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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Badass Habits summary
Jen Sincero
Cultivate the Awareness, Boundaries, and Daily Upgrades You Need to Make Them Stick
15 mins
Brief summary
Badass Habits by Jen Sincero is a self-help book that teaches readers how to break bad habits and develop empowering ones. It provides practical tools and strategies to help readers build self-awareness, overcome limiting beliefs, and create the life they want.
Table of Contents
Badass Habits
Summary of 5 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 5
To change your habits, change who you are.
Meet Alice. At 30 years old, she realized she was in a toxic relationship. Not with a parent or a partner, but with sugar. Every time Alice indulged in sweets, she’d get terrible breakouts, worry about weight gain, and generally just feel awful.
Something had to change. So she stopped buying and binging on snacks, sought advice from dietitians, and even watched documentaries demonizing sucrose.
These steps helped, but it always felt like she was one bad day away from slipping back into her old sugary ways. In the end, Alice had to change not just her actions but her whole identity. She had to become a person who simply didn’t eat sugar.
The key message here is: To change your habits, change who you are.
To put it simply, a habit is a routine, action, or behavior you engage in over and over again. Essentially, it’s what you do when running on autopilot. Habits can be positive patterns, like always putting on your seatbelt when driving, or destructive ones, like constantly misplacing keys, jewelry, or other valuables.
Habits work by connecting a trigger to a response, then connecting that response to a reward. Consider a habit like daily exercise. The trigger could be seeing your gym on the way home from work. The response would then be stopping in for 40 minutes of cardio. The rewards? The rush of endorphins and a feeling of accomplishment. Importantly, the more often you follow this sequence, the more automatic and ingrained it becomes.
Of course, you probably aren’t aware that the sequence is taking place; if you’re like most people, many of your habits are completely unconscious. So the first step in making any change to your routines is to identify them. To do that, reflect on your actions, as well as the thoughts and feelings associated with them. For someone like Alice, this meant looking at when sugar binges happen. Did stress trigger them? What reward did they offer?
Once you become aware of the sequences behind your habits, you can consciously alter them. This requires redefining your identity to fit the new habits you want. So Alice needed to stop seeing herself as a sugar-addicted ball of stress and instead cultivate an identity as a healthy, happy eater. Once you truly see yourself as a different person, your unconscious sequences will fall in line more easily. We’ll look at one way to establish an identity in the next blink.
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What is Badass Habits about?
Badass Habits (2020) is a lighthearted guide to developing positive habits. This manual lays out a step-by-step approach to breaking old patterns and creating new ones.
Badass Habits Review
Badass Habits (2021) explores the power of habits and how they can be transformed to create a life you love. Here's why this book is worth reading:
- This book offers practical strategies and tools to help you break bad habits and build empowering ones that align with your goals.
- With inspiring stories and relatable examples, it shows how small changes in behavior can lead to significant transformation.
- The book encourages self-reflection and empowers you to take ownership of your habits, helping you cultivate a mindset of personal growth.
Best quote from Badass Habits
The ability to choose and change . . . is a gift, especially since so many of the habits and identities that were walking around with werent consciously chosen by us.
—Jen Sincero
Who should read Badass Habits?
- Stubborn people looking to drop old behaviors
- Apathetic folks looking for some motivation
- Anyone aiming to build better habits
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Badass Habits FAQs
What is the main message of Badass Habits?
The main message of Badass Habits is to cultivate habits that empower us to achieve our goals and live our best lives.
How long does it take to read Badass Habits?
The reading time for Badass Habits varies depending on the reader's speed. However, the Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.
Is Badass Habits a good book? Is it worth reading?
Badass Habits is a valuable read for anyone looking to transform their habits and create a more fulfilling life.
Who is the author of Badass Habits?
The author of Badass Habits is Jen Sincero.
What to read after Badass Habits?
If you're wondering what to read next after Badass Habits, here are some recommendations we suggest:
- The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal
- You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero
- Good Habits, Bad Habits by Wendy Wood
- Mini Habits by Stephen Guise
- The Power of Discipline by Daniel Walter
- The Procrastination Cure by Jeffery Combs
- Procrastination by Jane B. Burka & Lenora M. Yuen
- SuperLife by Darin Olien
- The Now Habit by Neil Fiore
- Living in Flow by Sky Nelson-Isaacs