Roy Tang

Hopefully managing to read at least one book at month this year, kicking it off with Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I forget where I heard of this book, but it’s highly recommended and an Amazon best-seller. I followed the author on Twitter for a while before deciding to buy the book. I read it sporadically through the month. It’s not very long - less than 300 pages on the Kindle app.

The book is fairly good and insightful, although I’m not sure if there are any ideas I haven’t encountered elsewhere (especially if you read a lot of self-improvement stuff). Most of the concepts are easy to arrive at if you sat down to spend like thirty minutes thinking about (“Oh, I should make my good habits easier to do!” seems kind of obvious in hindsight).

But the book shines in tying these ideas together thematically into what the author describes as “four laws of behavior change.” I don’t think I’m taking anything away from the book by listing the four laws here as: make it obvious/make it attractive/make it easy/make it satisfying. As is typical with this kind of book, the theme is further supported by citing research, anecdotes, success stories, quotes, tips, and such. While the material in question doesn’t feel entirely revolutionary, the presentation is very good and makes it a worthwhile read.

I’ve had my own share of trouble building new habits in the past of course. I didn’t have a specific set of good habits to learn/bad habits to unlearn when I started reading, but the book’s insights did give me some ideas of how I could restructure some of my daily habits to make things easier for me. And I thought of some new habits during the course of reading and have been keeping them up for a week or so. So, the book has already provided some value for me personally. I hope I can keep it up.