James Clear’s Habits Advice Sold 26 Million Books, And It Will Change Your 2026

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23:49one of my favorite things to do is read and when you have four kids and you know five companies and a podcast and other stuff going on it gets really hot right it's like it doesn't ever feel like the cozy moment to like have a little read but i started doing you know like 10 minutes in the morning and I put my workout kit on and I sit in like the dark kitchen and I'm like, you know what, this is the moment. And for me, that was always useless because I like to read for an hour. I want a 90 minute clear moment where I can dive into something. And I'm like, you know what, I've only got the 10 minutes.

24:20So I'll just do that. And it, for me, it like restored me as like, no, I am still a reader. I get through books a lot more slowly these days, but it's like something that I love and something that's meaningful for me. And so that little 10 minutes just like restores me back to like, I haven't given up on this thing. That's still a part of me. It's just a little 10 minutes. That's such a great example of giving yourself permission to do the small version. You know, it doesn't have to be the perfect version. It still matters. Those 10 minutes still matter. All the minutes matter. You write about this really interesting thing.

24:51And you say time management is meaningless without energy management, which I love. What are your personal rules for protecting your energy? So, you know, we all, everybody always said, everybody only has 24 hours in a day. Well, that's true. But those hours, if you were to break them out into 24 one hour blocks are not equivalent. You have different control over certain hours than you do for others. You have different energy during certain hours than you do for others. I think the question is, when are my good hours? When are my best hours? And how do I want to structure those things? I found my big change this year has been shifting my workouts earlier in the day and just saying, it's probably going to impact business stuff a little bit.

25:31But if I say my health is important to me, it needs to get some of my better hours. What was happening last year is it was only getting my leftovers. And I was like, well, I said this was important, but then you look at how you're spending your time and it's not. So yeah, I think that's one thing. The second thing, I think probably the more useful answer to this question, it's so hard to tell people like, how should you spend your time, right? That's everybody's personal decision. But the practice that I find most useful and that I think would be helpful for others as well, is a practice of reflection and review.

26:00So just purely mathematically speaking, what are the odds that what you're spending time on right now is the highest and best use of your time? It's very unlikely out of the universe of options. Well, if you're listening to this podcast right now, I beg to differ. But otherwise, if you weren't. So the odds are that there's something better for you to be spending your time on. And the only way to find that is to have time to reflect and review. What I found is if you have a strong work ethic and you've found that working hard serves you well in life, then that's really good. But sometimes it can become a crutch.

26:38You know, it's like for me, for a long time, my solution, if I had a problem was, well, I'll just work my way out of it. And that works for a while. But what really matters, if you really push, maybe you can work like 10 % harder or 20 % harder. But if you work on the right thing, you could get like 100x outcome or 1000x better results. And so you don't only need to work hard. You also need to make sure you're working on the right thing. And I don't think you can just stumble your way into that. I think you need to carve out time to reflect and review. What do I really want out of my life? What am I focused on?

27:10There are some questions I like to ask myself to try to like figure this out. Will you share those? Because I really believe, especially at this time of year, like looking back, being reflective, being super, super honest with yourself is probably one of the most valuable things you can do. But it's really hard for people because all the shit you didn't do was your fault, usually, you know, so it can actually be a very difficult process to do, honestly. How do you do it? So here's some of the questions I like. And no single question will give you the total answer, but collectively, they can start to move you in the right direction.

27:44So the first question is, what am I optimizing for? Different people optimize for different things, you will optimize for different things at different times in your life. Sometimes maybe you're optimizing for money. Sometimes you optimize for creative freedom. Sometimes you optimize for family or free time, but whatever the answer is, it's probably pretty personal to you. And it's worth it to think about what am I optimizing for? And it's critical, right? Like to be that, because again, when you're saying, you know, it's about the money or it's about the quality of work, or I'm optimizing to spend more time with my family, like that is key to your decision-making.

28:17So you really need to get that clarity. It's key to your decision-making and it gives you permission to not do other things that maybe you are berating yourself about right now. Oh, why aren't I spending time on that? And then once you realize that's not what I'm optimizing. So you're using that question almost as a process of elimination. Sometimes, yeah. Okay, I like it because you know, I'm just like, I like to work the backwards way into everything. So that's helpful. So second question is, what season am I in right now? So once I know what I'm optimizing for, life has different seasons. You know, sometimes you're in a career-heavy season.

28:51Sometimes you're in a family-heavy season. There are all sorts of inflection points. And it could be everything as big as I had kids or all my kids moved out and now I'm an empty nester or, you know, I'm starting a new job. Or it could be as small as I took on a new project at work and, you know, that's changing things. But when your seasons change, your habits often need to change too. And I find that I'm kind of a slow learner in that regard. I kept, especially after we had our second kid, I kept trying to force fit my old habits into my current life. Totally. And then eventually... After my second kid, I was trying to force fit my old body into my old clothes.

29:25But I understand. It's the same thing. It took me about a year and a half. And then I realized, stop being a dummy about it. It took me about a year and a half too, James. This is amazing stuff. We have so much in common. So what season you're in dictates the habits that you're going to follow. After you've spent some time thinking about what am I optimizing for and what season am I in, you can ask yourself, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? Am I on the right path? If your current habits can get you there, then great. Maybe all you need is patience. But if they can't, something needs to change.

29:55And so that helps you distinguish like, am I just being impatient about this? Or do I need to make some bigger adjustments to what I'm doing each day? The other question I like kind of adjacent to this is, I call it like the, I don't know, like the alien test or something. But like imagine some alien came down from outer space and they were going to follow you around for the day. You can't talk to them. They don't understand your language. All they can do is see how you spend your time. Oh, Lord. What would they say your priorities are? That. Right? If they can't hear your words and they can only see your actions, what would they say your priorities are?

30:25That's great. Because a lot of the time, I find that the distractions that are most dangerous are the ones you have a good story for. You know, it's like, it's usually items that are like numbers three through seven on your to-do list because you're like, well, look, it's number three. It's number four. It's on here. I need to do this. but you have a good enough story for it that it prevents you from doing priorities one and two. And that stuff, that's your most dangerous distractions will always seem justified to you. And so you need to be ruthless about where you're spending your time and what you're focusing on.

30:57Yeah. So those are some of the questions. I mean, again, all kind of hard questions, right? What am I optimizing for? What season am I in? Again, you really have to be quite reflective about yourself to truly go like, really what season is right? I think you need to sit down and think about it. You're not just going to stumble into the answer. Because we tell ourselves a lot of stuff, right? We go, you know, I've just had a baby or I'm just like this. We just had a move and you kind of categorize yourself in these moments of your life. But it's like, is that really the truth? And how hard do you hold on to the season?

31:34You know, sometimes we get kind of comfortable in these identities that we make for ourselves. When in actual fact, it's like that's just something you used to say. It became, that became the habit. The, what you just said is a really important truth, which is the tighter that you cling to your current identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. And so you see that identity is kind of a two-edged sword. Yes. On the one hand, you know, we were talking earlier, identity is really useful. It helps you build habits. It helps you establish being this type of person. It helps you, it gives you something to hang on to and something for the habit to build around.

32:04But at some point, growth is unlearning. It's unlearning the things that you were holding onto. It's unlearning the habits that used to serve you in a previous season, but maybe don't serve you anymore. And now it's time for something new. The other question that's a little more tactical, these questions have been kind of bigger and philosophical. I love being philosophical. Yeah, so do I. It's January. It's like, let's go deep. This is the time. Let's go in. But some of the other ones that are good are a little bit more tactical. One question is, what habits are upstream from other good things happening?

32:37So when you live a good day, when you feel like you're productive or you're kind of dialed in, it's like, oh, that was a really good day. What are the major pieces of that day? And most people have two or three things that kind of bubble up. Like I know for me, if I get my workout in, that's a big part of it. Usually if I read, even if it's only for like five or 10 minutes, that's a part of it. For me, reading is often more important than writing because the reading sparks ideas to write about. So maybe those are two things that I would say are upstream from other good things happening. This thing happens when you think about what habits you want to build.

33:09It's really easy to pick a list of like six or seven or 10. And that's too many things to focus on at once. Is it too many things? I think so. It's just hard. It's very hard to perform at a high level while you're spreading yourself in seven different directions. What do you say? What's optimal? As I say to the woman with five businesses. I have a lot of people. I'm relying on a lot of other people's habits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I find that I can get away with, if you're just talking about I'm trying to build a new habit, But I find that I can get away with one professionally and one personally at the same time.

33:39And part of that is because habits are deeply tied to context, to environment. So if you were to talk to like an academic or something, they would tell you the definition of a habit is this automatic, non-conscious behavior, you know, brushing your teeth or tying your shoes or something you don't even think about. But I think a more useful definition for what a habit is, is it's a behavior that is tied to a particular context. context. So your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the context of your couch at 7pm. And if you walk into your living room at seven, and you're like, hey, I want to build a new habit, I want to start journaling, your brain is kind of subtly being pulled toward, hey, this is time to pick up the remote and turn the TV on.

34:19So one thing, and there have been a number of studies that have found this, it's easier to build a new habit if you have a new environment. Now, that doesn't mean that you always need like a brand new room. But you could, for example, you could get a chair and you could put it in the corner of the room and you could say, this is the journaling chair. And the only thing that happens when I sit down here is I journal for five minutes. And now that context is starting to get tied to the new habit and becomes easier for it to get established and for it to be built. And James, those things are important because as I, even as you say it, I'm like, do I really need a chair?

34:50Like, do I need the chair? Do I need a chair? You're like, yes. It doesn't have to be a chair. It can be a pillow. But you're like, you need something. Like, human nature means that we need that. You can't have a habit outside of an environment. It's not possible. We live in environments all day long. We're in some space always. And so if you want the behavior to be reliable, it helps for it to have a reliable place to live, for it to have a reliable space. Maybe that's the meditation pillow in the corner. Maybe it's the journaling chair. Maybe it's something else. But it happens in the same place each time.

35:23And that helps it get established. Now, once it's established, maybe you find that you can adapt it a little bit more or whatever. And sometimes when I hear from people who travel a lot, they kind of complain about it because they're like, well, I'm always switching context. So how do I do it? And in that situation, I would recommend find a part of the experience that is reliable. Oh, talk to me about that because I am religious about my workouts until I travel. And then I'm like, well, I'm traveling. I can't possibly do it because my train is not here and my stuff's not here. And I don't like, do you know, like I make that the total excuse.

35:55So like, let's say you don't know what hotel you're going to be in, but you know that you're going to check into a hotel and you know that whenever you go up to your room, you take your bag and you set down the luggage and you unpack it or whatever. That's the first thing you do. Well, if that is part of your typical process, you could say, all right, my new habit is going to be after I check in, I set my bag on the luggage rack and then I do 10 push-ups or whatever it is. And you find a way to tie it to that part of the experience that is reliable. That's the context that's reliable. Even though the environment's changing, that sequence is always the same.

36:27You got to tie it to the experience. This is what, in Atomic Habits, I refer to this as a habit stack or habit stacking. Oh, I love the habit stacking. That is, I have to tell you, thank you for that. Because it is one of the best takeouts. I want you to explain it. And then I'm going to tell you my favorite habit stack. Because I just did it. But to me, that was like, I use the phrase game changer too much. But that was so game changing for me. It really was the big, like if I could take one big takeout from your book, it was the one. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Well, it's not my idea. BJ Fogg, who's a professor at Stanford, came up with it.

36:59You could have taken it. Yeah, no, no, no. His insight, which I think is great, is that habits are easier to build or they're more likely to stick when you tie them or stack them to something you're already doing. So let's say that you make a cup of coffee every morning already. And your new habit is you want to meditate. Your habit stack could be, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds. And then once you start to get good at it, you can start to build them out a little bit. So you can say, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds. After I meditate for 60 seconds, I will write my to-do list for the day.

37:34After I write my to-do list for the day, I'll start working on the first item. And you've got this little stack of behaviors that you do in the same order every time, and it's tied to something you're already doing. And so it's just more likely that you follow through. A lot of people, I feel like they wake up and they kind of think, they have this general sense of, I hope I feel motivated to write today, or I hope I find time to meditate today. and you're never going to find it if it's just like that. You need like a specific place to insert it into your routine. Yes. And so part one of a habit stack is find the right place to insert it.

38:05Maybe it's your morning routine. Maybe it's some other time. But when is the right time for this habit to live and the right habit to trigger the new thing that you want to do? Yeah. And I think that it's that connection point that is really, really important. For me, you stole it because it was coffee followed by meditation because I have to, like nothing happens for me if it doesn't happen in the morning. So that was like a really, amazing one because putting those two things together has just become, that's my everyday. Like that's what I do. I would never skip the coffee. I would never skip brushing my teeth.

38:34I never skipped the meditation. And it goes like in that order. But my other favorite one is like when I travel, I like will take my kids. Like if I can like, but my trip up, you know, it's supposed to be on a Wednesday. I move it to a Thursday, which means like I can have a kid be with me over the weekend. And it's just such a like delicious little thing because it turns something that's like, okay, I've got to be away from the kids again into actually know this is our little moment to have like the offshoot time. And it's me with one kid in a city doing something that otherwise that would never have happened.

39:05And it's not, it literally has become such a habit for me that I'm looking for those moments in my schedule where I can make it happen. And I was like, this is, this is beautiful. And they probably love it too. They do. They do love it too. Who doesn't love one-on-one time with their mom? You obviously have worked with a lot of leaders, CEOs, like seriously high executives. And I wonder if there are like consistent habits that you see with leaders, like right across the board. I'm going to call these like an anchor habit or something. So it's like, what's the one thing that you do that you feel like primes you for peak performance?

39:38And there are some common ones that come up. Creatives often mentioned going for like a daily walk of some sort, gets their creative juices flowing, helps them see things clearly. Performers, musicians, comedians, things like that talk a lot about visualization routines, especially before they step out on stage. So that's another one. I'm going to come back to that in a second. CEOs and executives, meditation is, I would say, the most common one that I hear. You know, did I get my 10 or 15 or 20 minutes in in the morning? It feels like it sets the rest of the day up for success. And then workout is another really common one.

40:08Not, I don't know anybody that does all four of those every day or anything, but those are the common ones that come out and maybe you can figure out which one sounds best for you. The visualization one is an interesting one that I've been thinking about recently and also learning more about. I was talking to this guy the other day who is, I have a, in addition to my writing, I also run a publishing company and we're co-founded a book publishing company. First of all, we have to touch on that a little bit. Yeah, sure. It's kind of amazing what you're doing. So anyway, he's one of the authors that we're publishing.

40:36This guy named Brandon Webb, who is a, he previously trained the Navy SEAL snipers in mental performance. And he's also a father. He has three kids. And so he took a lot of the mental techniques that he used with them. And he also is teaching them to his kids, who now are older. kids. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Now they're older. They're great. They're all doing well. They're in college and whatever. But one of them, one of the key things that they talk to both Seals and his children is visualization techniques. And specifically, it is a positive outlook in any scenario and visualizing what a positive day might look like.

41:08So I actually ended up, I read a little bit about this. I talked to him a little bit. And then I started, I did this with my son the other day. So I have young kids. My son's born five, three, and 10 months. Yeah. You're in it. That's the best. I love that you say it's the best. It is. It's so nice. It's the best. Anyway, my three-year-old started preschool and he had a hard drop off the first day or two. You know, he's crying, fussing a little bit, doesn't really like it, whatever. So the third day comes and I'm getting him up. I were having breakfast and I was like, all right, today's a preschool day.

41:37And he was like, eh. And I was like, all right, hold on. So you like your teachers, Ms. Caitlin, Ms. Jayla, right? He was like, yeah. I said, what'd you do yesterday? You got to use glue sticks and the crayons. Like that was fun activity. He was like, yeah. I said, what about snack time? You like snack time and lunch? He's like, yeah. And then I said, what do you do after school? He said, well, when we get done, we go play on the playground for like 30 minutes. And that was it. I just stopped there. I feel like, you know, I'm not trying to like hammer at home. You love preschool, don't you? You know, whatever.

42:02But just a little bit. And then what I'm trying to do is get him to visualize the day going well. And you can see how this could help you at any stage, you know, when they're in fourth grade and they're giving their first presentation in front of the class. Like let's visualize what a good day would look like. And the more that you do that, I think it's just, to me, it's like, which story are you emphasizing? You know, there are good things and bad things that happen in every day. There are good things and bad things that happen in every life. And we're all going to have our time when it's your turn and life comes for you and things get challenging.

42:35But what story are you choosing to emphasize? And what I want is for them to emphasize the day going well, or for them to emphasize the positive moments. I played, I played baseball for a long time. I played through college. And when I was 10, 12, 14, at the end of each season, we go out on the back deck and I would sit out there with my dad. And we would talk about the wins from the season. We talk about the best games that we played and like the team. We talk about my best plays or like, you know, games that I had that went really well. We would talk about the good parts. And what happened was I would end each season.

43:07I'd have this catalog of memories of things that went well. And it would send you into the next season feeling good. And so I think it can both be done beforehand to rehearse what would a good day look like. And it can also be done afterward, reflecting what were some of the wins from my last year or from my last month and emphasizing some of those pieces of your story because it puts you in a better position to be persistent and to stick with it the next day. One time I was talking to David Epstein. He's the author of Range and Sports Gene, a couple of books. And he told me grit is fit. Grit is fit.

43:41Grit is fit. And what he means is that people often talk about wanting to be disciplined and persevere. They want to have mental toughness. But really, what mental toughness looks like is it looks like you are well-suited for what you're facing. It looks like you have a good fit with what you're dealing with. Because the person who is well-suited for it, the person who is a good fit, is having fun. They're having a good time. And so the person who is having fun doing that thing is a person you do not want to compete with. because when it gets hard, they're more likely to stick with it. The person who's not having fun, who it was a chore and a hassle and kind of a, they had like a negative frame around the whole thing to start.

44:21Well, as soon as it gets difficult, what are they going to do? They're going to give up. And so I think all of this weaves together to create this kind of mindset of resilience, which is you try to visualize what the day would look like if it went well. After things are done, you reflect on what the wins were and what was positive. And you look around and try to find the things that are fun for you. I actually think if I could add one question to Atomic Habits, one thing that's not in the book. I was going to see that. It was going to be this question of what would this look like if it was fun?

44:52You know, and so for any habit that you're trying to build, that doesn't mean that your habits will always feel like going to a concert or like the most fun part of your day. But pretty much any habit can be more fun than the default. Oh, yeah. And And just take the time to figure out what that version is for you.

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47:36I speak to so many founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs on this podcast, and they come in and they've lost money, they've lost companies, they've gone bankrupt. And I speak, and I will just say this, and I'll probably get killed for it. Mostly the men will tell me how much fun they had. and it didn't matter anyway because they were in it and they were thriving and they could get back up and do it again. And you can see it lights them up in a way. And I'm like, you're made to be an entrepreneur. You're made to be a founder because it is hard. It is difficult. You will lose. It's not always great. But you can see the people that thrive in that environment.

48:16And so to me, it makes so much sense. Like grit is fit. Like it's, that is extremely true. I love being an entrepreneur, but I don't really care if my kids want to be entrepreneurs or not. What I want is for them to find something that lights them up the way that that lights me up. You know, because all you really want is for them to be interested and invested and curious and excited about it. And if that energy is there, there's a million ways to improve. And you'll be successful and you'll be happy. And those are the things, that's all that any of us want for our kids. I think the big problem is, because I love that you speak about visualization.

48:51It's so much easier for people to sit in the place and be reflective about what didn't work out, right? It's like in a way, like we spend a lot of our time and a lot of our energy naturally goes toward what didn't work out. And it's almost like that opposite of what you're saying is the right thing to do. I think what's tricky, I'm trying to get better at this. I think what's tricky is there's a place for pessimism. There's a place for questioning and criticism. But the way that I've been thinking about recently is optimism in the beginning, pessimism in the middle, optimism at the end. So optimism in the beginning.

49:27Yeah, right. A little pessimism sandwich. Optimism in the beginning is I try, I don't always do a great job of it, but I try to not be my own bottleneck. I don't want to be the first person to tell myself no. I would rather the world tell me no first, and then I can learn. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe it's not going to work, but I don't want to say no. So what does that look like in practice for you? Like if you're going to be optimistic at the start setting out to do this workbook or to, you know, open your new publishing company? What does that sound like? My little shorthand in my head is work backwards from magic.

50:02So what is the magical outcome? Let's dream that up. There are no constraints. There are no restrictions. Let's figure out what the magical outcome is. And then let's try to work backwards from there and figure out a way to make it happen. But what we're not going to do is dream up the magical outcome and then talk about all the ways that it won't happen and then not attempt it to start. So optimism at the beginning. But then once you have a little bit of a plan formulated or you know what that magical outcome is, pessimism can be useful. And specifically, the question that can be useful is, if this is going to fail, how does it fail?

50:34If we're sitting here in two years and something went wrong, what's going wrong? I'm working on a couple of big projects right now. When I sit down with the team, I say two things. First is, I don't need to be right. I'm going to have a lot of questions or a lot of ideas, and I'm going to propose things. But I don't need to be the one who is right. What I want is for us to get it right. So I don't need to be right, but we need to get it right. And then the second question is, I'm a slow learner. So what am I going to figure out eventually in a year or two or five that you guys are looking at now and you're saying, if he only knew, then he would do it differently.

51:10Or what am I going to see in two years? And I'm like, well, now this is a real pain in the ass. I wish we would have figured it out then. The question that I asked for that is, what's not being said right now that needs to be said? Oh, yes. So I don't need to be right. I want us to get it right. And what's not being said that needs to be said? And if we can lay all that out and have an honest conversation, then I feel like the pessimism is useful. Because it's helping us improve the plan. But once we get through that exercise, now we got to go back. And now I don't want to hear anybody not on board, right?

51:40Now we all need to believe. Because the only way to make it happen is if we're all the way in. If you're trying to do something hard and it's going to be difficult anyway, we're going to face plenty of obstacles. I don't need to be talking myself out of it from the start. Let's not have it internally. How do you think about organizations and culture and habits? Like, is it possible to implement good habits within a company? Definitely. At some level, I feel like I get questions like this a lot from companies. I honestly think at some level, it's like an HR problem. And what I mean is, do you have the right people on the boat?

52:14You know, is everybody rowing in the same direction or are people rowing in opposite directions? And then you're wondering why you're not making any progress. Some people just want different things, you know, and that question of what are we optimizing for? Is everybody here agreed on what the answer to that is? And a lot of the time... And even if you're not, are you rowing in the same direction? It's me because otherwise you have to get off the boat. Yeah. So that's tough. And, you know, and sometimes, a lot of the time, you also are trying to do both. You're trying to get the right people on, but you're also trying to make progress with the people that you have.

52:42And I think there are some things that can help there. Role modeling is the biggest one. Don't ask people to do things that you're not willing to do, you know, or like what kind of, how do you want to show up as a leader? The best, the best form of motivation is not like fear of punishment. It's respect and wanting to reach that standard because they aspire to be the way that you are. Oh yeah. So you're saying the best way to implement great habits in an organization is for the leadership to model the habits that they want. For the leader to be competent. Yeah. I mean, that's like, you start there.

53:14Now, there are lots of other things that can come after that. One interesting, the bigger the organization gets, the trickier it becomes because it kind of becomes like a game of telephone. It's hella me. You know, it's like you have something that you say is a priority. And then as soon as it gets passed through the ranks, it gets filtered. And the message that finally lands to a lot of people is totally different than what you wanted. So it gets hard. You need to focus on fewer things. I heard the story that Microsoft, when they were launching Azure, which is their cloud computing product, they wanted both reliability, no bugs in the software, security.

53:55And they also wanted speed. We want you guys to ship quickly and have a lot of features. And they knew that if they told the team that both of those things were a priority, they would just use one as an excuse for why the other wasn't happening. Oh, you said you want us to ship quickly. Of course it had bugs. Oh, you said you didn't want any bugs. That's why it's taking a long time. And so they decided, all right, for the first year, it's just going to be about speed. And so the message to everybody was speed, speed, speed, iterate fast, ship quickly. Then after the first or second year, they shifted and they said, okay, now we have a fully built out feature set.

54:27Security is the main priority and speed is less important now. But it shows that clearly both of these things matter, but they had to choose. And I think you also have to choose as a leader. What are you emphasizing? Because the message is going to get muddy if you're trying to emphasize multiple things. Yeah, no, it's incredibly good advice. I mean, you've been so unbelievably successful now. And obviously we're talking about your publishing in print, which I think is quite brilliant. What made you decide to start your own thing, given all the success? I mean, anyone in the world would have taken whatever it was you were working on next.

55:01So why bother to do it yourself? I think it's fun to try to make things better. And so, yeah, I... You saw a bunch of problems in the publishing industry. Right. Yeah, you know, I launched Atomic Habits and I love the team that I worked with, but I think the model is broken. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but did you... I just got my copy of your book so I can make sure you sign it. And it's annoying because it's not the one that I've read a hundred times. It's a new copy that came from a sales and it says 20 million copies sold, which I think is now 25 million. Did you visualize that? Did you imagine that?

55:35Did you optimize for that? I don't think any reasonable person could have expected that. I had two things in mind. I thought, can I sell 100 ,000 copies in the first year? That was, I had, so my email list was about 400 ,000 when I launched. It's like 3 million-ish now. I thought, okay, maybe I can, if I push it hard, if I do a bunch of interviews, if I do the whole thing, can I do that? And the book is good, obviously. You knew the book was good. No, no, I'm saying if the book is good, maybe it could do that. You don't know until you launch it, right? No, you don't. So 100 ,000 the first year was my first thought.

56:10And then the second was, can it sell a million copies ever? So if I make the timeline long, could it sell a million copies in 20 years? Habits are still relevant in 20 years. 40 ,000 copies a year for 20 years? I don't know if I keep growing and keep writing about this stuff. Maybe that's possible. Those were the two things that were in my mind. So I did not expect to sell 25 million and five or whatever, but it was, yeah, it's been great. It's been pretty good. I wanted to ask you how success has actually changed your own habits. Like, have you changed the way you think about habits and discipline and your own purpose?

56:43That's interesting. Some stuff changes and some stuff doesn't change. I feel like the important stuff probably doesn't change. You know, like at the very beginning, I was just trying to be useful and share ideas that were helpful to people. I think that's basically the same now as it ever has been. You know, it's like, how can I be useful? How can I share something that's helpful? Congratulations, you succeeded. Yeah, thanks. Your time gets tighter. So that's different. You have to make decisions that seem almost kind of silly sometimes. Like if you do a good job at your thing, then your opportunity cost should increase every year, which means that things that used to be like the coolest thing that would come across my desk in a month, now I have to say no to.

57:21And that still feels kind of silly. Yeah. I can't have as tight of a relationship with the readers as I used to. The first 10 ,000 people that signed up to my email list, I emailed each of them individually. No, you didn't. They would sign up. I'd be getting like, let's say I would have like, you know, 50 people sign up in a day. I'd send 50 emails the next day to those people just saying, hey, thanks so much for signing up. I'm really excited to have you as part of this community. I'll be sharing more soon or, you know, something like that. You can do that for a while, but once it got over 10 ,000, I can't do it anymore.

57:47Then once it got over like 100 ,000, it was hard for me to reply to the emails. And certainly over a million, you know, I just basically had to put the inbox on autoresponder, which is fine. It's, you know, it's not terrible for anybody. It's just that I don't feel like I have quite as good of a read on the audience. I used to know it so well, you know, So the scale makes that part a little tricky, but it's all good. I mean, you know, what can you hope for? It's like best possible outcome. I mean, it's literally the best possible outcome, but does it stop you from thinking about doing something else?

58:16Has it been too successful? I don't think so. I hope not. I heard the story that when Adele wrote someone like me, or sorry, someone like you, that after that, she felt like the best song I've ever made is done now. Yeah. So you kind of feel like, oh, you peaked. I don't feel that way about Atomic Habits. You know, I feel like it can just be a project that I worked really hard on and did my best. And a lot of people liked it. And the next thing can just be another project that I work really hard on and do my best. And we'll see how that goes. But I don't think it needs to be more than that. You know, like I'm not making it my entire identity or life or whatever.

58:52I'm proud of it. I'm glad that people find it helpful. But I'll just move on to the next thing and try to be helpful with that. Did it change your life? Again, yes and no. In some ways, of course. I mean, you must have made a ton of money now. I'm talking to Emma Greedy now. I mean, hello. You weren't doing that before. So, you know, there's obviously lots of opportunities that have come as a result of it. You know, Authors' Equity, the publishing company that I co-founded, like that wouldn't have happened. It's called Authors' Equity. Authors' Equity, yeah. So there's clearly something there that you did around the Authors' Equity.

59:24What did you do? Yeah, the model is, The typical traditional model is you get paid in advance up front, but the publisher keeps the majority of the money. So the majority of the success of the book goes to them. Our model is different. It's no advance up front, but the author keeps the majority of the profit. And traditional publishing is fine, but it's really a pre-internet model. You know, before the internet, it was true that authors would write a book and the author or the publisher would do basically everything else. They would do all the printing and distribution. They had all the sales relationships.

59:55more or less everything else was through them. But post-internet, the author not only brings the content, they also bring the audience. 100%. And that is an enormous shift for the industry. And everybody has known this has been true for, I would say, at least 15 years. But all the incentives in the industry run against it. What publishing company is like, oh, we're keeping 70 % of the money, but we realize it's different now, so we won't. Nobody thinks it's going to do that. Nobody's going to disrupt themselves that way. But if you are talent, let's say, for example, an influencer, a creator, more traditional talent, you have a built-in audience and you know that you're going to, on the face of it, sell a bunch of books to your community or fan base, this is a far more advantageous model.

1:00:34For sure. You make two to three X the money per copy. Authors will probably make twice the money. It's not just if you have a massive audience. That certainly is who the model is tailored built for. You know, it's perfect for someone like you or I. You know that when the book comes out, it's going to get a lot of exposure and you can keep the upside now. But we've tried to map it out based on the size of the advance that you would get and how many copies you would sell. And it holds all the way through the line. So even for authors that maybe aren't going to move as many copies, you're still going to end up with more money.

1:01:03The key is, are you writing about something that's going to persist or not? If you have a book that is going to be relevant in three years or five years or 10 years, the author's equity model is very hard to beat. And how does it work on the flip side? Because you're obviously the publisher at this point. How are you deciding what type of project should go into your new venture? It's an interesting question. We see a lot of deals. We see a lot of books. It's been fun. You also just kind of have to decide, like, who do we want to be as a publisher? You know, what kind of ideas do we want to support?

1:01:33And so far, we've been lucky to work with really great authors. So I don't know. It's a one-off thing. Each book is its own choice. What an exciting new thing for you. I love it. It's probably the project I'm most excited about. Is it really? It feels like each time we do it, we're changing the industry. So if someone were to come up to me and say, what are you trying to do with this? I say, I'm trying to build the world's most valuable publisher. And what I mean by that is not the publisher that makes the most money, although that would be great. What I mean is the publisher that provides the most value to authors.

1:02:03So that means four things. You get paid the highest royalties. You get the widest distribution. You have the best rights. So that means you retain the creative rights to your work. And it means we have the best process. You have the best team to help you create a great book. And if we can check those four boxes, we're the most valuable publisher. So far, I think it's gone really well. How impressive. And you've put together a pretty dream team around this. Yeah, that's been a very fortunate thing. I think, I hope that in like 30 years, I'll look back and just be like, I just got really lucky with the timing on this.

1:02:32You know, Madeline McIntosh, she's the CEO of Authors' Equity. She was previously CEO of Penguin Random House, which is the largest publisher in the world. She brought Nina, her number two, over Don Weisberg was CEO of Macmillan, another one of the big five. He's one of the co-founders as well. So the four of us kind of helped launch this thing. And now we have an amazing team around it too. It's been a lot of fun. That's so fun. I mean, so exciting. Could you imagine when you were writing this book all those years ago that this is where you ended up? Yeah, and what's crazy is it's not even that many years ago.

1:03:02I was finishing the manuscript in March of 2018. And then like, here I am sitting with you now. And I'm like, not only did I publish a book, but it did well. And now I run a publishing company. Now you run a publishing company. And you're a father of three. and yeah. A lot's changed in the last seven years. I mean, a lot has changed for you. What hasn't changed for you? What is like still the same? I love working out. I love spending time with my kids. I love spending time with my family. I have a great wife. I like spending time outside. I like going on hikes and I love creating and interfacing with new ideas.

1:03:36Like on the reader side, the thing that I care about is, am I being useful? Am I producing ideas that are valuable? on my side, the reason I like doing that is because I think it's fun to engage with ideas and come across new. It's fun to learn new things. All those things are the same. And that's why when you asked me a minute ago, has your life changed or not? Yeah, some stuff's changed. You have more money, got a nicer house, whatever. But all those things, those things are all still the same. And interestingly, when you look at like, what are you spending your money on? It's mostly to be able to do those things.

1:04:11All the things you used to do. Yeah. Which is kind of amazing. Do you have another book in you? Yes, definitely. I, what I don't have are like 20 books in me. You know, some authors are just like, I'm making a lot. But if I'm fortunate enough to live to say be 80, then I think I'll probably publish three or four, maybe five. I don't know. Something like that. Are you working on one now? I am. I have, I have, I have three manuscripts that are in various states of disarray. Yeah. That's how you do it? Three? I procrastinate on one book by working on the other one. Okay. But then what happens is none of them get done.

1:04:43So, yeah. Will we be surprised at what you're writing about? Probably not. No? It feels like an extension. It's not going to be about habits. I wrote my habits book. You're done. That's basically everything I have to say. Yeah, I mean, seriously. You can't read it. Listen to this podcast, read that book. That's everything I have. Done. I do think that it should pair nicely with habits. You know, there's, like, there's one question you could add. you finish atomic habits, you're like, all right, I have the toolkit for building better habits, but which habits should I focus on? Like, how do I decide where to direct my energy and attention?

1:05:12How do I decide how to spend my precious time? And so that's a question of like strategy and focus and prioritization. And so that's one thing that I'm playing with a lot right now is how do you choose the best things to direct your attention and energy toward? So that's some of it. I also just really like this concept of how do I have power over my days? You know, people, power has been discussed a lot and it kind of gets framed as like power over others. But I think really what we all deeply want is power over ourselves, power over how we spend our time, what we focus on, power over our thoughts and our mindset.

1:05:45And so those are all questions I'm playing with. I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. I just wrote a book called Start With Yourself. All I think about is like how we have ultimately control of our own thoughts. I mean, it's one of the things that we're all trying to master every single day. For sure. Yeah. And with all this noise out there, it's really needed. Hurry up. Get on with it. I can't wait to read it. I'm like, let's go. In the meantime, I do have two things, two little projects I'm excited about. So one is the workbook. So you've got, you know, you've got Atomic Habits and the workbook comes in.

1:06:15We will all be buying the workbook. The second one though, it sounds kind of silly, but I really do like it. It's an Atomic Habits daily calendar. And what it is, is it's just a page a day that's a reminder from Atomic Habits. and I have found, you know, I look at, I've got like almost 4 million people on my email list now. Do you really? I'm like, why does this seem, like you're not on Substack or something like that. It's your own kit. Yeah, it's just a newsletter. JamesClaire.com slash newsletter. But... What a community. They must be so happy that you stayed with them all this time. Well, so here's what's interesting to me is why do you sign up for the newsletter when you could just read the book?

1:06:51And the answer is people need to be reminded. we all need to be told this stuff week in and week out so that we stay on course so we stay on track and that's where the daily calendar has been helpful i you know it's not it comes out in a couple months but i already have it on my desk and it's really helpful i think i i had this idea one time that uh i kind of wanted to hire a coach like a mental performance coach yeah and all they do is you they call you in the morning at like 8 a.m and they give you like a five minute pep talk just like one like mindset thing and then it's done that's it that's the whole service yeah um but it sends you into your day, like in the right frame of mind.

1:07:25And I kind of feel like that's what the Atomic Habits Daily Calendar is sort of like. You read like one little page and then you're like, okay, I'm primed for the day. And then you go. It's just, I don't know. It's just nice to have a little reminder to keep you on track.

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1:10:11we're going to go to rapid fire okay let's do it what's the first thing you do when you wake up i'm so bad at rapid fire by the way i i give such long answers i am so long-winded don't even worry about it um first thing i do uh turn my phone off and then take a shower turn your phone off in the morning well i mean like alarm oh turn the alarm okay fine i was like wow that is something else all right alarm off and get in the shower and what's the last thing you do before you go to bed at night? Give my wife a kiss.

1:10:42What is one bad habit that you've broken recently? Checking my phone before lunch. I try to leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. I don't do it all the time. I probably do it seven or eight out of 10 days, but leave my phone in another room. And then I actually get to work on my priorities from like nine to 11, say, or something like that. Shut up. Wow. The funny thing is I'm like everybody else. If it's next to me, I'll check it every three minutes just because it's there. But I have a home office, so it's only like 30 seconds away, but I never go get it. And so I'm like, did I want it or not?

1:11:14You know, in the one sense, I wanted it so bad that I'd check it every three minutes when it's there. But in another sense, I never wanted it badly enough to go get it. To actually get out of the room and go and get it. A lot of your habits are like that. Introduce a little bit of friction and it can curtail to the desired degree. You are the gift that keeps on giving, aren't you? What is a book that changed your life apart from Atomic Habits? Okay, so here's a little, I have a couple that I like. Manual for Living by Epictetus. A lot of people, it's one of the stoic books. A lot of people talk about meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

1:11:44I think Manual for Living is almost better. You can read it in like an hour. It's very short. Nothing in this book is something you haven't heard before, but everything in this book is something you need to hear again. So just good life principles. Manual for Living by Epictetus. The second is Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. So they're this historian, this husband-wife combo. They spent like this 60-year career as academics writing this huge 12-volume compendium, thousands of pages of everything that happened in history. And then when they got done, they wrote a little 100-page book called Lessons of History.

1:12:20And it's about the main themes that repeat throughout history. Also, you can read it in like an hour. Love. And then the third one, this is just personal for me, but A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I mean, it's... Okay, so I read that book and I was getting ready. I was kind of in the early stages of writing Atomic Habits. And I thought, all right, if he can write a book about the origins of the universe and it's easy enough for me to understand and it's in 180 pages, I have no excuse. I have to be able to write a book about habits that's easy enough for people to understand. Oh, yeah.

1:12:52So that was an important one for me. That's a great, I mean, that is a such a good reminder because that is a brilliant, brilliant, but we all had to read that in school in England back in the day. But I need to read. The British education system. Exactly. That's great. Real roots, Stephen Hawkins. Absolutely. What is something that you valued when you were starting out your career that you no longer value? Interestingly enough, the office that I write in, I used to think if I only had a better office, then I could have the writing habits that I wanted. if I just had the ideal setup, the ideal camera and monitor and desk chair and whatever.

1:13:30And now I have a nice office. And what I find is I actually write all over. I wrote Atomic Habits in the passenger seat of a car while I was on a road trip. I wrote Atomic Habits on my parents' couch while I was visiting for the holiday. I wrote Atomic Habits in my office. I wrote it at our kitchen table. It's not about the space. And so, yeah, or I guess I should say it's not about the gear. I valued the gear more, uh, then now I'm like, am I doing the work or not? What is something that you value deeply now that you didn't when you were starting out? In some ways, I feel like it was purest in the beginning.

1:14:06Um, you know, like it couldn't have been about the money cause I wasn't making any, you know, like I was, I was doing it just cause I loved it. And so I think the, the lesson is the climb is the fun part. And in the middle of the climb, you don't feel that way because you're just so busy trying to get to the next thing. You're so busy trying to climb to the next step. But the climb is the fun part. And so I think if I could go back, maybe appreciate that climb a little bit more. It's fun to get to the top. That's fun too. It's hard to stay at the top. That's a lot of work. But the climb is great.

1:14:42I can remember the first day that I got 100 email subscribers in a day. We went out to dinner to celebrate. You were like, yeah, it was like a big deal. You know, I don't even know what we're going to do. 3 ,000, 4 ,000. Nobody's even, we're not even paying attention. Selling a hundred of those workbooks is not going to move the needle right now for you. Which is great. And I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to complain. No, but I understand that. My point is just that you're in the middle of the good time right now. Even if it doesn't feel like that. The good time is like when you're having to work for it and when you care about the wins and when each little thing matters.

1:15:15You know, it feels like you're proving it. to yourself every little step that you take. I feel like my whole career has basically just been take my current advantages and try to use those to accumulate another advantage. And when you start out, you don't have many advantages. You don't know anybody, don't have much money or time or whatever. But you try to find some little win and carve out that step and you step up a little bit and then you just do it all over again. And each one of those little steps is worth it. Each one of those little steps is worth celebrating. I think that's a pretty glorious message to leave people with because when you're in the middle, it's so hard to think like that and to see it.

1:15:51But I think that's what anyone sensible and pretty much everyone I know says. It's like, I wish I could have appreciated it in that moment. It's not just business too. We were on vacation and we were eating at a restaurant and I went to the bathroom. And when I came back, my wife was like crying. And I was like, oh, what's going on? And she's like, I'll tell you afterward. And so we left the restaurant and, um, while I was gone, this man came over who's, he's probably in his like seventies. Um, and he was like, I just see you with your little kids. I'm like, it's just, I just want you to know, like, it's just the best time of your life.

1:16:26And you know, like, it's just so, you know, so great. And, um, we were saying that we were having the worst dinner ever with this five and three and 10 month old. And that's how it feels a lot of the time. Right. Um, what she said was, you know, at the end of your life, if you were granted a wish to go back and get to spend any one day again. We might choose right now, you know, like we might choose today. And I think it, it doesn't feel like that in that moment, you know, like what you feel is tired or stressed or annoyed because your kids aren't listening or whatever, but it's true. You might choose today.

1:17:01And so the climb is the fun part. It's the fun part of building a family. It's the fun part of building a business. It's the fun part about building your life. It's also work, but it's the part that matters. On that note, thank you so much, pleasure. Thank you.

1:17:38Gilead Fisher, Derek Brown, and me. Our executive producers from Odyssey are Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, Leah Reece Dennis, Asha Saluja, Lauren Lagrasso, and Jenna Weiss-Berman. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Shultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, Carlos Delgado, and Arnie Agassi. Social media by Olivia Holman. Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME. Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson-Rose, Tim Meikle, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Vieira.

1:18:22If you have questions for me, you can DM me at Aspire with Emma Greed. Greed is spelled G-R-E-D-E. That's Aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E with Emma Greed. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emagreed.me.