Have you ever struggled with habits?
Who hasn’t, right?
This book is going to change your habit life – permanently.
I’m talking about Atomic Habits, written by James Clear. Yes, it’s that good.
Clear puts in the legwork with scientific studies, award-winning sports team, and goal-setting entrepreneurs.
But the real magic of his book comes from the habit hacks he discovered.
The four laws
He teaches the four laws of successful habit formation: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.
Think about it. If your new good habit (say, running) is obvious, you won’t be hunting in the dark for your running shoes.
If it’s attractive, you won’t unconsciously put off going for a run.
If it’s easy to put on your workout clothes first thing in the morning and get out the door, your barrier is very low – it won’t take much effort.
(We like habits that don’t take much effort.)
And if it’s satisfying to go on that run, you’ll want to repeat the process (or habit) to get that same satisfying result another time.
And thus, a habit is born.
Is anything happening?
According to Clear, the difficulty with most people and habits is that habits are a long-term strategy.
It takes months of working out before you notice a change in muscle tone. You have to eat better for months until one day your jeans fit better.
It’s the long haul.
Which is why we so often give up on our habits after a week, a fortnight, a month when we don’t see immediate results.
You do not rise to the level of your goals.
James Clear
(If you dropped a pound the next morning every time you ate broccoli for supper, you wouldn’t have a weight loss problem – you’d just eat broccoli every time you needed to fit into that dress.)
Clear calls this the “plateau of latent potential.”
He likens this to heating an ice cube. You warm it up – nothing changes. You warm some more – still no change.
Finally, the temperature reaches 33 degrees F – and magically, the ice cube melts? Was the pre-33-degrees effort pointless?
No, it was a necessary preparatory part. Without the preheating, the ice cube would not have melted.
Another example Clear tells of is the “overnight success” phenomenon.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t really overnight. That person put in the work for months or years beforehand. One day, something clicked and they got discovered.
Habits – systems – goals
So how does this work? We know now that habit formation is playing the long game. But how do we actually go about it?
Again, James has you covered.
He explains why setting goals (run a 6 minute mile) never works for you. You actually want to form the habit of running.
A 6 minute mile is not a habit; it’s a goal. An outcome. Goals are great for setting outcomes, James points out – they just don’t convert well to habits.
For a habit, you need a system. A process. How do you achieve that 6 minute mile? By practicing running. That’s your system.
Okay, so I need to go for runs. I’m still not sure if I’ll be consistent. I’ve had motivation issues before….
Change from the inside out
And there’s the last problem with traditional habit setting. Habits that go against the flow – that don’t jive with your beliefs – are doomed to fail.
To truly succeed at your new system, you have to make an identity shift. You must believe that you are a runner.
Change your identity, and you will change your habits. And your habits drive your goals.
This is James’s system for making success inevitable.
If you tell yourself that you’re a runner, go out and prove it by running a quarter mile (remember, we’re “making it easy”), and do this over and over again, guess what?
You are a runner.
And over time, with incremental (easy!) increases to your running system (your habit), you will achieve that 6 minute mile goal.
It may take a couple years of slow and steady progress. But isn’t that far better than setting out to run a 6 minute mile in 3 months, failing, and beating yourself up about it?
Grab a copy of Atomic Habits from the library. Make time to read it. Take some notes.
James says, “Winners and losers have the same goals.”
We both want to get healthy, spend more time with our kids, write a book.
The difference is in the system we set up to achieve those goals. (Or don’t set up, as the case may be.)
I want to be on the winning side, don’t you?
