Today Marshmallow reviews Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear, published originally in 2018.
Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you like books about self-improvement and starting small, then this is the book for you!
Marshmallow’s Summary (without Spoilers): The book starts off by describing Clear’s own experiences with habit building. As a star baseball player, getting injured as a teenager was devastating for the author. But through methodical, mindful cultivation of healthy habits, he managed to get back on a new path that led him to where he is today. Now an expert in life-style advising and habit-building, he promises this book is a compilation of different advice he’s found from various sources all with a common core: they are changes you can make from Day 1 that will create long term fulfillment.
Throughout the book, Clear emphasizes the significance of small change creating larger differences in life. He rejects the notion that you must make drastic improvements to see any change in your quality of life. Rather, he argues that human behavior follows simple patterns that respond to stimuli, both positive and negative. He teaches that controlling stimuli is a more effective, easier way to control your behavior than simply depending on will-power alone. After all, as he points to a study of people with high levels of self-restraint, they are not mentally stronger — they expose themselves to temptation less. Along this general premise, he offers four main ways of making and instituting new atomic habits in your life.
In the long run, Clear promises, making a minute good choice everyday will exponentially improve your life. In a concisely simple yet detailed manner, Clear explains a new plan for change, one that relies on using human psychology to your advantage rather than fighting against it.
Marshmallow’s Review: I found Atomic Habits to be a very useful book. I’ve wanted to institute certain habits (daily yoga and journaling and meditation) in my life for a while now but never really actually got around to doing it. Reading this book not only reminded me of the atomic habits I wanted to add, it taught me how to do so. Clear’s advice about habit grouping (placing positive habits one after another to make them routine) and redesigning your workspace for success were particularly helpful to me. Overall, even though I haven’t yet utilized all of his tips, reading them has given me a better understanding of how human and bunny psychology might influence my everyday behavior which has made me more conscientious of my choices. This alone is a reason to read this book because everyone can always benefit from mindfulness!
I really liked Clear’s writing style as well. He doesn’t add embellishments which keeps this a very clean, organized book that serves its primary purpose: being an informative instruction manual for atomic habit changes. The author seems to be a modest guy from his writing voice, which makes the book feel more honest and less self-glorifying than some other self-help books. I especially liked how the book has very comprehensible graphs and diagrams that you can look up online afterwards as well. There are several relevant tools on the book website that add on to the book content too which I thought was cool.
All in all, I found Atomic Habits to be a very good self-improvement book, one that cuts out the fluff and tells you what you want to know off the bat.
Marshmallow’s Rating: 100%.
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