“I didn’t start out as a writer. I became one through my habits.”

The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.

At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

Research has shown that once a person believes in a particular aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief.

A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.

Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows.

But perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

A very small shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful change in destination.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.

WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones?

People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.

Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.

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.

Excellence is not an act but a habit.

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

The habit of giving only enhances the desire to give.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.

Excellence at everything you can do can be achieved on if it is a habit.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.