Two groups of students taking a college course were divided into a quantity group and quality group for taking photos. At the end of the course, the quantity group had produced all of the photos of the highest quality.

Motion vs. taking action. Motion is planning, strategizing, and learning. Action is the behavior that delivers an outcome. It is the difference between reading about diet and eating a healthy meal. Motion sometimes allows us to feel that we are making progress without the risk of failure. It can allow us to delay failure.

The key to mastering a habit is to start with repetition and practice. Just get reps in.

Habit formation may be related to {{c1::long-term potentiation}} (with each repetition, neural connections tighten--Atomic Habits). Hebb's law: neurons that fire together wire together. Repetition of a habit leads to clear physical changes in the {{c1::brain}}. Brain regions adapt similar to how muscles change with weightlifting.

Great difficulty is felt when learning something completely new. Repetition and engaging in active practice are essential to forming new habits. The students that took lots of photos spend time getting in reps in action and it resulted in them taking the best photos.

Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step. It occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over. A habit that is repeated more and more gradually becomes more and more automatic. Habits form based on frequency, not time. "How many?" is a better question to ask about forming a new habit than "how long?" What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. Take the actions you need to take to make progress. To build a habit, you need to practice it.