1st book of 2020
Atomic Habits is a solid framework with dubious science. I like habits, at current count, there are ~40 things I do every day, spending 2.5 hours every morning doing things from clearing email to brushing teeth to meditation.I appreciate keeping habits small, so atomic habits seemed like it would preached directly to my choir. Unfortunately, it didn’t teach much beyond a useful but obvious framework: Habits are made into 4 parts: (1) the queue, (2) the motivation, (3) the action, (4) the reward.To change habits, tweak one of these steps: (1) make it obvious (or hidden), (2) make it attractive (or unattractive), (3) make it easy (or difficult), and (4) make it satisfying (or unsatisfying).Perhaps the tip that I appreciated most wast the two minute rule – habits should be formed at the level that they take two minutes to complete. This creates the right incentives to keep them going, and once habits have been started it’s much easier to complete even a hard task.
As Clear continues through his thesis, the science gets garbled, and I feel like he plays it fast and loose with his definition of a habit. At one point he says that people enter a flow state when they are attempting a task 4% harder than their skill level. How was this measured, I wonder, what task were they completing, how did the experiment even measure flow state? He also loves to use sports anecdotes, using a very broad definition of habits to describe various teams that ended up finding success. However these anecdotes feel like pretty obvious correlation, rather than causation, and just bogged down the narrative for me.
To echo another reviewer, if you need convincing that habits are the right way to change your behavior, go ahead and give this book a try. If you already have found some ways to build your own habits but are looking to go to the next level, this book will have a few tips, but feels like mostly empty calories.
Interesting Concepts: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Goodhart’s Law.