《原子習慣: 細微改變帶來巨大成就的實證法則》讀後感

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Introduction to Atomic Habits

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. This book focuses on developing atomic habits. Atomic habits are the smallest of habits, the smallest unit of doing a pushup a day. This book talks about why you need to build atomic habits and how to build good habits and break bad ones in your daily life. AuthorJames ClearBased on my own experience, I have spent many years reviewing various literatures and practices on developing habits, and I have written this book which is quite easy to read and understand, so it is no wonder that this book has been on the bestseller list for quite some time now.

Why do we need to develop atomic habits?

Before we talk about how to develop habits, we must first understand why it is important to develop atomic habits. People often talk about goals, which may be long-term, medium-term, or short-term, but no matter what method is used to set a goal, the goal is actually a fixed state that has not yet been achieved. The easiest way to achieve a goal is to set up a "system". What is a system? A system is a set of habits, and habits are things that we do on a regular basis. For example, if my goal is to lose weight, exercising every day and eating healthy food every day may be the big habits, and then we cut these habits into smaller ones, as small as doing a push-up, eating a kind of vegetable at every meal, and saying "no" every time we see a fried food, which are just a few different atomic habits.

When we develop many atomic habits, these many atomic habits piece together a system, we can easily move towards a goal. Another advantage of cultivating habits is that once something becomes a habit, the brain does not need to think about it but to perform it in a fixed way, so that our brain power and willpower can be reserved for more important things. Human willpower is limited, if you have to spend most of your willpower to think about what exercise to do every day, you may not have the strength to say no to the explosives.

Besides, if we focus on one goal only, we will lose the goal when it is achieved, and we will be "knocked back" easily. If you want to have a healthy body, it is better to develop an exercise habit than to run a marathon, because the short-term goal is gone. Learning to get a little bit of fulfillment every day in developing an exercise habit will make it easier to maintain health in the long run.

The first step in developing a habit: What kind of person do you want to be?

There are many things we want to do, but we have limited time to choose the most efficient habits to develop. While setting goals alone may not be sustainable over the long term, we still need at least one long-term goal as a basis for deciding which habits to develop.

As I said earlier, when we discuss goals, we usually imagine a fixed state that has not yet been achieved. But in fact, we usually want to achieve a "persona" and imagine some short and medium-term goals, such as how much weight to achieve. Ultimately, it's all about getting closer to the person we want to be. So it's actually more helpful to clearly visualize what you want to be, and the clearer the statement, the more useful it is.

First of all, it is important to have an understanding of "the kind of person I want to be," and once this is clear, it can be seen as a vision of oneself, and then the next plan is much simpler: what are the habits of a person like this? Slowly developing these habits will make it easier for us to "become that kind of person". For example, healthy people exercise, so we need to cultivate the habit of exercising. But healthy people also eat healthy, so we need to eat fruits and vegetables at every meal. Finally, the first step in developing atomic habits is to choose one of the smaller, easier-to-implement habits: Starting today, I'm going to do one pushup a day. With the gradual development of good habits, we will also make more progress and gradually become our ideal selves.

How to develop good habits?

Once you have identified a habit that you want to develop, how can you increase the success rate of habit development? Atomic Habits summarizes four rules for us:

Make it obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make it satisfying

Make tips easy to see

This is the simplest, but arguably the most important step. For things that you want to do frequently, it's best to design your environment so that you can be reminded of them at the right time and place to increase your chances of success. It is important to note that the actual environment in which the program is implemented varies greatly from person to person, so the design of the reminder must be carefully thought out by yourself.

Take my own exercise habit as an example, I have tried to use the sticky notes on my computer, the fixed time schedule on my calendar, and the reminder function on my watch to remind me to go exercise when my work is over. In the end, I found that the fixed-time reminders were more of a distraction than a reminder. The most useful thing was to put my daily exercise program on the first item on my to-do list, along with my other tasks, so that I would see it before the next task, and it would be a logical way to "remember" how important it is to me.

Make habits attractive

It is important to make it attractive to do this at all times. It's only when it's attractive that you have the motivation to do it, that you will want to do it automatically. I think it's very important to go through the thought process from "what kind of person do I want to be" to "I want to develop a habit of doing something" because if you think about it and you internalize "why do I want to develop this habit", then the habit will naturally become attractive.

One way that works for most people is to join a group that already has a similar habit, and immerse yourself in a culture where it's normal and great to do this. People are social creatures, and when you're surrounded by people with similar habits, it's only natural that you'll learn to emulate them. I often use social software to achieve this effect, for example, when I want to get in touch with a new sport, I will go to join some local FB groups engaged in this kind of sports and increase my own interaction with these groups, so that FB naturally show me more relevant articles, and also be subliminally influenced by the laziness of sliding on the phone.

Other common techniques, such as creating rewards for yourself and setting short-term goals, are actually ways to help yourself feel more attracted to your habit.

Make it easy to take action

The point of this principle is to make things simpler, to reduce the "resistance to jumping into this thing". Designing the environment and habits for your situation is the core concept, ideally into a situation where it takes less than two minutes from being prompted to execute.

Again with the exercise example, every week I plan my workouts according to my commute, time and location, and make sure I have all the supplies I need to do my workout right in front of me. As I am constantly on the move, I keep a set of workout clothes in my bag and in my study at home, and I always wear sneakers so that I can easily change into my workout clothes during breaks between jobs to minimize friction during transitions.

Make rewards satisfying

To make the habit more attractive, the reward should ideally be immediately visible. The point is to allow yourself to see the benefits and sense of accomplishment right away. Personally, if I know exactly why I'm developing a habit, every time I complete it, I automatically feel like I'm accomplishing a big goal, and that's a natural sense of accomplishment. In addition to this, there are also various ways to strengthen the habit, such as seeing the data on your phone while exercising, using habit tracking apps, and so on, all of which are ways to keep the process of cultivating a habit "traceable" and "increase the sense of satisfaction".

The book spends a lot of time explaining the theory of the above four principles and sharing various techniques. Similarly, we can also break bad habits in the opposite way. If you want to know more about it, we recommend you to buy this easy-to-read book. (Note: The English version of the Cheat Sheet can also be found atAuthor's websiteDownload.)

Conclusion: So, what kind of person do you want to be?

Going back to the original starting point of developing habits, what kind of people do we want to be? This is a big question, and everyone may have a different answer. Our time is limited, and so are the habits we can build step by step. My own thinking is that no matter what kind of habit we cultivate, or to be more theoretical, what kind of person we want to be, the ultimate goal is to develop ourselves in the direction of "maximizing systemic benefits", and everyone's view on benefits depends on their personal point of view. Some people may want to accomplish great things in their lifetime and pursue growth in the workplace. Some may value physical and mental balance and want to spend more time with their families. Some may feel that the first step must be financial freedom, so they want to develop a skill set that will help them make money.

The book also concludes with a reminder that we don't necessarily have to strive to be the same as, compete with, or be better than others, but rather, we can choose to develop habits that are the most self-satisfying, and that demonstrate our strengths through differentiation. Ask yourself these questions:

What's fun for me?
What's the one thing that makes me lose track of time?
What is it that makes me more rewarded than the average person?
What comes naturally to me?

So, what kind of person do I want to be?

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After reading "Atomic Habits: The Proven Law of Small Changes Leading to Big Results