Book Review "Atomic Habits", make your life more valuable
Book Review, Lifehack ·First of all, I would like to clarify that this review reflects solely the author’s personal feelings and is intended for discussion with others. If you have any doubts or different opinions about what has been mentioned here, please feel free to leave a comment. As John Stuart Mill said, the only way to make our opinions trustworthy is through refinement by discussion with others. We are all prone to being wrong at some point, and even Socrates, who is considered one of the wisest figures in history, was not exempt from making mistakes, so this is entirely natural. That being said, let’s begin the review of “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.
I came across this book thanks to a recommendation from a friend. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have read it because I had already experienced the bitter taste of trying and failing to implement the ideas from another book on habits. Previously, I had read “The Power of Habit” and embarked on a six-month project to establish a habit by doing something, even if it was just a little bit every day. I succeeded in forming the habit, but after just one week, all of my hard work was undone, and I returned to my previous state. This made me skeptical about the importance of habits.
However, while flipping through the first few pages of “Atomic Habits” by James Clear by chance, I was drawn in by the author’s shocking personal experiences. I won’t mention them here since they can be found in other reviews. As I continued to read, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the author’s deep insights into human cognition and behavior. One of these insights was particularly striking to me:
To make lasting changes, identity-based habits should be established. This begins with focusing on the type of person you want to become.
“What do you want to become” can be seen as a top-level goal or value. For example, in my case, “I want to be a person who continuously develops and inspires people around me,” “I want to age gracefully,” and so on. In fact, I have been consistently following my morning routine and weight training during lunchtime for the past two weeks. The main reason I can maintain these two habits “happily” is because of these top-level goals. Therefore, even if I confirm every night that my weight has not changed, I am not disappointed because numbers are not a means of evaluation for me.
Regarding the stages of habit formation, the author explains it as follows:
Cue –> Craving –> Response –> Reward
Of the four stages, I found the explanation about cues to be particularly impressive, so I will explain it in detail, and briefly skip over the rest. I am looking for inspiration that can touch the depths of my mind, so these explanations are just some of the many techniques I have already seen.
The most impressive part of the explanation about cues was the discussion of the “conscious bandwidth.”
People with strong willpower minimize the conditions for using willpower. They don’t waste their conscious.
This paradoxical statement left a strong impression as if it had hit me from behind.
To achieve this, you can organize your surroundings. For example, in order to establish a morning routine, you could tidy up the house the night before. Additionally, the book suggests that changes in your environment can be helpful in forming habits. From this, I gained inspiration and realized that the “first step” in environmental changes is crucial. For example, for me, how I spend the first day of civilian life after completing military service in 2022 is very important. By the way, I plan to make sure that my first morning as a civilian is spent productively and I will focus on my “to-do list” for the entire day. This way, I am trying to minimize the use of my conscious mind by setting my lifestyle’s “default value.” (For empirical evidence on this point, see Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. It’s a really good book.)
To summarize the rest of the book briefly, it continues advising to strengthen the motivation for habit formation, make habit implementation easy, and make rewards attractive.
Unexpectedly, I gained a lot of inspiration from the book’s appendix, and I could feel the author’s expertise clearly. Here are a few quotes that left a lasting impression on me. Feedback and sharing opinions on my post are always welcome! By the way, my internal motivation for posting book reviews on my blog is to become a more trustworthy person through communication and exchange of opinions with others.
Poverty is not having less, but wanting more. Satisfaction is heavily influenced by the level of expectation.
In conclusion, we must have goals or motivations that are directly related to my identity. Such goals can naturally adjust my expectations to an appropriate level and fill my days with deep satisfaction.
Originally from return_go