James Clear’s ULTIMATE GUIDE to Crushing Your New Year's GOALS (Transform Your Life in 2024!)

23:32You know, so like I'll give you an example of a good habit and a bad habit. So for good habits, you want the physical environment to make it obvious and easy for you to do the behavior. You know, so like I have a pull up bar in your room. Exactly. Trying to do 100 pull ups a day. Right. Like have it hanging over your door. As opposed to even if you had one, but it was in the closet because I just have time. You wouldn't take it out or it's at the gym upstairs or down the street. No. You know, I have a friend who he wanted to practice guitar more. And so he left his guitar in the middle of his living room.

24:02And just so he'd walk past it a hundred times a day, it becomes much easier. Bad habits are the same way, but in reverse. Instead of making it obvious, you want to make it invisible. Take like, which is just talking about video games. A lot of people feel like they spend too much time watching TV or playing video games or watching a screen. But if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the television. So it's like, what is that room designed to get you to do? Turn it on. Yeah. So you can restructure that environment to make it less likely that you'll fall into that habit.

24:37And there are a variety of things you could do. You could take the remote control and put it inside like a drawer so you don't see it. You could put the television behind a wall unit or cabinet so that it's less visible. But you could also increase the friction with the task. So you could like unplug your TV after each use and only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch. So you can't mindlessly pull up Netflix and just find something. Or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it's an extra five to ten seconds to turn on. Maybe that's enough time to be like, do I really want to watch something right now?

25:08I'm just doing this mindlessly. If you really want to be extreme. Don't have the TV. Yes. You could get rid of the TV entirely or take it off the wall and put it in the closet and only take it out when you really want to watch something. For four years when I lived in Columbus, I removed the TV for four years. I didn't have a TV in my place because I was like, I want to earn money. I want to build my business and I have nothing. So I need to work. I need to focus on this to build the habit that I wanted for my business. And it was the best thing for me because I would spend hours just mindlessly watching.

25:43And now I was like, okay, if I want to watch something, I'm going to go to the sports bar and watch the game. I'm going to go to a friend's house and watch this specific thing. Or I'm going to go to the movies and take a break. Right. As opposed to three hours a day of TV. What's brilliant about that, and it's a really good example, is that we, I think about that a lot with phones as well. So every day I try to leave my phone in another room outside of my office, at least until lunch. Because then I get like a four hour block of time in the morning where I can just work without any distraction.

26:11Yeah. And it's funny how quickly you don't like if my phone was on me in the morning, I would check it like, you know, every five minutes or whatever. But when it's out of the room, I don't even find myself wanting to I never walk up the stairs to go check it, even though it's only 30 seconds away. So it's interesting how little we actually want to do these things, but we just do them all the time because they're obvious and easy. And I think the key is to invert that. Take the things that are the bad habits, the distractions, the procrastinations, the unproductive uses of time, and make them more invisible, reduce exposure, and less easy to do.

26:47And take the things that are good habits and make it the equivalent of having your phone on you all the time. Make it right in front of you. Make it obvious. Make it easy. Make it frictionless. list yeah if you're looking to write have your do you write with your journal or your computer i write on the computer i write never note it's gotta be faster yeah you'd have to transfer later and all these things yeah okay um if you were coaching someone who said i have no clue what i'm supposed to do with my life um i'm lost i have all these bad habits i smoke i drink i eat donuts every day. I have no job.

27:25My room is sloppy and I'm just depressed. What would you say to them to get started with changing their life around in the form of better habits? Well, you just need to pick one thing, first of all. I think that I just mentioned a few minutes ago, one of the most powerful forms of motivation is progress. So seeing some progress, I mean, it can be as simple is make your bed each day, right? But just doing that, embodying the identity of someone who's getting better, who's making progress, just pick one thing and use that as, this is true, I mean, Lewis, this is something you've probably seen with a lot of people that you've talked to, but habits are the foundation for mastery.

28:06So if you, you know, say, take a sport like basketball, you need to be able to dribble with both hands without thinking before you can worry about what strategy you're running on offense or what kind of strategic play you're going to run or what your defensive scheme is or all this other stuff, right? Like you need to automate the fundamentals of the craft before you can worry about the next level of performance. Same thing is true for chess. You know, like you need to know how the chess pieces move automatically without thinking about it before you can get into, all right, what is my strategy going to do?

28:36I'm going to do this and they're going to do that. And so I think this is true, not just at the peak levels of performance, that you integrate these habits and used habits as the foundation for the next level of performance, but also true when you're getting started. Just build one small thing. Carve out a 1 % change, a 1 % improvement, and use that as a stepping stone to the next level. What about self-control? Because what if we have this desire for something? What's the other word for self-control? Willpower, perseverance. What about willpower? How much willpower do we have? So you hear this a lot.

29:12I mean, it's very common, especially in self-help, motivation, self-motivament. You need to be motivated. You have to have willpower. Grit and perseverance are huge and important. And it's not that those qualities are not important. It's just that the way to develop them is different than what most people think. So most people think, I need willpower, so I should just try harder. There's an interesting body of research. I mentioned it in the book. I think it's in Chapter 7 on self-control and willpower, which is that the people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least.

29:44So they face temptations less frequently and therefore have the reserves and the resources to resist it when it occasionally comes up. And I think that this is actually like the lever to pull or the pressure point to push on is that the way to get better willpower is to design an environment that tempts you less, not to say, let me just try harder. Right. Yeah. Set yourself up to win. And you have a chapter that talks about the power of accountability partners. I talk about accountability and coaches all the time. I hire coaches for everything because I use sports as my life, an analogy for my life.

30:18And I know that I couldn't have gotten to where I wanted to be as an athlete without great coaches and accountability. So how important is accountability towards habits as well? Yeah, it's huge. So I recently hired a powerlifting coach. He's great. He's worked with like 12 world champions. And having him has, he's not based in Columbus actually, but Columbus is great for strength culture. It's, you know, I mean, Obviously, there's the Arnold, but then Westside Barbell and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, it was awesome. But your point about coaches is a crucial one, which is that having a coach forces you to be aware of things that you would otherwise overlook.

30:53This is what I call the downside of building good habits, which is you build habits, and in the beginning, you develop fluency and skill and ability, and things become easier. But after a little while, once a habit has been established, the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot, which means that you start to overlook your mistakes and not think about how to get better. And so what you need is a coach to keep you on that razor's edge so that you keep building habits, but it also forces you to stay aware of what the next level of performance is. And that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement.

31:26It's like a cycle. You know, it starts with awareness. if you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is, you don't have a chance to change it. Then from that awareness, you get a deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better. And eventually, the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes automatic. But once it becomes automatic, that's not the end. You have to return to awareness and see where you're at now and start the cycle again. Huh. And what if you can't afford a coach? How do you find the right accountability partner?

31:56That's where I think we come back to the social component that we talked about earlier. Join the group, join the community. That's probably the best way to do it. And the great thing about the internet and the web is that you can find those people before where you couldn't find them previously. It used to be that you had to hope that the people in your local community or on your sports team or at your organization were also interested in the same things. And now you can find those people and find those online. Search it. And what's the downside of Good Habits? So this is what I was mentioning with this fact that like you start to overlook your mistakes.

32:31There's an interesting study that was done on surgeons where they found that early on in residency, they were getting better. And then they continued to improve as they became a surgeon and practiced for a few years. And then they hit some kind of peak. And then their performance actually declined slightly because they stopped overlooking their mistakes or stopped looking for ways to get better. And so you need to be on that edge of paying attention. My favorite example of this is actually a surgeon himself, Atul Gawande. And he hired a coach, a previous surgeon who was retiring, to review the video of his surgeries and to tell him where he could improve and what he could do better.

33:07And I think that's a brilliant example of how to have a coach, even if you're not in sports or not a competitor or something. We can all benefit from feedback. And the tighter the feedback cycle, the faster you learn. That's powerful. I love it, man. This is powerful stuff. I'm going to ask you a couple of final questions. Yeah, sure. This one's called the three truths. If you could only share three lessons with humanity in the world, and they didn't have access to your writing or your blog or your books, but you only had three lessons you could share, what would those three lessons or three truths be?

33:43Yeah, that's really tough. So the first one I would say is about reading. I mentioned earlier that reading is sort of like this meta habit that helps you solve all your other problems. So I guess my lesson for reading would be start more books. No, would be, yeah, start more books, quit most of them, read the great ones twice. So if you start more books, you'll be exposed to more ideas. If you quit most of them, if you quit the ones that aren't relevant to you or aren't that good or just aren't a high quality bar, then you'll have the chance to start even more. And when you find the great ones, read them twice because the advice is incredible and it's potentially life-changing.

34:22Okay. All right, so the first one I would say is reading. The second one is something to do with physical movement and strength training. You cannot, every human has a body, and every human has like a physical presence. So learn to use your body in some way to be more alive and to experience what that's like to be human. If you just spend all day in your head or all day staring at the screen, you only kind of get half of what it means to be alive. So I would say physical strength is another one. And then the third one has to be something along the lines of community, connection, serving others.

34:57I don't know what exactly that would be.

35:02Personally, I have felt most engaged when I've been working on a shared mission with a group of people face to face. Which is interesting coming from someone who, you know, my business is built online, right? I spend most of my time sending emails to, you know, half a million people or whatever. but I think actually I find more satisfaction and more purpose in connecting with people face-to-face. So maybe that would be it. Talk to someone face-to-face every day. That's cool.

35:31What are three to five non-negotiable habits that every human being should, and if they could do on a daily basis, it would improve their lives and everyone's life around them? What are those non-negotiable habits on a daily basis we should do? Yeah. Three habits that would improve everybody's lives on a daily basis. It's so hard to give an answer like that because obviously everybody's, you know, dealing with different stuff. But there are a few things I think I do genuinely think most people would benefit from. So the easy answer would be, or the easy way to frame this would be reading, but I don't think it actually has to be reading books.

36:09I think it just is the habit of learning something new. So if you, you know, listening to podcasts, reading a book, watching a good YouTube video, whatever, it doesn't matter what version of that it is. But if you go to bed a little bit smarter than you were when you woke up, that's going to improve your life. And just having this thirst for lifelong learning, having an eagerness to learn or discover something new each day, it's going to pay off in a huge way in the long run, no matter what topics you're interested in. So a habit of some small habit of daily learning, let's just call it learn something new for 10 minutes each day.

36:45Some sort of physical activity, you know, this is, I think, an important realization about all habits, which is in most areas of life, there might not be a thousand ways to do something, but there's almost always more than one way. And, you know, I like working out in the gym, but not everybody wants to train like a bodybuilder and that's fine. You know, like you can kayak or go running or rock climbing or ride a bike or whatever. There's like a bazillion ways to live an active lifestyle. And you should choose the version of your habits that is most exciting to you. Like in a way, that's the first biggest hurdle to clear when building habits is have you selected a habit that you're genuinely interested in, that you're actually engaged with?

37:31Because if it's something that you actually care about, there are going to be like endless opportunities for improvement. If you're not actually caring, if you don't actually care about it, if you're just doing it because you kind of feel like society's encouraging you to do it, or your parents want you to do it, or your peers are kind of subtly saying, hey, this is something you should do, then even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a chore, you know? So let's call it 10 minutes of learning something new, some sort of physical activity, whatever is exciting or interesting to you.

38:02And then I think the other one is a process, a habit of reflection and review. So it's very easy in life to be so busy or working on stuff heads down, or just have the next task come up, whether it's things you got to do for your kids or responsibilities at work, that you never take even five minutes to step back and just breathe and ask yourself, am I working on the right thing? You know, am I directing my attention and energy to the highest and best use? And boy, there is nothing so wasteful as working hard on the wrong thing. You know, like so many people work really hard, but are you directing your energy and attention to the best spot?

38:45And so the only way to discover that, like, I know I'm not smart enough to figure it out on the first time. Like I can't, I can't just sit down, give me five minutes and be like, oh, this is exactly what I should be focused on. It takes iteration. It takes refinement. It takes a process of reflecting and reviewing and looking back on the previous day and be like, Hey, was that a good way to spend my time? Like, did I live a good life today? And the more that you do that, the more you start to course correct. And the other tricky thing, and the reason this needs to be a habit that you revisit consistently, I don't necessarily think it needs to be daily, but consistently is the answer changes over time.

39:22You know, like what you want shifts over time, the situation you're in or the resources you have or the time you have shifts over time. And so you need to keep coming back to this. Maybe it's every week, maybe it's once a year, but whatever it is, you need a chance to reflect and review and to try to ask yourself, is there a better way to do this? Am I working on the right thing? Am I working on what actually matters? Am I directing my attention and energy? in the highest and best way. Yeah. And how important is accountability then in your mind when we are taking on these new habits for ourselves?

39:59Is it important to have self-accountability, buddy accountability, coach accountability, you know, social accountability? Do those support habits, forming these consistent habits? And what other factors are in play there? They definitely support them or hinder them potentially, depending on the people you're around and the group that you're a part of. Ultimately, the form of accountability that matters the most is self-accountability. It's almost impossible to exceed the standards that you have for yourself. That almost always sets the baseline. If your beliefs or your standards are almost always going to be the limit on what you allow yourself to do or what you accept.

40:42Now, it's easier to stick to high standards in a supportive environment than it is in an unsupportive one. So there are a lot of things that can influence whether you want to maintain that standard, but ultimately the standard you hold yourself to is going to be the most important thing. Now, having said that, I do think that the social environment, the tribes that you belong to influence your habits in a really dramatic way. So if I had to pick one topic that I think is even more important now than I realized when I was writing the book, I would probably say the social environment. You know, we're all part of multiple tribes.

41:19Some of those tribes are like really large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be Australian. Some of those tribes are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local CrossFit gym. But all of those tribes, large and small, they have a set of expectations. You know, they have a set of social norms. They have a set of beliefs that, hey, this is how you act in this group. This is what's normal and expected. And the more that your habits align with the expectations of the group, the easier it is to stick with them, the more like appealing and attractive they are because they signal to the people around you, hey, look, I belong to, you know, like I'm part of this.

41:57And the more that they go against the grain of the tribes that you belong to, the harder they are to stick to because you start to get criticized for them. And if people have to choose between, you know what, I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something. Or I have the habits that I want to have, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized. I mean, the desire to belong will often overpower the desire to improve. You know, belonging will, the loneliness will lose to belonging. And so you need to get those two things aligned and join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

42:36It is so true. And it doesn't mean you can't make it happen. There's a great example that came up this week. Someone on my team on our team call said, uh, I asked, I asked everyone on the call. I said, what is one thing you want to let go of next year for your life? Like what's one thing that's not serving you right now that you want to let go of? And this person said, I want to let go of drinking, drinking alcohol, like, or at least drinking as frequently as I do with the social circles that I'm in. And I thought that was interesting because I've never been drunk in my life. I don't drink. It's not, it's not a part of my identity, right?

43:09I never did it from sports. And then after sports, I was just like, why? It didn't make sense to me. Nothing good or bad about it. It just wasn't fitting my values personally. I have other problems, which is sugar, right it's like I've got that that's my vice right so uh no judgment here but I was just like this never stopped for me you know in every until maybe the last four or five years where anytime I'd go out in college after college then the business world restaurants networking events like all that stuff people would always try to influence me to drinking and so I had to be I I had to be so firm in my beliefs and really just not even care at all about it.

43:53I just knew that people were going to try to influence me. They would try to say a joke. They'd be, I can't believe you never drank, all these different things. Try to get me to drink for the first time, all this stuff. I knew it would happen every single week. And I just realized, okay, this is going to happen no matter what type of circles I'm in, unless I find people that do not drink, which is very rare. And which is one of the reasons why with my girlfriend, when we started dating, I was like, listen, it's not going to work. If you like to drink, I don't think I can date you. Like, it doesn't mean you're a bad person.

44:20I just don't want to be in that environment for the rest of my life with the person I'm choosing to be with. And so I had to make a conscious decision. And she was like, well, I don't really need it. Like, maybe I drink a glass of wine once a month. I'm like, okay, that's fine. But if this is a weekly thing, like, it's just not going to work because I've chosen this to be a high priority of my value for my life. and it's very challenging if there's something you want to do and the people around you are influencing you the other way in terms of accountability. So I think it doesn't mean you can't do it but choosing to be around people or groups or tribes like you mentioned that are supportive even if it's the local CrossFit gym or whatever it might be find those communities as much as possible.

45:06You know if your family isn't as supportive find these other micro tribes to support you in that habit form. There's this whole chapter in atomic habits, it's called the secret to self-control. And one of the surprising things that I came across when I was researching the book is a lot of these self-control studies, we typically will like kind of the standard story we all tell is, oh man, I wish I had the discipline of that person. Or I wish I was, you know, as consistent as this professional athlete or whatever. But in fact, the people who exhibit the highest self-control are often the people who are tempted the least.

45:38That's like the predominant pattern that is common across those different contexts is that they are just cookies in your house. You're not going to eat them. Yeah. And so, you know, you want to stack the deck in your favor and design an environment or join groups and tribes where your desired behavior is normal, where your desired behavior is easy. And if you do that for yourself, sure, you'll still have to put effort in, but it's going to be so much more productive and easy to stick to the habit because you're in a space and a context that's designed to support it. And that's maybe one of the biggest hacks or strategies for building better habits is worry a little bit less about having superhuman willpower and worry a little bit more about designing an environment where you don't need willpower at all.

46:24You did something really smart, which I think a lot of people aren't willing to do. You spent 10 years writing every week in an incredible article or articles that were so detailed, so thought out, so researched. And you said, how can I serve the maximum number of people in my niche and then start branching out in the space as well and do it consistently over a decade without really making a lot of money selling other things? and then you came out with a book. And now this doesn't happen for everyone, but then you came out with a book and it became one of the best-selling books of the year, of the most-selling book of last year on Amazon, like you said, top five, I think, this year as well.

47:10And it just continues to add value to people. And I think it's a testament to what you created for a decade plus of adding value. So congratulations on everything, man. Yeah, thank you. That's very, very nice of you to say. It's been a wild ride. There are a couple of things going on there. I do try to operate with this core value of always give value before you ask for value. And if you think about in any business, but like in my business writing books, the amount of what it costs a reader or what it costs a customer is not just how much they have to pay for the book. It's also how much time they have to spend reading it or finding it and so on.

47:46And whatever that total cost is, time plus money, that's like the amount they have to pay. And then whatever I get paid is what I make. But what they get in return should be well in excess of that. So the value they get minus the time and money they spend, there's some surplus there. And we could call it whatever, but I think about it as goodwill. And I always want to have a surplus of goodwill. And so everything that I create, whether it's an article or a newsletter or the book, I I want people to have this feeling that it's like, oh my gosh, I get so much out of this. Of course, I would want to open the next email.

48:26Or of course, I would want to buy the book. It's like such an obvious win for me. So I always try to give value before I ask for value. And I don't think that there's any one way to do this. Like you could start with the book and not have an audience, for example. But the way that I did it is I wanted to focus on building the audience first, building the platform first, give as much value as possible, get the audience as large as possible. And then I was able, you know, I didn't have any credentials, right? Like I don't have any background for, and there was no reason for me to get a book deal.

48:55I was just a guy with a blog. And the only reason that any of the publishers in New York met with me is because I spent that time building the email list and developing the audience. And then that got my foot in the door and got the book deal. And then of course you have to execute well on that and create something valuable. And then, you know, ultimately the book being a hit was sort of just all this potential energy that had been built up for two years or five years or whatever. And then it being released when the book came out. So I, you know, to a large degree, I kind of think that's the hardest thing about writing books is all the work is up front.

49:32You know, you have to build the audience and write it and edit it and make the marketing plan and start to record interviews and execute on that. You have to do all of that stuff before you sell a single copy. And most people are just not willing to delay gratification that long. You know, I mean, it's probably, depending on how you measure it, Atomic Habits took somewhere between like three and six years. Definitely at least three years, because that's how long it was from when I got the book deal. But I was doing a lot before I even got the book deal. So, you know, it's just a long time to work on something without making a cent from it.

50:08And so if you're willing to do that, then you can get a great result.