Atomic Habits
James Clear, 2018
A practical guide to how tiny daily choices compound, and how to design the systems that make good habits automatic. Plain, hopeful and curious, it moves in short practical steps, with a steady newsletter voice and everyday examples.
Feels like hope and curiosity. About society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want practical ways to shape daily routines and enjoy clear, example-led explanations. Still, it is a self-development guide drawn from short newsletter posts, so you may find less sustained psychological depth than you would in a longer study.
Why read it
It offers a clear way to think about small daily choices and the systems around them, without asking you to overhaul everything at once.
A page from the book
A few degrees at takeoff, a different city entirely.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart. James Clear.James Clear began publishing a weekly newsletter on habits in 2012; the book grew out of those short, practical posts.
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Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Atomic Habits for me?
- You may like it if you want practical ways to shape daily routines and enjoy clear, example-led explanations. Still, it is a self-development guide drawn from short newsletter posts, so you may find less sustained psychological depth than you would in a longer study.
- What is Atomic Habits like?
- Plain, hopeful and curious, it moves in short practical steps, with a steady newsletter voice and everyday examples. Feels like hope and curiosity. About society.
- What should I read after Atomic Habits?
- If you liked Atomic Habits, try Good to Great (Jim Collins), Start with Why (Simon Sinek) and Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell).
A taste of the feed
What if the destination matters less than who is sitting beside you?
For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
Good to Great · Jim Collins
Motivation cannot be installed after hiring; it has to walk in.
Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.
Start with Why · Simon Sinek
Being brilliant is not the same as being in the right room.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?
Outliers · Malcolm Gladwell
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