James Clear, in his helpful self-help book, “Atomic Habits,” invites his readers to imagine an ice cube set on a table. The room is very cold; in fact, the temperature in the room is zero. Imagine every hour the temperature rises by one degree. For hours, the ice cube doesn’t melt. A person watching might wonder whether the effort of warming the room is having any effect on the ice. She might wonder whether efforts at warming the room are futile. She might not even feel much of a difference in the temperature of the room. After all, a slow change in temperature is not very noticeable. But then, in the hour the room reaches 32 degrees, the ice cube begins to melt. She might think that the change happened immediately, but the change was the accumulated result of all the hours of warming that preceded it. The metaphor is apt when it comes to thinking about legal content writing, a field in which I’ve worked for over nine years. Posting a piece of legal content writing to the internet is like putting an ice cube in a cold room. As you post more content to your website, and create internal links, the room warms up, but you might not see or sense the change for a long time. It can take months before you start to see a growth in traffic, more inquiries, and results.
Too many people post one article to their blog or website, don’t see the results they are looking for, and give up. This is no different than putting an ice cube in a room where the thermostat is set below freezing and expecting it to spontaneously melt. Legal content writing success requires more than just one action executed every now and then. It requires the consistent habit of posting strong legal content writing on a regular basis.
For James Clear, good habits, when repeatedly executed, have the effect of slowly leading to positive changes. Clear claims that repeated small improvements are what lead to success, breakthroughs, and change. Sudden changes like those initiated during the time of New Year’s resolutions are bound to fail because they are often focused heavily on goals, and not on the daily systems that will allow those goals to be realized. Big goals may be ambitious, but if they don’t have systems to back them up, they are doomed to fail. Posting one piece of good content to your website isn’t a habit, it’s a single action. Forming a good content writing calendar and then sticking to the plan of posting regular legal content writing can create the kind of habits that lead to growth, change, and results.
“Atomic Habits” it not a perfect book, but it is a helpful book and therefore fits its genre quite mightily. At times Clear offers platitudes disguised as measurable systems. I have terrible difficulty with his idea that one should strive to improve by one percent each day (more on that later). Yet, for its flaws, “Atomic Habits” also contains some helpful ideas for improving habits and reaching goals. We tend to be obsessed with immediate results, but Clear’s system doesn’t promise overnight success nor breakthrough results right away.
No, a strong system according to Clear, is a system built to endure, a system that accepts the reality that improvement takes dedication and time, and most importantly of all, it is a system that utilizes methods that are realistic to implement and achieve. For those of us who have been working hard at the same thing for years with seemingly slow success, Clear’s book offers some solace. Maybe we haven’t quite reached our version of 32 degrees Fahrenheit to melt the ice. Time will tell.
James Clear is a proponent of the idea of “the aggregation of marginal gains.” He doesn’t believe in breakthrough performances or overnight successes. Instead, he holds that what we call “breakthrough performance” and “overnight success” is really, like the melting point of an ice cube subject to steady heating, the tipping point that happens when a person keeps at something for a long time, looking to make small improvements on a regular basis.
The Flaws with the Idea of Improving by One Percent Each Day
Clear advocates for the idea of trying to improve one percent each day. In a book that is otherwise excellent and rife with specificity, the one percent improvement idea reads as insightful but is more a self-improvement platitude disguised as measurable goal.
Maybe the one percent better idea works if you’re trying to achieve a short-term goal like losing weight, where results can be measured, but what does it mean to become one percent better at writing, or art, or happiness? And what happens when we measure weight loss in the way we measure compounding interest? Clear notes that if we improve by one percent each day, at the end of the year we’ll have improved about 37%. This is great if we’re trying to go from 300 pounds down to 189. But would we want to continue improving one percent each day after that? Would it be realistic, or even healthy? And is improving one percent each day in the context of weight loss actually healthy either?
I found myself wondering whether the goal of one percent improvement was even appealing. Did I really want to measure the quality of my relationships in terms of percentage points?
I know I’m taking the advice to an extreme. The point Clear makes is that “productivity compounds…knowledge compounds…relationships compound…stress compounds…negative thoughts compound…” One cannot expect overnight results or even linear results. In a book that is largely to be taken literally, the one percent better idea may be too literal for its own good.
This is a case where the platitude cloaked in mathematical and scientific language might be taken more seriously than a platitude cloaked in metaphor. However, the misuse of the idea of measurable results can lead to more hazard than help in this case. Striving for improvement is one thing, striving for measurable improvement in areas of life where measurement may be difficult is doomed to fail.
Sometimes the simplest measurement is best. When it comes to legal content marketing, I advocate for posting one or two high quality articles each month. And when it comes to the writing itself, commit to writing 250 words a day, or hire a legal content writer to get the job done. Slow, steady, quality work is better than the occasional burst of inspiration followed by an 8-month-long fallow period.
The Myth of the Overnight Success
Still, Clear has some excellent ideas and there is much to be gained in reading this breezy book. In a society focused entirely on outcomes and results, the myth of the overnight success is our fevered dream. We fail to look at the means by which a person achieved success and focus only on the goals. Goals have an endpoint. Systems are about process, and can be a lifelong practice.
Clear notes: “Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.” Consumeristic and capitalistic culture privileges the outcome, and fails to look at the journey. Clear encourages his readers to evaluate their values and consider what kind of life they want to create, rather than focusing overly heavily on goals. In other words, Clear can tell you how to create new habits, but he’s not too worried about telling you which habits to set. Goals are highly personal.
Clear’s discussion of the science that underlies habit formation is fascinating.
Habits are built when the brain receives a cue, which leads to craving, which leads to response, which is followed by a reward. We hear the message chime ring on the phone, we want to know who is texting us, so we check our phone and see a nice text from our significant other and are rewarded. Clear asks his readers to evaluate everything they do in a given day, and then to link a new desired habit with something done every day, like checking one’s phone. It’s a simple hack, but I found it quite productive.
So, if you want to start meditating daily, you’ll be more likely to do it if you associate it with something you also do daily, like putting your tea kettle on the stove. Added bonus, is the tea kettle can be your meditation alarm. Clear calls this “habit stacking” and the idea was revolutionary for me because I found myself wanting to set new daily habits, but struggling to implement them. So, now, when I compulsively check Twitter, I follow up my doom-scrolling with sending a text to a friend I haven’t talked to in a while. And when I find myself indulging in reading the latest horrifying headlines, I follow it up with spending 15 minutes reading a book I want to finish so I can read 100 or more books this year. And to avoid procrastination, I pair drinking my cup of tea or coffee with a good two-hours of legal content writing or working on my own personal writing projects. The association is so strong that I don’t drink coffee or tea unless I’m writing.
“Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one.”
Clear encourages his readers to redesign their environment for success. In other words: make it easy to make the good choice. He encourages readers to link desirable things with things that must be done, but are less desirable, like watching tabloids only while riding the exercise bike, or by linking social media scrolling with the desirable, but more challenging task of making a phone call. Clear writes about designing a life that makes it easy to accomplish your goals, because there will be easy days, where everything is working, and tough days. And “on the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way.”
Perhaps this is the most useful point the book offers: I found ways to build new habits into my life, rather than trying to change my life to fit new habits. After all, Clear notes, “Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.”
Clear got me motivated because I realized the bar to massive change didn’t need to involve big changes, but could be accomplished by a number of relatively easy smaller ones. I finally cleaned my desk because I realized that an environment designed to promote work would lead to better work. I found myself spending less time reading the news and scrolling on social media. I felt better as a result because I found myself talking more to friends and meditating more. I drink my coffee and I get my work done.
I got more work done, not necessarily because I worked harder, but because I finally was working smarter.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.