Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As many other readers have pointed out, the utterly superficial and completely obvious points made in this book could have been encompassed in an article or a pamphlet. I am absolutely baffled that this book is currently a bestseller with so many 5-star reviews. Are we just becoming dumber as a society? This book pulls points shamelessly from various well-known research and works by other authors, and Clear seems to think that mentioning and praising their work with an air of humility and admiration somehow justifies the fact that he is recycling, and not presenting anything new here. Then there are the quotes sourced from places like Reddit and Twitter (which will only be recognized by those of us who are more detail-oriented and who dig a little deeper)... which just makes it seem like we could all just go directly to Twitter or Reddit for our own inspiration. I wanted to abandon this book before I was even a fourth of the way through it, but I stubbornly hung in there, wanting to remain open-minded and to give it a chance. Then sentences like "Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm," and "Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly" began to jump out at me more and more. And don't even let me get started on the charts and "graphs" that the author uses to support his painfully obvious points -- they are so insulting to the intelligence of any functioning adult of reasonable intellect that I found myself wanting to chuck this book with each subsequent "illustration" I encountered. (X and Y axis values, anyone?) If you are contemplating purchasing this book, and you are a reasonably intelligent adult -- don't. Don't waste your money, and more importantly, your precious time. Any grains of wisdom in this book, you can easily pick up from browsing through the preview. There is no additional wisdom, or useful strategies, to be found -- unless, perhaps, you have literally never read one single thing about the neuroscience behind habit formation. One decent Google search on strategies to form good habits and to break bad ones will readily get you more useful ideas than this entire 300 page book with its numerous references and links to Clear's website. Based on so many good reviews, and on browsing through the book preview, I had rather optimistic hopes for Atomic Habits. I was incredibly disappointed.