‘Atomic Habits’ starts with a life event of the upbeat author James Clear and how he came back as one of the key players of his team even though he was cut from his team after slipping into a coma and falling into an unfortunate accident in the playground. A small belief in himself and his determination to become a prominent player kept him going to recover and develop his body as an athlete. This led James Clear to discover the staggering power of small habits for the first time and included his lifetime experiences with acts of self-development in this book. To digest the lessons and meet our potential, the only thing we need is a small start and tiny breakthroughs.

We get what we repeat.

If we save a little money now, that won’t make us millionaires. We cannot learn a language if we study one hour today. As a result, we tend to return to our older routine, getting no results immediately. Similarly, we may eat an unhealthy meal today, but that one meal won’t affect our bodies. If we repeat, then we’ll have an unhealthy, diseased body. That declares that repeating our actions shapes us as a successful or failed person. As to the author, good habits make time an ally of us, whereas bad habits make time an enemy.

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking.

You must have thought that I had gone out of my mind. We spend all our lives learning how important it is to have a goal in our life. Hold on! That’s what James Clear tried to portray in this book, explaining the goal vs. the system. Our main attention should be in designing the system—how we will work toward our destination.

When a player is absorbed in the goal of winning a game, then what will be left to push or motivate after he wins? He may revert to his old habits of mishaps. We sometimes push ourselves too hard towards a certain goal and think all the purposes and happiness in our lives are surrounded by that goal. By doing so, we make ourselves the slave to a goal. If we succeed, we become happy; if not, we succumb to the darkness of failure.

We should design our system and fall in love with the process—the tiny improvements we are making daily—before we start working towards a goal. Then, we don’t need to curse our names even if we fail, since the process we appreciate is still there to hold onto us. You may ask what about the goal we were talking about. It’s still there in disguise. It’s just a matter of time before it comes to light through the process!

It’s often difficult to keep good habits like journaling, exercising, and eating healthy for more than a few days, even with the occasional burst of motivation. To fulfill the challenge to change, the author proposed three levels, like the three layers of onion:

Change in results: It indicates the setting of goals like losing weight and publishing a book.

Change in the process: It includes designing your system by implementing a new routine that we have already come through.

Change in your identity: It’s the deepest layer concerned with changing your beliefs, worldview, and self-image.

Here the identity change indicates considering ourselves the ones we want to become. When you are offered to smoke, you would rather tell them you’re not a smoker than explain you’re trying to quit. When you want to earn more money, being identified as a consumer rather than an earner will not help you.

Habit and the identity

When you want to become a writer, you need to cultivate the characteristics of a writer who is thoughtful, conscious of his surroundings, imaginative, and has taken writing and reading as a part of his daily activities. By doing so, you’ve become a writer; it’s your identity. In the same way, your goal is not to run a marathon but to become a runner—not to learn an instrument but to become a musician. Be the one ‘who is this’ not the type ‘who wants to become this’.

In this system, a false dichotomy may arise: doesn’t maintaining all these routines turn us into chained people? That’s not true; habit and freedom complement each other. A good financial habit provides sufficient savings in time for your needs. A balanced diet makes you energetic, and you are not out of strength most of the time. Daily furnishing of knowledge gives you the upper hand at any social gatherings. If all these don’t make you feel free, then what will?

Scientific explanation of how habit works

First comes cue—a stimulus affecting our behavior that predicts rewards like primary (food, water, sex) and secondary (money, fame, power, status). Cue indicates a reward that leads to craving, the second step of building a habit.

Craving is a motivational force to act so that you can change your internal state. When you crave sugary foods or smoking, you crave the pleasure, not the food or the cigarette.

Response is the actual habit you perform according to your ability.

Finally, it’s time to get rewarded to get satisfied. If we get rewarded, our manners are remembered subconsciously.

These four steps work as a loop. The cue triggers cravings. Craving motivates response, and response provides reward, which satisfies craving leading to cue.

The first law to form a habit is to make it obvious.

Pointing-and-calling

It’s a method normally used in Japanese railways. The operators of trains speak out loud about every signal, whether it’s green or red, whenever the train reaches a new signal. In each station, he calls out the exact speed of the speedometer. When it’s time to leave for the train, he states time. When the staff declares “all clear” by checking out, the operator starts the train. Here every detail is identified and named out loud, which makes the system 85% correct and cuts accidents by 30%. Can you feel how habit works in this case? This method raises awareness of our conscious and automatic behavior and ensures operators notice problems before something goes wrong. We need a point-and-call system in our real lives. This kind of instinctive behavior leads us to our desired manners. But the challenge is to track our daily habits and mark them as good and as bad depending on whether the things we are doing favor us to become the person we wish to become or not.

Starting a new habit with the implementation of intention.

When you decide to gain or plan to do something, think of the time and place where you’ll do so. Rather than saying I’ll study, raise your chance as planned by 90% by declaring to yourself, I’ll study English for 20 minutes at 6 p.m. in my bedroom. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with repetition, you get an urge to do the thing at the right time, even if you cannot say why.

There is an effect named The Diderot Effect that states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption leading to additional purchases. This pattern is visible everywhere, like when you purchase a dress, you feel the urge to get a new pair of matching shoes. The same act is present while cultivating a new habit. This connectedness of behavior can be used to our advantage.

To grab the best outcome, identify a habit you do every day and stack the new behavior on top of that habit. This method is called habit stacking, and the idea is to tie your desired behavior with your old one. For example, if you wish to meditate every morning, plan to meditate after you pour your coffee for one minute. The reason behind strategies like this is to trigger cues that lead to a certain behavior.

Designing environment

Sometimes when we walk through the kitchen, we see a cookie jar and grab one, even though we didn’t plan to have one. If we kept the jar in a place that is out of sight, we could save ourselves from regretting extra calorie intake. In the meantime, some of us buy stuff not because we want them to but only because we see that stuff presented nicely in a shop and feel the urge for that. That is why we need mindfulness to design our environment with productive cues. If you put your guitar in your closet, you’re less likely to practice. By keeping the bookshelf in a place that is not visible much, it’ll not be easy for you to read. That is, when a cue is hidden, it’s easy to ignore. If you watch TV in your bedroom, it’ll be hard for you to sleep early. If you play video games in your living room, it’ll be distracting for your study. That’s why you need to divide your rooms with different activities, move your TV to a different bedroom if you watch too much TV, and move your setup of video games if you play too much, neglecting your studies. Then you can do stuff without distractions. If you think about self-control to remain motivated, it’s short-lasting. It’s not common to muster the willpower to override your desires. No doubt, perseverance and willpower are essential to success. Nevertheless, to improve these qualities, we need a disciplined environment, since we can only break a habit but not forget it entirely.

The second law to form a habit is to make it attractive.

The dopamine-driven feedback loop.

Habit-forming behaviors like taking drugs, eating junk foods, playing video games, and browsing social media are associated with a higher level of dopamine. Once scientists thought dopamine was all about pleasure, but we can experience it also when we anticipate it. If we predict an opportunity as rewarding, our level of dopamine spikes in anticipation. Chain smokers feel exalted whenever they see the cigarette, not after smoking it, because of the surge of dopamine. As the dopamine level rises, our motivation to act stirs—that is, the anticipation of a reward that drives us to a certain action, not the fulfillment of the action. When Eid days approached, being kids, we felt thrilled thinking about the day, not after celebrating the day. As adults, we daydream about how to have a blast on the upcoming vacations rather than being on day-offs. It happens to me all the time. Before starting my study session, I put my earphones on and turned up the volume with my favorite song playing, and I felt an adrenaline rush to provide 100% concentration on my study. My brain is anticipating all the time about the pleasure I am about to get after I put my favorite song on. That’s why I feel the urge to start studying every morning.

Social norms in habit-forming.

‘The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives’—the deepest human desire is to belong. We don’t choose our earliest behaviors but inherit them. All the

The norms of our society guide us to marriages and decide which holidays to celebrate. Going along with others does not feel like a burden. It’s comfortable to imitate our close ones, the majority, and the powerful people.

A study shows if one person in a relationship loses weight, the other gets thinned down about one-third of the time. If a group of friends together aims to become researchers, then the environment leads them to their goal. It’s common for chain smokers to start smoking because of their friends. That’s why it’s effective to join a group where our desired behavior is the normal behavior. It always happens when we want to buy a new product. We feel insecure about which model to select; we tend to buy the product the majority of people are purchasing or giving good feedback on. Who doesn’t pursue power, prestige, and status? We search for the habits of people who have good names and aim to behave according to their proven ways that bring us respect, admiration, and status.

Laszlo Polgar, a firm believer in hard work, decided to raise his three daughters to become chess prodigies and designed the house with chess books, pictures of famous chess players, and children who were bound to play against each other constantly. After some time, three of them became chess prodigies and left a mark on the field of chess.

The third law to form a habit—make it easy.

Motion vs. Action

Motion is the planning, strategizing, and learning. All of them are about perfection but never produce an outcome. It’s the action that can lead to our most coveted outcomes. Generating ideas about your article is the motion, but if you sit down to write, it is the action. Fear of failing is the reason we slip into motion rather than action. You know what? If this motion in the disguise of preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you should change your method.

Walk slowly but never backward.

It’s the prerequisite rule to form a habit. When we repeat doing something, even if it’s a tiny step forward, after some time doing it becomes the automatic tendency of our non-conscious mind. There is no estimated date when a habit will form. It’s the repetition that automates our actions. To repeat any action, you need to make it effortless—the third rule of habit-forming. Our brain looks for easy tasks to perform, like scrolling phones, checking mail, and watching television without complexity and stealing so much of our time. If you are motivated to write a hundred pages at a time every day, after a couple of days, you feel draining rather than working up. Meanwhile, if you decide to write one or two pages a day, that will pay you off in the long term.

In this case, when you decide to read before bed each night, read one page. When you think of studying, open your notes. The goal is to make your desire as easy as possible. Anyone can read for one minute, and it won’t seem like a challenge to you. If you continue doing so, reading a book before bed will become part of your daily activities, and then you can improve the habit easily by reading more books. This idea is named the “Two Minute Rule.” The goal of this rule is to trick your brain by showing it the easy task and persuading it to advance in the intermediate step and repeat the process.

The fourth law is to form a habit—make it satisfying.

We are more likely to repeat what pleases us. At the beginning of the launch of chewing gum, it was not globally hit like today. Consumers got no joy from chewing until Wrigley revolutionized the industry by adding flavors like Juicy Fruit. Then manufacturers went another step forward by adding a pathway to clean the mouth of the chewing gum. Using the slogan in their advertisements, “Refresh your taste,” they skyrocketed the consumption of chewing gum.

When, as a company, we are boring, people tend to leave us as they get no entertainment from us. That’s why we need to make our desired routine pleasing, as everything giving immediate satisfaction is repeated and applauded. We know smoking kills, but we still smoke as it eliminates stress. We know overeating causes obesity, but still, we overeat. All of these give us ultimate pleasure, and we end up doing what is pleasurable, avoiding the facts. The costs of our bad habits are in the future, but the costs of our good habits are in the present. We all want good health and success, and to achieve these we need to ignore immediate reward. To ignore immediate gratification, the best way is to add immediate pleasure to the habits we want to grab on.

How to track your habits

The basic format to do so is not to break the chain. We can get a calendar and cross off each day we stick with our routine. This way, whenever we look at the calendar and see the streak, we’ll be reminded to act again. When we get the feeling of moving forward, we get motivated to continue down that path, and the progress, even if it’s a little bit, can become an addiction this way.

It’s normal to break our consistency in pursuing the habit for a day, but it’s wise for us to get back on track the other day. Our first mistake is never going to bring ruin to our life; the same type of repeated mistakes are!

The truth about talent

The secret to maximizing the odds of our success is to choose the right field of competition suited to our abilities—where our natural inclination lies. Many of us may show dissatisfaction with this fact, as none of us has any control over the genes that shape our abilities. However, we need to accept that to reach the top of any field, we need to be suited for that field with lots of hard work.

Let’s start pursuing the way that is suited for us and never stop improving, even if it’s a tiny progress. That’s where the power of atomic habit lies—tiny changes but remarkable results.