Revisiting Atomic Habits — My First Book of 2021 and 2022

1% Better Every Day…

Image Credits — https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

Before 2021 began, I decided to make a few new habits including the one of reading more 📚. According to many research studies, the first 30–90 days are crucial in forming a new habit so I made sure to read every day for at least three months, even if it was just one page. Every night I’d sleep like a baby knowing that I did not skip the daily routine. I did not have any particular choice of genre in mind, I just wanted to read because it would help me in minimizing my screen time. So, in a way, I was hitting two birds with one stone, improving my reading, and staying away from screens all at once. While researching what books to read next, I came across some articles mentioning “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and how it might be one of the best productivity books released in recent years. It explains the details of how to form new habits and make sure that we stick to them. I thought “Perfect!”, what better book to read when you want to construct new habits, especially when that habit is reading itself.

I had read my fair share of self-help books before and it was clear that this book was a little different than them. Instead of relying on “motivation mindset” and “pseudo-scientific” principles based on discipline, Atomic Habits provides practical ways and frameworks on how changing your environment can affect your mindset, and how making tiny changes daily can gradually help you in improving your habits and help you achieve more. Some of my biggest reasons to kick-off 2021 with this book were to form habits for:

1. Knowledge Absorption (Reading and Podcasts)🎒
2. Studying and Learning (Programming)💻
3. Staying Active and Eating Healthy 🏃‍♂️
4. Limiting Social Media and Gaming 📱🎮
5. Journaling 📔

Now 2022 is here and we all know that these last two years have been a complete roller coaster. We were all challenged in some form, either mentally, socially, or physically. So, I thought it would be a good idea to start 2022 by reading Atomic Habits again and in addition, take some nifty notes on self-improvement which will aid me as well as many readers who want to improve even further and expand their horizons this hopeful year. So without further ado, read on for my takeaway of Atomic Habits and also why you should start your year with this book as well.

Side Note: This is not a review of the book, just a few of my own insights and what I took away from it, there are a lot of reviews from thousands of readers who might have a different explanation of the book.

Whenever we fail at creating a good habit, we usually blame ourselves that maybe it was us that did something wrong because we expect immediate results. Atomic Habits states that making little changes over a period of a long time is what gives us actual results. The book does not provide you with some magic beans which will suddenly bring positive changes to your life. If we want a productive and fulfilling life, it is we who have to notice the smallest things around us that are holding us back and what we can do about them. Making these tiny or even “atomic” changes will give us a better and easier transition into forming productive habits and getting our routine on track.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it — but all that had gone before.”

— James Clear

Getting 1% better every day is better than doing nothing at all!

We expect rapid results from our ventures because let's face it, we humans are impatient beings. But what this book mentions is that success is more often than not, a compound effect of daily pursuit and hard work. Even 1% of improvement every day compounds over one year of massive improvement in our habits. At the end of the year, if we compare ourselves to us at the beginning, the changes observed will be more noticeable than a daily comparison.

We tend to feel discouraged after a few weeks because there are not any “visible” changes.

The book mentions that all habits generally consist of four stages: Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. And all of these are in a sort of “feedback” loop. I mean, we can all agree that if there is no reward at the end then why are we even pursuing something, right? We play video games, watch TV, scroll through Social Media because it provides us with entertainment which is our reward. But what about exercising, reading daily, meditation, or learning something new? All these provide rewards too but then why do people find it easier to turn towards entertainment than self-improvement?

All habits consist of four stages — Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward

James mentions that it is because our “system” of creating those habits might not be as effective as we thought it would be. Our environment, our culture, and the people we live around matters a lot when we are growing up and that leads us to form our habits for the major part of our lives. Some of them might be bad and we may want to change them and others might be good. This is known as our “system” of creating habits. Working against a system might be harder but not impossible. We can find creative ways to make our system work for us instead of us against us. For example: Just removing mobile phones from our work desk and other distractions can work wonders for productivity. Or, if going to the gym alone feels daunting, try to tag a friend along and it will seem easier to visit the gym daily.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”

— James Clear

Think about it, people who wake up every day at 5 AM and go cycling or working out or the people who can work tirelessly for hours straight have created a unique system just for themselves. They don’t dislike doing these things, because they know the rewards that wait for them at the end. Their daily routine has reached certain automaticity and they don’t have to work that much compared to when they started pursuing these habits. This brings me to my next point.

Repetitions 🏋️. It’s a no-brainer that a skill cannot be mastered without repetitions. Another one of my favorite books Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell mentions that to truly become an expert in something, prepare yourself to pour in at least 10,000 hours for that skill. The Beatles sang every day in Hamburg for two years before their popularity exploded in the US, Bill Gates learned to program every day and night whenever he got the chance in school, Sachin Tendulkar exhausted himself on a daily basis after practicing cricket in school. I could list thousands of individuals like this who have made a name for themselves by being extraordinary in their fields and one thing common among all of them is the amount of time and “repetitions” they gave to their passion.

“Its all about them REPS!”

— Every Gym Lover Ever

Point A is the hardest because it is just the beginning. But after enough repetitions, it will become easier and will require much less conscious effort later.

You can walk for 10 minutes, eat healthy food, and work out for 15 minutes all in one day but it won’t do anything. Now, do the exact same thing for six months and there will be actual visible changes to your physique. That is how habits and repetitions work, by the time you will achieve your goal, you will have come so far already that it will become second nature to follow that routine. Mastering a skill requires this kind of routine and achieving mastery in a field is nothing but multiple skills in a person’s repertoire.

Multiple mastery of skills will lead to mastery in that related field.

The last learning that I would like to mention which I particularly found very useful from the book would be the Good Day/Bad Day explanation by James. He says that not all days are the same obviously and we may have created the perfect system for us to form good and productive habits and we are finally getting ready to buckle down for the next year or the next few months to REALLY work on these habits. Everything is perfectly set up! But sooner or later, life will happen. Distractions may occur, you may get stressed from work and have no time, you may have some misunderstanding with your partner, you may have eaten a whole pizza by yourself, or any other bad thing that broke your habit loop. My point is that I can practically guarantee that your so-called “mind-map” of forming habits WILL fail, maybe after 30 days, maybe after 100 days due to one of the reasons given above.

The outcomes from our decisions throughout the day can be very different depending on our choices.

So what should you do on days like these? Well, James mentions that even if we are having a bad day, there will always be certain “key” moments in our day which will require us to make a choice. These moments will stack up at the end of the day which will ultimately lead to the outcome of whether the overall day of ours was bad or good.

For example, let’s say I am on a healthy diet for some time now because I want to lose weight, the habit is going well. But one day I could not resist and cheated on my diet, maybe with a full meal or just a cookie. After that, enormous guilt fell over me and the day has been ruined for me in my mind. This incident here had two “key” moments according to me. One was the decision to “cheat or not cheat” on my diet and the other was what to do AFTER I ate the unhealthy food. If I behave like the situation given above, both of my choices were “bad” and they are going to be collected at the end of the day and add up resulting in an overall bad day. On the other hand, even if I ate junk food, if I can convince my mind that it does not matter now, I enjoyed it and one meal won’t hurt my habit, I can still make good choices throughout the upcoming “decisive” moments in the rest of the day and feel better.

“The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments. Each one is like a fork in the road, and these choices stack up throughout the day and can ultimately lead to very different outcomes.”

— James Clear

So, in the end, it only matters what we “choose” to do with the time which we have now. Pay attention to our past mistakes and feel bad or do something about them now and move ahead? There may be days where even our choices won’t matter, be it good or bad the day will be bad no matter what. Well, that is life and life is unpredictable. Tomorrow we wake up with a clean slate again and do our best! 😃

That’s it, people, that was my collection of learnings from Atomic Habits. It’s an amazing book for those who are looking to change up their system of creating new habits and sticking to them. It helped me a lot last year and that was my reason to read it again in 2022 for leveling up. This was not a review of the book and there are a lot of things in the book that I have missed out on explaining because I only wanted to list the techniques that have helped me the most. I hope if you do decide to read the book, it helps you too in achieving your goals for this year.

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