Atomic Habits by James Clear
Introduction
This book is an international best seller and has sold over a million copies. James Clear is an expert on habits and decision making. He takes the reader through a process and way of thinking that enables people to make behavioural changes in their life that last.
Summary
The book is a blend of research, anecdotes and real life stories wrapped around key principles James calls 4 laws on behaviour change.
(1) make it obvious
(2) make it attractive
(3) make it easy
(4) make it satisfying
The premise is that with enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. The book describes the simple formula for changing a habit is to fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
What Resonated?
The book helped me understand the importance of stacking habits to enable them to ‘stick’ – by this I mean, if you run the following sequence; “when I get up in the morning, I brush my teeth, make a coffee and then take a morning shower.” If I want to start a morning meditation practice, I would stack the meditation in the best place in my current routine, for example “after my morning coffee, I will meditate for 10 minutes in the lounge before taking my morning shower.”
Embedding change is not easy, but reading the book did get me thinking about my goals in a different way. It’s made me more conscious of my day to day decisions, so that those small incremental changes add up to success and that it’s as much about getting the right system to fit your lifestyle first instead of the goal coming first.
Another key part of the book for me was when James wrote about becoming products of the environments that we live in. He says that you can never consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment and that a more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. He gives the following examples:
If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room.
If you continually feel like you are measuring yourself against others, stop following social media accounts that make you feel bad about yourself.
If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV out of the bedroom.
Favourite Quotes
These are the key messages or quotes that really resonated with me:
1. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
2. “Goals are about the result you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.”
3. “Your culture sets your expectation for what is “normal.” Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.”
4. “The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.”
Conclusion
Did I like this book? Yes, I did, it is full of useful research, real life anecdotes, and tools that the reader can go away and implement.
I would recommend this book if you are interested in self-development and want to achieve things but falter again and again. Although it is not a panacea to success without some effort though, merely reading the book is not enough, it takes conscious effort and decision making toward deliberate action on a consistent basis.
One final takeaway is that it’s not a lack of motivation, more a lack of clarity – consider when to stop, pause, rethink, redecide and then take action.