Preface
Recently, the company that I intern at put up a poster in the pantry summarizing the points in Atomic Habits by James Clear. The poster consists of summarized points such as make good habits easy, and bad habits hard, and I generally find that a poster that summarizes points of a pivotal self-help book like atomic habits clearly in a visually appealing format with simple-to-follow guidelines is great for absorbing information. Coincidentially, I also read and finished that exact same book half a month ago, and here I am to write a bit of what I learnt through it and review the book itself.
Review
The book is widely popular — I generally see the name of this book floating around Reddit threads where people recommend the best self help books to read. Nevertheless, the book teaches good lessons that are promptly backed up by strong amounts of evidence. Each lesson is accompanied by evidence to prove the point and convince the reader of the legitimacy of the lesson. The rules that the book recommends you to live by all have strong justifications and are integral to the foundations of the book. Understandably, the book teaches lessons that are vital for anyone looking to make change and upgrade their life, and I recognize many facets of my life which I can apply the rules to. Interestingly, after reading the book, I decided to break my bank and get a gym membership again! (and apply the idea of compounding gains into my life as well.
Key Takeaways
Here are my key takeaways from the book:
- Atomic habits have compounding effects
- Focus on what you want to become, not what you want to achieve (align your identity so you will act like who you want to be)
- Improve your system (habits) not short term motivations
- The 4 Laws of Habits:
- Make it Easy
- Make it Obvious
- Make it Satisfying
- Make it Attractive
Recently, I came across an article in which I read that Chinese officeworkers were using scratch tickets to motivate themselves to go to work. To go into more detail, Chinese officeworkers would leave scratch tickets at work, and for every day they came into work, they would scratch off a single grid on the scratch ticket. If they were to win, it would make them happer at work, if not, they would have motivation to come into work to scratch the next ticket. In a way, they were implementing a sort of Login bonus system to going into work. I would argue that this is similar to that of habits — by making going into work more satisfying and attractive, they were able to create the habit of going into work like it were an atomic habit. Again, interesting anecdote that I thought applied about this book.
Anyways, I do recommend people who want to take up good habits and improve themselves to read this book! It offered a unique perspective on things I used to consider somewhat common-sensical and even gave me the motivation to pick up a gym habit!