I recently picked up the audiobook version of “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. While I’ve only just started my second listen through, I already think it will become one of the most influential books I’ve read: right behind “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, and “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.

The basic premiss of the book is that while goals are great for setting a direction, they are really lousy as a means to achieving anything. Instead, success comes from changing your daily habits—sometimes in very tiny ways—so that they accumulate, inevitably, and almost without effort, into success. This is accomplished by dissecting the life-cycle of a habit, and taking specific actions for each stage to ensure a new habit sticks. The same applies to habits you’d like to break: just apply the opposite actions for each stage to break the habit.

What impresses me the most about this book is its specificity. A lot of self-help books do a great job of laying out some interesting ideas or principles, but then fail to help the reader make the jump to practicing what is written. Not here. Every chapter starts with some motivating anecdote, then describes the principle involved, and then works through several different ways to put things into practice. Each chapter includes various kinds of mental exercises, checklists, and specific actions to take.

Another thing I like, is that the author fully understands how challenging it is to jump in at the deep end of creating some complex new habit (or breaking a very familiar one). He talks through various ways to simplify the process of easing into the new habit so that it doesn’t require tremendous willpower to accomplish it. Just a slow process of continuous improvement from very easy steps to more complex ones.

It’s not a long book at all, just 5½ hours in the audiobook version, and it’s caught my brain on fire with future possibilities. I highly recommend giving it a read.