What I learned from reading Atomic Habits by James Clear

I would like to give a quick shoutout to my good friend David Russo for recommending this book for our book club to read. Even though our book club quickly fell through I credit this book for the motivation it gave to me to follow through with my new years resolution which is to read 12 books this year. Before diving into the book I did not have any thoughts about my personal habits or any particular habit I wanted to remove or add to my life. However, as I began to read I quickly realized how important habits are and how vital of a role they play in our life. Here are some of the most crucial things that I learned from this book and how they play a role in my life afterwards.

The power of tiny gains

This graph represents such a simple yet powerful message when it comes self improvement. When I saw this graph it provided a clear message on how important it is just to start something and to keep at it. I feel like most people and including me have a hard time starting something. I have made up a zillion excuses on why I should not start something but at the end of the day it all stems from some insecurity. Maybe it's because I am afraid I will not be good at it. Or I am afraid of the unknown. Or I am just too lazy and the list goes on and on. If you listen to these things then you will never start something. Never starting something is much worse than starting something and being bad at it or facing rejection. Because at the end of the day at least you started and more often times than not you quickly realize how unimportant your preconceived notions were. The zero to one step will be the hardest step out of everything you do in life. The zero to one step is the step that goes from nothing to something. This is the hardest step because you have no foundation to build off of. You have no idea what is coming next and most of the time you have no idea what you are doing. Little did I know this is all normal and part of the process. What James Clear is saying in his graph is that if you just focus on getting 1% better everyday than you will be 37.78% better by the time you reach the one year mark. This is substantial improvement in whatever area of work you apply this principal too.

Chapter recap: Tiny improvements everyday result in massive improvement later. Just start, it is not as scary as you think. Lastly, it is okay to not know what you are doing, it is all part of the process.

Habit Stacking

Habit stacking is stacking a habit you already have to another one you want to form. For me, this is one of the easiest ways to formulate a new habit because all you have to do is attach a new habit with one you already have. If you apply this rule you will quickly realize how easy it is to automate a new habit. I wanted to develop the habit of putting sunscreen on my face everyday regardless if I was getting sun exposure or not. After a couple days I quickly forgot to put it on. I new that if I wanted this to be a part of my daily routine I had to associate it with a habit I already have in the morning. That habit that I already have and I hope that everyone else has too is brushing their teeth. From that point forward I told myself that every single time I finished brushing my teeth I was going to put sunscreen on. I put the sunscreen right next to my tooth brush so every time I put my tooth brush away I would see it. Forgetting to put sunscreen on my face went from a daily thing to something that never happens.

Chapter recap: Associate an old habit with a new one. Make it a part of your routine. If you forget, forgive yourself and keep trying because after all, tiny gains result in substantial improvements.

Make it easy

If you want to start a new habit you have to make it easy and make it satisfying in order for it to stick. Sometimes developing new habits is extremely hard because it is something that we just do not want to do. For example, waking up early. Waking up early is painstakingly hard for me. It is something that I still struggle with to this day even though I have to wake up early every day for my job and school. An easy solution for many of us is to just go to bed earlier. Well, if only it was that easy. In fact, it can be that easy if you make it easy. I knew that if I wanted to go to bed earlier I needed to cut out the distractions that causes me to go to bed late. For most of us, this is technology. I set a hard deadline for myself that I am not going to be on any type of technology past midnight. I convinced myself that any time I am on technology after midnight it is simply a waste of my time and I will get nothing done, so why bother. Each time I got off technology I would immediately read because that way I am doing something productive and keeping my eyes off a screen which allowed my eyes to get ready for bed. This allowed me to wake up earlier with ease and be more productive in the morning since I was not tired. This allowed for more free time in the evening where I can enjoy my free time and decompress from the day. Cutting technology off after midnight served as a domino effect and served a wider purpose than just being able to wake up earlier with more ease. You will quickly realize this as well if you make it easy.

Chapter recap: It is in your best interest to make it easy because why make it hard? Forgive yourself, we all slip up sometimes but the most important part is standing up and trying again. Good habits provide a domino effect for your future self.

Make it hard

This rule serves as the inverse of making it easy. This is a good rule if you want to get rid of a habit. A terrible habit that I have and I feel like most of us do is procrastination. Pretty much all procrastination stems from sort of distraction. I knew that if I wanted to get rid of this nasty habit or at least alleviate some of the symptoms I knew that something had to change. What needed to change was my environment. My environment was setup for distraction, it was so easy to start watching another youtube video or pick up my phone to go on social media. None of these things served a purpose. In order for me to stop getting distracted I had to make it hard for me to get distracted. I approached this by setting time limits on apps on my phone. If the time was up I could no longer access that app for the rest of the day and this is nonnegotiable. I made sure to declutter my room to alleviate the background noise that my environment brought me. Once there was only a screen to focus on and a keyboard to type on it quickly became easier to focus because getting distracted became a lot harder. There became a point where it was easier to focus and harder to procrastinate. This brings me to my next sub-topic of this book. Creating a system.

Chapter recap: Make it hard, naturally your mind is not going to want to do it. Setup your environment for success, it plays a bigger role than you think.

Creating a system

If you want to be successful when it comes to getting rid of habits and developing new habits you have to create a system that serves you. Creating goals is not what is going to get you to a place where you want to be. It is creating a system that serves you that is going to get you to a place where you want to be. All of the methods we talked about previously is a great way to start developing that system. A system will serve as the foundation of keeping you on track and accomplishing your goals. A better system makes it easy to stay on track and it makes it hard to get off the track. A good system outlines better results. Do not worry about your goals, worry about your system.

Conclusion

I only talked about a very small amount of information that this book provided. If you enjoyed what you read and you want to learn more, I highly suggest giving this book a read. Hopefully, my takeaway from this book served as a good guidance for what you want to do in regards to your habits. Also, hopefully this served as a little boost to get started on whatever you are holding back on. After all, it is not as scary as you think and it is all about the system that you create.