book report on atomic habits

Sam Thomas Davies

Atomic Habits by James Clear

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Rating: 5/5

The Book in Three Sentences

• An atomic habit is a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do but is also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.
• Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.
• Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.

The Five Big Ideas

• Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
• If you want better results, then forget about setting goals . Focus on your system instead.
• The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become.
• The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
• Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.               

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Atomic habits summary, chapter 1: the surprising power of tiny habits.

“Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”

“Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.”

“Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.”           

“If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line.”

“Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.”                

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed what James calls, the “Plateau of Latent Potential.”

“When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success.”                

“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.”

“Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”                

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”

“Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.”

“Habits are a double-edged sword. They can work for you or against you, which is why understanding the details is essential.”

“Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.”

“An atomic habit is a little habit that is part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.”

“If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.”

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”                

Chapter 2: How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

“Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.”    

“There are three layers of behavior change: a change in your outcomes , a change in your processes , or a change in your identity .”

“Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.”                

“With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits , the focus is on who you wish to become.”                

“The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.”

“It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.”                                

“Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”

“The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become.”

“Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

“Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”

“The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs about yourself.”                

Chapter 3: How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

Whenever you want to change your behavior, ask yourself:

• How can I make it obvious?
• How can I make it attractive?
• How can I make it easy?
• How can I make it satisfying?

“A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.”

“The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible.”

“Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue , craving , response , and reward .”

“The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious , (2) make it attractive , (3) make it easy , and (4) make it satisfying .”                

Chapter 4: The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

“If you’re having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, ask yourself: ‘Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?’”                

“With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it.”

“Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing.”

“The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.”

“Pointing-and-Calling raises your level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level by verbalizing your actions.”

“The Habits Scorecard is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior.”                

Chapter 5: The Best Way to Start a New Habit

“The 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it obvious.”

“Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.”

“The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.”                

“One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking .”

“The habit stacking formula is: ‘After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].’”                

“The two most common cues are time and location.”

“Creating an implementation intention is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a specific time and location.”

“The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”

“Habit stacking is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a current habit.”

“The habit stacking formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”                

Chapter 6: Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

“Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”               

“Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time.”

“Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out.”

“Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.”

“Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue.”

“It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fighting against old cues.”                

Chapter 7: The Secret to Self-Control

“The inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it invisible.”

“Once a habit is formed, it is unlikely to be forgotten.”

“People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.”

“One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.”

“Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.”                

Chapter 8: How to Make a Habit Irresistible

“The 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it attractive.”

“The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.”

“Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.”

“It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.”

“Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.”  

Chapter 9: The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

“The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us.”

“We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe.”

“We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends) , the many (the tribe) , and the powerful (those with status and prestige) .”

“One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group. ”

“The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.”

“If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.”                

Chapter 10: How to Find and Fix The Cause of Your Bad Habits

“The inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it unattractive.”

“Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive.”

“Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.”

“The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. The prediction leads to a feeling.”

“Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.”

“Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings. Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.”                

Chapter 11: Walk Slowly, But Never Backward

“The 3rd Law of Behavior Change is make it easy.”

“The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.”

“Focus on taking action, not being in motion.”

“Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition.”

“The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.”

Chapter 12: The Law of Least Effort

“Human behavior follows the Law of Least Effort.”

“We will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.”

“Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.”

“Reduce the friction associated with good behaviors. When friction is low, habits are easy.”

“Increase the friction associated with bad behaviors. When friction is high, habits are difficult.”

“Prime your environment to make future actions easier.”                

Chapter 13: How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. James refers to these little choices as “decisive moments.”                

“Decisive moments set the options available to your future self.”                

“A habit must be established before it can be improved.”                

“Habits can be completed in a few seconds but continue to impact your behavior for minutes or hours afterward.”

“Many habits occur at decisive moments—choices that are like a fork in the road—and either send you in the direction of a productive day or an unproductive one.”

“ The Two-Minute Rule states, ‘When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.’”

“The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.”

“Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.”                

Chapter 14: How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

“The inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change is make it difficult.”

“A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that locks in better behavior in the future.”

“The ultimate way to lock in future behavior is to automate your habits.”

“Onetime choices—like buying a better mattress or enrolling in an automatic savings plan—are single actions that automate your future habits and deliver increasing returns over time.”

“Using technology to automate your habits is the most reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behavior.”                

Chapter 15: The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

“The 4th Law of Behavior Change is make it satisfying.”

“We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.”

“The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards.”

“The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.”

“To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful—even if it’s in a small way.”

“The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time.”                

Chapter 16: How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

“Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, Goodhart’s Law states, ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’”

“One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.”

“A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit—like marking an X on a calendar.”

“Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress.”

“Don’t break the chain. Try to keep your habit streak alive.”

“Never miss twice. If you miss one day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible.”

“Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing.”                

Chapter 17: How an Accountability Partner Changes Everything

“The inversion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change is make it unsatisfying.”

“We are less likely to repeat a bad habit if it is painful or unsatisfying.”

“An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.”

“A habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behavior. It makes the costs of violating your promises public and painful.”

“Knowing that someone else is watching you can be a powerful motivator.”

Chapter 18: The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)

“The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.”

“Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.”

“Genes cannot be easily changed, which means they provide a powerful advantage in favorable circumstances and a serious disadvantage in unfavorable circumstances.”

“Habits are easier when they align with your natural abilities. Choose the habits that best suit you.”

“Play a game that favors your strengths. If you can’t find a game that favors you, create one.”

“Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.”                

Chapter 19: The Goldilocks Rule—How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work          

“The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. ”

“The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.”

“As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored.”

“Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference.”

“Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.”              

Chapter 20: The Downside of Creating Good Habits

“The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is that we stop paying attention to little errors.”

“Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery”

“Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time.”

“The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.”                

Recommended Reading

If you like Atomic Habits , you may also enjoy the following books:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
• Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential  by Tiago Forte
• Better Than Before: Mastering The Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin

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Atomic Habits Summary

1-Sentence-Summary:   Atomic Habits is the definitive guide to breaking bad behaviors and adopting good ones in four steps, showing you how small, incremental, everyday routines compound into massive, positive change over time.

Favorite quote from the author:

Table of Contents

Video Summary

Atomic habits review, audio summary, who would i recommend the atomic habits summary to.

One of the best keynote speeches I’ve seen is Seth Godin’s presentation for his book Linchpin . On one of the slides, he shows a baseball bat flying into the stands, with people ducking away and raising their arms in terror.

While Seth uses the picture to make a point about our irrational fears , in some rare cases, those fears come true. James Clear was one of those cases. When he was in high school, a loose bat smashed right into his face. Broken nose, dangerous brain swellings, dislocated eyes, fractures, his recovery took months.

To get his own baseball career back on track, he had no choice but to rely on the power of small gains. In college, he slowly accumulated good habits and eventually managed to become one of 33 players for the All-American Academic team. Wow!

Today, he is one of the most popular habit researchers, reaching millions through his blog at JamesClear.com . His first book,  Atomic Habits , is now the definitive guide on the topic and has quickly become a New York Times bestseller!

Here are 3 lessons to help you use everything he’s learned to break bad habits and form good ones:

• Every time we perform a habit, we execute a four-step pattern: cue, craving, response, reward.
• If we want to form new habits, we should make them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
• You can use a habit tracker as a fun way to measure your progress and make sure you don’t fall off the wagon.

Let’s see what it takes to form new habits by learning from a true habit master!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: All habits are based on a four-step pattern, which consists of cue, craving, response, and reward.

In 1776, Adam Smith laid the foundation of modern economics in his magnum opus ,  The Wealth of Nations . One of his most famous observations is that, in a free market system, all workers naturally maximize their own society’s welfare, even if merely acting in their own best interest:

“…he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

When it comes to habits, James suggests that environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.  That’s why a prompt is always the first step in performing any habit . It may not always  be external, but, most of the time, it will be. Then, three more stages follow to complete the four-step pattern:

• Cue . A piece of information that suggests there’s a reward to be found, like the smell of a cookie or a dark room waiting to light up.
• Craving . The motivation to change something to get the reward, like tasting the delicious cookie or being able to see.
• Response . Whatever thought or action you need to take to get to the reward.
• Reward . The satisfying feeling you get from the change, along with the lesson whether to do it again or not.

There are several popular methodologies that try to predict how and why we do what we do, such as Charles Duhigg’s habit loop , Gretchen Rubins four tendencies , or BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits behavior model . James offers a more refined version of what Duhigg described in The Power of Habit and while all of these approaches are different, none of them are mutually exclusive.

Lesson 2: To form habits, you must make them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.

From the four-step pattern he suggests, James then derives four laws of behavior change, which correspond to one part of the loop each. Here they are, along with some ideas for how you can use them to facilitate good behaviors and make bad ones harder:

• Make it obvious . Don’t hide your fruits in your fridge, put them on display front and center.
• Make it attractive . Start with the fruit you like the most, so you’ll actually want to eat one when you see it.
• Make it easy . Don’t create needless friction by focusing on fruits that are hard to peel. Bananas and apples are super easy to eat, for example.
• Make it satisfying . If you like the fruit you picked, you’ll love eating it and feel healthier as a result!

You can apply these to all kinds of good habits, like running, working on a side project , spending more time with family, and so on. Conversely, do the opposite for bad habits. Make them invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. For example, you could hide your cigarettes, add financial penalties, get rid of all lighters, and only allow yourself to smoke outside in the cold.

Lesson 3: A habit tracker is a fun and easy way to ensure you stick to your new behaviors.

With a framework like this, making and breaking habits becomes fun. You’ll likely want to tackle multiple things sooner rather than later, but it’s important to not take on too much at once. An easy way of keeping yourself accountable without becoming overwhelmed is to track your habits with a habit tracker .

The idea is simple: You keep a record of all the behaviors you want to establish or abandon and, at the end of each day, you mark which ones you succeeded with . This record can be a single piece of paper, a journal, a calendar, or a digital tool, like an app.

This strategy is based on what’s sometimes called the Seinfeld productivity hack . Comedian Jerry Seinfeld apparently marked his calendar with a big ‘X’ every day he came up with a joke. Soon, his goal was to not break the chain. It’s a simple, but effective strategy to help you build good habits.

And since habits are the compound interest of self-improvement , that’s a process we should all start today.

When it comes to changing our behavior, we all need to find out what works for us. That said, there are several scientifically proven strategies we should all try first.  Atomic Habits  is a complete, fun, engaging, and simple to understand compendium of those strategies. I highly recommend you make it your first stop when wanting to learn about the science of habits.

Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account:

The 17 year old high school athlete, who wants to go pro in college, the 43 year old overworked creative, who struggles with finding time for sports, and anyone who’s never written down a list of their habits .

Last Updated on November 13, 2023

Niklas Göke

Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Born and raised in Germany, Nik also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration & Engineering from KIT Karlsruhe and a Master’s Degree in Management & Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He lives in Munich and enjoys a great slice of salami pizza almost as much as reading — or writing — the next book — or book summary, of course!

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Book Review: ‘Atomic Habits’ By James Clear

• by Sam Howard

‘Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones’ by James Clear is a masterclass in habit-forming. I say this with confidence because with the guidance provided in the book, I was able to cut off a bad habit (excessive scrolling on my phone) and develop a couple of good habits (freewriting everyday and getting some steps in). 

The step-by-step guide itself was impressive in its own right, but what I liked about it the most is how simple and actionable it was, plus how James Clear explained everything so convincingly. So now, let me walk you through how he managed to convert a skeptic (me!) into a believer of tiny habits.

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‘Atomic Habits’ Overview

James Clear sets out that picking up a good habit is thought to be tough not because we lack willpower or commitment, but because we don’t have the right systems built to support a habit to form and sustain. So to build these systems, he suggests following the four ‘Laws of Behavior Change’ that can help start and maintain a good habit. They are: 

• Make it obvious
• Make it attractive
• Make it easy
• Make it satisfying 

He suggests inverting these laws to break a bad habit: 

• Make it invisible
• Make it unattractive 
• Make it difficult
• Make it unsatisfying

Clear provides detailed explanations on how these laws work and he accompanies the guided chapters with anecdotes and personal experience, making it easy to see how the practices he’s proposing have a very real impact.

‘Atomic Habits’ Book Review

I (reluctantly) started on ‘Atomic Habit’ back when I was in a reading slump, hoping I can pick up reading everyday again. I figured if the book is as good as a lot of readers said it was, it just might convince me to get back to my TBR. 

So there I was, expecting a noncommittal read and eager to (hopefully) get back to the books I abandoned halfway, and James Clear hit me with an opening narrative so intriguing that I couldn’t help but get hooked on the book. 

He explains his foray into habit forming came after a huge setback during highschool, where he suffered a severe injury playing baseball. Wanting to get back on track, he started practicing small habits like sleeping well, studying consistently, and keeping tidy. I’ve got to say, the results were really inspiring:

“…improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding…” – Chapter 1

1% BETTER EVERY DAY 1% worse every day for one year. 0.99 365 = 00.03 1% better every day for one year. 1.01 365 = 37.78

It’s a little bit of a genius move; put this way, I could see how much impact a small habit can have, especially if they compound over time – which is exactly what Clear suggests. 

So I thought of trying out the ‘atomic’ method of habit forming, going by Clear’s laws of behavioral change. Let’s see how I did!

1. Make it obvious

With the first law of behavioral change, Clear suggests that if we are to be intentional about habit forming, we have to make our habits obvious. 

I loved the example he cited to show the benefit of making it obvious – the ‘Pointing and Calling’ safety practice from the Japanese railway system. This involves all the railway staff pointing and calling out specific details like arrival time, speedometer reading, and signal status. This habit seemed a bit weird to me, but making these safety details obvious by speaking them out loud has actually helped reduce errors up to 85 percent. So Clear’s suggestion here is to make the habit so obvious that you can’t miss it at all:  

“Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.” – Chapter 5

I felt like I could relate to this because I often complain I’m not motivated to do something, so I experimented with the first law of behavioral change by trying to make a habit of walking everyday. 

I work at my desk all day, tapping away at my keyboard and often when I stop for the day, it’s too late to go out for a walk or I’m just not too excited for it. So to carve out a time and to ‘make it obvious’ to get up and go, I followed Clear’s habit stacking formula.

The habit stacking formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]

I make myself a cup of coffee everyday around 5 in the evening, so I paired my coffee break with a 20 minute walk. I placed my running shoes right near my desk so when I get up to brew a cup, I’d put the shoes on and go on to make coffee. And since I’m already wearing shoes, what I’m thinking is I might as well step out of the house to take a walk for ten minutes and then back home. 

Believe me, I didn’t think it’d make a difference at first either, but against all expectations this actually worked. Apart from a couple of days where there was a ton of rain, I’ve been out as soon as I’ve had my coffee. And now, when I’m having coffee at a completely irrelevant time, I get the urge to get up and walk which means two things – I’ve successfully hardwired my brain to go for a walk after coffee, and I probably should have stacked walking with another habit 😅.

2. Make it attractive

The second law of behavioral change works by making a habit attractive so we get tempted to do it. 

Clear mentions that this is the practice that fast food companies follow to make their product so irresistible we always crave for more. Years of research have been poured into enhancing the flavor and mouthfeel of these foods; the science behind that is that our brain is attracted to hyperpalatable food so we are likely to go through a couple packs of potato chips or keep ordering thin crust pizza topped with gooey melted cheese.

So how does this fit in with making a habit attractive? Clear suggests we could heighten the appeal of a habit to immediately draw us to it, using ‘temptation bundling’:

“Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. In Byrne’s case, he bundled watching Netflix (the thing he wanted to do) with riding his stationary bike (the thing he needed to do).” – Chapter 8

I adopted this technique to get more nutrients in my system. I’ve been warned by the family doctor that I take in way less micronutrients than I’m supposed to and unfortunately, most foods I’m supposed to consume for micronutrients are not the most appealing. So, inspired by Mr. Byrne in Clear’s example, I resolved to watch Netflix only when I’m eating healthy. At first, this meant my time watching Netflix went down drastically, but a show I wanted to watch so badly got released and I had to go for some leafy greens and whole grains just to watch it. 

How did I manage to not watch Netflix until then, you ask? Well, I just got my partner to change the password to our family account and asked him to not share it with me under any circumstance (unless I was having the right food). This is also a couple of Clear’s techniques in action; the first is getting an accountability buddy to make sure you stick to your resolve and second is the reverse law of making a habit difficult (by adding the barrier of the password).

3. Make it easy

With this one, James Clear suggests applying the ‘Law of Least Effort.’ He elaborates that when deciding between two similar options, we tend to lean toward the option that requires the least effort. Humans are hardwired to find ways to do things so it delivers best possible value for low effort, so Clear suggests programming our habits that way as well. 

“The idea behind make it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.” – Chapter 12

Now, our brains can resist doing the right thing even if we make it attractive (remember me avoiding Netflix so I won’t have to eat spinach?); this is where ‘make it easy’ comes in. So to put the third law of behavioral change into action, I tried to make a habit easy with the 2-minute rule. This rule pushes you to do something for two minutes and not a second more, BUT you do it everyday. 

I’ve always wanted to build the habit of freewriting because I feel like I lose ‘my own writing time’ since I’m always writing for a particular reason. I’ve tried journaling and morning pages, but I’ve always fallen off the wagon (or page!) probably because I perceive both as big tasks. So I challenged myself to free-write everyday for two weeks to see how I do with the 2-minute rule. 

To my surprise, I felt no hesitation starting free-writing when my alarm rang signaling the time to write, because I limited it to two minutes only. I’ve been free-writing for over a year now, and I have this sense of fulfillment whenever I open my notebook. Funny thing is, I get the urge to write whenever I see my designated notebook – I’m not very sure what kind of brain conditioning happened there, but I’m not complaining!

Oh and by the way, the reverse rule of this helped me cut down my screen time because I activated an app blocker that cuts you off from accessing certain apps for a period of time. All my social media apps are blocked from 6 am to 6 pm, and it’s a pain to unblock it even if I wanted to. So I don’t check on social media at all during my working hours, and it has made me productive because I’m less distracted.

4. Make it satisfying

The final law of behavior change is to make a habit satisfying. Now, the challenge with this, as Clear explains, is how we can’t exactly see the progress we are making, especially with small habits. Waiting until the habit compounds is not exactly motivating at the moment, because we never know how long it will take to make a difference. 

“Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity. Visual measurement comes in many forms: food journals, workout logs, loyalty punch cards, the progress bar on a software download, even the page numbers in a book. But perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.” – Chapter 12

I tried tracking my newfound habit of walking, with a visual habit tracker. It felt like a hassle at first, but I resolved to make a tick on the tracker that I hung on the corkboard above my desk immediately before sitting down to work after my walk (habit stacking!). I have to say, ticking off each day feels really good because I’ve successfully done something I couldn’t get myself to do before. With the tracker, I’ve also got the added challenge of maintaining my streak because I don’t want to leave a day unticked. I have missed a day or two, but then I remember what Clear said: 

“No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up—you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time. Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.” – Chapter 15

So I try to never miss two days in a row, and so far, I never have.

When I read this chapter, I realized I’ve been using this law of making it satisfying without realizing it, with my language learning habit. My current streak on Duolingo is over 400 days long, and knowing the pain of losing the streak (I lost my earlier streak at 342 days😅) I fight tooth and nail to get my language lesson in everyday before midnight. 

There you have it, all the laws of behavioral change in action. This is exactly what I meant when I said James Clear’s book is simple and actionable. When I started reading, it didn’t seem to take a lot out of me to start forming a habit so I thought “I might as well try” and that went on for three months before I finally admitted to myself that ‘atomic habits’ actually work. 

One thing I have to mention though, I felt the content could have been a bit shorter considering it’s self-help. James Clear had made the book digestible with chapter summaries and simple graphics, but I still felt like it took forever to finish the book (it could be me, I was in a reading slump after all). 

Considering I managed to get out of my slump plus build a few good habits along the way, I suggest giving ‘Atomic Habits’ a try (even if you have a less than enthusiastic attitude to forming habits like me). Inside the book, you are highly likely to find nuggets of wisdom that appeal to you, and simple ways of tricking your brain to do good that make you want to try out a new habit just for the fun of it.

Who Should Read ‘Atomic Habits’

Anyone who wants to pick up good habits or to break a bad habit should read this book, as it can give you that gentle push you’re looking for. 

If you want to understand what influences human behavior and how we form habits, this book is a solid starting point.

Books Similar to ‘Atomic Habits’

No products found. is a refreshing take on life, perspectives, and how we tackle challenges when they come our way. If you need a self-help read backed by science, experience, and wisdom punctuated by ruthless humor, this book is an awesome choice.

If you’d like to read more about how small actions compound into creating a big impact, No products found. is a captivating read that can change the way you approach personal challenges and professional tasks. 

Also, if you’d like to find more self-help recs, my collection of self-help book reviews and lists of recommendations can point you in the right direction!

Final Thoughts

James Clear’s No products found. is exactly the book you need to read if you want to develop a good habit and break a bad one. Clear promises no magic, but instead, he shares with us a whole lot of convincing anecdotes, digestible research findings, and simple, actionable tips to make any big habit possible. So if you want to read any self-help book on developing habits and improving yourself, let it be this one.

Yes! It’s a simple, easy-to-follow guide on how to form good habits and break bad ones and it’s worth reading because it’s actionable and reliable.

The four rules, or rather laws, of behavioral change in ‘Atomic Habits’ are, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.

‘Atomic Habits’ is so popular because it helps you build systems of habits instead of goal-based habits. That way, you are focused on sustaining the habit without being overly focused on the outcome.

Although ‘Atomic Habits’ doesn’t claim to be written for people with ADHD, a lot of ADHD-friendly practices like the 2-minute rule, body doubling, Pomodoro technique, etc. are included and encouraged in the book.

Yes. ‘Atomic Habits’ draws on relevant research and concepts from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to explain how we can get massive results by compounding a lot of small habits.

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Book Summaries

Atomic habits book summary: key takeaways & review | clickup.

Senior Content Marketing Manager

January 11, 2024

How many times have you grabbed a motivational book only to lose your new-found motivation as soon as you finished reading it?

Motivation is that sudden push to make a significant change happen, but it tends to fade with time. What comes next once you’ve nailed that big goal you’ve been eyeing?

However, if you have a system set up, you’ll keep making progress daily. Those small changes add up and build lasting momentum. Instead of just aiming for a goal, concentrate on building an identity for yourself that guides you to take the right actions.

If you’re constantly struggling to feel motivated every day, it’s time to stop that.

Habits shape your identity. This Atomic Habit summary will help you dive into productivity hacks that will help you form new habits that bring lasting change. 

Atomic Habits Summary at Glance 

Key takeaways from atomic habits by james clear , law #1: make it obvious, law #2: make it attractive, law #3: make it easy, law #4: make it satisfying , popular atomic habits quotes , take charge of your life with atomic habits and clickup.

“If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.”

Atomic Habits by James Clear is a book that talks about the power of small habits in creating lasting changes in your life . Unlike generic and repetitive motivational books, this book tells you that real change comes from countless small decisions, not just motivation. 

A considerable emphasis is given to building a system instead of focusing on goals . 

With exceptional storytelling, personal anecdotes, and real-life examples, Clear takes you on a journey of self-improvement. Every concept you learn about is backed by scientific research, making it clearer that you will achieve results.

Whether it’s the habit loop, 2-minute rule, identity-based approach, habit stacking, or most of the other concepts, they all have a reason why they work. 

Clear also breaks commonly followed notions like chasing immediate positive changes. Instead, he explains how you need to improve by 1% every day consistently. For instance, if you go to the gym one day, you won’t build your abs. But consistently going to the gym for four weeks will positively change your body. 

He also breaks the myth that habit is an endpoint. He explains how taking a cab to the gym is what builds the habit rather than the end point of reaching the gym. Clear gives examples of some of the greatest achievements in different fields and brilliantly connects the dots to help you understand how these tactics work no matter what stage you are at. 

So, Atomic Habits is your go-to- guide if you’re stuck in a bad habit labyrinth or find yourself asking, “Why on earth do I do that?”. Whether you’re already achieving and craving more, or just aiming to improve and grow, this book can help. 

• Focus on making tiny adjustments to your behavior, as small changes lead to lasting improvements   
• Strategically use the habit loop–cue, craving, response, and reward –to build a new habit
• Align your habits with the identity you want to build , and let your habits reinforce the person you aspire to be 
• Integrate a new habit into an existing routine. Existing cues and human behavior make it easier to establish and maintain new habits 
• Have patience , as the progress in habit formation is often not immediately visible 
• Design your environment to support habit formation 
• Breaking down habits into two-minute tasks makes them more manageable 
• Habit formation is an ongoing process of continuous improvement. So, be willing to adjust your habits as circumstances change  

Forming Good Habits: A Breakdown of Atomic Habits’ 4 Laws

Clear’s four laws of human behavior change stem from the concept of the Habit Loop. This loop comprises four stages:

Stage 1 – Cue: The cue acts as the trigger, initiating the good habit loop, and can be anything from a specific time to an emotional state. 

Stage 2 – Craving: Following the cue, there is a craving—a motivational force representing the desire for the reward associated with the habit.

Stage 3 – Response: The response is the actual behavior or action performed in response to the cue and craving, constituting the habit itself.

Stage 4 – Reward: Finally, the reward is the positive outcome or satisfaction resulting from completing the habit, reinforcing the loop, and increasing the likelihood of habit repetition.

Based on these four steps, Clear created four laws that help you build a successful habit loop. In each law, he gives three to four tactics for habit-building and one tactic to break it. 

Let’s see how we can use both aspects to enhance productivity. 

Are you aware of the habits you must build and break? If not, there’s no way you can train your mind to act a certain way. 

You see, human minds act on cues and bad habits repeat. When you experience something repeatedly, your reaction to it becomes natural. There’s a cue that gives your brain a signal to act a certain way, and your behavior or response becomes automatic. 

As Clear mentions, “ Museum curators have been known to discern the difference between an authentic piece of art and an expertly produced counterfeit even though they can’t tell you precisely which details tipped them off.”

Why? Because they have been repeatedly identifying authentic art for years. 

The little gaps become so relevant that a single glance catches it. 

We might not think it’s real, but invisible cues trigger their minds. To pick up on these cues and automate behaviors, you’ve got to become more aware. Here are some ways to do this:

1. Habit scorecards

A habit scorecard is like a checklist where you jot down your daily activities. Then, you figure out if each habit is positive, negative, or neutral in its impact.

The goal of your habit scorecard is to gain awareness and identify patterns contributing to or hindering progress.

Creating it is simple; all you need to do is: 

• List your regular daily activities at work or home
• Categorize each activity as positive, negative, or neutral
• Rate each habit based on its overall impact 
• Understand how your current behaviors affect productivity 

Let’s put this into action. 

Look at the lowest score— submit completed tasks by the deadline (2). Now, observe how the tasks related to your submissions also have a low score. 

If you want to change this and submit your tasks on time, you need to: 

• Work more on high-priority tasks 
• Check progress and adjust plans 
• Reflect on the day and make better plans for tomorrow
• Wrap up the tasks you set for today 

If not, you will continue to miss deadlines, and the burden will shift to the next day. 

2. Implementation intention

Implementation intention involves planning when and where to take specific actions to reach your goals.

First, spot the gap in your existing habits. For instance, in the example mentioned earlier, you finish the task but don’t allocate time for reflecting on the day.

Now, set a goal like this— “I will reflect on my day and plan for tomorrow at 5 PM.”  

Secondly, you can use habit stacking, a technique to pair a new habit with an existing one. For example, “After I am done working on my current tasks, I will reflect on the priority tasks I couldn’t complete.”

Lastly, induce the cues of better habits in your environment. As Clear states, “.. motivation is overrated; the environment often matters more.” 

If you want to reflect on your goals better, look for goal-tracking apps that help you keep up with your progress. You can also set a vision board that compels you to take action. 

3. Breaking a bad habit–make it invisible 

Do you know that people with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations? 

They reduce exposure to the cue that causes bad habits, to eliminate them. 

For example, you wait for the day to end to go out for a drink, spend time with your spouse, or do something productive. But towards the end of the day, you find yourself browsing through social media.

In this scenario, you must distance yourself from these cues (your phone) until you do what you intend to do. Make it a pact not to use social media before planning the next day. 

Keep your phone silent and eliminate any other distractions in your environment as a part of your time management strategies. 

In his second law, Clear mentions that habits operate on a dopamine-driven feedback loop. Put simply, when dopamine goes up, so does the urge to take action. The anticipation of rewards is so powerful that it pushes you to act. 

Clear suggests the use of temptation bundling to achieve that. In this technique, you pair up an action you want to do with an action you need to do. 

Temptation building strategy

Let’s say you aim to minimize distractions and stay focused during work. But you also want to watch a podcast you love. 

Here’s what you can do:

• Designate specific time blocks for focused work (e.g., 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM)
• Listen to one episode of the podcast you love when you take a break at 11 AM

For instance, commit to 90 minutes of focused work on your marketing report. Take a 20-minute break, during which you can watch the podcast. 

This way, you train your mind to work consistently for 90 minutes before you get to do what you want. 

Combine habit stacking with temptation bundling

Clear also suggests combining two techniques to enhance your productivity. 

Here’s the formula:

After ( CURRENT HABIT ), I will ( HABIT I NEED ) 

After ( HABIT I NEED ), I will ( HABIT I WANT )

It looks something like this: 

After lunch, I will work on my marketing reports for 90 minutes.  

After working for 90 minutes, I will watch one episode of my favorite podcast. 

Another crucial aspect that helps is surrounding yourself with the right tribe. If you hang out with people who hate their jobs, you will start hating your job, too. 

But if you hang out with a crowd discussing progress, motivation, and goals, you will likely reflect on yours and set the bar higher for yourself. 

Breaking bad habits–reprogramming your mind

Now, let’s talk about breaking the bad habits we’ve built over the years. 

Let’s say you wake up at nine every morning and you have to leave to work at 10. You’ve been trying to break this loop and want to wake up early. 

So you keep telling yourself, “I have to wake up at 5 AM, but I’m unable to.” 

With a little shift in attitude, you can break this habit–replace have to with get to. 

“I get to wake up at 5 AM every morning and feel the pleasant breeze, exercise, and reflect on my personal goals.” 

The idea is to associate hard habits with positive experiences. How will starting the day at the right pace make you feel? Make it so attractive that your body craves those experiences. 

This change in perspective is so powerful, you’ll find it mentioned in many books on focus . 

“The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.”

The more you repeat a habit, the more your brain gets used to it. The structure of your brain changes and you become efficient in it. It is scientifically proven that repeating a habit leads to physical changes in the brain. 

Clear further states, “ The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.”

The law of least effort 

We as humans naturally gravitate towards the things that require the least effort. 

That’s where an environment shift helps. You need to create an environment where doing the hard thing is as easy as possible. 

Let’s say you introduce a new project management software in your organization. The old system, though outdated, is familiar and requires minimal effort. 

In this scenario, the law of least effort is evident as employees may resist the change. 

That’s where you can make the shift easy with training sessions, user-friendly guidelines, and a dedicated support team to address issues. 

Here, you make the environment conducive to learning and maximize the perceived difficulty of adopting the new system. Such changes lead to lasting work habits where employees welcome change with open arms. 

The two-minute rule

Our brain is programmed to avoid doing difficult things. 

Throughout our days, we make many decisions. For example, the decision to complete your work or watch another episode of your favorite series on Netflix. 

Clear states that habits are immediate actions. For instance, you take a cab to the gym every day. The habit is taking the cab , not hitting the gym. Habits are the entry point, not the endpoint. 

When starting a new habit, Clear suggests you should follow the two-minute rule. Anything new you take up, shouldn’t take longer than two minutes. 

Now, you might think that’s ridiculous, but you can break down any habit into a two minute-version: 

• If you want to build a reading habit, you can start with reading one page a day 
• If you want to start doing yoga for 30 minutes, you can start by taking out the yoga mat
• Or, in our project management example, you can put the shortcut software on your employees’ desktop so they can quickly log in 

This two-minute version makes you realize that starting is pretty easy. And you take away the power of hard habits. Such tactics are often mentioned and practiced in some of the most popular growth hacking books . 

The takeaway? Start a gateway habit that takes you down to a more productive path. 

Breaking bad habits–make it impractical

Clear states that to break habits, you need to make them impractical. 

Technology plays a significant role here. Let’s say you spend excessive time on social media during work hours. You can install an app blocker that automates social media blocking during certain hours. 

As the tool restricts access to social media sites, it makes it impractical (or even impossible!) for you to engage in the habit during those hours. 

You are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. Clear says that we, as humans, are conditioned to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards. 

While building great abs on the first day of gymming sounds impossible, there is another way to look at it. 

The cardinal rule of behavior change

“What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.” 

To make habits inevitable, you need to feel successful immediately in some way. 

If you put the above laws into practice—making things obvious, appealing, and effortless—you’re more likely to carry out the behavior.

But what if you do it only that one time? 

That’s where making it satisfying increases the likelihood of doing it again.  

Let’s say you’ve set a goal to exercise regularly. After each workout, you treat yourself to a healthy smoothie or a favorite snack. By rewarding yourself with something enjoyable after exercising, you make the activity satisfying. 

As a result, you’re more inclined to repeat the workout routine because you link it with a positive and satisfying experience. The idea is to associate immediate pleasures to continue moving towards your big goals. 

Habit tracker

Imagine you’re convinced you’re making progress, but suddenly, you find yourself feeling lost and confused without realizing how it happened.

A habit tracker can be a lifesaver. It helps you monitor your progress with new habits. By visualizing and measuring these habits, you get solid proof of your progress. It creates a streak where you keep working on the habits you’re building. 

Breaking bad habits–get an accountability partner

Having an accountability partner is great because they offer support, encouragement, and a sense of responsibility. Sharing goals with someone who checks in on our progress boosts motivation and keeps us committed to our objectives.

Knowing that someone else is aware of our goals and holds us accountable can provide a sense of external motivation to stay on track and avoid slacking off or falling back into old habits.

• “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
• “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
• “Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
• “You do it because it’s who you are, and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.” 
• “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

Apply Atomic Habits principles with ClickUp

Now, you probably have many ideas for boosting productivity using atomic habits principles. But to consistently apply these principles in your workplace, you need an all-in-one solution like ClickUp. It helps measure progress, automate tasks, and ramp up productivity.

ClickUp Tasks allows you to break down larger tasks into more manageable tasks to make incremental improvements each day. You can set due dates for tasks to establish a routine of consistent effort (1% better each day). 

To further ensure you complete your tasks, it lets you visualize your work in multiple ways. When you have a clear view of what needs to be done, your everyday progress is never hindered. 

But just breaking down your tasks is not enough. 

Clear talks about the importance of habit tracking , which means that you’ve got to turn these tasks into trackable goals. ClickUp Goals helps you manage all your habit-tracking goals in one place and measure success over time. Easily create sprint targets, weekly sales targets, and more. 

Then comes ClickUp Reminders which helps you in habit stacking or following your new habit with an existing one. When you have made a habit scorecard, you know which new habit you need to fit in between. 

ClickUp will drop in gentle reminders to ensure you successfully ingrain the new habit in your current schedule. It’s not just helpful for you but also for your team as you can send out reminders and avoid delays. 

When we’re focused on professional goals, we tend to overlook the importance of tracking our personal goals. But it’s crucial to grow and develop healthy habits in all areas of your life. So, here’s a personal habit tracker template to get you started: 

Whether you want to build an exercise routine or a reading habit, or simply drink more water, this template will help! 

The principles of Atomic habits, when combined with the right tools, will help you boost productivity in the workplace. 

Remember that building habits take time, and automating your tasks, goals, and reminders gives you the extra push to continue. 

Through steady progress, you’ll eventually build the necessary habits while breaking the ones you don’t. If you want to know more about how ClickUp can assist you in this, reach out to our team today!

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Book Review: Atomic Habits By James Clear

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Books are a great source of knowledge. They provide us with new ideas and ways of thinking. Books are like our mentors.

Why? Cause we can’t have Mentors such as Elon Musk or Robert Herjavec but due to the book they write, we can get a look into their lives, learn how they faced difficulties, managed competition, and achieved success.

The strategies they use, the techniques, and the life lessons are all in one single book, which we can read while sipping coffee at home, sounds awesome doesn’t it?

Due to this amazing amount of knowledge books possess, the demand for books is unimaginable.

I read books every single day as I know I am not the smartest guy out there but the least I can do is learn from the smartest in my field and study their pitfalls so I don’t make the same mistakes.

That’s why you should read books too, to learn, grow, and develop yourself.

Atomic Habits is a book written by James Clear which was published in the year 2018.

Atomic Habits is a self-help book that takes a scientific and logical approach to understanding how small habits impact our lives and how developing a few great habits and working on them daily for a long time will lead to higher productivity.

Book Review: Atomic Habits

Atomic Habits explains how to build a new habit with Habit stacking and Temptation Building. Achieve success by 1% improvements and get rid of our bad habits.

URL: https://thesagemillennial.com/go/atomic-habits/

Author: James Clear

Here’s what the book say’s

Early in his life after his major setback, James realized that small habits done consistently can reap massive success . “The way to start was small”.

This book will guide you and provide you with a step-by-step framework on how to be more productive and improve yourself to achieve success.

The guidelines provided in this book are backed up with science and logic to ensure you understand the process fairly well and use the principles appropriately.  

What does Atomic Habits mean?

Atomic habits mean tiny changes, marginal gains, and one percent increments which lead to huge results if done consistently.

Small tiny habits completed every day magnify your success. They help you grow into the person you wish to become.

The book has a lot of depth and information in it. So I’ll be going on some great pointers which I found helpful and I hope you find them helpful too. 

Gain practical insights, and make positive changes in your life!

Atomic Habits Book!

✅ Clear Understanding of Habit Formation ✅ Practical Strategies for Change ✅  Focus on Small Changes ✅ Scientific Insights in Accessible Language ✅ Inspiration for Long-Term Transformation

1. The 1% Percent Rule

James Clear says “It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis”

The one percent improvement says that first, you need to understand everything about your work, break it down into small easily achievable tasks, and improve it by just 1% every day. This can have significantly greater results in the long run.

Improving yourself by 1% every day will make you 37 times better in a year!

That’s surely an enormous amount of growth in a year.

2. Plateau of latent potential

If you take up a task, and try hard but eventually give up, James says that if you just had to put in a little bit more effort, you would have crossed the plateau of latent potential. 

The example atomic habits give is in reference to ice cubes

Let’s say there is an ice cube in front of you, the room temperature is 25℃ and is slowly rising to 27℃, 28℃, 30℃, 31℃; still, the ice cube does not melt. But when the temperature reaches 32℃, the ice starts melting.

This implies that in life we often try working hard till 31℃ and give up, not knowing that at 32℃ we could start seeing the results of our hard work.

Once your efforts reach 32℃, people start describing it as an overnight success but in reality, it is simply taking a few essential steps daily in order to achieve massive results in the long run.

Another example is that you head to the gym for three months but still don’t see any good results. You give up thinking that you will never be able to have a ripped body.

But only if you knew that consistently visiting the gym over and over again will eventually lead to greater results, and maybe an additional month would have gotten you closer to your fitness goal, you would’ve never stopped visiting the gym. 

Success takes time and constant effort. You shouldn’t give up just because you think you can’t achieve it. 

3. Valley Of Disappointment

We often feel that progress should come quickly to us, that a task we begin will soon reap benefits for us.

In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed, not for a few days, but months maybe even years until we realize the true value of previous work we have done. 

James terms the level of disappointment faced by us when we don’t get results as the valley of disappointment.

Focus on systems

He says that instead of focusing on goals, focus on systems. Goals are your end results for example – I want to be fit and healthy. Whereas a system is a process of how to achieve the goal more systematically and smartly.

Having a goal is great, but it might confuse you; instead, have a predefined system; this will keep you in track with your path to achieve your goals.

Ask yourself 

Are you becoming the type of person you want to become? Have you improved yourself by 1% today?

Asking questions like these trigger your mind into thinking – what qualities should a person possess if he wants to find success in a particular field?

Once you get the answers to that, you need to start taking small actions every day to possess those qualities. It’s that simple!

4. Build a positive atmosphere

Try to say everything in a positive manner. Don’t say things like, I get tired of going to the gym, instead say the gym builds strength and endurance which makes me more active.

Don’t tell your mom that chores are boring, rather say that chores help me burn fat which makes me healthy. 

Saving money is nothing but sacrificing your life, instead say that living below your means today will ensure your future means are well-taken care of.

When Habits get boring we need to figure out a way to get that excitement back or else the habit fades away.

That’s why most bad habits like drinking smoking and eating junk food never fade away – it gives us immense excitement every time. We need to learn how to be consistent with our habits. 

For this, James Clear explains the following:

Four laws of behavioral change

1. Make it obvious

If you want to change a habit but act like there is nothing to change, you will probably not change the habit. You need to start taking action and realize that you need to change this habit right away.

2. Make it attractive

What’s more attractive – watching a movie or studying?

Obviously watching a movie! This is because studying is considered boring but if you can change that by altering your studies so that it’s interesting, your mind will find them attractive and won’t procrastinate on studying.

3. Make it easy

The only way to ensure that you stay consistent is to make it so simple and easy that it doesn’t create any problems in your normal routine. The change should be so minute and smooth that you don’t understand how easy it is to do the task.

4. Make it satisfying

If the habit you wish to follow is satisfying, meaning it gives you a reward, in the end, you’ll stick to it. Ensure you use the temptation-building strategy to make your task satisfying.

How to Break a Bad Habit?

1. Make it invisible

If you can’t see the bad habit, you won’t do it, simple as that. If you smoke, make sure you avoid seeing cigarettes anywhere you go. If you’re addicted to using your phone all day, hide your phone in your cupboard and do something, trust me you won’t get up to grab your phone.

2. Make it unattractive

A simple way to break a bad habit is to make it look unattractive and boring. If smoking is made to look unattractive and not appealing, you’ll observe that the addict will stop smoking right away, cause now it’s boring for the addict.

3. Make it difficult

The good thing about bad habits is that they are easily available to us. Your phone is usually at an arm’s distance, but if you can make it difficult to reach your phone, in time you will stop trying to use the phone. When I don’t need my phone for work, I always lock it in the cupboard in the bedroom, away from me.

4. Make it unsatisfying

If you make your task unsatisfying, your mind will immediately tell you to not do it again. Why? Cause you only want things that give you satisfaction.

Other things are to be ignored. One way to make your phone unsatisfying is by changing the phone setting to monochrome in the developer’s options on Android devices. Looking at a black & white screen is very unattractive and you will keep them away for good.  

The 2 methods to develop a habit:

1. habit stacking.

How to stack a habit over an existing habit to ensure you do it daily?

Let’s say you want to do 10 push-ups every day the moment you get up in the morning.

So your habit stacking will be 

Once I get up from my bed I will brush my teeth and then do 10 push-ups followed by drinking water.

Do you see how you trained your brain to develop a path for your habit? Instead of just saying “I want to do push-ups every day in the morning” which seems vague and unclear to your mind.

2. Temptation building

Another strategy to get work done better is by using temptation building. This works by linking an action you want to do with an activity you need to do thus ensuring that the fun stuff is done along with what’s important. Win-Win situation for both goals.

The gym uses this technique quite often. Cardio machines have a virtual reality TV in front of it, so every time you do cardio(need task) you simultaneously watch something (want task), which creates entertainment while working out. A great strategy now used by many companies too.

Now that you know these two methods

The book says combining them is even better 

For example:

I will sleep for an hour and then go to the gym where I will do cardio(need) while watching a virtual reality TV (want).

You see I used habit stacking and said that once I sleep, I will go to the gym and then use temptation building to build a reason to go to the gym( virtual reality TV).

Will Atomic Habits Make You A Better Person?

Building better habits isn’t about flossing your teeth, taking a cold shower, or heading to the gym each day.

Habits help you achieve these things but they aren’t about having something they are about becoming something. Ultimately the habits you form help you become the type of person you desire to become.

We are so engrossed in finding the perfect workout, the perfect way to lose fat, we forget that taking action is what makes us better, finding the perfect way to do a task just delays today’s efforts. The only way you will improve is by doing something today. 

The principles and guidelines mentioned in the book can be used in all walks of life: personal life, professional life, parenting, finance , fitness, education anything which includes your behavior.

That’s what makes atomic Habits a must-read for every single one.  It’s a great choice for Millennials who are struggling to do it all in their 20s, it’s good for parents trying to manage their child along with their finances and professional life. 

Once you finish reading Atomic Habits, James Clear also offers you additional information which actually has a lot of really good ways to develop habits like how to apply atomic Habits to grow business, how to use atomic Habits for parenting, and so on. 

Feel free to leave your comments below if:

• You have a question or feedback
• You need me to clarify something regarding my Atomic Habits Book Review
• You wish to share your Atomic Habits Reading journey with everyone!

So let me know which habit you struggle to stick to and which habit do you easily adapt to.

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5 ways reading 'Atomic Habits' helped me stop procrastinating and change my life for the better

• Dayana Aleksandrova is a copywriter and digital nomad based in Costa Rica.
• She read "Atomic Habits" by James Clear to improve her productivity and address distractions.
• Decluttering, auditing her day, and creating temptation have helped her avoid procrastination.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dayana Aleksandrova , a 30-year-old copywriter, mentor for online entrepreneurs, and digital nomad based in Costa Rica, about her experience reading " Atomic Habits ." The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I expanded my online business from copywriting to business mentorship for online entrepreneurs, I started getting a ton of questions from clients about building good habits and time management. 

So I asked some of my high-performer friends who do 20 things at once and make it all look effortless what book they could recommend for improving upon this — and they unanimously said " Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones " by James Clear. 

I decided to read it in order to best serve my clients. So far, the lessons I've taken away from the book have worked at an 100% success rate — especially when it comes to addressing procrastination.

Here are five ways that my life changed for the better after I tried Clear's principles:

1. I beat distractions in my space

According to "Atomic Habits," the first law of behavior change is to "make it obvious." In the book, Clear refutes the idea that we're organized due to our willpower or genes and argues that our habits are a product of our environment. 

I'd been feeling very distracted at work, constantly jumping from one project to the next and leaving incomplete Notion tasks and half-finished emails. So, following the book's advice, I decided to upgrade my space.

My desk used to be a complete mess — sticky notes, pens, journals, and clementine peels everywhere, alongside multiple half-drunk takeaway coffee cups. 

After reading "Atomic Habits," I set an alarm for 20 minutes so I'd get it done under pressure and separated everything into three piles: essentials, nice-to-have, and extras. The "essentials" on my desk now are my laptop, a podcasting microphone, a journal with a single pen, and a water bottle. I stashed all my "extras" — my Kindle and any hardcover books, pencils, business cards, and highlighters — in my closet.

Getting rid of the clutter has helped me focus, and I no longer lose ideas. Now everything that crosses my mind is in that one journal rather than spread across 20-odd sticky notes. Plus, all the tasks I start actually get done. 

Clear's book inspired me to do the same inside my laptop, too. I grabbed all of my desktop folders and put them in one "Omega" folder, so now I enjoy a pristinely empty screen that doesn't give me anxiety. 

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Finally — this was the toughest — I began closing all my browser tabs before bed. I try to have no more than five open tabs at any given time now, which are my email, Canva , Teachable , and one or two Google docs.

2. I stopped dreading video calls

"Atomic Habits" advises making new habits attractive and dividing them into small increments that over time build up to produce massive changes.

One habit I wanted to improve upon was being comfortable on Zoom, especially after two years of video fatigue. So to emulate what the book said, I started asking people I admire to join me on 20-minute long "coffee dates." I would sit down with creators, CEOs, authors, podcasters, astrologers, and coaches — most of whom I met on Instagram — and just talk about work and life. 

When my timer went off, we'd wrap it up. That way, I could look forward to the next conversation. 

These calls went on for about two months. Finally, I'd totally forgotten why I started them, and Zoom no longer intimidated or drained me. As James Clear says, small habits generate big changes, as long as you don't quit.

3. I created more time and comfort in my day

When I read Clear's suggestion to "audit" my day by writing out every little thing I did for 24 hours, I found it painstaking, which is how I could tell it was going to be worth it. 

First, it made me realize that waking up at 7 a.m. was too late for my sleep chronotype. I was shocked to find out how much time I wasted on Netflix every evening — close to four hours — and how many consecutive hours I'd sit in a chair without getting up for a walk.

After this eye-opening audit, I began waking up at 5 a.m. and immediately felt in control versus "late to the party." The extra two hours per day allowed me to get a headstart on writing, and by the time 10 a.m. rolled around, I'd get up for an hour-long walk. I incorporated two more walks into my day — one around 3 p.m. and one at 8 p.m. when my Netflix binge would have been taking place. 

Adding these extra walks to my day has been a game-changer for my lower back, which hurts a lot less than before. My eyes feel less fatigued as well, as I'm spending less time looking at a screen, especially late at night. 

4. I made chores and dreaded tasks more manageable

Clear teaches his readers to do something called "temptation bundling." This means marrying two opposing actions: something you dread and something you love. 

I hate folding laundry, so inspired by Clear's idea, I "bundled" that task with listening to my favorite YouTube playlist. Whenever I feel too lazy to work out or do my daily walk, I pair that exercise with listening to my favorite podcast. I have two picks: one on manifestation and spirituality, and one on marketing. 

I now also save voice notes I get from my coaching clients to listen and reply to while I'm on my walk. That way, time flies and I get work done in the process. Plus, many of my clients love hearing the waves when I message them from the beach instead of the hollow echo of my home office. 

5. I built a new habit with the 2-minute rule

I've always loved the idea   of picking up new habits — but the reality is that it's hard. One of my goals last year was to get really good at recording Instagram Reels and posting every day, and "Atomic Habits" gave me a tangible strategy that helped me achieve this.

Clear suggests practicing the "two-minute rule" — setting your alarm for two minutes to test-drive a new habit, which is the only time you're allowed to practice that new habit for the day. So just as you start getting into it, time's up, and it leaves you craving more. 

This is exactly what happened. I'd sit down to shoot a Reel in just two minutes. Before I knew it, time would be up. The tight limit helped me stop overthinking and just speak authentically and with passion, which really resonated with my friends and clients.

The two-minute rule is also extremely powerful if you're a procrastinator. Since you know it's only going to take 120 seconds, you just start. There's no room for second-guessing, and you don't need to prep too much, either. So before you know it, the habit becomes second nature.

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Atomic Habits by James Clear: Book Summary and Insights

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Atomic Habits Summary

James Clear’s Atomic Habits offers practical strategies and proven ideas that will help you create good habits, stop destructive behaviors, and improve your life with a simple, four-step process for making small changes that compound into large, positive results.

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Key Takeaways

The fundamentals.

What are atomic habits? An atomic habit is a small habit that is part of a bigger system of changing your life with self-awareness, goal-setting, and action. With the right set of atomic habits, you can harness the power of small changes to create remarkable results.

The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”  We focus too much on single, defining moments when real progress comes from making small improvements on a regular basis. Over a long enough time period, those small improvements — created through building atomic habits and breaking bad habits — can compound to great results.

“Your habits can compound for or against you.”  Like compound interest can help you in your financial life, the compounding  power of habits  can work for you or work against you. If you focus on good habits like better productivity, knowledge, and relationships, your life will improve over time. If you let bad habits repeat (like stress, negative thoughts, or outrage) your life gets worse over time.

Progress is not linear.  We often expect our efforts to have a linear relationship with progress. But because your efforts and atomic habits compound over time, progress starts slow in the beginning and then grows at a much faster rate. If you give up too early, you lose the power of compounding.

“Forget about goals, focus on systems instead.”  Goals are measurable results, but systems are the specific processes that help you achieve those results. It’s better to focus on systems that build good habits in the direction you want to go, instead of dwelling on a one-time goal that is not repeatable. Because systems are so important to the results you achieve, it’s important to avoid building the wrong system.

How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

When building atomic habits, there are three levels of possible change:

• Outcome change : This involves changing the results in your life (e.g., losing weight, publishing a book, etc.)
• Process change : This is about adopting new habits and systems that move you toward the type of person you want to be (e.g., healthy habits like going to the gym to lose weight).
• Identity change : This is about changing your beliefs, self-image, and ideas about yourself and other people on your path of continuous improvement.

If you want to make big changes in your life, it’s don’t focus on specific outcomes. Instead, optimize your systems for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.

Your daily habits, including your financial habits, healthy habits, eating habits, cleaning habits, and everything that you do, ultimately create the person you are. So the best way to become who you want to be is to develop a set of good habits and systems.

How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

Habits are patterns of behavior that you’ve repeated enough to become automatic. The most helpful function of atomic habits is to solve the problems of your life with as little effort as possible.

The science of habit formation involves four things: “A cue, which triggers a  craving , which motivates a  response , which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and, ultimately, becomes associated with the cue.”

For example, a cue could be that your phone vibrates to let you know you have a text. Then the craving is that you want to know what someone said to you. The response is that you grab your phone and read the text. The reward is that you satisfy your craving to read the message. The habit loop repeats when your phone buzzes again.

There are  four laws of behavior change  for building better habits that leverage the science of habits: (1) make it obvious; (2) make it attractive; (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

The man who didn’t look right.

Because habits are automatic actions, our brain does not pay attention to them. With some training, you can start to become aware of the cues in your environment that encourage both good habits and bad habits. If you want to change a particular habit or make bad habits impossible, awareness is the first step so that you’re not trying to fly in the dark.

The Best Way to Start a New Habit

If you want to create new good habits, the best way to do it is to use the two most powerful cues: time and location. For example, let’s say you want to start reading more books because you believe that’s important for business leaders like you. You can make an intention like this: I will read a book at 7am (time) in my favorite lounging chair (location). This is a simple way to use the science of habit formation to your advantage.

A good way to adopt habits is to habit stack. Let’s say you have a habit of drinking coffee in the morning. If you want to read more books, you can say that you’re going to read while you drink your morning coffee (perhaps instead of scrolling social media). Habit stacking like this is easier because you already have the habit of drinking coffee and reading something. You’re just changing what you read from social media to a book to the delight of your future self.

Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

Because the cues in your environment are signals for your habit loops, it’s important to amplify the cues you have for good habits. For example, if you want to go to the gym more often, at night, you could put your gym clothes in plain sight so that when you wake up in the morning, you’re reminded that you want to go to the gym.

If you’re struggling to let go of some bad habits, it can help to change your environment so that you’re not surrounded by old cues that lead to the behavior you want to change.

The Secret to Self-Control

You cannot rely on intrinsic motivation for behavior change. That’s because motivation comes and goes, and when it goes, suddenly that motivation you had to quit smoking is consumed by your desire to reduce stress with just a few drags.

If you truly want to eliminate a bad habit, it’s helpful to make the cue for that habit invisible. Let’s say you love snacking on chips at lunchtime, and you want to develop better eating habits. Instead of relying on self-control to avoid the chips that you have on the counter, you can simply not buy chips at the grocery store and buy apples instead.

If the chips aren’t in the house and on the counter, you’re not likely to crave or eat them. This is much more effective than relying on willpower and self-control, both of which eventually fade and let bad habits repeat in the long run.

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

How to make a habit irresistible.

To activate the reward part of the habit loop, it helps to make the atomic habits you want to do attractive. Because the reward of a habit often releases dopamine, we are often motivated to do something to get the dopamine at the end of the cycle. If the reward is good enough, we begin to anticipate it, and that motivates us to act.

Imagine you love small doses of dark chocolate and you want to build a good habit like going to the gym. One thing you could do is to only allow yourself to eat dark chocolate once you log a workout. At the end of the workout, you get the reward of the chocolate, so you’re motivated to go to the gym and finish the habit with the joy of eating chocolate.

The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

The people and environment around us have a big influence on what behavior we find attractive. That means that we often will do things that are praised by people in our culture because we want to fit in and be well-liked. It also means that the people and culture around us matter a lot in moving us toward or away from our desired behavior.

There are 3 groups of people that influence the process of habit formation – friends and family, our wider tribe, and people with status and prestige. A great way to build good habits is to surround yourself with people who already do the behavior you wish to do and who you have something in common with. That way, there are other people doing what you do, enjoying it, and approving of it.

How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

A great way to shake a bad habit is to make it unattractive to you and to highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit. For example, if you want to drink less alcohol, you could come up with a long list of great benefits (like being a healthy person) you will gain from drinking less alcohol. That will make drinking less attractive.

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

Walk slowly, but never backward.

The best way to learn and make progress is to take action. Planning can often feel like action, but it’s really not. It’s better to simply do things, and little by little, those behaviors begin to become automatic and ingrained and ultimately easier as you repeat desirable behaviors. Moving slowly is a reliable way for using atomic habits for self-improvement.

The Law of Least Effort

Humans are naturally lazy and will gravitate toward things that require less effort. That’s why you should optimize your environment to form good habits and break bad habits.

For example, imagine you want to lose weight and are thinking about forming new habits that help you with that goal. If you keep only healthy food in your house, for example, there is very little friction for you to eat healthy when you get hungry in the afternoon.

And when your intrinsic motivation for your new habits wanes, there is high friction if you want to eat something unhealthy because you have to order it or go to the store. Because there is higher friction, you have created a helpful barrier for your bad habits.

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

The two-minute rule : “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

When you’re creating a new habit, make it as simple and easy as possible. This is very important for creating atomic habits.

If you want to exercise more, instead of planning on going to the gym for an hour a day, decide to do 10 pushups in the morning. You can do that in under 2 minutes, and after you do it for 30 days, you’ll have built the good habit of exercising every day. From there, you can more easily add on more difficult forms of exercise since you already have momentum.

Making Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

If you can lock yourself into the behavior you want to do more of or do less of, your likelihood of doing it is much higher. The best way to do that is to make a decision once that automates your future decisions.

For instance, let’s say you want to invest more regularly. Instead of logging into your account every week to invest, you can set up an automatic investment to occur every week. Once you set up your automatic investment, it runs in the background without you having to think about it.

The 4th Law – Make It Satisfying

The cardinal rule of behavior change.

If you enjoy something, you’re more likely to do it. That’s why the cardinal rule of behavior change is  “What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.”

So when you’re starting a new atomic habit, you need to make a way to find it immediately rewarding, so that you feel good about doing it again.

How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

Progress is one of the best forms of motivation. To benefit from the power of progress, you should keep a habit tracker to measure when you did the things you say you wanted to do. As you track your efforts over time, you will find it rewarding to see all of the progress you’ve made. It’s particularly rewarding if you don’t skip on doing your desired behavior.

Two rules that can help you make the most of the habit tracker: (1) don’t break the chain – keep your habit streak alive for as long as you can; (2) Never miss twice – if you miss one day, get back on track the next day. With habit trackers and a commitment to tiny behaviors, you can make the process of learning habits more accessible, enjoyable, and effective.

How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

Leveraging the power of an accountability partner can help you stay on track. In part, that’s because we care what other people think about us. If you say that you’re going to do something to someone, it’s more likely that you’re going to do it.

One way to make an accountability partner more effective is to have a penalty if you stick with a particular habit. Let’s say you want to write every day for 30 days. You can make a deal that you will pay your accountability partner $50 for every day you don’t write. And if you make that deal, you’re going to be much more likely to sit down and write every day. If you’re motivated by money, this is a very useful tool in the early stages of habit formation.

Advanced Tactics – How To Go From Being Merely Good To Being Truly Great

The truth about talent.

If you want to succeed in life, you increase your chances of success by choosing the right places to compete and the right atomic habits to build. The opposite is true if you make the wrong decisions.

We all have talent in different areas, and if you learn about the areas you’re inclined to, you can choose to build good habits in a game that comes easier to you and likely be more successful.

The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

Goldilocks rule : “Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.”

If you’ve been doing something for a long time, you will likely get bored. And boredom is a great way to halt your self-improvement and let bad habits repeat. So it’s important to find ways to continue pushing yourself in a domain to stay motivated and excited about what you’re doing. That way you don’t get bored and quit.

Reviewing Your Progress

Atom habits and consistent, deliberate effort can help you on any path of continuous improvement and mastery. One important piece of this path is to make sure that you regularly reflect on and review your performance so that you stay aware of what’s going on over time.

On a weekly basis, you can use habit trackers, to-do lists, journaling practices , and other tools. But you also want to be able to zoom out and check in over a longer time scale so that you can measure how you’re doing.

An annual or quarterly check-in on the areas that you care most about can help shed light on what’s going well, what’s going okay, and what needs improvement.

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Book Summary: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Book Summary: The Key Ideas

#1: Focus on your systems, not your goals. Habits are the compound interest of continuous improvement. A focus on our processes and identity, rather than one-off achievements of goals, is what brings long-term improvement.

#2: The four laws of behaviour change. For each step of the habit loop, four laws can help us form good habits: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. The laws can be inverted to help break bad habits.

#3: The 1 st law: make it obvious. To change, break or create new habits, we must become aware of our environmental cues using appropriate techniques. Simple re-designs of the framing of our habits, through techniques like habit stacking, can have profound effects on our behaviour.

#4: The 2 nd law: make it attractive. Any habit can be made more enticing. Through techniques such as temptation bundling and using the psychology of social norms, we can help stimulate a greater sense of anticipation for a habit.

#5: The 3 rd law: make it easy. Our brains are evolved to help us automate our habits and make them easier. But we can make them even easier by using techniques like the Two-Minute Rule and commitment devices.

#6: The 4 th law: make it satisfying . We are more likely to repeat a behaviour when it’s immediately satisfying. Techniques like habit tracking can help foster this feeling, while accountability partners and habit contracts can create a force to keep at a habit.

Book Notes: The Key Ideas in Detail

Premise of the book.

The book is based on a simple idea: small changes can compound into remarkable results. James Clear sets out a wide range of principles for creating habits that drive these marginal gains – and eliminating habits that undermine them.

A central theme of the book is the idea that we must focus on our systems rather than our goals, recognising how our environment and processes can act as levers for positive change.

#1: Focus on Your Systems, Not Your Goals

The Compounding Power of Habits

Instead of looking for transformational leaps forward, we should focus our energies on the compounding power of small changes. A 1% improvement every day for a year leaves you 37 times better than when you started.

As James Clear puts it, “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”

But habits can compound for or against you. For example, knowledge and productivity compound, but so do stress and outrage.

The Plateau of Latent Potential

To sustain these small improvements, we must recognise that success isn’t immediate. Time and results are seldom linear, and habits typically follow what Clear calls a Plateau of Latent Potential .

The early stages of a quest are often characterised by a valley of disappointment. Results eventually follow but are not immediate.

Systems > Goals

To maximise the compounding effect of habits, we must focus on our systems, and not our goals.

Goals have winners and losers and their achievement only brings momentary change.

Instead, commitment to processes brings long-term progress. One-off achievements of goals cannot have the same compounding effect on our behaviour.

Identity-Based Habits

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

There are three layers of behaviour change: (1) Outcomes, (2) Process and (3) Identity.

‘Identity-based habits’ are far stickier than ‘outcome-based habits’. Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with our identity, they are unlikely to stick. Our habits, little by little, are also the force that forms our identity.

#2: The Four Laws of Behaviour Change

The Four Steps of Habit Building

Our habits follow a four-stage habit loop:

• Cue: Information that predicts a reward.
• Craving: The motivational force behind each habit.
• Response: the actual habit you perform.
• Reward: The end goal of each habit.

The Four Laws of Behaviour Change

At each stage of the habit loop, there are four important laws that can be applied to optimise our habits:

• Cue: Make it obvious.
• Craving: Make it attractive.
• Response: Make it easy.
• Reward: Make it satisfying.

The four laws can be inverted to break bad habits, i.e. make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.

#3: The 1 st Law – Make It Obvious

With enough practice, cues become automatic and subconscious. Once automatic, this means we pay less attention to what we are doing. To change behaviour, we must therefore foster awareness of our habits and their cues.

Techniques to Highlight Habits

Clear suggests two techniques to raise awareness of our habits:

• Pointing-and-Calling: Raises awareness of non-conscious habits by verbalising behaviours.
• Habits scorecards: Make a list of behaviours and score as + or – or = if positive, negative or neutral.

Implementation Intention and Habit Stacking

Time and location are the most common cues.

Implementation intention is a useful way of committing ourselves to a new habit, by pre-defining the time and location of the activity.

The formula is “I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Alternatively, habit stacking can be used to pair a new habit with a current habit.

The formula is “I will [BEHAVIOUR] after [CURRENT HABIT]. Choosing the right current habit to pair with here is crucial.

Environmental Cues

“Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour.”

Small changes in visual cues can lead to big shifts in habits and behaviour.

It’s easier to associate a new habit with a new environment or context than to build a new habit in the face of competing ones. But this needn’t be a different place entirely. Simple new cues can have a powerful influence over our habits.

The Myth of Self-Control

“The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least.”

External triggers can cause a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit (sometimes even after years). This is known as cue-induced wanting .

Clear believes self-control is a short-term approach. Reducing bad habits in reality requires an inversion of the 1 st law of behaviour change: i.e. to make the cue invisible.

#4: The 2 nd Law – Make It Attractive

Our attraction to habits is often underpinned by a dopamine-driven feedback loop . When we predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, dopamine levels spike in anticipation. The anticipation – not the fulfilment – drives the action.

Temptation Bundling

A useful technique to make habits more appealing is temptation bundling . This is where we link the action we want to do with an action we need to do.

It can be combined with habit stacking as follows:

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]

After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]

Social Norms

“We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.”

Behaviours are attractive when they help us fit in. Clear suggests we imitate the habits of three groups:

• The close: When our desired behaviour is the norm and where you already have something in common.
• The many: When changing habits means fitting in with the tribe.
• The powerful: When we are motivated to enhance our status.

#5: The 3 rd Law – Make It Easy

The Power of Automaticity

All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice through to automatic behaviour – known as automaticity.

This is supported by our brain’s physiological adjustment through processes such as long-term potentiation (more on that here ).

The amount of time is not as important as the number of times we perform a behaviour.

The Law of Least Effort

Human behaviour follows the Law of Least Effort, where we gravitate towards options that require the least work.

Our environments can help us achieve habits with less effort, by fitting them into the daily flow of our lives.

As a general principle, we should focus on reducing friction for good behaviours (e.g. distractions) and increasing friction for bad behaviours.

‘Priming’ our environments is an effective strategy to reduce friction, setting up our environments to make future actions easier.

The Two-Minute Rule

The ‘Two Minute Rule’: When starting a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

Clear gives some examples: “Read before bed” becomes “Read one page”. “Run three miles” becomes “Put on my running shoes”.

The idea is that these smaller habits act as gateways to the bigger goals.

The Two-Minute Rule can be combined with ‘habit shaping’, mastering the first two minutes and progressively mastering phases towards a final goal.

Commitment Devices

To break bad habits, we can also invert the 3 rd Law of Behaviour Change to “make it difficult”.

A good way of containing bad habits and provoking good habits is to use a commitment device. This is a choice you make now that controls your actions later, e.g. paying for a gym membership upfront.

But the ultimate way to commit to future behaviour is to automate habits. Using technology to automate is a reliable way to guarantee a behaviour.

#6: The 4 th Law – Make It Satisfying

Hyperbolic Discounting

We are more likely to repeat a behaviour when it’s immediately satisfying.

Our brains are evolved to prioritise immediate rewards over long-term rewards. Psychologists call this hyperbolic discounting .

One way to counter this bias is to use reinforcement, tying a habit to a near-term reward.

Habit Tracking

Habit tracking can also be an effective tool for increasing immediate gratification.

First, it is obvious, providing a simple, prominent visual method. Second, it is attractive, offering visual cues as an effective motivator (and deterrent). And third it is satisfying, with the tracking becoming a form of reward in itself.

Never Miss Twice

Clear then sets out one of his golden rules: Never miss twice.

If you miss a repetition, get back on track as soon as possible.

Clear believes that maintaining the streak is crucial. Even if you’re just showing up, the action of the habit is a vote for your new identity.

Accountability Partners and Habit Contracts

An accountability partner can also create an immediate cost to action, as we don’t want to let people down.

Habit contracts can be used to add a social cost to a behaviour, making missing our habits more public and painful. The sense of observation of your habit by someone else can be a powerful motivator.

You can buy the book here or you can find more of our book notes here . For further related reading, check out The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg or these articles on procrastination , prioritisation and the science of habits .

Sponsored links below (if any). Clicking is one way of saying thanks for the article!

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Atomic Habits by James Clear - Book Summary and Notes

When readers ask about habit formation, I always point them to James Clear's blog. Now I'll be pointing them to his book, Atomic Habits.

Atomic Habits Book Review

full disclosure: I was provided with an early release copy of this book. I strive to only post notes from books that are worth your time, but remember that I am subject to reciprocity bias . I did purchase my own copy on release day.

Through his blog, Clear has explored habits and the psychology behind them. Now he's turned what he's learned into a concise but dense book.

Habits control a majority of our actions. Understanding how to create and destroy habits is a super-skill that benefits your life greatly. James lays out how habits work and how to shape both environment and behavior to make them stick (or unstick). All of this in an easy to understand writing style, with helpful summaries and cheatsheets

If you're interested at all in directing your life in a positive direction, read this book .

Want to level up your productivity and start getting work done?

We built an interactive coach, available 24⁄7 to give you a feasible next step to improve your productivity skills.

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Quick summary.

The following are rough notes I took while reading. These are mostly paraphrased or quoted directly from the book.

Why Small Habits Make a Big Difference

1% worse every day for one year. 0.99^365 = 00.03

1% better every day for one year. 1.01^365 = 37.78

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.

FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD

If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

Problems with goals:

• Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
• Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
• Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.
• Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

THREE LAYERS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE

• The first layer is changing your outcomes.
• The second layer is changing your process.
• The third and deepest layer is changing your identity.

When you have repeated a story to yourself for years, it is easy to slide into these mental grooves and accept them as a fact.

The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change.

THE TWO-STEP PROCESS TO CHANGING YOUR IDENTITY

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do. Each time you write a page, you are a writer. Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician. Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete. Each time you encourage your employees, you are a leader.

Of course, it works the opposite way, too. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it’s a vote for that identity.

New identities require new evidence.

It is a simple two-step process:

• Decide the type of person you want to be.
• Prove it to yourself with small wins.

How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate the process of solving it.

As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases.

Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.

All habits proceed through four stages:

If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.

THE FOUR LAWS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE

How to Create a Good Habit

• The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious.
• The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive.
• The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy.
• The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.

How to Break a Bad Habit

• Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible.
• Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive.
• Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult.
• Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.

How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?

THE 1ST LAW Make It Obvious

You don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin. You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it. This is what makes habits useful. It’s also what makes them dangerous. As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and nonconscious mind.

Pointing-and-Calling reduces errors by up to 85 percent and cuts accidents by 30 percent.

Pointing-and-Calling is so effective because it raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level.

One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing.

We need a “point-and-call” system for our personal lives.

Try a Habits Scorecard , which is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior. To create your own, make a list of your daily habits.

Once you have a full list, look at each behavior, and ask yourself, “Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit?” If it is a good habit, write “+” next to it. If it is a bad habit, write “–”. If it is a neutral habit, write “=”.

For example, the list above might look like this:

• Turn off alarm =
• Check my phone –
• Go to the bathroom =
• Weigh myself +
• Take a shower +
• Brush my teeth +
• Floss my teeth +
• Put on deodorant +
• Hang up towel to dry =
• Get dressed =
• Make a cup of tea +

As you create your Habits Scorecard, there is no need to change anything at first. The goal is to simply notice what is actually going on.

Observe your thoughts and actions without judgment or internal criticism.

If you eat a chocolate bar every morning, acknowledge it, almost as if you were watching someone else. Oh, how interesting that they would do such a thing.

The Best Way to Start a New Habit

The format for creating an implementation intention is: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”

Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals,

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.

The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

HABIT STACKING: A SIMPLE PLAN TO OVERHAUL YOUR HABITS

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.

Many human behaviors follow this cycle.

When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.

The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

You can also insert new behaviors into the middle of your current routines.

Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or:

B = f (P,E)

HOW TO DESIGN YOUR ENVIRONMENT FOR SUCCESS

Here are a few ways you can redesign your environment and make the cues for your preferred habits more obvious: If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter. If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.

Most people live in a world others have created for them. But you can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones.

Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.

The good news? You can train yourself to link a particular habit with a particular context. In one study, scientists instructed insomniacs to get into bed only when they were tired. If they couldn’t fall asleep, they were told to sit in a different room until they became sleepy. Over time, subjects began to associate the context of their bed with the action of sleeping, and it became easier to quickly fall asleep

It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.

One space, one use

The mantra I find useful is “One space, one use.” When I started my career as an entrepreneur, I would often work from my couch or at the kitchen table. In the evenings, I found it very difficult to stop working.

If your space is limited, divide your room into activity zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating.

You can do the same with your digital spaces. I know a writer who uses his computer only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting.

The Secret to Self-Control

“Disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.

Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.

Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.

You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. It’s a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.

“Cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.

You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.

In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in.

One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

THE 2ND LAW Make It Attractive

How to make a habit irresistible.

Supernormal stimuli. Junk food

Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.

The trend is for rewards to become more concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing.

While it is not possible to transform every habit into a supernormal stimulus, we can make any habit more enticing. To do this, we must start by understanding what a craving is and how it works.

THE DOPAMINE-DRIVEN FEEDBACK LOOP

Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.

Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.

It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.

Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward.

THE DOPAMINE SPIKE

Before a habit is learned:

• (A), dopamine is released when the reward is experienced for the first time.
• (B), dopamine rises before taking action, immediately after a cue is recognized. This spike leads to a feeling of desire and a craving to take action whenever the cue is spotted. Once a habit is learned, dopamine will not rise when a reward is experienced because you already expect the reward. However, if you see a cue and expect a reward, but do not get one, then dopamine will drop in disappointment
• (C). The sensitivity of the dopamine response can clearly be seen when a reward is provided late
• (D). First, the cue is identified and dopamine rises as a craving builds. Next, a response is taken but the reward does not come as quickly as expected and dopamine begins to drop. Finally, when the reward comes a little later than you had hoped, dopamine spikes again. It is as if the brain is saying, “See! I knew I was right. Don’t forget to repeat this action next time.”

Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.

Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it.

HOW TO USE TEMPTATION BUNDLING TO MAKE YOUR HABITS MORE ATTRACTIVE

The habit stacking + temptation bundling formula is:

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].

The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

The seductive pull of social norms.

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them. We follow the script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school, our local community and society at large.

We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.

There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.

Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.

How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

Where cravings come from.

Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.

Some of our underlying motives include:

• Conserve energy
• Obtain food and water
• Find love and reproduce
• Connect and bond with others
• Win social acceptance and approval
• Reduce uncertainty
• Achieve status and prestige

Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.

• Find love and reproduce = using Tinder
• Connect and bond with others = browsing Facebook
• Win social acceptance and approval = posting on Instagram
• Reduce uncertainty = searching on Google
• Achieve status and prestige = playing video games

Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.

Life feels reactive, but it is actually 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. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.

When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

HOW TO REPROGRAM YOUR BRAIN TO ENJOY HARD HABITS

Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.

Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.

Try a motivation ritual.

“My focus and concentration goes up just by putting my headphones [on] while writing. I don’t even have to play any music.” -- Ed Latimore, boxer and author

You can adapt this strategy for nearly any purpose. Say you want to feel happier in general. Find something that makes you truly happy—like petting your dog or taking a bubble bath—and then create a short routine that you perform every time before you do the thing you love. Maybe you take three deep breaths and smile. Three deep breaths. Smile. Pet the dog. Repeat. Eventually, you’ll begin to associate this breathe-and-smile routine with being in a good mood.

THE 3RD LAW Make It Easy

Walk slowly, but never backward.

It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change:

“The best is the enemy of the good.” -- Voltaire

There is a difference between being in motion and taking action.

When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.

Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.

More often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

The first takeaway of the 3rd Law: you just need to get your reps in.

HOW LONG DOES IT ACTUALLY TAKE TO FORM A NEW HABIT?

There is nothing magical about time passing with regard to habit formation. It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days or thirty days or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior.

In practice, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes for a habit to become automatic. What matters is that you take the actions you need to take to make progress.

The Law of Least Effort

The shape of human behavior.

Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change.

But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient.

despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, laziness is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.

Habits like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time because they can be performed almost without effort.

Certainly, you are capable of doing very hard things. The problem is that some days you feel like doing the hard work and some days you feel like giving in. On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way.

Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.

The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it.

Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.

The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.

PRIME THE ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE USE

Nuckols dialed in his cleaning habits by following a strategy he refers to as “resetting the room.” For instance, when he finishes watching television, he places the remote back on the TV stand, arranges the pillows on the couch, and folds the blanket. When he leaves his car, he throws any trash away. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the shower is warming up. (As he notes, the “perfect time to clean the toilet is right before you wash yourself in the shower anyway.”) The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action.

Nuckols says, "People think I work hard but I’m actually really lazy. I’m just proactively lazy."

You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult.

Whenever possible, I leave my phone in a different room until lunch.

Imagine the cumulative impact of making dozens of these changes and living in an environment designed to make the good behaviors easier and the bad behaviors harder.

Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit.

Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway. They lead you down a path and, before you know it, you’re speeding toward the next behavior.

Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments .

Each day is made up of many moments, but it is really a few habitual choices that determine the path you take.

THE TWO-MINUTE RULE

the Two-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy.

What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.

The point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up.

If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop.

The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work.

Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. “The best way is to always stop when you are going good,” he said.

At some point, once you’ve established the habit and you’re showing up each day, you can combine the Two-Minute Rule with a technique we call habit shaping to scale your habit back up toward your ultimate goal.

Then, advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process—focusing on just the first two minutes and mastering that stage before moving on to the next level.

How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.

The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it. If you’re feeling motivated to get in shape, schedule a yoga session and pay ahead of time.

When the time comes to act, the only way to bail is to cancel the meeting, which requires effort and may cost money.

HOW TO AUTOMATE A HABIT AND NEVER THINK ABOUT IT AGAIN

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.

Some actions—like installing a cash register—pay off again and again. These onetime choices require a little bit of effort up front but create increasing value over time.

ONETIME ACTIONS THAT LOCK IN GOOD HABITS

• Buy a water filter to clean your drinking water.
• Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.
• Buy a good mattress.
• Get blackout curtains.
• Remove your television from your bedroom.
• Productivity
• Unsubscribe from emails.
• Turn off notifications and mute group chats.
• Set your phone to silent.
• Use email filters to clear up your inbox.
• Delete games and social media apps on your phone.
• Move to a friendly, social neighborhood.
• General Health
• Get vaccinated.
• Buy good shoes to avoid back pain.
• Buy a supportive chair or standing desk.
• Enroll in an automatic savings plan.
• Set up automatic bill pay.
• Cut cable service.
• Ask service providers to lower your bills.

Technology is particularly useful for behaviors that happen too infrequently to become habitual. Things you have to do monthly or yearly

When you automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet.

Each habit that we hand over to the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” -- Alfred North Whitehead

During the year I was writing this book, I experimented with a new time management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send me the new passwords.

One of the biggest surprises was how quickly I adapted. Within the first week of locking myself out of social media, I realized that I didn’t need to check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn’t need it each day.

THE 4TH LAW Make It Satisfying

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.

We are not looking for just any type of satisfaction. We are looking for immediate satisfaction.

THE MISMATCH BETWEEN IMMEDIATE AND DELAYED REWARDS

You live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment

The human brain did not evolve for life in a delayed-return environment.

Is only recently—during the last five hundred years or so—that society has shifted to a predominantly delayed-return environment.

Time inconsistency: the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time.

The consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.

When the moment of decision arrives, instant gratification usually wins.

Let’s update the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.

Because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction.

Here’s the problem: most people know that delaying gratification is the wise approach.

Thankfully, it’s possible to train yourself to delay gratification—but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it.

The best way to do this is to 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.

HOW TO TURN INSTANT GRATIFICATION TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying.

It can be challenging to stick with habits like “no frivolous purchases” or “no alcohol this month” because nothing happens when you skip happy hour drinks or don’t buy that pair of shoes .

You want to make avoidance visible . Open a savings account and label it for something you want—maybe “Leather Jacket.” Whenever you pass on a purchase, put the same amount of money in the account. Skip your morning latte? Transfer $5. Pass on another month of Netflix? Move $10 over. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself.

It is important to select short-term rewards that reinforce your identity rather than ones that conflict with it.

Eventually, as intrinsic rewards like a better mood, more energy, and reduced stress kick in, you’ll become less concerned with chasing the secondary reward.

How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

Paper Clip Strategy . Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress.

Perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.

The most basic format is to get a calendar and cross off each day you stick with your routine.

“Don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra.

habit tracking

(1) creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, (2) is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don’t want to lose it, and (3) feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit.

JS: Check out Ultrawork's Lights Spreadsheet

What can we do to make tracking easier? First, whenever possible, measurement should be automated.

Second, manual tracking should be limited to your most important habits.

The habit stacking + habit tracking formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].

HOW TO RECOVER QUICKLY WHEN YOUR HABITS BREAK DOWN

No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point.

Try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.

Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.

This is why the “bad” workouts are often the most important ones.

It’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.

KNOWING WHEN (AND WHEN NOT) TO TRACK A HABIT

The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.

Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon. The best way I know to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior.

There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences.

Straightforward way to add an immediate cost to any bad habit: create a habit contract.

THE HABIT CONTRACT

A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through.

Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.

Even if you don’t want to create a full-blown habit contract, simply having an accountability partner is useful.

JS: If you need someone to keep you on task for an hour, check out Focusmate

ADVANCED TACTICS

The truth about talent (when genes matter and when they don’t).

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.

Embracing this strategy requires the acceptance of the simple truth that people are born with different abilities.

Competence is highly dependent on context.

The people at the top of any competitive field are not only well trained, they are also well suited to the task. And this is why, if you want to be truly great, selecting the right place to focus is crucial.

The obvious question is, “How do I figure out where the odds are in my favor? How do I identify the opportunities and habits that are right for me?”

The first place we will look for an answer is by understanding your personality.

HOW YOUR PERSONALITY INFLUENCES YOUR HABITS

The most proven scientific analysis of personality traits is known as the “ Big Five ”

• Openness to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

All five characteristics have biological underpinnings.

Our habits are not solely determined by our personalities, but there is no doubt that our genes nudge us in a certain direction.

The takeaway is that you should build habits that work for your personality.

You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.

HOW TO FIND A GAME WHERE THE ODDS ARE IN YOUR FAVOR

The most common approach is trial and error. Of course, there’s a problem with this strategy: life is short.

Explore/exploit trade-off.

In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration. After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found—but keep experimenting occasionally.

If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.

In the long-run it is probably most effective to work on the strategy that seems to deliver the best results about 80 to 90 percent of the time and keep exploring with the remaining 10 to 20 percent.

Ask yourself:

• What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
• What makes me lose track of time?
• Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
• What comes naturally to me?

When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.

Specialization is a powerful way to overcome the “accident” of bad genetics.

Even if you’re not the most naturally gifted, you can often win by being the best in a very narrow category.

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR GENES

Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.

People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.

genes can’t make you successful if you’re not doing the work.

The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

The way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”

The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.

And if you hit the Goldilocks Zone just right, you can achieve a flow state .

HOW TO STAY FOCUSED WHEN YOU GET BORED WORKING ON YOUR GOALS

“At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.

Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”

Variable rewards: The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure.

Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

The Downside of Creating Good Habits

Habits create the foundation for mastery..

But the benefits of habits come at a cost.

When you can do it “good enough” on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.

The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.

Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

Although habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time, so you can continue to refine and improve.

It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill—right when things are starting to feel automatic and you are becoming comfortable—that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency. The solution? Establish a system for reflection and review.

Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them.

Personally, I employ two primary modes of reflection and review. Each December, I perform an Annual Review , in which I reflect on the previous year.

• What went well this year?
• What didn’t go so well this year?
• What did I learn?

Six months later, when summer rolls around, I conduct an Integrity Report .

• What are the core values that drive my life and work?
• How am I living and working with integrity right now?
• How can I set a higher standard in the future?

These two reports don’t take very long—just a few hours per year—but they are crucial periods of refinement.

Our identity can hold us back from making change

One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, “keep your identity small.”

The key to mitigating these losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.

“I’m an athlete” becomes “I’m the type of person who is mentally tough and loves a physical challenge.”

“I’m a great soldier” transforms into “I’m the type of person who is disciplined, reliable, and great on a team.”

When chosen effectively, an identity can be flexible rather than brittle.

The Secret to Results That Last

Can one tiny change transform your life?

The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them.

Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.

That’s the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results.

Buy Atomic Habits on Amazon

Further Reading:

• James Clear's Blog
• Atomic Habits Cheatsheet
• Interview With James Clear - Ground Up Show
• The Importance of Systems
• Tiny Habits Program
• Deep Laziness - ribbonfarm
• Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking

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Book Review

Atomic Habits by James Clear

A Practical Handbook for Personal Change and Growth

Title: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Author: James Clear

Publisher: Random House Business

Genre:  Self-Help

First Publication: 2018

Language:  English

Book Summary: Atomic Habits by James Clear

People think that when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But world-renowned habits expert James Clear has discovered another way. He knows that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions: doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, or holding a single short phone call.

He calls them atomic habits.

In this ground-breaking book, Clears reveals exactly how these minuscule changes can grow into such life-altering outcomes. He uncovers a handful of simple life hacks (the forgotten art of Habit Stacking, the unexpected power of the Two Minute Rule, or the trick to entering the Goldilocks Zone), and delves into cutting-edge psychology and neuroscience to explain why they matter. Along the way, he tells inspiring stories of Olympic gold medalists, leading CEOs, and distinguished scientists who have used the science of tiny habits to stay productive, motivated, and happy.

These small changes will have a revolutionary effect on your career, your relationships, and your life.

Book Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Have you ever struggled to maintain a positive habit or break a negative one? Whether it’s hitting the snooze button every morning or consistently going to the gym, our habits play a major role in shaping our lives. Habits are the building blocks of our daily routines and can greatly impact our overall happiness and success. Fortunately, the power to create and change our habits lies within us. By understanding the science behind habits and implementing effective strategies, we can transform our lives and reach our full potential. This book will guide you on that journey, providing practical tips and insights to help you develop life-changing habits and achieve your goals.

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear is a highly acclaimed self-help book that dives deep into the science of habit formation and provides practical strategies for building good habits and breaking bad ones. Clear draws on a wide range of scientific research, as well as his own personal experiences, to explain how tiny changes in behavior can lead to remarkable results over time. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying mechanisms of habit formation and how to create an environment that supports positive change. With clear, concise writing and actionable advice, “Atomic Habits” is a valuable resource for anyone looking to improve their daily routines and achieve long-term success.

The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make Big Difference

In the first section of “Atomic Habits,” author James Clear delves into the fundamentals of habits, exploring why tiny changes can have a big impact on our lives. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, Clear helps readers understand the science behind habits and how they work on a neurological level. He emphasizes the importance of making small, incremental changes in our behavior rather than trying to overhaul our entire lives at once. By focusing on the small things, Clear argues, we can build momentum and create positive habits that lead to long-term success. With practical advice and actionable strategies, this section of the book lays the foundation for a deeper understanding of the role that habits play in our lives and how we can harness their power to achieve our goals.

The Four Law of Behavior Change

In the next part of Atomic Habits, James Clear outlines the four laws of habits, which are designed to help readers create and maintain long-lasting positive habits.

• The First Law: Make it Obvious – This law involves making the cues of a habit more obvious, as our habits are often triggered by environmental cues. Clear suggests creating obvious cues, such as leaving your running shoes by the door to remind you to exercise.
• The Second Law: Make it Attractive – This law suggests making habits more attractive and enjoyable to increase the likelihood of sticking to them. For example, pairing an unpleasant habit, such as cleaning, with something enjoyable, like listening to music, can make it more attractive.
• The Third Law: Make it Easy – This law is about making habits as easy as possible to do. Clear suggests breaking down habits into small, manageable steps to avoid overwhelming yourself and making it easier to stick to the habit.
• The Fourth Law: Make it Satisfying – This law involves making habits satisfying and rewarding to reinforce the behavior. Clear suggests creating an immediate reward for completing a habit, such as a piece of chocolate after exercising, to make the habit more satisfying.

The First Law: Make it Obvious

This part of “Atomic Habits” focuses on the first law of behavior change: making habits obvious. Clear explains that habits are often hidden in our environment, making them difficult to identify and change. To overcome this, he emphasizes the importance of increasing the visibility of our habits. He suggests tactics such as habit tracking and implementation intentions to help make habits more obvious and increase our awareness of them. Clear also notes the importance of designing our environment to support positive habits, such as removing temptations and cues that trigger negative behaviors. Overall, this section of the book provides actionable strategies for making habits more visible and creating an environment that supports our desired behaviors.

The Second Law: Make it Attractive

The second law delves into the idea of making our habits more attractive. Clear argues that we are more likely to stick to habits that we find enjoyable or satisfying. To make a habit attractive, he suggests adding a bit of pleasure to it, or associating it with something we already find pleasurable. For example, if we want to make a habit of exercising, we can pair it with listening to our favorite music or podcast. Clear also emphasizes the importance of environment in making habits attractive. By designing our environment to make good habits more appealing and bad habits less so, we can make it easier for ourselves to stick to our goals. The key is to make the desired behavior more attractive than the alternative. By doing so, we can transform good habits into something we look forward to, rather than something we dread.

The Third Law: Make it Easy

The third law of behavior change is all about making it easy. Clear explains that the easier a habit is to perform, the more likely it is to become a part of your daily routine. He introduces the idea of “habit stacking,” which involves linking a new habit to an existing one, making it easier to adopt. By reducing the amount of effort required to form a habit, the likelihood of success increases significantly. Clear also emphasizes the importance of environment and context in making a habit easy to perform. He suggests making small changes to one’s surroundings to nudge behavior in the desired direction. Ultimately, this section of Atomic Habits shows the power of simplicity and how making small, easy changes can have a significant impact on habit formation.

The Fourth Law: Make it Satisfying

In the fourth law of behavior change, James Clear introduces the principle that emphasizes the importance of creating a positive and rewarding experience around your habits. When we associate our habits with positive emotions, we’re more likely to repeat them in the future. Clear argues that we should focus on the immediate and intrinsic rewards of our habits rather than the long-term benefits. By doing so, we can create a positive feedback loop where we are motivated to continue our habits because they feel good in the moment. He also explores how to avoid the pitfalls of immediate gratification and how to cultivate a sense of delayed gratification to achieve our long-term goals. Overall, this section highlights the importance of enjoying the process of habit formation and how to create a sense of satisfaction that reinforces our habits.

Advanced Tactics: How to Go From Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

In the final section of “Atomic Habits,” author James Clear discusses advanced tactics for achieving great success. He argues that to truly achieve excellence, we must embrace the idea of “never stop improving” and commit to constant growth. Clear introduces concepts such as “ the Goldilocks Rule ” which emphasizes finding the right level of challenge to continue pushing oneself, as well as the “Four Burners Theory” which urges us to prioritize our goals and make trade-offs in order to achieve them. Additionally, Clear offers tips for creating a supportive environment and developing resilience in the face of setbacks. He highlights the importance of reframing failure as a necessary step towards success and encourages readers to stay committed to their goals even when progress is slow. By applying the principles outlined in this section, readers can take their habits and success to the next level.

Conclusion: The Secret to Result That Lasts

In the conclusion of Atomic Habits, James Clear emphasizes the importance of focusing on the process rather than the end goal. He argues that true success comes from consistently making small improvements over time, rather than expecting overnight transformations. Clear also stresses the need to constantly evaluate and adjust our habits as our circumstances change, and to never become complacent in our progress. He reminds readers that the journey to achieving our goals is just as important as the destination itself, and that developing good habits is the key to sustained success in all areas of life. Ultimately, Atomic Habits provides readers with a practical and comprehensive guide to mastering the art of habit formation, and the conclusion reinforces the importance of persistence, consistency, and patience in achieving lasting results.

Personally, I found Atomic Habits to be an incredibly insightful and practical guide to habit formation. The author’s writing style is engaging and informative, and the strategies outlined in the book are easy to implement in daily life. I particularly appreciated the author’s emphasis on small, incremental changes and the importance of developing a growth mindset.

I highly recommend Atomic Habits to anyone looking to improve their habits and achieve their goals. Whether you’re looking to develop a new skill, improve your health, or achieve success in your personal or professional life, the strategies outlined in this book can help you make meaningful progress towards your desired outcomes. By incorporating the principles of Atomic Habits into your daily life, you can develop the habits and mindset necessary to achieve long-term success and fulfillment.

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Atomic Habits by James Clear: Summary and Lessons

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

Rating: 9/10

Related: The Power of Habit , The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ,  Switch ,  Smarter Faster Better ,  The Willpower Instinct

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Table of Contents

Atomic Habits Short Summary

Atomic Habits by James Clear is the definitive guide on habit change. Learn how to create good habits and break bad ones with a simple step-by-step framework based on the best techniques from behavioral science. Highly practical, a must-read if you’re looking to upgrade your behavior and make the best version of yourself.

Executive Summary

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.

Awareness comes before desire.

A craving is created when you assign meaning to a cue. It can only occur after you have noticed an opportunity.

It is the idea of pleasure that we chase. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action.

With a big enough why you can overcome any how . If your motivation and desire are great enough, you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action – even when friction is high.

Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. To do anything, you must first cultivate a desire for it .

Appealing to emotion is typically more powerful than appealing to reason. Our thoughts and actions are rooted in what we find attractive and not necessarily in what is logical.

Suffering drives progress. The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state. This is also the source of all progress. The desire to change your state is what powers you to take action.

Your actions reveal your true motivations.

Our expectations determine our satisfaction. If the gap between expectations and outcomes is positive (surprise and delight), then we are more likely to repeat a behavior in the future. If the mismatch is negative (disappointment and frustration), then we are less likely to do so.

Feelings come both before and after the behavior. The craving (a feeling) motivates you to act. The reward teaches you to repeat the action in the future:

Cue > Craving (Feeling) > Response > Reward (Feeling)

How we feel influences how we act, and how we act influences how we feel. Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains. Wanting and liking are the two drivers of behavior. If it’s not desirable, you have no reason to do it. Desire and craving are what initiate a behavior. But if it’s not enjoyable, you have no reason to repeat it.

Pleasure and satisfaction are what sustain a behavior. Feeling motivated gets you to act. Feeling successful gets you to repeat.

How to Create a Good Habit

The 1st law: make it obvious.

• Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them
• Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]”
• Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]”
• Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

• Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do
• Join a culture where your desired behavior is normal
• Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

• Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits
• Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier
• Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact
• Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less
• Automate your habits. Invest in technology and one-time purchases that lock in future behavior

The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying

• Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit
• Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits
• Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain”
• Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately

How to Break a Bad Habit

Inversion of the 1st law: make it invisible.

• Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment

Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive

• Reframe your mindset. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits

Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult

• Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits
• Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you

Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying

• Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior.
• Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful

The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

Chapter 1: the surprising power of atomic habits.

A habit is a behavior performed regularly and, in many cases, automatically.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

Success is the product of daily habits . Getting 1% better every day counts for a lot in the long-run. 

The important thing is whether your habits are putting you on the right path. Be concerned with your current trajectory and not with your current results.

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”

If you want better results, forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

Goals vs Systems

• Goals are the results you want to achieve. Systems are the processes that lead to those results
• Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress
• Achieving a goal is a momentary change. Systems solve a problem for good
• Goals restrict happiness, e.g. “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” Systems make you fall in love with the process rather than the product so you don’t have to wait to permit yourself to be happy
• Goals are at odds with long-term progress. Goals are about winning the game. Systems are about continuing to play the game

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Chapter 2: How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

The Three Layers of Behavior Change:

• Outcomes: changing your results, e.g. losing weight. Most of the goals you set are at this level
• Process: changing your habits and systems, e.g. developing a meditation practice. Most of the habits you build live at this level
• Identity: changing your beliefs, e.g. your worldview or self-image. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and biases you hold are associated with this level

The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become .

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. True behavior change is identity change. 

“The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.”

Your identity emerges out of your habits. Repeating a behavior reinforces the identity associated with it.

Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become .

“Each time you write a page, you are a writer. Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician. Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete.”

New identities require new evidence. If you keep casting the same votes you’ve always cast, you’re going to get the same results you’ve always had . 

How to change your identity:

• Decide the type of person you want to be: What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become? Now ask yourself: “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?” For example, the type of person who could write a book is probably consistent and reliable. Now your focus shifts from writing a book (outcome-based) to being the type of person who is consistent and reliable (identity-based)
• Prove it to yourself with small wins: once you have a handle on the type of person you want to be, you can begin taking small steps to reinforce your desired identity

“I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, “What would a healthy person do?” All day long, she would use this question as a guide. She figured if she acted like a healthy person long enough, eventually she would become that person. She was right.”

Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity .

The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs about yourself .

Quite literally, you become your habits.

Chapter 3: How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic . Their ultimate purpose is solving problems as little energy and effort as possible.

Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop of four steps:

• Cue: what triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. The bit of information that predicts a reward
• Craving: the motivational force behind every habit. You don’t crave the habit itself, but the change in state it delivers (e.g. you do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides)
• Response: the actual habit you perform, as a thought or action. Whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and the amount of friction associated with the behavior
• Reward: the end goal of every habit. We chase rewards because they satisfy our cravings and teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future

If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Without the first three steps, a behavior will not occur. Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits :

• Cue: make it obvious
• Craving: make it attractive
• Response: make it easy
• Reward: make it satisfying

We can invert these laws to learn how to break a bad habit :

• Cue: make it invisible
• Craving: make it unattractive
• Response: make it difficult
• Reward: make it unsatisfying

Chapter 4: The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

You don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin. With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing.

That’s why the process of behavior change always starts with awareness . You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.

We need a “point-and-call” system for our personal lives. That’s the origin of the Habits Scorecard , which is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior.

How to create your Habit Scorecard:

• Make a list of your daily habits
• For each habit, ask yourself: “Is this a good, habit, or neutral habit?”
• If it is a good habit, write “+” next to it. For bad habits, write “–”. For neutral, write “=”

If you’re having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, ask yourself: “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be?”

Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad.

Chapter 5: The Best Way to Start a New Habit

The two most common cues that can trigger a habit are time and location . 

Implementation Intention: pairing a new habit with a specific time and location –  “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”

For example: “I will exercise for one hour at 5 p.m. at my local gym.”

Habit Stacking: pairing a new habit with a current habit – “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

For example: “After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.”

The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day . 

You can develop general habit stacks for specific situations:

• “If I see stairs, I will take them instead of the elevator.”
• “When I serve myself, I will always put veggies on my plate first.”

The secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue . Brainstorm a list of your current habits:

• In the first column, write the habits you do each day without fail
• In the second column, write everything that happens to you each day without fail
• Now find the best place to layer your new habit into your lifestyle

Make your cue highly specific and immediately actionable : “After I close the door”; “After I brush my teeth”. 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.

Chapter 6: Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. Habits are context-dependent. Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time. 

Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment :

• Practice guitar more frequently? Place it in the middle of the living room
• Drink more water? Fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them around the house

The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues . Habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue .

It is easier to build new habits in a new environment as you won’t fight old cues. Create new routines in new places, like a different coffee shop or a bench in the park.

If you can’t, rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, and entertainment. 

If your space is limited, divide your room into activity zones : a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating. You can do the same with your digital spaces.

“I know a writer who uses his computer only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every habit should have a home.”

A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.

Chapter 7: The Secret to Self-Control

Once a habit has been formed, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.  

Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself . They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food.

Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you notice something, you begin to want it.

You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. 

In the short-run, you can try to overpower temptation. In the long-run, you become a product of the environment that you live in. 

“I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.”

The best strategy to eliminate bad habits is to cut off at the source. Reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

For example:

• Can’t get any work done? Leave your phone in another room for a few hours
• Watch too much television? Move the TV out of the bedroom

Rather than make it obvious, make it invisible. Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.

People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.

Chapter 8: How to Make a Habit Irresistible

The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming. 

Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop . Every behavior that is highly habit-forming – taking drugs, eating junk food, browsing social media – is associated with higher levels of dopamine. Dopamine is released when you experience pleasure but also when you anticipate it.

It is the anticipation of a reward – not the fulfillment of it – that gets us to take action .

“Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.”

The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.

Temptation Bundling: pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do

• Only listen to podcasts you love while exercising
• Only watch your favorite show while ironing 

How to build your temptation bundling strategy:

• In the first column, write the pleasures you enjoy and the temptations that you want to do
• In the second column, write the tasks you should be doing but often procrastinate on
• Browse your list and link one of your instantly gratifying “ want ” behaviors with something you “ should ” be doing

You can combine temptation bundling with habit stacking:  “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].”

• You want to read the news but need to express more gratitude: “After I get my morning coffee, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened yesterday (need). After I say one thing I’m grateful for, I will read the news (want).”
• You want to check Facebook but need to exercise more: “After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need). After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want).”

Chapter 9: The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us. We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe.

We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups. Each group offers an opportunity to leverage the 2nd Law of Behavior Change and make our habits more attractive:

• Imitating the Close: we pick up habits from the people around us. To build better habits, join a culture where your desired behavior is normal behavior . If you are surrounded by fit people, you’re more likely to consider working out to be a common habit
• Imitating the Many: whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior.  Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves
• Imitation the Powerful: we are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status. If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise , we find it attractive. We are also motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status

Chapter 10: How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive .

We do not desire to smoke cigarettes or check Instagram. At a deep level, we simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, win social acceptance and approval, or achieve status. 

Our habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires . Some reduce stress by smoking a cigarette while others go for a run.

Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it. 

• Cue: You notice that the stove is hot. Prediction: “If I touch it I’ll get burned, so I should avoid touching it.”
• Cue: You see that the traffic light turned green. Prediction: “If I step on the gas, I’ll make it safely through the intersection, so I should step on the gas.”

Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive .

The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them . The prediction leads to a feeling, which is how we normally describe a craving – a feeling, a desire, an urge. 

Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings.

To reprogram your brain to enjoy hard habits, make them more attractive by learning to associate them with a positive experience . Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.

• Exercise. Exercise can be associated with a challenging task that drains energy and wears you down. You can view it as a way to develop skills and strength. Instead of “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast”
• Finance. Saving money is often associated with sacrifice. You can associate it with freedom as living below your current means increases your future means

Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit .

Chapter 11: Walk Slowly, but Never Backward

We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.

“I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.”

• Motion : outlining twenty ideas for articles. Action : sitting down and writing an article
• Motion : search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic. Action : eat a healthy meal

Motion can be useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself .

Motion feels like making progress without running the risk of failure. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done.

The most effective form of learning is practice , not planning. Focus on taking action, not being in motion.

To master a habit, start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. Just practice it. Get your reps in.

Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. 

The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it . What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. It’s the frequency that makes the difference.

Chapter 12: The Law of Least Effort

Human behavior follows the Law of Least Effort. We naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work .

So it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it . 

Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible . 

Rather than trying to overcome friction, r educe the friction associated with good behaviors. When friction is low, habits are easy. 

Optimize your environment to make actions easier. To practice a new habit, choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life. 

Another way is to prime your environment to make future actions easier . 

• Want to exercise? Set out your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag, and water bottle ahead of time
• Want to improve your diet? Chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables and pack them in containers so you have easy access to healthy snacks

To break bad habits, increase the friction associated with bad behaviors . When friction is high, habits are difficult. 

• Watch too much television? Take the batteries out of the remote after each use so it takes an extra ten seconds to turn it back on
• Check your phone too much? Leave it in another room so you must get up to check it

Chapter 13: How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

Habits can be completed in a few seconds but continue to impact your behavior for minutes or hours afterward. It’s easier to continue what you are doing than start something different. 

Many habits occur at decisive moments – choices that are like a fork in the road – and either send you in the direction of a productive day or an unproductive one.

It’s easy to start too big. Excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon. To counteract it, use the Two-Minute Rule :

“When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

Scale down habits into a two-minute version:

• “ Read before bed each night ” becomes “ Read one page ”
• “ Do thirty minutes of yoga ” becomes “ Take out my yoga mat ”

The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start . The actions that follow a new habit can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. You need a “gateway habit”.

Find gateway habits that lead to your desired outcome by mapping your goals on a scale from “very easy” to “very hard.”

• Running a marathon – very hard
• Running a 5K – hard
• Walking ten thousand steps – moderately difficult
• Walking ten minutes – easy
• Putting on your running shoes – very easy

Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes. 

The point is to master the habit of showing up. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.

The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. Standardize before you optimize.

The rule also reinforces the identity you want to build. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be. One minute of reading is better than never picking up a book. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.

Once you’ve mastered showing up, scale your habit back up toward your ultimate goal with habit shaping .

For example, if you want to become an early rise:

• Be home by 10 p.m. every night
• Have all devices turned off by 10 p.m. every night
• Be in bed by 10 p.m. every night 
• Lights off by 10 p.m. every night
• Wake up at 6 a.m. every day

Chapter 14: How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard. 

C ommitment Device: a choice you make in the present that locks in better behavior in the future

• Overeating? Purchase food in individual packages instead of bulk size
• Want to get in shape? Schedule a yoga session and pay ahead of time

Commitment devices are useful because they take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation . They increase the odds that you’ll do the right thing in the future by making bad habits difficult in the present.

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do .

The ultimate way to lock in future behavior is to automate your future habits . Onetime choices – like buying a better mattress or enrolling in an automatic savings plan – deliver increasing returns over time. 

Using technology to automate your habits is the most reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behavior.

“Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy what social media had to offer until Monday morning when she would do it again.”

For example: 

• Cooking: meal-delivery services can do your grocery shopping
• Productivity: social media browsing can be cut off with a website blocker

Chapter 15: The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

Behavior is repeated when the experience is satisfying. For habits to stick, you need to feel immediately successful – even if it’s in a small way .

Habits produce outcomes across time that are often misaligned. The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: “What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.”

Add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and immediate pain to ones that don’t.

In the beginning, make the ending of your habit satisfying so you stay on track. Use reinforcement with an immediate reward to increase the rate of the behavior.

Select short-term rewards that reinforce your identity rather than ones that conflict with it.

For example, rewarding exercise with ice cream is conflicting. Maybe reward yourself with a massage, which is both a luxury and a vote toward taking care of your body.

You can also make avoidance visible . Open a savings account for something you want – like a “Leather Jacket”. The immediate reward of seeing yourself save money toward the jacket feels better than being deprived. You are making it satisfying to do nothing.

Eventually, intrinsic rewards (better mood, more energy, etc.) kick in and you’ll be less concerned with chasing the secondary reward. You do it because it’s who you are. Identity sustains a habit.

Chapter 16: How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.

A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit—like marking an X on a calendar. Don’t break the chain .

Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress.

Whenever possible, automate measurement . Limit manual tracking to your most important habits. Record each measurement immediately after the habit occurs. 

The habit stacking + habit tracking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].”

• After I finish each set at the gym, I will record it in my workout journal
• After I put my plate in the dishwasher, I will write down what I ate

Try to keep your habit streak alive. 

Life will interrupt you at some point. Remind yourself of a simple rule: never miss twice . If you miss one day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible . 

Show up on your bad (or busy) days. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you. Doing something – ten squats or one push-up – is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.

Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system. Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing.

Chapter 17: How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

Behavior is avoided when the experience is painful or unsatisfying. Pain is an effective teacher. The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behavior.

To prevent bad habits and eliminate unhealthy behaviors, add an instant cost to the action to reduce their odds. There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences. As soon as actions incur an immediate consequence, behavior begins to change.

Habit Contract: a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through. Find accountability partners that sign off on the contract with you

An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. Suddenly, you are not only failing to uphold your promises to yourself but also failing to uphold your promises to others .

A habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behavior. It makes the costs of violating your promises public and painful. Knowing that someone else is watching you can be a powerful motivator.

Advanced Tactics: How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

Chapter 18: the truth about talent (when genes matter and when they don’t).

To maximize your odds of success, choose the right field of competition .

Genes cannot be easily changed, which means they provide a powerful advantage in favorable circumstances and a serious disadvantage in unfavorable circumstances. 

Habits are easier when they align with your natural abilities.

Choose the habits that best suit you , not the most popular. Find the version of the habit that brings you satisfaction.

Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle. 

At the beginning of a new activity, you want to explore. In relationships, it’s called dating. You want to try out many possibilities, research a broad range of ideas, and cast a wide net.

Then, shift focus to the best solution you’ve found—but keep experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you’re winning or losing.

If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.

In the long-run, work on the strategy that delivers the best results about 80 to 90% of the time and keep exploring the remaining 10 to 20% (as per the 80/20 rule ).

To narrow in on the habits and areas that will be most satisfying to you, ask yourself as you explore: 

• What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
• Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
• What comes naturally to me?

Play a game that favors your strengths. 

And if you can’t find a game that favors you, create one . Rewrite the rules. When you can’t win by being better, win by being different . 

A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.

Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. Once you realize your strengths, you know where to spend your time and energy.

Chapter 19 The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.

The Goldilocks Rule: “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.”

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. As habits become routine, they become less interesting and satisfying. We get bored. Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference.  

“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else? At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom . 

Chapter 20: The Downside of Creating Good Habits

The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is that we stop paying attention to little errors and feedback.

Habits alone aren’t sufficient for mastery. You need a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice:

Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

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. Each habit unlocks the next level of performance . It’s an endless cycle. 

You must remain conscious of your performance over time so you can continue to refine and improve. Establish a system for reflection and review to ensure that you spend your time on the right things and make course corrections whenever necessary.

• Annual Review

Each December, reflect on the previous year. Tally your habits and reflect on your progress by answering three questions:

• What went well this year?
• What didn’t go so well this year?
• What did I learn?
• Integrity Report

Six months later, conduct a different review. Revisit your core values and question if you have been living in accordance with them. Answer three questions:

• What are the core values that drive my life and work?
• How am I living and working with integrity right now?
• How can I set a higher standard in the future?

Reflection and review is also the ideal time to revisit your identity .

In the beginning, repeating a habit is essential to build up evidence of your desired identity. As you latch on to that new identity, however, those same beliefs can hold you back from the next level of growth.

The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. Avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. 

Redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes:

• “I’m an athlete” becomes “I’m the type of person who is mentally tough and loves a physical challenge.”
• “I’m the CEO” translates to “I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.”

When chosen effectively, your identity works with the changing circumstances rather than against them.

Your Free PDF

A Visual Book Summary of Atomic Habits by James Clear

What is Atomic Habits about?

Atomic Habits explains how small, repeated actions (habits) compound to change your life. In this visual book summary we'll cover:

• 5 big ideas that will help you hit your goals and change your life ‍
• 4 practical tips you can use to change your habits ‍
• 6 ways I'm personally implementing what I learned from the book

The FREE Habit Worksheet

I put together this free worksheet to help you change your habits. Click on the image below to get it: 

The 5 Big Ideas

1. small repeated habits add up to big changes..

Imagine you’re a pilot flying from Los Angeles to New York City. Just before takeoff you turn right by 3.5 degrees. This tiny change is barely noticeable on the runway. The front of the plane moves only 90 inches. It seems like nothing.

But when you take flight, that small change in direction starts to add up. After flying across the entire United States, you land hundreds of miles away in Washington DC instead of New York City.

Tiny changes in your habits add up in the same way. At the start you can’t see their impact. Over months and years, though, your habits multiply to change your life.

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” page 16

2. Early progress is invisible. Don't get discouraged.

Most of us want fast results—We want to see the impact of a new habit right away. Unfortunately, early progress is hidden.

Imagine an ice cube in a room 10 degrees colder than the melting point of ice. You heat up the room by 1 degree and look at the ice cube. Nothing's changed. You heat the room again—2 degrees. Still nothing. 3 degrees, 4 degrees—nothing. At this point you probably feel like giving up. The work you're doing to heat the room seems pointless.

But if you keep going, you'll eventually hit the melting point. Suddenly you get results—water starts dripping from the ice. With each additional degree, your work compounds. The ice melts faster and faster. All that invisible work is finally paying off.

Habits work the same way. When you start a new habit you don't see immediate results. You might work for days, months, or even years. This long period of work with no results is discouraging—It's why a lot of people give up before they see a difference.

If you stick to a habit for long enough, eventually you'll break through The Plateau of Latent Potential . It’s the critical threshold (like hitting the melting point) where results become suddenly visible.

To the outside world, this looks like an overnight success, but you know the truth. Your sustained effort is finally visible.

3. Goals don't work. Use systems.

Classic productivity advice emphasizes goal setting. Companies use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and people use New Year's Resolutions. With such a strong focus on goals you'd think we'd all be succeeding, but we all know people who've failed to hit their goals (including ourselves!). What's the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails? Hint: it's not their goals.

What we really need is something that makes success inevitable.

Imagine two people trying to start a weekly newsletter. 

Person A writes down their goal, but they’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, so they don’t take action towards achieving it. Person B focuses on the steps to achieve their goal. They create a system:

• Write every morning at 8 AM for 30 minutes
• Edit on Thursdays at 6 PM
• Schedule the email to go out on Monday at 10 AM.

Which person is more likely to start a newsletter?

We don't need better goals. We need better systems.

4. Lasting change is identity change.

There are three layers involved in changing any behavior: identity, process, and outcomes. 

Every single person trying to change thinks about the outcome layer. You know the outcome you want to achieve. For example:

• Stop drinking
• Write a novel

This is the what of behavior change. Most attempts to change start here.

People who start to achieve their goals work on the middle layer—process. They set up a time to go to the gym and plan a new workout routine for when they get there.

Very few people consider the third layer—Identity. This layer involves changing your beliefs about yourself and the world.

As a result, most people try to change habits from the outside in. They focus on what they want without changing their beliefs. Even if they succeed, beliefs from their old identity prevent them from making a lasting change.

If you want to make changes that last don't start with what you want . They start with who you want to become . Start your habit change by changing your identity.

Most of us have self talk that sabotages us. You might too. It's hard to make lasting change if your internal voice is telling you you're not good enough. Making changes that last starts by shifting these limiting beliefs.

If making positive change feels like a struggle, your identity may be blocking you. 

If identity change is so important, what can you do about it? There are two steps:

• Decide who you want to be
• Prove it to yourself with small wins

You can think of every habit and every action as a vote for the person you want to be. Every time you exercise it’s a vote you’re a healthy person. 

When you practice these habits over and over your votes accumulate. This proof starts to shift your identity.

The best part is that you don’t have to be perfect. You just need the majority of the votes.

This is the power of habits. Stick with them long enough and you can actually change your identity.

5. How to build good habits and break bad ones

Ok great, we know we need to repeat tiny habits. But how do you get yourself to take action so you can become who you want to be? The key is to understand what drives your daily habits—The Habit Loop:

This 4 step process is beneath everything you do.

• A cue triggers a craving
• The craving makes you want a reward
• You respond to get that reward
• The reward satisfies your craving

Understanding these 4 steps gives you a blueprint for building good habits and breaking a bad ones. If you want to build a good habit you can:

• Make it Obvious (cue)
• Make it Attractive (craving)
• Make it Easy (response)
• Make it Satisfying (reward)

You can make good habits obvious by:

• Creating visual cues in your environment that prompt you to act
• Setting implementation intentions—"I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]

You can make good habits attractive by

• Temptation bundling—pairing something you want to do with something you need to do
• Joining social groups where your desired behavior is the norm

You can make good habits easy by

• Using the two minute rule—when you start a habit it should take less than 2 minutes to complete
• Focusing on quantity over quality when you're creating something new

You can make good habits satisfying by

• Making rewards immediate after you accomplish a good habit
• Using visual progress and habit tracking to make each action more satisfying

If you want to break a bad habit you can:

• Make it Invisible (cue)
• Make it Unattractive (craving)
• Make it Difficult (response)
• Make it Unsatisfying (reward)

You can make bad habits invisible by:

• Reducing visual cues in your environment for the bad habit
• Spending less time in tempting situations

You can make bad habits unattractive by:

• Highlighting the benefits of avoiding the bad habit

You can make bad habits difficult by:

• Using a commitment device—a one-time choice that locks in your behavior in the future
• Adding friction that makes a bad habit harder to do

You can make bad habits unsatisfying by:

• Adding an accountability partner to create an immediate cost to inaction
• Making failure public and painful by letting people watch your behavior

If you're struggling to change your behavior but don’t know why, the answer can be found somewhere in the 4 laws described above.

4 Practical Tips You Can Use to Create Change

Let's look at some practical tips you can use to apply these ideas in your life.

1. Build an environment filled with visual cues

We all have a deep need to feel in control of our lives. We like to believe we can get what we want by using willpower. This desire blinds us to the most powerful thing we can use to change our habits—our environment. Most of us don't consider changing our environment to make a lasting change in our behavior. As a result, our environment silently changes us.

"Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior" page 82

The strongest cues in your environment come through your primary sense—vision. Seeing a bag of chips on the counter reminds you of their tasty crunch. Seeing your television when you sit on the couch prompts you to put Netflix on. Seeing a notification on your phone nudges you to open Instagram.

"Visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior" page 84

Adding visual cues to your environment is one of the most powerful and overlooked ways to change your behavior. Here are some examples of environmental changes you could make:

• "I want to feel more calm."
• Put a meditation pillow in your living room.
• "I want to be a musician."
• Get a guitar stand and leave a guitar next to your bed
• "I want to floss more."
• Put a habit tracker on your wall in the bathroom

These environmental changes make your goals more obvious (cue) and easy (response). You can use your environment in the opposite way for our bad habits by making them invisible and difficult.

If you recognize the power of your environment, you can design your home and office to help you hit your goals.

"Be the designer of your world, not merely the consumer of it." page 87

2. Focus on quantity over quality

Jerry Uelsmann taught a photography class at the University of Florida. On the first day of class, he decided to run an experiment.

He divided his students into two groups. The first group was the "quantity" group. Their grade would be based solely on the number of photos they produced. 100 photos would get an A, 90 photos a B, 80 photos a C, etc.

The second group was the "quality" group. Their entire grade would be based on the excellence of one photo. To get an A it would need to be nearly perfect.

At the end of the class the best photos came out of the quantity group. These students spent their time running photo tests. They tried different lighting, experimented with lenses, and took photos to test composition.

The quality group behaved differently. They read, studied, and speculated about perfection. By the end of the class they had one mediocre photo and a bunch of unverified theories.

If you want to improve, focus on volume and forget about being perfect. By practicing over and over you'll begin to improve. In the large quantity of work you create, excellence will emerge.

3. Stack your habits

Stanford professor B.J. Fogg invented the idea of Habit Stacking as a part of his Tiny Habits program. It's a way to use the completion of one task as the cue to begin the next one. Rather than trying to keep track of all our habits individually we can use Habit Stacking to do them one after the other.

It starts by picking a habit you're already repeating and planning one to do next.

An example might look like this:

• After I wake up I will meditate
• After I meditate I will brush my teeth
• After I brush my teeth I will exercise
• After I exercise I will shower
• After I shower I will journal
• After I journal I will open my to do list

Building your habits on top of one another can help you build powerful routines. Rather than needing a cue for each behavior you use finishing one to cue the next. These large stacks of habits lead to massive change.

4. Habit tracking

Habit tracking helps you facilitate change because it leverages 3 of The Four Laws of Behavior Change:

Habit tracking makes your habits more obvious by giving you a visual cue that reminds you to perform a habit. You can multiply this effect by putting your habit tracker in the place in your environment where you perform the habit.

Habit tracking makes your habits more attractive by giving you a visual marker of your progress. The results of early progress are invisible, but a habit tracker turns that invisible progress into something you can see.

Habit tracking also makes your habits more satisfying by delivering the joy of checking off an item. It's an immediate pleasure you can get long before you start to see the results of your efforts.

6 Ways I'm Personally Implementing What I Learned From the Book

1. habit tracking sheets: making it obvious.

It may surprise you that the CEO of a digital note taking app uses an analog method to track his monthly habits. I do eventually make my tracking digital, but all my habit tracking starts on printed habit tracking sheets.

Printed habit sheets have one huge advantage over digital tools—I can put them where I'll see them. I put mine next to my mirror in the bathroom where I know I'll see them first thing in the morning.

The habit sheets I use are printed on standard 8.5" x 11" paper. When I first started doing these I'd print new sheets every month. But, I don’t own a printer so I stopped doing them several times because of the friction of printing. Now I have them printed on dry erase paper so I can reuse the same sheets over and over again. I check off each day using a wet erase marker so I don't accidentally erase my progress.

I use a separate sheet for each habit so I get the satisfaction of checking off a big box for each habit. This also allows me to add and remove habit tracking sheets as my priorities change.

Each habit sheet consists of:

• A large satisfying visual
• 31 checkboxes

I try to find a visual that motivates me. The purpose of the visual is to remind me why I started doing this habit in the first place. The example above is meant to remind me of how good it feels to work and live in an organized space. I check off this habit for any action that has to do with keeping my space organized:

• Doing laundry
• Cleaning dishes
• Taking out the trash
• Cleaning and organizing my desk space

I don't have an exact rule, but I'd estimate I try to do at least 10 minutes of organizing each day to earn a check mark. It's often more, but keeping the requirement low helps me stick to the habit. This is my wife's favorite habit. :)

My current sheets are:

• Loving Kindness—hand on my heart, take a deep breath, and say "Good morning Andrew, I love you."
• Peace of Mind—20 minutes of morning meditation
• Fitness—10+ minutes of exercise
• Organization—10+ minutes organizing my home/workspace
• Take the Initiative—reach out to a friend and suggest something social
• Voice—share something interesting or useful (usually a tweet)
• Healthy Gums—floss before bed

Here's what they look like:

I am far from perfect on hitting all these habits. It used to really bother me when I'd miss even a single day. There's a trick I've been using to stay motivated when I miss days.

2. Staying Motivated When I Miss

I recently started drawing a heart on days that I miss. It's a reminder to love myself even on the days when I don't get my habits done. This was my wife's idea and it's genius.

I used to look at a 31 day goal sheet with 1-2 missed days and see failure. This seems insane in retrospect, but I think it's pretty common. If you're still reading this blog post you are probably a bit of a perfectionist like me. I encourage you to try this technique and give yourself forgiveness on days that you miss.

It feels good to put something kind on those missed days, and it keeps me paying attention to the sheets. This December I missed a ton of days between Christmas and New Years while traveling to see family. I was able to see some habit sheets that were ~40% hearts and still consider them a win.

3. Making It Satisfying—Celebrating Each Checkmark

Every time I check off a habit I do a little physical celebration. It could be looking at myself in the and saying "hell yeah," or just doing a fist pump.

It sounds silly, and that's good. Sometimes I laugh out loud at how ridiculous this is when I do it. This little physical celebration makes it feel even better to check something off. It gives me a fun, immediate reward that keeps me coming back to check off items again.

4. Habit Stacking in the Morning

I try to check off as many of my habit sheets as I can first thing in the morning by stacking my habits. My ideal morning habit stack looks like this:

• After I wake up I will stand in front of the mirror, put my hand on my heart, and say "Good morning Andrew, I love you."
• After I give myself a little love I will meditate for 20 minutes
• After I meditate I will go downstairs and exercise
• After I exercise I will come upstairs and shower
• After I shower I will spend a little time organizing the house
• After I organize the house I will go get a morning coffee
• After I get coffee I will sit down with my laptop and open my To Do list in Thunk Notes

There are a couple of things on this list that I do on purpose:

• My very first habit is very easy and it takes less than 30 seconds
• I try to do meditation early because it's a habit I have a much harder time fitting in later in the day

5. Audience Building—Focusing on Quantity and the Long Term

One big change I'm trying to make after reading the book is focusing on quantity over quality. My natural tendency is to work on something until I think it's as good as I can make it. It's a tendency that's directly at odds with the ideas from the book.

One of my goals this year is to grow the audience for Thunk Notes . There are two big changes I'm trying to make to increase my odds of hitting that goal:

• Focus on quantity over quality
• Focus on long-term over short term

I'm starting by scheduling tweets to go out every Wednesday for the entire year. Once I'm done I'm going to come back and do Monday, then Thursday. My goal is to see how quickly I can get a full year of tweets scheduled to go out 3 times per week.

6. Making It Satisfying—Managing My Tasks in Thunk Notes

To accomplish my Twitter goal, I'm using our to do lists in Thunk Notes to break this down into smaller tasks. Our new to do list helps make progress more visible by showing progress as you check off an item's sub-tasks.

Thank you for checking out this visual summary. If you found anything useful here, please share this with someone you know who's might benefit. If you have any feedback, please let me know on Twitter.

If you've read this whole article, you should definitely check out my free habit worksheet . It gives you a set of actionable advice you can use to change your habits.

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Atomic Habits Book Review: Is It Worth Reading?

POSTED ON Oct 1, 2023

Written by Sarah Rexford

If you’re unfamiliar with the Atomic Habits book now is the time to review it. A New York Times bestseller , with over one million copies sold, this book has influenced countless readers. Clear’s nonfiction work largely contributes to the success of those dedicated to becoming one percent better every day. Creatives, entrepreneurs, and authors can use his principles to accomplish better work in less time.

This article is an in-depth review of Atomic Habits , James Clear’s phenomenal book on the power of habits to transform your life. Let's dive into Atomic Habits, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones . 

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Atomic Habits book: article breakdown

Atomic habits summary.

Whether you will listen to the Atomic Habits audiobook on your commute or read the physical copy, here's a sneak peek of the Atomic Habits book. I’ve found it is helpful to read a summary of a book before I delve into the topic itself. 

Introduction

James Clear begins his Atomic Habits book with an in-your-face (quite literally) first sentence that compels you to continue reading: “On the final day of my sophomore year of high school, I was hit in the face with a baseball bat.” 

This vulnerable introduction preps the reader with background for what plunged Clear into developing his own healthy habits. After setting the scene and sharing what you, the reader, will learn from his own life lessons, the A tomic Habits book begins with chapter one. 

The fundamentals

Before committing to read best business books like Atomic Habits , it’s helpful to understand the fundamental reasons you should. In fact, Clear spends the first three chapters of the Atomic Habits book doing just that: he shares the power of these types of habits, how they shape you, and overviews the four steps he discusses throughout the book. 

The 1st law

The first step, or law, of what Clear calls atomic habits is to make your habit obvious . For instance, if you want to establish a habit of practicing gratitude, you may want to set a gratitude journal in a location you will see every single day. 

The 2nd law

James Clear’s second law is to make your habit attractive , even irresistible. He briefly overviews how friends and family influence our habits as well as pinpoints the root of bad habits and how to fix them.

The 3rd law

Third, make your habit easy . If you want to accomplish big goals, this habit may sound counterintuitive. You may ask, “How can easy habits help me reach big goals? You’ll want to spend some focused time on this law (chapters 11-14) to familiarize yourself with how small steps can create big results.  

The 4th law

The Atomic Habits book finishes its laws by encouraging you to make your habit satisfying . I expand on this below, but essentially, you want your habits to satisfy you so you actually stick with them.  

Advanced tactics 

For the overachiever, the one who truly wants to max out on their potential, you will love these final three chapters. Subtitled, How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great, James Clear covers exactly that. 

What are the 4 principles of Atomic Habits ?

The four principles of the Atomic Habits book are: make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Sound familiar? You just read them above, but repetition is the mother of learning, so let’s discuss these laws, or principles, in greater detail.

1. Make it obvious

The starting point for the Atomic Habits book lies in James Clear’s simple statement: “Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing.”

To establish great habits, habits that create lasting change in your life, it’s crucial to make your habits obvious . Clear states that the process of behavior starts with awareness, so good habits begin with awareness of current habits.

Once you know your current habits and the habits you want to make, make your new habit obvious. 

If you want to write more regularly, make this habit obvious. Let’s say every morning you make loose leaf tea. Consider choosing from a list of daily journals for writers and then journaling a few sentences while your tea steeps.  

2. Make it attractive 

Next up, make your habit attractive . Again, if you want to build a healthy habit of working out five days a week, you can make your habit obvious by laying out your gym clothes the night before. But how do you make physical exertion attractive? 

In 1954, neuroscientists discovered the actual process behind what people crave and what they desire. They discovered that without dopamine there is zero desire, and without desire there is zero action. 

When making a habit attractive, choose to pair the habit you want to form with an aspect of life you desire.

I find it helpful to reserve specific TV shows for my workouts. I allow myself to watch the show (something I desire) while I workout (a habit I want to continue forming). 

3. Make it easy

This law is not equivalent to only taking action if the task is easy, but making the task easy to act on. For instance, if you want to live in a more organized environment, how can you make this goal easy to achieve? 

Years ago I watched a YouTuber explain that when she comes home after a long day, she refused to throw her coat on the couch. If she did, she’d have to pick it up a second time to put it away. 

Effectively, by not putting the coat away immediately, she would have to put twice the effort into the same goal.   

This idea stuck with me. I simply apply the rule to the various objects I engage with. When I’m done working, I reorganize my desk. When I come home, I hang my coat up. When I'm doing cooking, I do the dishes.

The Atomic Habits book creates easy answers to sometimes complicated obstacles. What’s one choice you can make easier to execute? 

4. Make it satisfying 

If you want to persevere with your goal, you need to create results that satisfies you. For example, let’s say you want to invest in some book writing help . Your thought process goes something like this, “ I wrote a book! Now what? I don’t have extra finances to invest in publishing.” 

Your goal is to save up to publish your book. For many people, saving isn’t satisfying in the short term. Let’s say you love buying new books though. Instead of purchasing a new book, borrow one from your local library. 

Every time you borrow a book instead of purchasing one, put the money you saved into a savings account you call “Book Fund” or something similar. Over time, this perseverance creates a sum of money you can put toward publishing your book and achieving your goal. 

In the long run, you will even qualify yourself in how to write about perseverance in a way that impacts your readers.

Is Atomic Habits about ADHD?

While the Atomic Habits book is not specifically about ADHD, it does cover methods that can help if you struggle coping in this area. ADHD can make it difficult to maintain a healthy routine. Daily tasks become a challenge to overcome. 

Reading the Atomic Habits book could help you because it: 

• Identifies healthy habits
• Shows small (atomic) ways to achieve the habits
• Creates a reward system for the one making the habit

Additionally, once you build strong, healthy, atomic habits, you can achieve far-reaching results. Atomic habits, linked together, can help you:

• Write that job application in much less time than it would previously take
• Listen to a podcast episode (such as Using Atomic Habits to write and publish a book ) with focus 
• Keep your car organized and clean 

Whether you want to apply for your dream job or learn how to write a motivational book or how to write a self-help book , the Atomic Habits book provides actionable steps, even if you struggle with ADHD. 

How to apply the concept of atomic habits to the book writing process 

As a writer, chances are you want to read the Atomic Habits book and apply it to your own writing goals. From coming up with your main theme, to book launch ideas , to author book signings and appearances , your early habits matter.

In his interview with Chandler Bolt, James Clear discusses the positive results of using Atomic Habits to write and publish a book . 

Clear states that it took him five years to ideate and then finally complete the Atomic Habits book. Throughout the process, Clear and his team chose to take action on the very ideas people know work.

However, instead of just going through the motions, they chose to upscale these ideas in a big way. 

Email list 

Upon signing his book deal for the Atomic Habits book, James Clear had roughly 200,000 subscribers. He grew this list to about 440,000 by the time the book officially released. At the time of his podcast recording with Chandler Bolt, Clear’s list was over one million. His small efforts created tremendous results.

Book Announcement 

About ten weeks before his book came out, James Clear announced its pending release. This announcement drove pre-orders, but he didn’t linger too long on his announcement. Instead of over-promoting his book, he went back to writing his standard articles. One small change aided the success of his launch.

Bonus packages 

Just two weeks before the Atomic Habits book was released, Clear made another announcement: a suite of bonus packages. Looking back, Clear says he likely wouldn’t repeat this step. While it boosted sales by about 700 copies, the investment didn’t have the payoff he had hoped for. 

Emails during launch week 

Launch week is busy for writers, and this fact applied to James Clear just like it does the rest of us. During launch week he sent four emails to his newsletter list:

• Monday (day before release): an excerpt of the Atomic Habits book
• Tuesday (day of release): Layered his CBS This Morning interview into his email
• Wednesday: break
• Thursday: Another excerpt
• Friday: Last call, bonuses ending, etc. 

Tip: Refuse the urge to stop promoting your book once your release week ends. Instead, put focused effort into continually marketing your new title.

Podcasts 

James Clear recorded 75 podcasts and asked the hosts to release them around the time the Atomic Habits book came out. Podcast hosts released all 75 recordings in the ten days surrounding the Atomic Habits book release, making for a compelling launch with podcasts alone. Not stopping here, over the following six months, Clear engaged in 200 interviews. 

Influencer copies

Before he published his book, Clear reached out to the various influencers he hoped would support him. He sent them a primer on his book and offered to send them a copy if they were interested. This way, he secured influencer support and only sent copies to those truly interested. 

It’s important to note that while James Clear sent the Atomic Habits book to influencers who opted in, he never asked them to promote his book. Instead, he chose influencers he believed would benefit, whose audiences would benefit, and hoped the quality of his book would do the rest of the work. 

Related: How Much Money Can You Make From Writing a Self-Help?

What is the main point of Atomic Habits ?

The main point of the Atomic Habits book is the power that small changes have on large goals. James Clear focuses on two primary points throughout his book: the importance of small habits as well as how crucial it is to choose where you put your focus (hint: it’s not on goal-setting). 

Small habits 

Clear titled his Atomic Habits book appropriately. The smallest of habits can yield massive results. Throughout his book, James Clear stresses how vital small, daily habits are. 

For example, if you want to become physically healthy, you can start with:

• Saying no to the small things (like the extra cookie) 
• Saying yes to the small things (like walking instead of taking the elevator) 

One of the reasons the Atomic Habits book seems to impact so many readers is because of its accessible message. You don’t need to completely overhaul your life to create change. You can start with small, atomic habits that point you in the right direction. 

Systems over goals 

My favorite quote from the Atomic Habits book is a simple statement: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

James Clear encourages readers to create atomic habits that focus on the system of how you do a task rather than the end goal you hope to accomplish. 

Let’s say your goal is to turn your book into a speech for further promotion. Let’s also imagine you are a morning person. If you choose to work on creating a speech from your book every night when you can barely keep your eyes open, you will fall to the level of your system. Instead, rise to the level of your goals by creating atomic habits that aid you. 

Is the Atomic Habits book worth reading?

For anyone hoping to develop or maintain healthy habits, the Atomic Habits book is worth the time investment to read. While you could choose to spend your time trying to make your current system work, I encourage you to dedicate specific time every day to reading this book.

Implementing these small habits will likely save you time in the long run. 

Even if you feel you are a master at healthy habits, the Atomic Habits book is a great example of how to write about serious topics . At times, everyone struggles to live the life they want to live. 

James Clear calls this difficulty out by sharing his own story, creating small, actionable steps to help, and encouraging readers on every page. While the topic is more serious than, say, a children’s story or cookbook, Clear makes a difficult message available to the average reader. 

Change can feel difficult, but with the proper guidance and habits, anyone can take steps to lead the life they want to.

Related: 14 Books Like Atomic Habits To Read Next

Now it's time for you to move forward with what you just learned from the Atomic Habits book. You can use the Atomic Habits book to change your life and build the writing habits you need to reach your goals. But life change starts with one small step, or dare I say, one small atomic habit. You've got this!

Did you enjoy this review? Read other book reviews done by the selfpublishing.com team!

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• A Review of the Prince Harry Memoir, Spare
• Book Review of The War of Art
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Book review : atomic habits.

No matter your goals,  Atomic Habits  offers a proven framework for improving–every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. Goodreads

Atomic Habits came highly recommended from many people I know and from the Twitterverse. Reading the book, though, was a bit of a mixed experience.

I really like the accessible, informal tone of the book. It felt like a long blog post written by a friend rather than reading a ~250 page long book. There isn’t a lot of “scholarly” pretension anywhere in the book, though James undoubtedly knows what he is talking about very deeply from an academic perspective too.

He builds out a nice 4 point framework for building habits and explains some good practices built around behavioural trigger that can help us reshape our lives.

The most powerful takeaways for me were:

• Think in terms of processes and journeys rather than fixed, boolean goals.
• Tiny changes add up over time.

Neither of these are new ideas by any means – the agile process is essentially the former and compound interest the latter – but somehow neither is very intuitive to us and they are where I think most people fail over the long term. James reiterates these points many, many times in the book, and cautions against the big-bang success narratives riddled with survivorship bias.

Atomic Habits is a great book if you are looking for something prescriptive which will lay out a bunch of do’s and dont’s for creating new habits and breaking old ones. It is full of directly actionable advice.

My problem with the book is actually what I mentioned above – there are no new ideas in this book. I was looking to learn more deeply about how habits work with respect to the human mind and psychology. I realized that this was the wrong expectation only after I a long way into the book. Even so, I came away from the book without the feeling of having “learnt” anything. There are no really new or groundbreaking ideas here. The book is essentially a “practitioner’s guide” of the many years James has spent learning and talking about the subject. Thinking Fast, and Slow is a better book for those who want a deeper study of the mind.

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Here are my highlights from reading “Atomic Habits”. This is not a summary of the book. James does that himself by giving very succinct summaries at the end of each chapter. These are just some passages from the book that stood out for me.

• In the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
• It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.
• Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
• Be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
• Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
• Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
• Mastery requires patience.
• Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
• If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
• Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
• Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
• We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.
• Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
• The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
• When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
• The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
• An atomic habit is a little habit that is part of a larger system.
• Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.
• There are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits. Behaviour that is incongruent with the self will not last.
• The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
• True behaviour change is identity change.
• The real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way.
• Your habits are how you embody your identity.
• The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
• Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well.
• Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
• Work backward from the results you want to the type of person who could get those results.
• Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in every moment.
• “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
• One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing.
• People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit.
• Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.
• The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
• Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
• Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one.
• If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is because you lack self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person.
• Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.
• Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time.
• It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
• Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
• Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle . Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
• Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
• Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
• Habits are all about associations.
• The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving—a feeling, a desire, an urge.
• Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity.
• A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.2 It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.
• Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.
• The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
• Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and simple.
• Mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
• We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.
• The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.
• You value the present more than the future.
• A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future.
• The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
• Let’s update the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
• In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself. In the real world, good habits tend to feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with something.
• Use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of a behavior.
• Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
• Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity.
• Habit tracking also helps keep your eye on the ball: you’re focused on the process rather than the result.
• The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
• The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.
• Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you.
• The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behavior.
• People are born with different abilities.
• Our environment determines the suitability of our genes and the utility of our natural talents.
• Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.
• The takeaway is that you should build habits that work for your personality.
• Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
• A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.
• Work hard on the things that come easy.
• The Goldilocks principle 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.
• A flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” and fully immersed in an activity. Scientists have tried to quantify this feeling. They found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability.
• At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.
• Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Once the beginner gains have been made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade.
• The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us.
• Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
• Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.
• 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.
• When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.
• Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

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3 thoughts on “Book Review : Atomic Habits”

Hello Kislay verma..! You have highlighted the most important point of the books.As a reader always I expect this,so that I get a pure idea about the book and under purpose of the books. BTW I also write review you can check it out here – https://healthybookish.com/atomic-habit-book-review/

Great review, Kislay. For me it was one of those books, which should have been a blog and you have written that. So, thank you. Please write a few hundred of these and the humanity will thank you for saving millions of hours which can be spent in reading real books.

The power of habit explains the science behind habits a lot better. While you are at it, do read the tell-tale brain. Most psychology bits are explained by evolution. The remaining parts are better explained by biology 🙂

Beautiful book review!

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Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones Hardcover – October 16, 2018

Purchase options and add-ons

• make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
• overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;
• design your environment to make success easier;
• get back on track when you fall off course;
• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Avery
• Publication date October 16, 2018
• Dimensions 6.33 x 1.07 x 9.29 inches
• ISBN-10 0735211299
• ISBN-13 978-0735211292
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writ­ing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth- shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable —but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little dif­ference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent. This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment. If you save a little money now, you’re still not a million­aire. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines. Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss. But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little ex­cuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumu­lation of many missteps—1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem. The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magni­fied across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart. Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the differ­ence between who you are and who you could be. Success is the prod­uct of daily habits—not once‑in‑a‑lifetime transformations. That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your cur­rent trajectory than with your current results. If you’re a millionaire but you spend more than you earn each month, then you’re on a bad trajectory. If your spending habits don’t change, it’s not going to end well. Conversely, if you’re broke, but you save a little bit every month, then you’re on the path toward financial freedom—even if you’re mov­ing slower than you’d like. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat. If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny bat­tles like these are the ones that will define your future self. Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy. Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up, which is why understanding the details is crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avery; First Edition (October 16, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735211299
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735211292
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.09 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.33 x 1.07 x 9.29 inches
• #1 in Personal Transformation Self-Help
• #2 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
• #3 in Parenting (Books)

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About the author

James clear.

James Clear is a writer and speaker focused on habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. The book has sold over 5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

Clear is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work has been featured in places like Time magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on CBS This Morning. His popular "3-2-1" email newsletter is sent out each week to more than 1 million subscribers.

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Atomic Habits - by James Clear

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The aggregation of marginal gains: searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. It's easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. But our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps. Choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. You get what you repeat. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks. If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. Fall in love with the process rather than the product. A systems-first mentality beats a goal-oriented mind-set. Runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. “Identity” derived from the Latin “essentitas”, which means being, and “identidem”, which means repeatedly. Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want? Who is the type of person that could lose forty pounds? Who is the type of person that could learn a new language? A habit is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past. When you have your habits dialed in and the basics of life are handled and done, your mind is free to focus on new challenges. If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future. Without the first three steps, a behavior will not occur. Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated. The cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and, ultimately, becomes associated with the cue. How to Create a Good Habit: 1 (Cue): Make it obvious 2 (Craving): Make it attractive 3 (Response): Make it easy 4 (Reward): Make it satisfying How to Break a Bad Habit: 1 (Cue): Make it invisible 2 (Craving): Make it unattractive 3 (Response): Make it difficult 4 (Reward): Make it unsatisfying The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. The cues that spark our habits become so common that they are essentially invisible. Begin the process of behavior change with awareness. Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones. Make a list of your daily habits. There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way - even the bad ones - which is why you repeat them. Categorize your habits by how they will benefit you in the long run. Good habits will have net positive outcomes. Bad habits have net negative outcomes. Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real. Create an implementation intention: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.” People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. 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. When the moment of action occurs, there is no need to make a decision. Simply follow your predetermined plan. Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing. Temptation bundling is one way to create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. To build a new habit, identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” Social skills: When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet. Finances: When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing. Healthy eating: When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first. Minimalism: When I buy a new item, I will give something away. People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you. Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. Think about your environment as filled with relationships - not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. Train yourself to link a particular habit with a particular context. Habits can be easier to change in a new environment. It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues. Want to think more creatively? Take a break from the space where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought patterns. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise. One space, one use. 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 behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable. 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted once they return home from rehab to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place. Practice self-restraint not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment. Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away. Every behavior that is highly habit-forming is associated with higher levels of dopamine. Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. It is the anticipation of a reward - not the fulfillment of it - that gets us to take action. Daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. The brain allocates a lot of space to the regions responsible for craving and desire. Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response. The Polgar sisters grew up in a culture that prioritized chess above all else - praised them for it, rewarded them for it. In their world, an obsession with chess was normal. Whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find. We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them. We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful. Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have. 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. Every action is preceded by a prediction. Life feels reactive, but it is actually 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. A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be. What you really want is to feel different. Reframe your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks. Instead of telling yourself “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast.” Living below your current means increases your future means. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. Motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. To master a habit, start with repetition, not perfection. Habit formation: It doesn’t matter if it’s been thirty days or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. Addition by subtraction: look for every point of friction and eliminate it. Subtract wasted effort to achieve more with less effort. Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy. Prime your environment so it’s ready for immediate use. Decisive moments set the options available to your future self. 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. When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. Master the habit of showing up. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. 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. You’re becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. Cut down on eating? Ask the waiter to split my meal and box half of it to go before the meal is served. A woman who had a narcissistic relative who drove her nuts. In an attempt to spend less time with this egomaniac, she acted as dull and as boring as possible whenever he was around. Within a few encounters, he started avoiding her because he found her so uninteresting. The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future. What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. 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. The ending of any experience is vital because we tend to remember it more than other phases. You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying. 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. Visual measures - like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles - provide clear evidence of your progress. They reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity. The best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker. Don’t break the chain of creating every day and you will end up with an impressive portfolio. Record each measurement immediately after the habit occurs. The completion of the behavior is the cue to write it down. The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it. People who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not. Habit tracking keeps you honest. Most of us have a distorted view of our own behavior. We think we act better than we do. Measurement offers one way to overcome our blindness to our own behavior and notice what’s really going on. One glance and you immediately know how much work you have (or haven’t) been putting in. If I miss one day, a simple rule: never miss twice. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all. 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. Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity. The all-or-nothing cycle of behavior change is just one pitfall that can derail your habits. When a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Babies who turn toward noise are more likely to grow up to be extroverts. Those who turn away are more likely to become introverts. Understand your nature to better your strategy. Genes tell you where the odds are in your favor. Work on tasks of just manageable difficulty. The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty : roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability. Successful weightlifting comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over. Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life. 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. Peak performance = getting slightly better each day. 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. Review the choices at the end of each month or year to see where you were correct and where you went wrong. I perform an Annual Review, in which I reflect on the previous year. I tally my habits for the year by counting up how many articles I published, how many workouts I put in, how many new places I visited. What went well this year? What didn’t go so well this year? What did I learn? Revisit your core values and consider whether you have been living in accordance with them. What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future? Your identity creates a kind of “pride” that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing. 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. The veteran who is committed to doing things “his way.” The band who produces a mind-blowing first album and then gets stuck in a rut. The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. Avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. Keep your identity small. Happiness is simply the absence of desire. Happiness is when you have no urge to feel differently - when you no longer want to change your state. Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming. Suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it. Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems - if you do not desire to act on what you observe. Craving is about wanting to fix everything. We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional. The primary mode of the brain is to feel; the secondary mode is to think. This is one reason why appealing to emotion is typically more powerful than appealing to reason. If a topic makes someone feel emotional, they will rarely be interested in the data. This is why emotions can be such a threat to wise decision making. Resisting temptation: just ignore it. It creates space for the craving to pass. Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy it. New plans offer hope because we don’t have any experiences to ground our expectations. New strategies seem more appealing than old ones because they can have unbounded hope. Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance. The first time an opportunity arises, there is hope of what could be. Your expectation (cravings) is based solely on promise. The second time around, your expectation is grounded in reality. You begin to understand how the process works and your hope is gradually traded for a more accurate prediction and acceptance of the likely outcome.