-size pizza for dinner, it won't make you overweight overnight.
But if we repeat these small behaviors day after day, our choices compound into major results. Eat pizza every day, and you will likely have gained considerable weight after a year. Go jogging for 20 minutes every day, and you'll eventually be leaner and fitter, even though you won't notice the change happening.
You've probably worked out the main insight here: it's that small habits can have a surprisingly powerful impact on your life – and you won't necessarily see this impact happening in real-time. You'll only see the results of your habits after a while.
Now, we know that not seeing the impact of your efforts can be dispiriting. If this is happening to you – if you're feeling discouraged by the lack of immediate positive change – then it's important to try to focus on your current trajectory rather than your current results.
Let's say you have little money in the bank. But you are saving something each month. Your current results might not be that great – your nest egg is still pretty small. But you can be confident that your trajectory is right. Keep going in this direction and, in a few months or a few years, you will notice a major improvement. When the lack of perceived progress gets you down, remember that you're doing the right things and that you're moving in the right direction.
But how do you get yourself on the right trajectory? You need to develop habits. In the next blink, we'll learn how they are built.
2、Habits are automated behaviors that we’ve learned from experience.
When you walk into a dark room, you don't think about what to do next; you instinctively reach for a light switch. Reaching for a light switch is a habit – it's a behavior that you've repeated so many times that it now happens automatically.
Habits like this dominate our lives, from brushing our teeth to driving our car. They are immensely powerful.
3、Building new habits requires hard-to-miss cues and a plan of action.
So, we have just discovered how habits are formed. Let's briefly recap. A habit consists of four things: a cue – a trigger that gets you to act; a craving – a desire you want to achieve; a response – the action of the habit itself; and a reward – the positive feeling you get from completing the habit.
Once you know how they work, you can start to hack the habit-forming process to get good, productive habits to stick.
5、If you want to build a new habit, make that habit as easy to adopt as possible.
Making a habit pleasurable is a surefire way to make it stick. Another way we can hack the habit-building process is to make it easy.
Easy behaviors dominate our lives. We scroll through social media or munch through a bag of potato chips because these are easy things to do. On the other hand, doing a hundred push-ups or studying Mandarin are both pretty tough and take a lot of effort. This is why we don't find ourselves drawn to intensive exercise or language learning in our spare time.
6、You can increase the chances of serendipity in simple ways.
We're getting closer to the end now. But before we're done, let's talk about the final rule for using habits to improve your life. And to do this, we need a story. It's the story of a very successful public-health researcher named Stephen Luby.
Back in the 1990s, Luby was working in a neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan – and was excellent at his job. He reduced diarrhea among the local children by a huge 52-percent. He also cut pneumonia rates by 48 percent and the rate of skin infection by 35 percent.
