It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got injured...
Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.
Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone agreed with me because I wasted hours reading Atomic Habits. Thank you Good Reads. It was therapeutic.
Is it that good?
From my personal experience, I remembered the most from this book years later, in contrast to the other two. Specifically, I still use the idea of "prompts" for behaviour change. I remembered how it's typically not a good idea to use time as a prompt to do something (e.g. this is not effective: "At 8 pm every day, I will go outside for a jog"), but instead to use a prompt that's easy to notice (e.g. this is more effective: "After dinner every day, I will go outside for a jog").
I also really appreciated the idea of avoiding personally blaming yourself or others for unwanted behaviour, and looking at systems change first. I still remember the author's anecdote about solving a conflict with a roommate who complained about the bathroom floor being wet too often: instead of focusing on guilting the person, the systematic change was simply to put a bathroom towel on the floor to make it easier to dry the floor. Similarly, I've been able to keep my own bathroom cleaner by putting cleaning tools in easier reach.
Lastly, I appreciated the appendix that contains book summary charts, mnemonics (e.g. a habit can be thought of as "ABC": an anchor/prompt, a behaviour, and a celebration), and suggested habits (especially positive habits that help with tending to interpersonal relationships).
I still remember all of this years later, so in my personal experience, this book had the greatest impact on me.
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For "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, it's a bit harder to skim as it lacks the graphs and summaries from "Tiny Habits." However, the ideas are mostly the same. For example, this book focuses on triggering behaviour with "cues,” which are equivalent to "prompts" in "Tiny Habits.”
The idea of “keystone habits” also stood out as more emphasized to me from this book, where certain habits can have the most impact in contrast to others.
I suspect this book was popular because you might feel smarter from reading it, as it explores case studies about corporations and US military training, but it’s a bit harder to skim to refresh, due to lacking the graphs and summaries of the other two books.
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For "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, I respect the book for what it is. It's engaging for most people to read, popular, and it makes the ideas easy to understand for lots of people. I prefer the "Tiny Habits" more, but I respect “Atomic Habits” for making the ideas accessible to a larger audience.
I actually found it fairly similar to Tiny Habits: it also has diagrams, and it also has mnemonics (e.g. a habit as a Cue-Craving-Response-Reward). The author also talks about making positive habits easier to do in simple ways, similar to the “Tiny Habits” author.
Upon a skim now, I do remember having the feeling that the ideas of “Atomic Habits” were similar to “Tiny Habits,” but I preferred the “Tiny Habits” appendix more, and I also had a personal preference for the writing style of the book by Fogg.
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To summarize this whole comment, I believe all three are worth at least a skim, though I like “Tiny Habits” the most for the writing style and provided graphs and mnemonics. But you can’t go wrong if you’re interested in habit change with any of them, as they overlap a lot and roughly cover the same ideas for behaviour change.
My condolences.
(Looks like there are a few different books you could be referring to.)
Couldn't recommend it enough. I can make my life robotic if I want, and still be happy. Its mind boggling.
(Admittedly, you have to turn it into a habit, which means like ~3 days of 'suck', but after that its automatic)
I've done things every day for 50+ days without the habit sticking. I think I heard "habit resistance" is related to ADHD.
But I also should clarify that this is specifically the basal ganglia that is being affected, and the basal ganglia works in a rigid way. A 'habit' isnt sticking after 50 days, you might be replacing it occasionally with something else, which is essentially breaking the habit. From the book, I can imagine a bunch of ways why this is going wrong.
Maybe you are doing something that scratches the itch that would otherwise drive the habit.
Maybe you are not doing the cue-routine-reward cycle when you do your new habit.
I feel like I'm doing a real disservice to the book because I'm summarizing ~300 pages, I'm about to hop off HN and don't want to go into further detail, and I don't even know what habit you were working on.
Don't let my terrible comment dissuade you. I also don't recommend summaries of this book, they missed too much.
Good god, how scary. Thanks for the warning!
Anyway, getting off all drugs has been great, mostly due to the hedonic treadmill/tolerance.
Similar with video games. Games are fun today, but if I play them for a few weeks, they become work.
I get way more excitement out of achieving a new 3D print design or finishing a coding feature. Not to mention, reading non-fiction is pretty great, mind blowing stuff if you find the right book, as previously mentioned.
I somewhat blame Disney, I get all excited for some hedonism, and they release a crappy starwars episode. I'm more disappointed than if I worked all night.
That hits the nail on the head. I cannot comprehend how this book is so popular. It literally covered in dozens of cute little platitudes like "take little steps". It does not contain a single paragraph of original thought. It's just so... naively simplistic, so _obivous_.
I'm someone who likes reading a good rant or complaint. I'm not sure why that is but I find them very entertaining.