Atomic Habits
Feburary 9, 2023
Bellevue, WA
These notes about Atomic Habits (by James clear) is from a summarization from the youtube video ATOMIC HABITS - Tiny Changes that Create Remarkable Results - James Clear
Atomic Habits is a book by the author, James Clear. In this book James explains a few things.
- Why habits are important?
- How habits affect your life?
- What makes building good habits difficult?
- and What you can do to make it easier?
Why Habits are important?
In life there are a few consistent factors in success. There is Luck and there is also Habits. Luck is something that is hard to have any control. It is much easier to work on our habits. Even for those of us who have some level of Talent, the Hard work of maintaining good habits will always be a key factor in how we do in life.
Key takeaways
- Focus on what you can control
- Even if you are talented, you can't succeed without having great habits to execute and fully realize your potential
How habits affect your life?
Every action you do in life will determine the type of person you are. Both Positive and Negative move your life forward in that directly. It is the small actions that add up the the person that we are. Rarely is it a big action or change in our lives. We have to remember that we have better control over the smaller actions in our lives. For example you might not be able to control what country you grew up in, but you can make the choice to make your bed every morning.
Key takeaways
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to become
- True behavior change is identity change
What makes building good habits difficult?
The difference between good habits (which are just repeated small good actions) versus bad habits (which are just repeated small bad actions) is in how they reward you. Good habits generally will have more pain in the short term, and only reward you in the long term. Whereas bad habits will tend to instantly reward you, but will lead up up to pain in the long term. The one thing we have to also keep in mind that these effects also scale, where the short term effects are generally a small part of your life the long term effects are basically how you are defined.
| Immediate effect | Ultimate effect | |
|---|---|---|
| Bad Habit | Ex: Junk food tastes good! | Ex: You become overweight |
| Good Habit | Ex: Going to the gym takes time and effort | Ex: You developed heathier body and lifestyle |
This is why building good habits and breaking bad habits is difficult. Our brains are easily swayed by Instant Gratification.
What you can do to make it easier?
One mental trick to become more focus on the long term effects and the scale of the long term effects. Remembering that our actions are cumulative and That instant gratification is minor compared to the scale of reward in the long term. The tough part is "when"? There are no guarentees about when the long term effects will be noticable. Going to the gym everyday, you still might not see any visible improvement over several months.
Key takeaways
- The cost of your good habits is in the future.
- The costs of your bad habits is also in the future.
- The scale of effects is smaller present vs. larger in the future.
In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear highlights 3 key pratical takeaways for buidling good habits.
Optimize your environment
One of the easiest things to control is your environment. Just like putting running shoes by the front door to make it easy for you to go for a run and removing junk food from your fridge will make it easier or harder depending on how you design your environment.
Scale down your habits
Habits are built off of the small actions that you take. The smaller the action, the easier it is to accomplish. The trick with small actions is that there is a numbers effect where its the sum of all the successful actions that you take that will make the most difference. So scaling down the actions/habits will make it easier to accomplish and that in turn can build a chain of other successful activations.
Master the entry points
One key factor is that habits are not the end results of your actions, but rather the beginning. The habit might be to water your plants, whereas the results is a healthy garden. The great things about this is that we don't have to make massive changes to our lives, but rather small tweaks that lead to larger results. Focus on where these "entry points" are in life and make the change there.
Key takeaways
- Change your environtment in a way that encourages good habits and discourages bad habits.
- Make the habit as easy as possible to do.
- Focus on the entry points, these are where the habit starts.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.
― Will Durant
References
After Skool youtube channel ATOMIC HABITS - Tiny Changes that Create Remarkable Results - James Clear
ATOMIC HABITS book by James Clear and his website