JAMES CLEAR: “ATOMIC HABITS” Author (#1 Best Seller)

Insightful conversation on invaluable tools to develop good habits and break bad ones. How small changes can lead to huge results. Plus ways to accomplish more in less time and using social media for personal growth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
It was a few years ago, and suddenly a bunch
of people I knew, entrepreneurs, creative types, coaches, and players
were all quoting from the same book, Atomic Habits, about
tiny changes producing remarkable results. Ideas like that really connect
with me because consistent, continuous improvement and growth. That's a

(00:31):
huge daily focus for me. So my guest today is
the author of Atomic Habits, number one New York Times bestseller,
close to ten million copies sold in fifty languages. James
Clear is a brilliant guy, great communicator, and an ex
college athlete. This conversation with James was a year in

(00:51):
the making, but worth the way. James has the best
advice I've ever heard. Specific ways to gradually build good
habits that can age beliefs about ourselves who we are
or want to become, and how to recognize and reverse
bad habits, specific ways to reshape behaviors. We also talk
about altering social media habits, something a lot of us

(01:14):
wrestle with. How curating your social feeds helps direct your
future thoughts in positive ways. And James is an expert
on productivity hacks, on doing more in less time and
not feeling overwhelmed. There's so many ideas and tools in
his book and on James clear dot com. So, with

(01:35):
the year wrapping up and a new one approaching, all
the evaluation and pledges to improve yourself that go with that,
there's no better way to wrap up season five of
Fouler Who You Got than a fun, far ranging, fast
moving conversation with James Clear. Well, James, I'm so grateful
for your time. The next five minutes that can to

(01:56):
be very useful and important for people, But more importantly,
they're also going to get people to go to your
weekly email newsletter and your Instagram feed and of course
read or reread atomic habits. There's so much to cover
that we'll try to hit the highlights. But but let's
start with the new year that's approaching means that people
are going to be focusing on self improvement. But new

(02:18):
year's resolutions, I speak to myself too notoriously ineffective. They
don't last long. So give us some some concrete tools
and tips for how to make new habits stick in
the new year. Sure, so, um well, first pleasure to
talk to you, Thanks the opportunity. I uh so, I
kind of have two things that come to mind immediately
So the first is that a lot of the time

(02:40):
when we start with making behavior change or trying to
make some kind of improvement, we think about and I
think it's a fairly natural way to do it. We
think about the results we want to achieve. So I
want to lose forty pounds, or I want to make
more money or be more productive or whatever finishing a
half marathon, and then we come up with a plan
for doing that, so you've got results, and then you
have a plan, a strategy, and we kind of implicitly assume,

(03:03):
you know, if I'm able to achieve this thing, or
if I can follow through on this, then I'll be
the kind of person that I want to be, or
I'll you know, I'll be more of the person I
hope I could be. And my encouragement is often to
flip that on its head and to start and say,
let's start by asking ourselves who is the type of
person that I wish to become or what is the
type of identity that I hope to reinforce? And you

(03:25):
start there and then you build habits that reinforce that
desired identity. So, no, doing one push up does not
transform your body, but it does cast a vote for
on the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and
no writing one sentences not finished the novel, but it
does cast a vote for I'm a writer. And I
think this is the real reason that habits matter. Like

(03:47):
the truer, deeper reason is that every action you take
is like a vote for the type of person you
wish to become. And so small habits seem fairly insignificant
on any given day or any particular instant, but they
actually reinforce being that kind of person, and they give
you evidence that this is part of your story. They
give you something to take pride in, and once you

(04:08):
take pride in that aspect of your identity, it becomes
easier to fall through on it. You know, like, if
you're the kind of person who takes pride in the
size of your biceps, you like never skip ourm day
at the gym, you know, if you take pride in
how your hair looks, you have like this really complicated
hair routine that you follow every day. And so what
you're really hoping to do is to try to encourage
that process a little bit, and maybe this year, rather

(04:32):
than worrying so much about the results, we can focus
a little bit more on the identity that we want
to reinforce in the habits that can help us get there. Yeah,
what the world needs as much as anything right now
is kindness, compassion, empathy. So if I want to shape
my identity to improve the habit of I want to
be a person that listens better, is more tuned in,

(04:54):
is more kind, is more compassionate. Doing the things that
people have those quality do is what you write about
being very important. It's sort of what would a kind,
compassionate person do, Let's do more of that. I actually
think questions like that are useful to carry around in
a lot of ways. I find questions more powerful than advice.

(05:15):
You know, advice is kind of brittle because it's very
context dependent. It's even somebody who's been there and done
exactly what you want to do, their situation was different
or the timing was different, and so you know, it's
easy for that advice to fall flat or to not
work quite as well as you had hoped. But if
you have the right question, then you can walk around
and you can ask yourself, like you said, you know,
what does a kind person does a compassionate person do? Well?

(05:37):
The answer will arise naturally as you go through the situation,
or what would a healthy person do? That's an interesting
question to kind of carry around with you if you're
trying to build a better fitness habit and so on,
um on that same theme of questions, I think, and
this is kind of where you're getting at or the
direction you're moving in. Any way, we start by asking ourselves,

(05:58):
who's the type of person I want to be? What
is the kind of identity I want to reinforce? And
then the natural next question is like, Okay, I kind
of have a better idea of that, or I know
what I'd like to achieve, but how do I actually
do that? And this is one of my kind of
like gripes or complaints about a lot of self help
books or a lot of how two books, is that
they say they're how to, but they're actually what to.

(06:18):
They tell you what to think, like don't doubt yourself,
believe in your greatness, you know, fall through, show up,
work out four times a week, but they don't actually
to tell you how to do those things. And um,
I wanted a time of habits to be both a
how to and a what to book. And I think
if we're asking that question, how do I actually do this?
How do I actually fall through? They're roughly like four

(06:40):
things that you want working for you if you're trying
to build a good habit or break a bad one.
So you want the habit to be obvious, like you
want the cues that sparked to be obvious, available, visible,
easy to see. You want the habit to be attractive.
Some more attractive or appealing appealing a habit is the
more motivating or enticing it is, more you feel compel
to do it. You wanted to be easy, The easier,

(07:03):
more convenient, frictionless, simple habit is, the more likely it
is to be performed. And then the fourth and final
thing is you wanted to be satisfying, more satisfying or
enjoyable habit is. The more pleasurable or rewarding it is,
the more likely are to fall through on it. And
I call those the four laws of behavior. Change, make
it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, to make
it satisfying. And if you're sitting there and you're thinking, man,

(07:25):
you know, I how this habit? I've just been procrastinating
on it, or I got this thing I keep trying
to do it, but I, you know, only do it
every now and then I'm not falling through very consistently.
You can just go through those four steps and ask yourself,
you know, how can I make the behavior more obvious?
How can I make this more attractive? How can I
make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying?
And the answers to those questions again a good question

(07:47):
to carry around with you will reveal the answer as
you're kind of going through life. So, um, I think
start with identity, and then how do we actually do that?
We kind of have these four different stages or four
phases that we can implement and apply. I cringe. Whant
to hear someone say with my luck filling the blank
and they catastrophize and sort of expect the worst to happen.

(08:09):
And that kind of a mindset can lead to bad habits.
And what you write about in Atomic Habits It's so
important is that positive habits are great, but avoiding negative
habits might be even more important, in the way that
avoiding terrible decisions might be even more important than making
a bunch of good ones because they're so life altering,
and that bad habits can can increase by one percent

(08:31):
and send you way off course in a hurry. So
what's the best way to check that, be aware of
it and prevent it. Yeah, that's a good question. You know,
some of the things you mentioned there are really difficult,
because there I would kind of have two buckets. There's
like habits of thought and habits of action. Habits of
action you know, doing to push up or meditating for

(08:51):
one minute or whatever the stuff like that. Um, you
can plan for it a little bit more. Habits of thought, Man,
they're so rapid. They arise so quickly. You're having to
come station with somebody and they make an off and
comment and suddenly you're you know, judgmental or self loathing
or you know, just like these feelings arise like pretty quickly.
And I don't have a great way to like stop

(09:12):
a thought from happening. But I do think that there
are ways that you can optimize your environment to try
to prime things to be in a better position, to
try to like stack the deck, so to speak, in
your favor. And one thing you can do is just
walk into the rooms where you spend most of your
time each day, your office, you're living room, in your kitchen,

(09:34):
and look around and ask yourself, what behaviors are obvious here,
what behaviors are easy here? What is this space design
to encourage? And you'll start to notice a few things
that you could tweak and design and improve, you know,
like when I um one bad habit, for example, that
a lot of people feel like they have is checking
their phone too much, or maybe browsing Instagram or Twitter
all the time or whatever. And I fall into that

(09:56):
just like everybody else. And so when I wanted to
start reading a little bit more where I did two things.
The first thing I did was I downloaded Audible for
audio books, and I moved it to the home screen
on my phone. I put it kind of in the
home bar, and I took all the other apps and
moved into the second screen. Now that's a really minor thing.
It's not going to radically transform your behavior, but it's
a subtle reminder each time I opened up my phone, Hey,

(10:17):
the one thing I want to be doing is spending
more time reading. And I sprinkled books around like the
physical environment, you know. I had a bunch of my
desk and some by the bed, and some of the
living room and so on. But then the second thing
that I did was I started to leave my phone
in another room until lunch each day. And that doesn't
work for everybody's job. And I can't do it all
the time, you know, I can't do I probably do

(10:39):
it maybe eight percent of days, but man, whenever I
do it, I almost always have a better morning. And
the thing that's funny is that if it's next to me,
I'll check my phone every three minutes, just like everybody else.
But if I have a home office, and so if
I leave it in another room, it's only like thirty
seconds away, but I never go get it, And I'm like,

(10:59):
did I want it or not? You know, Like, in
one sense, I wanted it bad enough to check it
every three seconds when it was next to me, But
in another sense, I never wanted it so bad that
I would walk thirty seconds down the hallway and go
get it. And there are a lot of behaviors in
life that are like that. They'll kind of curtail themselves
to the desired degree if you just increase a little
bit of friction between you and the action, increase the

(11:22):
number of the number of steps. And so I think
that's one thing that you can do when you're thinking
about some of your bad habits are just maybe some
of the time that you're spending in a way that
you'd prefer to spend it in a different way. How
do you increase a little bit of friction, how do
you introduce a little bit of distance between you and
the behavior. That's a great point. Um, Yeah, I try
to furiously protect I don't know the succeed the first

(11:44):
minutes of the day. I can't go till lunch without
checking the phone. But when I get up in the morning,
whether it's breathing, drinking water, stretching, and certainly not bombarding
my senses with with devices and input, I don't turn
on the TV things like that. And now many people
listening or going to find that's the most radical confrontational
suggestion you could possibly. I can't do it out my phone,

(12:05):
but you you've actually practiced that. You you will uninstalled
the Instagram app. I've heard you say, just to avoid
scrolling and falling prey to the evil algorithms that dictator
patterns of right now. Actually, I uninstalled Instagram about six
months ago and I haven't put it back on, and
it's been really good. I uh, I used the desktop

(12:26):
app so I can log on like when I'm on
you know, my computer or something, but I'm not sitting
at my desk all the time, whereas my phone is
with me constantly, and so I don't know it. Just
for some reason, that little shift, it feels like, Okay,
now I'm using the service the amount that I would
like to use it, rather than just checking it all
the time. You're an athlete. We'll get to your college

(12:47):
baseball career and how that puts you on this path.
Athletes connect with atomic habits and coaches maybe coaches first
and then athletes. But when the book came out around
ninety and I kept running into teams and coaches who
were referring to your book and encouraging their players to
read it. I mean week after week on the college
football circuit every end of this and the players would

(13:09):
talk about it because I had read it, and we
would have part of our little production meeting would be
about your book and what they were getting out of it.
So that has to be very gratifying to you that
in a world of sports where or habits are are
so much and it's a result oriented thing, but really
the smart people focus on the process and not the
results that you're connected with so many coaches and athletes. Yeah,

(13:31):
thanks for sharing that. It's fun. You know, I don't
get to hear all the stories a lot of the time,
they like don't make their way back to me or whatever.
And uh, it's cool. It's really kind of wild and surprising,
and it really nice to be able to create something
people find useful. Um, you know, like that's that's kind
of my ultimate objective is is this contributing is my

(13:52):
little contribution to the you know, pile of knowledge for humanity?
Is that doing something? You know? Is it like carving
out a little niche in the universe and making a
positive difference. And it's fun to see the book doing that.
And as a former athlete, um that it feels cool
to be able to contribute to that particular sphere. What
kinds of work have you done with athletes or teams?

(14:12):
And what's what's the most powerful thing you've heard back
from from someone about how it's it's helped them in
a really tough, challenging competitive world. Well, I spoke with
the now the Cleveland Guardians. They were the Indians back
when I went talked to them, and they've had one
of the best records in the American League for the
last couple of years now, and I don't think we
can attribute very much of that to my book universe,

(14:36):
so I know, right, yeah, but it's fun. You know,
it's fun to contribute to a winning program and to
see kind of where they've been in the path they're on.
And yeah, I've you know, most of the most of
the teams have received copies of the book at this point.
A lot of those sports performance or mental performance coaches
that work with some of the professional teams, they love

(14:56):
the book, and I talked to them like fairly frequently. Um,
you're right, it it's kind of it's funny. It's like
the coaches like it, and then the players like kind
of asked to read it, or like parents like it
and their kids are kind of asked to read it.
Whether they enjoy it or not, I don't know, but
it's uh, I don't know, it's fun. You mentioned something
a minute ago about how it's a very results oriented business,
and sports is perhaps more that than almost anything else

(15:19):
because it's so easy to measure did you win or
did you lose? And I am a very results oriented
person and pretty much everything that's in the book is
written as a reminder to me to stop for focusing
so much or worrying so much about the results. Think
of a little bit more about the system, Stop worrying
so much about the goals, think a little bit more
about the type of person you're trying to become. And um,

(15:42):
it helps to kind of pull myself back to center.
And I do think it's true that if you genuinely
care about the goal, if you really care about the results,
you'll focus on the system. You know, this is one
of the core ideas of the book, is that you
don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall
to the level of your systems. And so often in life, man,
it's so easy to focus on the outcome. It's so

(16:03):
easy to focus on the result. And results do matter,
but they aren't the thing that you'd be getting most
of your focus. I mean, that's like Bill Walsh's famous line,
you know he wants multiple Super Bowls. In his line
is always the score takes care of itself. And that's true.
If you're committed to the system, if you're focused on
building a better process day in and day out, you

(16:24):
end up with much better outputs. It's one of these
like interesting or almost ironic things about life. Our outcomes
in life are offering a lagging measure of the habits
that precede them. So your knowledge is like a lagging
measure of your reading and learning habits, or your bank
account is a lagging measure of your financial habits, or

(16:44):
even like stupid stuff like you know the amount of
clutter in your garage the lagging measure of your cleaning habits.
And we also badly want our results to change, but
the results are not actually the thing that needs to change.
It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Um.
And if you if you think about like your goals

(17:04):
are what you're optimizing for. That's like the target, the
thing you're shooting for. And then your system is the
collection of daily habits that you follow. If there's ever
a gap between your goal and your system, if there's
ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits,
your daily habits will always win. Like almost by definition,

(17:25):
your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results.
So whatever system you're running, whatever collection of habits you're following,
they're kind of carrying you almost inevitably to the outcomes
that you have. And it's not that habits are the
only thing that influence outcomes in life. You know, you
got luck and randomness. Sometimes the bul just takes a

(17:46):
bad bounce, but they are the element of the situation
that's under your control, and by definition, luck and randomness
are not in your control. And the only reasonable rational
approach in life is to focus on the element to
the situation that you can control. So for all of
those reasons, I think the collection of habits that you

(18:07):
have is the system you're running, and that's the thing
that deserves most of your attention day in and day out.
I want to repeat that because it's one of the
core principles, and for a lot of people who read
Atomic Habits, it is kind of an aha moment. You
do not rise to the level of your goals. You
fall to the level of your systems. And I'm surprised
to hear that you're you're that goal oriented and that
that not that system orient and that the book helps

(18:28):
remind yourself that I kind of preach against goals, James.
I think I just don't value concrete goals as much
as I do the path the process. I think that
that if you think about paths and that destinations or
not even paths, but just directions instead of destinations, because
the path is sometimes hard to define or even find.

(18:49):
But if you had any direction, to me, that's always
been more powerful than than the end result. And uh
I get that. You come from from that sports world
where it's all about the score. You are what the
score is. You know, you're not defined by anything else
than that. But how cool that you've you've come to
this and it's a reminder for yourself what's important. Pretty

(19:10):
much everything I write is a reminder to me. Um I,
uh I like the term. I like how you phrase
their path or direction. I think a lot about trajectory. Now,
that's like kind of the thing that I try to
come back to. It's not we have all these measurements,
all these analytics, all these numbers for determining our current position.
You know, there's so much discussion about position in life.

(19:32):
What's the number on the scale, what's the current record
of the team, what's the stock price or of the
quarterly earnings. We have like all these ways of analyzing
and measuring our current position. And then if the number
doesn't come out right. If it's not what you're hoping for,
it's not where you're hoping to be. There's often a
lot of judgment that comes as a result of that.
You know, like all this coach is washed up and

(19:53):
like their past their prime. Or you know, I feel
like a failure because I didn't achieve what I said
I wanted to achieve. Or we've been working on this
aught up for six months and it's still a mess
and we haven't shipped it yet. Like there are all
these feelings and judgments that come as a result of
analyzing your current position, and my like current suggestion or
current focus is saying, hey, let's stop worrying so much

(20:15):
about our current position and focus a little bit more
on our current trajectory. Are we getting one percent better
or one percent worse? Are we improving or have we flatlined?
Because if you're on a good trajectory, all you need
is time. You know, like time will magnify whatever you
feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes
your ally and every day that goes by kind of

(20:36):
getting a little bit better position. And if you have
bad habits, if you're not a bad trajectory, then time
becomes your enemy, and every day that clicks by, I
dig the whole a little bit deeper. And so I've
started to come to this feeling that it's much more
about the trajectory and returning to that focus, to that
path or that direction as you called it, and much
less about the result on any particular day. Yeah, that's powerful.

(20:59):
I love the traject because there's a three dimensional quality
to it, right, I mean path and directions kind of
you think of a flat space. Trajectory can can can
imply and signify even more. Um So let's go back
to the way you start atomic habits and I'll just
quickly a paraphrase and not make you relive the details.
But sophomore year high school, you're hitting the face with

(21:21):
a baseball bat. It's a freak accident, but it's frightening, terrifying.
I think you had multiple skull fractures. Both I sockets
were broken, ended up almost losing your life being in
a coma, and it's an excruciatingly long, challenging rehab and
it basically ruins your high school baseball career. Who what

(21:42):
gave you the belief James that after playing as you
as you talked about eleven innings of varsity baseball that
you still had some baseball in you and you could
go to college and become an outstanding player at Dennis,
And which you did. Where did that come from? Um?
Probably family, I guess I was gonna point to to
one particular area. Um, you know, some of it is

(22:03):
just like luck, and some of it's maybe my personality
or makeup, but a lot of it was family. I
think mostly my dad and my grandpa, my mom. Um,
those are people that played like a really crucial role
in my recovery. And um, they're very positive people, you know.
My my grandpa in particular, was very positive. And I think, uh,
for whatever reason, even though it was like, hey, this

(22:24):
terrible thing happened to me, Like one of the first
things I said when I woke up out of the
coma was I never asked for this. Um. I kind
of was able to move on from that, like fairly quickly.
Even while I was still recovering. I couldn't drive a car,
you know, my first physical therapy sessions, I was practicing
basic motor patterns like walking a straight line. But I
remember being in like a fairly good mood despite that,

(22:46):
and so I don't know. I I think somehow keeping
my mental state in a positive place was like a
really important part of the early process. And then there
also was just a lot baked into it. You know,
my dad was a very good baseball player. He played professionally,
he played the minor leagues for the St. Lois Cardinals,
and so, you know, my whole life, I grew up
looking at that and thinking about that and thinking about

(23:08):
how cool WO be to play professionally too, And you know,
I was never as good as him and didn't end
up having that kind of career, But I do feel
like I fulfilled my potential. And I'd say, like maybe
that part was like kind of my personality. And how
much of that's genetic and how much of that's learned,
I don't know, but that's definitely something that I feel
like has expressed itself, not just in my sports career,

(23:30):
but also in the other things that I try. If
I attempt something and like I'm serious about it, who
knows where I'll end up. Like I'm not saying I'm
gonna be the best in the world at it, but
I want to feel like I squeezed everything I could
out of it. You know, I want to feel like
I maximized my potential, and as long as I feel
like I gave it my best shot, then I'm pretty
satisfied before we're out at the end of the day.

(23:51):
And it's almost always been the case that my early
results are never that great. Like, you know, I was
never the fastest promote, that most death let person on
any team that I played on. But I stuck with
it for a long time. And if you keep getting
better each day, and you keep trying to squeeze out
all of your potential, you can end up in a
pretty good place if you're persistent. I remember my dad

(24:12):
telling me that that we at the end of each
baseball season early on and throughout high school and so on,
we would sit on our back deck and talk about
how the season went, and he would always say something
along the lines of like, you know, like more guys
are gonna drop off at the end of this year,
Like this is gonna be the last year they play.
You know, they won't show up again next year. And
it's interesting how like much that probably played a role

(24:34):
in my career that like I just kept being like, yeah,
I'm gonna play again next year, and if you keep
showing up, you know, after a fifteen or seventeen years
or something, you're like, yeah, you ended up having a
decent career. And I was kind of one of those
guys that started sort of slow, but just continue to
get better and better, and um, I ended up feeling like, yeah,
I had a really good career. At the end of it.
Baseball was a really important part of my life. I'm

(24:55):
really glad that I had it, and I'm glad I
didn't lose it after the injury because it ended up
playing any and more crucial role after that. Yeah. Just
showing up, right, just showing up and and improving that.
That's that's a lot of what the book is about. So, Dennis,
and you're the Male Athlete of the Year, and I'm
proud to see that ESPN recognize you is an Academic
All American. That's a pretty big deal. So you know,

(25:16):
my company that same Academic All America team. So I
was listening on that team under the D three players
and whatnot. And then Buster Posey was selected as the
Player of the Year that year. Four years later, he
was playing for the Giants and I was starting a blog,
So we had like very different trajectories after that, but

(25:38):
for that one year we were together, I know, I
had a lot of fun with it. You know, I
feel like the person who has the most fun ends
up winning at the end of the day. And um,
it was Baseball was just a huge part of my
life at that time. And I was really lucky to
have great teammates. Teammates are kind of like family. You
don't get to pick them, but I just like, I
got really lucky with the set that I had. And Uh,

(25:59):
it was definitely very formative experience, and I think a
lot of the lessons I learned both building habits at
practice each day and in the gym and so on,
and just like relationship wise and competitiveness wise, a lot
of that stuff has been like copied and pasted over
into my entrepreneurial career and has continued to serve me well.

(26:19):
We share a passion for fitness. UM, the therapeutic value
of it, the mental health benefits as well as a
physical UM. I've heard you say that workout can can
change the course of your day. And if you can
change the course of a day, you can you can
change the course of a longer period of time. UM.
I get called Jim obsessed, and I said, well, you know,
let's let's just refame it as wellness obsessed. You know,

(26:41):
fitness to me as wellness and longevity. So for people
that have a hard time building a gym habit, and
don't roll your eyes out there. I know I talk
a lot about the gym, but it is important to
me and um and to you too. So what what
can people do aside from just showing up to make
the habit stick and make it not seem like drudge
because you right, fun, let's not downplay that. If if

(27:03):
you can be active in some way, if you can
not think about lifting weights but just being active, can't
we all find something that's active that we enjoy. Oh.
I think that's a huge element of any habit that
you're trying to build. You know, the truth is a
lot of the time people pick up habits because they
kind of feel like it's what they are supposed to do,
It's what society is encouraging them to do, or their

(27:25):
parents or their friends are encouraging them to do. It's
not actually what they want. But you know, there's not
a thousand ways to do anything in life, but there's
almost always more than one way. And so I think,
for whatever habit you're trying to build, ask yourself, what's
the version of this habit that brings me the most
joy or makes me the most excited. Because if you're

(27:45):
excited about it, if you're interested, if you're curious, if
you're engaged, that is like almost always the first huge
hurdle to clear, because if you're excited, then there are
endless ways to improve. But if you're not excited, if
it does feel like drudgery or like a chore, then
even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a
hassle because you don't really feel like doing it. You

(28:07):
want to be there. So I I like training with weights,
but not everybody wants to train like a bodybuilder like
some people want to be you know, kayaking or rock
climbing or going for a run or cycling with a
friend or whatever whatever that version of fitness looks like
to you. I think, try to find the one that
makes you most excited or interested. As a real kind
of extreme example of this, I think probably one of

(28:29):
the greatest fitness apps that was ever built was Pokemon
Go because it was like a back door to getting
people would go walk like ten miles a day just
to try to find a Pokemon. It wasn't a fitness
app on the surface, but man, I got people moving.
And that's a good example of like, hey, you know,
like I just found this really fun and so it
got me digging around the park for three hours. So, um,

(28:52):
find the version of the habit that's exciting to you.
I think that's the first step. Second thing, though, and
I do think this is particularly it's not necessarily unique
to fit us habits, but it is very common with
fitness habits, which is man, you know, especially for ambitious people,
sit around and you think what you want to achieve
and becomes really easy to bite off more than you
can chew. And I don't know why we're this way,

(29:13):
but we are so focused on finding the perfect diet
plan or the best workout program, the ideal sales strategy.
We're so focused on optimizing that we don't give ourselves
permission to show up in a small way. And this
is one of the strategies I talked about in the book,
which I call the two minute rule and says, take
whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down

(29:35):
to something. It takes two minutes or less to do
so read thirty books a year becomes read one page,
or do yoga four days a week becomes take out
my yoga mat. Now, sometimes people resist this a little bit,
so like, okay, buddy, you know, I know the real
goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. I
know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So this
is some kind of mental trick. And I know it's

(29:55):
a trick. Why would I fall for it? Basically, but
I have this guy. This guy's name is Itch, I
mentioned in Atomic Habits, and he ended up losing over
a hundred pounds and he's kept off for more than
a decade. And when he first started going to the gym,
he had this strange little rule for himself where he
wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So
get in the car, drive to the gym, get out,

(30:17):
do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home.
And it sounds ridiculous, you know, it sounds silly. You're like,
this is obviously not gonna work. But if you take
a step back, you realize that he was mastering the
art of showing up up. And so I think This
is like this deep truth about habits, which is a
habit must be established before it can be improved. You know,

(30:38):
it has to become the standard in your life before
you can scale it up and optimize it into something more.
So I think probably a couple of things we've mentioned
already all tie into this. Pick a habit that excites you,
that you're interested in, that feels like it's a good
fit of fun fit for you. Um use the two
men a rule or something similar to scale it down
and make it as easy as possible to master the

(30:58):
art of showing up, to become the type of person
that goes consistently, and then tie that into the identity
piece that we talked about earlier. You know, who is
the type of person that doesn't miss workouts? What happens
do they have? Who's the type of person you're hoping
to become. What would a healthy person do here? Those questions,
those like um uh, forms of identity, Those are interesting

(31:20):
to think about it. And ultimately I think the the
ultimate version of this is kind of where you're at now, Chris,
which is you take pride in it, you know, like
you take pride in being that kind of person who
focuses on wellness or who is fit or who prioritizes
that in their life. And because it's an important part
of your story, because it's an aspect of your identity,
it's kind of easier to show up each week. It

(31:42):
doesn't mean the workouts are easy, it doesn't mean it
always feels like you want to do it. But you
don't have to motivate yourself to go to the gym
in the same way that somebody's just getting started does.
Because it's part of your story, You're like, no, this
is just like who I am. This is something that
I do each week, and it's important to me. And
hope believe those little steps can get you started and

(32:02):
set you on that path to becoming that kind of
person I read about Mitch. She puzzled me because I
don't get it. Every day I get to work out,
I don't have to work out. I view I view
it as something that is great process or and I
don't have fitness goals. I don't do it for anything
other than I Actually I'm completely present in the gym,
and that is a great hour, hour and a half,
and that's that's its own reward for me. Beyond weight

(32:24):
or aesthetics or anything else you achieve. But on the
other hand, um, I do think of myself as a
disciplined person. I'm shitty at having the discipline to get
better in Spanish. There's just something like that where you know,
I speak it by living in Miami. I want to
be fluent in it, and for some reason, I know
what it takes to do that. I know it takes consistency.
I know it takes practice and study and talking, and

(32:47):
I just I am having a block with that. And
I'm sure everybody out there has something they'd like to do,
they know sort of the roadmap to it that damn it.
If it's just hard to execute day after day, I
still have a lot. That's that's for I'm going to
get better at it by finding ways too to show
up every day, so you know, it's fascinating. My My
best personal example for this is nutrition. So like if

(33:10):
we say you got fitness and working out, you have sleep,
and you have nutrition. That's kind of being the three
like big pillars of of wellness or health. I was
always pretty good. I was always great at prioritizing sleep, um,
and I was always pretty good at at working out.
But nutrition just eluded me for a long time, and
I kind of got away with it when I was
in my twenties. But then you start to get older

(33:30):
and you're like, yeah, I can't quite like slide in
the same way that I could before until you hit sixty, James,
I want to tell you, so, I, Um, I tried
a bunch of things, you know, I tried all the
different types of diets or whatever. I tried, um uh,
downloading apps like my Fitness Pal. I actually used my

(33:52):
fitness but I didn't even use it for a single
a whole day. I used it for a single meal,
and I was like, this is an enormous paint in
the ask. There's no way I'm gonna be blocking my
food to all this. So um. This was over a
span of five, seven, you know, nine years, Like I
was trying all kinds of different stuff, and I just
never I don't know, I just always kind of reverted
back to my normal way of eating. And over the
last two years I finally have made like meaningful progress

(34:14):
on it. And the thing that changed it was I
hired a coach and he doesn't actually do even that much.
He just there's a spreadsheet, so it's just a Google
sheet where I log my meals. And the thing that
helped a lot was, like many people, I eat a
lot of the same things each week, Like there's probably
twenty meals or thirty meals that are what I eat,
like eight percent at the time. And once I logged

(34:37):
those twenty or thirty in there, I could just copy
and paste them in each day, and that made it
was so much easier to track. And then um and
then he sends me an email once a week to
check in and see how things are going. And I
don't know why, but that version spreadsheet, plus an email
from a coach, that was the thing that got me
to stick to tracking my calories and staying on track.

(34:58):
And I'm not perfect with it, you know, I'm not
even worried about being perfect with it, but I bet
of the weeks throughout the year, I'm on target. And
that is so different than how it was before. And
the point that I'm trying to get across here has
actually nothing to do with new nutrition and tracking. Whatever.
The point is, I wrote a book about the stuff.
I know all the strategies. It's not like I didn't
know what to do right. So like if you're feeling like, man,

(35:21):
I keep being told what to do, but I'm not
falling through. Yeah. Same, you know, like there's so so
don't feel like that that's like the core issue or
that you're unique or in your struggle there. Um, it's
just that I had to keep trying different lines of
attack before I figured out one that fit and worked
for my life. And I think this is generally how
I think about habits and behavior change, which is there

(35:42):
is no single best strategy for doing it. There is
no one way to build habits. There's no one way
to break a habit. There are many ways. And what
I tried to do with atomic habits is lay all
the tools out on the table and say, hey, here's
here's a wrench, and here's a screwdriver, and here's a hammer,
and your job. The thing you have to bring to
it is a willingness to try things, a willingness to say,

(36:03):
you know what, I'm gonna pick up a hammer today
and see how that works. And then the next week
maybe it's like, you know what, I'll try the screwdriver.
And eventually you find the right tool for the job,
You find the right thing for your situation. But it
can take a while, and you know, like that has
been true for me, just as it's true for everybody else.
So I think that's just kind of if you're serious
about change or serious about improvement, you also need to

(36:25):
be serious about having this mindset of self experimentation, this
philosophy of trying things out and of experimenting until you
find the right solution for you. So that's just It
doesn't make it easier, but that, like, that is just
part of the process, and those things are hard. If
you're saddled with the fear of failure, if you're if
you're a perfectionist, you're afraid to fail, then you don't

(36:46):
want to experiment you because you feel like, well, what
if it doesn't work. Well, that's not the point. You
You talk a lot about things that really stem from
self awareness. You write the self awareness or lack of
it is poison, and that reflection and review is sort
of the antidote for that. Awareness to me is such

(37:08):
a missing component and such an elemental thing for a
lot of people. I don't think you can be a
good leader if you're not aware. If you're not aware
of what's going on around you, your people. With the problems.
But but how do people sort of spark that kind
of self awareness if they if they don't have it.
If you're not self aware, you don't even aware that
you're not aware. Yeah, it's a great question. It is crucial.

(37:29):
And I again, this is all this stuff as reminders myself, right,
so like I've made all these mistakes too, and self
poorness is tricky. A lot of times you think you
have it and you don't, and so like that, boy,
that's really hard. You feel like, yeah, I know what's
going on that you're actually missing the bigger picture. I
think there are a couple of things that are involved.
So the first is are you engaged at all? Like

(37:49):
are you interested and curious? If you kind of checked out,
then you're just sort of blind to all the things
that are going on. So it's really hard to be
self aware if you're not engaged um. And that can
mean on like a personal level, that can just mean
that you care about the thing, you care about the workout,
or you care about the novel you're working on, you
care about the project or whatever. But are you engaged um.

(38:10):
And then ultimately, self awareness is the process of recognizing feedback.
So sometimes the feedback comes and you don't recognize it.
Sometimes you miss it, you don't see it. Other times
the feedback is not there. You're not getting the information
at all. And so I think this is where the
process of reflection review comes in and can be useful,
which is it is a process for sourcing, for collecting,

(38:33):
and for analyzing and noticing feedback. UM. I have a
couple of different processes of reflection review. You can sort
of think about this almost like a meta habit. It's
like one level up or one level above all the
other habits you're building, because if you have a process
for reflection review, you can kind of look down on
the rest of your habits from above and maybe notice

(38:55):
them or look at them a little bit more. Maybe
it even gives you a little distance where you can
get out of the emotion and the feelings of of
it and you can just kind of see it for
what it what it is. UM. So my two processes
for a reflection review are one. I do a weekly review,
so every Friday that's mostly business related for me. I'm
mostly looking at how many email subscribers do we get

(39:17):
this week, how much revenue expenses, um, you know, do
we published like just kind of getting a view of
the business, where's the money coming in, where's it going out, etcetera.
And um, most of the time I don't do a
whole lot with that because the feedback cycle is pretty
quick from Friday to Friday, and not a whole lot
has changed, but it does. It's interesting a couple of

(39:38):
times a year something a little flag will go up
and it's like, hey, that's a little abnormal, you know,
like that doesn't look the way it should. We need
to course correct and so, um, that's a useful kind
of weekly review. Then at the end of the year,
I have an annual review that I do each December,
and I used to publish them publicly. I haven't published
it the last year or two. But this looks at

(40:01):
all kinds of stuff. I look at the number of
workouts that I did throughout the year. I look at
the average number that I did each month. Um, I
look at my best lifts for the year. Um. I'm
training in a different way now, so I don't care
as much about hitting max as I as I used to.
But that was like a big thing that I used
to look at, like, hey, did I hit a higher
weight this year? At some point that I did the
year before, Um, I look at how many places I

(40:22):
traveled to, number of cities that I went to, how
much time I spent away from home, how many nights
did I sleep outside of my own bed? Um, And
then like is that too high or too low? A
lot of the time when I was trying to like
travel more and see more of the world, I felt like, Oh,
I should do a little more of this. And then
the year after the book came out, I was traveling
like crazy, and that year it was interesting. It was
like the opposite. I was like, oh, there's way too

(40:43):
many nights away from home, and so I kind of
dipped it down. The next year. Um, I look at
the number of articles I published, how many words I
wrote that year, um, the amount of traffic that each
article published, etcetera. So you get the idea it's gonna
be unique for each person, and you have to ask yourself,
what are the kind of the core things that I
want to track or pay attention to. But it's a

(41:04):
chance to check in, and I think mostly it's a
chance to say, hey, I have these things that I
say are important to me, Like I say that I'm
this kind of person or that I say I'm working
towards this sort of outcome. What did I actually spend
my time on this year? And are the is there
are those two things lined up, like the way that
I spent my time and what I actually did? Is
that lined up with what I say my priorities and

(41:26):
values are. And every year I find areas where they're not.
Where I said one thing was important, but actually I
didn't spend enough time on it, or that wasn't where
my attention was directed. And so the process of reflection
review gives you a chance or course correct. You'll never
be perfect, but now you have a chance to adjust.
And the more that you have that, I think, the

(41:47):
more you're starting to get a little bit of that
feedback and you can be aware of what's going on
rather than just kind of continuing blindly down some path
for two or three years, ten years. Reflection and review
that's a powerful a new meaning for R and R.
Rest and relaxation are really nice. I mean that nothing
against that, but I think I think that the other
R and R is a great tool, um you know,

(42:09):
for awareness, and I think that reflection review probably is
easier if you can clear out the static, internal static.
We talked about finding ways to get centeredness and peace
solitude if possible, but also the external stuff, leaving your
phone in the other room, that that's that's so crucial.
I think people are yearning for that kind of inner harmony,

(42:32):
that sort of centeredness and the ways to get there
and what all the things that you describe that that
can lead to the that it can improve in medicines
and a lot of ways. Focus is the art of
knowing what to ignore and instead of thinking about what
should I be focused on? What should I be sending
my time on? Which should I you give more attention to?

(42:52):
It can be useful to start by saying what do
I need to ignore, what I need to get rid of,
what do I need to like call and delete from
my life and create the capacity to spend more attention
on the things that matter. You know, I mean a
lot of time we feel like we can't do we
want to do because we're tapped out, we're exhausted, you know,
we don't have capacity. So that removing the static, as

(43:14):
you say, can be a really helpful thing to do. Yeah,
not to get to philosophical or too eastern, but I
think unlearning things can be even more powerful than learning
them sometimes because we all get very program and we
all have to stop and check ourselves and and unlearned
self control. So it's part about that. I agree with you.
I think it's a really important point. I just want
to double click on that for a second. Is um,

(43:38):
un learning is really tough because a lot of the
things that you learned did serve you for quite a while,
it did benefit you, and so um, I think about
life is like a series of seasons. So my personal
example for this is like when I was writing Atomic Habits,
I was in this season where it's really career heavy.
I was working tons of hours, focused a lot on
the book and finishing it and doing a great job

(43:58):
and launching it and marketing it and so on. Then
a couple of years later, I had kids, and now
I'm in this season where everything shifted. I've got young kids,
and so it's not his career heavy. The family burners
kind of turned up now the work burners turned down lower.
And I was really slow on the uptake there, Like
it took me probably a year and a half to
figure out, oh, some of these things that we're serving

(44:20):
me in my previous season aren't serving me anymore, and
I keep trying to force fit them into my new life,
and so it can be tough to I think my
assumption early on was unlearning means everybody learned some of
these bad patterns throughout life or some unhelpful things, and
you need to unlearn those. And that's kind of true.
I think we all have things that are suboptimal that

(44:41):
we can unlearn. But it also can mean there were
a lot of good things that you learned, are good
habits that you had, but they just don't fit your
current life or your current season that you're in, and
you need to unlearn those two And that has proven
to be tougher for me to unlearn, but I think
can be just as useful. So I think that question
of what season in my inn right now and what

(45:02):
habits do I need to let go of that previously
certainly but no longer do And what habits do I
need to soak up that are a better fit for
the season that I'm in. Those are some interesting things
to come back to from time to time. That's that's
a great way to think about it. I hadn't before,
but I'm gonna I'm gonna ponder that the way of
looking at it in terms of life seasons, um, a

(45:23):
couple more things. Self control governs a lot of the
things we talked about. What you write is that people
with most self control are often the ones that are
best at removing themselves from temptation or moving the temptations
from their proximity. So help people sort of grasp that,
how can they achieve some success with what we're talking

(45:44):
about by just strengthening their self control with some of
the tricks of the trade. I thought that was one
of the more surprising things that I came across as
I was researching the book and talking to different academics
and so on, is that, I mean, h ones are
all somewhat similar in the sense that, yeah, most people
think donuts taste great. You know, are like most people

(46:06):
are excited to watch a really good TV show, or
you know, like it's just easy to do some of
the things that people spend a lot of their time doing.
And um, we look at some people are like, man,
they have such incredible self control. How do they do it?
You know, they never eat donuts, they never watch TV
or whatever. And the answer is, they're actually not that different.
They just aren't tempted nearly as much like they the

(46:28):
person who the person who eats the fewest number of
donuts as a person like never really sees them or
doesn't pass a donut shop. Um. And that's kind of
interesting because if you take that idea seriously, then you
start thinking about, how can I structure my life so
that I'm tempted less? How can I structure my day
so that I'm coming across the things that I want
to be tempted by and maybe not the things that

(46:50):
I feel like are wasting my time or pulling away
my energy and so on. So the first thing you
can do is just reduce exposure. You know, unsubscribed for emails,
don't keep junk food in the house. If you're trying
to follow a new diet, like don't follow food bloggers
on Instagram. You know, you're constantly being triggered by the
thing that you're trying to avoid, reducing exposure to the
queue that prompts it. That's probably one of the most

(47:11):
straightforward ways. The second thing that you can do is
increase friction, sometimes increasing it so much that you can't
even do the behavior anymore. One of the more interesting
examples I came across when I was writing the book
is some people who were biting their nails and doing
it for years, and they wanted to get rid of
this habit. One of the ways that they kicked it
was by getting invisible line. And the invisible line the

(47:33):
liners that you wear on your teeth. Once you have
them on, you can't bite your nails while those are in,
and so it was this weird thing that you like,
you wouldn't think it was for that, but they were like, hey,
I need to straighten my teeth. And then all of
a sudden their nail biting habit faded to the side
because there was too much friction between them and the behavior.
And I think that's kind of an interesting thing to
think about too, Like how can you introduce steps between

(47:55):
you and the thing that you want to do. Sometimes
it can be a subtle, a really subtle thing, like
I gave the example of keeping my phone in another room.
Another example for me, if I buy let's say I
buy a six pack of beer and I put in
the fridge. If it's like on the door or at
the top shelf where I can like right in front
of my face, and I can see it when I'm
sitting in there. I'll drink one every night with dinner

(48:16):
just because it's there. But if I put it down
like on the lowest shelf of the fridge, like all
the way in the back, I have to like bend
down to see it, I can't even really spot it
when I opened up the door. Sometimes it'll sit there
for like two weeks. I won't even like think about it. Now,
this is not going to work for someone who like
has no how CAHOL problem or is struggling with you know,
it's like a real addiction or something like that. But
there are a lot of habits that are like that

(48:38):
if they're just like not visible, if they're just like
the friction is increased a little bit, they kind of
fade away. So I think that's actually the first place
to focus with self control is optimize your environment. We've
talked a lot about physical environment. The last one that
I want to mention with this just because I think
it's so important is social environment. And if you really

(48:59):
want to get habits to stick, like if you want
him to stick, get him to stick for two years
or five years or I don't know, even decades. The
social environments one of the most powerful elements to capture.
You know, if I if I walk outside my house,
I look across the street, let's say my neighbor's cut
in their grass. I might think, oh, man, you know what,
I need to mow the lawn too, And you'll stick

(49:20):
to that habit of mowing your grass for five or
ten or twenty years, like however long you live in
the house. And why do we do it? Partially we
do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn,
but mostly it feels good to have a clean law
because you don't want to be judged by the other
people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And
so it's actually this social norm and the social expectation

(49:40):
of the group of your neighbors that gets you to
be motivated to do the habit consistently. And that kind
of thing happens with all sorts of habits. And so
I think the punchline if you want to increase self control,
if you want to increase consistency with habits, is join
a group, join a tribe where your desired behavior is

(50:02):
the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that group,
man it's going to be really motivating for you to
stick to it. You know, like people will join across
Fit Jim thinking that they're gonna build a workout habit,
and then you find them six months later and they
all are eating paleo and they have the same brandon
nee sleeves, and they're like wearing the same workout shoes.
And they were never trying to like pick up all

(50:22):
those habits. They just they are soaking them up because
that's what the tribe is doing. And so if you
start to build relationships, build friendships with people where your
desired behaviors the normal behavior, it becomes much easier to
maintain that sense of what we would call self control
and stick to the habit of the long run. So
physical environment, social environment, both of those are powerful ways

(50:45):
to kind of hack self control and get it to
stick for a longer period of time. Yeah, social environment
includes strangers on social media platforms, and a good way
to avoid toxicity in your life is to remove yourself
from that um the platform that begins with Tea among others.
But I don't want to get side. Were short on time,
but you you write very convincingly about the need to

(51:07):
sort of shape and curate your social media feeds so
that between to reinforce things that you want to make
part of your identity and remove things that you don't
want part. I mean the people you follow on Twitter
or Instagram or whatever. In a sense, you're choosing your
future thoughts when you choose those people people, you're choosing
your future thoughts by who you are clicking on. That

(51:28):
That is a that is a great way to incentivize
people to take stock. You have to think carefully about
it in a way. You're when you choose who to
follow on all these sides, you're kind of creating your
own little city. And pretty much every thought that you
have is downstream from what you consume. It's almost never
the case that a thought just arises spontaneously. It's almost

(51:50):
always somebody said something in conversation and then I had
a response, or I read something, or I viewed something
and I had a response as a thought. And so yeah,
like when you choose who to foll all on the Twitter,
you're choosing your future thoughts. So think carefully about what
you want to be focused on a week from now,
or a month from now, or a year from now,
and pour more of that into your feet and into

(52:11):
your life, and less of what you feel like makes
you feel down or angry or depressed or whatever. You're
generous with your time. Last thing, now that you've helped
people change their mindsets, which changes lives, which is contagious,
which changes the world, what is the next frontier for you?
And where do you see UM an area that that
excites you beyond um the work in Atomic Habits. So

(52:35):
I kind of have two things first, as you mentioned
at the beginning of the show. But three to one
is the weekly newsletter that I put out. So it's
three three short ideas for me, two quotes from other people,
and then one question to think about for the week.
And uh, I really enjoyed the practice of putting that together.
And I think it's nice because it's a reminder for
myself again each week, like what I want to focus on,
what I want to think about, what's an interesting question

(52:56):
to kind of sit with. And the audience seems to
be enjoying as well. So that comes out every Thursday.
And then I am working on a second book. UM
I wrote my Habits book. I'm like, I don't have
anything else to share about it. I don't. I don't
have any other ideas. Everything's in that one, um, But
I do feel like there are some questions you could
have at the end of the book, Like, for example,

(53:17):
one question might be, Okay, I know how to build
better habits now, but which habits should I be focused on?
Or where should I direct my attention and energy for
it to be the highest and best use. And we
could call that different things, you know, we could call
it focus or choices, or like how you're you know,
channeling your energy and attention. But I'm kind of circling
a lot of ideas around that right now and trying

(53:38):
to figure out um. You know, people work hard in
many different areas of life, many different professions, many different careers,
many different countries, and yet the results are very different
depending on what you choose to direct your effort toward.
And this is true even within an individual life. We
all can think about stuff where, hey, when I put
my effort here, I get a lot out of it,

(53:59):
and when i've my effort here, I don't seem to
get many results. So what's going on there and what
is the difference between things that kind of multiply your
effort and things that sort of divided, and so I'm
thinking a lot about those choices and maybe how to
best direct your attention and energy. Can't wait to see
what's next. I'm sure it'll be wise. Hey, it's nice

(54:20):
to meet you two dimensionally on this screen, James. I
really appreciate what you've done, as I said, and grateful
for your time today. Yeah. Thanks, Christ appreciate the opportunity,
and I hope we get to hang out in person sometimes,
so thank you again. That'd be fun. I really hope
you've got a lot from that. We only had time
to scratch the surface. James offers so many proven methods

(54:40):
and tools for self improvement. I recommend checking out James
clear dot com. As always, a huge thank you to
the team at Octagon by co executive producer and wife
Jennifer Dempster and I are so grateful you've made valor
who you've got part of your listening habits and be
saying you best wishes for the new year. We'll talk

(55:01):
to you then in season six mm hm