We Are What We Repeatedly do — My Review of Atomic Habits by James Clear

All big things come from small beginnings. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Imagine you want to be a painter, imagine the exact kind of painter you would love to be known for. I once read about Salvador Dali, for example, dreams were the greatest muse of this surrealist painter. He concocted a trick to wake himself in time to remember these visions. As he drifted off, he’d hold a key, his hang dangling over a metal plate. When slumber made his hand go limp enough to drop the key, it’s clanging on the plate would rouse him to return to work.

Another was Gerhard Richter, a German visual artist, he on the other hand considers himself a willing slave to routine. Each day begins with a walk at 6:15 am. After making breakfast for his family, Richter goes to his studio until lunch, which is always the same: yogurt, tomatoes, bread, olive oil and chamomile tea. Then he returns to work until it is time for dinner. The routine has paid off — in February, Richter’s 1986 work “Abstraktes Bild” auctioned for $46.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a living European artist.

These examples are two great artists but obviously, it’s just not the talent, hard work or luck but it’s something else that plays a subtler role in the making of these wonderful artists and many more. And that is the process of building wonderful and meaningful habits.

Do you want to be a Gerhard Richter or Salvador Dali? Do you want to be a G.O.A.T?

For you to be anything at all, I think you have to start thinking about your daily habits, routines, and actions. Start showing commitments to develop ones that will help you become what you want to be. Start building up to them, step by step, stroke by stroke, day by day, poco-a-poco, you will grow, you don’t become who you want to be, overnight.

Photo by Luwadlin Bosman on Unsplash

I had this book, “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear, as a gift and for some reason, I couldn’t read the book and kept it on the bookshelf, then moved it to my books bag.

After exactly a year, on the same date, I stumbled upon it (such a coincidence!) then I finally brought it out, and got around to it.

See, I’ve had my share of failures, but I’ve already been trying to implement positive habits in my life for a few months and I wanted to improve my progress, finding the book again was timely to improve my productivity.

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear is a significantly easy read, the research and stories backing up the claims about human psychology were good. It’s got real advice. Doable advice. And that’s something we all need, especially when it comes to behaviour change.

Since the book is all about the little habits and the compounding effects of small positive habits, I thought the most practical way of applying the system is to select a single habit I would like to change and practice it every day for 21 days. I experimented with my reading habit to see the power of moving the needle in tiny increments as a superior method to creating a rack of change.

Guess what?! It helped me break the culture of not reading every day.

I devotedly read small sections in the morning and at night and it took me about three weeks to read the book; I see myself going back to it one day for another skim through to refresh on the content because I got a lot out of it.

Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. In the same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

So, I’m going to share 100+ highlighted points from this book, they are principles on habits that I have learned so far from reading this book. While I do that, I’m not sharing everything from the book. I would still encourage you to read it if you’re interested in this topic and need some help creating change in your life.

To start with, James talks about how habits are formed and what they are. He also gives some examples of how you can use habits to improve your life. If you have ever wondered why you do certain things, this book will answer that question for you.

The author recommends making small changes to create new habits because it is easier than trying to make big changes at once. He gives examples of what those changes might be, such as going to bed earlier or waking up later in the morning. This makes sense because if we try too hard all at once, then we fail right away since there isn’t enough time or energy left over for other things like family or work etcetera; however if we make small changes gradually over time then we will build momentum towards success rather than failure because our brains are naturally wired for progress even when there seems like none possible just yet so long as one keeps plugging away at his/her goals no matter how seemingly impossible they may be.

That being said, here are my highlights from reading “Atomic Habits”. (Feel free to use the highlight feature to accentuate any point that resonates with you)

Photo by Sophi Raju on Unsplash

1. Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience.
2. In the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
3. Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up…you need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking, so that you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.
4. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.
5. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
6. You get what you repeat
7. Be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
8. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
9. Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
10. A small change in what you can see can lead to a big shift in what you do.
11. Mastery requires patience.
12. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
13. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
14. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
15. Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning — the survivors — and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
16. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.
17. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
18. The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
19. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
20. The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.
21. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
22. An atomic habit is a little habit that is part of a larger system.
23. Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.
24. There are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits. Behaviour that is incongruent with the self will not last.
25. Habits are the entry point, not the end point. They are the cab, not the gym.
26. The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
27. True behaviour change is identity change.
28. The real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way.
29. Your habits are how you embody your identity.
30. The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
31. Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well.
32. Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
33. Work backward from the results you want to the type of person who could get those results.
34. Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in every moment.
35. “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
36. You don’t have to be victim of your environment, you can also be an architect of it.
37. One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing.
38. People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit.
39. Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.
40. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
41. Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
42. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one.
43. Most people live in a world that others have created for them but you can enter the space where where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones.
44. The primary reason the brain remembers the past is to predict better what will work in the future.
45. Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.
46. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time.
47. It is the anticipation of a reward — not the fulfillment of it — that gets us to take action.
48. Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
49. Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
50. Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
51. Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
52. Habits are all about associations.
53. The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving — a feeling, a desire, an urge.
54. Many of the actions we take each day are shaped, not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.
55. Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity.
56. A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.2 It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.
57. Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.
58. The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
59. The feedback loop behind all human behaviour is to try, fail, learn and try differently.
60. Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and simple.
61. Mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
62. We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.
63. The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
64. The first three laws of behavior change — make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy — increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change — make it satisfying — increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.
65. You value the present more than the future.
66. A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future.
67. Your identity emerges out of your habits, you are not born with present belief. Every belief, including those about yourself, is learned and conditioned through experiences.
68. The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
69. Let’s update the Cardinal Rule of Behaviour Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
70. In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself. In the real world, good habits tend to feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with something.
71. Use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of a behaviour.
72. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
73. Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures — like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles — provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behaviour and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity.
74. Habit tracking also helps keep your eye on the ball: you’re focused on the process rather than the result.
75. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
76. The dark side of tracking a particular behaviour is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.
77. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
78. Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you.
79. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
80. Goals are about the result you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
81. The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behaviour.
82. People are born with different abilities.
83. Our environment determines the suitability of our genes and the utility of our natural talents.
84. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
85. Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.
86. The takeaway is that you should build habits that work for your personality.
87. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
88. A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.
89. Work hard on the things that come easy.
90. The Goldilocks principle states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
91. A flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” and fully immersed in an activity. Scientists have tried to quantify this feeling. They found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability.
92. At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.
93. Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Once the beginner gains have been made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade.
94. The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us.
95. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
96. Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.
97. The more sacred an idea is to us — that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity — the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
98. When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.
99. We are changed by the World around us.
100. Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
101. The road less travelled is the road of delayed gratification.
102. Most people know that delaying gratification is the way. The what the benefits of good habits; to be healthy, be productive, to be at least but these outcomes are seldom top of mind at the decisive moment.
103. It is possible to train yourself to delay ratification but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long run and a little bit of the immediate pain to ones that don’t.

Photo by Bernie Almanzar on Unsplash

In conclusion, we are what we repeatedly do, by our nature, we are creatures of habit. Change is something that we have to build into our daily routines until it becomes an automatic behaviour. It takes effort and focus to change your habits, but it is well worth the try if you are serious about improving your life and maximizing your potential.

I hope this book review has sparked your motivation to form new habits and rid yourself of the bad ones. You can do it. If you can dream it then you can achieve it. If you learned one thing from reading this, please click “Share” below.

This will help share the learning.

And finally, you can find out more from James Clear …

James Clear has a totally free newsletter that you can sign up for here. The 3–2–1 Newsletter is one of the most popular newsletters in the world. Every Thursday, the latest issue is sent to over 1,000,000 people. Each message includes 3 short ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question for you to ponder.

Enter your email and sign up for free right now. https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1

Thanks for reading my book review of “Atomic Habits,”. Have a great day and week!

Love always,

Ayooluniyi.