1. Atomic Habits
Dr Ihtesam Inam

2. Atomic Habits
• The #1 New York Times bestseller published in 2018.
• In Atomic Habits, James Clear draws on insights from cognitive and
behavioral sciences to provide a powerful step-by-step plan that can help you
to create better habits in any area of life.
• Most powerful and practical book written on habit building by James Clear
• An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones.
• Tiny changes: Remarkable results

3. The Aggregation of Marginal Change
• British Cycling Team.. Team Sky
• 1908-2003
• Only one gold medal in these years
• Performance getting worse… specially in the biggest cycle race Tour de
France
• Cycle manufacturing company refused to give them cycles.

4. New Coach Hired
• British Cycling Organization hired a coach Dave Brailsford.
• 1 percent improvement in a better way
• Results get more excellent
• Dave redesigned seat in comfortable way,
• used light weighed fabrics for riders
• Rub alcohol on the tie for a Better grip

5. Strategies
• He improved everything related by 1%
• He made special beds for a peaceful sleep
• Learned special hands washing techniques so that riders may not get sick
• He tried to redesign everything from eye drops to chain oil.

6. Achievements
• 60 % of gold medals achieved by his team in 2008 Olympics.
• In 2012 Olympics, his team made 9 Olympic and 7 world records
• With 1 % of improvement in 2007-2017
• 178 world championships
• 66 Olympics and para Olympic medals
• 5 tour de France

7. Atomic Habits
1% achievement
• Do not make goals, results
• Make systems, processes.
• One who follow system and does continuous improvements, achieve goals
very fast.
• The way things are made up of small atoms, in the same way, remarkable
results are also made from small habits.

8. Atomic Habits
Habits can be changed in two ways
• Outcome based
• Identity based
Be identity base
The way you speak, the way you behave, your belief is your identity

9. Habit formation
1. Cue
2. Craving
3. Response
4. Reward

10. To build good habit(reading a book)
1. Cue/ visible
Keep a book in a right place where you can see it easily(sofa, bed, table, etc)
2. Craving/ attractive
(Use book marks, start from 10-15mins daily)
3. Response/ easy
(Keep it near…easy to respond)
4. Reward/satisfying
(Choose the right book so that your satisfaction level can be increased)

11. To remove bad habits(want to leave phone
addiction)
1. Cue/ Invisible
keep at such place you won’t see/access easily
2. Craving/ Unattractive
(Think that apps like tiktok, facebook, insta are not value adding)
3. Response/ difficult
(Remove face and finger print unlock, make a difficult long code, your brain hates complex tasks)
4. Reward/Unsatisfying
(delete time wasting apps, use the grey scale

12. We imitate the habits of three groups in
particular
• The close
• The many
• The powerful
• Some people think that there are short of motivation in them. They needs
some motivation to start new work. In reality, there is short of clarity not
motivation in them. They don’t know what, when and how to start.

13. We imitate the habits of three groups in
particular
• Motivation is overrated.
Environment matters the most.
For example, some students drink cola from cafeteria,
management know about their habits, they influenced
students to drink water instead of cola.
They just changed arrangements of bottles.
People choose the products according to the place where
it is kept not for their benefits.

14. We imitate the habits of three groups in
particular
• For example you won’t pickup easily the packed
items kept inside kitchen, but the items kept in
fridge or openly in kitchen, you will start eating
them.
• The environment has invisible hands.
• Because there is some visible hands with the
environment that change human behavior very
easily.

15. We imitate the habits of three groups in
particular
• To keep the washroom clean at Amsterdem
Airport, the staff did a simple but powerful
experiment.
• They pasted a sticker of small bug at urinal, so
everybody wants to remove that bug by
targeting, by this experiment, spillage was
reduced around the urinal and wash rooms
become more clean and fresh.

16. Self Discipline
• We think that more will power and self control are needed to be self
disciplined( they does not require any effort).
• If self disciplined think that TV is consuming their time, they throw out
their TV.( no TV, no problems)
• If you build self disciple in a systemic way, then this very easy, you can do
any thing through proper instructions and hard work.
• Best example is the story of Polgar sisters.

17. Polgar Sisters
• Best example is the story of Polgar sisters.
• Hungarian Chess teacher and education psychologist, Laszlo Polgar used to believe in hard
work.
• He used to believe that students can become genius through deliberate practice and good
habits.
• He chose teacher Karla for this experiment
• She believe that we can make our skills advance through proper instructions.
• For the experiment, they chose Chess.

18. Polgar Sisters
• They made a whole plan to reach their students world class in chess.
• Lazlo Karla has 3 daughters
• Zsuzsa, Zsofia, Judit.
• Zsuzsa, Zsofia achieved many things in chess.
• Judit made her place in top 100 at 12 years of her age.
• She became youngest Grand Master at the age of 15.
• She was the no.1 female chess player in the world for 27 years.
• We can achieve many things with the support of proper environment and good habits.

19. Paper Clip Strategy
• Paper clip strategy
• A straetgy that gives 6 figures income to a bank employee.
• There used to be 2 jars at the desk of Stephen. One with 120 clips and other empty.
• He used to do sales calls every day, after completing a call, he put one clip from one
jar to empty. In this way he starts the day with 120 paper clips, he used to do sales
calls till he doesn't remove all the paper clips. This simple secret of Stephen made a
profit of million dollars in some month to the bank.
• His salary became six figures , this paper clip strategy helps to measure progress
visually .

20. Habit tracking
• Lots of benefits of habit tracking
• Because when you are not in mood, then forgetting the progress is very normal.
• Habit tracking is your visual proof of hard work.
Think out of the box
get out of your comfort zone.
Nobody tells that which comfort zone or books they are talking about, solution to this
problem is found in this book, that is The GoldiLock Zone.

21. The GoldiLock Zone
• Human brain like to Face challenges.
• But the challenges that are available.
• For example you like to play tennis , but if you play
with a 10 year kid, you will get bored because this is
very easy for you, but if you play with professionals,
then you will lose motivation because they are tough
players and if you play with equals,both can win, and
you can win by putting more efforts ...

22. The GoldiLock Zone
• Neither more hard nor easy, just right at the edge ...
Which you have seen in a cricket match some times.
We have to go a bit far from our difficulty level to
stretch our comfort zone...but make sure that a bit far
distance not more...
• Because only we have to stretch our comfort
zone...nowadays people cant achieve success
because of boredom not because of failure.

23. The GoldiLock Zone
• Boredom kills ambition, because to achieve mastery over a thing , the same
needed to do again and again .. and you get bored by doing the same things
continuously and you will leave the work and thinks that successful people
have more money ....
• But many coaches said that successful people bored like normal people
but still they don't quit...they continue to practice until they make it
world class.