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Summary of Atomic Habits

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Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#91

Post by MrDresden »

helmholtz wrote: post #90
MrDresden wrote: post #86

I started reading Atomic Habits last october, and couldn't get much further than chapter three. There just wasn't much there to grab a hold of me. Nothing new I had not heard in multiple poscasts or read in articles elsewhere. Not saying the book is bad, just not so phenomenal when the ideas aren't new to you.

In fact, the Rich Roll podcast episode with James Clear is the one I'd recommend for all. Roll is a great listener and interviewer, and together they did a much better job than the book alone in focusing on the forging-an-identity part of habit formation. Highly recommended, it's something like two hours long.

Thank you for the recommendation, will check it out

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#92

Post by maaaaattttt »

morsch wrote: post #65
westcort wrote: post #41

I read this book and I think this sums it up in a Tweet: The laws are: Make it obvious, Make it attractive, Make it easy, Make it satisfying; Each law maps to one of the four steps of habit formation: Make it obvious → Cue Make it attractive → Craving Make it easy → Response Make it satisfying → Reward; Make it Obvious To effectively build a new habit, make the cue for that habit blatantly obvious

For example? Leave fresh fruit on the table to encourage (cue) eating an apple a day?

In the book he takes almost this example. Once a week (after doing grocery shopping for example) prepare some fruits: peel and cut them if applicable and place them in containers in your fridge. Then, when times comes to have a snack it's really easy to eat fruit vs. something else. That would be the "make it easy" rule. You could combine it with the inverse of that same rule rule for junk food: "make it hard" and don't buy junk food during grocery shopping.

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#93

Post by emerongi »

xenodium wrote: post #89

I loved reading Atomic Habits during the first lockdown. I was excited to try out its actionables, specially tracking to keep me honest. I tried a bunch of iOS apps, but wanted no friction, no tracking, no cloud, no social, etc. so eventually built https://flathabits.com . Also wanted to own my habit data (as plain text), so I made sure Flat Habits stored its data locally as an org file. I'm an Emacs nutter and can s…

Whoa, this is the app I've been looking for. Thank you so much. Every app under the sun now requires an account, has a friends list and stores data remotely.

Please let me pay you for this app.

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#94

Post by maaaaattttt »

In my opinion, the best take away from the book was the "atomic" part. Meaning, start building your habits with something very small, like one push-up if you want to get into the habit of working out. It's only one example and the rest of the book really helps building the habits into bigger ones and lasting ones which is also important. But this bit was the real eye opener to me.

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#95

Post by amd64 »

xenodium wrote: post #89

I loved reading Atomic Habits during the first lockdown. I was excited to try out its actionables, specially tracking to keep me honest. I tried a bunch of iOS apps, but wanted no friction, no tracking, no cloud, no social, etc. so eventually built https://flathabits.com . Also wanted to own my habit data (as plain text), so I made sure Flat Habits stored its data locally as an org file. I'm an Emacs nutter and can s…

I would love to use this. Android please :(

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#97

Post by apricot13 »

santa_boy wrote: post #24

I've been having major issues reading books (mainly non-fiction and strategy and personal development oriented) due to what I feel to be "filler content" as mentioned in the thread above. I'd be very interested in authors (I mean book authors) to provide direction on the mindset and shortcomings of the summary culture (e.g. Blinkist et-al) Surely, every 10th article on my FB feed is about reading books and there is p…

I have the same feelings as you a lot of these books are glorified blog posts - my trick to dealing with them is to treat them as such. I read on kindle so for books like this I read on my ipad and check the 'continuous scrolling' option. Eliminating the 'book' aspect of them makes you feel less guilty for skipping whole paragraphs when they're really just filler!

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#98

Post by rhubarbcustard »

Pleased to see this pop up here today as I'd just finished the book yesterday.

I've been putting off buying it for a long time as I'd assumed it was another great blog turned into a book that contained 90% filler.

As someone else said below, there's a small amount of filler in here, but it feels like the right amount and allows you to take the time to absorb the content more fully.

I honestly feel like this book has fundamentally changed the way I view work, side projwects and tasks in general. I've procrastinated on a number of things as they felt like huge efforts that were not achievable - reading Mr Clear makes me realise that I can achieve those by not focusing on the end goal but getting into a habit, a system, and chipping away at it over time.

You could say the book's content is obvious stuff, but it's certainly opened my eyes and changed my thinking.

Highly recommend.

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#99

Post by _dain_ »

xenodium wrote: post #89

I loved reading Atomic Habits during the first lockdown. I was excited to try out its actionables, specially tracking to keep me honest. I tried a bunch of iOS apps, but wanted no friction, no tracking, no cloud, no social, etc. so eventually built https://flathabits.com . Also wanted to own my habit data (as plain text), so I made sure Flat Habits stored its data locally as an org file. I'm an Emacs nutter and can s…

Is there an Android version of this? Looks really cool.

Re: Summary of Atomic Habits

#100

Post by 100011_100001 »

seanhunter wrote: post #52
azemetre wrote: post #2

Somewhat related but I find many nonfiction books could easily be condensed down an immense amount (talking 20 to 50% here). I don't know if it's me getting older or simply not wanting to put up with filler content anymore. A book that does this terribly is the "The Checklist Manifesto." ~250 pages of filler when the original article was 20 pages, the exact same information but distilled down to its essence: https://…

My favourite example of this is "Essentialism", which has so much filler that really (if fully following its own philosophy) could easily have been less than 5 pages in total.

All self-help books can be condensed to a few pages. 5 pages is probably on the high end.

I am an avid notetaker and most books I have read, I can summarize in less than a page, sometimes half a page. I do try to condense though, so 3 pages is probably realistic.

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