Atomic Habits: Conceptual Summary

Thesis

How many times have you set out in life to either create a new habit, or rid yourself of an old one, and succeeded? I’ll pass no judgement because until now, I’m probably batting a single digit success rate, and that’s as someone who thinks about personal improvement daily! That is, until I discovered the systems for habit change described by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits.

What I’ll share with you here is my summary of those crucial concepts in his book, then in the next post, how I’ve put together a workshop for myself to use when building or breaking down those pesky behaviors that must change. Because what good is an intellectual understanding without action?

To truly test the validity of James’ system, I’ll be embarking on a 13-week habit formation journey with a close friend as we employ the techniques, reflect weekly on progress, and report back here on the results that followed. I hope you’ll join me and share your results along the way as well. So let’s begin!

Why Habits Matter

James gives a myriad of reasons habits matter, including an incredible journey that he himself took to recover from a near career ending sports injury, to eventually becoming a star college athlete. However instead of recounting his reasons to you, I’ll give my own.

“You are what you do”
— Carl Jung

What is your heart doing right now? What shoe did you tie first this morning? Do you generally drink more coffee or tea? It only takes a moment of reflection to realize that the vast majority of our actual behaviors are really just a large collection of small habits that have been formed over years of experience, environmental stimuli, and perhaps even the occasional genetic disposition. But what’s significant about this isn’t the habits themselves, but the long-term compounding effect that each one of them slowly accumulates towards.

In effect, “you are what you do” puts it perfectly. Your health is a direct result of your long term eating habits and your income is a direct result of your long-term learning and interpersonal habits. This is what’s typically referred to as “the compounding effect” in behavior change.

It gets even more interesting, though! When you did the dishes last, did you do every last one of them or did you leave a couple “because you made a large dent already”? When you last deployed a new application change, did you document all your changes, or did you document “most of them and just the big ones”? I’m guilty of these too, but what’s critical to see is that not only are we forming singular, material habits that dictate the way we interact with the world in specific situations, but we’re also building “meta-habits”. Habits about our habits. And it boils down to this: “How you do anything is how you do everything”.

Producing excellent work isn’t something done on command once a month when your team is in a sticky situation and counting on you. Running your fastest mile ever doesn’t happen on race day without continuously exceeding your best pace week after week. We know this, but what’s often missed is that running your fastest mile week after week in an effort to build one habit, is actually going to transfer to the level of effort you put into all your other habits regularly.

The greatest achievers in the world weren’t born that way. They made themselves, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do through a process I call Subconscious Automation.

As someone who wants to make improvements in nearly every aspect of their life, I really don’t want to have to think about the decisions that lead to those improvements often or ever! Ideally, I want to set myself on a trajectory that’s going to lead to long-term compounding growth, and to reap those rewards while reserving my brain power for the things I love to do!

To accomplish this you should intentionally pick some keystone habits for yourself — the small habits that have the greatest downstream effects in our lives — then work to make those tiny, atomic behaviors automatic to the degree which we don’t have to think about them. The first step to doing that is understanding that, as James puts it: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Goals vs. Systems

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

The Problem with Goals

Goal setting workshops, visualization, and affirmations are the cliché of personal improvement, but do they work? To answer this, ask yourself, “how often have you set a goal and achieved it”? Again, your success rate is probably as dismal as mine! And that’s because goals as a tool are insufficient. Using them exclusively is like being a carpenter who owns a saw but nothing to fasten a screw.

Goals are insufficient on their own for a number of reasons:

• Winners and losers often have the same goals.
• Achieving your goals is momentary! As I recently experienced, it’s crucial you put in the conscious effort to line another one up right away, or you’ll quickly fall victim to the success dip.
• They restrict your happiness up to the fleeting moment you achieve them.
• They’re inevitably at odds with long term, lasting progress which comes through subconscious automation.

Before I get too far ahead of myself disparaging goals though, let me first explain that creating high-quality goals is a key component of habit formation. Specifically, a high-quality goal is one that is SMART, but more importantly it comes with a “why”. We’ll cover this more soon.

The answer to the inadequacies of goals is instead, systems and identity.

Systems and Identity

A system in this context is the series of interconnected “atomic” habits you form which support the identity you choose to embody.

Let’s start with identity.

Your identity, or rather, identities, are the most powerful force in human psychology, and as a result, I believe one of the most powerful forces in the world. And we’re going to harness that power!

What makes your identity so powerful is that it’s the blueprint which your subconscious mind is going to do everything in its power to help you match, through micro-behaviors. Because this system is running at all times — and by definition without your awareness — these small behavior changes are going to be the majority voters on your results trajectory.

Consider someone who’s looking out their window on a cold winter morning wondering if they should go for a run or not. It’s lightly raining, but clouds loom that threaten something more. Do they go running or not? The answer will largely come down to whether they consider themselves a runner or not. And I’d argue that if they were truly a runner, they wouldn’t have even spent the time in front of the window wondering at all.

Choosing to embody an identity that serves us allows us to harness our subconscious as a tool for avoiding an overwhelming number of micro-decisions that will eventually exhaust our finite will power. There’s a feedback loop here as well because as these small decisions add up, we’re building our belief in our identity through hundreds or thousands of votes. This is why habits can’t be created in a finite number of days, but are achieved through the number of repetitions.

Picking your identity

Your identities are not created in a vacuum. They’re the reflection of your values and belief systems, all of which I highly recommend you explore through something like Tony Robbins’ Personal Power II program. But for the purposes of this process we don’t need to go that deep yet. Instead, all we need to do is understand that we have agency in choosing our identities, and should do so in relationship to our goals.

In other words: choose the identities that will best help you accomplish your high-quality goals! My favorite tool for doing this is to ask yourself, “what would an extraordinary life look like to you if you were living it right now?” Go wild here! I often write down things like: I’d commute to work by helicopter, I’d work while I traveled and would be paid to read, think, and consult on ML Engineering. Be materialistic and throw guilt out the door because it won’t serve you here.

If you really want to take this to the next level, ask yourself why you want these things. Often times the most compelling goals come down to seeking personal growth or contributing positively to the world around you. I’ll cover more of this in the workshop.

Crafting your systems

As a runner, when do you run? Probably every other day, rain or shine. What are your habits supporting this behavior? You likely get up before sunrise, drink a glass of water, then change into your running clothes, maybe check the weather and throw another layer on if needed, then you walk outside and start walking down the road. The run is what follows, but it was the system of small habits that got you out there in the first place.

The keystone habit in this case would be the threshold moment, which is personal. For me, it’s the point at which I’m outside and have walked down the stairs of my apartment. From this moment forward, my running system has supported my identity as a runner which sends me on the trajectory toward achieving my goals.

I find that successful habit change is often tied to a willingness to be iterative here. When I set out to become a runner I knew my goal and my identity, but because each were new to me, I didn’t know what a strong running system looked like. I tried running in my neighborhood and failed. Then tried running every day and failed. Then tried going to a trail nearby and finally started to succeed. But then the weather turned and the habit broke down again! What’s critical here is to be self-aware and self-compassionate. This is a process where you’ll learn what an ideal system looks like to you.

Once we understand the anatomy of a habit we can be more precise and deliberate about how we choose to build these systems and ensure they’re going to stick.

Habit Structure

The bulk of Atomic Habits is an in-depth analysis of the 4 mechanisms of a habit loop and how to hack them to achieve your desired outcomes. For anybody who’s made it this far, I highly recommend you read through it all for yourself, but as a primer, I’ll synthesize the core components.

Habit Loop

The feedback loop which drives behavior is:

• Cue — the (typically subconscious) trigger that initiates a habit
• Craving — the emotion of desire which can be so brief for ingrained habits that we don’t notice it before transitioning to the next stage
• Response — the behavior we take to fulfill our desire
• Reward — the emotional reward for completing the habit

Cue

For every habit, beneficial or otherwise, each of the four components must be present for its continued existence. The cues in our environment can be as large as the context — for example driving to the office might be a cue to turn towards Starbucks — or as small as a habit tracking calendar on your wall, hint hint.

Craving

A craving is the feeling of desire generated by our brains to spur us to action. It’s the dopamine hit that motivates all life on earth, and believe me it is powerful! Sidebar: this is actually the scariest aspect of Neuralink in my opinion. See the book for a wild story on how inhibiting dopamine in rats removed their entire will to eat or drink, despite the fact they still got pleasure from both the actions!

Response

A response is the behavior that our subconscious triggers to help us achieve the reward. It could be as benign as reaching for a light switch when we walk into a dark room or harmful as reaching for candy in the pantry first thing in the morning. But what’s important to remember is that the response is where the magic happens. So don’t despair that it’s working against you because it’s actually an incredible power you possess!

Reward

And finally, the reward is what reinforces the pathways which lead to the repetition of your habit loop. It will be critical to identify clearly what rewards are reinforcing your present behaviors as we will need to interrupt them for bad habits, and build in stronger short-term rewards for the good new habits that make up your habit system.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change

The four laws of behavior change simply follow from the four components of the habit loop to help you either reinforce a good habit or interrupt a bad one!

They are:

• Make it obvious or invisible
• Make it attractive or unattractive
• Make it easy or difficult
• Make it satisfying or unsatisfying

Make it obvious/invisible

When it comes to triggering the habit loop for a good new habit you are building, the last thing you want to do is bury your cue behind a dozen other new habits that have to be executed perfectly, and a stack of papers on your desk. You want to make it obvious, so it’s easy to be triggered by it. If you’re trying to eliminate a bad habit start by eliminating the cue from your environment, such as by throwing away all the junk food in your pantry and putting healthy foods you want to eat at eye level.

Make it attractive/unattractive

I find that making a good habit attractive can be tricky, but with some practice, you’ll get it. Start by envisioning the long-term rewards of your new behavior and creating short-term reinforcement to help you get there. Like being able to strike off another day on your habit calendar or using temptation bundling (something I’ll cover more later). Your peer group also plays an important role here in that behaviors which your tribe exhibits will automatically be more attractive to you. So choose your company wisely.

Make it easy/difficult

Making good habits easy and bad habits difficult is one of the most straightforward and effective ways we can change our behaviors. Consider an Ulysses Pact — a decision that binds you to further future decisions. For example, leaving all your money at home when going out, so you’re not tempted to buy things you don’t need or food that will make you fat.

Make it satisfying/unsatisfying

Perhaps the most overlooked part of building a good habit is the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting which we all exhibit. Hyperbolic discounting simply explained, is our tendency to prefer a short-term reward over a greater long-term reward. It’s been used to attempt to predict the level of success in life that people will have starting at a young age, and it’s the obstacle we’ll need to overcome to achieve anything truly great in our lives.

To do so, start by finding ways to reward yourself in the short term for doing habits that typically only have long-term gains. This is where my favorite tool, the habit tracker, comes in. By putting a highly visible (cue) calendar in your house and striking off each day that you do your habit, you can build a secondary habit which brings its own reward: keeping the streak going and never missing more than one day in a row!

A sample habit tracker from jamesclear.com/atomic-habits/media

We’ll dig into more tools you can use in the next post, but for now, it’s sufficient to understand how we can affect our habit loops. Meanwhile, I’d love to know whether you’ve subconsciously already been aware of some of these concepts, and whether any were new to you!

Summary

• How you do anything is how you do everything AND what you do is who you are.
• We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.
• Goals are essential to help us find the identities we want, then to build the systems of habits that support and reinforce those identities.
• The habit loop is: cue → craving → response → reward
• We can affect it through making it
• obvious/invisible (cue)
• making it attractive/unattractive (craving)
• making it easy/difficult (response)
• and making it satisfying/unsatisfying (reward)