Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The thing I hated most about this book is that Goodreads now keeps recommending the 'book' "The Secret". A book so notoriously full of bullshit even people who worship Q Anon won't read it. Secret also left a somewhat tattered reputation for self-help books. While the genre has never been a stranger to trashy advice, mega dumps of the stuff can make it hard for books that can genuinely help people. So much so that I nearly skipped over AH entirely because of it. It also forced my preconceptions into distrusting it from the get-go. Something that might have affected how I read this book, but at least I was self-aware of it.
Overall, I think this is a good book to read. It's flawed, which is something I'll get into, but has enough good information to justify its existence. As with literally all self-help books, you should read this with your highlighter at the ready. A book, of course, has to put things in a book format, so the mineral of relevant information needs to be filtered out from the rubble of structure. The value of such books can be weighed by how much you take note of to be used in your actual life. As I indicated before, it was just enough to make reading this book worth it.
Though, a major flaw in this book is how it's structured. Or, to be more accurate, is how the information is presented. The book mostly repeats the process of telling a story as an example of the larger point and then drips out the useful information, sometimes repeating the process of telling a story in an effort to pad things out. I know it's too much to ask of this book, or any book really, to just list out what it wants to tell me, but doing it this way isn't much better. One, it feels like the author is pitching something rather than teaching it. Plugging his website and newsletter doesn't help matters. Two, the space between story and information is spaced out to larger degrees than it should be. 99% of books of this type use this story method, but there is a nuanced difference in how this book does it. If I had to pin down a more precise reason, I would say the stories, and by consequence the information, felt more anecdotal than scientific.
The book also has a minor habit (get it?) of pointing things out rather than teaching the reader something useful. This is particularly true in a couple of the later chapters where practical methods give way to one-way discussions. Author Pro-tip: if most readers can't use what you're saying in their lives, then it isn't worth telling them. There's a difference between having a point and being helpful.
I can't use the phrase 'few and far between' when it comes to the usefulness:uselessness ratio. There are plenty of things here that can at least put you on the right track to making this book helpful. How that information is presented and a lack of implementation keeps it from being the revolutionary tome it wants to be. It finds its own way to be useful, but beyond that, there's nothing in here that's a big secret.
