Book Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear

People often think that your life can only change if you set big goals. But world-renowned habit expert James Clare found another way. He knows that real change comes from the compounding of hundreds of small decisions—doing two push-ups a day, waking up 5 minutes earlier each day, or talking on the phone for a short time.

He called these "Atomic Habits."

In this ground-breaking book, Clears reveals exactly how these minuscule changes can grow into such life-altering outcomes. He uncovers a handful of simple life hacks (the forgotten art of Habit Stacking, the unexpected power of the Two Minute Rule, or the trick to entering the Goldilocks Zone), and delves into cutting-edge psychology and neuroscience to explain why they matter.

Along the way, he tells inspiring stories of Olympic gold medalists, leading CEOs, and distinguished scientists who have used the science of tiny habits to stay productive, motivated, and happy.

These small changes will have a revolutionary effect on your career, your relationships, and your life.

"This is a very practical and useful book. James lays out the most basic information on habit formation, so you can improve by focusing less." ----Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Fucking

'James Clear has spent years honing the art and studying the science of habits. This engaging, hands-on book is the guide you need to break bad routines and make good ones.' -----Adam Grant, author of Originals

"This is a book that will change how you spend your day or even your life." -----Ryan Holliday, author of "The Obstacle is the Way"

About the Author: Atomic Habits by James Clear

James Clear is an author and speaker focused on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Time, and on CBS This Morning. His website receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter at jamesclear.com.

He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Through his online course, The Habits Academy, Clear has taught more than 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers.

The Habits Academy is the premier training platform for individuals and organizations that are interested in building better habits in life and work. You can learn more at habitsacademy.com.

Quote from Atomic Habits by James Clear

Page 19: How Your Habits Shape Your Identity

We often find it challenging to change habits and difficult to develop good habits for two reasons:

We don’t find the right thing to try to change;

We think we are changing our habits in the wrong way.

Change occurs on three levels:

the first is to change your outcome;

the second is to change your process;

the third and deepest level is to change your identity.

The right thing to do is to cultivate identity-based habits, which require us to focus on who we want to be.

Most people don't think about changing their identities when they focus on self-improvement, only what actions to take to achieve their goals, not the beliefs that motivate action.

The result of the former is that after the goal is achieved, the old identity will cause oneself to continue to be stuck in the original state, undermining the new change plan. We can only make real change if we look at cultivating our belief systems and consider fundamentally changing who we are!

It's hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that govern your past behavior. You have goals and new plans, but you are still you, nothing has changed.

The real change in behavior is a change in identity. You can develop a habit out of a motive, but the only thing that will keep you in it for the long haul is because it's integrated into who you are. Improvements are temporary unless they become part of you. -----Quote from How Your Habits Shape Your Identity

Every practice of a good habit is a "vote" for one's longing for identity. The more times of practice, the more obvious the strengthening of the identity. The more a behavior is repeated, the more the identity associated with it is strengthened.

You believe that your current identity is because you have evidence, so if you want to change your identity, please keep accumulating evidence corresponding to your new identity!

In turn, bad habits can in turn reinforce bad identities. So don't label yourself: road idiot, bad at math, bad at communication, you talk about the same label year after year, and eventually slip into this mental formula and believe it.

It's been a long time, and I didn't have the courage to try when I encountered a similar problem. So don't put negative labels on yourself. If you find that you are lacking, you must have the courage to change and improve!

Two-step process:

1. Decide what kind of person you want to be;
2. Prove it to yourself with a small win.

Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. This is a two-way street. -----Quote from How Your Habits Shape Your Identity

What kind of person or this person he wants to be, what would he do?

Book Summary: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Strong push! This book is very suitable for people with scientific thinking. The author comprehensively uses psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, biology, and other multi-disciplinary content to break down the "habit" system, break it apart and smash it to tell you the formation mechanism of habits and the relationship between habits and self-perception.

If the medicine is used as a metaphor, this book is a magical medicine for me, like Ganoderma Lucidum and ginseng. It not only confirmed many of my personal past life experiences, but also solved many of my confusions, such as why some habits, such as keeping a diary, I can persist for more than 10 years, and some habits, such as memorizing words every day, are reluctant to continue after I meet the test requirements?

Why does the weight go down and come back again and again? What's more, it has almost immediate results - such as improving procrastination, building exercise habits, reducing snacking, and more. I would say that I lost five pounds easily in the process of reading this book.

There are a lot of dry goods in the book, and I only intercept the ones that I think have the most influence on me:

"Forget about goals, focus on system instead" There are two outcomes of setting goals, achieving the goals and then relaxing or failing to achieve the goals and then being disappointed. And the final outcome of this result-oriented thinking is to bring people back to their original state. "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems". For example, why is it easy to lose weight and regain weight, because it is too tiring to control diet and increase exercise in the process of losing weight, you always think If I want to lose weight successfully, I can eat a big meal, so won't I gain weight in the end, because your body's habits are still the habits of that fat man? The idea of "building a system" is the opposite. It is a never-ending process of self-improvement. Taking weight loss as an example, establishing a system is equivalent to developing the eating habits and exercise habits of thin people - from a person who loves to eat all kinds of snacks and can't stop eating it but keeps restraining himself because he is afraid of getting fat. If I don’t like sweets in my heart (yes, it’s me), I naturally don’t need any perseverance to lose weight and don’t worry about rebounding.

"Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits" This is easy to understand. Simply put, it means that you will continue to study hard to become a scholar, and after you internalize the label of a scholar, you will continue to study more naturally. Playing games every day makes you a scumbag, and after you internalize this label, you will naturally become lazy and don’t want to learn. But it doesn't stop there, we can use this to change the habit by identifying who we want to be, by constantly changing the habit to prove to ourselves that we're getting closer to who we want to be. Taking weight loss as an example, if you believe that you are a thin person, you will continue to try to improve your self-control instead of thinking in your heart that you really want to lose weight, but it is difficult to control yourself. It's actually a bit like the "law of attraction" argument. “The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results, but because they can change your belief about yourself”

Core point: The formation of a habit requires the following four elements: Cue (trigger), Craving (craving), Response (response), Reward (reward). weaken these four elements. For example, to create a fitness habit, you can create a trigger habit: I take off my high heels and put on sneakers every day when I get home; Make exercise more responsive: Sign up for the gym downstairs instead of miles away. Establish a reward strategy: take a comfortable hot shower immediately after exercising, etc. I think the Craving element is great for understanding and changing bad habits. The author believes that bad habits such as smoking are not because you like the smell of smoke too much, but that smoking can relieve your anxiety or emptiness. If you can deal with anxiety or emptiness in other ways, the bad habit of smoking is good to change. Interestingly, the current hot tech companies are also built on satisfying such craving motives to maintain user stickiness: Find love and reproduce, connect and bond with others (Facebook), win social acceptance and approval (Instagram), achieve status and prestige (online games), reduce uncertainty (Google).

Excerpts from other viewpoints:

"Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits"

“The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it”

“True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity”

“Your behaviors are a reflection of your identity. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.”

“The Secret to Self-control: People with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least”

"Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive - All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you've just seen and what has worked for you in the past. The same cue can spark good habits or bad habits depending on your prediction. These predictions lead to feelings, desire, urge"

"Reputation Matters: Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. Habits form based on frequency, not time"

" When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. A habit must be established before it can be improved. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. "

"What is immediately rewarded is repeated, what is immediately punished is avoided. The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification."

"How to stay focused when you are bored? Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood. The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom"

All in all, it's a really good book! Strong push!

Book Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear

The number of words in this book is 6658, and the estimated reading time is 6 minutes.

Also read : Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Reading enriches and shares delights. A mind map is attached at the end of the article to help you sort out the essence of the context. Welcome to read, you are one step closer to knowledge.

The book I’m sharing today is Atomic Habits.

Why "Habits Change Destiny"? Because 40% to 50% of an individual's behavior depends on unconscious habits. Habit formation requires four steps: cue → craving → response → reward.

The cue triggers the craving, the craving triggers the response, and the response provides the reward that satisfies the craving and is ultimately associated with the cue. Together, these 4 steps form a neurofeedback loop that ultimately allows you to develop a habit that comes naturally, forming a complete habit loop.

According to the four steps of habit formation, the author summarizes the corresponding 4 laws of habit formation: make it obvious; make it attractive; make it easy; make it enjoyable.

Through these 4 laws and 56 specific cases, this book helps you quickly develop good habits. At the same time, using the opposite of these 4 laws can help you get rid of bad habits.

01 Recognize habits

It's easy to overestimate the importance of a decisive moment, and it's easy to underestimate the value of making small improvements every day. A 1% improvement isn't particularly dramatic, but it makes more sense, and in the long run, a small improvement can make a surprising difference. Habits are compound interest for self-improvement.

Habits are a double-edged sword that can work for us or against us, which is why understanding the details is crucial.

As long as we repeat our 1% mistakes day in and day out—making bad decisions, repeating small mistakes, and making excuses for our own small mistakes—over time, our small choices can add up to detrimental outcomes. A 1% deterioration here and there, and so many mistakes add up until the consequences are manifested.

Breakthrough moments often occur as a result of a series of previous actions that have amassed the potential needed to initiate significant change. Any compounding process has a common characteristic: the most powerful results are always late.

In the process of cultivating a habit, we cannot feel its effects for a long time, until one day, we break through the tipping point and enter a new realm. In the early and middle stages of any exploration, there is usually an unsatisfactory trough. Therefore, habit needs to accumulate and precipitate for a long time.

A book I shared before, "Mini Habits", also agrees with the author's point of view in this book, we need to start with small habits. If you can't write a 3000-word article, then write 50 words and make progress from small changes.

If you want better results, stop setting goals and focus fully on our system.

Why It's So Difficult to Build Habits

Habit changing is challenging for two reasons:

1. We don't find what we're trying to change;

2. We're trying to change our habits the wrong way.

There are three layers to our behavioral change process, change in outcome, change in process, and change in identity.

a. Change our results

This level is about changing our outcomes: losing weight, writing, etc. Most of the goals we set relate to changes at this level.

b. Change our process

This level involves changing our habits and systems: Going to the gym regularly, organizing your desk regularly, and improving productivity, most of the habits we develop are related to this level.

c. Change our identity

This level is about our beliefs: worldview, self-image, and judgments about others. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and biases we hold are related to this level.

The outcome means what you get, the process means what you do, and identity means what you believe.

When we develop habits and improve systems, the question is not which level is better or worse. The key is to change their direction.

Many people start changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to develop habits based on end results. The right thing to do is to develop an identity-based habit. In this way, we look at who we want to be.

Two-step method to change your identity:

• Decide what kind of person you want to be;
• Prove it to yourself with a small win.

Your identity comes from your habits. Every action is your vote for who you want to be. To be your best self, you need to continually edit your beliefs, upgrade and expand your identity. The real reason habits matter is not because they give you better results, but because they change your beliefs about yourself.

The four-step approach to building a habit:

Habits are behaviors that become automatic when repeated enough times. The process of habit formation begins with trial and error. Simply put, habits are a surefire way to solve recurring problems in our environment.

The habit-forming process is broken down into 4 simple steps: cues, cravings, responses, and rewards. This four-step pattern is the core pillar of every habit, and our brains run the steps in the same order every time.

1. Tips

It triggers our brain to initiate a certain behavior. For example, money and fame, power and status, praise and recognition, love and friendship, etc. Our brains are constantly analyzing the external environment, looking for clues about where the reward is. Because cues are the first sign that we are close to a reward, they can lead to cravings.

2. Desire

The motivation behind each of us comes from motivation and desire, and if we don’t desire change, there’s no reason to act. Cravings are not habited themselves, but state changes

3. Reaction

Responses are our actual habits, which can take the form of thought or action. Whether or not a reaction occurs depends on how motivated we are and how easy it is to act.

4. Rewards

Getting a reward is the ultimate goal of every habit. The role of the cue is that we notice the presence of the reward. Craving is wanting a reward, responding is getting a reward.

We pursue rewards because they serve two purposes:

1. satisfy our needs;
2. they teach us.

The cue triggers the craving, the craving triggers the response, and the response provides the reward that satisfies the craving and is ultimately associated with the cue. Together, these four steps form a neurofeedback loop—cue, craving, response, reward, cue, craving, response, reward—and ultimately allow you to develop a natural habit that completes the habit loop.

So how do these four steps affect our daily life? The author turns these four steps into a practical framework that can help us design good habits and eliminate bad ones. We call this the Four Laws of Behavior Change.

Continue Reading..