Omar Usman – Atomic Habits James Clear 3 Things I Learned
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book atomic habits by James
Clear.
This book is probably my favorite book on
the topic of habits or behavior change or
willpower or however you wanna slice that topic.
And I was actually hesitant to read this
book just because I've gone through so many
of those other ones and they haven't released
like they haven't resonated quite as well.
But this one for me really was the
best of that on that subject.
And what atomic habits is about is the
idea
that the smallest
action you can do daily
compounds
in its results. If you make it easy
to do and do it consistently.
Now that's a fairly simple concept to understand.
And we we look back and we it's
easy to look back and say like, okay,
well
if I had spent 5 minutes or 10
minutes or 15 minutes every day for the
last 3 years of the last 5 years
trying to
learn this second language or
exercising or whatever habit that we want to
work on. If I just put in 10
minutes a day for the last 3 years,
I know exactly
how far ahead I would have gotten by
now.
But it's a lot more difficult to look
ahead because we're starting at 0 and we
say, well, it's gonna take so long to
see results.
But
in order for change to be sustainable, in
order for it to have that impact, we
have to start small and then let those
results compound. And that's where you really start
to see a lot of gains.
And the idea of habits
or tiny habits even is not a new
one.
But this book gets into the psychology and
the systems needed for those habits.
And what the author highlights are really two
crucial components to any type of behavior change.
1,
dealing with your internal emotions,
and then 2,
the influence of external stimuli. And if you're
able to keep both of those in the
back of your mind,
then this book helps you to tackle both
of those to create sustainable habits.
The first lesson I learned from this book
is the idea of action
and not motion. And the 2 are very
different things.
Motion
is a sophisticated
form of procrastination.
It's planning, it's preparing, it's optimizing,
it's figuring out the best way of doing
something, but action is much more important.
If you wanna think of it this way,
take an analogy of cooking
motion
is watching a cooking show on Netflix or
Youtube
and learning how it's done and the techniques
and what ingredients are used and all of
those things. But action is actually attempting to
make the dish.
And
when we look forward, we say, well, if
I'm gonna dedicate
time to
learning something or changing something,
we want to optimize it so we don't
waste effort.
But again, when we look back, we know
that even an unoptimized
effort would have been useful. So let's say
that my habit change, I wanna walk
10,000 steps every day.
Well, that might be difficult, but if I
set an atomic habit where the smallest version,
let's say it's 500 steps or a 1000
steps,
something that's easily attainable,
that's helpful.
And looking back, if I had done a
1000 steps a day,
that was still better maybe than,
you know,
now being in a pandemic, sitting at home,
getting no steps in essentially, right? And so
maybe having done a 1000 or 2000 steps
a day for the past 2 years may
have improved my health.
And so looking forward, we have to do
the same thing as just be in action.
It be in
a mode of action,
Even if it's not optimized, even if it's
inefficient,
just the habit of actually doing something is
going to be helpful.
And one example that comes to mind is
if you've ever seen like a balanced scale,
Right? And then in some countries, they would
sell rice like this where they put a
a weight, like a kilogram or 2 kilogram
weight on one side of the balanced scale,
and then on the other side, they're pouring
in grains of rice. Now for a long
time,
the the scale doesn't move.
But eventually,
there reaches a point where
one grain of rice tips the scale.
And then every subsequent
grain of rice
weighs it down more and more and more
lifting the weight up into the air. So
for that first stretch,
you don't see any change.
The scale stays exactly the same. But there
is a tipping point where all of a
sudden,
it tips over and you start seeing results.
And that's
the image that we should have in mind
when it comes to habit changes.
Don't expect to see the results for a
while, but then when they come, they're going
to be significant.
But you have to stay focused
on the idea of frequency.
And that action
should be the simplest form of any possible
action. Amber, one piece of advice I heard
and I think I may have shared in
another video,
but someone gave the example that if you
want a habit of working out of the
gym,
don't make your habit working out of the
gym. Make your habit driving there and sitting
in the parking lot. And as long as
you're able to do that, that's a win.
And so maybe it's eating healthier. Maybe your
smallest action is something along the lines of
eating 1 serving of vegetables or something like
that. But find the easiest possible thing to
achieve
and then make that your focus. As long
as you're in action mode, you'll be succeeding.
One other tip in terms of action,
and that's make sure that you shape your
environment to encourage that action. So, for example,
get rid of the get rid of the
bad stuff.
If you have a habit, and this is
something that I did, if you have a
habit of checking your phone while you should
be working at your desk,
I used to do that because my phone
would sit on the charger on my desk.
Well,
if that becomes a bad habit, it starts
to impede my ability to work, change the
environment. And so I put the charging cable
inside a drawer, and so now I put
the phone inside a drawer,
Adding just a little bit of friction
makes it a little bit harder to implement
that bad habit. On the flip side, let's
say I want to drink more water every
day. Well, all I do is fill up
a water bottle and put it at my
desk and that's it. That's the habit is
to fill up a water bottle and put
it at my desk.
I don't hold myself accountable for drinking it,
but the simple fact that the environment is
shaped to encourage it means that I'm going
to end up drinking that water. The second
thing I learned is that consistency
matters more than time.
And another way of looking at this might
be that systems
matter more than goals.
See, goals set direction but systems make progress.
And one thing that the author said in
the book that really stuck with me was
we do not rise to our goals,
we fall to our systems. And our systems
are the thing that make something happen consistently
on a day to day basis. An example
of a goal
is like a 30 day challenge.
Right? A 30 day
diet or a 30 day workout plan or
a 30 day reading plan or, you know,
your new year's resolution. Those are goals. And
they might orient this in a certain way
but they often don't stick. And we all,
you know, we've all had goals that we
set and we put a time limit like
60 days or 90 days
thinking that, well, if I can just tough
it out for 60 days, it'll become permanent.
And then that's not the case.
We always, not always, but we often end
up reverting back to the old way of
doing things. And so
having a system that encourages consistency,
that matters a lot more because
the other thing is that the cost of
failure is much lower. The daily benchmark
is more sustainable. So if we if we
take that example of the bottle of water,
if my system,
my daily habit is to have a bottle
of water at my desk
every day,
there's not much cost of failure associated with
that. Like if I,
if I miss a day or I miss
2 days,
I didn't lose a whole lot.
If, if my small, my atomic habit is
something like
a 1000 steps around the neighborhood,
a 5 minute walk around the neighborhood, and
I miss it 1 or 2 days,
it's not going to really affect me all
that much. There's a low cost of failure,
but if I'm doing a 30 day challenge
where I have to to
eat a very strict diet or follow a
very strict workout plan or I have to
read, you know, a 100 pages a day
because I'm gonna read one book every week.
If that's the goal and I miss one
day or I miss 2 days,
the cost of failure becomes very high and
almost insurmountable.
And that's what makes people lose motivation because
now that I've already missed 2 days,
I'm too far gone to come back. It's
gonna be too difficult to get back on
track.
So a system
combined with an easy to do action,
it lets us show up even when we
don't when we don't feel like it. And
it
also mitigates against the temptation
to revert back to old habits because again,
it's so easy to achieve
that even if we miss a couple of
days, we get right back on and keep
going. And eventually over time,
that action and that consistency
will win out. The third thing that I
learned from the book Atomic Habits, intrinsic motivation
matters a lot more than outcome based motivation.
Outcome based motivation is very difficult to sustain
and if the results don't start to come
quickly, we lose interest. So for example, an
outcome based motivation might be,
I want to read a 100 books this
year.
And so in month 1, if I only
read
4 books,
I'm already short of my goal. And then
now if I don't make it up in
February and February I stay at the same
pace, I'm gonna be further and further and
further behind.
The motivation is going to dissipate very quickly.
But if I go with an intrinsic motivation,
meaning something along the lines of my identity,
I'm someone who likes to read, I'm someone
that's healthy, I'm someone that exercises,
That intrinsic motivation and that identity is a
much stronger motivator
than that end goal that's outcome based.
And the way to build that intrinsic motivation,
ironically enough or interestingly enough, is with an
atomic habit because when you have a small
action,
it becomes easier to tell yourself that story
to reinforce that identity
that I am the type of person who
does x. And so
eating a side of broccoli every night with
dinner with my pizza and my chicken nuggets
might not make me lose weight,
but it reinforces
my identity as someone that's trying to become
healthier.
And the more that I reinforce that self
identity,
the more willpower and motivation that I build
up
to take more and more action over time
and develop the habits that I need to
then reach some of those broader goals that
I have. So be consistent with your small
action,
have a system in place to achieve it,
and shape your identity around it by doing
it frequently.
And so that's 3 things I learned from
the book, Atomic Habits.
You can get a a link to the
book in the show notes below. If you
enjoyed the video, please share, subscribe, all that
good stuff and share it with a friend.
Otherwise, see you in the next video. Thanks.