A Brief Book Review of Atomic Habits by James Clear
Everyone has guilty pleasures. I’ll admit that occasionally one of mine is the pop psychology genre. Every time I pick up one of these books it’s with a pound of eagerness and an ounce of anticipatory regret. You leave feeling motivated to tackle anything but not without consuming a stale diet of if-they-can-do-it-you-can-too success stories of celebrity athletes, outworn lessons on how the human brain was made for the Serengenti not the modern world, watered down ideas borrowed from Kahneman and Tversky, and so forth and so forth. But just as you don’t judge a bird for how it swims or a fish for how it flies, you gotta review a book for how it fits in with its genre. And within its genre I really like “Atomic Habits”. James Clear is long on tangible, practical advice and writes with a clean and breezy writing style that hits his points home without feeling too hokey or new-agey. I thought this book significantly better and more useful than one of the most popular in the field, “The Power of Habit.” Key concepts, such as “systems over goals”, “the two-minute rule”, “action over motion”, “temptation bundling”, “intentional friction”, “favorable environments”, “falling in love with boredom”, “reflection and review”, “the close, the many, and the powerful”, aren’t entirely new but are explained in novel and helpful ways. A very quick read, I found myself nodding along to each page like an enthusiastic audience member listening to a pretty good cypher. Maybe it’s the beat of the genre and not the lyrics of the author-MC that keep me coming back to this literary habit; but that’s a topic for another day.