How to shape your habits with pragmatic process — A brief summary of Atomic Habits
Today’s compose is a casual compose — sharing a book that impressed me in terms of habit-forming. I’d like to share it to more people as I found the content is pragmatic and effective, no matter what profession you are undertaking.
Atomic Habits was published in 2018 and soon became a bestseller. The book is written by Jame Clear, who is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. In this book, he drew on scientifically-proven ideas to create an intuitive guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.
Why are habits important to us
Habits are a part of us. If we put aside external factors such as luck and accidents, we can even say that we are the product of our habits. The small changes brought about by habits can cumulatively bring about huge changes, but to each action the impact is seemingly subtle. Ultimately, it is habits that make us the kind of people we ultimately want to be.
In the Book, Jame Clear presents four approaches to habit formation:
- Make it obvious
- Make it attractive
- Make it easy
- Make it satisfying
Let me interpret the approaches with an example of “how to keep up with exercising”.
Make it obvious
- Pay attention to your patterns (when are you motivated to exercise? When do you have trouble sticking to it?);
- Then, design specific environments and situations to make the behavior easy to occur (find a gym within walking distance of your office and head to the gym directly after work).
Make it attractive
- Tye the action to additional benefits (consider the benefits of exercise from a health perspective and understand the process of exercise as a process of becoming healthy);
- Find alternatives that can satisfy the motivation by being aware of the underlying motivation behind the vice (let’s say you avoid exercising by binge-watching short videos as the motivation is to avoid boredom. Then pick an alternative that can satisfy this need, e.g. exercising while listening to an audiobook that interests you).
Make it easy
- Plan early (packing exercise supplies in the basement in advance) or imposing restrictions to keep vices at bay (stop storing high-calorie snacks at home if the goal of exercise is weight loss);
- Start with baby steps (do a 5-minute jogging) and phase in more ambitious habits (jog for 30 minutes or more).
Make it satisfying
- Proactively set yourself up for instant rewards (eat your favorite snacks or drinks immediately after the workout);
- Strengthen your social identity (log your excercise record on your social account or with people your care about, impress others as if you are a fitness guru so that if you don’t stick with it, isn’t it humiliating?).
The action we take, the vote we make
The biggest takeaway of this book to me the confidence it has given to me. Despite some habits are turning complex and stubborn to get rid of, there is a process to crack them. Our life is designed based on the habits we chose to stick to. I believe the courage is in the identity that we want to build, and in the every small action that we take.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.
by Jame Clear, author of Atomic Habits
