Whether you’re building or breaking a habit, the goal of James Clear’s Atomic Habits is to help you make even a one percent improvement each day. Through these compounding effects—adding one more push-up today, reading one more page, or cutting your snacking by one potato chip—real change can be created. If you start improving a habit by 1% each day, you’ll be 37 times better after one year. Atomic Habits can break down a huge goal into hundreds of smaller decisions, gradually transforming aspects of your life. Each chapter details a way to make building a good habit easier, and then inverts the method to help you break a bad habit. Take the first law – ”make it obvious”. If you want to practice an instrument, make it easy and leave it lying in plain sight where you often hang around. If you want to look at your phone less, make it hard to open by leaving it in another room.
Opening line: “On the final day of my sophomore year of high school, I was hit in the face with a baseball bat.”
Favorite line: “Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone. Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be.”
Why I like it: I guarantee that there is at least one line that will resonate with you and make it easier to improve your habits, even by 1%. And if you’re truly committed to change, is there any reason not to take a 1% improvement?