I included Atomic Habits in my select list of the best books for breaking bad habits, and I honestly think James Clear’s book deserves a closer look at some of its key points. As you know, I never recommend books I haven’t read. That way, on the one hand, I avoid recommending crap that for some reason is among Amazon’s bestsellers (the place where books for media recommendations get picked), and on the other, I recommend something I know can help readers.
In the case of Atomic Habits, I believe it belongs to the elite of good books that can change your life, as long as you apply what it says. Among all the junk books out there with lots of marketing behind them but very little use, Atomic Habits is one of those that really delivers on its promise and adds a lot of value for anyone who truly wants to change their life.
So let’s look at some of the points I liked in this book.
Lessons we can learn from Atomic Habits
1. Beware of the motion vs action trap
When you’re in motion, you’re planning, strategising and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce any results. Action, on the other hand, is the kind of behaviour that will produce a result. Deciding to take action and then actually taking it is what brings results.
I put this first because it’s one of the reasons why, for some people, “self-help” and personal development don’t seem to help. You could say that many people fail to change their lives because they’re too busy reading books on how to change their lives without putting anything into practice.
Deep down, everyone knows this. You know when you’re not taking action and are just busy doing things that don’t produce results. And that’s what many self-help books are about: telling you something you already know. But until you see it in writing, with the consequences and/or benefits of applying certain things spelled out, you don’t react, or you don’t realise you need to. In this case, James Clear does a pretty good job.
An example of being in motion and thinking you’re making progress
Imagine you’re a writer. You get up in the morning, eat healthily, sleep well, meditate, write in a journal, go to the gym, do yoga, meditate again, make a to-do list at night for the next day, and so on… but you’ve barely written anything and your book hasn’t moved forward. You wrap up each day beautifully, but the pages don’t write themselves, even though you’re living a life full of the habits of success. To get the result you want, you need to write, and ideally writing should take up most of your time.
An example of taking action
You get up in the morning, have breakfast and sit down to write the damn book. You don’t even need to plan your day, because what you have to do is write the book. Meditate quickly, because you need to get back to writing the book; eat healthily, but write.
Believe it or not, the biggest problem many people have is thinking they’re making progress on something when in fact they’re simply confusing being busy with producing results.
When I said I had written my last book in 22 days, some people didn’t believe it, but when you’re taking action instead of just being busy, those 22 days are equivalent to many months for other people who take things more slowly. To write the book, I disconnected all my devices during the day, didn’t even check social media, turned off my phone and put all my attention on what I was doing: writing the book.
Being in motion is only useful for planning what we’re going to do, and that motion must quickly be replaced by action. For some reason, regular readers of self-help and personal development books often read brilliant messages but get rather mediocre results in many cases, and this is due, among other things, to getting trapped in the feeling that they’re making progress because they’re in motion.
In other cases, the average self-help reader isn’t a voracious reader of other subjects, so they often end up falling for certain bestsellers without being able to pick out the nuggets of gold from all the chaff they’ve been fed. To give one example, as I wrote some time ago, The Secret is poorly grounded from a scientific, neuroscientific and psychological point of view. Its success lay in delivering a message that’s very easy to chew and doesn’t need digesting. The problem is that it’s a book that steers your motion in the wrong direction and, on top of that, doesn’t push you to take action.
As I explained when I gave my opinion on The Secret, it’s a magnificent anaesthetic for your current situation, but a terrible remedy for fixing it. Bestseller or not, it may well be one of the biggest pieces of garbage ever written.
2. We live in a delayed-return environment
Our cave-dwelling ancestors lived in an immediate-return environment. In other words, you were hungry, you left the cave, hunted a bison and the whole family or tribe ate. Decision, action and reward on the same day.
In modern society, many of the decisions that are good for you won’t benefit you right away. In fact, progress in life, both in terms of money and success in any field, is based on delayed rewards, and most instant gratifications have to be avoided to achieve a long-term reward.
For example, if you want to earn a university degree, you’ll have to make many daily decisions and put in daily effort and habits, but you won’t see the result of that effort until you finish your degree a few years later. What’s more, you won’t see the real reward until a company hires you thanks to the degree you earned thanks (again) to your efforts.
See also: The 3 best books to read this summer (2018)
For most things worth doing, you’ll work for years before you see your actions produce a reward.
Why do humans find it so hard to turn down instant gratification?
As with other mechanisms engraved in our genes, instant gratification is something we carry in our DNA, because it was, in a way, a survival mechanism for our ancestors. What’s more, our ancestors had a low chance of surviving into the medium term, so the long term didn’t cross their minds much either.
In our society, the odds of reaching 70 are pretty high, as long as you don’t go jumping off moving trains, of course. But we still have that mechanism that prefers a quick hit of gratification over the satisfaction we could get from a long-term achievement.
In his book, James Clear mentions behavioural economists, who describe this distortion in how we evaluate rewards as “time inconsistency” (or dynamic inconsistency).
And this is another big problem with some self-help books, because with the message that “only the now exists” and “live in the present without worrying about the future”, meant to give us supposedly more happiness in the present, we’re setting ourselves up for unhappiness in the future.
No, folks. The now isn’t all there is. There is tomorrow and there is the future (for your sake and your family’s, I hope so), and there is the need for effort today and the need to plan for tomorrow. And if thinking about the future stresses you out, get a cat and pet it, or learn about emotional management.
If there’s one thing James Clear makes clear in Atomic Habits, and this is backed by many studies by behavioural economists, it’s that people with low time preference will prosper in life, while people with high time preference will be crushed in the future, even if they’ve read lots of self-help and personal development books, especially the ones that tell you “only the now exists”.
Think about it. Smoking is a habit that gives you instant gratification and whose consequences can take decades to show up. Well, the same thing can happen with healthy habits, but in a positive direction. It’s all a butterfly effect.
The same goes for saving and investing. Those who sell you the idea that you can get rich in a year will bankrupt you, while those who talk about the long term can make you very rich over decades.
3. Change your identity, and the rest of the change will follow
We should aim for certain habits to become part of our identity. We are our habits, so there’s a huge difference between saying “I’m the kind of person who wants to achieve this” and saying “I’m the kind of person who is like this”.
If you want real change, focus first on who you want to become rather than on what you want to do and how you want to get it.
When two people are trying to quit smoking and are offered a cigarette, one says, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.” The other says, “No thanks, I don’t smoke.” The second person has a much better chance of beating the addiction, because they’re not trying to drop the smoking habit; being a “non-smoker” has become part of their identity. In other words, it’s not about what they’re trying to do; it’s about who they are.
Instead of wanting to write a book, figure out how to be the kind of person who writes books. What qualities and habits do book writers have? Now shape yourself until you become that kind of person. The habits come included in that process.
This may sound like magical thinking, but as I’ve argued before, the way we talk to ourselves is essential. Avoid saying “I’m a shy person” if you want to stop being shy. Change it to: “I used to be shy. Not anymore.” When you want to change a behaviour or a habit, it’s about becoming the person you want to be. The habit follows naturally.
4. Winners and losers have the same goals
Having goals in life isn’t enough. Both winners and “losers” have more or less the same goals. So, logically, having a goal can’t be what makes the difference between those who win and those who lose.
Everyone wants to make more money. That’s a goal in life. But not everyone achieves it. So success or failure depends on the system we develop to help us make progress in life.
Here’s a line from James Clear that’s well worth keeping in mind:
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
When you set goals and achieve them, it isn’t because you set goals. It’s because you put the right system in place to achieve them. If you want to see results or reach your goals, you should care much more about your system than about anything else.
Clear rightly says that small actions are the compound interest of personal development. Just as the secret to building wealth is to use compound interest to multiply our money, in personal development those small actions added up over the days and weeks (that system) make our actions and decisions multiply exponentially. And that’s when the goal ends up taking care of itself.
See also: The best personal development books: top 10
Featured image: HTO, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
