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Atomic Habits by James Clear - Summary and Book Review (PDF)
Atomic Habits by James Clear - Summary and Book Review (PDF)
radreads.co/atomic-habits-james-clear
February 4, 2019
A friend once told me they used set recurring daily reminder to read more. “Come on,” I responded, “that would be like putting
having sex on your to-do list.” Paying your rent, filling out school applications and scheduling annual physicals are tasks. Making love,
exercising, and sleeping more (maybe the three form a compelling bundle?) are habits that lie well outside the jurisdiction of the to-do
list. In Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones James Clear gives us a playbook for durable
and long-lasting habits. In this summary we’ll cover why habits don’t stick, the Four Laws of Behavior Change, and the challenge
behind “habits of the mind.”
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement,” writes Clear. He uses the 1% Rule to illustrate how an Atomic Habit that drives
a 1% improvement can logarithmically scale; and how the inverse, being 1% worse, can quickly decay towards a negative asymptote.
We start too big: Clear warns, “Your life goals are not your habits.” You’re unlikely to become a millionaire if you’re not saving in your
401k; You won’t run a marathon if you swap your morning run with the snooze button. It’s great to dream big, but dreaming big can be
daunting and unrealistic.
In Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success, Brad Sulberg points out the
deceptive nature of “consistently heroic efforts:”
Don’t aim for consistently heroic efforts. Aim for being heroic at consistency.
Heroic efforts = take a huge toll emotionally, physically, and cognitively. Not a sustainable thing to strive for.
Consistency = compounds over time. Good enough over and over again makes you great.
Stulberg argues that we make the mistake of aiming too high. Borrowing an analogy from Moneyball, we try to hit a home-run every
time we step up to the plate. Not only is that unrealistic, it’s emotionally exhausting (and the perfect recipe for self-loathing). Instead
(continuing the baseball analogy), we should focus being “heroically consistent” by getting on base by any means necessary (a walk or
even a bunt).
Systems work better than goals: Being too outcome-oriented can distract from having the right processes in place to make habits
effortless. Let’s take the example of a six-pack of abs. With beach season around the corner, you channel your GTL committing to 400
sit-ups a day. Come Speedo Season, you’re locked-in and ready to go.
But keeping those abs is going to require much more than brute force; relying on super-human willpower doesn’t work over long
periods of time. You’ll need the right mix of exercise (abs vs. cardio), nutrition, and rest/recovery.
A cue (Step 1) sends a trigger to your brain to set off a specific behavior (an alarm, entering your bedroom, your phone buzzing)
A craving (Step 2) for a certain feeling or emotion arises (the excitement of gambling, the calmness of alcohol)
A response (Step 3), the habit itself (having a drink, checking your phone)
A reward (Step 4), either temporary or permanent is unlocked (excitement, calmness)
Clear believes that Atomic Habits can be formed (or broken) by attacking each step of this pattern. He adds, “changing your behavior
requires asking yourself” the following questions (and inverting them for bad habits):
In this summary of Atomic Habits, we’ll take you through these four laws using examples of habits (both good and bad) that I’ve
incorporated (and am seeking to add) to my life.
1. Make it Obvious
That chain of events all starts with the cue. Cues can be highly visible (like your alarm going off) or subtle (you walk into your
bathroom). The gateway to habit formation is identifying and using these cues to your advantage. In Atomic Habits, Clear describes
the two most powerful cues: time and location.
Time: These include waking up, your afternoon coffee, when your child falls asleep. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson listed all the time-
based cues that form the foundation of his habits (emphasis mine):
Location: Sitting down at your desk, the gym, the yoga corner in your bedroom, and dropping your kids off at school.
Another way to reinforce cues is by redesigning your environment to make habits more obvious:
To remember your medication each night, place the pill bottle directly next to the faucet
To practice the guitar more frequently, place the guitar stand in the middle of your living room
To send more thank you notes, keep a stack of stationary (and stamps) on your desk
To drink more water, fill up a few bottles each morning and place them across your home
2. Make it Attractive
Habits compound over the long term, yet our primal instincts motivate us for the short term. That’s why that afternoon cup of coffee is
so hard to resist, even when you know you’ll pay the price by tossing and turning in bed that evening.
And whether it’s processed food or our iPhones, companies have become quite deft at making their products attractive – and sending
us on wild dopamine goose hunts. All you need is to eat one Pringles potato chip (“Once you pop, you can’t stop”) to see this
“Attractiveness” at play.
Behind these impulses lie cravings, deep existential needs that we feel compelled to soothe on a regular basis. The depth of these
cravings was one of my favorite parts of Atomic Habits, with a few examples shown below:
Conserving energy
Obtaining food and water
Finding love and reproduce
Connecting and bonding with others
Winning social acceptance and approval
Reducing uncertainty
Achieving status and prestige
“Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires,” adds Clear. As an exercise in self-discovery, I mapped out my own cravings
and deeper underlying motives:
To make a habit attractive (and reconcile a short-term craving with a lont-term desire) Clear recommends a strategy called temptation
bundling. Temptation bundling “pairs an action you want to do with an action you need to do.”
Only listening to the Hunger Games while you run on the treadmill
Doing yoga while watching Netflix
Doing burpees before reading TMZ (or Donald Trump articles)
Clearing out your inbox while getting a pedicure
It’s also possible to use Temptation Bundling as a work strategy. Productivity blogger Tiago Forte combines projects he’s excited about
with those that are more routine to tap into this momentum:
I’ve found that, by delaying working on something I’m extremely excited to work on, the energy behind it gathers, like a pot
pressurizing the steam within. Delaying the start of such a task by a few days gives me a store of energy that I can unleash when
I actually do get started.
3. Make it easy
The third rule is all about getting out of your own way. By removing friction for good habits (or adding friction for bad ones) you can
“stack the deck” to work in your favor. As the name Atomic Habits implies, the small unit size is conducive to high amounts of repetition
and Clear reminds us the “number of times you have performed a habit” is much more important than the “amount of time you have
performed it.”
Our energy is precious and our brain is wired to take shortcuts whenever possible. It’s because of this tendency, known as the
Law of Least Effort that when “faced with two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least
amount of work.”
Conversely, two of my habits involve significantly decreasing my screen time. To achieve this goal, I inverted the rule and
made it as hard as possible. I truly have gone overboard on the apps, extensions, and tricks that I use to focus and this includes:
Clear also reminds us of how our surroundings affects our subconscious decisions and that we should “prime the environment for future
use” including:
Want to improve your diet? Chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers, so you have easy
access to healthy, ready-to-eat-options during the week.
Want to read more? Move your Kindle app to the dock of your smartphone and take all your old tablets and iPads and scatter
them around your home (and bathroom!).
Want to draw more? Put your pencils, pens, notebooks, and drawing tools on top of your desk, within easy reach.
And the best way to combat procrastination and start a new habit is to use the “two minute rule.” Recalling one of the main reasons
habits fail, we find that the goals were set way too ambitiously. And so the Atomic Habit starts with the smallest unit possible to build up
the muscle memory and momentum. “Doing thirty minutes of stretching” becomes “Take out my yoga mat” and “Reading before bed”
starts with “Reading one page.” And by showing up each day, you begin to internalize a rhythm that lets the habit flourish (and stick).
Clear calls this “habit shaping” and gives three examples of this incremental approach:
4. Make it satisfying
As a parent to two young kids, getting them both fed, cleaned, and asleep is (the cue) an accomplishment that rivals running a 10k. And
once I’ve done my share, all my brain wants is the satisfaction of a stiff cocktail: the reward. And even though the cocktail serves as an
impediment to other habits I’m looking to build (reading, stretching) my brain is not enlightened enough to prioritize these delayed
rewards over the immediate gratification of alcohol.
The first three laws of behavior change (obvious, attractive, and easy) increase the odds that you perform the action; the fourth law
increases the odds that the behavior sticks.
My favorite story from Atomic Habits is about a cold-calling strategy that perfectly capture the satisfying nature of building habits. Trent
Dyrsmid was a rookie stockbroker, looking grow his roster of clients using the “Paper Clip Strategy:”
Dyrsmid began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty. As soon as he
settled in each day, he would make a sales call. Immediately after, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar
and the process would begin again. “Every morning I would start with 120 paper clips in one jar and I would keep dialing the
phone until I had moved them all to the second jar.”
This strategy shows the power of habit tracking, whether it’s in a journal, an app, or a jar on your desk. The management guru Peter
Drucker once said “What gets measured, gets mastered” and habit tracking works for the following reasons:
Gamification (and streaks) are incredibly powerful ways to build up and sustain the momentum to habit formation. Clear recommends a
simple, yet powerful trick to keep them going: “never miss twice.” If you miss one day, keeping that momentum by getting back on
track as soon as possible.
Finally, to break a bad habit, Clear inverts the 4th law: Make it unsatisfying. And to do so, he suggests tapping into our core human
desire: avoiding social rejection. This includes getting an accountability partner, whose presence will be a “powerful motivator” and
can create an “immediate cost to inaction.” Being even more public about your habits (via, Social Media) can make the costs of
violating your promises “public and painful.”
I was positively surprised and it has (thus far) helped me with specific action-based habits like drinking less alcohol or doing more yoga.
But what about habits of the mind? So much of our happiness comes from our emotional well being which includes how we manage
our scarcity mindset, negative self-talk, and envy. In his 2010 paper deconstructing happiness and money, Daniel Kahneman expressed
this collection of feelings as emotional well-being:
Emotional well-being (sometimes called hedonic well-being or experienced happiness) refers to the emotional quality of an
individual’s everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, fascination, anxiety, sadness, anger, and
affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant.
I stumbled upon the following subreddit about “lesser known things to avoid” and found that so many of these were habits of the mind,
such as:
Admittedly, breaking out of these negative thought patterns probably falls under the jurisdiction of a life coach or a therapist, but
Atomic Habits left me yearning to see if the Four Rules could easily translate to these more hidden behaviors.
In summary
A habit is an “atomic habit” when it’s broken down to it’s smallest component
Compounding small Atomic Habits over time can lead to spectacular growth
Habits fail because we aim too big and don’t have the right systems
The habit feedback loop consists of: Cue → Craving → Response → Reward
The 4 rules of behavior change are make it: Obvious, Attractive, Easy, Satisfying
#1 Make it obvious: Time and Location are powerful cues
#2 Make it attractive: Understand the impulses behind your cravings
#3 Make it easy: When faced with similar options, we gravitate #4 towards the one with the least amount of work.
#4 Make it satisfying: Use a habit tracker or accountability partner
I help entrepreneurs and executives on building durable habits, robust workflows, and with career introspection. Should we be talking?
If so, hit me at khe [at] radreads [dot] co.