Atomic Habits
James Clear
Summary
James gives great actionable advice you can implement and use to shift your mindset to conquer your goals. It's all about small things done every day and eventually, with the value of compounding, you'll be able to accomplish more than you could imagine
Rating: 5/5
Notes
If you get 1% better every day for a year, you will end up 37x better
A 1% decline here and there compounds over time
Success is the product of daily habits
The most powerful outcomes are delayed and you will facer a valley of disappointment
Forget about the goals, focus on the systems
- Achieving a goal is only a momentary change
- When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy
- You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the levels of your systems.
Don’t focus on what you want to achieve but focus on who you wish to become
True behaviour change is identity change
Progress requires unlearning
You will become your habits
Decide on the person you want to be and prove it to yourself with small wins
Habits are built in 4 steps: cue, craving, response, reward
Creating good habits: make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying
Breaking bad habits: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying
Say out loud what you’re doing to make the unconscious conscious when in a bad habit
People who make a plan for what and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through
Dident effect: obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases
Habit stacking: stack a new habit on top of another one
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour
Avoid mixing the context/environment of one habit with another
One of the best ways to remove a bad habit is reduce exposure tot he cue that causes it
It is the anticipation of a reward - not the fulfillment of it - that gets us to take action
Temptation bundling: link an action you want to do with an action you need to do
Join a culture where your desired behaviour is normal and you have something in common with people
A craving is a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive
Reframe your habits to highlight benefits rather than drawbacks
To master a habit, start with repetition, not perfection
Focus on taking action, not being in motion
Make your habits easy to accomplish. Add by subtraction, make it convenient
When you start a new habit, it should take less than 2 mins to do so
Master the habit of showing up
Success is sometimes less about making good habits easy than bad habits hard
Use commitment devices which reduce the change you get caught up in a bad habit
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
Incentives can start a habit, identity sustains it
Visual measures like moving a marble provide clear signs of progress
Don’t let losses eat into your compound. Never miss 2 days in a row
The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behaviour
Find an accountability partner or create a habit contract
Genes don’t determine your destiny, they determine your areas of opportunity
Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular
Work on things that come easy to you
Professionals stick to a schedule, amateurs let life get in the way
The greatest threat to success is not failure, it’s boredom
Habits + Deliberate Practice = mastery
Annual review: what went well this year? What didn’t go well this year? What did I learn?
Keep your identity small
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How the World Works
Noam Chomsky
Summary
A combination of books Chomsky wrote in the 80s and 90s about America and it's role in the world. Fascinating read and insight into one of the great thinkers of the 21st century
Rating: 5/5
Notes
The US invaded Greece in 1947 and supported a horrendous war which led to 160k Greek deaths. This was the model for Vietnam and allowed American business to gain and thrive
US policies in the 3rd world consistently opposed democracies if they couldn’t be controlled as real democracies believe government should respond to the needs of their own population rather than those of US investors
US-run contra forces in the 3rd world isn’t ordering killing - it’s brutal sadistic torture (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala)
From the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 till the collapse of the communist governments in eastern europe in the 80s, it was possible to justify every US attack as defense against the Soviets
If you want a global system that’s subordinated to the needs of US investors, you can’t let pieces of it wander off. It’s clearly stated in the documents of record
The US wants ‘stability’ meaning security for the upper classes and large foreign businesses
Solid case for impeaching every American president since World War 2 either outright as war criminals or involved in serious war crimes
El Salvador and Nicaragua were not covered by the US media in the 70s when US-supported brutal torture and murder were taking place
In the early 80s, America’s friends slaughtered 10s of thousands of Guatemalans with countless others tortured and raped
After Vietnam, the major US policy goal has been to maximize repression and suffering of countries demonstrated by their violence - blocked other countries from seeking aid
The US regularly carries out or supports aggression
For most of the 20th century, the US was the dominant economic power and used economic warfare as a weapon ranging from illegal embargoes to enforcement of weak IMF rules with their military becoming pre-eminent
The US tries to avoid negotiations with countries as the US fears it will lose and other countries will be better off
When a state has huge debts, it must divert the population from what’s happening and they do this by inspiring fear of our enemies (Russia in Europe)
The real enemy of the US has always been ‘the poor who seek to plunder the rich’. In America, it’s the opposite and has been for generations
‘The war on drugs’ was a manufactured media blitz by the US leadership to distract the population, increase repression in inner cities and build support for attack on civil liberties
The US government blocks international effort to seek peace (Russia and Ukraine)
Major media are large companies owned and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. The market is the advertisers and the product is audiences
The power in the US lies in the hands of people who determine investment decisions as they determine production, distribution and staff the government. They want a passive, quiescent population
The struggle of freedom is never over and requires active and sustained efforts
One important consequence of globalization is it extends the third world model to industrial nations where the average person has their jobs shipped away while the rich and elite continue to amass massive amounts of wealth
We’ve moved to an international state with the IMF, World Bank, G7 & EU, WEF where the general population doesn’t know what’s happening and it doesn’t know it doesn’t know
If the borrowing the US has done was used for constructive purposes like investment or infrastructure, the US would be better off, but it was used to enrich the rich - for consumption, financial manipulation and speculation which are all harmful
The class warfare of the last few decades has successfully weakened popular organizations leaving people to feel isolated
The US is so deeply in debt to the international financial community because of debt that they have a lock on US policy
Many of the large number of security council resolutions vetoed by the US have to do with Israeli aggression or atrocities
Invaders typically use local collaborators to run things for them by playing upon existing rivalries to get onne group to work for them against another
European wars were wars of extermination. If we were to be honest about history, we would simply describe it as barbarian invasion
There has always been racism but it developed as a leading principle of thought in the context of colonialism.
A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression
In the US, you’re not allowed to talk about the class differences, which is the real issue
When the US establishment talks about jobs, it means profits for its corporations
The elite are masters and they follow what Adam Smith said about ‘the vile maxim’ - all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else
People who aren’t owners and investors have nothing much to say in the US
Jefferson warned against banking institutions and corporations and said if they grow, aristocrats would’ve won and the revolution would’ve been lost
The ‘Free market’ is for the poor. We have a dual system - protection for the rich and market discipline for everyone else
There’s been a considerable increase in inequality and has the American society moving towards a third world model, thereby seeing increased crime and signs of social disintegration
A huge area of the media is dedicated to diverting people and making them more stupid and passive
There’s nothing individualistic about corporations who are totalitarian in nature
Free trade agreements result in reduced wages for local employees while predominantly benefiting the rich consumer while also destroying unions
Operation Paper Clip imported large number of known Nazi criminals
The American army’s counter-insurgency literature begins with an analysis of the German experience in Europe written with the co-operation of Naxi officials (instruments of statecraft - book)
US involvement in Chile with the coup in 1973 to reduce social democracy
The threat of a good empire is what the US worried about with reforms on uncontrolled capitalism
The US killed a few million people and destoryed 3 countries during the Vietnam war
A huge amount of business propaganda is to create wants
The answers to solve all these issues is to organize. Being alone you can’t do anything but if you join with other people, you can make changes
Under capitalism, investment is supposed to be as risk free as possible. No competition wants free markets - what they want is power
The government subsidizes corporations’ costs, protects them from market risks and lets them keep the profits
There’s never been much difference between the 2 business parties and the differences are disappearing
The CIA has been involved in drug running for generations (the politics of heroin book)
You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what’s really happening to them. You have to engender fear and hatred
The first world lives in a highly indoctrinated society
Neoliberalism is nothing more than the imperial formula: free markets for you and plenty of protection for me. The rich would never accept it but they’re happy to impose it on the poor
The UN does mostly what US business wants
‘Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business’ - John Devery
If people dedicate themselves to organizing and activism, we’ll gain access to broader audiences
If you extrapolate to the future, it’s very ugly but the point is it’s not inevitable. It can be changed but we can’t change things till we understand them.
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