Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

Google famously asks employees
: Bharat Mediratta and Julie Bick, “The Google Way:
Give Engineers Room,” New York Times, October 21, 2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/jobs/21pre.html
.
“Flow is the mental state”
: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of
Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

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“Everyone has at least a few areas”
: Scott Adams, “Career Advice,” Dilbert Blog, July 20,
2007,
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html
.
CHAPTER 19
most successful comedians
: Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Leicester,
UK: Charnwood, 2008).
“4 years as a wild success”
: Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Leicester,
UK: Charnwood, 2008), 1.
“just manageable difficulty”
: Nicholas Hobbs, “The Psychologist as Administrator,”
Journal of Clinical Psychology 15, no. 3 (1959), doi:10.1002/1097–
4679(195907)15:33.0.co; 2–4; Gilbert Brim, Ambition: How We Manage Success and
Failure Throughout Our Lives (Lincoln, NE: IUniverse.com, 2000); Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
(New York: Basic Books, 2008).
In psychology research this is known as the Yerkes-Dodson law
: Robert Yerkes and
John Dodson, “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit Formation,”
Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18 (1908): 459–482.
4 percent beyond your current ability
: Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding
the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (Boston: New Harvest, 2014). In his book,
Kotler cites: “Chip Conley, AI, September 2013. The real ratio, according to calculations
performed by [Mihaly] Csikszentmihalyi, is 1:96.”