Джеймс Клир - Atomic Habits - Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

But there can be a downside.

The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.

Humans are similar. There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it—you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think—but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.

When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

3. Imitating the Powerful

Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status. We want pins and medallions on our jackets. We want President or Partner in our titles. We want to be acknowledged, recognized, and praised. This tendency can seem vain, but overall, it’s a smart move. Historically, a person with greater power and status has access to more resources, worries less about survival, and proves to be a more attractive mate.

We are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status. We want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups or the musician who can play the hardest chord progressions or the parent with the most accomplished children because these things separate us from the crowd. Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.

This is one reason we care so much about the habits of highly effective people. We try to copy the behavior of successful people because we desire success ourselves. Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire. You replicate the marketing strategies of the most successful firms in your industry. You make a recipe from your favorite baker. You borrow the storytelling strategies of your favorite writer. You mimic the communication style of your boss. We imitate people we envy.

High-status people enjoy the approval, respect, and praise of others. And that means if a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

We are also motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status. We trim our hedges and mow our lawn because we don’t want to be the slob of the neighborhood. When our mother comes to visit, we clean up the house because we don’t want to be judged. We are continually wondering “What will others think of me?” and altering our behavior based on the answer.

The Polgar sisters—the chess prodigies mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—are evidence of the powerful and lasting impact social influences can have on our behavior. The sisters practiced chess for many hours each day and continued this remarkable effort for decades. But these habits and behaviors maintained their attractiveness, in part, because they were valued by their culture. From the praise of their parents to the achievement of different status markers like becoming a grandmaster, they had many reasons to continue their effort.

Chapter Summary

The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us.

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.

We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige).

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.

The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

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

IN LATE 2012, I was sitting in an old apartment just a few blocks from Istanbul’s most famous street, Istiklal Caddesi. I was in the middle of a four-day trip to Turkey and my guide, Mike, was relaxing in a worn-out armchair a few feet away.

Mike wasn’t really a guide. He was just a guy from Maine who had been living in Turkey for five years, but he offered to show me around while I was visiting the country and I took him up on it. On this particular night, I had been invited to dinner with him and a handful of his Turkish friends.

There were seven of us, and I was the only one who hadn’t, at some point, smoked at least one pack of cigarettes per day. I asked one of the Turks how he got started. “Friends,” he said. “It always starts with your friends. One friend smokes, then you try it.”

What was truly fascinating was that half of the people in the room had managed to quit smoking. Mike had been smoke-free for a few years at that point, and he swore up and down that he broke the habit because of a book called Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking .

“It frees you from the mental burden of smoking,” he said. “It tells you: ‘Stop lying to yourself. You know you don’t actually want to smoke. You know you don’t really enjoy this.’ It helps you feel like you’re not the victim anymore. You start to realize that you don’t need to smoke.”

I had never tried a cigarette, but I took a look at the book afterward out of curiosity. The author employs an interesting strategy to help smokers eliminate their cravings. He systematically reframes each cue associated with smoking and gives it a new meaning.

He says things like:

You think you are quitting something, but you’re not quitting anything because cigarettes do nothing for you.

You think smoking is something you need to do to be social, but it’s not. You can be social without smoking at all.

You think smoking is about relieving stress, but it’s not. Smoking does not relieve your nerves, it destroys them.

Over and over, he repeats these phrases and others like them. “Get it clearly into your mind,” he says. “You are losing nothing and you are making marvelous positive gains not only in health, energy and money but also in confidence, self-respect, freedom and, most important of all, in the length and quality of your future life.”

By the time you get to the end of the book, smoking seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world to do. And if you no longer expect smoking to bring you any benefits, you have no reason to smoke. It is an inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: make it unattractive .

Now, I know this idea might sound overly simplistic. Just change your mind and you can quit smoking. But stick with me for a minute.

WHERE CRAVINGS COME FROM

Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive. I often have a craving that goes something like this: “I want to eat tacos.” If you were to ask me why I want to eat tacos, I wouldn’t say, “Because I need food to survive.” But the truth is, somewhere deep down, I am motivated to eat tacos because I have to eat to survive. The underlying motive is to obtain food and water even if my specific craving is for a taco.

Some of our underlying motives include:*

Conserve energy