Atomic Habits by James Clear is a great book reminding you mostly about what you already know with some cool stories and quotes sprinkled in between. A lot, but not all, of the content could be deduced by simply sitting down and thinking for a while but most people rarely do it. The purpose of this book is then clearly to work as a trigger for that process of starting to systematically think about one’s life - which is truly great advice. And therein lies the largest issue as with most self-help books: the advice must now be applied. Luckily, however, the author James Clear makes this as easy and straightforward as it could possibly be by providing concrete tips and protocols for building new positive habits and doing away with old bad habits.

The structure of the book is great with logical progression through each of the four stages of forming and keeping habits in Clear’s cue, craving, response and reward framework where each stage provides multiple immediately actionable ideas while also building on top of the ideas that came before. However, personally I would have wanted the book to be either longer with even more scientific reasoning and analysis or shorter with less repetition. I really liked the summaries at the end of each chapter though as it highly increases the book’s utility as a reference after reading. Another thing disturbing me after years of mostly just academic reading was the lack of referencing /footnotes when mentioning studies in the body of the text. These were all found at the end of book but “multiple studies have shown” makes me really unsettled without any references or asterisks at the end of that very sentence already.

Overall, Atomic Habits is a well-written book about not only habits but our very identity. We are what we do repeatedly. As such, it is a very important and helpful read for anyone who wants to end a bad habit, start a good one or figure out who they want to become and how to get there. It is another book that I will have to recommend to everyone. Of course, the younger you are, the more time you have for your habits to compound and the further you may get. This is thus perhaps best read at any and every transitory periods, those being between schools, jobs or before becoming a parent. Read it and live it. I’ll head off to make my own habits scorecard now!