Dear Reader,
Since we replaced the Second Drafts March book review with an extra podcast, April’s review is a self-help “twofer,” covering and combining James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, with Donald Miller’s latest title, Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life.
While they sometimes can be helpful, so-called “self-help” books are not a favorite genre for Peaches and me. Still, it’s good to read books that are sometimes outside of one’s preference to stay honest (and, at least in the case of these two books, we learned some things, too).
As a reminder, these monthly reviews are long essays with plenty of book excerpts to get a feel for the author’s writing (and not just my musings about it). My goal is to draw out the main themes, tie them together, and share how the book(s) impacted me and may be of interest to others.
Scroll to the bottom of this page for Peaches’ Pick as to what we’ll be reading for May. Thanks for supporting my writing here at Second Drafts. I hope you enjoy the review.
Craig
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Perhaps you’ve been on the receiving end of the phrase (or accusation, depending on what you did) describing you as “a creature of habit.” For some, this could be an insult (“Great. I’m boring.”); for others, a compliment (“Well, at least I’m consistent.”).
For author James Clear, it’s meant merely as a reality: all of us are creatures of “atomic” (very small) habits that not only have shaped our identity, but that we can use to shape our identity ourselves. Clear’s main idea in Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones is this:
“It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.”
Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.” p. 15
From here, Clear’s book is full of interesting chapter-opening stories and inventive anecdotes that illustrate the principles he wants to champion, shoring up several misconceived notions—focusing on goals and outcomes is not as helpful as concentrating on systems and processes; behavior reinforces identity, not vice versa; and habits do not restrict freedom, but instead create it—along the way.
Clear builds on Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, in explaining how the science of habit works. Using Duhigg’s four terms verbatim, Clear writes:
“The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. Breaking it down into these fundamental parts can help us understand what a habit is, how it works, and how to improve it. This four-step pattern is the backbone of every habit, and your brain runs through these steps in the same order each time.” (p. 47)
Fully engaging from an evolutionary perspective, Clear is quick to hang the majority of our motivations on our prehistoric ancestors and our since more evolved variations of their behaviors: cues trigger our brains of the potential of rewards, whether they be “primary rewards like food, water, and sex” of our early animal ancestors’ times, or our own more evolved “secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.” (p. 48)
“Because,” writes Clear, “the cue is the first indication that we’re close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving,” which Clear calls “the motivational force behind every habit.” These cravings, which are different for different people and not motivated by the same cues, turn into a response, which “is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.” (p. 48) In summary,
“Finally the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: 1) they satisfy us, and 2) they teach us.” (p. 49)
Clear then uses these four aspects of what he calls the “habit loop” to build a framework he calls “The Four Laws of Behavior Change,” the levers of which can be pulled to create a good habit or, by inverting them, to break a bad habit as below:
“How to Create a Good Habit”
1st law (cue)—Make it obvious
2nd law (craving)—Make it attractive
3rd law (response)—Make it easy
4th law (reward)—Make it satisfying
Likewise,
“How to Break a Bad Habit”
Inversion of 1st law (cue)—Make it invisible
Inversion of 2nd law (craving)—Make it unattractive
Inversion of 3rd law (response)—Make it difficult
Inversion of 4th law (reward)—Make it unsatisfying
The rest of the book is a practical unpacking of these laws and various tangible ways to apply them. In concise, easy-to-follow chapters, Clear elaborates on the benefits and tricks of changing environment and context, of depending on family and friends (i.e. our “tribe”) for help. He offers advice on habit scorecards, stacking, and tracking; dopamine tapping and temptation bundling; reprogramming our brains through “gateway habits”; initiating one-time actions that lead to fewer (negative) behavioral options; and winning in situations involving both instant delayed gratification.
Writes Clear,
“If you have ever wondered, ‘Why don’t I do what I say I’m going to do? Why don’t I lose the weight or stop smoking or save for retirement or start that die business? Why do I say something is important but never seem to make time for it’ The answers to those questions can be found somewhere in these four laws. The key to creating good habits and breaking bad ones is to understand these fundamental laws and how to alter them to your specifications. Every goal is doomed to fail if it goes against the grain of human nature.” (p. 55)
In this last statement, he is absolutely right. But one can’t fully talk about human nature without talking about sin, which is the biggest critique I have of the book. As accurately as I think Clear writes about many of the patterns and problems we as humans have when it comes to behavior modification, there is no discussion of the presence or power of sin in explaining our often-nonsensical choices. While Clear is quick to discuss the impact of our ancestors when it comes to how we process and interpret cues, turn them into cravings, and respond in search of rewards, there is little to no discussion of our ancestors’ influence upon us and our sin nature.
As a result (and despite much to commend about the book in general), there’s a mechanistic feel to Clear’s analysis that would benefit from a humanizing understanding of our biggest problem of all when it comes to making and breaking habits; namely, that we want what we want, for as Jeremiah 17:9 so eloquently puts it,
“The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?”
Thus, I think it is for the book’s lack of deeper, more philosophical and theological groundings that it took me a couple of months to work through it; while there are definitely good insights and observations, as well as helpful suggested practices and tricks that resonate with me, it often feels like a paint-by-number attempt at making art—the picture being painted is familiar enough, but it doesn’t capture all that is there.
Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life
Coming from a very different angle (and, somewhat surprisingly, with a cheesier title) is author Donald Miller’s latest book, Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life.
I’ve been a Donald Miller fan since his Blue Like Jazz days in the late 90s. I designed and worked with him on the first conference retreat out of the gates for his second release, Searching for God Knows What, and have read every title that followed, even when he went into the world of business coaching, in which he has since redefined himself and found a publishing home.
Miller and I are the same age and I’ve always resonated with his writing as it is much like mine—more conversational than ornate, more direct than roundabout. Despite my hopes that we would keep in touch after that first conference retreat together, things didn’t work out that way as Miller was on his way to becoming the new, young “it” author in Christian publishing, which I broke into with a pseudo-glorious run a few years later.
That said, I somehow missed the release of Miller’s new book in January, but quickly made amends a few weeks ago, finding it locally and (unlike with Clear’s book) reading it in the course of a weekend. Miller’s thought, tone, and writing style have always been like that of an old friend to me, so it was no problem investing the time.
As Miller’s work has taken him down the trail of business and marketing coaching more than religious writing, his books have become more focused on storytelling. His 2009 book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story and his 2017 book, Building a Storybrand: Clarify Your Message So That Others Will Listen, are obvious predecessors to Hero on a Mission’s emphasis on narrative, character, and messaging; the difference is Miller now has both feet in the “self-help” world.
From the first chapter:
“Living a meaning-filled story does not happen by accident. In fact, living a good story is a lot like writing one. When we read a great story, we don’t realize the hours of daydreaming, planning, fits, and false starts that went into what the reader may experience as a clean line of meaningful actions. Stories can be fun to write and fun to live, but the good ones take work.
Whether we like it or not, the lives we live are stories. Our lives have a beginning, middle, and end, and inside those three acts we play many roles. We are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, teammates, lovers, friends, and so much more. For many of us, the stories we live feel meaningful, interesting, and perhaps even inspired. For others, life feels as through the writer has lost the plot.” (p. 3)
All of this is true, of course, and serves as good setup for Miller’s study of the four primary characters he identifies in every story: 1) the victim; 2) the villain; 3) the hero; and 4) the guide. These characters, he writes, are not always separate from one another, but often are one and the same person in real life. Here’s his explanation:
“In my life I play all four characters every day. If I’m faced with an unfair challenge, I usually play the victim for a minute, feeling sorry for myself. If I am wronged, I dream about vengeance, like a villain. If I come up with a good idea and want to make it happen, I switch into hero mode to take action, and if somebody calls and needs my advice, I play the guide.” (p. xiii)
He continues to unfold his thesis, writing at the end of the first chapter that,
“The truth is, our lives can be charged with meaning, just as a good story is charged with meaning. Good stories, however, obey certain rules. Stories are built on age-old principles, and when storytellers ignore those principles, their stories suffer.
If you have ever felt like your story is so uninteresting you don’t even want to turn the page, there is hope. Even a casual exploration of the principles that make a story meaningful can deliver a better life experience…
…I used to not like life, and now I do. Even with its injustices and tragedies, it is a beautiful experience, and we get to participate in making it so. One of the great tragedies a person can experience is to feel dispassionate about their own life. To wake up believing fate is writing a terrible story that we are bound is akin to being imprisoned in our own skin.
The idea that fate writes our story is a lie. We do not suffer fate. We partner with fate to write a story generated from our own God-given creativity and agency. And that story can be more than interesting: it can be meaningful. The rest of this book will explore how.” (p. 17)
Compelling, but problematic when you understand Miller’s use of “fate” and “God” in the book are largely interchangeable. In fact, at the beginning of the chapter, Miller lays his cards on the table as to where he is coming from, and for someone who has followed and been spiritually helped by his past writings, it’s disappointing:
“For practical purposes, it is my position that the author of our stories is actually us. Perhaps the single greatest paradigm shift I’ve had as a human is this idea: I am writing my story and I alone have the responsibility to shape it into something meaningful. I agree with James Allen, who said in his 1902 book, As a Man Thinketh,
‘Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, then becomes the rightful master of himself.’
Here is a hard truth: if God is writing our stories, He isn’t doing a good job. I think we can all agree that some people’s stories seem quite tragic and many of us have experienced our share of those tragedies. What’s more, if God is writing our stories, He isn’t doing a fair job either. Some people are born privileged, and some are not. Some people die an untimely death, and others lie in prime health until their credits roll.
What if, instead of writing our stories, God has invented the sunrise and sunset, the ocean and the desert, love and various forms of weather and then handed us the pen to write the proverbial rest? What if we are much more responsible for the quality of our stories than we previously thought? What if any restlessness we feel about our lives is not in fact the fault of fate, but the fault of the writer themselves and that writer is us?” (p. 4)
What Miller is clearly outlining here is an 18th century Deist perspective, historically verbalized as God having set the world spinning and now sitting on the sidelines watching what we do with it. Again, Miller hardly veils his perspective:
“…If I believe fate has all the power and so I sit neutral as my story wanders aimlessly around the page like it was dictated by a dispassionate imbecile, who should I blame? God? Fate? Steinbeck?
It seems to me that blaming myself is the most viable option. While that option may implicate me, it also offers me the most power to do something about it.
Regardless of who is writing our stories, it is a useful belief that we are the authors. And it’s more than a useful belief: it’s a fun belief. What if we get to partner with the fixed elements of life to carve out a little narrative of our own making?” (p. 5)
Christian Smith, in his 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, introduced a more modern variation on the historic tenet of Deism called “Moral Therapeutic Deism,” which Smith sums up as:
A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.
This sort of Deism is the foundation Miller is building his “life as story” paradigm on, and while it seems to have worked well for him (so far), the danger is that others may not be as “lucky” in the story that they write for themselves. What then? For someone who takes Miller’s call for choose-your-own-adventure story writing to heart, but doesn’t end up experiencing the same kind of success that Miller has, it would seem that more damage than good could be done.
It’s not that the book isn’t worth reading; I very much enjoyed and benefitted from much of Miller’s literary take on story, narrative, and agency for one’s life. He writes about the importance of not playing the victim or the villain in life’s circumstances, opting instead to pursue the roles of hero and (later) guide for the good of others. The inspiration also comes with tools for perspiration via his website, with exercises for writing one’s eulogy, casting long-term and short-term visions, and getting things done by way of a mission daily planner.
In addition, Miller’s thoughts and interactions on the work of Holocaust survivor and philosopher Viktor Frankl and his teaching on “logotherapy” were helpful to consider, as was Miller’s outline of what he says goes into being a “hero”:
The hero must want something
The hero must engage their challenges
The hero learns from their mistakes and misfortune
The hero is not ashamed to want something
The hero wants something mutually beneficial
The hero wants to share
The hero is in touch with their primal desires
The hero makes a choice about what they want
The hero is guided by a controlling idea
The hero finds a story that sticks
The hero asks, “What if?”
The hero can join another story
The hero does not lose the plot in their story
The hero makes living intentionally a habit
What’s missing from the list? The hero is willing to sacrifice and die for another.
This absence, I think is telling, as what used to be more of an evangelical understanding of the Gospel seems now for Miller a cross that, for lack of a better phrase, is little more than a bloodless stick. Miller does not see value in church, claims no membership in a local body of believers, and while he says he prays, the statement begs the questions “to Whom?” and “why?” in light of his Deistic stance.
There’s no question that Miller understands the aspects of story and the need for narrative when connecting with people; both his writing and his speaking are winsome and engaging to follow, and both have served him well as he has made the transition to the business world. In addition, Miller married late in life and he and his wife just had their first child, a daughter, who I’m sure will draw out new aspects of Miller’s thinking and writing that would have gone unearthed otherwise.
But as good as the literary teaching is, I have to qualify it as incomplete, for no story is written by a character within the same book, play, or movie. Miller calls for us as creatures to be the sole crafters of our own narratives because he mistakes our Creator as being indifferent to our plight. Nothing could be further from the truth (see Romans 8 for just one of hundreds of examples).
To conclude, Hero on a Mission seeks to make us the hero of our own story, but God is already the Hero of the greatest story ever told. Let’s learn to tell that one better, trusting God to write our story according to His will and for our (ultimate) good.
May Peaches’ Pick: Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis
Part memoir, part history, part apologetic, C.S. Lewis’ book, Surprised by Joy, is Peaches’ Pick for May. From the back cover:
“C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—takes readers on a spiritual journey through his early life and eventual embrace of the Christian faith. Lewis begins with his childhood in Belfast, surveys his boarding school years and his youthful atheism in England, reflects on his experience in World War I, and ends at Oxford, where he became ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ As he recounts his lifelong search for joy, Lewis demonstrates its role in guiding him to find God.”
Pick up a copy and read along with us! Book review to be published Saturday, May 28.