Atomic Habits - James Clear
- Abhishek Rao
- Aug 7, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 23, 2024
Sign Up to receive E-mail updates when a new Blog is posted.
Genre: Productivity
Rating: 5/5
Date Read: 21/11/2022
Goodreads Profile: Abhishek Rao
Book Link: Atomic Habits
Small Habits don’t add up. They Compound. That’s the Power of Atomic Habits. Tiny Changes. Remarkable Results.
Can one tiny change transform your life? It’s unlikely you would say so. But what if you made another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change. The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1% improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of Atomic Habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
When a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut-cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.
Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. - Lao Tzu
All habits serve you in some way - even the bad ones - which is why you repeat them.
The more sacred an idea is to us - that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity - the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
Our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps.
The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be.
Desire is the engine that drives behaviour. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
Avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are.
Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy it.
We tell ourselves, “I’m going to eat healthier” or “I’m going to write more,” but we never say when and where these habits are going to happen.
The problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
A craving is a sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.
Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act.
Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones.
Resisting temptation: just ignore it. It creates space for the craving to pass.
Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.
Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start.
The cues that spark our habits become so common that they are essentially invisible.
Happiness is when you have no urge to feel differently - when you no longer want to change your state.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.
The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty: roughly 4 per cent beyond your current ability.
Addition by subtraction: look for every point of friction and eliminate it.
How to Break a Bad Habit:
(Cue): Make it invisible
(Craving): Make it unattractive
(Response): Make it difficult
(Reward): Make it unsatisfying
Do not say you are bad, say you can be better.
The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments. Each one is like a fork in the road, and these choices stack up throughout the day.
How am I living and working with integrity right now?
How can I set a higher standard in the future?
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.
It's easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements daily.
We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much at the moment.
Decisive moments set the options available to your future self.
Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behaviour over time.
Revisit your core values and consider whether you have been living in accordance with them.
The mere act of tracking behaviour can spark the urge to change it.
Keep a “decision journal” to record the major decisions you make each week, why you made them, and what you expect the outcome to be.
Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting—even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review are the antidotes.
A habit is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past.
The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible.
To master a habit, start with repetition, not perfection.
Change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behaviour.
Choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
One glance and you immediately know how much work you have (or haven’t) been putting in.
A systems-first mentality beats a goal-oriented mindset.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game.
The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.
Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and upgrade and expand your identity.
Being curious is better than being smart.
Begin the process of behaviour change with awareness.
Happiness is simply the absence of desire.
Fall in love with the process rather than the product.
Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more. - Seneca
Does this behaviour help me become the type of person I wish to be?
Practice self-restraint not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you. The environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour.
Prime your environment so it’s ready for immediate use.
Prime your environment to make future actions easier.
Create a separate space for work, study, and exercise.
Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.
Take a break from the space where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought patterns.
Every action is preceded by a prediction. Life feels reactive, but it is predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past.
There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems.
Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.
How to Create a Good Habit:
(Cue): Make it obvious
(Craving): Make it attractive
(Response): Make it easy
(Reward): Make it satisfying
People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet.
Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have.
When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
Categorize your habits by how they will benefit you in the long run.
To build a new habit, identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behaviour on top.
The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
Create an implementation intention: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
Each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose. Sleep comes quickly when it is the only thing that happens in your bedroom. If you want behaviours that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
Habits like “read more” or “eat better” are worthy causes, but these goals do not provide instruction on how and when to act. Be specific and clear: After I close the door. After I brush my teeth. After I sit down at the table. The specificity is important. The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific cue, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.
It is the anticipation of a reward - not the fulfilment of it - that gets us to take action.
Add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.
Healthy eating: When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first.
If your reward for exercising is eating a bowl of ice cream, then you’re casting votes for conflicting identities, and it ends up being a wash. Instead, maybe your reward is a massage.
And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future.
The best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
Habit tracking keeps you honest. Most of us have a distorted view of our behaviour. We think we act better than we do. Measurement offers one way to overcome our blindness to our behaviour and notice what’s going on.
People who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not.
Don’t break the chain of creating every day and you will end up with an impressive portfolio.
Master the habit of showing up.
It’s easy to train when you feel good, but it’s crucial to show up when you don’t feel like it - even if you do less than you hope.
Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
If I miss one day, a simple rule: never miss twice.
If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I sit down and write an article, that’s action.
Each time you write a page, you are a writer.
If you show up at the gym five days in a row - even if it’s just for two minutes - you are casting votes for your new identity.
Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity. The all-or-nothing cycle of behaviour change is just one pitfall that can derail your habits.
Finances: When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing.
Living below your current means increases your future means.
Book Link: Atomic Habits
Like, Share and Comment
Sign Up to receive E-mail updates when a new Blog is posted.
Comments