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.
Summary of Atomic Habits
111–120 of 128 posts
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#112I 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.
Thanks. Nice to hear there’s interest. Unfortunately, it’s a native iOS app. Android support is out of scope for me.
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's consider an axis across books that are terse (maybe not even a book but an article, summary or list) and books that are more verbose (stories, examples, exercises). Allow a second axis for quality, and only consider the best. If you think a book is padded or leaves out important details, then ignore it for our comparison. Shorter and longer books are no better or worse (in this comparison, we removed that compo…
> Shorter and longer books are no better or worse (in this comparison, we removed that component above). This is kind of begging the question because between the original setup and this statement, we're assuming the two axes are orthogonal whereas I'd wager they're not.
I get what you mean, but I think there’s a slight difference. I kinda skipped ahead here, but you can phrase it as more of a question.
If we create an axis, and then say “let’s just only focus on the really good ones” is there still any spread on the axis? If not, that axis is a subset of “good ones”. If there is, then we have some other axis to think about.
Extreme example, but if we’re talking about creatine (a nutritional supplement) and we considered the axis of purity and then only the good ones, there wouldn’t be a large range. At least to me, I don’t think there’s any creatine that’s both super high quality and less than 99% purity.
Not the case for books. I can think of great short ones and long ones. And the point of me constraining things this way is to avoid the “a book isn’t good if it’s too long” or “I once read a book that was long and bad” which just isn’t super useful.
Don’t need to keep things isolated though! I’d certainly rather have the average book be half as long versus twice as long. So there’s a trend there, at least for me.
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#114I'm sorry, but at 7500 words, this is more of a novella than a summary. The summary at the end of the book is shorter than this blog post and contains the big takeaways. I love this book as much as the other person does, but there are much better reads to go deeper into some of the inspiration: https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1059504529111158784 Additionally the major influences on the book: https://twitter.com…
7500 might barely be considered a novelette. But if you're going to categorize non-fiction in fiction terms, the most comfortable length category is short story, which usually goes up to 10k.
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#115I 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…
> Optionally, you can save your habits to a shared location or cloud
How do you do this bit? Is it documented anywhere? (or maybe I'm missing the obvious)
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#116I 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…
> Optionally, you can save your habits to a shared location or cloud How do you do this bit? Is it documented anywhere? (or maybe I'm missing the obvious)
Try import in-place: https://xenodium.com/flat-habits-v101-org-import-menu
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#117I'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…
The E-Myth (Revisited?) is a book that suffers badly from having page after page of sentimental drivel, padding it out significantly.
The core message is quite insightful and worth knowing, but the author doesn’t respect the readers time.
Edit: some book notes from Derek Sivers-
https://sive.rs/book/EMythRevisited
It’s like a modern open world video game in book form.
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#118I 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 too would love an android app.
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different people learn differently, maybe? The great truths in life boil down to a few sentences (ex: "just do it"). If someone writes a book about that truth, are they wasting your time? Maybe. But there are other people who need to hear the story to learn from that grain of truth. I've definitely read books that were way too long and full of filler content. But I've also scrolled through tweet-sized brilliant insig…
If you've scrolled through tweet-sized brilliant insights and forgot them the next minute then maybe they weren't that brilliant to begin with? Or maybe you have a habit of mindlessly scrolling which you need to get out of. In any case, I find it hard to believe that people would prefer to read 200 pages which could be condensed down to a single sentence.
I think it comes down to individual learning style. Here [1] is James Clear tweeting a 3-sentence summary of his book. These ideas totally impacted the way I operate and helped me achieve a lot more than I would have on my own. But I needed to read the book to implement these tactics. If I only read the tweet, I don't think it would have had any long-term impact on me.
I agree that being wordy can be a waste of time! And I agree that many business books blow up small ideas into large books. I also think that sometimes expanding on an impactful insight can help you teach it better.
[1] https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1477686252333903877
Re: Summary of Atomic Habits
#120I 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 too would love an android app.
I've tried a few and this is my favorite habit tracker app on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.isoron.uha...
Ad-free and FOSS: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits