There are a lot of self improvement books out there for people who are looking to improve. There are actually so many books, courses, and videos to watch that it would take an entire lifetime to consume them all. On top of that, the typical kind of person who is looking to improve is the exact kind who falls prey to “consumer mentality”, forever jumping from one book to the other.
Unfortunately for them, simply reading things does little in terms of tangible improvement. Sure, you get fresh ideas in your head on how to think and what to do, but that simply isn’t enough and sometimes you forget the things you’ve read if you don’t put them into a higher plane of memory by utilizing those things through action.
This is a conundrum that is affecting a lot of the youth right now. I’ve seen personally how computer programmers, particularly entry level candidates or fresh college graduates, forever undervalue their own skills and jump from resource to resource, getting caught in what the industry calls “tutorial hell”. We think it’s lack of information that prevents us from improvement when that’s simply not the case. Our problem is lack of action ON the information.
Keeping this in mind, we need to be vigilant when we see titles such as “These 5 books will make you a millionaire” or “Read this book to fix your life”1 because, in all likelihood, the books will not do much if we do not implement what we learn into our lives. Keeping this in mind, however, I would like to talk about one particular book that I think is special. It analyzes the simplest things that all people have: habits.
This book rightly points out that a life is just a series of actions and most of our actions are determined by the habits we have. And these habits do not necessarily need to be physical. We have mental habits as well. Little shortcuts of thinking we make that determine what we do in the world. According to the book, if we become aware of what these habits may be and replace them with healthier versions of them, we can make tremendous changes in our lives with some time. These changes do not need to be big. They can be microscopic. They can be… atomic. Let’s talk about James Clear’s wonderful book: Atomic Habits.
What makes Atomic Habits special?
I’ve found that most books on self improvement are very abstract and offer little practicality. They talk about big ideas that are nice to hear but there’s no identifiable path forward through the ideas. On the other hand, Atomic Habits talks about the simplest, yet most important thing that defines our lives: our habits. Life can be measured through actions. If you had done a set of different actions in the last 3 years, you would be in a totally different situation right now, for better or for worse. This is the variability of life.
Our habits dictate our actions and hence can define why you are where you are and where you might be going, given your current trajectory. Atomic Habits chooses to focus on this simple thing completely and gives you golden nuggets after golden nuggets of valuable ideas about it. The ideas are rooted in human psychology and the author draws from his own personal experiences as well as real world examples to support all of his claims.
The result is an extremely empowering text that drills an important fact into your head: your life is under your control. Yes, your genes and environment are important variables to consider. But we must be fully accepting of those and use them in our favor and not fight against them. By doing that, and by formulating great habits using the tools written in the book, we can obtain unimaginable results in whatever we choose.
This is the power of compounding playing in our favor. Most people allow the power of compounding to work against them, which is why people stagnate after getting that comfortable job or why examples such as “the person who peaked in high school” are so popular. Most people aren’t aware that the power of compounding goes both ways and you could be deteriorating over time.
This book teaches you how to get compounding to play in your favor. It shows you what is at stake every single day. A tiny singular habit performed during a slice of time will not mean much. But the same thing done over a long period of time can mean drastic things. This is what’s at stake. Achieving your dreams or the death of them.
In the following sections, I am going to summarize the most valuable ideas I’ve found while reading the book, with relevant examples wherever possible. Even if you do not read the book, if you keep these ideas in mind, you will have obtained 80% of the value from the book.
Expectations and the plateau of latent potential
Major changes do not occur in a split second. They’re sculpted with great care and attention over a long period of time. There are no “overnight successes” in this world. Even nature operates in this way. Think about how long it takes for the seasons to change or for a block of ice sitting on your table to melt. Things take time. This is important to remember as we will come back to this point again and again in the following sections.
We should be aiming to improve 1% in all areas of our lives every single day. Although 1% doesn’t seem like much, over a long period of time, it leads to unimaginable improvements. This is the same strategy that Pat Riley used to lead the LA Lakers team to victory in 1987. There is more to the strategy than just 1% improvements, but we will get to that soon.
What we need to have in mind while we’re making these improvements is to think about our current trajectory more than our current results.
“Given what I am doing, where will I be in 5 years?”
We’re making 1% improvements after all. We probably will not be seeing results on the daily, but the trajectory will determine our results over the course of months and years. Outcomes are a lagging measure of habits. Because things take time, the results of our habits do not arise instantaneously.
In fact, you need to check your expectations and make sure they’re low because the default nature of people is to expect a lot when they begin something new. The number 1 reason why people quit good habits is because they do not see the value created immediately. But the reality is that the results you’re looking for hide behind what James Clear calls “the plateau of latent potential”.
Let’s think back to our ice block example. An ice block placed on the table does not melt all at once. There’s a period of time when it seems that nothing happens at all. But slowly but surely, you will see a little puddle forming at first. And then the puddle grows larger. And suddenly the ice is gone. Momentum builds slowly first but then snowballs into something significant. The first month you lift, you’re not going to see many changes in your body. But just like the block of ice, if you will yourself to stick around until you get over the plateau of latent potential, you are going to see changes. This is a given.
Another beautiful example cited in the book is the stonecutter, who hammers away at a stone hundreds of times. Each time, he expects this will be the strike that will break the stone but it doesn’t happen. Yet he persists and eventually there comes a strike that breaks the stone apart. And at that time, it is obvious that it wasn’t just the last strike that did what it did: it was the accumulated effect of all that had gone on before.
Systems, processes, and identity
People talk about goal setting a lot in modern times. According to Clear, this is incomplete because this creates a mentality that is only focused on the finish line. What we need is to be focused on actually running the race, which is done by developing a hyper focus on the processes that get you to the goal. What you are doing on the daily. What creates your trajectory and keeps you there.
You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems
A small example is the goal of keeping your room clean. This is a recurring goal that you’ll have to do every couple of weeks. A slight change to your mentality occurs by analyzing what makes your room dirty. This unlocks something that makes achieving your goal automatic. You start noticing that your room gets dirty because you take things out of your closet, your clothes, papers, books, etc and you do not place them back where you found them. This accumulates over time and creates a big mess to be cleaned every fortnight.
To combat this, you implement a system for placing everything back every time you use it and suddenly you’ve achieved 60% of your goal every single day. We remove our focus on the finish line and focus on what needs to be done right now. Not only does this keep your focus where it needs to be, it also allows you to avoid let downs of expectations, the number 1 reason why people give up on their habits. The process takes precedence over everything else, including your actual goal.
There’s another unique thing about focusing on the processes that will take you where you want to be. Through the processes you go through every day, you’re casting a vote for your desired identity. The process of going to the gym every day makes you feel like a fit person. Writing everyday makes you feel like a writer. Practicing scales is what a musician does and you’re doing the same thing. You’re creating identities by having systems of actions, something that pays off in the long run, as it becomes a source of motivation when you have off days.
When you see yourself as a reader, you will be naturally inclined to read more than if you simply set goals or new year’s resolutions for reading X number of books this year.
Becoming a phoenix
A phoenix is one of the most interesting mythological creatures. At the tail end of its life, it burns in its own nest but through the ashes a new baby phoenix arises. True change requires something similar. The beliefs and mentalities you hold need to continuously burn and morph into something that is a stronger fit for who you want to become.
Progress requires unlearning, something arguably more difficult than learning. You need to upgrade because your prior mindset is why you’re where you are right now. Not your circumstances. Not your luck. Your mindset is the reason. Furthermore, even if your circumstances were terrible and were truly the reason, this mentality gives you the most power. It puts the ball in your court rather than leave it to something that happened to you.
So by consciously choosing what kind of identity you want to develop and by formulating the habits that are going to take you where you want to be, you give yourself the highest chance of winning, whatever that may mean for you. So the next question becomes: how do we create habits that we want? James Clear points to human psychology for the answer.
Anything we do can be traced back to a 4 step method, according to neuroscience.
Cue -> Craving -> Response -> Reward
You can break down anything to this 4 step framework. We check our phones because we notice it (cue), we feel a craving because of all the positive associations we have developed over the years with our phones, we check our favorite apps (response), and the reward is the positive feelings we get after watching another cat video on Instagram.
On the other hand, avoiding something we do not want to do follows a similar framework.
Cue -> Avoidance -> Response -> Reward
Looking at the homework we need to do (cue), avoidance (picking something different to do), response, and reward. People procrastinate because they replace something they need to do with something that is more pleasurable than doing the work.
With this understanding, Clear suggests some ideas to create good habits and destroy bad ones. The key is to make good habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Bad habits need to be invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying.
So how do we do these things? Obvious and easy means making sure cues related to the habit are easily visible in your worldview and that it is as easy as possible to do it. An example of this working tremendously well for me was when I tried to quit my Facebook and Instagram addiction. I decided to remove the apps from my phone. Could I still use the platforms by logging in from the desktop? Sure. But I noticed that the simple added steps of me having to open Chrome, navigate to the website, and log in dissuaded me from spending time on the platforms. My usage decreased to a 0! I was shocked at how lazy I truly was, so use your laziness to your advantage.
Making a habit attractive and satisfying are slightly more challenging. This is more mental than physical. The book offers some hacky advice about making something attractive and satisfactory by rewarding yourself after you do your habit. Sure, you can try it and see if it works for you. But this did not work for me. At the end of the day, making things attractive and satisfying came down to an awareness of what the habit was doing for me, the trajectory it was leading me towards, and what I would look like 1, 2, 3 years from now.
Now, we need to start gauging what habits are working on our favor and the habits we could do without. And we need to track this. The reality is that we overestimate our efforts and underestimate our flaws. We do not track how long we spend on our work and what we do. This needs to change so we can effectively measure what we’re doing. The book mentions creating a habit scorecard where we track what we do, how long we do it for, and whether they’re helpful. This doesn’t just need to be physical habits; it can also be mental thoughts and patterns. Awareness is always the first step to any solution. We need to put visibility onto what we do.
Reframing the concept of discipline
There’s a paradigm shift that needs to happen about this thing we call “discipline”. We’re all convinced that disciplined people are born with it and that they possess superhuman amounts of it. However, this is simply not true. First of all, discipline, like any other skill, can be gained over time. It can be practiced. The way to do that is simple: keep doing things even when you don’t feel like it. This is it. Even hyper disciplined people don’t feel like doing the work; they do it because they’re disciplined.
Secondly, disciplined people do not possess superhuman amounts of discipline. Yes, they’ve built up larger reserves of discipline than most normal people have, but this doesn’t portray the full picture.
Disciplined people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self control. They spend less time in tempting situations
It’s easier to avoid cigarettes when you don’t have several roommates who smoke every single day. It’s easier to be fit when you were around a culture of fitness as you were growing up in childhood. Some of these things, you cannot choose. What family you’re born into, your height, your natural abilities, are all god given. But everything else is up to you to design. And that is precisely what disciplined people take advantage of.
Even more important, disciplined people make sure that they structure their environment such that it being tremendously easy to avoid indisciplined actions. Avoid stupidity to become intelligent. Addition by subtraction2. This can mean anything from:
- Shifting your working desk into the living room from your bedroom to avoid crashing onto your bed every couple of hours
- Not buying sugary treats or fattening items, even if you’re certain you will ration how much you’ll eat
- Removing apps that suck away your time from the phone
The goal is to remove as much friction as possible to get yourself to do what you want. When this is done successfully, you now have the ability to stack good habits on top of each other. One habit’s successful completion becomes the cue for the next good habit to ensue. This is where radical change starts occurring over time. Compounding’s exponential growth is visible and you start living the idea of kaizen in multiple sections of your life. Here, life gets to a whole new level of exciting, as you see progress in different arenas.
Compare this to bad habit stacking, which is the default state of most people. One bad habit feeds another and another and you end the day with a feeling of emptiness. Furthermore, the effect of momentum also works against your favor here. After several hours of scrolling the phone, you feel drained and then you say, “Fuck it, might as well have ice cream today”. This is a very real thing that happens, and it is incredibly difficult to stop the train of negative momentum at this point.
Good habit stacking flips this situation and makes momentum work in your favor. When this happens, taking action becomes extremely smooth. This is why David Goggins suggests making “winning the day” a priority. If you win the day by stacking some good habits early on, you build bits of momentum which makes doing the next difficult thing smoother than if you hadn’t done so.
Helpful Mindsets
What to remember
- Multiple studies, most importantly B.F. Skinner’s conditioning experiments, have shown that animals – including us – get motivated to act by the anticipation of rewards. Our brains continuously scan the environment and past experiences for pleasures and pains. When it finds something in the past that had given us pleasure, our brain gets motivated to access that thing again. And the level of motivation is directly proportional to the amount of pleasure.
If this is the case, bringing our potential reward to the forefront of our head when we’re having difficult days, when we don’t feel like putting in the work, is a good antidote. - Our emotions are in control of all decision making we do throughout the day. This should be a very interesting thing to consider. The hormones running through your body determine what you do and don’t do; therefore, your emotions control your life, or at least the trajectory of it.
Without emotions we cannot make decisions. Everything we do, all decisions we make, are out of a desire to change our emotions (or state). There’s a reason why people check their phone every couple of minutes. It is out of a desire to change their states. - Volume wins. Stop thinking perfection and just do good work. Don’t let the idea of perfection become friction to you getting started. The less energy a habit takes, the more likely it is to occur, so do not think you have to do it perfectly. This will just take up energy.
- The costs of good habits are in the present. The costs of bad habits are in the future.
- Add an immediate cost to bad habits to reduce their odds of happening. You do not need to be Silas from The Da Vinci Code and whip yourself or anything. But think of some creative ways you can do this. Perhaps partnering with your friends who can hold you accountable for whatever you’re trying to avoid.
- Know thyself. You need to pick the habits that support your natural inclinations the best. People who are successful have habits that suit them.
- When you’re starting a new activity as a habit, there should be a period of exploration. The goal is to cast the widest net possible, research as many sub-topics as possible, and try possibilities. If you’re getting results, exploit. If not, explore other options.
- Until you work as hard as the people you admire, do not explain away their results as luck.
What to do
- Try joining communities, whether online or in real life (best case scenario). There are little things that motivate action in humans than belonging to a tribe. This is why the age old adage of “you’re the sum of 5 people you spend the most time with” exists. Your friends, family, and acquaintances matter. If you join a group of like-minded people trying to achieve the same things as you, you’ll be much more compelled to act in accordance to the group. The power of social conformity is tremendous.
- Be mindful of the way you talk. Our language shapes the way we interact with the world in powerful ways. I personally used to think meditation was boring. But when I reframed it as me learning “mind control”, which it is in a way, meditation became automatically interesting to me. Now, I actually look forward to practicing it. Never describe your good habits as something you have to do. Instead, say you get to do it, which is completely true, given the habit we’re talking about. A day will come when you will not have the luxury of doing it, for example, working out when you’re old and your spine forms an S.
- Track your progress. I’ve already mentioned this point but it’s important enough to be reemphasized. We are prone to overestimate our own efforts. You’d be surprised how wildly different what you’re actually doing is from what you think you’re doing. Combat this by tracking the time you perform each habit. Each practice session. Draw the Pomodoro tomatoes3. Whatever it takes.
- Rebound quick. One missed workout can be taken as an accident, but two is the beginning of a new habit. Listen to Charlie Munger. The first rule of compounding: never interrupt it unnecessarily.
- Work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty”. James Clear calls this “the goldilocks rule”. The human mind loves a challenge that isn’t too difficult for its capabilities and isn’t too easy to be boring. Slowly increase the intensity as you gain competence.
- Practice deliberately. Focus on your weak points. Drill your movements until the fundamentals become automatic, so you become free to focus on more advanced details. Habits + deliberate practice = mastery.
Conclusion
Pat Riley used a simple method to take the lakers to victory the very next year they suffered a crushing loss. Having a hyper talented team wasn’t enough, Riley realized. Similar to the British Cycling team, Riley implemented a method that would track specific metrics of each player on his team. He compiled these metrics meticulously, going all the way back to the player’s high school stats. Then he proceeded to compare the stats against other players in the NBA to give the players a target to hit. Finally, he asked his players if they could strive to improve in any metric by a percent every single day. Crucially, the improvements didn’t necessarily need to be the “big metrics” such as rebounds of points. They could also be the intangibles, such as mentality.
This is what James Clear is describing in this book. This is what will change all of our lives if we follow a similar mentality.
One dollar will not make a difference for you, but what if you get a billion of it? Similarly, one atomic habit will not change your life, but when you stack up thousands of such improvements over the course of 2-3 years, you will become unrecognizable. You will have built something significant, something you can be proud of.
- But seriously though, this book will fix your life. If you implement the knowledge you learn. ↩︎
- For example, adding more time to your life by removing minor distractions that suck up your time ↩︎
- The Pomodoro technique is an effective time tracking method. You work for 25 minutes (or however long you can focus well) and then take a break (typically 5 minutes). This represents one tomato, which you can scribble on your notebook. You rinse and repeat this. ↩︎
