Atomic Habits by James Clear
“Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”
3 Main Messages:
Success is the product of daily habits, not once in a lifetime transformations
Design your environment for success
Fix the inputs and the outputs fix themselves
Many have written about the incredible results of Dave Brailsford’s work as Performance Director for British Cycling. His focus on marginal gains meant that every tiny opportunity for improvement was explored.
Brailsford said, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
The impact of this approach is astounding, with British cyclists winning 178 World Championships, 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and 5 Tour de France wins between 2007 and 2017.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear looks at how we can use this strategy in our everyday lives, by suggesting that improvements can be made by making tiny changes and building on them. As he says, “Success is the product of daily habits, not once in a lifetime transformations.” By embedding positive habits into our lives, we can find shortcuts and make time our ally, rather than our enemy.
He emphasises the importance of focusing on systems, rather than concentrating on the success of reaching our goals because, as he says, if we fix the inputs then the outcomes will fix themselves. Clear quotes Bill Walsh, the 3 times Superbowl winner, whose focus was always on strategy as then “the score takes care of itself.”
One of the most powerful suggestions in the book is to focus on building identity based habits. All too often we say that we set targets of ‘reading a book a week’ or ‘running a marathon’ or ‘losing a certain amount of weight’. Clear tells us that the goal is not to ‘read a book, but to be a reader’ and so we should make small, everyday decisions about what we are going to do based on what a reader/runner/healthy person would do.
There are many useful, small and easy to implement steps suggested in the book, which are obvious but very well written and explained, which makes them effective. Clear writes about the four-step pattern which is the backbone of every habit as being ‘cue - craving - response - reward’. He tells us that understanding this helps us to build good habits and end bad habits.
To start a good habit you need to make it ‘obvious - attractive - easy - satisfying’ and then, of course, the opposite is true when trying to break a bad habit, making it ‘invisible - unattractive - difficult - unsatisfying.’ He tells us to “design our environment for success” by making the best choice, the most obvious one.
Clear gives many examples of how to do these in practical terms in the book. Perhaps the simplest suggestion he gives is to have healthy snacks and drinks like cut-up fruit, olives, carrot sticks and water at eye-level and easily accessible parts of the fridge, while putting beers (wine in my case), soft drinks and chocolates in fridge drawers or behind other items. We are then helping ourselves to make the healthy option the easy option. It sounds simple, but, having tried it myself, I can assure you that it works.
Habit stacking is another strategy described in the book which helps to start less attractive habits. This is the process of identifying things that you already do everyday (brushing teeth, closing the computer, coming in the front door) and adding a habit onto that. By adding onto habits we already have we are setting ourselves up for success.
Much of what is described in the book is about changing our mindset and environment in order to make it easier to make good decisions and harder to make bad ones. This includes reconsidering the layout of our homes, cupboards, offices and desks, and looking at who we surround ourselves with in order to help our future selves to make the right choices.
By building these good habits, we then ritualize positive processes, cutting a memory groove, which allows us to focus on continuing to make small, new adjustments. We are also much more likely to be successful if we start with a small habit and build it up, rather than set an unrealistic goal and become frustrated when it takes too long to reach it.
Clear says “With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.” I hope that this proves to be true, as I sit here with my sparse desk - clear of distractions, my phone in another room, my glass of iced water in front of me and a tick list of things to accomplish before my healthy lunch. This article is now finished in record time and ticked off - evidence that this works!
