Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Old Ones – James Clear

Summary: This book’s first three chapters outline Clear’s model of the habit. Each habit has four components—Cue, Craving, Response and Reward—which occur in succession, and Clear argues that any new habit will not stick if it is deficient in any of these four components. The remaining chapters of the book expand on these four steps, offering examples of how to apply them to build new habits and to break old, unwanted ones.

Thoughts: I enjoyed Atomic Habits - Clear is an engaging writer, and there was a good balance of anecdotes to theory. Occasionally, he will generalize too broadly in citing a specific study as evidence for one of his concepts, but on the whole, I found that his model provides a useful and practical way to go about shaping one’s own habits. I appreciated how each chapter concluded with a summary of key points - more authors should do this!

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. With that said, I took more notes than usual on this book, so it should come fairly close to a full summary.)

Clear, James. 2018. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Old Ones. Avery.

Introduction: My Story

The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

1. The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

• 14: Things the British Cycling team did to improve:
  • learn to wash hands effectively, to lower the chances of becoming sick
    • j: good reasons for masks and handwashing even outside of pandemic times!
  • learn what type of matress and pillow lead to optimal sleep
    • j: cf. similar in approach to Quantified Self movement
  • dozens of such tiny improvements accumulated, and added up to have a big effect on the team’s performance
• 15-16: Clear talks about how becoming 1% better every day compounds, and by the end of the year, you’ve improved 37-fold. j: this would be true of money, but the comparison to habit forming is certainly overblown. Diminishing returns happen in most domains, and they would surely cut away from this.
• 18: Clear argues that you should worry less about where you are now, and more about your trajectory. Is your current trend one of improvement, one of stagnation, or one of atrophy?
• 21: Jacob Riis: “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.”
• 24: goals are important, for setting a direction, but systems are necessary to make progress in that direction.
• 26: one of the problems with focusing to much on goals is that you can end up postponing happiness until you reach the goal (and this happiness is fleeting when you reach the goal). But if you have a good system, you’re free to enjoy the process.

2. How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

• summary of chapter: one of the most effective ways to build a new habit is to associate that habit with your identity. Sometimes, this requires you to change what you identify with.
• 33: The more pride you take in an aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be cultivate habits associated with it.
• 34: “Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.”
• 34: When people believe in some aspect of their identity, they tend to act in ways that are consistent with that belief - cf. cognitive dissonance
• 37: In order to figure out their identity, people look for evidence - “do I often go to movies? I do! Therefore I identify as a movie-goer.” - so each of your actions contributes to shaping your own identity.
• 38: lots of small actions can add up to significant change in identity. “This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change.” j: it’s important to remember this in other domains too!
• 39: if you’re not sure what identity you want, you can start with a goal and work backwards: “what kind of person would have {blank}?”
• 40: habits and identity are a feedback loop: habits shape identity, which can reinforce habits.

3. How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

• 45: Jason Hreha, behavioral scientist: “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
• 45-46: habits allow you to skip problem solving and go directly to a solution.
• 46: “the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain.” Habits help free up working memory, by relegating tasks to non-conscious parts of the brain.
  • 46-47: good habits thus create freedom rather than restricting it - they allow you to focus on the creative, meaningful things rather than having to approach each task from first principles.
• 47: Clear divides habits into four stages: Cue, Craving, Response and Reward.
• 49: “if behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.”
• 50f: earlier books about habits: Charles Duhhig’s The Power of Habit, Nir Eyal’s Hooked.
• 54: in order to build good habits, cultivate each of the four stages by:
  • 1. Making it obvious (Cue)
  • 2. Making it attractive (Craving)
  • 3. Making it easy (Response)
  • 4. Making it satisfying (Reward)
• 54: each of these techniques can be inverted to help break bad habits.

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

4. The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

• 61: The strength (and the danger) of habits is that we don’t need to be aware of a cue to launch into the habit
• 62: Karl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
• 63: Pointing-and-calling: safety system to reduce mistakes, by making observations explicit. All necessary details for performing an action are pointed at and stated out loud (cf. checklists). Effective because it raises unconscious habits to the conscious level.
• 64-65: The Habits Scorecard: Clear’s way of making one aware of one’s habits. Simply make a list of your daily habits as you go through a day. Afterwards, label the list with +, - and = for good, bad and neutral habits respectively.
• 65: “all habits serve you in some way—even the bad ones—which is why you repeat them.” The question is whether they serve you well in the long term or not.
• 66: pointing-and-calling can be an effective first step toward conquering bad habits. Identify, out loud, the action you’re tempted to do, and the long-term effects of that habit.

5. The Best Way to Start a New Habit

• 70: In order to make a new habit stick, you need to sort out an implementation intention - exactly what the cue will be, and exactly what action you’ll perform when you receive the cue.
• 70: voter turnout increases when people are prompted to create implementation intentions: “when will you vote, what route will you take to get there…” etc.
• 70-71: “the punch line is clear: people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.”
• 71: “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.” The idea is to have a plan, and when the time (/place) comes to perform the action, there is no need to make a decision - just follow the plan.
• 73: Diderot effect: The tendency for one purchase to lead to another. Similar patterns can be found throughout human activity, where one action leads to another: e.g. washing your hands leads to drying your hands. Each action is a cue that triggers the next action.
• 74: Take advantage of this using Habit Stacking: “After I {current habit}, I will {new habit}.” Eventually, you can form entire series of habits
• 76-77: Can also design habit stacks for situations you expect to come across during the day. A couple of good specific suggestions:
  • “When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet”
  • “When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait 24 hours before purchasing.”
  • “When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first.”
  • “When I buy something, I will give something away.”
• 77-78: identify potential base layers for habit stacks by creating two lists: one with things that you do every day without fail, and one of things that happen to you every day without fail. (similar to Habits Scorecard)

6. Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

• 83: In many cases (particularly when we’re consuming/buying things), our decisions are shaped by our environment - what’s obvious and clearly available - much more than we often realize.
• 84: Clear cites studies claiming that we have ~11 million sensory receptors and ~10 million of them are dedicated to sight, and that half of a brain’s resources are used on vision. j: Both figures seem unreasonably high.
• 85: if a cue is not obvious, it’s less likely to trigger a habit.
• 87: an entire context/environment can act as a cue, especially for habits that are deeply ingrained.
• 87: re: designing spaces: Clear suggests thinking of one’s environment as a collection of relationships/interactions rather than a collection of objects. i.e. this is where I {}, and this is what I use to {}, etc. j: cf. affordances
• 88: habits can be easier to change while you’re in a new environment. “It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.”
• 89: Clear suggests, whenever possible, making a point of not associating one context with multiple habits. “When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—and the easier ones will usually win out.”

7. The Secret to Self-Control

• 91-92: Many soldiers in the Vietnam War became heroin addicts, but when they returned from Vietnam, many of them were able to break the habit (since all the cues related to that habit were removed). This challenged the belief, held at the time, that heroin addiction was effectively permanent, and due to a moral failure
• 93: “The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least.” The easiest way to become a more disciplined person is “by creating a more disciplined environment.”
• 93: Bad habits are often self-reinforcing.
• 94: Habits can be broken, but they’re almost impossible to forget.
• 95: “if you’re spending too much money on electronics, quit reading reviews of the latest tech gear.” welp.

The 2nd Law: Make it Attractive

8. How to Make a Habit Irresistible

• 103: supernormal stimuli, e.g. the red dots on herring gulls’ beaks - when the stimulus is exaggerated, it can lead to an enthusiastic response. Much marketing, product design today is centred around creating supernormal stimuli (e.g. food science). When faced with stimuli like ultra-sweet, ultra-fatty foods, it’s easy to understand why people pick up bad habits related to eating.
• 104: we can take advantage of this phenomenon by crafting attractive stimuli that encourage us to follow good habits.
• 106: we take action not based on a the reward, but based on the anticipation of the reward.
• 106: the parts of our brains associated with anticipating a reward are the same as those associated with receiving a reward.
• 109-110: temptation bundling. If there’s an activity that you really enjoy doing, and you commit to doing it only while performing a habit you want to build, you will come to crave the habit.
• 110: can be combined with habit stacking. Start with a habit you already have, then perform the habit you want to build, then reward yourself with a habit you already enjoy.

9. The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

• 114: “whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.”
• 116: We tend to imitate those who are close to us, those who are powerful / have prestige, and behaviors that are widespread / that many people do.
• 117: “One study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence.”
• 117: Clear suggests that, if you want to build a habit, find a community of people that already value that habit. He states that best results can be obtained when you join a community that you have something in common with already.
• 121: the human brain is good at fitting in within a culture. if the habit you want to build runs against the grain, you’ll be in for a hard time. If the habit you want to build means that you’ll fit in, it makes this new habit very attractive.

10. How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

• 127: Humans have a few deep, underlying motivations. Clear lists: conserve energy, obtain food and water, find love and reproduce, connect and bond with others, win social acceptance and approval, reduce uncertainty, achieve status and prestige, etc. Each of our cravings is just a specific technique we’ve learned that helps us achieve these deeper motivations…
• 128: …but it’s important to recognize that there are multiple ways to achieve each of these underlying motives.
• 129: Clear states that a craving is “the desire to change an internal state… [to address] a gap between what your body is currently sensing and what it wants to be sensing.”
• 130: the importance of emotions in decision making: “Neurologists have discovered that when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions.” emotions allow us to decide between “good” states and “bad” states.
• 131: some tasks can be made easier through reframing: I get to do this, rather than I have to do this.

The 3rd Law: Make it Easy

11. Walk Slowly, but Never Backward

• 141-142: Jerry Uelsmann’s photography class: divided students into groups, with one group being graded on the quantity of photos they took, and the other being graded on the quality of the best photo they took. At the end of the term, students in the “quantity” group had better photos.
• 142: Clear distinguishes between motion and taking action. Motion is “planning, strategizing and learning”, while taking action delivers an outcome. Motion is necessary sometimes, but taking action is where things actually get done.
• 143: “When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.” j: welp, this strikes close to home.
• 145: habits form based on the number of times you perform the habit, not how long you’ve had the habit.

12. The Law of Least Effort

• 149-151: Jared Diamond’s theory in Guns, Germs, and Steel: Agriculture could was able to spread more quickly across Eurasia because it features long stretches of land at the same latitude - crops and domesticated animals bred in one climate could be cultivated and herded from one end of the continent to the other. In Africa and the Americas, it was more difficult for these crops to spread, because the continents lie on a North-South axis with multiple climate bands.
• 151: Humans tend to follow the Law of Least Effort: when presented with two possible courses of action, humans will tend to choose the option that involves doing the least work.
• 152: when it comes down to it, you don’t want a habit itself, but rather the outcome of the habit. If there’s too much friction involved in performing the habit, you’ll tend to avoid doing it.
• 154: most habit-forming software/products reduce friction in your life.
• 155: Successful companies simplify, eliminate steps, and automate as much as possible - both internally (as when factories are designed to eliminate unnecessary motion) and externally (as when a piece of web software makes it super easy to sign up or start using the product). We can apply this to our own lives, cutting out unnecessary steps and automating things related to our good habits.
• 156: you can “prime your environment” to make good habit-actions easy to perform. If there’s an object you need to perform the habit, set it up ahead of time so you’ll have it at hand.
• 157: of course, you can invert this to discourage bad habits, by making bad habit-actions difficult to perform.

13. How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

• 160: be aware of what Clear calls “decisive moments” - moments that lead to a long string of good habit-actions.
• 162: when you start a new habit, it’s a good idea to make sure you can complete it in less than 2 minutes - the “Two Minute Rule”. Once the habit is established, you can expand it.
• 165-166: habit shaping: work backwards from an ultimate goal - what would be a good step towards that goal? what would be a good step towards that good step? - until you reach a habit that is trivial to accomplish. Once you’ve built that habit, you can start to step upwards, towards the ultimate goal.

14. How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

• 170: commitment device: “a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future”
• 172: similar to commitment devices: look for one-time actions that will “lock in good habits” and/or combine continuous returns. e.g. John Henry Patterson’s investment in a cash register - removed the temptation for employees to steal, leading to his business becoming profitable
• 174: look for ways to automate your life - if there are tasks that computers/technology can easily do, it leaves you with more time and brainspace to focus on things only humans can do.

The 4th Law: Make it Satisfying

15. The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

• 187: Humans evolved in an immediate-return environment, but now we live in a delayed-return environment. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, instant gratification was usually an adaptive strategy, but now, many actions only pay off after a length of time.
• 188: time inconsistency: humans tend to value rewards differently depending on when we expect to receive them. A slight tendency towards this is adaptive, but sometimes it can lead us astray.
• 189: “The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.”
• 189: Clear’s Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: “What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.”
• 190: People who are better at delaying gratification have a much easier time in life: correlated with higher SAT scores, less substance abuse, better social skills, etc.
• 191: a way to build a habit of saving money: start up a bank account, and label it with something you’re aiming to buy. Whenever you resist an impulse buy, move that amount of money into the bank account. Provides instant gratification of seeing yourself move closer to the fancy gadget you’re looking forward to buying.

16. How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

• 195-196: the Paper Clip Strategy: have two containers, one with {N} paperclips {or another object} in it, and one that’s empty. Whenever you perform a habit-action you’re working to develop, move a paperclip from the one container to the other. Provides both visible and tactile feedback of your progress towards a goal
• 196: Ben Franklin used a habit tracker.
• 197: Habit trackers check off multiple boxes (haha!) in the habit cycle: they make behaviors obvious, attractive, and satisfying.
  • 198: obvious: whenever you check your habit tracker, you’re reminded to perform that habit-action - a visual cue
  • attractive: you see the progress you have been making, and don’t want to lose it
  • satisfying: you get to fill in a box, recording a successful instance of the habit-action
• 201: don’t panic if you miss a day - just make sure not to miss two in a row. “Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.”
• 203: Goodheart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” - it’s worth reminding yourself every so often of the larger goal a particular habit builds towards, to ensure you’re not gaming your own system.
• 203: reminder: a numbers-, data-driven approach is often a productive one, but remember not to confuse easy-to-measure metrics with important ones, and not to think of possible-to-quantify factors as the only factors.

17. How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

• 207: if you’re going to rely on punishment to change your behavior, the punishment must be at least as costly as not performing the behavior you want to develop.
• 209: Bryan Harris has used habit contracts to great effect in his life. He’s found that if the contract is not official enough (doesn’t include specific goals and punishments, and isn’t signed by him and his accountability partner(s)), it’s much less effective.
• 209-210: simpler than writing a habit contract is having an accountability partner with whom you regularly check in.
• 210: Thomas Frank’s accountability system: has a script that will send out a tweet at 6:10am, attesting to his laziness and offering a reward of money, unless he disables it each morning.

Advanced Tactics: How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

18. The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)

• 219: if you’re interested in being at the top of a field, it’s important to recognize that you need to play to your strengths. “Genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.” Gabor Mate: “Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.”
• 220: Behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin: “It is now at the point where we have stopped testing to see if traits have a genetic component because we literally can’t find a ssingle one that isn’t influenced by our genes.”
• 220: the Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. Must learn more about!
• 221: in terms of our habits, its important to recognize that certain habits will be easier or more difficult to form based on how open, conscientious, etc. we are
• 222f: Clear links to “some of the most reliable” personality tests at the book’s website: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits/personality
• 223: the explore/exploit trade-off: when you’re new to a field, it’s a good idea to get the lay of the land, so to speak, before committing to a course of action - explore. as you learn more about the field, start focussing on the most promising course of action - exploit. One should continue to do a bit of exploring, though, to look for even better courses of action.
• 224-225: how to identify fruitful courses of action? Clear proposes several questions you can ask yourself:
  • What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
  • What makes me lose track of time?
  • Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
  • What comes naturally to me?
• 225: by specializing, you narrow the field of people you have to compete with. You can specialize by combining several skills you have - many people will be better than you at any particular skill, but few people will be better than you at the combination.
• 227: Some things, like physical and personailty traits, may be genetically influenced and may make certain activities easier for some people, but such skills don’t amount to much if they’re not acted upon and developed. “Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.”

19. The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

• 231-232: Clear states that once a habit has been established, it’s important to develop it (especially if it’s just a tiny, two-minute habit)
• 233: Clear cites a coach as saying that the difference between elite athletes and everyone else is elite athletes’ willingness to stick with a habit even when they’re bored.
  • j: there are two ways to apply this knowledge. One, work to make habits automatic enough that they are performed even when they’re boring, and two, find ways to enliven habits to ensure they’re boring as infrequenly as possible
• 234: we’re driven by novelty - when our habits become routine, they stop being engaging.
• 235: variable rewards: often, we’re motivated to complete a task if the outcome is not known ahead of time (think, for example, lottery tickets). We need to be already motivated to achieve the potential outcome, but it helps alleviate boredom.
• 236: it’s worth thinking about which habits are truly important to you. “If a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick with it in any mood.”

20. The Downside of Creating Good Habits

• 239: if you have a well-developed habit, you become less sensitive to feedback, and will tend to perform the task mindlessly.
• 240: each individual activity/ability yields diminishing returns when practiced. To achieve mastery in a field, it’s important to look at and sharpen as many possible activities, so that ability continues to accumulate.
• 242: The LA Lakers’s Career Best Effort metric: a composite statistic, tracked for each player on the team. Each year, they are expected to maintain a 1% improvement on that metric. Metrics like this allow you to track whether you’re continuing to make progress, and can push you towards finding new ways to improve.
• 244: it’s important to spend some time reflecting on one’s goals and one’s habits, making sure you really care about your goals, making sure goals and habits are aligned, and making sure that your habits are truly the best ones for making progress towards the goal.
• 245: Clear reflects by writing an Annual Review, asking “What went well this year?”, “What didn’t go so well this year?”, and “What did I learn?”.
• 247-248: “keep your identity small” - if a huge part of your identity is tied up in a particular skill/role, you’re likely to end up adrift if, for example, you lose your job. it’s worth remaining flexible with your identity - for example, Clear advocates defining yourself around general values that are role/skill agnostic.

Conclusion: The Secret to Results That Last

Appendix

Little Lessons from the Four Laws

• 261: Humans’ default mode of thought is emotional, not rational. “We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional.”
• 262: “Self-control is difficult because it is not satisfying”
• 262-263: satisfaction is positively correlated with (positive) outcomes, but negatively correlated with expectations. We can be satisfied or unsatisfied with a given outcome depending on whether our expectations were low or high at the outset.