Can Little Changes Make Big Habits?

New Year’s resolutions, we all either love them or hate them. The turning of a new year often inspires us to implement some radical form of change. This could be anything from working out weekly to reading a new book every month. 

The goals we set are all over the place, often both unrealistic and unreachable. However, James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, has something to say about this. Clear is a highly accomplished businessman and speaker. He has been featured in organizations including the New York Times, Time, Entrepreneur, and CBS This Morning. Based off of the principles he teaches in this book, Clear has founded the Habits Academy, a leadership training organization. 

He speaks often at Fortune 500 companies, and his strategies are used by several teams in the NBA, NFL, and MLB. His book, published by Penguin Randomhouse, makes a radical claim. Improving your habits by 1% every day is vastly more useful than setting goals at all! 

The message is simple. The easiest and most effective way to create good habits is to set a small goal to begin with. If you are able to stick with and improve this goal by 1% every day, you will start to see marked habitual differences. The purpose of Atomic Habits is to show you how to create and sustain good habits and kill off bad ones. Clear breaks this down into several specific examples as he moves through each chapter. 

In this book, you will learn how to create a system for improving by 1% every day. From there, the book will cover breaking bad habits, common mistakes made when changing habits, overcoming lack of motivation or willpower, developing an identity, creating new habits, creating a 1% change, getting back into a habit after losing it and application to real life. Atomic Habits is an amazing book about powerful, basic changes we can make in our own lives. The book is both affordable and readable and is great for any student looking for easy and clear insight into self-improvement.

Atomic Habits is one of the best self-improvement books I have ever read. The strategies Clear introduces are simple, effective, and easily implemented. I have been following his 1% change guideline for only one month, and I have already witnessed an incredible difference. 

The sections on motivation and willpower. Instead of just forcing ourselves to do things, Clear claims that restructuring our environments is the better thing to do. Changing our environment in small ways alters our entire perception. Doing 10 pushups every day will most likely be more effective than setting unachievable goals. If you want to read a book every month, place the book on your pillow every night. I guarantee you’ll read it, more often than not. After reading Atomic Habits, I hope your New Year’s resolutions will not be quite so daunting.