A review by alg
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
slow-paced
2.0
Do not read this book.
I picked this up at the suggestion of my therapist and damn, I hated it. The author is not a scientist or a journalist. He in an “entrepreneur” who has written one book and has successfully marketed it enough to get it on bestseller lists which in turn won him the opportunity to collect checks as a featured speaker at corporate events.
He regurgitates (a few) concepts from behavior scientists and then spends the rest of the chapter trying to illustrate them with inappropriately applied anecdotes. In one chapter he talked about making bad habits unattractive as a tool to break them. His anecdote is a thought experiment proposed by a pacifist that the codes to nuclear weapons be imbedded within an innocent bystander so that the bystander would have to die in order for the president to access the nuclear weapon. So in this case the bad habit being broken would be nuclear holocaust? WTF. That was the example that seemed the most out of hand, but there were plenty of others that I thought were not relevant or were poorly applied.
There are a lot of graphs that he uses as devises to explain his ideas but I don’t believe they are actually sourced from any type of data. Seems weird to include since he postures himself as a “habits expert” despite never having done clinical research.
Losing weight is also used as a common goal to apply his habit building to, which seems especially tone-deaf considering how much research has revealed about obesity’s link to genetics, and the ineffectiveness of diets long term. He rarely ties eating and exercising to the value of being healthy in itself, divorced from weight loss. Clear states in the penultimate chapter “a lack of self-awareness is poison”. Ironic.
Ultimately I found the book mostly unhelpful. Chapter 8 talks about when dopamine is delivered during a feedback loop and that was interesting. Should have been an article. Not 250 pages of fluff.
I picked this up at the suggestion of my therapist and damn, I hated it. The author is not a scientist or a journalist. He in an “entrepreneur” who has written one book and has successfully marketed it enough to get it on bestseller lists which in turn won him the opportunity to collect checks as a featured speaker at corporate events.
He regurgitates (a few) concepts from behavior scientists and then spends the rest of the chapter trying to illustrate them with inappropriately applied anecdotes. In one chapter he talked about making bad habits unattractive as a tool to break them. His anecdote is a thought experiment proposed by a pacifist that the codes to nuclear weapons be imbedded within an innocent bystander so that the bystander would have to die in order for the president to access the nuclear weapon. So in this case the bad habit being broken would be nuclear holocaust? WTF. That was the example that seemed the most out of hand, but there were plenty of others that I thought were not relevant or were poorly applied.
There are a lot of graphs that he uses as devises to explain his ideas but I don’t believe they are actually sourced from any type of data. Seems weird to include since he postures himself as a “habits expert” despite never having done clinical research.
Losing weight is also used as a common goal to apply his habit building to, which seems especially tone-deaf considering how much research has revealed about obesity’s link to genetics, and the ineffectiveness of diets long term. He rarely ties eating and exercising to the value of being healthy in itself, divorced from weight loss. Clear states in the penultimate chapter “a lack of self-awareness is poison”. Ironic.
Ultimately I found the book mostly unhelpful. Chapter 8 talks about when dopamine is delivered during a feedback loop and that was interesting. Should have been an article. Not 250 pages of fluff.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia