Thoughts

Welcome to the Spotlight series, a new series where I share with you one resource that I discovered recently and found particularly valuable, for instance a book, a video, a blog post, an author, or another medium that I find worth your time.

In this month of July, I want to share with you a book that a dear friend lent me: Atomic Habits by James Clear. I know it's not an original recommendation and you often see this book recommended in many places, but perhaps my insights will be original enough to be worth your time.

My initial impression of this book was that it worked by exploiting the placebo effect, but, as we left the introductory chapters to enter the more practical chapters, the book presented many methods to actually improve one's habits.

Note: If you're like me and like your readings to be scientifically sourced, you may find that this book does not have many sources cited in the text. However, there is a long list of sources at the end of the book decomposed by chapter, which you can use along your reading of the book.

The first chapters describe the theory behind habits, and although one can find them trivial, I think the identity part is very important due to the mental shift it induces on the reader, even though it boils down to pure self-motivation. They also explain the decomposition of habits into 4 steps, i.e., cue, craving, response, and reward.

On the more practical side, the first step to integrate a new habit into our lifestyle is to make it obvious. For this, the author recommends maintaining a habit scorecard with all your habits, and stacking new habits with old ones, something he calls habit stacking. I found that, out of the 4 methods given in the book, this is the most impactful. Except for very rare and erratic holidays, I have not failed to execute the new habits I want to integrate in my routine. On this topic, I advise limiting to two new forming habits at a time until they become automatic, which can take up to 90 days.

Another action the author advises to make the habit obvious is to prime your environment, as “motivation is overrated”. The author mainly talks about the physical environment, such as your office or your house, but I suppose that this can also work for your digital environment.

My experience on the environment change is that changing my digital environment had a more meaningful impact than changing my physical environment. I mainly work on my computer, so having my projects and tasklists better organized should have a stronger impact than organizing the physical office I more rarely interact with.

The second step to construct a new habit is to make it attractive. The main action to do this is called temptation bundling. As Mr. Clear says, the strategy is to do the thing you need to do first, then reward yourself with the thing you want to do.

I haven't particularly tested this step, as the new habits I am constructing integrate well with the habit stacking method, and so I don't have any particular feedback on the temptation bundling method for now.

The third step, make it easy, is for me the less useful one, or is at least one I don't really resonate with. The main takeaways I got from this part is that repetition and reduced friction make actions easier, which in turn make picking up new habits much easier.

The last step is to make it satisfying. In this part, Mr. Clear mainly talks about how to ensure you keep a habit streak by suggesting having a habit tracker and having an accountability partner.

For the habit tracker, I cannot explain it better than Mr. Clear himself. As he says, “habit tracking (1) creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, (2) is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don’t want to lose it, and (3) feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit.”

An accountability partner is someone with whom you write a habit contract. You promise to execute the habit, and have to do something in return if you do not execute it, such as giving money to the accountability partner for instance. The strategy is to create an immediate cost to not perform a certain habit. To be honest, I'm not a fan of this punishment method at all. However, in the absence of the punishment, an accountability partner can still be useful, especially if it improves your social relationships.

I've written about the four major steps to construct new habits, but throughout the book, Mr. Clear also speaks about how to use the opposite of those steps to remove bad habits. I find the opposite of the third step particularly useful, i.e., making a habit difficult to perform greatly reduces the number of times you do it.

Finally, the last part of the book talks about “advanced tactics” to “go from merely good to being truly great”, and is decomposed in three chapters. I suggest skipping Chapter 18, as I find it to be a defeatist perspective on genetics and “born” talent, although it still has some positive messages. Chapter 19 is a particularly good read on how to deal with the boredom of repeating habits. Chapter 20, the last of the book, enlightens the reader on habit mastery brought by the integration of automated habits and deliberate practice of even the smallest friction points.

Overall, I find Atomic Habits to be a great book, and I recommend it to people who want or need a more methodical lifestyle.

---

Thank you for reading. Reach me for further discussion and updates!