Habits—those things we do without thinking—make us who we are. Good habits improve our lives, while bad habits turn us away from our goals. James Clear has distilled current research on habits and has made that work accessible and immediately practical.

Habits have four components:

1. Cue
2. Craving
3. Response
4. Reward

Take, for example the habit of brushing my teeth. The cue is walking into the bathroom after waking up. The craving is for a clean teeth. The response is actually brushing my teeth. Finally, the reward is the satisfaction of fresh breath.

In order to strategically improve our habits—to increase the good and minimize the bad—we need to optimize or frustrate each component.

1. Cue – make it obvious or invisible
2. Craving – make it attractive or unattractive
3. Response – make it easy or hard
4. Reward – make it satisfying or unsatisfying

Atomic Habits is full of strategies to optimize the various components of habit formation.

One more note. I had already read much of this research in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a book Clear pays homage to. Clear’s contribution to the field is to make Duhigg’s work immediately practical. At the end of each chapter, there are simple opportunities to optimize your habits.

Clear is a big believer in small gains. What if we could get 1% better every day? It wouldn’t be noticeable for a while, but the gains (not unlike compound interest) eventually grow exponentially.

Atomic Habits offers a simple and effective way to improve your life, one habit at a time.

Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Penguin Random House, 2018.