By Tiffany Ling ’27

Without fail, every time I have walked into a McNally Jackson this year, Atomic Habits by James Clear stares at me from the display table, almost daring me to read it. In addition, everyone from my favorite influencer to my dad has been preaching to me the importance of maintaining good habits. I think a lot of college students don’t have the time to read a 300-page book. So, I decided that I would take one for the team and read Atomic Habits. From this blog post, you’ll gain understandings of my most important takeaways from this #1 New York Times Bestseller, almost like you read it yourself.  

 

So what? Why are habits important anyway? The best answer I have to this question is the 1% rule that Clear discusses in Chapter one of Atomic Habits. A habit can be as small as just a 1% change. As Clear writes, “improving by 1% isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run.” For my math people out there, 1% better every day for a year can be represented by 1.01365 = 37.78 whereas 1% worse every day for a year is portrayed by .99365 = 00.03. Small, repeated behaviors are so important because they compound over time, hopefully for the better.  

 

Something else I learned from this book is to leverage your ego to form better habits. Clear asserts, “the more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.” And I think he’s onto something here. Studies show that people are more inclined to act in alignment with what they believe a particular aspect of their identity to be. For example, if you’re someone that’s extremely proud of how your quads look, you’ll make it a habit to never skip leg day. In sum, our pride in an identity binds us to follow the habits of someone with that identity.  

 

Habit stacking is something that I have tried and succeeded with since reading Atomic Habits. Essentially, habit stacking is stacking a new behavior onto your routine after a habit that you already perform each day. This method was created by BJ Fogg, a research associate at Stanford University as a part of his Tiny Habits program. Fogg’s habit stacking formula is as follows:  

 

“After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]” 

 

The beauty of this formula is how simple it is; I’m surprised I didn’t think of it first. As someone with a terrible short-term memory, what I love about habit stacking is that it eliminates forgetfulness to perform the new behavior, since the cue is a habit that you routinely perform. 

Something from Atomic Habits that I might try this midterm season is going to a coffee shop I haven’t ever been to before, and only studying there. With enough repetitions of this behavior, I might be able to trick my brain into associating that specific coffee shop with studying, and no other activities like scrolling on social media or Facetiming a friend. According to Clear, “It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues… It can be hard to study in the living room without getting distracted if that’s where you always play video games.” Whenever I need a good, focused study session, that coffee shop could be a place I go to.  

 

Last but not least, I learned that it’s absolutely ok to miss one day of a habit. To quote the book, “Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast.” The perfectionist in me really needed to hear this. I think this message is consistent with the 1% rule too; 1% worse for one day is not as detrimental to your habit journey as 1% worse compounded over many days.  

 

I devoured this book in a little less than twenty-four hours and learned so much about the importance of habits, how they are formed, and how they can be broken. I will say, I don’t think there’s a single bookstore in Manhattan that doesn’t have Atomic Habits in stock, so if any of the ideas I wrote about are of interest to you, I would highly recommend giving it a read. On the other hand, if Atomic Habits is truly “Too long didn’t read,” I hope this blog post can serve as a good touchpoint for Clear’s ideologies.