Too Small to Fail: How Tiny Habits Lead to Dramatic Changes | Elaine Griffin | 7 Min Read

January 28, 2025

At the launch of a new year, many of us examine our lives and make lofty goals for the year ahead. However, in his book, Atomic Habits, James Clear makes a counterintuitive suggestion: think small. Clear argues that if we truly wish to make lasting changes in our bodies and ourselves, cultivating modest habits is actually much more effective than developing extravagant, long-range goals.

As explained by Clear, habits can change your character and reshape your destiny. Lofty and intimidating goals are built to crash and burn while modestly crafted habits will stay the course. The hare, after all, didn’t win the race in Aesop’s fable. The tortoise did. In this article, I’ll share Clear’s philosophy to help you and your children (or students) find a way to take small steps that will lead towards big changes in 2025.

At the start of Atomic Habits, Clear describes a terrible accident that changed his life. After getting hit with a bat during a baseball game in high school, he spent months in rehabilitation. And while he subsequently earned a spot as a freshman on Denison University’s baseball team, he was basically a third-string water boy.

But instead of bemoaning the chasm separating what he had once been and now was, Clear began focusing on small improvements. While his peers stayed up playing video games, he went to sleep early. While they lived in messy rooms, he kept his clean. He committed to a strength-training routine and dedicated himself to studying. 

Each of the changes was small. But they added up to something monumental.  

Clear began earning straight A’s. He was named the top male athlete at Denison University. And he got the idea for this excellent book. My “experience taught me a critical lesson,” he writes. “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.” In essence, he argues, “the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.” 

Clear gives another illustrative example involving the British cycling team — once so bad that bike manufacturers didn’t want to sell to them, for fear of devaluing their brands. All that changed in 2003, when Dave Brailsford became its performance director and put his philosophy of “the aggregation of marginal gains” to work. That’s fancy talk for looking at every single aspect of riding and finding ways to marginally improve it, even if only by 1%. 

The Brits made infinitesimal improvements to bike seats, tire traction, and racing fabrics.  

They tested muscle gels to see which one promoted the fastest recovery. They emphasized handwashing so teammates wouldn’t get sick. They researched the best pillows and mattresses to make sure riders got a good night’s sleep. They even painted the inside of their van white so that they could see where dust gathered on the bikes and remove it. Five years later, they dominated team cycling events during the Beijing Olympics. The moral: no step is too small, as long as every one of them cycles forward.

Before I take another spin forward, I want to tell you what Clear’s book is not about. You might think that because Clear won an award for being the best athlete or because Brailsford’s cyclists won gold medals, this is a book about developing habits to achieve goals. 

It isn’t. 

Clear believes habits matter much more than goals. Your habits reflect who you are. Your habits are your character. Since this is a book column, let me explain Clear’s point this way: If you read every day, you’re a reader. Whether you reach a goal of reading a certain number of books per year matters much less than the fact that you care about the world of ideas and take time to read about them. If your daughter is a dedicated student and studies every day, she may never earn all A’s. But her dedication will foster intellectual growth. Lead to greater opportunities. And make her a better human being. 

When people focus on goals, Clear argues, they miss the incremental improvements that are themselves worth celebrating. A dieter whose sole focus involves reaching an arbitrary number on a scale will miss the arguably more important benefits healthy eating offers: an improved complexion and higher energy level, greater self-esteem and increased odds of a longer life. 

What does this mean for you as a parent?  

Let me be blunt: You’re missing the boat and short-changing your kids if you tell them to get straight A’s, get a spot on varsity, or get the lead role in the play. 

Goals are results, not processes; once the goal is reached, the work is done. Conversely, habits are processes; when you do them every day, you internalize them — whether you are given rewards or not. Encourage your kids to develop life-long habits, and you will shape their characters for the better, which is far more important than winning any shiny object. “Watch your habits, they become your character,” Lao Tzu wrote, 2,500 years ago. “Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

Here’s five “atomic” takeaways to power discussions with your children about forming habits that can change their lives. Ensure that those discussions are dialogues rather than monologues — opportunities to listen and engage rather than instruct and prescribe. Letting your children collaborate in such discussions is a good habit I’ll recommend you cultivate in this and every conversation with them. Ultimately, it’s their future — not yours — that’s being discussed.   

  1. To start a new Habit, you need a detailed plan: By simply adding a day, a time, and a place next to the habit you desire, you will exponentially increase your chances of sticking to it. Clear cites a study involving an exercise regimen suggesting that you’re three times as likely to make it stick if you develop a daily schedule regarding when and where it will happen.
  1. Pair a habit you want with an already established habit. Clear calls this “habit stacking,” and it works because once you’ve tied your desired behavior to something you already do, you’ve created a cue that reminds you about the new habit and creates momentum for completing it. Here are two examples he gives of habit stacking: After I take off my work clothes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes. Or, after I pour my morning coffee, I will immediately meditate for ten minutes. Habit stacking implicitly has the time and location of the new habit built into it, because the new habit fits next to something in your established routine.
  1. Make your new habit obvious: You need to be the architect of your environment because we are creatures of our environment. If you want to drink more water, have a water bottle within reach. If you want to read before bed, place the book on your pillow after making your bed each morning. People have an easier time committing to good habits that are right in front of them. The converse is also true: if you want to avoid a bad habit, make it less visible. You’ll watch less TV after moving your TV from the family room to the basement. You’ll eat less junk food by moving it from the front to the back of the shelf. 
  1. Habits need to be attractive for us to repeat them: Your dopamine-craving brain is more likely to develop a habit if that habit makes you feel good. Clear suggests that you try “temptation bundling”: combine an action you want to do with an action you need to do. If one of your guilty pleasures is watching reality TV, then only watch it while on the treadmill. If your son needs to study for a test, you could suggest he reward himself after an hour of studying with a 15-minute break to watch ESPN. Here’s the formula: After I [habit I need], I will [habit I want].
  1. Do a habit for two minutes: You can do almost anything for two minutes! The most successful habits start small. They are a “gateway” that naturally leads you down a more productive, ambitious path. An exercise newbie promising to hit the gym for an hour each day is setting herself up to fail. But if you’ve promised that you’ll do two minutes of stretching at home — even on those days when it’s hard to muster up any energy — you maintain momentum. Just show up and stop trying to be perfect!

Clear suggests making a list of your current habits and evaluating them. Decide which habits you want to keep, which you want to avoid, and which new habits you want to develop. Focus on small habits to make your life incrementally better. “Imagine,” he writes, “the cumulative impact of making dozens of these changes and living in an environment designed to make the good behaviors easier and the bad behaviors harder.” 

Ask yourself: What things could I do to make some aspects of my life 1% better? If I did those things every day, who and where would I be in a year? You and your children can remake your own history, one habit and one day at a time. 


You may also be interested in reading more book reviews written by Elaine Griffin for Intrepid Ed News.

Elaine Griffin

Elaine Griffin is the Middle School Head at University School of Milwaukee, where she had previously served as an Upper School literature teacher and administrator for more than 20 years. Her essays have previously appeared in Education Next, The Once and Future Classroom, Chinese Language Matters, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Her professional interests include parent education, curricular reform, and social-emotional learning.

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