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- Real progress is exponential, whereas perceived progress is linear, which leads to a “Valley of Disappointment”

Chapter 1 Conclusion:
- Habits compound: 1 percent better each day counts for a lot in the long run.
- Habits can be bad or good
- Small changes appear to make no difference until you break through the Plateau
- Focus on systems not goals as systems encourage constant improvement, whereas goals only encourage progress up to a point.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking.

It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Commit to the process; not the process.

When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you can become satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can take the shape of any form, not just one.

#3 Goals restrict your happiness - they create an “either-or” conflict. Either you achieve your goal and you are successful, or you fail and you’re disappointed.

Goals also restrict and delay your happiness to one specific scenario that might be impossible to achieve. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to once scenario when there are many paths to success.

#2 Achieving a goal is momentary - Fix the inputs and the outputs will likely be impacted lastingly. Solving a problem at the results level is only temporary, whereas solving it at the systems level is lasting.

Problems arise when you focus too much on goals and don’t spend enough time designing your systems;
#1 Winners and losers have the same goals - we just don’t hear about the losers. So goals aren’t what separates bad from good.

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

If you completely ignored your goal and focused on your system, you’d still succeed. Whereas the same wouldn’t be true of focusing on a goal whilst ignoring the system.

*Goals take care of themselves if you focus on the system.*

If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle different measures, and your method of receiving feedback from your instructor.

Systems are more beneficial as they lead you to outperform goals and take you to places you didn’t imagine. They’re also more adaptable to the fluid circumstances of life, whereas goals are rigid and make you feel like you’ve failed if you don’t achieve them.

A driver stuck in the desert focuses on altering his car or his driving to get out, rather than trying to change the road ahead.

Goals are about the results you want to achieve.

Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

You can set a long term goal and then reverse engineer a system to try and hit the goal. But you’re best doing this, then forget the goal and focus simply on improving the initial iteration of your system instead.

- The author tells us to focus on Systems instead of Goals.
The point being that goals bring with them a whole host of problems, such as not fully allowing happiness until a goal is reached, not allowing for continuous improvement and so on.
Systems however allow you to focus on improving the system continually, which usually allows the goal to be achieved without thinking about it.

“The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”

*Change can take years before it happens all at once.*

*With compounding progress, the most powerful outcomes are delayed.*
You have to believe in the process and the results will eventually come of their own accord sometime down the line.

Clear likens habit progress to an ice cube melting.
At 27
28
29
30
31 degrees
There is no sign of melting, despite increasing efforts.
Then suddenly, at 32, the ice cube melts.
This is how progress works in his view (despite this pattern actually being a linear progression, which he claims that progress isn’t).

He says that the results do not come until the exponential line of real progress breaks through the linear line of expected progress, which he calls “The Plateau of Latent Potential”.
It is at this point that the months and years of habits become noticeable and everything seems to fall into place all at once, and is the point at which people think you’re an “overnight success”

Clear calls this space “The valley of disappointment” as it is where individual expectations lie furthest from reality, and motivation wanes as progress is not taking the form that the individual thought it would, even after weeks, months or years.

Clear then discusses his theoretical system as to why people give up working on their habits.
He thinks that people often start habits thinking that progress is linear, which is wrong, because it’s actually exponential.
This leaves a small valley at the very beginning underneath the linear line but above the exponential curve

- Stress that debilitates individuals in their 40s and 50s is a compound of little stressors that they’ve let slide their entire life.
- Negative thoughts: the hugely negative views about yourself and others are made up of the little negative thoughts you’ve let slide over the years

- The author then goes on to discuss different Good aspects and bad aspects of human life, and makes the point that they’re all the result of a compounding of smaller things.
- e.g. Riots and Movements are sprung from microaggressions and daily aggravations that eventually compound to tip the scale and spread like wildfire.

Over a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.

Success is the product of daily habits - not once in a lifetime transformations.

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than your current results. You get what you repeat.

- The author says the impact caused by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Going LA to NYC; shifting just 3.5 degrees south will land them in Washington DC.
- Powerful metaphor there; a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination.

This also shows that, on top of the math, the negativity bias is also stronger for human behaviour, as bad habits tend to be passive, requiring no thought or energy, whereas good habits, at least in their beginning, are active, and require thought or energy. Therefore it takes more effort to guard against the bad habits, and they have greater downside risk mathematically too.

Hard for bads: if you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time to finish it later.

- Hard for goods: if you save a little money now, you’re not a millionaire. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the language.

*it is not until five or ten years later that the value of good habits or the cost of bad habits becomes apparent*

This is my biggest problem, and probably the reason I picked up this book. Small changes don’t seem to matter much in the moment. I need to visualise and make a contract with my future self.

Nonetheless the people reading this book, like myself, are obviously people struggling to start, and starting is the hardest part. Specifics of numbers are secondary to the context of this book, which is getting you to start making these habits, rather than actually achieving 37x increases.