“Atomic Habits came highly recommended from many people I know and from the Twitter verse. Reading the book, though, was a bit of a mixed experience.
I really like the accessible, informal tone of the book. It felt like a long blog post written by a friend rather than reading a ~250-page long book. There isn’t a lot of “scholarly” pretension anywhere in the book, though James undoubtedly knows what he is talking about very deeply from an academic perspective too.
He builds out a nice 4 point framework for building habits and explains some good practices built around behavioural trigger that can help us reshape our lives.
The most powerful takeaways for me were:
Think in terms of processes and journeys rather than fixed, boolean goals.
Tiny changes add up over time.
Neither of these are new ideas by any means – the agile process is essentially the former and compound interest the latter – but somehow neither is very intuitive to us and they are where I think most people fail over the long term. James reiterates these points many, many times in the book, and cautions against the big-bang success narratives riddled with survivorship bias.”