Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James ClearMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
What kind of book is this?
This is an expository work; more specifically, a practical self-help book.
Rational & Why I read this book
2022 is my "year of kaizen". I place a strong focus on making tiny improvements on a daily/weekly basis and building better habits are at the core of this endeavor. Atomic Habits seemed to be a perfect fit. I already had listened to it as an audiobook a couple of years back and the book gained a lot of traction recently.
The unity of the book — what is the book about as a whole?
The book is about personal transformation and the road to mastery.
The author introduces a system, which advocates small ("atomic") changes and revolves mainly about designing ones habits. 4 "laws" of behaviour change are presented: Make it obvious. Make it attractive. Make it easy. Make it satisfying. These easy to remember guidelines are supposed to help with shaping and designing ones life and advancing toward mastery in one's strong areas.
The book's structure
The book has 6 parts with 3-4 chapters each (20 chapters in total) and has a total of about 250 pages:
1. The Fundamentals - Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference
2. The 1st Law - Make It Obvious
3. The 2nd Law - Make it Attractive
4. The 3rd Law - Make it Easy
5. The 4th Law - Make it Satisfying
6. Advanced Tactics
The book summarises itself quite often and overall is summarised in a single table of the 4 Laws of Behaviour Change. There is also an Appendix with some further ideas of the author.
One particular lesson
I took 153 highlights; one of my favourites being: "The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit." (p.200)
Judgement & Recommendations - Who should read this?
TL;DR: overall, I assign this book a 6/10 (★★★). It is OK; slightly above average but in my opinion has tangible weaknesses.
I still recommend you to read the book with some reservations. Upfront, the good: if you have never read anything about habit design, I think this book will be as good as any other in getting you started. Habits, after all, are a central theme in self-improvement and even raising your awareness of their role in your life can help you. This book can definitely do that for you. The book contains some good thinking and several intriguing ideas and tips. The author also summarizes his guidelines into his 4 basic "laws" of habit design which are easy to remember and to take with you in your daily life. I like that he tries to give credit to everything he "borrowed" from others (even though sometimes his approach is quite fishy - e.g. he several time uses phrases like "was inspired by" when something was downright stolen and minimally adapted to his cause). I further appreciates that Clear also does explore some downside of habits and does not leave you with the impression that habits or his system are the magic bullet for all things. As a bonus, I like how the footnotes are organised. That being said, like many self-help book authors, Clear has no special "qualifications" to write this book. He manages to deliver mediocre to good tertiary literature (e.g. as opposed to Tiny Habits written by someone who actually conducted many of the experiments in habit design). Overall, many of his claims are backed by reasons and sources (often he only brings anecdotal internet sources, but several times he also highlights scientific studies). However, quite often there are also claims mixed in, made totally out of the blue, without any backing of any kind e.g. in chapter 10 where he talks about "where cravings come form"; I guess that's just his personal experience mixed in without making the reader aware of that. In my opinion, Clear also misnamed his book. This book has surprisingly little to do with the "atomic" part of habits, as the title suggests. After finishing the book I had the feeling that of 250 pages in total no more than 20 are qualified to be called dedicated to the fact that making habits "really small" is important. Two other books – Tiny Habits and especially Mini Habits – do a way better at staying true to their title. What Clear does instead is what many self-help books end up to do: trying to deliver a whole system for self improvement. Implicitly, Clears focus is also mostly on building habits as part of skill building on the way to mastery, less about every day habits you would think about when picking up such a book. What troubles me the most, however, is that the quality of the content does not remain constant thought the book - some parts are really good (what he writes about identity change and habit tracking), many are OK, several are just bad and wrong (e.g. his take on goals - in the beginning of the the throws out "goal setting" completely, while at the same time he "admits" his goal-driven approach in writing this very book and also explains the importance of "deliberate" work ). Lastly, the fact that he starts every chapter with a somewhat unnecessary and unrelated story, is a personal distaste of mine. To sum up, I think that this book does not deserve the fame it currently receives. It is not popular due to its content, but its content is there because it was made popular. Something that probably happens quite naturally when an author repurposes his blog posts into a book, then leverages his newsletter audience to make it an instant success on Amazon. The book could be better (7/10) if half of the content was simply cut out.
-----------
View all my reviews on Goodreads