Who Should Read It?

This book “Atomic Habits” written by James Clear is tailored for individuals who have a genuine interest in personal growth and are dedicated to cultivating positive and enduring habits.

It caters to those who aspire to enhance their lives by honing their daily routines and behaviours. The book provides valuable insights and actionable guidance for individuals seeking to embark on a journey of self-improvement and maintain a consistent path of self-development. It addresses the needs of readers who are enthusiastic about harnessing their full potential and establishing positive routines that can lead to personal growth and success.

This book teaches you about the tiny routine habits that help transform all the phases of your life positively. The author discusses about a four step plan or four simple laws that will have a huge impact in you, if you follow it over the course of time.

Whenever we think of improvement or success, we tend to overestimate the importance of only the big defining moments in the journey and almost forget about the small steps and tiny improvements that compound to build a legacy.

A rough estimate can be made to find how just a mere 1% improvement a day can build your performance by 37 times in a year. So that is the power of atomic habits. These habits can compound in two ways, one is positive and another is negative.

When you develop your habits in making your day more productive by automation, enhancing your knowledge, or developing your relationship, there habits on a long term will compound to give its benefits and help you grow. But on the downside if you are taking more stress, negative thoughts or outrage each day, these small actions will disrupt your mind and health over the course of time.

To achieve compounding, it is important to set goals, because goals sets the direction and guides us, and it is as important to follow systems that lead us towards the goal. The author highlights, that how it important to know the difference between goal and system, he states that fixing the inputs will make fix the outputs themselves.

Next, the author highlights the importance of how habits shape your identity, it may be a bad or good habit, but the most difficult part is quitting the bad ones and transitioning into following a good habit, this is a basic psychology and this is how humans have certain neural circuits wired, the reason behind this is:

1. trying to change the wrong thing
2. trying to change habits in wrong way

People tend to change the wrong thing, because as mentioned earlier they focus too much on outcome and end results, and try to form outcome-based habits. This approach blinds new ideologies to form effective process that suits us and gets us to the goal. So the alternative is to have identity-based habits. It is more of like altering your assumptions, biases and beliefs in order to understand the true reality. So this is what the concept of unlearning is.

“Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”

From various researches and statistical data, one base idea of habit formation is based on the feedback loop, ie., try, fail, learn, try differently. So basically, thorough each experience of your life, your brain learns to lock in on the cues that lead to success and trim down the unnecessary actions, that distort the process.

From a neuroscience perspective this is basically a concept called neuro-plasticity, simply put it is the brain’s ability to form new neuron connections, that leads to modified neural circuits, that ultimately helps you refine yourself.

Then the author mentions about the science behind how habits work, the process is broken down into four simple steps:

In a nutshell, firstly cue signals the location of primary rewards, next craving is about wanting and desiring the reward, response is about obtaining the reward, and then finally you get the reward.

Through tabular representations, the author beautifully articulates the concept of creating a good habit and how to break a bad habit with the four laws as mentioned above.

The next part of the book mainly focuses on the four laws in depth. Let us look at each law in short

1. 1st Law: In this section, the book covers, concepts such as habit automation, execution of conscious actions, methods to start a habit, importance of environment in which you work and self control.
   • To start with, experience and exposure are the most important aspects that we have to cultivate in order to identify the relevant cues and encode that lesson into your brain learned through that experience.
     
   • So the most core thing that we should cultivate before identification is, awareness or self-consciousness, this is the factor that helps us to take the right decisions and direct life in the way we want.
     
   • Next, the author emphasis the importance of the concept of “implementation intention”, it is basically making a plan beforehand about when(time) and where(location) to act. So when these variables become discrete through planing we naturally tend to stick towards our goal and execute it.
     
   • With this, as an add on, habit stacking (setting consecutive goals next to each other) will improve your productivity. On a chapter under this section, the author discusses the significance of self-control, and how it shapes us, long story short, the secret to self-control is to make the cues of good habit obvious and cues of bad habits invisible.
     
2. 2nd Law: The author mentions about the dopamine feedback loop in our brain. Dopamine is basically a neuro-chemical in our brain, that is released due to desire, craving and motivation.
   
   • Taking action does not happen due to the fulfilment, but rather due to the anticipation of the reward. So there is a dopamine kick in our brain, whenever there is an anticipation or craving.
     
   • Cultural significance has a lot of influence over our habits, and behaviours. The reason behind this basic human psychology, is approval, praise from others and strong desire to fit in.
     
   • So to leverage this as an advantage to develop good habits, you can join a culture where you have something common with the group and your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour of the group.
     
   • To find the fix the cause of bad habits, we have to identify the underlying craving that attracts towards the habit. Craving basically is to reduce uncertainty, relieve anxiety, win social approval, or to achieve status. These are actually good thoughts/craving , but when people tend to fall into short term mindset of winning these aspects, they might choose wrong ways, or pick up bad habits.
     
   • But on a long term this will have a negative impact on them, this impact could be on physical or mental health. Basically, the action towards a craving is initiated, to fill the gap between your current state and your desired state. And it is easy for humans, to take up shortcuts, which may cultivate bad habits.
     
   • So in order to reprogram the brain to enjoy hard habits, you have to transition from seeing these habits as burdens and turn them into opportunities. This shift in perspective will have a huge impact in your behaviour and growth.
     
3. 3rd Law: The author highlights the importance of taking actions, over focusing so much on figuring out the best approach and strategy. So to master a habit, the key is initiate and start with repetition.
   
   • Two minute rule, is one of the best ways to start with a habit or a work, chapter 13 gives a in-depth working mechanism of this law. The author pulls in neuroscience explanation for how progress happens with practice. So basically any activity in the brain takes place, only with the help of neurons firing together, communicating information with electrochemical signals.
     
   • Long term potentiation, refers to strengthening of connections between neurons, based on recent patterns of activity. So with this concept and increasing gray matter (cortex) in the brain with practice and experience, you tend to expertise and automate certain behaviour over the non-concious mind.
     
   • He mentions about the law of least effort, which basically emphasises importance of human energy, and the way in which it is spent. Humans naturally tend to shift towards the easy path that offers them success, because more the energy required, the less likely it is to happen.
     
   • To achieve more with less effort, redesigning the process and environment in which you work, and reducing or removing the factors that cause friction, which can lead us to get to the goal efficiently. The next step is to standardise certain aspects into your routine, in order to get the habit to work effectively and compound over time, and then finally, to attain master the habit has to be optimised and improvised.
     
4. 4th Law: The 4th law is titled “Make it satisfying”, the reason behind this name is to emphasise the fact that a habit is likely to be routinised and repeated, only if it provides a satisfying experience.
   
   • The outcome could be long term or short term. But the human brain is wired in such a way to prioritise immediate rewards over delayed rewards, so it takes patience and resilience to achieve long term plans.
     
   • Then he writes about how progress can be exciting, when we can track the process visually. So habit tracking and not breaking the chain that compounds to progress, will make the journey feel easier and motivating on the long run.
     
   • Before getting on the path of progress, the secret to achieve success with a higher rate of probability, is to first chose the right field of competition. It is noteworthy to mention the concept of explore/exploit trade-off ideology, it basically a framework that guides you to first explore all possible fields of interest and exploit more, if you are winning in that field, if you are currently losing for a long time, then continuing to explore more is the right choice.
     
   • The core mindset to not lose is reflection and self-evaluation, because those are the entities that help us make the right choices.
     
   • He also mentions the importance of pain in life and gives the proportional relationship of pain to learning from that pain, on the same light he highlights the benefits of having a accountability partner with whom you can sign a contract for imposing punishments, if the habit or routine is not followed by you. So this factor can act as a good motivator, even on the days in which you don’t feel like sticking on to the habit.
     
   • Last but not the least, habits do have a downside, attaining mastery due to a habit, can make us form fixed mindset over certain things, but the world doesn’t remain the same everyday, so it is as important for us to be like flowing water through a river, as our identity modifies with the changing circumstances rather than against them.

Kudos for your reading stamina, this post tries to cover the major aspects of the book, I hope I have been able to add value to you. This is an excellent book that brought a lot of change in me, changed my perspectives on growth, consistency and habits, and I firmly believe that it will give you a lot of insights, new ideas and reinforcement of old ones, so I highly recommend you to read the physical copy of the book if its possible.

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