📚Book Club - Habit Building & WTF Self-Help Personal Development Huh
Context Collapse Book Club!: Atomic Habits #1
It’s Book Club - a weekly post and thread about a book that matters. Let’s do this!
On tap: Week 1 of James Clear’s Atomic Habits.
Atomic Habits is a book about building habits and, as author James Clear puts it, “an easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones.”
Which sounds good!
That said, I’ve never been a self-help book person. I’ve never been a personal development book person. Like a lot of people, there’s a circuit in my brain which equates reading about solving personal problems to not actually spending time solving those problems. Just a thought process I have.
Anyway, that’s a whole lot of words to say I’ve never been the Gary Vaynerchuk or Tim Ferriss or Tony Robbins type.
Self-help books? Not appealing. Spending 10 hours in a row working on creative projects? Way more interesting.
So… that’s how I ended up smashing that Amazon Buy This Book And Embed Itself In Your Kindle Forever button. I have lots of good habits - Lots of parenting and raising-an-awesome-toddler habits, lots of good work habits, I make time to meal prep most weekends and put in time for foreign language study everyday. I’m also really crap at making time to exercise, drink too much sometimes, and enjoy junk food too much.
Basically, like a lot of Americans… especially coming out of pandemic year.
For me, 2020 was a year where I exercised way to little, drank on the couch after the kid fell asleep way too much because everything was closed, and ate too much takeout food cooked with too-little love because you somehow end up working even more once you’re based in a home office. I’d like to change that.
Clear opens his book with the story of a brutal beating he went through in high school and his subsequent recovery. Not fun! He talks about how establishing small routines and focusing on incremental change helped him in the months and years following it.
That’s a solid writing trick right there: Opening anecdote serving as a combination statement of purpose and summary of the book’s major bulletpoints. I like it.
The atomic habits name? More than just something which sounds cool. Here’s the philosophy:
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.
Fair enough. I like the idea of incremental change. I like the idea of making changes atom-by-atom.
Clear again:
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
By now, you’ve probably realized that an atomic habit refers to a tiny change, a marginal gain, a 1 percent improvement. But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small. They are little habits that are part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.
Fair enough. Dude’s a systems guy—his philosophy: build an architecture, stick to it, get results.
Next week: Digging into the system a bit.