The following writing is an analysis, interpretation and summary of James Clear book, Atomic Habits. This book can be summarized quite well into one sentence.
“The quality of our habits determine the quality of our lives.”
Do your habits support and build you?
Or diminish and slow you?
Are they catabolic? Or are they anabolic?
Are they building?
Or are they destructive?
Those who are familiar with me know that I don’t spend the hundreds of hours that takes me to invest in analyzing a book if it’s just average. But this one, in particular, I felt I needed to. The lessons, the light bulb moments, and the profundity that this book provides — and not just theory but the practicality of the psychology of how to unwrap, untangle, and take advantage of our own brain, so it can work for us instead of against us.
How can we build constructive habitat? How can we untangle destructive ones? For ourselves? For the people around us? For our clients? This is a now mandatory rating and recommended reading for all my new clients.
We’re all trying to implement behaviour change at some level. This book serves as an incredible framework into doing that.
Who is this book for? This is one of those books like How to win friends and influence people and the 48 Laws of Power it’s a foundational book for human beings. We all have habits, whether we are aware of them or not. And so, how can we get them to work for us? Because they serve as the basis and underpinning of a lot of the progress, success, and potential that you and we, and I can have in this life.
The habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence. The less energy and more time we spend on trivial decisions, the more we can spend on what really matters to you.
And so, we should understand the bad habits repeat seldom because you don’t realize you want to change. Most people have the awareness that they probably should change. Now there’s might be some denial or cognitive biases mixed up in there, but because you have an ineffective system and environment to change, change becomes very difficult or it doesn’t happen at all.
Now we’re going to go into the habit framework that we all interact with on a day-to-day basis. For those who have studied psychology, know of operant conditioning by B.F. Skinner, who cited three steps to a habit or a behaviour, the stimulus and cue, the response, and then the reward.
We’ve all interacted with this on a day-to-day basis.
We get cued by something, the sun could come up. What does that trigger to do? Response: open the blinds, open the curtains. Reward = light. Very simple.
Almost every single behaviour we have has this type of mechanistic loop
4 Step Habit Framework Cue
This is how we all interact with our behaviour on a day-to-day basis. What are you craving? What’s cueing you? What are you then desiring? And how was it impacting you?
The Power of Atomic Habits.
The aggregation of marginal gains:
Searching for tiny marginal improvements in everything you do because it adds up to huge improvement over a long period of time. This is also known as compound interest. Compound interest, the more money that goes into an account with a compounding interest rate, the more that will grow and the faster rate it will grow like a snowball rolling down the hill.
The same thing could be said about our habits. What does it look like if you improve 1% every day? And what does it look like if you regress 1% every day? Because both of them compound if you’re 1% worse or 1% better.
It’s easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. That is what we’re trying to do. A lot of people want to change themselves and they want to change so many things at once. The sustainability and ability to stay adherent to this extreme enthusiasm is very low for the majority of people. Sorry, you’re not David Goggins (sorry).
Now you can try and mimic some of these habits, but if we just look at psychology and adherence, sustainability there is a reason why there’s only a couple of David Goggins in the world.
Small meaningful improvements on a day-to-day basis can get you there. The slow pace of transformation is why it’s so easy to let destructive habits slide and why people often wake up one day with the realization they’re fat, they’re out of shape, they’re broke, they’re unsuccessful, they’re weak. When we repeat 1% errors day in and day out and we rationalize our excuses in the meantime, where we don’t notice we’re in denial, we’re ignoring our small choices as they compound into toxic results.
Instead, we must realize a very small shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful change in destination — who you become. So, your habits dictate the meaningful change toward your destiny and who you become. Over the span of moments over a lifetime, these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
This is tapping into your potential by understanding, taking advantage of, and building productive constructive habits. And I really liked this one that James said, he said, “your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.”
So, we all have habits, right? Whether that’s a body composition change you’re trying to make, body fat loss or you want to become smarter and more intelligent in your field. Often the results that we look for, take time, right? But they’d lag. It’s not immediate.
You go to the gym a couple of times for work for the first week, you’re not bigger or stronger noticeably in that first week because the outcome lags. The same often can be said for most things in life. Building good relationships with people requires investment effort upfront. Often you don’t get reciprocation until you give, to begin with. The reciprocation lags behind.
Another interesting point is the idea of task automation. And so, what’s the power of habits? The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas. So, this is where creating systems comes in place. Systems and intelligent systems and habits free your mind to focus on more of the things you care about. A lot of people do a lot of tasks in their day-to-day that they could systematize or automate or outsource and delegate. How much time, energy, and effort could you save to then be productive in other areas?
What progress is really like?
Habits appear to make little or no difference until you cross a critical threshold. Bamboo takes years to grow its roots underground, while at the surface of barely looks like it’s growing. And all of a sudden it’s a tipping point and the bamboo grows tens of meters in a matter of weeks. You need to cross this critical threshold with each outcome you are trying to create.
There is an ingrained patience that you should assimilate into your identity, almost like you’re bamboo. Putting your roots into the ground, establishing good habits, and then, oh all of a sudden, oh, I’ve doubled my income. Oh, I’m three times stronger than I used to be. I’m 5kg kilos leaner than I was.
We call this crossing the plateau of latent potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it for 25 to 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Your work is not wasted, it’s just being stored. All of the action happens when you hit 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) — that’s when the ice begins to melt.
That’s the plateau of latent potential, the critical threshold. Often people give up just before this critical threshold, when your ice just begins to melt. When you finally break through that plateau and that’s when people call people overnight success.
It’s the work you did a long time ago when no one was watching when you didn’t feel like you wanted to do it, when you wouldn’t really notice much progress, that’s what makes the overnight success possible. Mastery and excellence necessitate patience.
You have to be like the stone cutter who hammers the stone. Seemingly unchanged, the stone goes until the thousandth hit and the stone breaks. But if you gave up on that 999th hit and the stone will remind unbroke and you never find the gold. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a hundred-year-old oak tree from the ground. Its roots are deep and thick. It’s going to be hard, difficult, patient work. While building a new habit is like carefully cultivating a seed to grow into a flower. You got to nurture it. You have to be intelligent. You have to feed it the right environment.
How Setting Goals May Be A Mistake
A lot of people set goals. I used to set goals for myself all the time. Every year when I was a teenager, particularly when I was an athlete, basketball athlete. Wanted nothing more than to play professionally, to earn money and travel the world playing the sport I love. So, I set goals, stepping stone goals for me. Things that I had to do to achieve the next stepping stone.
Honestly it’s probably one of the biggest mistakes I made in my youth was. You’re told that setting goals are what you should do. You should sit down, you should think about what you want, and you should write it down. You should put a date, you should make it specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timely. That’s smart, isn’t it? Well, not necessarily. Because most people set goals and they put them away and they’re done.
You can then go do work to then progress yourself towards your goals. But what work are you doing? How deliberate is that? And it’s not just about the work behind the goals. It’s about the systems and the habits. How smart you work, not just how hard you work. So, instead of trying to develop goals first, we should look at developing systems and habits first. Goals are about the things you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. A lot of people define the carrot stick they’re chasing, but they don’t stop to define how they’re going to get it — the processes that are most constructive for them to get there.
I don’t believe in specific goals, I believe in setting up systems. Scott Adams said, “set up systems, not goals”. Use your judgment to figure out what types of environment you want and can thrive in and then build systems to create that environment. So, you’re statistically more likely to succeed and prosper. Success has less to do with your specific goals you set, are more to do with the systems and habits you create that cultivate an environment for meaningful progress and future success. You can have the most specific objective, measurable goal but if you don’t develop the systems and habits, it’s useless. Whereas maybe you don’t have an exact specific objective goal but you know what direction you want to go in. So, if you know what direction you want to go in, you can then define some general systems and habits to get you in that direction, to be more effective than having just goals alone.
But having both ae likely lead to the greatest progress and success. However, if you don’t know what you want but you have a feeling of the direction, consider systems and habits you can create.
Your goal might be to lose 10kg of body fat in eight months. And your system, that’s your exercise regime, that’s you’re nutrition plan, that’s your sleep schedule, that’s your recovery plan.
You want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. Well, what are the systems and habits you need to set up? Well you probably should start recording your income and expenses, right? You probably should start recording every dollar that comes in and every dollar that comes out. So, you know your profit margin or your loss margin. The next system is to set a budget, so then you can distribute your income accordingly to investments and savings and to acquire more wealth. What’s another system? You could automate money to go into your account and then straight into a mutual fund or into a bank account with savings on a high interest account. Or an account that is your investment account, where you put into investing in people and education. And then you could decide, I’m going to read one new book on business and wealth every month.
Goals, they‘re ’useful for setting the direction. Systems is what makes the progress. People typically end up spending way too much time on their goals and not enough time on developing their systems. Focus on the systems that underpin the results and goals to ensure you will get to your goals more effectively.
4 Problems With Goals
Goal setting suffers from survivorship bias. So, we focus our attention on the winners, the people who get to the top and they explain their success through their ambitious goals while we overlook all the people who had the same goal, but didn’t succeed. Every candidate wants to get the job. Every team wants to win. Every podcaster and wants to be popular. If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be the main driver, which differentiates the winners from the losers. It has to be what’s underneath it. It has to be the systems and the habits, that is a main criterial difference between those who make it and those who don’t. If I look back on a lot of the systems and habits I had as a young athlete, I would change so much. My goals were great. My goals were ambitious. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t have the right framework and structure and it had me wasting a lot of time. I was working really hard, but I wasn’t working smart. And that’s where intelligent systems and habits come in.
So, look at the people who are where you want to be and don’t necessarily look at what they have but look at what they do. And not even what they do now, but what they did. Everybody looks at The Rock and like ‘oh man, I want to work out like The Rock’. Dwayne Johnson man, he’s jacked and big and strong. You want to look like The Rock, don’t do what The Rock does now, do what he did to get to the place he is now. Maintenance and refinement is a very different process than accrual and building. A lot of people we look at in society, I’d admire influential, successful people. There are at a maintenance and refinement. They’ve built their foundation. They’ve made their wealth and now they’re in a different place, much, much different place to you. And so, their habits are going to reflect differently to what it took them to get to that place.
#2 Achieving a goal is a momentary change
If you have a goal to clean your room, you achieve it. Okay. You have a clean room now. But if you maintain the same habits that lead to that messy room in the first place, you can be looking at another messy, dirty room again. And you’re going to wait for another burst of motivation to fix it up. So, you end up chasing the same outcome repeatedly because you never changed the system behind it. You treated the symptom without addressing the cause. This is a big thing we do in our society, we treat symptoms and don’t get to the root causes of our problems. So, all right. Why is your room so messy? Why does it get messy in the first place? Oh, is it because every time you come home from work, you just dump the stuff on the ground. And so, after five days of coming home after work, you have five days worth of dumping stuff on the ground. That takes you two seconds to do, to take clothes off, put them on the ground and be done with it. But now that takes you quadruple the amount of time to pick up, fold away, put away.
So, instead how could we address that system? How about every time you walk past your bedroom, you just put away one thing. So, now at the end of the week, it’s not some big overwhelming task that is piled up in front of you that you have to dedicate an hour to. No, but it’s something you dedicate a minute to every day. You have a minute. I have a minute. ‘I’m just going to put that away. Done. I’m going there anyway. I’m on the way there anyway, I might as well.’ This is how we can stack habits and systems together.
Cue = walk in my room.
Craving = cleanliness/feeling like it’s time to put something away.
Response = putting the item away.
Reward = feeling like you have a tidy room.
We think we need to change our results, but our results aren’t the problem. We need to look at the roots instead of at the branches. We need to change the systems that caused those results. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
#3 Goals restrict your happiness
People think once I reach my goal, I’ll be happy. Implying the whole process and journey towards the goal is something to dread or not enjoy and you should forego joy until you reach the goal. A systems approach provides the antidote when you allow yourself to find joy, meaning, fulfillment in the process, you don’t have to wait until this perfect moment of achievement to feel those emotions, the process can serve for that as well. But I don’t think it necessarily has to as well. I don’t think happiness is really important as a goal and I don’t think it really should be. I know it’s an unpopular opinion in general, probably one of my most unpopular against the grain opinions but that’s a topic for another article.
#4 Goals are at odds with long-term progress
When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what’s left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many revert to the old habits after they achieved the goal. Why do a lot of people who go on The Biggest Loser end up straight bouncing back to them to previous weight, if not heavier? Here’s the crazy thing, they had an environment that was very conducive to radical change, right? You might travel somewhere, your habits and systems might improve dramatically. The people you’re around, you have accountability. It’s amazing. The weather’s better. You feel great. Go back to your environment and that environment is not there. You never actually designed your environment around you to be successful.
Those Biggest Losers contestants could get the most value if they sat down with a psychologist or a coach and worked with them to answer the questions…
How can we apply some of these principles here to your environment at home?’
What’s the biggest limitation that you have cueing you into unhealthy behaviour at home?’
How can we manipulate that environment to work for you instead of against you?
Okay. So, you leave the bag of chips out on the counter every day. Okay. How about we just put them away?
How about every time you bring home your groceries, you put everything away in closed cupboards.
How about we look at replacements of behaviors. So, you might enjoy something sugary and sweet. That’s fine. How about we look at some intelligent non-caloric sweeteners, like an allulose, sucralose or erythritol. And we look at getting those types of sugary tasting high palatability drinks with no calories in it.
You look at these things that they aren’t telling these contestants, they aren’t telling these people. They’re just trying to rip the bandaid off.
This is why many revert to their old habits after they achieve their goal. Hence why you need a true purpose of why behind your goals that keeps the fire stoked.
True long-term thinking is go-less thinking. It’s not about any singular accomplishment. It’s about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement towards excellence. And so, those are the four problems with goals.
A system of atomic habits
Bad habits repeat themselves again and again because you don’t have effective system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your habits and systems. Atomic habits represent the small marginal habits and gains that represent a larger system, just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules. Atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.
That is chapter one books summary of Atomic Habits. I will be summarising all the chapters. You can see it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and all podcast platforms.