Could a cyclist’s seat pad determine his performance? Enough to win a Tour and exponentially improve his sporting results?

The answer is yes, if this tiny change is combined with many others, such as redesigning the seats, applying alcohol to the wheels to increase their traction, using tights with electrical heating systems to maintain ideal muscle temperature, monitoring each cyclist’s response to training with sensors, testing lighter and more aerodynamic fabrics… even painting the inside of the truck transporting the bikes white to detect dust particles.

These were improvements that were put in place in 2003 by the new director of the British cycling team, Dave Brailsford . He succeeded in turning a team that had not had a single Olympic success in a hundred years or whose members had not shone in the Tour de France into a team that, between 2007 and 2012, had 178 medals in world championships, 66 Olympic and Paralympic medals and five Tour victories for its riders.

Tiny changes, implemented simultaneously, with one underlying idea: 1% better every day. Brailsford’s example serves as a starting point for the proposal of the American writer James Clear. His book, Atomic Habits , is based on the definitions of “atomic” (immense source of energy or power) and “habit” (routine or practice that is performed on a regular basis), and has been the best-selling book on the New York Times list with more than fifteen million copies published.

What does Clear offer, and why have so many millions of people wanted to learn about it and try it out?

Personal improvement step by step

The idea behind Clear is that forming habits from their most basic and simple (atomic) state facilitates access to any goal. Step by step, as a result of hundreds of small decisions, these changes can end up having the force of a tsunami and improve our professional career, our relationships and all aspects of our life.

The book is an instruction manual to become the person we want to be. The proposal is to create habits in a sustainable way over time until we achieve changes in the results, in the process and in the identity, according to a cognitive-behaviorist model. To do this we must:

1. Make them obvious.
2. Make them attractive.
3. Keep them simple.
4. Make them satisfying.

Once we have decided how we want to be, we look for how to make that goal a two-minute behaviour, and we try to “anchor” that action, establishing a fixed time and place. To do this we must design the environment, the possible difficulties or frictions. Concentrate and limit ourselves to the action and the habit to be carried out, propose rewards and support from the social environment to finally achieve the “graduation” of the habit, that is, that it becomes part of our routine.

The two-minute rule

The idea is to start with small goals, with the smallest and simplest unit: the two-minute rule. We can find a short version of any goal like this.

“When you start a new habit, it shouldn’t take more than two minutes: reading before bed becomes reading a page; doing 30 minutes of yoga becomes preparing the yoga mat; writing a book is really writing a sentence a day; and running 10 kilometers begins with putting on your sneakers.”

Far from positive thinking

In this way, Atomic Habits is not so much a self-help book as a step-by-step proposal – a personal improvement plan – to develop habits consistently over time. Far from the idea that nothing is impossible, Clear proposes a new version of this slogan: “Some things do end up being impossible.” In other words, focusing on positive thinking does not make problems disappear.

It is a position that is similarly argued by the psychologist Buenaventura del Charco Olea in Hasta los co… del pensamiento positivo , where he describes “forced and simple positivism” as a new “dogma” that ends up becoming an imposition, an obligation to be well.

Objective: what we want to be, not what we want to obtain

Clear argues that the most effective way to change our habits is not to focus on what we want to achieve, but rather on the person we want to become. As the character “Il Commendatore” (Enzo Ferrari, founder of the Ferrari racing team) says in the film Ferrari regarding the rivalry between Jaguar and Ferrari: “Jaguar wins races so it can sell cars. We sell cars so we can win races.”

A sense of mission helps build these habits. For example, two people who are aiming to quit smoking might respond in two different ways to the offer of a cigarette:

1. “No thanks, I’m trying to quit smoking.”
2. “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.”

This last person has already made a change in his identity: he no longer sees himself as a smoker. In the same way, the goal is not to read a book, it is to become a reader; it is not to run a marathon, it is to become a runner; it is not to learn to play an instrument, it is to become a musician. Our behaviours, our habits, are what form our identity.

Atomic Habits does not propose anything new. Before, Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas had explained to us how the repetition of good acts is essential to achieve virtue.

Growth of people in the educational field

In the educational context, the notion of habit is related to helping a person grow: promoting certain intellectual and moral habits can make our lives more fulfilling. Habits are an extension of our primary nature, they make our existence more “habitable” and give us access to greater freedom.

School situations often show how the repetition of “good” acts (starting an activity on time, finishing it perfectly, helping a classmate or having an assignment in the classroom) can be key to the development of values.

In two downloadable chapters, Jame Clear proposes the application of this guide to raising and educating children and to business and the corporate world .

Listening to Serrat in his farewell concert, I realized another way of explaining this idea when singing “Hoy puede ser un gran día” (Today can be a great day), he tells us: “it depends partly on you.”

Author Bio: Gerardo Meneses is a Primary School Teacher, Associate Professor at URV. Collaborating Professor at UOC, Rovira i Virgili University