5 Lessons from Atomic Habits: How to Build Life Changing Habits

Reading is quickly becoming one of my favourite hobbies. Fiction, non-fiction, you name it. I’ll almost certainly be willing to pick it up and read it. It wasn’t always this way though. Like everything in our lives, repetitive behaviour comes from building habits.

Longer term readers of the blog will remember that last year I completed the 75 hard challenge (you can read my review here). For anyone familiar, one of the daily checklist items is 10 pages of non-fiction. Prior to the challenge, I’m not sure I’d ever heard of self-development books, let alone read one. Since then though, I can’t put them down. All because I built the habit.

Recently, I decided to read Atomic Habits by James Clear. An international best seller, it’s a book all about how you and I can learn to form life changing habits in the easiest way possible. It was a great read and I took a lot of lessons from it. Indeed, I’m currently building my own habit stacks right now (spoiler: this is lesson #4) and using James’ methods to change my approach to building good habits and breaking bad ones.

Enough rambling. Here’s 5 lessons about building habits.

Lesson #1: Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement

All good things in life are created by compound interest. Okay, maybe not *all* good things, but a lot. If you’ve ever dived into investing or seen the 1% rule shared on social media, you’ll likely have a vague idea of what compound interest is. In the event that you don’t, it is essentially the idea that as we grow, the value we generate from our actions snowballs. If you have money in a savings account that gives 10% interest on your £1 savings, you’d have a total of £1.10 when the interest is paid. You will have generated 10p for your action of saving £1. The next time the 10% interest is paid however, you’d gain 11p instead of 10p, taking you to £1.21. This essentially continues to grow and grow over time. This is compound interest in action.

The same logic can be applied outside of finances too. For example, habits. James argues that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. If we focus on improving by just 1% every single day, in a single year we will have improved by 37 times over when compared to the start of the year. Can you imagine doing that year after year? You’d be unstoppable.

Remember: small actions lead to big change.

Lesson #2: Habits are the systems that lead to results

Remember when you were at school and everyone would always ask “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and “what are your goals in life?”. Yeah, me too. It was fucking annoying, right? Well, what is interesting and what none of us noticed at the time was that no-one ever asked us “how do you intend to achieve those goals?”

To quote James directly from the book, “Goals are good for setting direction. Systems are best for making progress.” That’s where this lesson comes into play.

Maybe your goal is to read 12 books this year (like me), or perhaps you want to save up money for a holiday. The goals aren’t unrealistic but they’re intimidating enough to feel like they will require us to push ourselves. That’s the put of goals after all. But what most of us don’t think about it *how* am I going to achieve those goals, without it being a last minute rush. That’s because most of us don’t have the right systems in place.

Let’s say you created a habit to read 20 pages a day. In a year, you’d end up reading over 7000 pages, more than enough to read those 12 books. If you created a habit to save £200 a month, in just a few months, you’d have enough money to go on holiday with relative ease. The point is, when we create a system (habit) that enables us to effectively work towards our goals, half of the work is being done for us. 12 books is intimidating. 20 pages a day is not.

Remember: the destination is the direction we travel in, the journey makes us who we are.

Lesson #3: It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4

How many times have you said that you were going to form a new habit or break a bad one? Perhaps it was under the umbrella of a “new year’s resolution” or you simply said “I’m going to stop smoking”. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know where to start, myself included. Luckily for you and I, James has come to the rescue with a simple 4 step system that can help create a good habit or break a bad one.

For good habits:

1) Make it obvious

2) Make it attractive

3) Make it easy

4) Make it satisfying

For bad habits:

1) Make it invisible

2) Make it unattractive

3) Make it hard

4) Make it unsatisfying

Remember: these 4 laws of behaviour change.

Lesson #4: It’s all about momentum

“It takes 30 days to make a habit” is a saying we’ve all heard. It’s not entirely true but the base concept is solid. Effectively what this is saying is that momentum is key. The more we practice, the more natural it becomes.

Whenever you’re trying to create a new habit, momentum is the force that propels you. It doesn’t matter how much or how little effort you put in on a given day, the point is, simply doing *something* is enough to keep momentum.

Let’s say you want to become a runner. The easiest way to achieve that is to build a habit of going for a run at the same time every single day. It doesn’t matter whether you run for 5km or 1km, you are still training your mind to recognise that when it reaches 6pm, you go for a run.

It’s not just about singular habits either. In the book, James introduces a concept I had never heard about before that enables us to make the most of our momentum. It’s called “habit stacking”. Essentially it’s the practice of combining multiple habits together, using each habit as a trigger for the next. For example, “when I wake up in the morning, I will have a glass of water. When I’ve had a glass of water, I will do a morning workout.”

This is all based on the principal of momentum. Once we’ve started, it’s easy to keep going. If you’ve ever been cleaning the house and told yourself “well, I’ll just do the living room” and when you finish you think, “well, I may as well clean the kitchen now” — this is essentially the same thing. If you have a collection of related habits, stack them together and leverage momentum to propel you through.

Remember: regardless of big or small the action, it is the momentum that moves us forward.

Lesson #5: Don’t beat yourself up

We all fuck up. None of us are perfect. I’ve discussed it many times before but social media paints a picture of the perfect lifestyle. You scroll and scroll through endless content of people living the life you wish you had, but the reality is, they fuck up just like you.

That’s why this lesson is arguably the most important.

If you fail to fulfill your habit on a given day, don’t beat yourself up. We all have off days and we all miss sometimes. Maybe you don’t have the energy, maybe life gets in the way. Whatever the reason, don’t beat yourself up. The failures in our lives are what teach us the most about ourselves and it’s where our most important lessons come from. It’s all about how we bounce back.

James has a great quote in the book — “don’t miss twice”. Essentially what he’s saying it that it’s okay to fuck up and miss once in a while, but the next time the opportunity comes around to hit, don’t miss again. So next time you miss, don’t beat yourself up. Next time you get the opportunity, take your chance, even if it’s just taking a tiny amount of action to maintain your momentum.

Remember: we all fuck up, so don’t beat yourself up.