Atomic Habits
Written by James Clear.
⏱️ ️The book in three sentences
Success is not about having a goal, it's about building the best process to reach the goal.
The effect of a habit compounds over time; the results are not linear, but exponential.
Make good habits easy & enjoyable; make bad habits hard and dissatisfying.
🪞 Reflections
James Clear is a bit of a phenomenon. He is the writer of a newsletter with over 1 million subscribers and the author of Atomic Habits, a book that has sold over 4 million copies and has resided on Amazon's Most Sold Non-Fiction list for 138 weeks, at the time of writing.
As you may have deduced from the title of the book, Atomic Habits is about building better habits. Clear uses both science and anecdotes to back his claims and bring them to life, respectively. But, the book is not really a discussion on the science of habit, nor is it about specific good habits to implement in your life. The author largely leaves that decision up to the reader. Atomic Habits, instead, is about the power of small but repetitive action, and more importantly, how to set up those actions so that they actually become habitual. It's not a textbook, it's a handbook.
A habit is broken down into four stages: the cue, the craving, the response and the reward. The 4 sections of the book subsequently address each stage directly with suggestions and actionable advice on how to manipulate and mould the desired action into a habit (or break a bad one).
For instance, the "cue" is the trigger point that begins the process of taking an action. So in order to trigger a good habit, we need to make the cue obvious. If you want to take your vitamins, leave them out in the open. You'll see them, then you'll take them. It's Clear's simplicity that makes the book so easy to understand and follow. It all makes sense. Of course, not every strategy he suggests is as simple as "just leave it out," but the book is ultimately designed to help make building good habits as easy as possible.
Clear's use of studies to back his techniques is also enjoyable and memorable. One that stood out to me was a study done on the techniques chimpanzees use to crack their nuts. The study revealed that even when a chimp knew a highly effective way to crack a nut, they still choose to use a less effective method if that was how their associate chimpanzees did it - a lesson on designing our environment to make our desired actions the norm, rather than the exception.
Atomic Habits is a book everyone should read. It's not as jam-packed with life-changing information as the hype made me expect. But it's not long, excessive or redundant, and because of its handbook-like nature, it's one of those books you know you'll return to. In other words, it's a fantastic reference whenever you're trying to make a positive change in your life. If you're interested in self-development, learning a new skill, being more consistent, or frustrated with how you float from day-to-day without making progress towards your goals, this book may be what you need to realign yourself and move forward.
💥 Personal Impact
Atomic habits challenged me to rethink my process of goal setting. Clear explains how goals are important because they give us direction, but truly, the process is what allows us to reach our targets. Think about the championship game in your favourite sport. Both the winner and loser have the same goal, but only one competitor wins. There is, of course, an element of luck, but that's out of our control so it doesn't warrant our attention or effort. Luck aside then, the team with the better process of planning, improving, practicing, etc. is the team that wins.
When I personally set my goals I like to follow a process of brainstorming a desired outcome with a 5-year timeframe. Then I ask myself in decreasing increments, what could I do to get closer to that outcome? What could I do in 1 year to be closer? What could I do in 1 month to be closer? What could I do this week to be closer? You get the point. James casts this method aside. Instead, he suggests thinking about your desired outcome and asking yourself what type of person would reach this goal? For example, if you want to get in shape, the kind of person to reach this goal is someone who eats 3 healthy meals a day.
Ultimately, I think our approaches reach the same outcome - you determine what you could do on a daily basis to improve your current situation. The difference is in perspective. Clear recognizes that the problem with goals is that you become overly focused on the future. You delay your happiness until you reach the goal. Then when you finally reach it, you end up feeling lost and dissatisfied. Success is about sustaining positive actions forever, not a sprint towards an outcome.
I don't think I'll ever abandon goal setting. It's something I love doing and has benefitted me tremendously since I started to take it seriously. However, Clear's theory has merit. I can relate to the feeling of dissatisfaction that comes shortly after celebrating a goal-achieved. I'm yet to put Clear's strategy into practice, but I'm planning to test it out next time I sit down to write out my goals for the upcoming period.
🗣 Top 3 Quotes
"Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees." (pg. 21)
"Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity." (pg. 71)
"If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection...It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days or thirty days or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behaviour. You could do something twice in thirty days, or two hundred times. It’s the frequency that makes the difference." (Pg. 143,146)