If you improve your life by 1% each day, you will improve your life will be 37 times better after a year. This is one of the famous ideas in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
However, I know you guys too well. The problem is never about whether the book is effective enough or not, the problem is YOU COULD NEVER GET THAT BOOK READ. I know reading might be hard or tiresome for lots of people, so I decided to summarize all the points I find effective in this book so you could still improve your life just by reading this article!
By the way, I find this book rather effective and I tried out many of the methods in it and it worked! OK, let’s get started. I will be summarizing the part of “how to build good habits” because “how to quit bad habits” is just vice versa.
The book breaks down the steps of having a good habit into four categories. However, before diving into these steps, there’s one thing I think you need to do — change your identity recognition.
What does this even mean? Well, say that your goal is to read every day, don’t just set your goal like that. Set your goal as “Becoming a reader ”. This also applies to other habits. Change your goal from “exercising for 30 minutes every day” to “becoming a healthy person who exercises on a daily basis.” You might think that this identity recognition thing is for child or might be useless, but I tried it and it really worked.
Here’s why it worked. When I changed my identity recognition into “a reader”, I will try to do all the things that suit this identity and avoid those that do not. Reading each day? Yes. Watch Netflix instead of reading? No. Writing book comments? Yes. So on and on it goes, and it reinforces my identity recognition, which creates a virtuous cycle.
But this identity recognition thing is like a double-sided blade. If you use it in a negative way, such as “I could not remember people’s faces” or “I am bad at finding places”, you will slowly become what you think you are. So please, please avoid sticking negative identity cards on yourself.
Now, after finishing the identity recognition, let’s hop into the 4 principles.
Big Principe 1: Make the hint easy to see
- Track down your habits. This may be done by writing down the daily habits and evaluate whether they are good, bad, or neutral. Then, you could better understand what needs to be fixed.
- Make your task as specific as possible. For instance, if you want to form the habit of drinking a cup of water each morning, you could write it down as “I will use my white cup to drink a full cup of water in the kitchen when I wake up.” By making it as specific as possible, it increases the probability of you actually DOING it.
- Create a suitable environment to make the hint impossible to be neglected. I think this one is very, very important and effective. Take the drinking water example, you could put the cup right beside your bed so it’s really easy to see.
Big Principle 2: Make the habit attractive
- Do something you like before or during your habit. For instance, if your goal is to form an exercising habit, you can listen to the music or podcast you like while you are doing it. If you want to go to bed early, pick up a book you like and give it a good read before it.
- The power of family and friends. Tell them your goals or do it with them. I personally find this very useful because people DO care about what other thinks, and by telling more people your goal you put more responsibilities on yourself. So whenever I decided to skip exercising, I become afraid of whether my friends will check out on me and I have to sadly admit to them that I am a fat and lazy person.
Big Principle 3: Let the actions you have to take become easy
- Minimize the effort you have to take. You never want a new habit become too hard to form. Take exercising for an example. If you want to minimize the effort, choose a gym right next to your working place or house so you could pass it each day. Put your yoga mat right in the living room so you can grab it very easily each day. Simplify the steps you need to take to perform the habit, so you can do them easily.
- The Two Minute Principle. Make yourself able to start the habit in 2 minute so you won’t lose the momentum to do it.
- Standardize your actions. Make all the steps you have to do standardized, so your body will automatically start to do it each time without have to stop and think.
Big Principle 4: Make the rewards satisfying
- Give yourself a reward right after you did the habit. For instance, give yourself a spa or a nice bath after your exercise. Don’t choose rewards that will contradict with your habit. For instance, don’t give yourself a big meal after it.
- Habit tracker!! This is actually very useful. Visualize your habit so you can see if you do it every day. For me, I put different colors of check on the calendar on my desk if I did it today.
- Never miss twice. You might be in a extremely bad mood or health condition today, so it’s ok to not be perfect every day. Don’t blame yourself and lose faith, but just remember not to miss the habit twice in a row. Quickly pick up the habit again after the day you missed it so your brain won’t think it is ok to miss.
That’s about the summary and tips I learned from the book. This is a very good and useful book, and if you follow the steps, I am sure you are not far from the person you crave to become.