I recently re-read Atomic Habits by James Clear. In fact, in my quest to learn languages, I tried to read it in German. I stopped at 66% in my Kindle. This is a great exercise, but I recommend doing it on books you have already read.
Otherwise, you may miss the author’s message. This was my case for Atomic Habits.
This book has been summarized thousands of times, so I won’t go through the exercise.
I propose you a real case where I could test the magic formula of James….
It might inspire you to put the message into practice in your everyday life.
How to create a good habit? James Clear’s formula.
James suggests a simple scheme to turn your desires into habits.
An example in everyday life.
We are careful about what we eat at home. And we try to drink a lot of fresh juice.
I like squeezed orange juice.
Especially in winter.
But I wasn’t drinking enough.
If you look at the context around my habit.
First, we had an automatic plastic orange press. Every time we finished, we had to put it away in a closet. So you can guess…we didn’t take it out often.
In James’ scheme,
- We had made the habit invisible. The orange squeezer in the closet
- We had made the habit difficult. Taking the orange squeezer from the closet, unplugging another appliance so you can connect it, then storing it away so you don’t get scolded by your wife 😀
The orange press finally broke down. Maybe due to all the constant movement.
As a good minimalist, we thought, we’ll continue using the manual lemon squeezer.
But back to James’ magic formula. We break another obvious rule.
“Make it easy”. Here, we turned it into “Make it hard”. The lemon squeezer works great, but it’s relatively hard and time-consuming when you have to squeeze oranges for the whole family. (a good dozen)
A better option.
Asking the question “what else?”
We finally bought an automatic orange squeezer that stays in its place.
Always available. Easy to use and wash.
At the same time, the kitchen was reorganized and the fruit became more visible.
With these two contextual changes, we check the 4 boxes of the magic formula.
Does it work?
As a result, we drank (even the children) squeezed orange juice almost every day in January.
More than 20 kg of oranges in a few weeks. 😀
It was good for all of us.
In addition, our fruit consumption in general, has increased. The fact that they are right in front of us makes us want to consume more of them.
How could you improve your context to implement habits you want?
The visible and easy-to-use orange press, coupled with the more prominent fruit was the right equation for us.
What could be yours?
- My page opened the day before on my PC or my notebook to write in my journal
- My running gear prepared in the evening for the next day’s run
- The big file to be treated placed in the middle of the desk
- …
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