4 rules from “Atomic Habits” by James Clear
By: Pauline Jackson
Tags: Habits, Habit Building, Atomic Habit, Book Lessons

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear is the best habit-building book that I’ve ever read. The strategy being the foundational sort of birds-eye view, huge ideas that really form the foundation of everything you’re trying to do. And tactics being the more the trenches plans that allow you to carry out the strategy on a day-to-day basis, in addition to dealing with whatever crap life happens to throw your way. And while running a business and building habits in your everyday life aren’t completely identical goals, they do have one key component: they are very, very alike, which is that you need both strategy and tactics.

And luckily, “Atomic Habits” also deals with this more tactical question. In fact, clear lays are four different rules for making habits stick over the long term and making sure that you stick with them even when life inevitably gets in your way. So in the article, we are gonna see four rules from this book.

1- Make it obvious

Any habit that you’re trying to build shouldn’t come with question marks on it. Where am I gonna do it? How do I do it? When do I do it? If you’re asking these questions, you’re already getting off on the wrong foot. One of my favorite quotes from this book is actually one of my favorite quotes in general, which are that “You do not rise to the level of your goals, “You fall to the level of your systems.”

And if your system hasn’t defined a clear picture of what a habit is supposed to be, then you’re not really gonna know what to do. For instance, I will eat more vegetables is unclear. How do you know on any given day that you’ve actually completed that goal? Is a single baby carrot enough? Well, if you’ve set your system in an unclear way or if you set the bare minimum so low, then on many days, you’re gonna find yourself falling to that bare minimum, eating a baby carrot and saying, “Hey, I ate vegetables.” And that’s the thing, on jam-packed days, or days when you’re feeling just really, really tired or unmotivated, you can bet that you are going to fall to the bare minimum requirement that your system has set.

And over time, this can lead to self-sabotage because while you are technically fulfilling your system requirements, the results you get through that habit, through that practice, are so infinitesimally small that you don’t see real progress over time. You’re basically just stalled out. But you can easily fix this by making the goal obvious by setting some specific requirements that give you a very clear bare minimum that’s actually gonna get you results.

So going back to our vegetable goal, instead of saying, “I will eat more vegetables,” just again, very unclear, maybe say something like, “I will eat one full serving of vegetables “every day at lunch, except for on Sundays “and fries don’t count.” I don’t know who thinks fries are a vegetable, but hey, we gotta be specific here, right? But you can see it’s obvious minimum requirement makes it a lot harder to cheat yourself in the long term. And it also makes it a lot more obvious what you’re supposed to be doing on a day-to-day basis. And if you want to make this even more obvious, then it’s a good idea to have a written record of your past accomplishments, of your past compliance with the habit you’re set out.

In other words, track your habits. We, human beings, have a very fallible memory. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what we did yesterday,

let alone two weeks ago. So if you have an actual concrete record of what you’ve done, you’ll often find it motivating, and you’ll find it easier

to keep doing this in the future. Now when it comes to tracking your habits, there are a ton of different methods out there.

2. Make it attractive

The idea here is to pair the habit that you’re trying to build, which is often difficult, requires self-discipline, requires motivation, and willpower, with something that you already like to do. And this can be especially important in the early stages of this habit. Again, it’s taking mostly willpower for you to do it because it hasn’t yet worn a well-worn neural pathway that makes it an automatic behavior. Or, I guess in definition, a habit.

You could also create what I like to call Jedi Councils, which is just my nerdy term for a mastermind group. I don’t really like the term mastermind group cause a lot of those fake gurus to love to use it. So I’m gonna go to Jedi Council. Still, essentially, a Jedi Council is just a group of like-minded people who have similar levels of ambition, who agreed to get on a call every week or every two weeks and support each other.

I was on the same Jedi Council call with the same four people for about four years. And every couple of weeks, we’d get on a call, and we talk about what we had done over the past couple of weeks. Every week, somebody would be in the hot seat. They would kind of do a deep dive on the struggles they were having, what they were trying to do in their business, or their goals.

We’d like all sorts of providing support and encouragement and accountability. At the end of that call, everyone would say, “Here’s what I’m going to do in the next two weeks, “keep me accountable.” One thing I’ve noticed with friends is that often friends are too close to you. They like it too much to really hold your feet to the fire with a goal. Maybe some friends will actually do it, but many friends will forgive you when you fall off the horse, which is not always what you need.

Sometimes you need to somebody who’s kind of at arm's length, who cares about you, but they care about you in a way in which they’re going to really hold your feet to the fire and ask you, “Why did you not do what you said you were gonna do?” You know, they’re not gonna take it can excuse from you. So it can be very, very helpful to form a group like this.

The accountability these people provide you might not always be enough to help you hurdle the difficulties involved in sticking with your habit long-term, which is why sometimes you need to look for a way to reduce that difficulty.

3. Make it easy

The main thing we’re looking to do here is to remove as much friction as possible from whatever positive habit you’re trying to build. So, for example, let’s talk about guitar for a second. It took me all of two seconds to go and grab this guitar off the stand over there. When I bought this guitar when I bought my first guitar in Colorado, they always tell me the same thing. You live in Colorado, which is a very dry environment.

So you need to buy a case, and you need to keep the guitar in the case as much as possible, and you also need to buy this humidification device which you have to fill with distilled water every two days. Otherwise, the guitar is gonna crack over time and become worthless. And I understand what they’re saying, and they’re not wrong, but here’s the thing, I did that at first diligently when I bought my first guitar here in Colorado. As a result, I rarely played it because it was locked in the case. It would take me, you know, probably 20, 25 seconds to get the case, unlock it, take the stupid humidifier out of the strings, and then get myself ready to play.

So now I’ve said, “You know what? “I don’t care if my guitars crack over time, “I will buy a new guitar 40 years down the line, “when my old one has worn itself out.” Because in exchange, by keeping my guitars out all over the house on stands, just ready to play, ready to pick up whenever I have a whim to play, I play much more often. And as a result, I’ve seen my skill grows so much faster. And the funny thing is, I don’t even have to make it obvious for this goal. I don’t have to say, and I will practice guitar and make these scale patterns every single day for 20 minutes.

So, make it easy. Remove the friction involved in getting into whatever habit that you want to do. Another way to make a habit easy is to start with baby steps, or in other words, to set the bare minimum at least at first, at a level that you know you could accomplish every single day even if something weird and unexpected comes up and interrupts your day, even if life gets in your way.

4. Make it satisfying

So part of what makes building a habit so difficult is something that the human brain hasn’t wired itself to accept yet fully. And that’s the concept of delayed gratification. This is when you forego a present reward, a short-term reward, to get a future and hopefully better reward. And this comes up a lot in modern-day life because we love to make big plans. Plans that right now might cost a lot of effort, money, and time, but that potentially won’t pay off for a very, very long time. And I say this happens more often now because many of us can reliably count on that future existing in the modern day. So we go to school, or we start that scrappy business in our garage, or we save up for that PS5, but for most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers who had to rely on what we can get right now.

And while PS5s are very hard to catch, as the saying goes, one PS5 in hand is worth two PS5s in the book. In other words, if you don’t know that your next meal is coming, then you learn to prioritize what you can get right now over future potential, maybe rewards. Loss aversion becomes a very, very useful survival mechanism when the potential consequence is starvation. And we’ve never fully escaped this mindset. This deep-seated brain wiring takes a long time to change. Our external environment has changed relatively rapidly. It seems like it’s been thousands of years, but in terms of brain wiring, well, that’s pretty done quick, and the brain just hasn’t had time to catch up.

As Claire points out in the book, “Because of how we are wired, “most people will spend all day “chasing quick hits of satisfaction.” And you can see how this might be a little bit productive for building strong habits. Since many habits aren’t immediately satisfying and take a bit of discipline to get you toward their eventual goal. So what we need is some metaphorical way of getting all three PS5s. We need something that motivates you to stick with the habit long-term but gives you something satisfying at the moment.

In other words, we want to bundle some short-term rewards with the long-term rewards gained through the habit. There are really bad ways to set this up. For example, if you are a runner and try to go on a run every day, maybe giving yourself an unhealthy snack as a reward isn’t the best idea. For one, eating as little as three Oreos could actually counteract the calories burned in an eight-minute mile, and well, not everyone’s gonna care about that.

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