Best of Habit Formation: James Clear

22:53James Clear:The technical definition of a habit is a behavior that's repeated enough times to be more or less automatic. So it's those things that you do kind of mindlessly. And like you said, we're building them all the time. And this is one of the things that makes habits so important, I think. You don't get to decide. Your brain is automating whatever it can to save energy and to conserve effort. wherever possible. And so you're going to be building habits, whether you want to or not. And if that's true, the next step I think is like, well, you might as well be a little more in control of the process, right?

23:24James Clear:You might as well be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of people feel like they're the victim of their habits. Like, oh, I just, I didn't even realize I was building these things. And now I bite my nails or I snack too much, or I like watch so much TV or I look at my phone all the time or whatever it is. And they didn't even realize that habit was getting established. So that's one way to describe what a habit is. But there are a couple other definitions of a habit that I think are useful too. Like one way to define a habit is that it's the solution to recurring problems in your environment.

23:56James Clear:I really like that definition. I think Jason Raya was the one who came up with that. And basically the point that that's trying to get across is you go through life and there are a variety of problems for you to solve on a daily basis. Like let's say you get done with work at 5 p.m. and you feel stressed and exhausted. Well, that's a problem that needs to be solved. And for one person, they might solve it by playing video games and just chilling out for an hour. For another person, they might solve it by drinking a glass of wine. For a third person, they might solve it by going for a run. And you can see pretty quickly that all of those habits solve the same underlying problem, but some of them are more productive or healthy or useful than others.

24:37James Clear:and nobody's going to be perfect with this. We all go through life. We go through childhood and our early adulthood and we sort of soak up these solutions to the recurring problems in our environment and we aren't always thinking about it. And you turn around and you're 25 or 35 or 45 and you've got these habits that you've kind of been relying on to solve those problems. And some of them you inherit from your family and friends and some of them you just sort of stumble into. But at some point, once you become aware of that, once you realize, oh, these are the things that I do consistently to solve those problems, it becomes your responsibility, even though it wasn't necessarily your fault that they got formed.

25:14James Clear:And once you realize that it's your responsibility, then it becomes time to take ownership and try to figure out, is there a healthier solution to this recurring problem? So I like both of those definitions of a habit, and I think it reveals different things. But the practical takeaway, I think, is that you're building them anyway, so you might as take ownership over them. And you're going to stumble into some that aren't that helpful, which is fine. You don't have to blame yourself for it, but it does become your responsibility to fix it or to improve it. So as you mentioned earlier, how do you take that from the what to the how?

25:47James Clear:I think understanding that habits are important and understanding the crucial role they play in our lives is a good starting place. But at some point you have to operationalize it. And I like to use a framework for it in the book where I kind of have four different steps. And so from a real high level, if you want a good habit to stick, you roughly want four things to happen. The first thing is you want the good habit to be obvious because the more obvious or available or visible a habit is, the more likely you are to take action on it. The second thing is that you want it to be attractive. So the more that you expect the outcome to be good or the more appealing something seems, the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it.

26:24James Clear:The third thing is that you want it to be easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionless your habits are, the more likely you are to perform them. And the fourth thing is you want it to be satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is, the more you kind of have this positive emotional association with it, the more you want to come back to it and repeat it again next time. And so I call those the four laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. In the book, I break down those practical ways to do each of those. But that's kind of the high level framework on, okay, I know good habits are important.

26:58James Clear:How do I actually get a good habit to stick? Make those four things obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. Why don't you go ahead and dive into each. So making it obvious is mostly about the cue. The cue is something that precedes a habit. So whenever your phone buzzes, that's a physical cue or a tactile cue. Your phone's vibrating in your pocket. That starts the habit of pulling your phone out and checking it. Or an ambulance drives down the street and you hear the siren. That's an auditory cue that starts the habit of pulling to the side of the road. Or you see a plate of cookies on the counter.

27:29James Clear:It's a visual cue that starts the habit of eating a cookie. So you can see that it works the same way for good or bad habits, but the practical strategy is you want to make the cues of your good habits as obvious as possible. Rather than having the cookies on the counter, let's put fruit and nuts there, something that you want to actually eat, and then let's take the stuff that are snacks or sweets or that you don't want to eat as much and make those less visible. Put them on the highest shelf in the pantry or the bottom corner of the fridge. And you can apply that idea to a bunch of different things.

27:58James Clear:So for example, with my bad habits, rather than making it obvious, I want to make it invisible. And so one of the habits that I've been trying to follow recently is I take my phone and I leave it in another room until lunch each day. Now, I can't do it all the time, but I can do it most of the days, 95 % of the days. And what's funny to me is if I have my phone next to me, I'm like everyone else. Like I'll check it every three minutes just because it's there. But if I leave it in another room, I have a home office, so it's only 30 seconds away, but I never go and get it. And so I'm like, well, did I want it or not?

28:33James Clear:When it's next to me, I wanted it badly enough that I would check it every three minutes. But when it's 30 seconds away, I never want it so bad that I'll go get it. And you'd be surprised how many habits work like that, where if you add a little bit of friction, or if you make it a little more obvious or a little less obvious, the behavior changes entirely. And so I think that question of what habits am I making obvious in the workplace, in my kitchen, in my living room, what are the most visible or available things? Can I redesign that environment so that it serves me rather than hinders me? So that's the core idea behind making it obvious or in the case of bad habits, making it invisible.

29:09And how about attractive?

29:12James Clear:So I think a good example for this, let's say you're like, all right, I listened to this guy talk about habits today. So tomorrow I'm going to wake up early. I'm going to go for a run. Tomorrow's going to be the day. So you set your alarm and you set it for like 6am or something. 6am rolls around and your bed is warm. It's cold outside. Well, I'll just press snooze and sleep in maybe tomorrow. But if you rewind the clock, come back to today and you send a text to a friend and you say, Hey, can we meet at the park and go for a run at 6.15. Well, now 6 a.m. rolls around and your bed is still warm and still cold outside.

29:46James Clear:But if you don't get up and go for a run, you're a jerk because you leave your friend at the park all alone. So suddenly what you've done is you haven't made the habit easier. It's still just as hard to go for a run, but you have made it more attractive. You have simultaneously made it more attractive to get up and go for a run and less attractive to press snooze and sleep in. And that little strategy where you change the calculus going on in your head so that it bears an immediate cost, that's what scientists refer to as a commitment device. And I give a bunch of examples of commitment devices in the book.

30:18James Clear:But it's just one way to make the habit a little more appealing than it was otherwise. I'm curious what the difference is in some sense between obvious and easy. Yeah, it's a good question. I often find myself feeling like they overlap in meaningful ways, but making something obvious does not necessarily mean scaling it down, which is a part of what making it easy does mean. So for example, you could make doing yoga obvious by setting your yoga mat out in your living room so that you can see it every time you go in there. So that's making it obvious. It's visible, easy to see, easy to remind yourself to do it.

30:53James Clear:But it doesn't necessarily make the yoga workout easier. So one of the ways to make something easy is to scale it down. And I like to recommend the two minute rule. So to use both of those strategies, you would say, all right, I'm going to set the yoga mat in the corner of the living room, going to make it obvious. I can see it, remind myself to work out each day, but then I'm also going to make it easy by using the two minute rule, which basically says whatever habit is you're trying to do, you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less. So rather than say, I'm going to do a 45 minute yoga a workout.

31:22James Clear:You say, I'm just going to roll out the yoga mat and I'm going to do the first pose. And that strategy of making it easy and layering that on top of making it obvious, I think, increases the odds that you're going to do it because making it easy, it makes the habit less intimidating. In the words of Leo Babauta, it makes it so easy that you can't say no. Like, you can say no to doing a 45-minute workout. You're like, I don't have time or don't have the energy, but anybody can roll the mat out and do one pose. Like, you don't really have a good excuse for that. And so the two minute rule helps you get over that hump and get started.

31:56James Clear:And sometimes when I tell people about that, they resisted a little bit because they're like, all right, buddy, I know the real goal isn't just to do one pose. I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So if this is some kind of mental trick, then why would I fall for it? Basically, I get where people are coming from. But one of my favorite stories in Atomic Habits is this guy named Mitch who ended up losing over 100 pounds. And for the first six weeks that he went to the gym, he had a rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home.

32:31James Clear:And it sounds ridiculous, right? You're like, okay, obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants. But what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. And I think that this is like a deep truth about habits that people often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize it into something more. And so make it easy is all about that. It's not saying only do the easy thing.

33:06James Clear:Like you can still do very hard things or work toward very ambitious goals, but it is saying make it as easy as possible to do the thing that matters. and make it as easy as possible to master the art of showing up. There's a quote from Ed Lattimore where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. And it's kind of that idea. How can we make it as easy as possible to open the front door and then let the next set follow? You mentioned something in saying that really tied to identity. So Mitch is the kind of person that goes to the gym. Is that a mind trick compared to the actual habit and pattern of doing what you want to do to form the right habits?

33:42James Clear:Well, I think in the, possibly in the short term, it could be a, you know, a little mindset shift, but in the longterm, I think it's really the thing that we're trying to achieve. It's the result that we're really hoping for. So I refer to this in the book as identity-based habits. And the idea is that ultimately true behavior change is really identity change. We think that what we're trying to shift is the results or the outcome. If I could just have more money in the bank account or a lower number on the scale or more employees at the company or whatever it is, then I would be happier. Then I'd have the results I want.

34:16James Clear:But actually, the outcome is not really the thing that needs to change. It's the story that we're telling ourselves about who we are. It's the identity that we or our team or our culture or whatever that we have. And I think this links directly to our habits because every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so the more that you show up and perform a particular habit, the more you're casting votes for that type of identity. And I think this speaks to the power that small habits can have. Like, no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer.

34:53James Clear:And no, going to the gym for five minutes does not radically transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And in the short term on any given day, that doesn't mean a whole lot. You're not going to have radically different results. But in the long term, adopting that identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or I'm the type of person who finishes what I start or I am a runner. I'm a meditator. I'm a writer. Once you start identifying yourself in that way, you're not even really trying to convince yourself to do the habit anymore.

35:25James Clear:You're just showing up and doing it because that's part of who you are and part of what you do. You got a lot of people who like work toward running a half marathon because they think, oh, this will be a cool thing, a cool challenge, a goal to have. But then after the race, they stop training and they turn around. It's been like three months like, man, I need to sign up for another half marathon day, like get myself out there and get running again. And then you have other people who they just identify as I am a runner. And so they can run the half marathon, too. But once the race gets over, they're running again a week or two later because that's just part of who they are.

35:55James Clear:It's what they do. They're a runner. And I think ultimately that's what we're looking to do is to try to instill or encourage a new identity. And small habits are one of the best ways to do that because they cast these little votes for that story. As that builds and the word compounding obviously comes to mind, eventually you get into this satisfying or is that something that satisfying you're trying to accomplish early on with the small habits? Well, so I think you can think about it on a short-term scale and a long-term scale. So in the short term, you want your habits to be immediately satisfying in the same way that eating a donut or eating a cookie is immediately satisfying.

36:32James Clear:The reason we keep repeating that is because whenever you take a bite of the donut, it's like, wow, this is sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. You have this immediate satisfaction with the result. And I should just say as a brief sidebar, I think this is a good way to define or distinguish the difference between what is a good habit and what is a bad habit? Pretty much all behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time. And so for bad habits, the immediate outcome is often pretty favorable. Like I said, a donut is sweet and sugary and tasty. But the ultimate outcome, if you keep eating donuts for a year or two years or whatever, is unfavorable.

37:06James Clear:Same thing even for like smoking a cigarette. Like the immediate outcome of smoking a cigarette might be you curb your nicotine craving or you reduce stress or you get to socialize with a friend outside the office. It's only the ultimate outcome that's unfavorable. But with good habits, it's usually the reverse. The immediate outcome of going to the gym for the first week is kind of unfavorable. Your body looks basically the same in the mirror. The scale hasn't really changed. If anything, you're sore. And it's only the ultimate outcome a year or two later that is what you're looking for. And so the cost of your good habits is in the present.

37:39James Clear:The cost of your bad habits is in the future. I think that difference in time preference or that difference in how behaviors pay off in the long run is a good way to distinguish the difference between a good habit and a bad habit. And it also reveals this kind of fourth law, this idea of making it satisfying. It reveals the importance of having some immediately satisfying element to your good habits because they often don't have that. They pay off for you in the long run, but they don't serve you right now. And so you can do this in a variety of different ways. One of my readers, he and his wife wanted to start cooking more at home and eat out less.

38:16James Clear:But the problem with not going out to eat is it's not very satisfying. You just sort of miss out on a meal that you were excited about having. And so the strategy they came up with was every time we stay at home and cook, we're going to transfer 50 bucks or 100 bucks into the savings account that we're going to label trip to Europe. And so at the end of the year, they took all that money that they had saved up and they put it towards the trip. But on any given night, they get some immediate satisfaction where, okay, we don't get to go out to eat, but we do get to see$100 go into the savings account and immediately see the vacation budget bump up.

38:51James Clear:And so you got to find little strategies like that that make your good habits immediately satisfying in the moment. In the long term, the way to make it satisfying is by building that identity. But in the short term, you can use some other strategies. So in between the short term and the long term, I imagine anyone who's trying to form new habits, break bad habits, runs into obstacles. And I'm curious, kind of what are the common obstacles people will run into? Yeah, you can define this in different ways. Sometimes broadly, I think there are really only two things that people struggle with habits.

39:23James Clear:The first one is getting started and the second one is sticking with it. So getting started, a lot of the strategies that we've talked about, like environment design or scaling it down using two minute rule and so on, that can be helpful for that. Sticking with it is interesting. I'll give two strategies that I think are helpful for this. The first is it's very hard for behaviors to stick if you're not part, don't have some like social element working for it. And you don't have to do it in some really strategic way where you're like, oh, I have an accountability partner and they text me or whatever.

39:56James Clear:Like it doesn't have to be that formalized. But what you often see with any behavior that really lasts for years or decades, there's often a social component associated with it. So say, for example, you move into a new neighborhood and you walk outside and you see your neighbors mowing their lawn and you're like, oh, I need to mow the lawn and trim the hedges and spruce up the yard. And people will stick with that habit of cutting their grass for decades. As long as they live in the house, they will do it. We wish we had that level of consistency with some of our other habits. But if you wonder why do they do it, partially it's because it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly they do it because they don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy neighbor.

40:39James Clear:And so it's actually the social expectation, the social norm that gets that habit to stick. And you see this happen with all kinds of stuff. You walk onto an elevator, everybody turns around to face the front. No reason it has to be like that. You could face the back, but that would be weird. You'd be the one doing the different thing. And so the social expectation gets us all to perform that habit every time. I could be giving this interview in a bathing suit, but that would be strange because it would violate our expectation for what I should be wearing. So all kinds of stuff from what we wear to how we act to how often we cut our grass is socially reinforced.

41:13James Clear:And I think the punchline to this, if you want to make it practical for your habits is you want to join a group. You want to join tribes where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that group, it's going to become very normal and reasonable for you to stick with it in the long run. And then the second strategy that I'll mention is a more tactical one or something you can do on your own, which is having a habit tracker is a little thing, but being able to mark down that you did a habit and building up a streak is a good way to kind of help encourage yourself to be consistent.

41:47James Clear:So my dad is a good example. He, both my parents, actually, they like to swim. But the problem with swimming is that whenever you get out of the water, his body looks exactly the same as when he jumped in. And so he has no evidence that that workout was worth it. And so what he does is he takes out a little pocket calendar and he puts a little X on that day. And then he counts up the X's for each month and compares that to the month before. And it's a small thing, but that X gives him a signal of progress. And that's really what the punchline of this strategy is. You need ways to visualize your progress because one of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is the feeling of progress.

42:26James Clear:And if you keep making it, you have every reason to continue. And so habit tracker is a good way to encourage yourself to do that and encourage consistency. I want to turn a little bit and talk some about how both the book itself and what you've learned have applied in your own life. What habits have you formed that came out of publishing the book? Well, the one I mentioned earlier about leaving my phone in another room, that's one that I've started to do more consistently since writing the book. What I really like about Atomic Habits, though, and what I try to do with all of the writing, any article that I make or tweet, I try to only write about things that I have to practice in real life.

43:07James Clear:Because I think there is a potential danger in these kind of new age content creators becoming sort of new versions of academics in an ivory tower where you just share ideas all day, but you don't actually have to implement them. And there's that quote that in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. The fact that I had to build a writing habit in order to write the book, that's good because that forces me to see how hard it is to build a habit. the fact that I use the ideas in the gym when I do strength training each week.

43:43James Clear:That's good because that forces me to wrestle with, does this strategy actually work or not? And a lot of the environment design strategies that I mentioned earlier, those are all designed to encourage me to watch TV less or encourage me to do productive things more. Just little things like that. Individually, none of them make a radical difference, but collectively, they all sort of make the good habit, the path of least resistance. And I think the larger point is that by having to live out the ideas, I think it actually makes the writing better. I heard a great line recently, which is practice sets a high bar for truth.

44:16James Clear:And I resonate with that. Like there's, it's hard enough to have a good opinion, a well-informed opinion. But at the end of the day, anybody can have an opinion. Anybody can write about it. there are many fewer people who can actually do it, who implement the ideas. And so by practicing them, you set a really high bar for truth and you probably guarantee that the ideas will be better when you do share them and write about them. So not too long ago, you started this 3-2-1 email on Thursdays and I'm kind of blown away by the consistency of say the three ideas that come from you. And you mentioned a spreadsheet of 850 and I'm curious what habits or what process you've built to figure out like what all of these really interesting ideas will be each week.

45:02James Clear:Thank you. I hope I hope I can stick with it. When we started, I did have this little fear where I was like, I don't know if I can come up with this many. I think a lot of shots on goal is an important part of it. So I'm going to share three ideas each week, but that might mean I need to write 30. I'm not good enough to just write three and have them be good. And so then the next question is, all right, how do I do that? How do I have a lot of shots on goal? And for me, there are probably two things that really work in my favor. And I don't know if it works for everybody, but one is it kind of is just fun for me.

45:36James Clear:Like I sort of am playing with sentences, essentially playing with words and Twitter makes that easy to do and gives you sort of social rewards for it. My only objective with Twitter is I try to share one tweet a day. I don't always do but I try to send one a day. And it's a way for me to get feedback and see like, oh, what resonates with people or, you know, what doesn't. So that's like one way to potentially test the ideas. The other thing that works really well for me is whenever I'm reading, or even just in daily life conversations, usually books or conversation in the two places that most of the ideas come out of.

46:10James Clear:And I'll read a sentence that I'm like, oh, that's a good point. I kind of like that. And then I'll try to either apply it to a different industry. So I'll write about the principle is the same, but I'm going to write about it in a new context. Or I'll take the format of the sentence and I'll try to apply it to a new topic. So for example, there's a great quote from Claude Shannon where he says, information is the resolution of uncertainty. So you're like, oh, that's interesting. If you're uncertain about something and then that uncertainty gets resolved, what you've gained is some piece of information.

46:42James Clear:So I took that format, information is the resolution of uncertainty. And I just tried to almost create like a Mad Libs situation with it. So it was like blank is the blank of blank. And I tried a couple different things, but I was like, all right, I'll try it with writing. And so I put writing as the topic. So it's like writing is the blank of blank. And I just tried a bunch of different things. And eventually what I came up with is writing is the antidote to confusion. So you're confused about something, you write about it, and then you remove that confusion. So that is a different sentence than information is the resolution of uncertainty, a different topic, but the sentence struck me in a nice way.

47:20James Clear:And so I was like, oh, well, maybe I'll try that format out and see if I can come up with something interesting with that. So I do a lot of that. And like I said, that's basically just playing with sentences. And if I do that enough, if I get enough shots on goal, then I can usually come up with three good ideas. And do you have a process for kind of storing all these things that you read or hear in conversations? I don't really have a good process for storing what I read or what I hearing conversation. Honestly, the way I think about it is it's almost like a bunch of layers of Swiss cheese or something.

47:47James Clear:And you've got like four or five layers and you try to get them all lined up. And eventually every now and then there's an idea that goes through the whole of every layer and makes it all the way through. It's just kind of like having filters. So the very first filter is choosing what you're going to consume. And I think that this is actually a much deeper, bigger, more important choice than most people realize. Almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. And so when you are choosing who to follow on Twitter or Instagram or whatever, when you're choosing what books to read, what news station to watch or what articles to read, you are choosing your future thoughts.

48:26James Clear:And most people don't put that much weight on it. They don't think about it as being that important. But I think curating your information sources is one of the most important choices you can make. So that's the first layer. then you've got this high quality high signal source of information coming to you so now you've got all this information you're consuming twitter feed instagram feed books you're reading etc and for me i'm like well a lot of this information is good i've already tried to curate it but what are the best ideas from that and so now i'm trying to even pin it down even further and so i don't really save everything i'm reading or anything but i do try to save the best bits that usually I just save it to Evernote or I make a little note of it on Google Doc that I'm working on.

49:08James Clear:So essentially what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make everyone else's best ideas my baseline. I'm trying to make that my starting material. And then once I've got all that stuff together, then I'm trying to find ways, how can I build off of this? How can I integrate it? Can I come up with an example in a different industry? Can I find different ways that these ideas connect that I hadn't thought about before? And so that's maybe the next layer. So you kind of got these two, three, four layers that you're going through. And eventually you spit out some good ideas on the backend. So I'm curious about two, let's call it habits.

49:38Why not? That kind of apply to my world of investing. And the first is you're in a seat at this point in time where a lot of people may reach out to you, where what you're saying is resonating with a lot of people. And I've noticed from our communications over time, you were on email. You're not really on email. There are certain ways I've been able to find you, but some ways I can't. How have you thought about managing your time when you're facing a large audience?

50:05James Clear:Yeah, a couple different thoughts here. I mean, first of all, I just think part of it comes with the territory. So it's a good problem to have. If you're growing, then get a lot of inbound communication. And that's a very flattering and very great thing. And mostly, I'm just happy people are finding the ideas useful. You should consider it a minor miracle that anybody cares about what you have to say. It's a good problem to have. That said, I have made a lot of mistakes. and it's very hard to come up with a good solution to it. The first 10 ,000 subscribers to my email list, and that happened over the course of months, I emailed each of them and said, hey, welcome to the community.

50:38James Clear:Thanks for joining. I'm excited to have you here. I'll send out new articles soon. And just a welcome message. And then at some point, you get to the point where you can't do that anymore. And so then I stopped emailing people proactively and I just answered emails as they came to me. And I stuck to that for a while. And then at some point you get, like now my list is in the hundreds of thousands And you're like, okay, I can't do that anymore. So then now we're about to cross a million subscribers. And so I got to do new things where it's like, well, not only can I not just respond to some emails, like I kind of got to be out of that inbox entirely because there's just too many messages coming in.

51:10James Clear:I can't even do useful stuff in there anymore, like reaching out to someone that I need to talk to or whatever. So that's the first thing is like, you'll probably make a lot of mistakes and it's going to have to change over time. But the second thing, and I have this little sentence that stuck with me. I wrote an article about it at one point, but there was this Microsoft executive thing is named Steve Hanselman. He said, email is where keystrokes go to die. And I was like, that's interesting. And what his point was is if you wanted, you could measure your life in keystrokes. You only get a certain number of times where your finger gets to hit the pad.

51:42James Clear:And that number is finite. And so every time you spend a keystroke on an email, that's a keystroke that is only being sent to one person that if you had chosen to use that keystroke writing a book or writing a tweet or writing an article, you could have reached 10 ,000 or 100 ,000 or a million people. There are higher leverage ways to use your keystrokes. And so for me, I'm trying to focus on as high leverage of a way as possible. All right, let's use those key strokes writing a second book rather than responding to 100 emails. And the person who sent me the email, they can read the second book, but so can a million other people.

52:18James Clear:And so it's becoming more useful to more people. The other thing that I try to remind myself because I still feel guilty about not being able to get to all of it or like Instagram messages. Like I have a bazillion Instagram DMs, but I just, I don't respond to any of them. I just can't check them. That's the other problem with all these different services is that you start to actually have like 10 email inboxes. You have like an inbox on Twitter. You got one on Instagram. You got one on email. Now suddenly you're expected to respond everywhere. So I do feel guilty about that. But what I try to remind myself is the only reason anyone is sending you a message to begin with is because you did the high leverage keystroke thing because you wrote the book or because you wrote the article.

52:56James Clear:So what people actually want is that higher leverage work. And that's why they're reaching out to you. So just do more of that. That's a good way to serve a wider group of people. In a lot of the investment work, there's a fair amount of evaluation of other people. And I'm curious, how do you think about evaluating or recognizing the habits in others, both good and bad? I don't really think about it that much. I guess I think about it in the sense that I try to observe it so that maybe I can learn something. I'm watching my own habits. I'm watching my family members or people around me or just someone on the street walking by.

53:35James Clear:And you're like, maybe you can learn something from that. You know, it's just trying to like keep your eyes open essentially and like see the world clearly. So I do that kind of thing. But I don't really think about evaluating the habits of others because I don't really think it's my job to do that. There's this funny thing that happens where sometimes people will be talking to my wife and I and say something to her like, oh, gosh, is he just like so annoying to like have around? Is he always like judging your habits or talking about stuff? And we always laugh because I don't think I've really ever said anything about it.

54:02James Clear:And I don't even really think about it because I don't think it should be that like that's not my job. You know, it's not my role. And nobody wants to be around someone like that. And actually, what I hope is that that feeling comes through in Atomic Habits. Sometimes my favorite feedback on the book is that, oh, like, you know, I really liked it. Most self-help books are so judgmental or like finger waggy or feel like telling you how to live your life. And I've tried very hard to not make the book like that. It's not my job to tell you how to live your life. And it would be ridiculous to think that I could do that well, because I don't know your circumstances, don't know your priorities and all kinds of other stuff.

54:40James Clear:All I'm really trying to do is to share a toolkit and say, Hey, if you need a wrench, here's one that you could use. And if your life is different, you need a hammer, then here's another strategy. And maybe you should try that. And I think it's more about empowering the reader than telling them the way that they should live their lives. So hopefully that comes through and hopefully I'm able to do that in a good way. But But I think to answer your question, it doesn't really cross my mind to evaluate others that often. What's your next big project? Yeah, very lucky that the project's gone well.

55:13James Clear:It's great. I'm trying to compartmentalize it a little bit and just be like, okay, atomic habits is a great thing. It was a good project and it can be its own thing. Let it do its thing. It doesn't win me any awards or mean that now I don't have to share good ideas or anything. It's kind of like, okay, let's move on. How can we continue to do great work? So I am working on a second book. So that's definitely a big project. Depending on how you measure it, Atomic Abbot's took anywhere between three and five years. So these things take me forever to work on. So who knows how long the second one will take.

55:43James Clear:I'm sure my publisher, if they're listening to this, is cringing right now and being like, please don't take five years. So hopefully that'll go smoothly. I am actually toying with the idea of a podcast. So that'll be something to explore next year and see how that goes. So that could be fun. But in the short term, I'm very focused on the newsletter. and I just want to continue sending useful, interesting, compelling messages each week. So that'll keep me busy. And then I've kind of got those two big projects kind of that I'm working on in the background. Any tips on what book number two is going to be about?

56:13James Clear:Well, I already wrote my habits book. So I feel like that's basically everything useful I can say on that topic. I'm not just going to keep writing about habits, but I do think I want something that like plays nicely with habits or that works well with it. And so I've been thinking more about what are the main levers or pillars of living a good life or of like driving our results in life. And I think habits are certainly one of them. I think luck and randomness is certainly another piece. And then I think if we put a third one in, we would probably say it's like your strategy and your choices.

56:44James Clear:So by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control. But if you can get the other two under your control and do a good job with your strategy and choices and your habits and actions, then often you put yourself in a pretty favorable position to get a few good bounces. And so I'm thinking more about that final category, that category of like strategy, choices, decision-making, and kind of how to combine good strategy with good habits. Because that's one of the questions you could have after you finish Atomic Habits. It's like, okay, great. I know how to build better habits. I know how to get them to stick and last, but which habits should I be building?

57:19James Clear:Where should I be focusing? So it's kind of circling those topics like focus, attention, strategy, decision making, all that kind of stuff. All right, I'm going to ask you a couple of closing questions. But before that, I know this is going to come out just right at the turn of the new year. It's kind of everyone's favorite time to make their resolutions or call them desired habits. So how are you thinking about 2021 and both for yourself and any suggestions for other people looking to make New Year's resolutions? Sure. Sure. So for me, I find that I'm coming back to the basics. There's sort of a cycle that goes early on.

57:54James Clear:You're like, okay, I should just focus on the fundamentals. And then you're like, all right, I kind of got that handled. So now I should optimize and improve a little bit. And then you get too much in the weeds and too much in the details. Then you got to remind yourself to come back to the fundamentals. So I'm kind of on that part of the curve right now, where I'm like, all right, really what I need to do is I've spent a lot of time optimizing the last couple of years, I just need to stay consistent on let's write articles, let's work on the next book chapter, let's publish the newsletter this week.

58:21James Clear:So I'm really focused on just maintaining consistency. I think that's going to be the thing that I'm trying to pull myself back to center on. Because there have been a lot of opportunities that have popped up in the last two years. And just those details can start to get you distracted from the stuff that really moves the needle. And if I have any encouragement for other people, or just maybe not even an encouragement as much is a different way to think about it. Most of the time when people talk about resolutions or when I hear from people talking about them, it's something like, oh, I want to lose weight or I want to, you know, whatever.

58:53James Clear:They pick like the, these results that they want to achieve. And I think I want to bring it back to what we mentioned a few minutes ago, that it should be more about the identity rather than focusing on losing 30 pounds. Let's try to become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And so that question of, for this new year's resolution, rather than thinking exclusively about the result, let's ask the question, who is the type of person that could achieve that result? And then let's try to focus on fostering and reinforcing that identity. Great. All right, James, going to turn to a couple of closing questions.

59:24What is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?

59:28James Clear:I think I would probably say weightlifting. That's probably the one that feels, you know, it's really funny because you have to expend energy when you're working out. But in a psychological sense, it fills me with energy. It's the one thing that I have where I feel like it's just for me. I can leave all the other responsibilities behind. I can leave the work for an hour and I can just do that. And so much so that I almost feel like if I didn't work out, I don't even know that I would have a business anymore because I think the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship, especially those early years, it just would have got to me too much.

1:00:02James Clear:You know, I needed something to keep me balanced. There are a bunch of others too. Like I said, And I'm really into travel. So I'm like weirdly into optimizing the best travel bag. I love the outdoors and like hiking and stuff. So just getting out and moving around in nature. My grandparents owned a farm when I grew up. So like basically my whole childhood was running around in the fields and stuff. And so I like to do that whenever I can. What's your most important daily habit? It's so hard to answer this because of how things work. So like, let me give you an example. I think I could make an argument for sleeping eight hours a night.

1:00:33James Clear:I could say that's it. Because if you don't get good sleep, Everything else is downstream from that and the whole rest of your day is screwed. And so the interesting thing about this, and this is actually one of the ideas that I'm kind of working on for this second book, is that success is rarely the result of one thing, but failure can be. So sleeping eight hours a night is not going to make you successful on its own. But not sleeping at all can make the next day a failure. And so to say that it's the most important habit in my life sort of dismisses the fact that success is usually a recipe of multiple ingredients.

1:01:08James Clear:And like I both need to sleep well. And another one that I thought of answering is reading. Because like I said, every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. And I essentially get paid for the quality of my thoughts. And so we could say, well, reading is actually very important for your business, because if you don't have good ideas, you don't have a business. But again, that kind of dismisses the fact that well, you could also say writing because like, if I don't publish, then the ideas don't get out there. So you see where I'm going. It is interesting to me that if you remove any link in that chain, if you don't sleep or you don't read or you don't publish, the whole thing falls apart.

1:01:46James Clear:And so success is like the mix of a variety of ingredients and the absence of anything that would ruin the mixture. And so you kind of have this whole recipe that you need to follow. But for the sake of the question, I'll say sleep. All right. What's your biggest pet peeve? I don't have a ton of things that bother me, but I will say something that keeps coming up again and again with me is when people do things in an unthoughtful way, it just drives me nuts when you get a product that it clearly was not like when you use a product and then you're like, did they test this? Like, did they actually use it or did they just like design it and then they manufactured it and then they sold it?

1:02:26James Clear:Because as soon as you use it, you start to see so many different ways in which it could be designed better or more thoughtfully put together. There's a house in our neighborhood that we walk by and it's on the corner and the lot faces north. So you're not going to get a ton of sun because the southern facing side of the house is where you get most of the sun, at least in our hemisphere. Well, the house is designed so that all the windows are on the northern and western sides of the house. And I'm like, well, this is like they have these huge, beautiful bay windows that are facing north. So they never get any light.

1:02:59James Clear:And that's one where I look at it and I'm like, whoever built this house did not think this through. Like, why would you arrange it like that? And there are so many things like that where I'm just like, what the world needs is more people who are thoughtful, more people who like really care about getting it right. and in a way I almost feel like that answer or that approach of just wanting to get it right that alone can be enough to put you in like the 90th percentile of most industries I've been listening to a lot of Maggie Rogers recently she's a musician she has a an Instagram post where she takes she's got this one of her songs one of her popular songs she found her notes on it and different things that she was trading back and forth with the producer on how to improve it and it was just such a cool Instagram post to like see these screenshots of her different notes because she was talking about the most minute things that the average listener wouldn't think about at all.

1:03:52James Clear:Like, oh, maybe we should bring the symbol in half a beat earlier. And like, she's got all these different things like that. And you see how much she cares about getting it right. You know, she can't, for her to be a musician and to put that music together, she can't not do it that way. And when I see stuff like that, I'm like, yeah, no wonder she's great. You know, no wonder she's popular. No wonder her music is amazing. She cares so much about getting it right that it's almost like she doesn't give herself a choice but to produce something exceptional. And I don't know, it's just this is maybe just how I'm wired and you know, different people want different things.

1:04:25James Clear:So I'm not saying everybody should feel the way I do about it. But for me, I'm like, why would you want to do something except to do it in an exceptional way? And so if you don't care about doing it right or getting the details right, I just don't know why you would want to spend your time on it. And here I am consuming the time that people spend on these other products and they didn't care about getting it right. So I guess I've ranted about this enough that obviously it is a pet peeve. So I will go ahead and say that's my answer. All right. What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?

1:04:52James Clear:I will say I have been very fortunate to have two great parents. That's a huge bit of luck and randomness in my life that I think has served me really well. But I can think of like two things at least. One is throughout my childhood, whenever I had a big test or had a big, usually it was a big game if I was talking to my dad about it beforehand. And if I was feeling nervous before I would go out and pitch or before a basketball game, he would always tell me, trust your preparation. And it did help a little bit to calm the nerves and remind yourself like, listen, you've been practicing for this.

1:05:25James Clear:You've been training for this. It's not just today. You know what to do. You've shot a free throw a thousand times. You can do it when you go out there. But there's a second message baked into that, which is you better prepare. It teaches you that, yeah, listen, you'll be fine right now. But also, the only reason you'll be fine is if you put the reps in ahead of time. So that has definitely stuck with me. I've thought about that a lot. I think about it with the launch of Atomic Habits, people like, wow, I can't believe how well the book did his first week out or you know, it came out exploded to this big success.

1:05:54James Clear:And I look back on what we did. And I'm like, man, you have no idea how many reps we put in over the two, three, four years before that. And I'm not talking just about the ideas. Like I recorded a hundred podcast interviews before launch day. So, you know, I haven't sold a single copy and all of those are waiting to come out and hit. And so it's like, trust your preparation, you know, like you have to put the work in before. So, uh, that's a big one. And then the second one that I think of, and this is for me as a parent, I think about like, what's the gift I want to give my kids. And probably the biggest gift that my parents have ever given me is that I never had to wonder.

1:06:32James Clear:My siblings and I have talked about this too. We never have to wonder if we were loved. And that I feel like is maybe the biggest thing that I don't have any baggage around that. I know how much my parents love me and I know it because they told me it and they showed me it and they were there. And if I can give that to my kids, hopefully that'll be enough. And so just to be present and to make sure that they know they are loved, that's a huge thing that I'm able to carry with me each day. Greg, I got one more for you and then we'll tack on a few more for our premium members. But what life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a bunch earlier in your life?

1:07:04James Clear:There are a couple that I feel like are really important. So the first one is to know what you want. Most people sort of know what they want. They know what they want in a general sense. I want more money. I want to be in a happy marriage. I want to be lean and fit or whatever. Like we generally know, but very few people specifically know what they want in a sense of being able to state exactly what their daily life looks like or what their ideal day looks like to know what is authentic or genuine for them and their personality. And so to have a good answer to that requires a lot of self-awareness.

1:07:40James Clear:It requires a lot of introspection. It also, and this is something that I definitely have learned over time. I used to think that a lot of these big decisions, what do I want? What career should I have? And things like that. What city should I live in? Whatever. I used to view those more as like a before and after choice. You make it once and then you're done. But actually all of those things are processes, not decisions. They're cycles that you go through. And so to know what you want also means to continually revisit that question. And as the world changes and as your priorities change, I'm a very different person today than I was 10 years ago.

1:08:15James Clear:And so the answer to what do I want is very different. And you should take the time to revisit that occasionally and update what you're doing and what you're spending time on. So that's probably the first big one coming directly out of that. Once you do know what you want, the phrase that I like is work backwards from magic. So what is the magical outcome? What is the, the ideal outcome? And then just work backwards from that. And what is shocking, stunning even to me, even after having done it once or twice in my life, is you can pick things that are really bold and ambitious and radical and surprising and untraditional, and you can just work backwards from it.

1:08:55James Clear:And there is often a path to making it happen, which is really surprising. Most people do not work backwards from magic. They work forwards from the status quo. They work forwards from the desires of other people. They work forwards from the expectations of society. But if you really know what you want and you think about the most magical version of that and work backwards from it, it is shocking how often you can find a way to make it happen. So I guess maybe another lesson baked into that is you can bend the world to your will in a surprising number of cases. But what it requires, this is maybe another lesson, is a lot of focus and commitment.

1:09:31James Clear:It requires you to be a force of nature. And so you need to know what you want and work backwards from it to develop a plan. And then you need to be focused and be a force of nature about it to pester, to show up consistently, to be consistent, revisited again and again. And if you're willing to do that, then you can often make it happen. That's really fascinating. James, I know it's been a while since we were planning to do this live in June and COVID, but I really appreciate you taking time. Of course. Thank you for having me. Before you hit off, let me ask you two more for our premium subset.

1:10:06But what's the biggest mistake you've made and what did you learn from it?

1:10:10James Clear:So there's there are all kinds of mistakes that I've made that are small mistakes that seemed big at the time. So like I think about the first big webinar that I ever got for my audience. I was just a small fish. I was just starting. And this guy had like an audience of 300 ,000 people. And he was like, yeah, I'll email him about it. And you can do a webinar with him and sell your product or whatever. And I screwed up a bunch of things. I screwed up the tech. The punchline of it is that people essentially couldn't log in until an hour later than when it was supposed to start. And I was expecting for this to be, for me at the time, it was going to be some huge payday.

1:10:42James Clear:I was going to make like$30 ,000 or something. And instead, I think like eight people attended and it was just a total flop. And that felt like a huge mistake at the time. But it wasn't in retrospect. One thing like that rarely makes or breaks you, especially if you just keep showing up. so instead what I think the honest answer is to the biggest mistake I've made is either in some of the sort of the same thing but just saying it in different ways it's waiting too long to get started and the main thing about that was waiting for someone to give me permission to work on the thing that I really wanted I was always good at school and I liked school and so I thought I needed to follow this kind of academic trajectory where it's like oh well you apply to a program and then people say whether you get in or not and then the professor tells you what kind of grade you get.

1:11:27James Clear:And it's all based around permission. But entrepreneurship is not based around permission at all. So by waiting for someone to give me permission to start a business or to launch a product or to do the thing that I wanted to do, I lost years. And I think looking back, that's the biggest mistake. All right, James, I got one more for you. And all this reading and all this information you're consuming, what is your favorite book? I don't have any one favorite, but I do have a lot of favorites for different things. like I love Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time because if he can write about something that complicated, the origins of the universe and astrophysics and things like that, and he can make it easy enough for someone to understand, then I have no excuse for making something like human behavior or habits difficult to understand.

1:12:15James Clear:So it encourages me to write about my topics in a simple, easy, clear, understandable way. I love Richard Feynman's stuff. surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman is an amazing read and it inspires you to be broad and wide ranging and fun loving like you don't have to you don't have to be so serious to be a top performer you know like you don't you don't have to take yourself so seriously like life can be a joy as well so I love that I really like Manual for Living by Epictetus in my opinion it's the most accessible of the stoic works he just hammers on this point of like focus on what you can control.

1:12:50James Clear:And it's surprising how often you need to be told that message. I've had been told it many times and then a year will go by and I'll forget it and I need to be reminded of it again. So, so I like that. And then I think I'll also say the lessons of history by Will and Ariel Durant, short book, a hundred pages or so you can read it in an hour or two, but it just compresses all of these big insights from across history and shows you sort of those recurring themes. And as someone who is interested in what doesn't change and someone who tries to write, you know, fairly evergreen topics about timeless issues, I like reading about stuff like that where you're like, yeah, OK, like there are a lot of ways that humans are very similar, even though the modern world is very different.

1:13:33James Clear:And so I like being reminded of that stuff, too. James, thanks so much. It's really great. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.

1:14:10James Clear:and securities discussed on this podcast.