“Atomic Habits” by James Clear

I once heard a story about a man who uses a wheelchair. When asked if it was difficult being confined, he responded, “I’m not confined to my wheelchair-I am liberated by it. If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my house.” This shift in perspective completely transformed how he lived each day.

– James Clear in “Atomic Habits”, Chapter 10: How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

This book is a couple years old and it seems like half the population has read it by now. For good reason. I will skip the generic review and just include a couple quotes that I liked mostly from this chapter. If you click any of the James Clear links you’ll get to his blog and more information about the book.

The excerpt that started this post was from a discussion about “reframing” or “making a slight mind-set shift.”

Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.

Many of my coworkers (many have become close friends) got laid of recently as part of the big tech layoff fad. So that line there stuck out for me. The parts of my job that I enjoy less, lately I’ve been thinking of them as a blessing rather than a curse. It looks like there is a “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)” “power ballad” but I am unfamiliar. I think of Joni Mitchell in Big Yellow Taxi:

Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.

– James Clear, “Atomic Habits”

I thought that was an interesting “reframing” of the way we think about the decisions we make and the actions we take. In reference to habits, James was pointing out that we are predicting how an action is going to make us feel and the prediction can help form (or break) a habit.

“Our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.”

– James Clear, “Atomic Habits”

I picked out that line because it very much reminded me of a favorite quote:

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

– Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

This is also a Stoic theme and I’m sure I could find more similar quotes from Marcus Aurelius alone:

If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them.

If any external thing causes you distress, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it.

– Marcus Aurelius

I’m only about halfway through Atomic Habits, I’m sure I’ll write another post, but it feels a little strange to do so, as the book is more or less a refined compilation of blog posts by the author.

A quick summary: the book is concise and informative and I’m not surprised by it’s popularity and I imagine it’s helped many readers improve their habits and their lives.