Book Summary: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
There are few books out there that I consider life-changing. That I come back to again and again, continuously gaining wisdom from them. Atomic Habits is one of them.
I don’t think I’ve gone a day without thinking about this book since I read it in November. It has had a tremendous impact on my life, and I recommend it to almost anyone looking for a new book to read. That being said, I wanted to recap some of the insights I learned from reading the book.
What are habits?
A habit is simply a routine or behavior that you perform regularly. Most people already have tons of habits, many of which you don’t even notice. There are many things that I do every day that I wouldn’t necessarily call a “habit”.
For example, one negative habit about myself that I noticed after reading Atomic Habits was that every time I went into the kitchen, I would open up the pantry. This was definitely a habit that led to me snacking way more throughout the day, made all too easy by working remotely.
Small habits like that compound over time. This can have both a positive and a negative effect.
The way you look, your finances, and your job performance are all accumulations of the work that you put in each day. A single salad won’t make you lose weight, but eating a salad every day for a year may make a difference.
Much like compounding interest, if you incrementally improve just a tiny amount each day, that adds up to a huge improvement over the course of time. However, this also can result in the opposite problem when you get incrementally worse each day. Focusing on getting just a tiny bit better, instead of trying to make a huge leap towards improving (ex., I’m going to walk for 10 minutes a day vs. I’m going to start running 5 miles per day) is more likely to be successful.
How do you form habits?
Contrary to what many clickbait articles may tell you, there isn’t a magic number of days that it takes to form a habit. In fact, it isn’t about time at all. It’s about frequency. The more you do something, the more likely it is to become a habit.
It’s important to focus on building a system of habits, instead of setting goals.
This is something that I have definitely struggled with in the past. If I wanted to become a runner, for example, I would set the goal to complete a marathon. Woohoo! That sounds great! However, what happens once the marathon is complete? Assuming I even get to that point.
Instead, a better habit would be to run every day. It doesn’t have to be much at first, maybe 5 or 10 minutes, just to flex the muscle of going for a run. But eventually, if you do a little bit every day (or in the case of strenuous exercise, a few days per week) it will become a habit and will be easier to keep up the momentum of completing the task.
Your goal instead, then, should be to “become a runner” instead of “to run a marathon”. By building this into your identity of yourself you don’t set up an end date or a finish line, which can easily break habits once they are reached.
One way to make it easier to form a habit is to be more specific about where and when the habit will take place. By being specific, you will be more likely to complete the habit.
For example, each day I walk on the treadmill in my garage after my daughter goes to bed. The goal is specific, and building that into my daily routine allows me to stack the habit of “walk on the treadmill” with the “put daughter to bed” habit.
Finishing one habit can lead to performing the next habit, called habit stacking. For example, going to the bathroom and then washing your hands. Or putting on your pajamas and then brushing your teeth. Or opening the pantry and then eating a snack. When you stack habits together, you can lead from one habit to the next without even thinking about it.
Chasing your limits
Finally, there’s my favorite quote from the entire book. “People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.”
This speaks to me on so many different levels. I’ve always assumed that I am the type of person to not finish things. If you see my OneNote folder dedicated to half-baked side project plans you would understand why.
I’ve had this assumption about myself for such a long time, that it often makes me not want to start something new for fear of not finishing it. This is something I’ve been challenging myself on recently. For example, finishing a re-write of my website, which is something I had been wanting to do, but had been putting off for a while, as evidenced by my 3 years now without new blog entries.
This book has easily become one of my favorites, and there are so many more insights I have gained from it than I will ever be able to put on a page.
I also highly recommend checking out James Clear’s website as well. His weekly newsletter is excellent and he has way more content available online that I love to look through and add to my never-ending list of articles to read.