Systems beat goals. Build, maintain and edit the daily habits that compound into results.
Chapters
- Why 1% Better Isn’t Enough
- Consistent But No Progress? It’s the Hurdle Rate
- To Achieve Your Goals, Aim at Your Habits
- Why Comfort Will Ruin Your Life: The Turkey Problem
- Willpower Is Finite (How to Do Hard Things Anyway)
- My Cold Shower Got Better. My Business Didn’t.
- Substitute, Don’t Subtract: How to Break a Habit
- Start Laughably Small
- The Con I Run on Myself to Start Working
- The One Minute Rule for Habits That Stick
- The Tardigrade Test: How to Build Habits That Last
- Why Some Habits Stick: 12 Tardigrade Traits
- The Minimalist Philosophy of a Jellyfish
- Why Rich People and Dying Spacecraft Follow the Same Rule
- The Cure For Anxiety Is Doing More Of It
- Mental Toughness via Meditation
- Confidence Is a Trailing Indicator
- Madam C.J. Walker: $1.25 to 20,000 Agents
- Chase Risk Before It Chases You
- How Meditation Eats Stress
- The Optimization Trap That Broke My Meditation Habit
- What Everyone Gets Wrong About Continuous Improvement
- Ray Dalio’s 42-Year Daily Habit
- The 10,000 Hour Rule Counts the Wrong Thing
- How I Got My First Customer With 8 Notion Docs
- An AI Named the One Trait That Predicts Success
- Habits of Great Writers, Founders and Investors
- The Habit Range System
- Ron Hill’s 52-Year Daily Running Streak
- How to Adapt to Change Fast Enough
- How I Build Habits That Don’t Break
- How to Make Habits Stick When Life Pushes Back
- I Had Too Many Habits. Here’s What Saved Me.
- Your Habits Are Your Investment Portfolio
- Your Habit List Is a Single Point of Failure
- The Pattern Behind Every System Collapse
- The 1 Area I Ignored Across 20 Businesses
- Work-Life Balance Is a Myth. Choose Your Table.
- You’re in a Status Game Whether You Entered or Not
- Stop Trading Your Habits Like Stocks
- Anti-Habits: The Discipline of Saying No
- I Set These 10 Anti-Habits: How I Finish Work by 4pm
- Why Poker Pros Fold What Investors Buy
- The 10pm Rule I Failed for Two Years
- Why I Can’t Drink a Latte (and Billionaires Pay No Tax)
- I Optimized My Habits Until They Broke
- Optimizing Your Life Is Killing Your Progress
- Your Habits Have a Hurdle Rate
- How to Stay Consistent (By Finding the Minimum Dose)
- I Pay 34 Minutes a Day for My Business to Grow
- The Navy Cured Scurvy. Then It Uncured It.
- The 200-Million-Year Test for Any Habit
- 190,000 Taste Tests Said Yes. Customers Said No.
- Why I Went to the Gym at Midnight (The Streak Method)
- One Small Promise, Kept 108 Mornings in a Row
- Why Mormons Get Rich and Adventists Live to 100
- Your Habits Are Only as Strong as Your Worst Day
- The Map Is Not the Territory (And Why That’s Fine)
- Habit Banking: What You Can Bank and What You Can’t
- Habit Banking: How to Keep a Streak Without the Panic
- Stop Raising Your Standards. Start Proving Them.
- Patagonia’s 5-Word Policy for Getting Work Done
- How to Focus on One Thing All Day
- Why Good Habits Get Boring
- You Stopped Feeling It. It Didn’t Stop Working.
- I Quit Daily Writing in My 20s and Regretted It for Years
- Your Cold Shower Is an Exposure Therapy Rep
- I Got Everything I Wanted at 23 and Stopped Growing
- Cold Water Beats a Pep Talk
- You’re Not Overthinking. You’re Under-Moving.
- Why Polar Bears Pace and Rich Men Dive to the Titanic
- Why Achieving Goals Doesn’t Make You Happy
- What 2,000 Days of Building in Public Proved
- Why Rest Days Made Everything Harder
- I Stopped Taking Rest Days. The Binges Started.
- The 3am Binge Isn’t a Willpower Failure
- His Joke Was So Bad It Cost £500 Million
- The Same Loop That Killed Sears Runs Your Nights
- Moving Averages for Life
- 1 Metric for Life Progress: The Daily Tempo Score
- Small Habits, Big Results: 47 Novels Before Work
- Most Habit Trackers Miss the Point
- Get More Done by Counting What You Finish
- The Tater Tots Trick for Repurposing Content
- Eat The Frog Last
- The Morning Habits That Stick (Why Order Matters)
- Your Morning Habits Work. The Order Doesn’t.
- Compound Lifts
- Analysis Paralysis Is a Bundling Problem
- You’re Not Lazy. The Step Is Too Steep.
- The Estimation Trick I Use to Start Moving
- How I Stop Procrastinating | The Single Page Method
- The Atomic Ivy Lee Method
- Force Ranking
- Everything Feels Important? It’s a Ranking Problem
- The Resistance Rule
- The Replay Protocol
- 4 Things I’d Tell My Younger Self. One Changed Everything.
- How I Review a Year in One Hour
- Words Are Software
- Friction is the Feature
- How I Use a Paper To-Do List to Finish What Actually Matters
- Why I Rewrite My Principles by Hand
- Think on Paper to Keep Your Principles Sharp
- The 150-Year Art of Delayed Gratification
- Neil Gaiman’s Two-Draft Rule
- Don’t Hard-Code Trauma: How to Let Go of the Past
- How I Get Business Ideas
- How to Get Startup Ideas: Build the “Dumb” One First
- Is It Necessary?
- I Deleted Social Media. Here’s What I Kept.
- The One-Hour Trap
- Why I Check Email Once a Week
- The Sound That Trained Me to Overwork
- The Hidden Cost of Moving: Decision Fatigue
- Proximity Is Power. Here’s the Math.
- Not Perfect, But Better
- The Hidden Cost of Unreliability
- Climb to See the Next Peak
- Simplicity Through Intensity
- Consistency Over Intensity: What Pushing Harder Costs
- The Math of Inevitable Success
- Force Yourself to Go Faster – Then Pay for It
- What a Poker Table Taught Me About Daily Habits
- The Downward Spiral of Oscar Wilde
- You’re Not Undisciplined. Your Habit Is Too Big.
- The $4.6 Billion Lesson in Not Rushing
- Do Less, Get Better: I Removed a Good Chapter
- Do Less, Get More: The F1 Math
- The NBA Deleted a Shot. Your Habit Needs the Same.
- Not All Trade-Offs Are Real
- I Chose to Be Worst at Replying
- The 3% Mortgage Debate Is Really About Sleep
- Revenge Bedtime Procrastination Isn’t About Sleep. Ask Hermès.
- Stop Wasting Your Off Days
- Fifteen Years on One Wall. One Day Off the Business Week.
- How to Close a Chapter Without Regret