Very engaging book. In addition to learning about the power of habits, you’ll also learn to recognize what parts of your life are good/bad habits and how to build/break them. It’s a solid framework for everyone to understand, regardless of your goals. Best of all, this book keeps you engaged from chapter 1 with well told anecdotes and analogies.
My takeaways:
- Small changes often appear to make no difference, until you’ve crossed some critical threshold. A hallmark feature of compounding gains. You need to be patient.
- To improve your results, focus on your system, not the goals themselves.
- To improve your system, focus on your identity. You become your habits. Therefore, changing your habits requires you to change your identity. Are you someone who wants to do X, or are you someone who is doing X?
- Any habit can be broken down into a 4-step feedback loop: que, craving, response, and reward. To effectively change behaviour, simply target one of the 4 parts of the feedback loop: i) make it obvious; ii) make it attractive; iii) make it easy; iv) make it satisfying.
- Point & call the action to make it clear what is happening & its consequences. I.e., I am opening a new tab and typing “r” out of habit, this will take me to reddit if I press enter where I’ll have some fun but likely spend too much time and regret having come in the first place.
- Use habit stacking to chain new habits to existing ones. i.e., After I close my laptop for the day, I’ll immediately do 20 minutes of language homework.
For a complete list of habit strategies, checkout the Atomic Habits cheat sheet.
Habits work best applied to your strengths:
Your strengths are a cross between your genetics & your interests. What doesn’t feel like work to you? What are you naturally predisposed to being great at?
For example, I think I’m great at communicating a goal to a team, organizing the team’s energy and focus to tackle the problem quickly. Allowing for new thoughts to form, connecting dots, and listening to others while creating a space that allows others to speak up.
This is a behaviour strength, which I’ve slowly come to learn about the more teamwork I’ve done. A personality test could have helped me uncover it too, but in general, it’s always good to be doing some “exploring”.
Then, when you’ve found a regime that fits you well, you can “exploit” it, for accelerated gains compared to your peers. This process is known as “explore vs. exploit”. You should always have a bit of both in your life; likely more explore while your young, and exploit once you’ve found your groove.
5/5.