⚛ Atomic Habits

Why another self-help book?

I’ve spotted Atomic Habits multiple times at airport bookstores, have people recommend it to me and have watched a few Youtube videos by James Clear, the author. But I’ve always been sceptical of books in the self-help genre. Most of the times they pump you up with motivation and substantiate their arguments with research and stories, and then I am left not knowing what to do next.

Atomic Habits, however, is like a long well-researched blog post written by a person next door, who is talking about relatable stories and is giving you a simple framework on how to slowly and steadily change behaviours.

Whenever I get feedback or when someone points out things that I should improve on, I get defensive and act like a rebellious teenager. While books, reveal advice and opinions slowly, chapter by chapter, allowing me to think, digest and act on that advice at my pace. Atomic Habits was easy and thought-provoking with pearls of wisdom tucked away on every page.

How to read through this document?

This post is not a review of the book. It is a playbook that is a derivative of the book that I have written for myself, to come back to time and again, whenever I feel low, confused and in need of encouragement. I’ve also added my past experiences as examples to help me boost my morale — which is evidence for me to know that I’ve been able to overcome obstacles

🕵🏽‍♀️ What are my goals right now?

At this point in life, I have consciously decided to work towards doing things that bring me happiness and build on what I like doing. Some of my goals (not exactly SMART goals here) for the next 6 months are:

• ✍🏾 Write consistently.
• 💪🏾 Get Fit.
• 🥶 Control my anxiety and obsessive behaviours around it.
• 👩🏽‍🎤 Get intentional about what I do in my day/ week.
• 🙋🏽‍♀️ Find intrinsic motivation to define and build a structure in life.

The Playbook

🧏🏽‍♀️ Think

• The power of compounding: If you improve on anything by just 1% every day, at the end of the year you would have improved by 37%
• 💭 It’s difficult for investments to give 37% YoY returns. If you invest in yourself and grow by 1% every day, you are growing by 37%. Could there be a better investment?
• Quality of your life depends on your habits.
• 💭 Eating junk makes you feel like trash the next day. Instant sink in quality of life/day.
• We overestimate one defining moment.
• You may see the stone break with a single blow of the hammer on the stone cutter’s chisel, but he has been landing countless blows on that chisel before the stone breaks.
• On the flip side, a minor setback can accumulate over time into excuses, habits or fears that define us
• 💭 Value the time and effort each person puts in to build themselves up. Everything is a process
• Time magnifies everything
• If you think of yourself to be fat, lost, inconsistent, unsuccessful or anything negative, time will build up that feeling in you into a deep-rooted belief.
• 💭 Love yourself. Positive thoughts and affirmations help.
• Critical Threshold
• We expect progress to be in a linear fashion. But there is always a plateau and then exponential growth.
• Latent Energy — We put in the effort now and expect a result tomorrow. But progress is not linear. The energy you put in now is latent energy that is spent in getting the system ready, ready to be mature enough to deliver any output
• Bamboo shoots sporadically after five years because for those first five years it is establishing its roots and building a strong foundation.
• 💭 You don’t lose weight the next day after you exercise. It’s a slow process. It takes weeks if not months for your body to react to exercise and diet. Be patient and keep putting in the effort.

🧗🏽‍♀️ Forget Goals — Focus on the system

• Goals are momentary. Think not in terms of goals but systems.
• 💭 Don’t think about how much weight you want to lose or how many push-ups you’ll be doing at the end of the month. Focus your energies on building a system. A system which is conducive and encouraging you to exercise every day.
• Happiness is not goals but habits and systems
• Fall in love with the process and not the product.
• 💭 You get true happiness by not just achieving your daily goals, but by having a system which helps you to layout your plan in the morning, pushes you to pursue it, keeps a check on when you are slacking, motivates you and helps you track everything. Process preps you to achieve goals every day. It’s the bigger shit.
• You don’t want to just win a game. You want to be a long term winner.
• You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems

🤥 Habits define your identity

• You can start any habit but you’ll stick to the one that defines your identity. That implies, if you want to change a habit you are changing your identity.
• You don’t change with the flip of a coin. You’ll change day by day, by choosing proactively to edit your behaviours and in turn editing your beliefs.
• Votes mount up
• To win you need majority votes. Each day when you act towards a particular habit, you are casting a positive vote in the direction of a change, a positive behaviour.
• 💭 There will be negative votes, bad days, excuses sometimes. But remember, you need majority votes to win. Keep going, that’s most important.
• Shift focus
• 💭 A goal-based focus would be to write a book. A behaviour based focus will be to be a consistent writer who is publishing at least one article a week and improving her writing.
• 💭 Be a fit person, rather than a person who weighs X kilos.
• Habits reduce cognitive load and tune you for automatic response.
• Know and shape your automatic responses, be intentional about them.
• 💭 You want to be a person who remains focused during her day and does not get distracted by say, social media. Develop a habit of not checking social media during work hours.

🧁 👅 🛒 😣 Cue, Craving, Response and Reward

• Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it’ll direct your life and you’ll call it fate.
• Know why you do a certain behaviour?
• A smoker craves a cigarette not for the nicotine but for the feeling of relaxation that nicotine brings to their nerves.
• Introspect why do you do certain behaviours or have a certain habit?
• 💭 Food distracts you during your workday, not just because you like food but because you are filling time, you are not engaged in your work enough, you haven’t committed yourself. Even if you have, is it too ambitious? Why not start with smaller commitments then?
• No behaviour happens in isolation. It triggers the next action.
• Be intentional about your action.
• I will do <action>, at <time>, at <location>
• 💭 Checking social media for 5 minutes ends up being 15 minutes. That delays the immediate task. This delay leads to slight slacking and demotivation. That compounds to the following tasks being done sloppily or hurriedly, eventually you being dissatisfied with your day. Be intentional about your actions.
• Habit Stacking
• To pick up a new habit attach it to an existing one
• After <current habit> I will do <new habit>
• You see a cue, you jump on to it, to satisfy your craving. The craving calls for a response. Your response leads to a reward.

👀 Make it obvious — Cue.

• Motivation is overrated — Environment matters
• You don’t have to be a victim of your environment, you can be the architect of it.
• We have a relationship with each of the objects in our environment. Change the context, step out of your environment.
• 💭 The author mentions a friend who uses a Laptop for work, phone for social media and a tablet for reading. Clear demarcations and defined environments.
• It’s easy to build a new habit in a new environment
• 💭 Habits are tied to an environment like being lazy on the couch, being sleepy in the bed, worrying about food in the kitchen. Somehow in your head, with everything new you get / change, you set up new resolve. Like how you brush twice a day now because you have a new electric toothbrush!
• People with the best self-control use it the least
• It is easier to use restraint when you don’t have to use it often. Being disciplined comes from creating a disciplined environment.
• Bad habits are autocatalytic.
• 💭 Missing workout one day in the morning would result in you being lazy and being sluggish on your goals. That slight negative feeling just carries through the day.
• ‘Cue induced Wanting’ — external trigger causes compulsive craving
• You can break a habit but you are unlikely to forget it
• In the short run, you can overpower temptation but remember that you are a product of your environment.
• Self-control is a short term strategy.
• Make things invisible that promote bad habits.

👅 Make it Attractive — Craving

• Dopamine feedback loop: Dopamine kicks in when you anticipate pleasure and not when you experience pleasure
• You take an action in anticipation of a reward. Anticipation is the dopamine kick.
• 💭 Most of your actions are taken to fulfil these short term desires. To get immediate dopamine kicks.
• Desire is the engine that drives behaviour.
• Desire is the delta between where you are right now and where you want to be.
• How to change your behaviours from immediate responses to habits that give long term benefits?
• Know your underlying motivations.
• 💭 Why do you want to do develop a certain behaviour? Ask 5 whys.
• Be a part of a pack
• We imitate the habits of 3 groups
• The close: Join a culture where
• Your desired behaviour is normal.
• You have something common with the group
• Sustain behaviour by belonging to a tribe.
• The many: There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the behaviours of a group. This will help you belong.
• The powerful: If the behaviour gets us praise, approval and respect, we find it attractive
• Change behaviours from burden to opportunity
• 💭 Rephrase ‘I have to exercise’ to ‘I get to exercise’. Shift your view on events. Don’t make these habits burdens, turn them into opportunities.
• Temptation Bundling
• After <current habit>, I will <habit I need>. After <habit I need>, I will <habit I want>

⛷ Make it easy — Response

• Walk slowly but never backwards
• If you want to master a habit, the trick is repetition, not perfection.
• The amount of time you’ve been practising a habit is not as important but the number of times that you’ve been doing it
• Law of least effort
• The less energy the habit requires, the more likely it is to occur
• Make your habit easy by organising your environment for it
• Disable your bad habits by disabling them in your environment
• 💭 If you sit on the couch and be lazy, don’t hover around the couch during the workday.
• How to stop procrastinating
• New habits should not feel like a challenge.
• ‘Gateway habit’ — An easy habit that leads to you to a more productive habit
• 💭 When you put on workout clothes, you know that you have to work out.
• 2-minute starter habit — Show up
• Do something for just 2 mins if it is too difficult to do. Run every day for 2 mins, write for 2 mins at a certain time, exercise for 2 mins. When you keep repeating those 2 mins, you’ll eventually do more. You’ll want more for yourself.
• If you make the start easy, rest will follow.
• Stay below the point where it feels like work.
• Commitment Device — to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible
• Make a commitment to the present that controls your action in the future
• Example: If you don’t buy wafers and snacks, you’ll not eat unhealthy evening snacks.
• Automate Habits — use tech to automate habits
• 💭 The smart lights in the living room change colour for cooking time and dinner time. Prompts to propagate habits. Use tech.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Make it Satisfying — Reward

• Positive emotions cultivate habits.
• Good habits have delayed rewards and bad habits have immediate rewards
• 💭 Exercising leads to a fit body but over a long period, but the chocolate cake that you crave right now will give you immediate fulfilment.
• Develop immediate rewards for habits that pay off in the long run
• 💭 The man who moved paper clips from a full jar to an empty one, for every sales call he made. The future reward would be to get better at bringing business but the immediate reward was to just see the empty jar fill up. Small things matter.
• Incentives can start a habit, identity sustains it.
• Never break the chain
• Never miss twice
• It’s human to slag or commit a mistake. But it is never the first mistake that ruins you, it’s the 2nd one and the 3rd one.
• Best athletes don’t quit, don’t stop playing because they don’t play perfectly.
• Don’t do ‘0’ on sluggish days, just do something, the absolute minimum.
• Be the person who never misses a workout even when it is boring.
• Everyone gets bored, even the best athletes. But the difference between them and an average athlete is that they stick to things especially during the boring phase, during the routine.
• Habit Tracking
• Tracking is rewarding. Use visual cues.
• Don’t measure the wrong thing when you are habit tracking
• 💭 If fitness is a goal, is tracking the number of push-ups a measure or is there some way to track your form and technique? In the beginning, it could just be tracking the number of days in a week you do a workout.

🧙🏽‍♀️ What could go wrong?

• Don’t let measure become the target
• The most satisfying feeling is the feeling of making progress
• Choose the habit that suits you
• Goldilocks rule: Peak motivation comes when working on tasks that are at the edge of current abilities, not too hard, not too easy.
• The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
• Excel at being fascinated by what you do again and again. Each habit unlocks new difficulty.
• 💭 You rarely get bored with cooking, even when it is repetitive. And you look for experimenting and innovating because you are interested. Find ways to develop an interest in things that are difficult or boring, right now. You’ll sail through this.
• Reflection and Review
• It’s most important to develop long term improvement and self-awareness.
• 💭 This is something you repeatedly shy away from, analysing how you played a game, knowing your errors at a task. Confrontation with self is difficult. Either you can learn by playing the game multiple times and learning over a longer period or you can sit and know your mistakes, reactions, habits and improve from the very next moment. Remember, what’s difficult now, will reap sweeter fruits in the long run.