Superhuman by Habit: A Guide to Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit at a Time by
Tynan
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
This is a book about how building good habits and being consistent with those habits can make a man a superman. Author tells about about how he does it in this book. Here are some notes that i took:
1. When people learn that I write every single day, study a foreign language every day, work on my big projects every day, eat healthy every day, work out every other day, and maintain a consistent sleep schedule, they marvel at the deep well of self discipline that I have. In truth, though, it's all just habits that feel easy. Habits are the closest we can get to having superpowers.
2. Replacing just a few key negative habits with a few positive habits can easily be the difference between being mostly unhappy and being happy almost all of the time.
3. The benefit of a habit isn't the magnitude of each individual action you take, but the cumulative impact it will have on your life in the long term.
4. Missing two days of a habit is habit suicide. If missing one day reduces your chances of long-term success by a small amount like five percent, missing two days reduces it by forty percent or so. Three days missed and you may as well be starting over.
5. When you first miss a habit, the next occurrence of it should become a top priority. You must execute on that habit at any level possible. Do it perfectly if you can, but do it terribly if that's all you can handle. Just make sure that you do it.
6. Just like a marriage, any habit that's intended to last forever will require loyalty through good and bad, sickness and health.
7. Remember that the power of a habit isn't actually in the individual execution, but in the consistency. It is far far worse to skip doing something than to just do a horrible job of it.
8. So if you're trying to lose weight, evaluate yourself based on how well you stick to your plan rather than the number on the scale, especially in the short term.
9. Track your adherence to process, not your results.
10. Sometimes building small habits can build momentum and self-confidence that gives people the strength and motivation to tackle the larger ones.
11. The first phase of habits, countering your weaknesses, makes you the best version of yourself.
12. Exploring areas that “just aren't you” is how you expand how you define yourself and take things to the next level.
13. create habits to surround yourself with positive people. The way I did this was to create a habit of only hanging out with people who I wanted to become better friends with. Within half a year this changed my social circle significantly for the better.
14. Whether other people are doing smart things, dumb things, things that help us, or things that harm us, both parties can be best served through fostering compassion and minimizing focus on how wrong the other is.
15. “Remember that everyone is just doing their best and trying to be happy, just like you.”
16. Eating healthy food may be the single most important habit that you can cultivate.
17. Sugar and highly-refined grains are the most significantly unhealthy things in the standard diet. Eliminating those two groups of foods is about eighty percent of getting to a healthy diet.
18. Items to cut out include refined sugars (including all fruit juices), agave and maple syrups, and honey, and refined grains such as white flour, white rice, and white pasta.
19. increase your intake of complex carbohydrates, like brown rice, as well as natural simple carbohydrates like fruit.
20. The goal isn't to have a perfect diet in every way, but to eliminate the dozen or so foods that do the most damage, and to enjoy your diet enough to make it sustainable.
21. When you successfully tackle sugar and refined carbohydrates, you can turn your attention to fats. The greatest threat is consuming too many Omega-6 and Omega-9 fats. These are found in most cooking oils as well as non-pasture raised meat, eggs, and dairy.
22. limit your oil intake to coconut oil for cooking and dressing, olive oil for dressing, and grass-fed butter. Meat should be limited to grass-fed beef and lamb, pasture-raised pork and poultry and wild-caught fish.
23. experiment with extremely healthy foods like miso soup, kale, cruciferous vegetables, tempeh, nuts, and seeds.
24. I eat a sardine sandwich and tuna sandwich almost every day for lunch. Any time I'm running low on Ezekiel bread, spinach, hummus, or fish, I restock so that I'm never more than a few minutes away from a healthy meal.
25. The goal with good sleep is to get as much sleep as your body wants, probably around 8 hours on average, and to wake up without an alarm clock.
26. The first step towards a good sleep habit is creating a good sleep environment. The key components of a good sleep environment are complete darkness and silence.
27. The tipping point for me was reading the excellent book, the Willpower Instinct, which said that the two best practices for increasing willpower were working out and meditating every day.
28. There are a lot of purported benefits of meditation, all of which I'm sure are experienced by one person or another, but the most significant benefit I've derived is better impulse control.
29. Every day, just sit for five minutes in a quiet space, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. For the first minute or two, it can help to subvocalize, “breathe in.... breathe out... breathe in... breathe out...” Such a simple task is enough to keep your mind focused.
30. Your overriding goal is just to sit there for five minutes. Any time you do that, you have successfully meditated. When you notice that your mind starts thinking about something else, refocus on your breath.
31. The most tangible benefit I noticed from meditation was that it created a space in between feeling an impulse and acting on it.
32. Work out three days a week, doing three exercises each day. Monday is deadlifts, pullups, and rows. Wednesday is bench press, incline bench press, and curls. Friday is squat or leg press, straight-leg deadlift, and cable crunches. Deadlifts of both varieties are two sets of 4-6 reps, pullups are three sets of 4-6, everything else is three sets of 8-12.
33. Shifting your diet to 30-40% protein, including a shake one hour before working out, will help.
34. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum, so whatever outside influences we're exposed to become a part of our creation process and affect our output.
35. Our brains are lazy and we're creatures of habit. That means that without conscious effort, we will only do what is comfortable and familiar.
36. By making desirable behaviors comfortable and familiar, we can change them from being cumbersome and mentally taxing to comfortable and easy.
37. I noticed that having a clean and uncluttered living and working space makes it easier to think, helps keep my stress levels low, and improves my mood.
38. The essential habit of becoming a minimalist is the habit of regularly evaluating how your possessions either add to or detract from the conscious life you're living and then getting rid of those things that are burdensome.
39. Twice, then Quit is very simple. When you want to quit working for the first time, don't. Push through and work some more. The second time you want to quit, also don't quit. Push through again. The third time you want to quit, go ahead and quit. This habit is deceptively simple, but is very effective.
40. To truly exceed our normal capabilities, we must learn to use that willpower as efficiently as possible. To do that, we habitualize as much as possible, taking actions that previously consumed willpower and making them automatic.
A good and easy to read book.
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