Overall Review: A fantastic self-help book providing pragmatic strategies for building positive habits and quitting negative ones. It’s enjoyable to read and practical to follow. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to improve themselves.
Synopsis: James Clear shares four straightforward strategies to help build habits: 1) make the trigger for the habit obvious 2) make it desirable to perform the habit 3) make the habit easy to perform 4) make the habit enjoyable. He gives easy-to-implement tactics for following each strategy and shares scientific evidence as well as personal anecdotes to reinforce them.
Many of my friends strongly recommended Atomic Habits, so even though I don’t usually read self-help books I put it on my list. I even remember the exact conversation which convinced me to pick up the book. We were on the Q train headed to Coney Island for a fun day on the beach. As the near-empty subway car rumbled through Brooklyn I discussed improvements I was struggling with, like getting in better shape and upgrading my fashion style. My friend shared how much of a positive influence Atomic Habits had on her self-improvement, and I placed a hold on the book at the library as soon as I got back to Seattle.
After waiting a few months to get my hands on a copy, I can say the book was worth it. The strategies are deceptively simple yet insightful, and the more I read the more I found myself connecting with the book’s recommendations.
Atomic Habits is engaging and easy to understand. He inserts personal moments (such as side notes on his love for Harry Potter) throughout the book which makes it feel human. James opens the first chapter with a story of his debilitating high school injury which almost ended his baseball career and left him with a year-long painful recovery. Despite this setback, he went on to become a successful college baseball athlete. Sharing his story of perseverance at the very beginning of the book showcases the effectiveness of incremental improvements regardless of a person’s situation.
James also does a great job of explaining the underlying rationale of his strategies for habit-forming. The idea that goal setting is ineffective for habit-forming in particular resonated with me. He explains that if someone doesn’t make quick progress towards their goal, they get demotivated and give up. On top of that, if they do happen to persevere and reach their goal, they often give up shortly afterward because their motivation comes from striving for the goal rather than making lasting progress. Instead, James argues you should focus on imagining what type of person you want to be and following the systems that such a person would follow. He says if you do that instead, not only will achieving your goals come naturally but the improvements will stick long-term too. Setting up this crucial framing goes a long way in motivating the rest of the strategies in the book.
I finished reading the book last week and I’ve already found a few of the tactics useful. My favorites are:
- It’s ok to miss a habit once, but don’t miss a habit twice in a row.
- If you miss a habit once, you tend to consider it a fluke. Everyone makes mistakes and mistakes don’t define who you are. However, if you miss a habit a second time you start to lose faith in being the kind of person capable of sticking to that habit. It becomes easy to start consistently missing it. Pretty soon, you’ve given up altogether
- Make your habits achievable in two minutes or less.
- Once you start to do something, it’s easy to keep going. For example, I find it hard to start cleaning my dishes, but once I’ve cleaned one dish I’m likely to do all of them. Plus, if habits are small then it’s harder to miss them. I might not run five miles every day, but I can certainly put on my gym clothes and stretch every day. Eventually though, that simple habit will lead to running three miles a day.
Like the example of putting on the gym clothes, James is great at compellingly connecting his various tactics and showing the reader how all the strategies complement one another. He also illustrates concrete examples of common goals and how to solve them with his tactics, making it very easy for the reader to imagine themselves using them in their own life.
Overall, I was thoroughly impressed by Atomic Habits and recommend it to anyone looking to make improvements in their life. Take it from someone who tends to shy away from reading anything that doesn’t have at least a bit of science fiction – it’s well worth the read.