Life Leveling

Today marks day 2 of reading Atomic Habits and I am absolutely loving the book. I’ve been tempted to read more chapters a day, which in turn would mean doing more reviews in a day, but I don’t want to blow up everyone’s phones (lol). So I will stick with one chapter per day (maybe, don’t quote me).

The book itself is 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.

This chapter followed up an insanely valuable first chapter and it did not disappoint, so without further ado, let’s get into the chapter review!

Chapter Summary:

• “There are three levels of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change.” For example, you have those of us who want to be healthier, but we struggle to go to the gym. Most would say they try to go to the gym, but these people are usually more focused on the outcome than actually changing the process, and finally, they wouldn’t even dare identify as someone who goes to the gym. This is called being an outcome-driven person, and these types of people often fail. On the other hand, you have identity-driven people, those who identify as a routine gym goer don’t struggle to go to the gym, because it’s a part of who they are, and when we identify as something, we become very determined to maintain that view. The whole idea of this is to start on the inside (identity), rather than the outside (outcome), if you can make going to the gym a part of your identity, then it will no longer be a struggle to get yourself to go (the process), which means you will end up getting the results you want (outcome).
• “The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but who you wish to become” I guess I got ahead of myself a little bit, but this is the idea we talked about in the last summary. Once again I will preface that if you can become the type of person who goes to the gym, then going to the gym is easy, but if you identify as the type of person who doesn’t go to the gym, you will be fighting an uphill battle.
• “Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” I absolutely adore this quote, it completely shifted the way I’m going to be looking at changing who I am. For a long time I struggled with the idea of perfection, the pursuit of perfection. It was an unreachable goal, especially for someone as flawed as me. This is why I love this perspective. If you think of every time you go to the gym as a vote of confidence that you are the type of person to go to the gym, and you think of every time you go to the gym as a vote against, it makes it so as long as majority of the time you are going, then you are a gym going. You don’t have to win 100% of the votes to win an election and the same goes for convincing yourself that you are the type of person you want to be.
• “Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.” I like to interpret this by drawing back on the previous material of becoming 1% better each day. As long as you continue to get better, adapt, grow, upgrade, level up, whatever world you want to use, as long as you do this each day, you will become a new, better version of yourself, becoming multi-dimensional opposed to one dimensional.
• “The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs about yourself.” This line is further building upon the idea of focusing on identity opposed to outcome. If you can change your habits, therefore gaining your own confidence in who you are, that you are a good person who does good things, then you likely will become a good person who does good things. Essentially, the results will come as long as you do this, even though you aren’t focused on the results, the results will still come, because of the identity you have built.

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