Atomic Habits 📙
Atomic Habits 📙
A review + summary of one of the most popular personal growth book of all times.
Hey there! This is a Book Edition — where I publish my review + summary of a famous non-fiction book in our space.
It is made possible by the book club in the community, where every two months we decide on some book to read in the engineering/management space, and we review it together in a live event at the end of the period.
If you are a paid subscriber to Hybrid Hacker or Refactoring, you can join the community and the book club (instructions at the end of the article).
Atomic Habits has been on my backlog since… forever.
Personally, I am a creature of habit: as I have written in the past, I schedule all my tasks on my calendar, create recurring slots for ceremonies, and organize most of the things I do as routines.
So, as such, I was already familiar with James Clear’s work: I have been following him on social media for years, and I am subscribed to his newsletter.
This is a double-edged sword, because, as I approached Atomic Habits, I suspected I would be already familiar with most of its ideas.
It turns out I was wrong, and I loved it.
The book not only elaborates on James’ most popular ideas, but it presents them in a neat package that turns them from individual insights into a full-fledged framework. So 1) I learned new things, and 2) I understood better what I thought of knowing.
Here is what we will cover today:
🏃♂️ Why habits matter — it’s about identity and systems.
🧅 The three layers of change — a handy mental model to think about progress.
🪧 The fours stages of habits — how habits are about creating a problem and finding a solution
📖 The four laws of habits — how to manipulate the four stages to your advantage, to consolidate good habits and break bad ones.
📌 Bottom line — my final take on these ideas and the book itself.
🏃♂️ Why habits matter
We often think of habits as a means to progress — a means towards a goal. But if I had to isolate only one teaching from the whole book, it is that habits are the progress.
Habits are the goal.
This shift in perspective is based on two fundamental ideas:
1) Habits compound 📈
When you look at big stories in tech, sports, investing, and more, it’s very rare to find true overnight successes.
When you look closely, you find that success stories are usually the result of producing decent performance for an inordinate amount of time, rather than extraordinary, one-off feats.
Most successful people I know, in fact, are 1) disciplined and 2) willing to think long term. And in a world where skills only get cheaper, a long-term mindset may be the only true edge we have left. The more modern culture pushes us towards instant gratification, the more the ability to plan and execute on a years scale gets scarce and valuable.
Good habits compound over time, like the famous +1% every day.
2) Systems > Goals 🔄
The second idea stems pretty much from the first, and debunks the most common way people try to make progress — that is, by setting end goals.
Goals have three problems:
⏱️ Goals are temporary — what happens when the goal is achieved? Goals are about winning, but once you win there may be nothing left to do.
⛰️ Goals are aspirational — they do not tell you how to get there: that’s what you need systems for.
☀️ Goals delay happiness — sacrificing something today to get something tomorrow is often a smart play, but there is a catch. It is risky to do something you don’t like for a long time just because of some ideal reward at the end. The outcome you wish for might 1) never materialize, or 2) not be as good as you expected.
So wait a minute: didn’t we say it was good to plan long-term? Yes — but to get far you need to somewhat enjoy the journey, too. And while you do, you may find that you don’t need a specific destination anymore.
There is a great quote at some point in the book:
People don’t rise to the level of their goals: they fall to the level of their systems.
To me, this is similar to: play games you enjoy playing, rather than only winning, which I wrote about in a previous edition last year.
But what does it mean, in practice?
As an example, rather than thinking that you should “lose weight” and focus on a target weight, think about what it means to be a healthy, active person. What does this version of you look like? What do they do every day?
Visualize this person and their life, and make it happen with habits. That’s what James Clear wants you to do, rather than setting your target weight.
Still, goals do have their place. When you set out to go in some direction, you need KPIs to check that you are on track. You can place stepping stones along the way. Just know that goals only mark progress, they do not make it.
🧅 The Three Layers of Change
If this still feels a bit nebulous, think about change as made of three layers: