Ephemeris of the Mind (Book Review) Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Time to read: 2 min read
Book Cover
Human behavior is always changing: situation to situation, moment to moment, second to second. But this book is about what doesn’t change. It’s about the fundamentals of human behavior. The lasting principles you can rely on year after year. The ideas you can build a business around, build a family around, build a life around.
Reviewac
Usually I avoid self-help books like a plague because the advice they give is often overly prescriptive and are just common sense packaged with anecdotes. I read this book because it came highly recommended from a friend.
In this book, Clear dives into the psychology behind our habits, both the good and bad. Clear explains some frameworks on habits, namely a modified version of Duhigg’s The Habit Loop, where habits start with a cue, which leads to a craving, which leads to a response, which ultimately leads to a reward. Clear suggests various techniques to both build good habits and break bad ones by targeting specific steps on the Loop; for instance, he recommends clearing one’s workplace from habit triggering cues to avoid distractions.
The book is well written and a quick read. I liked how there are plenty of anecdotes and example applications of Clear’s suggestions. The book also had visuals and tables to drive the points home. I did find the book to be a tad overly verbose as many ideas can be more succinctly summarized. There are also two chapters which one can only read online (after signing up for Clear’s newsletter).
Overall my three key takeaways are:
Success comes from incremental improvements. Making small improvements on a daily basis will drastically improve one’s life over time.
One should focus on systems as opposed to goals. Systems will help overcome the “Plateau of Latent Potential”, where one’s work is making progress but one’s progress does not manifest itself yet.
One’s habits are closely tied to one’s identity, thus it’s important for one to focus on defining an identity that one wants to embody and that identity will inspire habit change.
Conclusion
Decent self-help book that's probably longer than it needs to be.