Atomic Habits
Cover of Atomic Habits by James Clear
Rating: 🔟
Atomic Habits is a life-changing book for me. It brings a new idea to light regarding habits.
“1% Better Every Day”
James Clear mentions this regularly in the book, coming back often to show the importance of daily improvements. Habits make any changes exponential, albeit how tiny they can be.
Before jumping ahead of myself, Atomic Habits is possibly the best book I've read so far; going head-to-head with Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. These two books have consciously made me change the way I live and work. And I can't praise it any more than I already do.
About James Clear
James Clear is a blogger and New-York best selling author. Atomic Habits has sold over 1 million copies and he has blogged on his website for almost a decade. James discusses topics such as habits, performance, thinking and health on his blog and he boasts over 650,000 email subscribers for his weekly newsletter.
James was driven for personal improvement by an injury, similar to the story of Jim Kwik as he dives into it in his book Limitless. He took a baseball to the face in a high school game and doubts of his future started to surface. James then found the miracles of habits and the rest is history.
James has given keynotes at companies such as Intel, LinkedIn, McKinsey, General Electric and Cisco about habits, self development and continuous improvement. A lesser known fact about James Clear is that he used to be an All-American Pitcher for College Baseball and he's currently a weightlifter.
Summary
The whole premise of Atomic Habits is built upon the four principles that James Clear outlines. He puts these principles to work, to make good habits easy, attractive and doable while making bad habits impossible and out-of-reach. He does preface this by talking about good and bad habits. There are no good or bad habits, only effective and ineffective habits.
Habits are basically the human body's way of dealing with repeating stimuli, whether that's brushing your teeth or bringing your spoon to your mouth. Habits reduce stress and strain on your body and brain; imagine waking up everyday forgetting how to tie your shoe or how to use your phone.
Fundamentally, behaviour change is driven by a change in character and self-identity. Life is a massive game and each day is a game of chess, each move you take dictates the larger picture.
““Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. There can never be a 100% vote for one side but you can aim for majority vote.””
James discusses how habits are carried out in 4 stages; Cue, Craving, Response and Reward. These are essentially the four sections of the book, he builds upon the stages with tactics to shape your habits to your liking. Personally, I appreciate the other side of things where he provides not just ways to build good habits but also plentiful methods to rid yourself of your bad habits.
In each step of a habit, James gives us control over our habits. Think about it, 50% of your life is dictated by habits, how much does that 50% mean? The cue triggers the starting point of habits. It could be as simple as the environment we're in, the music we're listening to or even the actions of a previous habit. In this chapter, James gives ways to manipulate cues of your habits, making good habits noticable and bad habits invisible.
““Habits with the most obvious cue are often habits that get done.””
Cravings of a habit tells us how it benefits us. The habit has to appeal to some form of basic human need. James also talks about societal pressure and how it can majorly influence our actions. It feeds our primal desires to fit in a tribe. The chapter ultimately focuses on how habits are driven by some form of underlying or primitive motive.
““Joining a tribe where your goals are aligned with societal pressure, it makes adopting a habit easier.””
The cue and craving drives the response of the habit, this is the actual action taken from a habit. At this point, James outlines the ways to reduce or increase friction to depending on what you want to do. He uses watching TV or console gaming as prime examples, if you want to reduce your gaming or watch time. Every time you want to watch TV or play games, put your TV box or gaming console in an obscure place, making it harder to start the habit or carry out the response.
““You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days... This is why the bad workouts are often the most important ones””
Reward rounds up the habit cycle. What do you get or how do you feel after finishing your habitual response? Could it be that after gaming you feel less stressed? Maybe you feel less hunger after snacking? Or you could feel accomplished after reading 20 pages. James teaches the way to reinforce our habits. You'll probably think of Pavlov's dog when you think "reinforcing" habits or actions, but James talks about habit tracking in this section. He talks about apps like "Habitica ", gamifying your habit goals.
““The reward tells the brain whether a habit is worth remembering or not. If a habit is associated with good rewards, it will be reinforced neurologically.””
Top 5 Takeaways
The four principles to building good habits and breaking bad habits are established around the four stages of habits; Cue, Craving, Response and Reward.
Habits are carried out in stages and at any stage, there are ways to make habits easier or harder to adopt.
Follow the Goldilocks Rule to optimise your potential and interest.
The Goldilocks rule suggests to keep your activities or tasks just slightly harder than your current abilities. It helps keep you engaged but still maintains your ability to improve.
Habits completely take over your day, in both a positive and negative way.
Habits are formed to make life easier and they take over 50% of your day on a conservative estimate.
Habits compound any positive or negative effect that comes with it. Think of gaming versus exercising as an escape from stress; both of these have the same cue, craving and reward but they differ in response. The magic comes when building the right habits.
Make habits easy with the Two-Minute Rule
The two-minute rule in Atomic Habits is designed to break down habits to the easiest form possible.
Break down your habits to two-minute chunks or starting points. Example, to start exercising more, your two minute activity would be to put on your workout clothes. Just Get Started.
I learnt the power of Environment Design from Atomic Habits. What a power it can have in our day-to-day lives.
Environment can be as simple as leaving your journal open next to your work station if you want to journal daily. Or removing snacks from eyesight to stop snacking.
Favourite Quotes:
“Ineffective habits work on a negative feedback loop, once they happen, they are a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
The quote blew my mind. Speaking of myself, I've definitely played games to destress and because I gamed, I got more stressed. This triggers a continuous cycle where your habit fuels itself.
I have been inspired to re-evaluate some of my habits after reading this quote. Do I have any self-fueling habits like my gaming or constant YouTube-ing?
“Habits are often not the best way to solve problems you face; they are methods you have learnt to use.”
Habits are created when you have the first reward to a certain cue or craving. Whenever you get a reward from any response, that will naturally be the habit you come back to, whether it is effective or not.
“Action taken is infinitely more impactful than planning and preparing for action.”
Action helps you push your own boundaries, whether that's personal or professional. You could be creating content instead of elaborately planning it or taking the initiative in your team project at work.
Quotes like this have been popping up everywhere. They have been incredibly motivating and inspiring for me to take action. I've been "planning" and "getting ready" to start a blog and be more creative but quotes and books like these have been encouraging.
“Everyone has goals, but if we only work on them when the time is right, nothing will ever get accomplished.”
Similar to the last quote, it pushes for action. That's the name of the game for me at the moment.
The most effective step towards your goal is getting work done; but it has to be meaningful work in the right direction. The best example would be for starting a YouTube channel, unless you are releasing a video, you're not making true progress in the YouTube sphere
“The average person spends over two hours on social media, think you can do better or worse?”
The average social media consumption is continually increasing as well. Spilling the tea on myself, I recently checked my social media usage and I've spend an average of 30 hours a week on YouTube...
What do you think you could do with an extra 14-20 hours a week? (I'm not saying social media is useless but how much of that is actually effective towards your long-term goals?)