Hello!
Recently I finished reading the book, Atomic Habits. It was another one I read for my schoolwork.
I really enjoyed it! It’s a book that I think, besides for a few parts, every human should read. It would be so helpful for everyone!
I loved James Clear’s style of writing. He drew me in from the beginning when he shared how he got hit in the face by a baseball bat when he was in high school. Reading a little bit of this introduction was part of the reason I decided to start this book next, plus I knew the topic of habits would really be helpful to me right now.
I’m so glad that I own this book (Dad bought it for me) because this is a seriously helpful tool that I should come back to again and again. And thankfully the way James Clear wrote it and laid it all out will be very helpful with that! One of the things I love is this idea of an atomic habit and small habits stacking up and becoming huge! I loved the idea of improving by 1% in a bunch of little ways.
What’s something you liked about it (and why)? I like how this book is pretty easy to read. James Clear is a fantastic writer. It does get deep in areas, it’s certainly not the best book to just sit down and read for fun. But I think it could be worse- it could be so much more intellectual, hard to understand and relate with and just plain difficult to read. He’s very personal in his writing, the chapters are pretty short, he adds in lots of stories from real life- but all of them directed to help you understand the point, he adds lots of charts, spreadsheet type things and pictures and one of my favorite parts… he adds a chapter summary to the end of each chapter! So I still did struggle to comprehend stuff, but I know that a book on this topic is going to be like that and I loved how easy it was to read despite that. Because all of this really helped me to enjoy reading it, to understand it better and it’ll make it a lot more likely and easy for me to come back, search through it’s tools when I need one and remember parts of the book.
What’s something you disliked about it (and why)? Some of the charts and pictures were a little hard to understand for me. So I wish a few of them would have been a bit clearer. He also referred to some inappropriate things a few times, I know it’s a book for adults so it’s not crazy, but they were usually used as examples and I think, maybe not all of them, but some could have been taken out or replaced with a different example. I don’t know, that’s just my opinion because it was unnecessary for me to read and put not so great and just bad thoughts in my head. I bet that would be the case for others too.
What was your biggest takeaway or lesson? There were so many huge takeaways for me! I learned and was reminded of so much because of this book. One of the biggest lessons though, is what he calls the Four Laws of Behavior Change. It involves the idea that habits are broken into four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward and he says that you can think of each law as a lever that influences human behavior. He says that when the levers are in the right positions, creating good habits is effortless. When they are in the wrong positions, it is nearly impossible.
The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying. He also says, we can invert these laws to learn how to break a habit… make it invisible. Make it unattractive. Make it difficult. Make it unsatisfying. We can do these things to habits to make them more likely or less likely to happen, and they connect with the natural part of each habit. These ideas were big takeaways for me because it’s so simple but so effective and frankly, I want to make my good habits obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying! Mainly the rest of the book goes through each of these laws in practical ways.
There were so many ideas and lines throughout the book that were big takeaways as well!
What is something you’re curious to learn more about as a result of this experience? I’m curious to figure out and learn how I can not just set this book back on the shelf but to actually implement parts of it. I really struggle to comprehend things I read and watch and I also have a hard time putting them into practice. I also get caught in all-or-nothing thinking so that could be helpful to remember… I don’t need to implement everything in the book, but to just start with a few things.
Thanks for reading!
Lucy