Book Review — Atomic Habits

Atomic Habits in 3 sentences

Atomic Habits by James Clear is a practical guide emphasizes the power of making small, consistent improvements—just 1% better each day. The Four Laws of Behavior Change provides a straightforward set of rule for building good habits and breaking bad ones. Clear argues that the first step is to identify the type of person you want to become, and then align your habits to support this identity transformation.

Inspirations from the book

Atomic Habits don’t need introduction, it’s one of the fundamental book of modern productivity and habit building. The concept distilled in the book have been used by many since its release and, without knowing it, you probably know some of them.

This article doesn’t aim to summarize the many tools provided by the book or all of the presented concepts. Instead, I want to go through the ideas that I resonated with and that were either new to me or opened new perspectives on aspects of my life.

Identity-base changes

James Clear repeat throughout the book that the habits we intend to build should aim to help us become the person we wish to become. Habits are thereby here to support our efforts to become a better version of ourselves. They focus on whom we wish to become rather than what we want to achieve.

Instead of wanting to lose weight, we should aim to become a healthy person.

According to Clear, the most effective way to build lasting habits is to focus on creating a new identity. The developed habits should align with our desired identity and support use through the journey to this new identity. The habit is not a means to an end, it’s helping us reach who we wish to become.

This is something I resonated with. I always knew that we should do things because we do them for ourselves because we want to become something bigger or better. Truly wanting something, being honest with ourselves throughout the process and stacking the odds on our side is the way of reaching new heights.

What was new was the framework put around this, being intentional and asking ourselves “who I wish to become” forced me to change some of my objectives and things I did in my life.

Asking ourselves who we wish to become and using this as our north start is an excellent tool that will help anyone reach their goals. Defining the person we want to become and acting to become this person, thanks to small habits, is how changes are sustained and goals are reached.

Small is often bigger

What a shocker! A book called ‘Atomic Habits’ focuses on small gains, being 1% better every day! Well, that’s pretty obvious, but it’s an important concept. A seemingly small action can produce a huge result if repeated enough times.

Trying to change everything at once is often a recipe for failure. The secret to long-term change is to start small and increase the intensity over time.

No one would go to the gym for the first time and try to deadlift 200kg. So why approach habit change in the same way?

Starting stupidly small, even stupider than you think, will help create the habit and integrate it into your routine. Just like in a gym, you can add weight, time or sessions once you’ve got the basics down.

Again, this concept of starting small and increasing with time is dear to my heart. I’ve been training with Freeletics for a few years now, 4 years according to the app. I’ve been constantly training 4 or 5 times a week with small breaks during holidays.

The only reason I’ve been able to train consistently and keep with it was because I started small. It was during Covid lockdown, I wanted to exercise since I couldn’t go outside. My first training sessions were only 30 seconds long. With time, I increased the intensity, from 30 seconds to 1 minute, then 2, 5 and finally 10 minutes. At that point, I decided to install Freeletics and use this instead of the random assortment of exercises I was doing.

What’s funny is that, about 8 years ago, I tried using Freeletics. However, I made the mistake of trying one of their harder workout. I was humbled really fast and never tried the app again until 4 years ago.

We should let our ego outside the picture when starting a habit. Starting small and keeping things small for long enough will lift many barriers that we would have hit face up otherwise. Once the path is clear, greatness will follow.

Build or break habits with 4 simple rules

Habits can be good or bad, for example, smoking is a bad habit where running is arguably a good one. The book details not only how to create good habits, but also how to break the one that doesn’t benefit ourselves.

This is done thanks to the 4 laws of behavior change. Each law supporting creating positive habits has its opposite that helps break bad habits.

Those rules create a feedback loop that helps to associate the reward we get at the end with the cue that triggered the whole process. As Clear states in the book: the cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and, ultimately, becomes associated with the cue.

The first two steps, make it obvious and make it attractive, help start the habits, they are here to make sure you have no excuse for skipping it. The two seconds steps, make it easy and make it satisfying, are here to push you through the habits and to completion.

Let’s illustrate how this looks like with someone who wishes to become a runner:

1. Make It Obvious: Set out your running gear the night before and schedule your runs for a specific time.
2. Make It Attractive: Listen to your favorite music or podcast while running, and consider joining a running group.
3. Make It Easy: Start with short runs and prepare everything you need in advance.
4. Make It Satisfying: Track your progress and reward yourself after each run.

Having those rules laid out in front of me was quite eye-opening. I’ve watched my fair share of productivity YouTube videos, and they all distill some of those concepts, but I never grasped the full picture.

Suddenly, some habits, such as working on my blog, seemed ill-adapted and deemed to fail. I was missing some rules, and it leads to frustration and failure.

In the past, I often said, “I need to write for my blog”, which always felt wrong. Who do I think I am? Hemingway smoking the pipe in a café with other writers? Ridiculous! I’m Flavien, alone, in a café with my laptop!

In all seriousness, those rules helped me identify, in this case, that the habit I wanted to build was not properly defined. I don’t want to write for my blog, this is not what I want, I want to work for my blog. Whether it’s building a new feature, spending time tinkering a new design on Figma, writing part of an article, reading a chapter of a book, … What I want is work on my blog and explore things that spark my interest.

This idea shift had critical changes on my inspiration, my motivation and the overall result of the content I produce. By no mean my blog is the best in the world, I have a lot to learn. However, I feel like I’m improving and getting better at all the things related to my blog. Time will tell how this adds up, but those rules were a remarkable tool to help support my growth.

Building or breaking habits can be made easier thanks to the four laws of habits. Any habits should be obvious (invisible), attractive (unattractive), easy (difficult) and satisfying (unsatisfying). Following those rules helps us build long-lasting habits since we stacked our chances of starting (by making them obvious and attractive) and to do it again (by making them easy and satisfying).

More details on each step and how to apply them to your habits can be found in the: The Habit Cheat Sheet.

Stacking the odds in your favor

The four laws of habit building are an excellent framework that can be used to make or break habits. However, alone, this framework lacks one crucial element James Clear presents throughout the book.

The concept of stacking the odds.

Clear gave many advice or practical examples that resolve around creating an environment and conditions that makes it easier to stick with good habits. By stacking the odds, you make it harder to skip the habit you’re trying to build.

Stacking the odds is the concept of creating an environment that ensure success.

Sculpting your surrounding — Make it Obvious

Your environment can be a catalyst for positive change or a barrier to progress. By shaping our environment, anyone can influence where the balance lands. Clear suggests making cues for good habits obvious and easily accessible, while removing cues for bad habits.

Keeping a bowl of fresh fruit on your kitchen counter or dining table will make it more likely that you’ll take an apple when looking for a snack.

Make things related to good habits obvious, and things related to bad habits invisible.

Optimization of effort — Make it Easy

Making things as “in your nose” as possible is a great start. However, this can be insufficient. Some habits can require some preparation, and making this work in advance will increase your change of success.

Setting your workout clothes, shoes, and any other gear you need the night before will reduce the effort required to get ready in the morning.

Prepare your environment to make good habits easy to do and bad habits harder to do.

The success momentum

Why stop after performing a good habit? Instead, you could use the end of one habit as the cue to start another one. Leveraging established will make the adoption of new habits automatic and less reliant on willpower.

If you have a habit of going to bed at a certain time, stacking a page or chapter of a book just before you turn off the lights can make it easier to adopt this new habit.

The success of one habit can be used as the clue for your next successful habit.

Never skip twice

Consistency is key to building new habits, but life can get in the way. Missing a habit once can happen, but missing it twice can start a negative pattern. Getting back on track as soon as possible (the second time) prevents small lapses from becoming setbacks.

If you miss a workout one day, make it a priority to exercise the next day to avoid falling out of your routine.

Avoid skipping a habit twice to maintain consistency and prevent setbacks.

As an aside, every time I talk about the two-day rule, I feel obligated to share a video from one of my favourite YouTubers, Matt D’Avella. He introduced me to the concept of this rule.

Who is this book for

Atomic Habits is packed with advice for people who want to improve. Clear’s tips can be applied to people who wish to improve but haven’t started yet, or to people who have started but lack a rigorous system or struggle to keep on track.

The 4 Laws of Behavioral Change can be adapted to many situations and habits, good or bad. I’m convinced that anyone who would like to become a better version of themselves can find value in the content of this book.

However, I must point out that the book is the foundation of many other productivity or personal growth systems. For this reason, I would not recommend the book to experienced people.

This also applies to people who watch a lot of productivity videos on YouTube. Many creators have taken some Clear System and distilled it into their videos. If you’ve subscribed to the big productivity gurus, feel free to skip this book.

Quotes from the book

One of Clear’ strength is the amount of punchline he can deliver on one page. The book is filled with excellent phrases or quotes from others. Always delivered on time. Making a selection for this article was difficult.

I fulfilled my potential.

Knowing when you’re set with something is a wise realization. We all have area in life where we can strive and become experts in. This is not the case of every aspect of life and knowing when to stop helps get a peace with it.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits

Nobody expects money put in an investment fund to create instant wealth. This process takes time, and we only see the fruits of our patience after a few years. The same applies to habits. We should treat habits as an investment towards ourselves and accept the fact that things in life take time to yield results.

It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success.\

The identity-based change Clear is presenting in his book resonates a lot with this sentence. There is no right pace to becoming the person we want to become. Sometime we’ll run, but others we’ll walk, or we’ll have setbacks. What’s important is to see the bigger picture, see that despite the struggle we’re still moving in the right direction.

When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it?

Will you keep running after you did your marathon you registered to? The answer will depend on what made you want to do this marathon in the first place. If the goal is to cross the finish line, then it’s unlikely. However, if you wanted to become a runner, you might stick with the habit.

If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.

I felt dumb reading this sentence. At the beginning of any game, both teams wish to win. However, there is only one winner at the end of the game. So wanting to win is not the thing that makes you win. The system you put around your goal is. It also helps stay humble, knowing that “Every Dead Body on Mt. Everest Was Once a Highly Motivated Person”.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

There are times when life gets in the way. Setbacks are natural. Having a safety net that will catch you when this happens will lessen the fall. This is what your system is for, making sure that, when you fall, you’re not falling too far.

A habit must be established before it can be improved

At the beginning of this article I said that starting stupidly small, smaller than you’re thinking, is the right approach. Building a habit is the hard part, and that’s what needs to be made easier. Once the habit is there it’s easy to improve, optimize and think about performances. Start small, learn and get use to the new habits, then find ways to improve it.

When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.

Being too attached to who we are is a sure way of hurting ourselves in the future. I see friends being too attached to what they should do in life. People online going above and beyond to prove a point they know is wrong. Myself getting angry and refusing to listen to counterarguments when I decided that something is not true. Since I read this sentence, I kept noticing instances of people refusing to listen because of admitting they are wrong would shatter their worlds.

The score takes care of itself. — Bill Walsh

Trust the process and seems we’ll be right. This sentence is powerful and encapsulate what’s needed to win. This reminds me of the CEO of my company saying, “We know we will win because we know we right”.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate. — C.G. Jung

It’s easy to stop seeing things. Whether it’s the Christmas decoration you plan to put back in the basement, or a piece of paper you wanted to throw up, but has been sitting on your countertop for weeks. Things vanish out of sight and become part of the decor. The same can be said for benefits that we do every day without realizing their impact.

My Concerns with the Book

I have to admit that reading Atomic Habits was a bit of a hassle at times. It wasn’t the earth-shattering experience as some people describe it. To be fair, I found the book boring and had a hard time coming back sometime.

Quick disclaimer, I’ve been following many productivity-based YouTubers and this can have a bias towards the content of the book. Many people online discuss the book, or some of its concepts. This can explain some of the critics I have and why some part of the book were less interesting to me.

My biggest gripes with the book is its length. There are many repetitions, and I’m not sure if it’s done to nail the point down or hit a word target. Regardless of the reason, the book could be shorter than it currently is. The presence of chapter summaries are a good thing. However, some chapters could be skipped altogether, since the summary offers enough details to understand the gist of it.

Furthermore, many chapters begin with an anecdote or a brief story, often related to sports. This singular event is then used to substantiate the chapter’s main argument. Consequently, there are instances where the chosen example feels improper and serves merely as an isolated incident to back an entire chapter. It’s like saying, “I’ve only seen one white crow in my life, so all crows must be white.”

Lastly, the book places significant emphasis on the systems people need to implement to achieve their goals and become who they aspire to be. While I agree with the book’s overall premise, I feel it overlooks the complexities of real-life situations that aren’t as straightforward as Clear suggests. Life is rich with nuances, and this book falls short in capturing that complexity. The oversimplification of some advice may not provide sufficient value for individuals who might find it challenging to apply these principles.

Wrapping Up

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear is a well-delivered and impactful book that offers actionable advice to help you become the person you aspire to be. In this sense, it serves as an excellent reference and an engaging read.

Rating this book is challenging. On one hand, it’s important to acknowledge its significant impact and how it has reshaped the landscape of productivity. On the other hand, the book can feel lengthy, and some advice may seem outdated or overused due to its widespread adoption and adaptation.

“Atomic Habits” suffers somewhat from its success. Many of its concepts have been integrated into other productivity systems, which can make the original advice feel less unique and groundbreaking.

Nonetheless, the book’s influence is undeniable. Clear’s work has inspired a new category of YouTube content and motivated many to rethink their approach to productivity.

For these reasons, I consider “Atomic Habits” a valuable reference book. I would rate it a 3 out of 5 for its reading experience.