Atomic Habits by James Clear
By: Ilknur Eren
Tags: Book Review, Atomic Habit, Habits, Productivity

An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones

Why are habits important?

You might not believe that small tiny habits can have a significant change in your life. James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits, argues and proves that tiny changes in your life can and will have remarkable results.

Tiny positive habits are important and they compound day to day, year to year to significant result.

Habits are compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.

1% better every day

You might not think that improving your daily habit by 1 percent will give you results because day to day, you don’t feel any different. But over time, that small improvement in your life will compound to incredible results. In Figure 1 above, you can see how over time, 1 percent change to your daily life compounds to incredible results. Alternatively, not changing your daily habit result in decline of result. Over time, positive improvement compounds exponentially where as negative habit declines in a slower rate.

How can I start a new habit?

Every single new year, most of us start a new years resolution. We want to exercise more, read more, go out more. We want to improve ourself and get better. However, most of us stop working on our new years resolution by February, if not sooner.

If you want to build a good habit, there are some steps you need to take in order to stick to your goals.

Make it easy — You will never stick to your habit if it’s not easy to complete it. You may do the habit for couple days, months but it will never stick long term if it’s not as easy as possible. You need the habit to be so simple enough to not have any excuse to start it. Habit stacking — When you first start a habit, it might be a good idea to stack the new habit on top of the old ones that you already do. This will make the new habit very easy to start and complete. For example, if you want to drink more water, make it a habit to drink water every time you go in your kitchen to eat. During the day, you are bound to go to your kitchen to make yourself food. Walking to the kitchen will trigger you to drink more water. Over time, this habit stacking will become a routine and you will be able to drink more water. Change your environment — It’s so important to create an environment for yourself to start your habit and eliminate bad ones. You should have environments where you only work, work-out and relax. You shouldn’t work on your bed, you shouldn’t relax at your office. Every single environment of your house or your office should have a purpose.

Plateau of Latent Potential

When you start any new habit or a goal, we tend to think that our progress should be linear. In reality, the results are delayed. Most of us want results right away and get disappointed when we don’t see it right away. This is called “Valley of disappointment”. Valley. of disappointment is often when people quit their goal because they haven’t seen results yet.

All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.

It’s important to push through the Valley of disappointment phase and realize that results will come after the hurdle. Results will grow exponentially if we stick to our habit.

Repetition, repetition, repetition

James Clear, makes it very obvious that whatever habit you want to create for yourself is not going to be easy to start with. You need to repeat, your habit enough times for it to become automatic for yourself. There is no set amount of time or repetition for it to become automatic and it will change from habit to habit. It’s important to stick to your habit and push through the valley of disappointment.

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results