500 Words a Week - My Highlights from Atomic Habits

The following below are my highlights and favourite pieces from “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.

Showing Up

“You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad days. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you”.

“Stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur”.

Change the Game

“When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combing your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out”.

“A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favours their strengths and avoids their weaknesses”.

Review and Reflection

“Reflection and review enables the long term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement”

1, What went well this year?

2, What didn’t go so well this year?

3, What did I learn?

The price of good and bad habits

“The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future”.

“The more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals”.

Doom scrolling Instagram, binge watching Netflix, eating excessive junk food.

Walk slowly, but never backward.

“It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan”.

“We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action”.

We supplement so many things for doing the thing. We plan about it, we talk about it, what dream about it, but we never actually do anything about it.

Where cravings come from

“At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status”.

It’s by identifying where the cravings are coming from, we can tackle them better. For instance, after reading this, for me, binge watching Netflix stems from attempting to relieve anxiety. Now that I know this, I can try to do something about that mindset when all I want to do is watch reruns of Friends.

Clarity > Motivation

“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”.

Survivorship Bias

“If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers”.

It’s not the goals that differentiates, it’s what the person does to achieve them that differentiates. It’s the systems they put in place toward goals that differentiates.

A final question

“But the true question is: Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?”