By: SEAN YANG
Staff Writer
High school is a student’s final preparation for the outside world. Many will choose to go to college. Some may go to a trade school and become certified in their vocation of choice. Others will go on to serve in the military or immediately start being a part of the workforce. Whatever your choice may be after high school, it is important to develop good habits that pave the way for your life to be easier and more fulfilling during this transient period, while also quashing bad habits that actively make your life more chaotic and difficult.
I can express from experience just how debilitating it was for me to habitually and unconsciously make decisions that severely impaired my own quality of life as I progressed through high school. My horrible time management and organizational skills were a huge impediment to my lofty goal of becoming something of a scholar. Being highly inconsistent in all parts of my life meant that I always struggled to keep up with the pace of classes, even if I believed myself to be more than capable of any task.
A friend of mine had warned me about the efficacy of self-help books before I started reading Atomic Habits, quipping about the fallacy of needing to read someone else’s book to help yourself. She was an absolute genius and someone very close to what I would call a true jack of all trades, for she was knowledgeable in nearly every field I could think of that we had some related interest. I could expect there to be some truth to what she said—you must understand your own position, strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and fears in order to create pathways for progress. Many books will make assumptions or require a baseline to start making changes, which is why they are not optimal.
However, that is not the case for Atomic Habits. James Clear does not provide any certain prerequisites or make any assumptions about the readers. Instead, he provides a clear-cut approach and strategy to forming and breaking habits—in fact, it builds upon my friend’s idea of understanding yourself, your environment, and your motivations before you make any changes. Clear goes on to say that habits are practically the building blocks of our lives, and they define how we live. Every behavior we have is derived from habits, and we form and develop new ones every second. From this, it is possible to then develop new, fulfilling habits via Clear’s four laws of creating habits:
- Cue: Make it obvious.
- Craving: Make it attractive.
- Response: Make it easy.
- Reward: Make it satisfying.
You can also inverse this process for breaking old, obstructive habits:
- Cue: Make it invisible.
- Craving: Make it unattractive.
- Response: Make it difficult.
- Reward: Make it unsatisfying.
This process is quite similar to that of operant conditioning, a psychological learning process to modify behaviors through associating stimuli with reinforcement or punishment. However, this four-step process can be applied anywhere that is needed, as long as you understand how to utilize it.
I highly recommend any aspiring underclassmen to read this book and truly put in the work needed to succeed by creating good habits. Atomic Habits has permanently changed my perspective on how we develop behaviors and maintain them, and on how we are able to consciously modify our brain via these simple steps. I suffered greatly because I never made good habits for managing my time properly, studying effectively, or developing a proper work ethic. I struggled to get eight hours of sleep consistently, let alone sleep at the same time every night. Even if I still struggle with developing such habits, it is so much easier to take action because I finally know the steps I can take to make it easier and easier to create good habits and break bad ones.