Atomic Habits has sold more than 15 million copies and has been translated into over 50 languages. To say that it’s been a success is a gross understatement. I alone have probably bought the book 4 or 5 times. Why has it become so popular and why does it have the staying power it does? It comes down mostly to two things:

1. Immediately relevant and helpful subject matter

2. Minimal fluff

If you’ve ever read any of James Clear’s articles, you know that he doesn’t waste words. Atomic Habits isn’t one of those “it could have been a blog post” books. It is jam-packed with useful information. I’m going to outline what I found to be the biggest takeaways here.

We’ll start with a quote that I think summarizes the theme of the book:

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

As humans, we need to solve problems. All of our behavior is aimed at that end. At first, the behavior is deliberate, conscious, slow. But when repeated enough times, it becomes automatic to reduce cognitive load. Although behaviors always solve “problems”, we might hesitate to call them all good behaviors. Smoking, for instance, is a way to reduce stress, but I doubt many would call that a good behavior.

Habits are ultimately automatic solutions to recurring problems.

Habits Have Four Parts

Habits can be broken down into cue, craving, response, reward.

The cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving, and, ultimately, becomes associated with the cue.

You come home from work stressed and you see wine (cue). You crave the wine because it helps you reduce stress (craving). You pour a glass (response). You start drinking the wine and you feel less stressed (reward).

Each part of Clear’s Four Laws of Behavior Change addresses one aspect of a habit, with the idea being if you can address the habit at every stage you stand a better chance of changing it.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change

1. Make it obvious (cue)

2. Make it attractive (craving)

3. Make it easy (response)

4. Make it satisfying (reward)

Make it Obvious

Implementation Intentions

You can remove the ambiguity of when and where you will perform a habit using implementation intentions. They take the format of “when situation x arises, I will perform response Y”. The more specific you can get with implementation intentions the better.

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.

When you clearly lay out when and where you will perform a habit, it not only stays top of mind but it prevents the business of daily life from interfering. This is often why I tell clients to place their workouts on their calendar, even better if it’s a shared work calendar so people can’t schedule stuff when you’re at the gym.

Engineering Your Environment

Our environment is “the invisible hand that shapes behavior”. We don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about it, but it has a marked impact on who we are and what we do.

“disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control

Thinking about your routine and environment even a little bit ahead of time can make your life much easier. It reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s quote:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.

Doing frontend work to make the right choice obvious and the wrong choice invisible means you have to use significantly less willpower to perform the right behavior. Here are some examples:

• Placing healthy foods in easy to see and reach places in your home and fridge and leaving unhealthy foods out of your house or having a partner hide them.

• Placing something you need to remember by the front door. I have, on multiple occasions, placed things in my walking path so I couldn’t possibly miss them without tripping over them.

• Placing a book out where you will see it all the time if you want to read more.

Basically, if you want to use something as a trigger for a habit, it needs to be accessible and prominent.

Make It Attractive

To create a response, a habit must be attractive. Many companies have figured this out by exaggerating things that we find attractive to draw us in like moths to flame (supernormal stimuli). Porn, social media, and junk food are all examples of supernormal stimuli, where the attractive qualities of each have been dialed up to an 11. Porn is an exaggerated form of sex, social media is an exaggerated form of social interaction, and junk food is an exaggerated form of food.

Indulging in any or all of the above can make their normal counterparts less appealing by comparison, so we would be wise to exercise caution when consuming them.

Temptation Bundling

One of the best ways to make a habit more attractive is to combine something you need to do with something you want to do, aka temptation bundling. Here are some examples:

• Only watching Netflix or reading a fiction book when you’re on the treadmill

• Only playing video games while listening to a non-fiction audiobook

  • I used to do this all the time, and you’d be amazed how much you absorb this way. I think the game creates contextual anchoring for the information you’re hearing and those associations led to better retention for me. The game has to be somewhat mindless though.

• Watching your favorite shows while you meal prep

• Listening to your favorite music while you catch up on emails

These all illustrate Premack’s Principle, which states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable ones”. You can implement this by creating a list of behaviors you need to do, a list of behaviors you want to do, and match up ones on opposite lists that fit together.

The Close, The Many, and The Powerful

The Close

How hard is to stay sober when your friends are drinkers? How hard is it to make healthy choices when your partner doesn’t? If your friends started going to fitness classes, how likely are you to tag along?

Like it or not, the people we surround ourselves with matter just as much, if not more, than our physical environment. We don’t necessarily have a choice when it comes to family, but we do have autonomy when it comes to who we spend time with. If you want to change your life for the better:

Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.

The Many

In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini discusses the concept of social proof. We learn and perceive how to act from others. The greater the number of people that engage in a particular behavior, the more likely we are to deem that behavior to be correct and/or appealing.

This highlights the power of broader social norms that we adhere to in order to “belong”. From Atomic Habits:

Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

Going against the crowd is not easy, but it’s often exactly what’s necessary to change your life for the better. But rather than going against the grain, try to find the crowd that is performing the behaviors you want to perform.

The Powerful

How many times have you seen celebrities sell products or lifestyles built around those products? Advertisers have learned that humans seek status and prestige and they will do almost anything to get it. We think that with enough emulation—via habits, routines, possessions, etc.—we can recreate the lives of these celebrities for ourselves.

Successful people do have good habits. But most folks don’t understand the difference between correlation and causation, so many of them may misattribute their success to a behavior that has no bearing on it. If you learn about successful people in a more aggregated way, you will start to see the behaviors they have in common. Those are the ones you should be paying attention to.

Make It Easy

If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

Make the habit easy enough that you can do it over and over again. Don’t start with hour long workouts or trying to read 100 pages. Lower the threshold until you reach a point where it can be done consistently.

The 2-minute rule

If you struggle to complete a habit in its current form, shorten it to a version that takes less than 2 minutes. Read one page of a book, get to the gym and turn on the treadmill, go through two stretches, walk around the house. This strategy helps in two key ways:

1. It reduces the mental friction of starting

2. It builds the habit via increased frequency

You can build out from there, but that’s not the point. At this stage, we are “mastering the art of showing up.” A lot of folks think the 2-minute rule feels contrived, so they always have a feeling they should do more and it ruins the practice.

When I think about pushing beyond the “forced” 2 minutes, I’m reminded of this quote about academic writers from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

the urge to push onward beyond that point “includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time” for work. Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

The same is true of habits. We don’t have faith in our future selves, so we do as much as possible. We don’t realize that the pressure to do more that we’ve now created is exactly what prevents us from future action.

Reducing Friction

Every habit has points of friction. Let’s use the example of reading. If you want to read more, you need to make the action as easy as possible. Here are some ways I have done that for my reading habit:

1. I use a kindle because holding relatively heavy books for long periods is uncomfortable.

2. The kindle goes everywhere with me, and I’ve bought a case so I don’t feel bad about jamming it in my backpack or travel bags.

3. The book is always downloaded so I can start reading it immediately wherever I am, and the kindle is always charged.

4. I have an echo device in my living room that I use to play brown noise while I’m reading. The noise dilutes any distracting environmental sounds that disrupt my concentration.

5. A lot of folks may see this as “cheating”, but I often download the audible audiobooks at a reduced price as well. I use the whispersync feature to pick up where I left off while walking or running on the treadmill.

For any habit you’d like to improve, do this process of finding areas of friction and removing (or reducing) them. Do this enough times and you will make the habit significantly easier to accomplish.

If you want to decrease a bad habit, do the opposite of this. Make the habit as inconvenient as possible.

Make It Satisfying

For a habit to be repeatable, it must be satisfying. Some part of the action must make you feel good in some way, and the more immediate that feeling, the more likely we are to associate it with the habit.

Today, we are a delayed gratification society. Many of us have our immediate needs covered, so we can think more into the future than our ancestors. But our biology is not built for that. The long-term satisfaction is not always enough; we need to find short-term rewards or satisfaction to cement behaviors that have long-term payoffs.

Here are some examples of rewards you can employ to increase the frequency of a behavior:

• Every time you get a workout in, put $10 away for a special gift for yourself.

• I use credit card reward points to buy books. It’s my way of rewarding myself for being financially responsible.

• Every time you finish a book, treat yourself to a nice meal out.

The reward should not act in opposition to the spirit of the goal (e.g. if you’re trying to save money, the reward should not be to spend money).

Other Conceptual Takeaways

Systems vs Goals

I first encountered this principle in Scott Adams book How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big, but Clear does a great job expanding it and explaining why systems thinking is superior to goal thinking.

Goals are great for giving you a direction, but they are too far removed from day to day habits and processes to be useful for behavior change. Running a 5-minute mile is a goal, but things like your running program, diet, sleep, stress management are part of the system that actually gets you to that goal.

When you’re only focused on goals, you suspend rewards until some arbitrary moment in the future when the goal is reached. But then you have to set a new goal and have to wait again through an uncertain timeline. With systems thinking, every time you run and improve your process, you’re “succeeding”.

The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

This concept hits the core of how we need to think about habit change. It’s about improving in some aspect of your system by 1% and doing that over and over again. Each of these improvements compound to create larger, lasting change.

Summary

Big long-term changes come from small daily improvements in our habits. Improving those habits means thinking about each aspect of the habit—cue, craving, response, reward—and finding ways to improve them.

There is no finish line. There is no permanent solution. Whenever you’re looking to improve, you can rotate through the Four Laws of Behavior Change until you find the next bottleneck. Make it obvious. Make it attractive. Make it easy. Make it satisfying. Round and round. Always looking for the next way to get 1 percent better.

James Clear Atomic Habits

Thank you for reading. If you have anything to add, drop a comment!