Atomic Habits, by James Clear (2018)

I relented, after holding off from personal development books for an extended period I bought into another one, a big one, and thankfully a good one. After passing the typical hyperbolic hooks that start these books (this one was a childhood incident) and ignoring the sad reality of publishing these days (this book was published after the author grew an insane social media following), I got stuck into the content and it was thoughtful and helpful.

The structure is simple, following the lifecycle of a habit where Clear simply presents ways to encourage the lifecycle for good habits, and discourage it for bad ones. The summaries at the end of chapters and the end of sections are quite helpful and will get a workout. Many personal development books are written as books, they are entertaining but don’t allow for repetition or reference, Atomic Habits is kind of set up like a text book, I can see it being most useful when referenced frequently. This is similar to how the Barefoot Investor has written his books I guess.