Book Notes: Atomic Habits

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Atomic Habits, by James Clear, has quickly become a book I’ve recommended to many. The book offers practical advice on how to manage your habits while also explaining the important role your habits play in everyday life.

The book breaks down the simple ways you can start (or stop) a habit and build on it over time. The longer you do the habit, the more powerful that habit becomes and can eventually lead to big accomplishments.

How are Building Habits like Compounding Interest?

  • Compound interest applies to habit-forming and success as it does in finance. It has a snowball effect over time. When your accumulated interest earns interest, you see large performance gains the more you invest and let interest compound.
  • The results of your habits build on each other over time until you see large success. Like starting the habit of one push-up that eventually builds into a longstanding workout routine.
  • The “bad days”, where you lack motivation for a habit you are looking to adopt are especially important. By showing up to at least do the minimum, you maintain the compounding. If you miss a day, you lose the compounding.
  • Look to improve yourself by 1% every day. This keeps habits interesting. If you don’t try to improve the habit regularly, it will become boring, and you will drop it.
  • People often think they need more planning, and pre-work before doing something. This ends up meaning you miss out on practice. By focusing on quantity over quality, you get the practice. The repeated practice will build quality over time.
  • Good habits can be hard to build because they require an upfront cost. That is why it is helpful to start small, so there is an ease in adoption.
  • Bad habits feel good right away, which is why they are hard to break. The long-term effects are damaging, but because you get instant gratification, you will often stick with the bad habit unless you make it hard to continue with those habits.
  • If something “feels good” at the moment, ask yourself if it’s a bad habit in disguise.

How Can Your Systems Help You Achieve Your Goals?

  • Great quote in this book: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
  • Goals are important for setting a direction. You can’t have a system without a goal in mind, otherwise, the system would be pointless.
    • A system in this context, is habits you’ve set, and a means by which you’d make them stick.
  • However, you cannot set goals without a system. The system you set will make all the difference. Your systems are what will make your goals a reality.
  • Your system needs to be as bulletproof as possible and eliminate ambiguity to successfully adopt habits.
  • OKRs are useful for setting goals. You set the goal, then use your systems to achieve your OKRs. This can serve as a great framework for setting goals and executing off them against measurable outcomes.

How Can You Start a New Habit or Break a Bad One?

  • The 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
  • The first layer translates to the importance of goals, the second layer translates to the importance of systems, and finally, the third layer translates to how you self-identify.
  • You’ll tend to act out your label—whatever identity you give yourself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • You want good habits to become part of your identity (ex: “I am a person who works out”). If you want to eliminate a behavior, you need to remove it from your identity (ex: changing “I am a smoker” to “I don’t smoke).
  • The more you do something, the stronger the neural connections in your brain for that behavior becomes, which is the basis for habit-forming. It’s sometimes referred to as “grooves in your brain”.
  • The stronger those neural connections, the simpler something becomes for you.
  • You want to make a new habit as easy and brainless as possible for it to stick. And you want to make it as pleasurable as possible.
  • New things require a great deal more concentration, which inherently makes them hard to start and easy to break. By making something obvious, easy to reach for, and even better, something that is pleasurable, you have a much stronger chance of something sticking.
  • Habit stacking is a great way to make a new behavior easy and obvious. Adding one new habit to occur after performing an old habit that’s already sunk in will make something easy to start up.
  • To break a bad habit, make it as hard as possible to do, and make it less obvious and not pleasurable.
  • You’ll reach a threshold or a critical mass where once you’ve done a habit long enough, you’ll start to see the real impacts of it. The benefits of your work take time to compound, but once the compounding has built on itself to a sufficient level, you’ll start to witness powerful outcomes.

What is the Psychology of Habit-Forming?

  • Habit tracking is a great way to make adopting new habits pleasurable. We get pleasure out of crossing something off our to-do list, and the desire to maintain the habit compounds on itself the more you do it.
  • Jerry Seinfeld’s never break the chain method allows you to see a long chain of habits that you’ve done over weeks, months, maybe years. You’d never want to break a years-long chain of an accumulated streak of doing something every day.
  • On good days you’ll produce great work, on bad days you’ll at least do the bare minimum, but reinforce the habit and the identity.
  • We imitate the habits of those we are close with since they have a huge influence on how we identify ourselves and their behavior reinforces what we do.
  • We imitate the behaviors of “the many” as we want to appear part of “the tribe” and fit in. Likewise, we believe if many other people are doing it, it is for good reason, and we stand a better chance of survival if we do that same thing.
  • We imitate the powerful as we believe if we imitate what they do, we’ll inherit that same power. If it works for them, it will work for us.
  • We are wired to exert the least amount of energy as possible. Since food was scarce as we evolved, we also evolved to find ways to do less to conserve energy.
    • This is what makes adopting new habits difficult. It requires more energy at first.
  • Whenever we take on any behavior that requires energy, we are doing so because we want to feel differently. Especially when we take on bad habits, we are doing so because we want that immediate dopamine hit.

What’s the Best Way to Start a New Habit?

  • Habits are easiest to adopt when they require the least amount of friction as possible to start.
  • The habit at first should take less than two minutes to do.
  • “Just showing up” to the habit will set in motion the remainder of the habit. This may be small at first but will become more natural the stronger the neural connections are once the habit is built.
  • Over time, the “showing up” is just the start of the larger routine. Doing one push-up turns into 20. Opening up a text editor turns into writing three paragraphs.
  • Common advice is to not play the game everyone else is playing. Invent your own game that you can win at and make everyone else play that game. This applies to politics, finances, marketing, and is even a core principle in Blue Ocean Strategy and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
    • This principle not only ensures you are playing a game you can win and mitigates your risk, but it also emphasizes your strengths and de-emphasizes your weaknesses.
    • In this book’s context, you should emphasize habits (or the flavor of habits) that best play to your strengths and personality.
  • You achieve a flow state when you are pushing past roughly 4% of your current ability.
    • Your OKRs should continually look for improvement to keep a system, habit, and practice interesting.