Below are a few reflections after reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Why are habits important?
Small changes we make in our life have negligible impact, but as a habit they compound into major results.

How to form habits that you wish to compound?
Habit can be formed by understanding its four components:
Cue – a trigger that gets you to act
Craving – a desire you want to achieve
Response – the action of the habit itself
Reward – the positive feeling you get from completing the habit

For example, I have been meditating every morning for years. Post-bath time is my designated cue to sit and meditate. I crave for a peaceful start to the morning and clear my head before heading out. Depending on availability of time, I meditate for at least 15 minutes. This helps me to clear any cognitive stress I would have built up.

Another trick to form habits is to opt for a short commitment instead of a long one. For example, instead of reading one book a week, you can choose to read 10 pages a day.

How to break habits that you do not wish to compound?
One approach is to introduce friction by making the habit harder to start. For example, I do not have any apps on my phone that are binge-worthy. This implies, to use such apps, I need to install them first.

How did I implement these learnings?

• I desired to read regularly. I already had a cue, craving and response. My reward was the joy of learning. Gradually, the reward did not feel enough. It is worth noting that a habit can sustain only if the reward is truly satisfying. So, I created this platform. Here, I can synthesize, distill, reflect and elaborate how I implemented the learnings. This makes the reading fun and memorable for me. Bottom line, to ensure a habit thrives, the effort to reward ratio must always be in check.

• As the author atomized habits, I felt the need to atomize forming interests. Over the years, we develop prejudices about activities that we spend time in. In layman’s terms, we stay around activities that we find interesting while skip the ones we don’t. This led me to infer that an interest is an amalgamation of familiarity and output. The more you grow familiarity with a topic, the more you find comfort in synthesizing it to generate an output. Once you can get output, that activity or topic is interesting for you. This helped me nudge myself towards activities that never amazed me earlier.
  

Standout quote from Atomic Habits

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.