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A review by vikingvisuals
Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear
3.0
There are a few things I enjoyed about the book: It emphasizes the importance of consistency and how even the smallest steps count towards the habit. This is something I've been applying to my own life even before reading the book and can concur that it is much better to do a few minutes of something you are trying to start/change/improve than to do one long session every so often.
I think for the most part the ideas are pretty decent and the structure was easy to follow. I appreciated that he didn't put so much importance on "goals" and mentioned that habits are neither good nor bad (which I appreciated, since I get annoyed by value judgements being placed on every aspect of life), however it annoyed me that throughout the rest of the book "good habits, bad habits" were consistently a part of the language, which to me goes a bit against some of the very ideas he was putting out about the importance of how we frame our language when habit forming plays a huge role in our identity.
For me the book suffers the same sort of issues that virtually all self help books do: examples are always taken from people who are high achievers. It's nice to have examples of how certain behaviors pay off, but that doesn't really help truly illustrate effectiveness of his strategies, more just him cherry picking examples that help pay into his framing of habit building.
I also think lots of the examples and advice are not super helpful for neurodivergent individuals and apply/are more beneficial for neurotypical people.
Personally I am a sucker for research, so when people are trying to convince me to something, it helps to see actual studies that back it up, however here most of what was brought up was mostly related to theory or just anecdotal evidence.
On that note I also really hate the lack of proper notation. Citations are never marked where given in the book, so you have to guess the sentence you were interested in seeing more citations on actually even is listed in the back of the book. When footnotes are used, it's generally just to links on the author's own website, which to me is a bit annoying. I know it's typical for self help author's to also sell a whole mindset for their living, but it always puts me off.
All in all the book is decent enough, even if to me a bit overrated. The ideas are simple enough to follow and have potential to be very helpful, however I felt lots of the book was filler, of which personally more beneficial filler could have been given instead (more examples for wider ranges of habits than the usual "lose weight, stop smoking"). The actual anecdotes to me didn't really add much.
I think for the most part the ideas are pretty decent and the structure was easy to follow. I appreciated that he didn't put so much importance on "goals" and mentioned that habits are neither good nor bad (which I appreciated, since I get annoyed by value judgements being placed on every aspect of life), however it annoyed me that throughout the rest of the book "good habits, bad habits" were consistently a part of the language, which to me goes a bit against some of the very ideas he was putting out about the importance of how we frame our language when habit forming plays a huge role in our identity.
For me the book suffers the same sort of issues that virtually all self help books do: examples are always taken from people who are high achievers. It's nice to have examples of how certain behaviors pay off, but that doesn't really help truly illustrate effectiveness of his strategies, more just him cherry picking examples that help pay into his framing of habit building.
I also think lots of the examples and advice are not super helpful for neurodivergent individuals and apply/are more beneficial for neurotypical people.
Personally I am a sucker for research, so when people are trying to convince me to something, it helps to see actual studies that back it up, however here most of what was brought up was mostly related to theory or just anecdotal evidence.
On that note I also really hate the lack of proper notation. Citations are never marked where given in the book, so you have to guess the sentence you were interested in seeing more citations on actually even is listed in the back of the book. When footnotes are used, it's generally just to links on the author's own website, which to me is a bit annoying. I know it's typical for self help author's to also sell a whole mindset for their living, but it always puts me off.
All in all the book is decent enough, even if to me a bit overrated. The ideas are simple enough to follow and have potential to be very helpful, however I felt lots of the book was filler, of which personally more beneficial filler could have been given instead (more examples for wider ranges of habits than the usual "lose weight, stop smoking"). The actual anecdotes to me didn't really add much.