Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

Are you looking for remarkable results in your productivity? Then reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way To Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones will give you a simple guide on how making good daily habits can lead to success. Here at StudyStream, we are providing you with a short summary of the book and revealing the best tips and tricks for you to change your habits and change your life.

James Clear said, “If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line.” He speaks about the power of daily habits and how it is the little choices that we make that contribute to our success.

The four-step pattern

James Clear believes that it is the environment that shapes human behavior. That’s why how you surround yourself is the first step to performing any habit. Firstly, in the four-step pattern, you have a cue, a piece of information that suggests there is a reward. Then, craving, which is the motivation to change something to get the reward. The response, the thought or action you need to take to get to the reward. Finally, you have the reward itself, the satisfying feeling you get from the change, with the lesson on whether to do it again or not. Extending from the four-step pattern, Clear has four laws of behavior change that form habits that must be easy, obvious, attractive, and satisfying. You can apply these to all good habits.

Track your habits

Using a habit tracker is a fun and easy way to make sure you stick to your new behaviors. You can track your habits to keep yourself accountable and it is an easy method that can be a journal, app, or calendar. There is even the Seinfield productivity hack that you could try. The comedian Jerry Seinfield would mark his calendar with a big ‘X’ every time he came up with a joke, it’s a simple way to keep your goals and help you build a healthy habit. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement, so if you want success, you should start today and then mark it on your calendar.

The Goldilocks Rule

It is normal to lose motivation when we are learning a new skill or trying to build a habit. But the main reason we fail is not that the task is too easy or too hard, it’s because we are bored with it. We need to be challenged, that’s when The Goldilocks Rule comes into play. The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. James Clear states that “The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.”

To learn more from James Clear’s methods, read Atomic Habits in its entirety to learn how to build a system for getting 1% better every day, break your bad habits and create good ones, overcome a lack of motivation and willpower, make tiny changes that deliver big results and know how to put these ideas into practice in real life.