Book Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Atomic Habits is an amazing book if you are looking for something detailed and full of motivation that will lay out a bunch of dos and donts for creating new habits and breaking the old ones. Atomic Habits is full of directly actionable advice. No matter what your goals are, the book Atomic Habits offers a perfect guideline for improving your life and your routine. The Author James Clear is one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach the readers exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

About the Author

James Clear is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. The book has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. He has appeared in Entrepreneur magazine, Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning. In addition to writing, he is also a motivational speaker and spoken at large companies and events. His previous clients include Capital One, Cisco, General Electric, Honda, Intel, LinkedIn, Lululemon, McKinsey & Company, Merrill Lynch, and many more.

The Book In Review Atomic Habits

The book revolves around five ideas
-Habits are the sole interest of self-improvement for any human.
-If you want evident 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 behavior change laws are simple; cues-make it obvious, cravings-motivations to pursue to make a habit attractive, response-actions we take habits that need to made a little easy to start and reward-a satisfying feedback for yourself.
-Your surrounding is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

James starts the book with a convincing argument that people generally start with an idea with a goal of changed outcomes, usually, that becomes the case where people can’t sustain their habits. With changing identity first can be one of the basic goals for a change, it doesn’t mean that what people want to achieve, it’s all about what they want to become. He discusses that people focus on identity and they will use behaviors that are likely to act in accordance with that identity. Once the focus is on changing the identity, the changes in the process will fall in place, leading to the change in outcomes anyway.

The Surprising Power Of Tiny Habits that become Atomic Habits

He discusses that everything is an outcome of the lagging measure of your habits. For example, 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 are 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, “Plateau of Latent Potential.”

The plateau of latent potential james clear

At the point when you finally are able to have the option to get through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will consider it an overnight achievement. The reason for defining objectives or setting goals is to dominate the game. The reason for building frameworks is to keep playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single achievement. It is about the pattern of endless refinement and persistent improvement.

Habits Shape Your Identity

James further elaborates that changing our habits is challenging for two reasons. Either we try to change the wrong thing and or we try to change our habits in the wrong way.

Here comes the “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.

How to Build Better Habits?

A habit is basically behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. We discussed above the four factors on which you can change your habits, whenever you want to change behavior, ask yourself how can you make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying?

Habits are often 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.

And do not forget to reward yourself after every milestone, because it helps you motivated! In some cases people don’t lack motivation, they lack clarity, so the first thing you do is to make a habit an obvious one, breaking the bad one for yourself and keep a changed habit a regular part of your life. Keep doing that and you will get automatic on it.

James, throughout the book, stressed the fact that Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery! If someone would run on these points, he or she will eventually be a part of the cycle and be able to maintain that particular habit. Your good habits are a part of your inner self!