Atomic Habits - Clear

James Clear in his truly remarkable book, “Atomic Habits” comes to me much later in life.  After I had figured out most of life's secrets through my own observations.  Trying to pass those experiences on to your kid is still not easy. If you’ve ever formed a habit, or worse, formed a bad habit, nothing changes overnight.  But if we want change, we hope we can change it overnight.  But if it doesn’t change  we are quick to give up and return right back to the older bad habits we learned.  Everyone should go to military school like that “Finklestein shit-kid”.  Quoting from Cheech & Chong Up In Smoke, if you didn’t get the reference.  Here’s another concept about military school in the movie in which Robert Duvall p[layed the Great Santini,  written by Pat Conroy..  

You may not have to go to military school if  your dad forces you to learn how to make  your bed, square your corners, clean your room.  Perhaps you never figured it out.  A military school, above all others, teaches discipline repetitively so it becomes a habit.  Polishing your shoes.  Cleaning your weapon.  Humans, as well as most animals, do repetitive things.  We form good habits. And we form bad habits.  Habits are a form of discipline.  A friend of mine  used to say, there are two types of discipline.  Your own, and somebody-else's.  Somebody-else's usually hurts more.  I’ve often wondered if his dad may have had  similar DNA to the Great Santini (An authoritarian discipline-junkie and a real prick of a dad).   Creating habits, good habits, should be the goal of good parenting.  I’m not going to judge the creation of one person's habits above another, but things like sleep hygiene and personal hygiene are probably universal.  One doesn’t need a whistle to create good habits, as Baron Von Trappe used in the Sound of Music,  but sometimes it helps.

James Clear instructions on changing habits and creating new habits are so simple we should all be changing our bad habits today.  When I first conceptualized what may be inside the book, I thought, this jackass knows what’s good for us and we have to start picking up these habits because successful habits have been studied in successful people and we want to be like them.   Ala Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”.  I didn’t give James Clear sufficient credit for what he set out to do.    His book is not about “a particular habit”.  His book is a method of habit forming and habit breaking.  If you want to start a bad habit, his book is just as effective.  But it is the recipe of human nature that any program that strives to bend, mold, form, squeeze, or otherwise alter human behavior must understand before undergoing any such task.  Create that right habit, and you will have success.  To me, any psychological therapy one undergoes, should also start with habits.  Use Clear’s formula, to write down every habit, good or bad, and then figure out what habits you want to keep, which ones need to go away, and what good things you need to form. Then build the strategy to break each one and create the missing ones.  That should be the recipe for almost any human work that needs to be done.  Clear’s recipe will work.  I’ve been using most of the techniques for years without realizing it. I am certain his formula will work.   It unlocks the keys to controlling human behavior. Which, in the wrong hands, could be dangerous. 

Molding people in an ethical way is  important.  Clear stays away from any moral questions since his book is pointed at the individual for self-help. .  But if you teach habits as orthodox doctrine,  just like a military school indoctrinates young minds into the disciplines of military habit (since you can’t have insubordination in the fox hole) , so too does any fundamentalist institution.  Master the administration of habit and you can control those within its grasp.  Ten years before 9/11, Usama Bin Laden knelt down with his minions at noon everyday to pray and lecture them on the wickedness of the United States thereby  brainwashing his army of evil doers we know as Al Qaeda.  Once we’ve formed a habit, we no longer ask why we are doing something.  We “Just Do It”.  That’s a good thing, from Nike’s perspective, if it  means running for fitness and buying their running shoes.  It’s a bad thing if the habits we learn harm ourselves, others, or the world around us.