Atomic Habits. Enormous Results.

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“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

I’m lazy. I sleep in, I hate cooking and laundry is a struggle.

At least this used to be my truth and I always thought I had no power to change that. I was always told that people don’t change. Growing up in my small town, it was often that people didn’t.

Going through university, I struggled to decipher who I was and who I wanted to be. At the time, my opinion of self-development books was that it was all the same mumbo-jumbo written in different ways. They were a space for opportunistic authors to blow smoke up my ass with mantras of ‘positivity’ so they could make a pretty penny.

This continued to be my train of thought until I was coerced into reading Atomic Habits (and trust me, it was an uphill battle). As a naturally adversarial person, I don’t like to do what I am told. In fact, I will often go out of my way to do the opposite…so reading this book took a lot of convincing.

To my surprise, I was hooked after the first chapter.

Rather than pushing ideals on you, Atomic Habits provides you with the tools and mentality to make incremental changes over time that will have a lasting impact. It stresses the idea of positive and negative compounding actions.

Think of it like a bank. If you have interest on a savings account, then over time and in small increments, you will see that account grow. But if you have interest on a loan, you will continue to owe more and more money over time, pushing yourself further into the negative. The same goes for your actions. I had realized that every time I procrastinated, slept in, or chose not to listen to good advice, I was reinforcing my negative traits and pushing myself further away from the person I wanted to be.

The more you allow yourself to take those negative actions, the easier it becomes to give into temptation and the harder it is to make change in your life. After reading this book it really made me think about every little action from picking up garbage right away, to making my bed in the morning, to getting school work done ahead of time.

I saw real results. And quicker than I imagined. I went from earning post-secondary grades in the 55–65% range to 97–100%. Wow.

I learned that the only thing stopping me from achieving that level of success before was my list of negative habits. I was the villain in my own story. While I’m still not sold on the self-development genre as a whole, I’ve learned that books like Atomic Habits can legitimately help you reshape your mindset and equip you with tools to succeed.

But you are still the person that needs to put in the work and make success a reality.

This Executive Summary was contributed by Laura-Kathleen Gifford.

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