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A review by anna_hepworth
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Did not finish book. Stopped at 70%.
With a good edit and a better set of examples, this would have been a good book. As it was I felt more and more uncomfortable with each weirdly judgemental example that just showed that the author has had a surprisingly priviledged life. Very prosperity gospel and moral judgements on things like eating and exercise.
I ran out of time on the library loan, and I don't think I'll bother with trying to finish it. There have to be better books on developing and maintaining habits out there.
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Adding my reading notes:
Prologue - yeah, interesting
Ch 1 - kind of good, but the weight loss stuff is going to piss me off
Ch 2 - better to make identity goals rather than outcome goals, because they are easier to maintain. So, 'I want to run 10km' becomes 'I want to be a runner' which becomes the atomic habit which presumably we get later
Nitpick on the weight loss / health thing; need to watch out for that as an unhelpful conflation.
Ch 3 - building better habits. more science (this is a feature of this book). However, also a frustrating conflation of a couple of ideas:
I ran out of time on the library loan, and I don't think I'll bother with trying to finish it. There have to be better books on developing and maintaining habits out there.
--------
Adding my reading notes:
Prologue - yeah, interesting
Ch 1 - kind of good, but the weight loss stuff is going to piss me off
Ch 2 - better to make identity goals rather than outcome goals, because they are easier to maintain. So, 'I want to run 10km' becomes 'I want to be a runner' which becomes the atomic habit which presumably we get later
Nitpick on the weight loss / health thing; need to watch out for that as an unhelpful conflation.
Ch 3 - building better habits. more science (this is a feature of this book). However, also a frustrating conflation of a couple of ideas:
Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy
.. as a person who had shit health habits but was absolutely full on in my 20s, and now has reasonably good health habits and shit energy (if we ignore the going to bed issue) that doesn't actually make sense.
The chapter on making bad habits inconvenient or unpleasant in the moment has a whole lot of delayed punishment as the examples, and the whole thing is about quite unpleasant results. This is not something I want to encourage. After all, it talks about fines -- and one of the things that we know is that when library fines are abolished, more late books come back.
CW: fatphobia. Punishment mentality
The chapter on making bad habits inconvenient or unpleasant in the moment has a whole lot of delayed punishment as the examples, and the whole thing is about quite unpleasant results. This is not something I want to encourage. After all, it talks about fines -- and one of the things that we know is that when library fines are abolished, more late books come back.
CW: fatphobia. Punishment mentality
Content Warnings
Moderate: Fatphobia