A Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear

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Summary

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Running 2 Keep Up Personal Development Book Club. If you follow me on medium.com you know that I write a series of Personal Development book reviews. This is the first one that I have managed to commit to audio/video format. Please let me know if there is a specific book you recommend or would like me to review in this series. I hope you will enjoy this review of James Clear's Atomic Habits and I hope you will share your experiences of this book. How did it resonate with you? How has it impacted your world? Can't wait to get a conversation with you underway. In the meantime please share this review with anyone you think will benefit from reading and implementing Atomic Habits.

Transcript

I believe we're all seeking an edge. We all have limited time to spend on our personal development and we all need a hand to figure out where the gold is. So in this video I'm going to ask, is the gold in James Clear’s Atomic Habits? This is my review of his book. Let's find out together. 

Hey everyone, Andrew Burns, founder of Running2KeepUp.com here with you again. As you know by now I hope, I have been studying and reading and thinking and teaching and writing and talking and evangelising about personal development, and improving productivity, and limiting procrastination and building new and useful habits, I have been doing that for 20 years now. And every month thousands of people just like you are engaging with my content, whether that be video, written or audio. 

If you follow me over on medium.com, you will know that I publish an occasional series of reviews of personal development books, some which I really love, and some, which I don't really love. And this is the first time that I've committed one of those videos so bear with me! 

So why am I reviewing these books? Well, first of all, I love books. I love reading. And in particular, I love personal development books. This one, James Clear’s Atomic Habits really speaks to me because it seeks to build on one of my favourite books of any genre, which is Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. I love that book. And so I am eager to to to learn what James Clear has to add.

First things first, it is such an enjoyable read. It has lots of interesting stories in there from James Clear's own experience. There's a story of him getting hit in the face with a baseball bat while he was at high school, the injuries he sustained. It’s a pretty harrowing tale actually- the impact that those injuries had on his life and the kind of the challenges that he faced as a result. And the way he kind of bounced back from them. And that's just that's just one of the many stories. 

Some of the other stories in there are pretty well trodden if I'm absolutely honest with you. He talks a lot about Dave Brailsford, British cycling, their concept of seeking marginal gains. This has been talked about in a lot of other books. If you're familiar with Matthew Syed’s work you will have heard this story. He talks about the habit of regular hand washing that formed in India. Again, if you've read Atul Gawande, his Checklist Manifesto, you will be familiar with that story. He made slightly different points out of these stories, but they're pretty well trodden. But nicely written nonetheless. And, you know, I actually found myself enjoying reading those stories from James Clear’s point of view, even though they were pretty familiar to me already. 

One of the things that James Clear does in this book is he builds on the habit loop. The habit loop was kind of popularised in Charles Duhigg’s book as Cue, Routine, Reward. And James Clear builds on that a little bit. He kind of remodelled it, he makes it Cue, Craving, Response, Reward, which sounds like a pretty subtle shift, but actually it's key to the next part of his book. 

On this kind of slightly expanded habit loop he builds his Four Laws of Habit Change: Make it obvious; Make it attractive; Make it easy; Make it satisfying. This is one of the areas where the book didn't really chime for me. The make it satisfying part, particularly, I've struggled with a little bit. Making a habit satisfying feels to feel to languid to me. For me, habits are built in emotion. They are built in... they're driven by the amount of emotion that we imbue those habits with. And so satisfying just doesn't work for me. 

I wrote a piece a while back now, maybe even a couple of years ago now, about a game that I play with my children on long car journeys called Yellow Car Punch, and I wrote about how the kind of frantic nature of that game... it's very straightforward game. You're in the car, you're looking at the other cars. If you see a yellow car, you have to be the first one to shout “Yellow Car Punch” and then punch the other passengers in the car. It sounds much more brutal than it really is. And in fact, we had to ban the punching part because, particularly me, generally the designated driver, I was getting overexcited. But it's that excitement, that frantic nature of the game, that kind of will to win that grooved that game into habit for me. And what I found myself doing was playing that game spotting yellow cars, even shouting “Yellow Car Punch,” when I was in the car on my own. Slightly embarrassing, I'll admit, but if I was just mildly satisfied having won that game I'm not sure that the habit would have been grooved in the same way. 

And so this is the one aspect of the book that I really have a problem with. And it sounds like I'm splitting hairs a little bit, but I'm not because it's important. Because it feeds into James Clear’s other innovation, if you like, in this book, his other big idea in this book. Which is that of habit stacking.

Habit stacking is where you use one habit that's well ingrained into your life as the cue for a new habit that you're going to build on the back of it. And that sounds like a great idea and intellectually I really like it. In practice, I haven't been able to make it work. And the reason I think that I haven't been able to make it work is that if your habit ends in emotion, celebration, kind of big effusive gestures, it's quite difficult then to use that as a cue for another habit. Habit stacking it seems to me only really works if the end point of each habit is mild satisfaction. And so I found this element of the book, probably the most difficult thing to deal with. 

So yeah, I think habit stacking is problematic for me right now. What I would say is that this book is much more practical much more actionable than the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg’s book, that this book was a great debt to in terms of the groundwork. But if you read the Power of Habit, there isn't very much to implement. There isn't very much for the reader to do. It's not a kind of personal development book in that way. It's chock full of science and research and interviews and it's wonderful, but there isn't necessarily very much for me to do to improve my world. Atomic Habits really meets that need. It is practical, as I said, it's actionable, it is implementable and from that point of view, James Clear has really achieved what he set out to achieve. And I guess that my issues with his Four Laws of Habit Change and his Habit Stacking concept probably just means that I need to do more experimentation. 

But I really enjoyed the book. I think it delivers lots and lots for me to work on, lots for me to think about and I think it could do the same for you. So I would recommend that you go and seek it out. Even if you just read and do nothing else. It's really enjoyable. So yeah, go and find it.