Are you casting votes for the person you wish to become?
If you’re serious about creating good habits, or conversely breaking bad ones, Atomic Habits, the international bestseller by James Clear, is a good place to start. On the one hand, it is a step-by-step evidence-based guide to doing just that, and on the other, it paints a bigger picture about the need to consciously evaluate whether your actions and habits align with your core values.
The importance of questioning whether a particular behaviour casts a vote for or against the person you wish to become is one of Atomic Habit’s core themes. In this respect, it goes beyond a self-help habit manual to something more philosophically profound.
“Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity”, asserts Clear, who argues that our identities are undergoing constant microevolutions shaped by our habits.
Meaningful change, he proposes, comes about when we repeatedly cast votes in favour of our desired identities. Over time, these votes – our actions and habits – add up to provide evidence of who we really are.
To guide the process of purposeful identity change, Clear suggests following this two-step process:
- Decide the type of person you want to be.
- Prove it to yourself with small wins.
The small wins are the atomic habits referenced in the book’s title: slight changes in behaviour that build on each other and compound into significant results if we’re willing to stick to them. After all, our actions are a barometer of how much we really want something: “If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself”, writes Clear.
In the case of identity creation, it seems that actions really do speak louder than words. By continually repeating the activities that shape our identities, our brains adapt to become more efficient at those activities. Far from making life dull, these habits can actually create freedom by “solving the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible”, says Clear. The more we can automate, the more we can reduce our cognitive load and “create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.”
Success stories very rarely happen overnight, observes the author. They occur as a result of persistently taking action through thick and thin, even when motivation is low. And that’s one of the reasons why repetition is crucial. People who succeed at becoming who they wish to be – or who become excellent at a particular discipline – have mastered the art of showing up; of working through the periods of disappointment when it feels as if their efforts are in vain.
The backbone of Atomic Habits is a “four-step model of habits – cue, craving, response, and reward – and the four laws of behaviour change that evolve out of these steps.”
If we want to create a good habit – one that will benefit our long-term wellbeing – Clear suggests that we need to follow a simple set of rules:
> Make it Obvious
> Make it Attractive
> Make it Easy
> Make it Satisfying
In Atomic Habits, Clear takes each rule in turn and offers proven ways to apply it successfully. For example, he suggests designing our environments to make the best choice the easiest and most obvious thing to do, such as sprinkling visual cues throughout our surroundings to prompt our good habits. In short, he offers a series of eminently sensible ways to generally “reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.”
Speaking of which, if the above rules are designed to help create and maintain good habits, it follows that “we can invert these laws to learn how to break a bad habit”, says Clear.
Beyond his practical system for self-improvement, Clear offers insights into why our bad habits are so compelling, while the good ones are often hard to stick at. He explains that while we live in a delayed-return environment, where “you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff”, our brains are still essentially wired to prioritise and repeat actions that offer immediate rewards (regardless of their long-term outcomes).
“Our ancestors spent their days responding to grave threats, securing the next meal, and taking shelter from a storm. It made sense to place a high value on instant gratification”, he writes.
“The distant future was less of a concern. And after thousands of generations in an immediate-return environment, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones.”
If you consider habits such as smoking and overeating, for example, it’s clear that the consequences of such behaviours are often delayed, while the rewards are immediate. In the words of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat: “Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits.”
“Put another way,” says Clear, “the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.” In light of this, and with trademark sagacity, he has some sound advice: “The more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.”
And while there are many obstacles to maintaining good habits, the biggest threat to success, suggests Clear, is actually boredom – something that will resonate with anyone who has derailed their progress in the pursuit of novelty.
“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”, says Clear.
When put like this, it’s not hard to see why quick-win habits hold such power, and it’s this kind of clarity that elevates Atomic Habits when it comes to understanding what it actually takes to achieve meaningful change. No-nonsense realism, combined with a systems-first approach to making the best choices the ones that are the most obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying, make Atomic Habits a thought-provoking read for anyone who wants to build better habits. More than this, it is a book about freedom and the power to choose who we are by proving it to ourselves through our actions, day by day, habit by habit, one vote at a time.
- Atomic Habits is published by Penguin Random House.
- Further info on James Clear’s website
Lead picture credit: Sarah Swinton on Unsplash
