Atomic Habits

This is an extremely useful book with science backed ideas and enjoyable narrative. It was a pleasure to follow James teachings and understand the different stages from which one can study habit formation and take action to create more consistency, less friction and more joy in my daily routine.

The fundamental idea of the book states the four elements of a habit: cue, craving, responde and reward. All these elements loop sequentiatly from the first to the last and in the repetition of a habit starts all over again from beginning. Associated to each element, there is a basic principle to increase the likelihood of a habit to stick: make it obvious/visible (cue), make it attractive (craving), make it easy (response) and make it satisfying (reward). If what we need is to avoid a negative behavior, we might try to follow the opposite advice: make it invisible (cue), make it unattractive (craving), make it difficult (response) and make it unsatisfying (reward). Then James expands on these ideas.

During the last three months, I have been creating several habits: meditating, reading, studying programming (data structures and algorithms), studying french, exercising and learning touch typing. All of this has been happening before and during the reading of this book. I have to say this book is such a treasure in my situation, I feel equipped with all I need to stick to my good habits in the long term. I will revisit this book in the future.