Life Leveling

Today marked the beginning of me reading the book Atomic Habits. I chose this book because it is a self-help book and I’m eager to build up my knowledge to further spread to you all! The book itself was very highly rated on amazon https://amzn.to/3x4K7Sa (affiliate link to book), boasting a 4.7 star rating over 157,532 reviews. The book also claims to have sold over 15 million copies as of Oct. 16, 2018 and has sold over 20 million copies as of Mar. 4, 2024.

So far (although only a chapter in) I have loved the book and already feel as though I’ve gained a tremendous amount of value despite only just starting the book. I had initially planned on reading the entire book and then doing a full review on the book, but changed my mind after getting past the first chapter and already feeling an immense desire to share what I’ve learned.

I’m a really big fan of how each chapter ends with a summary of the key details covered in the chapter, it makes it significantly easier to talk about what I’ve read, as all I really need to do is cover the chapter summary, so that is what we will do!

Chapter Summary:

• “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long run.” This is a concept that I’ve tried to integrate into my videos thus far and it makes me incredibly happy to now have a source to call upon. This idea is crucial to understanding if you want to reach success in most challenging tasks, especially YouTube. You need to have an understanding that progress takes time and you can’t expect to see results right away. As long as you improve each and every day, even if it’s only by 1 percent, you will eventually end up somewhere new. So many fail to get in shape because they lack this mentality, they put in all this hard-painful work, yet they don’t see results. So they give up, even though if they had continued, it is inevitable that they would have eventually seen results, it just may have taken longer than they wanted.
• “Habits are a double-edged sword. They can work for you or against you, which is why understanding the details is essential.” This line is referring to how we can develop good habits, that can be incredible for our lives, but on the flip side, we can also develop bad habits, which can be incredibly bad for our lives. You have to understand this (in my opinion) if you want to ever reach happiness, success, etc.
• “Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.” Many of us don’t feel that sense of achievement until we reach these “critical thresholds”. You may notice that these summaries overlap quite a bit, but I believe this is to further hammer in the idea into your head. The idea of this summary is to realize that the best results often take the longest time and you need to be patient or you will never have the opportunity to reach the desired results.
• “An atomic habit is a little habit that is part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.” This summary once again covers the same idea of the “compounding effect” of small habits. Saying that although our habits may seem small and insignificant, over-time they have a very significant result.
• “If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.” The context of this summary is that most people just focus on setting goals. While setting goals is good, many people get caught up in their goals and completely forgot that the key to reaching goals is a proper system. If you focus on your system you will see results even if you lose sight of your goal, but if you lose sight of your system in pursuit of your goal, you likely won’t ever reach it.
• “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your system.” This line further builds upon the last summary. You aren’t going to reach success just because you have your sights on a goal, millions of people have sights on the same goal, what’s going to separate you from the others, is having a focus on the proper systems that will get you to your goal and if your system sucks, then you will fall to the level of that system. You can’t succeed with a bad system, that’s why good students study, they are good students because they have that system.

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