Atomic Habits

As the name suggests, Atomic Habits is about building habits via steady incremental steps. I finished read this book in 2025 but had listened to the audiobook a few years ago.

The principle of atomic habits is simple: commit to the smallest change possible but commit to do it every day. An extreme example is to instead of going for a 30 minute run every day, commit to just putting your shoes on.

I shared this chart from the book on Threads and asked what's wrong with it. It went "viral" for some reason (almost 1M views).

Interesting Ideas

Microhabits. One argument against doing the smallest change possible to initiate a habit is that your brain won’t fall for the trick since it knows your ultimate goal. If that’s the case, then switch to doing the smallest change and no more. Force yourself to stop even if you’re willing to continue.

Habits and Identity. One of the most interesting idea I got from the book is to make the habit part of our identity.

I had heard of this theory before in a different context. An experiment which divided students into two groups, one were praised for their intelligence, the other for their hard work. I don’t recall the details, but the group labeled hard-working did better in the long run. But the idea I found interesting is that you end up becoming what people expect from you, especially when you are little and don’t have a solid identity formed.

There’s also the idea what humans try to preserve inner cohesion, so if you think you are something, you are likely to try to act in a way consistent with that. I think that’s why people can believe things despite counter evidence and fall prey to confirmation biases.

This is useful for keeping habits you already have, but for building new ones, the author suggests aiming for changing your identity rather than a specific goal:

Habits are not about achieving something but becoming someone

Specificity. The idea is to be very specific when planning our habits.

Many people think they like motivation when what they really like is clarity

A suggested template is:

I will [behavior] at [time] in [location]

This reminds me of the SMART acronym used for project planning: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Cues. These are external factors that might trigger unconcious associations. One example is the environment. The author suggests leveraging the environment to change habits:

Motivation is overrated; Environment matters more

Examples include not using the same place for studying and playing video-game because the environment is a cue to your brain. Another particularly useful to me is to use two phones: one that has social media and games, another that has note taking, learning apps. I keep the former away from me.

Another way to tweak the environment is to choose the people we hang out with. Our social species tend to follow the majority (reminds me of “Social Proof” in The Art of Thinking Clearly).

Another way to leverage cues to our favor is to create routines that bundle neutral/positive habits with the ones we wish to start. One example from the book that I happen to also use is to put earmuffs on before reading.

Auto-pilot. Automate away chores, commit to something in the future that makes it hard for you to back out. I’ve used this technique with writing blog posts. I publicly commit to writing a blog post a month on average.

Nice quote by Alfred North Whitehead:

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

Goldilocks Rule. Is the idea we find joy in doing things of the right level of difficulty.

Nice quote by Niccolò Machiavelli:

Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.

Quote from the author:

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

Connections

In Chapter 18, section How to find a game where the odds are in your favor, the book mentions the explore exploit trade-off, which I first learned in the book Algorithms to Live By.