A Snapshot: Atomic Habits by James Clear
‘A Snapshot’ is a series of blog posts featuring my favourite quotes and snippets from books I love and podcasts I have listened to.
This week we’re taking a look inside Atomic Habits by James Clear…
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When creating new habits, begin with this question: what kind of person do I wish to become? Habits, therefore reinforce the kind of person you want to be; they cast votes for a certain kind of identity.
And so it becomes less about the results you achieve and more about whether you are performing daily actions and behaviours that reinforce that identity.
Goals are useful for setting direction but once you’re clear on your goal, put it on the shelf and spend 90% of your time developing a system or a collection of daily habits.
The issue with goal related strategies is that they all encourage you to feel bad if you haven’t achieved the goal yet. Therefore, focus on building a system and developing a process rather than on achieving a goal or outcome.
Dangerous thinking: “once I get there then I’ll finally be enough.” You can be happy with who you are right now and still continue to work toward these things that are important to you.
Think of a seed or an acorn. You plant it. It then becomes a sapling, which then breaks through the ground, grows a little bit further into an amateur tree and then it grows into a mighty oak. At no point along the way do you criticise it for what it is. You don’t look at the acorn and think, “man, what an idiot, he’s not a grand oak yet.” We don’t look at it as though it’s this unfinished, terrible thing, and yet we do that with ourselves, all the time. And still the acorn never stops growing. Not because it’s not what it should be or because it’s unsatisfied with what it is at that time, but just because that’s what a tree does; it keeps growing. We can also apply this kind of thinking to our own lives.
Introducing the four laws for behaviour change: aka four things to help build a good habit:
Make it obvious: The cues of your habits, the things that catch your attention that gets you started, or the prompts that influence the behaviour should be as obvious as possible. Examples include environment design; prime the environment for the good habit to be the path of least resistance. Such as making it harder to watch the TV if you’re wanting to watch less. Putting your phone in the other room if you’re wanting less screen time. Think about the physical environments surrounding your habits; what does the space encourage?
Make it attractive: the more appealing the more excited you feel to do it and the more likely you are to follow through. Examples include making things automatic with tech (such as an auto transfer to savings account) or inviting a friend to a gym session so it’s more fun and you can’t cancel as easily.
Make it easy, convenient, frictionless, simple. The hardest part is showing up, so commit to something easy to begin with, such as spending just 5 minutes writing in your gratitude journal, four days a week. Consistency is Queen. This helps build momentum.
Make it satisfying: like most things, it’s got to be pleasurable even if it’s in a small way. Examples include some kind of rewarding experience such as a bubble bath after a full week of showing up to exercise.
If you want to break a bad habit, do the opposite:
Make it invisible: don’t keep junk food in the house.
Make it unattractive.
Make it difficult: add barriers and steps.
Make it unsatisfying: layer on a cost or consequence especially if it’s immediate.
An important thing to remember with the above is that you don’t necessarily need all four. Think of them like levers; pulling one gets you closer to being able to do the desired behaviour, and so the more levers you can pull, the easier it will feel.
What not to do:
Don’t start too big. Start small. Build capacity before you start to take on more. Once you’ve done that you can handle more intensity.
Motion rather than action. This is when people spend too much time planning so they can tell themselves they are making progress when they aren’t actually doing the thing.
Remember:
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
A habit must be established before it can be improved.
You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
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