Then, all of a sudden, it clicks and you get better fast – and people will call it an overnight success. You work, you put in your reps and you see no results day after day. I’ve experienced this personally in many areas of my life.James refers to a concept called “The Plateau of Latent Potential” – an idea that your results don’t grow linearly but rather compound.Goals are the results you want to achieve, but systems are the processes that get the results. You don’t need better goals, you need better systems.Great habits reward you bad habits destroy you. “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than your current results.” Time is your ally when your trajectory is correct.As Charlie Munger has said: “The first rule of compounding is to not interrupt it unnecessarily.”
Habits are the compound interest of self improvement.It’s the base level component of our behavior patterns. An atomic habit is a regular practice or routine.Here are some of my brief highlights and key takeaways from the book: Building great habits enables you to change your identity for the better. He makes a convincing argument – that identity change drives behavior change, not goals – and I couldn’t agree more. Even my own writing style has been inspired by his. It’s incredibly tweetable, meaning each sentence is written to invoke action. I found myself drawn to how James communicates throughout the book. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results. And a lifestyle is not an outcome, it’s a process. By committing to get 1% better each day, the compounding growth you achieve over time is tremendous. Your current results don’t matter as much as your current trajectory. The premise of Atomic Habits is that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
James has a unique way of communicating powerful truths in digestible form that drive you to action. I’ve read this book three times and listened to it on Audible once.Ītomic Habits is intensely practical – you’ll find yourself wanting to get started before Chapter 1 is over. Great books demand you come back to them over and over again, and this is one of the all-time greats. Apart from the Bible, no book has had as profound an impact on my life as this one.