Habits and Skills

Habit is a behavior performed on regular basis.

Skill is an ability to perform certain action correct and fast - "easy".

We need to create a habit for skill execise if it does not happen without additional effort.

E.g. if you are alone in a new country, you'll learn new language without much bothering about it.
But if you came to new country with your family and your circle of friends consists of newcomers like you and you are a reserved person unable to chit chat with anyone on the street... Or if you just need to learn a new language without being exposed to native speakers... Then you need explicitly exercise new language and do it on regular basis.

Or if you believe that new skill can boost your career but cannot exercise it on your current working place.

Or your health is worse than it could be and you'd like to move more and eat differently.

Sounds like a bunch of new habits, eh?

Really here is one habit: a habit of regular deliberate learning.

"a habit must be established before it can be improved"^*does not really work:

• If you are going to establish an hour-long behavior, doing something meaningless for 2 minutes will make you annoyed long before desired habit will be established.
• If you try to do something you cannot currently do properly, you'll get harmed or at least disappointed. First-jogging-day-traumas are rather usual in overweighted middle-agers.
• And last but not least: a habit is your gravitational well, a behavior performed automatically, without any willpower or even attention while learning new skill is deliberate conscious process.

Let's try another scheme:

1. Create 2 slots in your day schedule:
   • Teacher's - to collect and organize learning material.
   • Student's - to learn.
   Limiting yourself to courses and tutorials is a drunkard's search. When you direct your learning yourself, you learn 2 times both as teacher and as learner, and your learning is tailored for you.
2. Create a timeslot for the habit itself and use it for something close to desired behavior but already known:
   • Walking instead of running
   • Recalling previous lessons and playing with their materials.
   The point is to do something you can do easily, without conscious concentration and willpower exertion.

Notes on Text Segmentation

There are larger text parts than paragraph like e.g.chapter but in language learning long texts do not make much sense.
Our text for a lesson should be no more than a few paragraphs long no matter how advanced is the learner.

We are going to distinguish:

• Paragraph
• Sentence
• Phrase
• Word
• Morpheme
• Character

Notes on Atomic Habits by James Clear.

It's not that simple with habits

You can stick to some routine for months or even years and stop doing it one day without any desire to proceed.
I know a number of men who were used to shave every day for years and then became unwilling to shave and did it only on some occasion or getting really ugly.

Sometimes a routine good for one can be bad for another.
I tried to get up at 5:00 AM and kept it for more than half an year, but began to feel tired in the middle of the day despite of 7-8 hours of night sleep...

Let's see if "Atomic habits" can answer my questions about habits.

Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

• Small improvement every day can have a great cumulative effect over time
• Effect of accumulation is not linear. Sometimes it may seem there is no effect at all. Be patient and one day you'll see even more than you expect.
• Goals are good for choosing direction and bad as a measure of success
• In order to change your habits change your beliefs: "Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last."
• The habit loop: 
  
• "The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving."
• Purposes of reward:
  • Satisfy your craving
  • Teach you which actions are worth repeating in the future.
• "If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit:
  • Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start.
  • Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act.
  • Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it.
  • If the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future.
  "
• 4 laws of creating a habit:
  1. Cue - make it obvious
  2. Craving - make it attractive
  3. Response - make it easy
  4. Reward - make it satisfying
• In order to break a habit revert all 4

The first law: Make it Obvious

• We do not pay attention to our existing habits. When we'd like to change them we need to notice them first:
  create a list of existing habits and mark them as good, bad or neutral.
• When doing something important attract your attention to the process by "Pointing and Calling": point at the signal triggering your action and call out command describing the action.
• In order to create a new habit find place and time for it.
• Habit stacking: the time can be described as event immediately preceeding your new habitual action.
  "This allows you to take advantage of the natural momentum that comes from one behavior leading into the next"
• Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. People tend to choose most obvious option and buy things they see more and better placed.
• Make a habit of preparing some action like placing a book on the pillow in the morning in order to read it on the night.
• "Over time your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior."
• If particular context is tightly linked to particular action, it will trigger the action for sure.
  If you but sleep in your bed you will never be an insomniac.
• "It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues."
• "Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room, a rooftop patio, or a building with expansive architecture."
• "One space, one use". "When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits — and the easier ones will usually win out."
• "The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least.""Disciplined" people spend less time in tempting situations.
• "You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
• "Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible."

The second law: Make it Attractive

• Supernormal stimuli: "the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule, it lights up like a Christmas tree."
• The trend is for rewards to become more concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
• "It is the anticipation of a reward — not the fulfillment of it — that gets us to take action."
• "Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them."
• "Desire is the engine that drives behavior."
• Do what you need to do together with something you want to do: "more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors." Or do what you want to do after something you need to do.
• one of the deepest human desires is to belong
  Or to posses???
• We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:
  • the close: the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
    Join a culture where:
    • your desired behavior is a norm
    • people of the group have something in common with you
    *remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It looks like one question is answered: when a man leaves a tight group of every-day-shavers he may stop every day shaving 😉
  • the many: we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves
    The advice is the same: join the tribe with desired habits.
  • the powerful: we want to be acknowledged, recognized, and praised.
    We imitate people we envy.
    I can see a problem here:
    • how can we obtain a list of their real habits?
    • how can we tell habits facilitating their success from all the others?
    • will their habits facilitate our success?
• Finding initial causes of bad habits in order to fix them sounds irrelevant to me:
  • The thing that caused you to start a habit and the cause supporting it now can be 2 different things.
    When my husband started to smoke at the age of 15 it was because he wanted to look and feel adult. Now being surrounded by non-smokers and people quitting smoking he feels himself special telling "I'll quit smoking when I'll quit breathing".
    BTW, a group can urge a person to do something unusual for this group just to stand out.
• The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.
• Habits are all about associations. Associate better solutions with your old problems.
• Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. Every time you perceive a cue, your brain runs a simulation and makes a prediction about what to do in the next moment. These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving—a feeling, a desire, an urge. Feelings and emotions transform the cues we perceive and the predictions we make into a signal that we can apply.
• When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.
• Reframing your actions to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to seem they more attractive.

The third law: Make it Easy

• You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it.
• Like the muscles of the body, particular regions of the brain adapt as they are used and atrophy as they are abandoned.
• The idea behind make it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.
• when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort.
• Successful companies design their products to automate, eliminate, or simplify as many steps as possible. They reduce the number of fields on each form. They pare down the number of clicks required to create an account. They ask their customers to make fewer choices.
  And even more successful companies create huge forms mostly filled in with defaults beneficial for them rather than their customers. Customers make fewer choices and the choices they make are well designed 😞
• Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscious decisions that follow. Decisive moments set the options available to your future self.
  For instance, walking into a restaurant is a decisive moment because it determines what you’ll be eating for lunch. Technically, you are in control of what you order, but in a larger sense, you can only order an item if it is on the menu.
• When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. Even if nothing interesting can be done in 2 minutes, focus on the first 2 minutes and proceed further only in case you feel like it.
• The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work.
• Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
• Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard by creating what psychologists call a commitment device.
  A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is useful because it enables you to take advvantage of good intention before you can fall victim of temptation.

The fourth law: Mak it Satisfying

• Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.
• What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
• “Don’t break the chain”
• Perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker. Marking a task complete feels like a reward however tiny.
  Habit tracking is obvious
  • The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it.
    really it just attracts attention to tracked behavior and can magnify negative feelings like food log can magniy the feeling of deprivation.
  • Habit tracking keeps you honest. When the evidence is right in front of you, you’re less likely to lie to yourself.
  Habit tracking is attractive.
  • The most effective form of motivation is progress.
    Habit tracking usually tracks effort rather than progress. But the idea of tracking progress is worth effort of creating special piece of software for it.
  Habit tracking is satisfying
  • Tracking can become its own form of reward.
• Many people resist the idea of tracking and measuring.
  Rather they resist the hassle of tracking and measuring.
• You’ll find a few weeks of measurements to be insightful. It’s always interesting to see how you’ve actually been spending your time.
• No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point.
• I can’t be perfect, but I can avoid a second lapse.
• The “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge. Don’t put up a zero.
• The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it. We optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
• As soon as actions incur an immediate consequence, behavior begins to change.
  Correct. I could leave smoking when noticed that the first cigarette in the morning tastes disgusting. The trick was to fix on this feeling.
• The habit contract I've read it all and found it useless. Punishment induces hate. Perhaps, if you have nothing else to care about... In real life you need to inject new habits as painlessly and as effortlessly as possible. You simply do not have spare time and energy. Increasing stress of your life is not a good idea anyway.

How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

• The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
• Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.
• 5 spectrums of behavior
  • Openness to experience: from curious and inventive on one end to cautious and consistent on the other.
  • Conscientiousness: organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.
  • Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved.energetic is not qualifying, I'd rather say "cocky"
  • Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.
  • Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.
  All five characteristics have biological underpinnings.
• You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
• At some point, you need to make sure you’re playing the right game for your skillset. The most common approach is trial and error. But life is short.
• Explore/exploit tradeoff:
  • In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration.
  • Then shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found so far — but keep experimenting occasionally.
    If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit.
    If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.
    There can be a trap: it just looks like you are winning or losing.
• Questions to ask yourself while exploring:
  • What feels like fun to me, but like work to others?
  • What makes me lose track of time?
  • Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
  • What comes naturally to me?
  To be honest, some of this process is just luck.
• If you can’t find a game where the odds are stacked in your favor, create one. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition.
• Even if you’re not the most naturally gifted, you can often win by being the best in a very narrow category.
• Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They tell us what to work hard on. People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.
• Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy.
• Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying.
• “What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?”
  “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
• As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”
• Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
  Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.