How to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones | James Clear

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/e215479e8cb973e4

What's the two minute rule? Take whatever habit you're trying to focus on.
and scale it down to something it takes two minutes or less to do. You know, I have this reader, he started going to the gym.
And he lost over a hundred pounds, kept off for more than a decade now.
But when he first started to go
He had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes. Right? It sounds like kinda ridiculous. Like oh clearly this is not gonna get the guy the results he wants. What you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up.
A habit must be established before it can be improved. You need to standardize before you optimize. And then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate.
What is the mechanism by which we can do that? Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit. And I think one of the best things you can do early on, this is if I could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't in it, it would probably be this.
What is the role that identity plays in terms of habit formation?
Ultimately I feel like identity may be the most important thing with habits.
Um
Your habits are how you embody a particular
Identity.
So when you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized.
If you study biology for twenty minutes on Tuesday night, you embody the identity of someone who is studious.
The act of doing it is proof that you are that type of person.
And eventually
You start to build up this body of evidence.
For being that way. You have every reason in the world to believe it.
So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that
Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
So when you show up at the gym today, you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts.
When you sit down and make one sales call, you are casting a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you are casting a vote for being a writer.
And no doing one push up does not transform your body.
But it does cast a boat for that identity. It does provide evidence for being that type of person.
And eventually.
As you build up that body of evidence, you start to take pride.
In being that way.
And I think that's where you get to this really resilient place in terms of building your habits. When you start to take pride in being that type of person.
you will fight to maintain the habit.
you know, it becomes the opposite situation. Now instead of trying to force yourself to do it, you're trying to maintain it, uh, because it's a part of your identity that you believe in and that you, you know, want to to keep.
You know, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you never skip arm day at the gym. No. If you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long hair care routine, you do it every day.
We wouldn't know but you know. Slight. Um and so
Um
Really the goal.
is not to read a book. The goal is to become a reader.
You know, the goal is not to run a marathon, it's to become a runner. The goal is not to do some silent meditation retreat, it's to become a meditator. It's to
install and adopt
This identity.
that this is the type of person that I am.
And I think ultimately that's why small habits matter so much.
You know, behavior and belief is like a two way street.
You know, what you believe will influence the actions that you take.
But the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself.
And you know, every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. And so my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way.
to start with some small action.
And then prove to yourself and you're in that moment that you were that kind of person. And as you start to
foster and build that identity.
Um sticking with the habit becomes easier.
I'll I like the idea of the small w you had one percent better in your book to uh these small changes leading to big results. I think where people go astray
And
the lack of patience sort of changes the outcome. So I know I want to be healthier.
But I know it's a lot of work and a lot of time if I
eat healthier, I go to the gym more, I I just live a healthier lifestyle.
And that's where we get in trouble, but we do it with everything. It's not Lack of Patience changes the outcome. That's a good phrase. Um, it's definitely true. I think there are two ways people can go astray. So there's there's what you just mentioned, which is not being patient enough and sticking with it. We'll talk about that in a minute.
The other one is um
Small changes can really matter.
But only if they're oriented in the right way. You know, we we know we all know people who spend time on minutia and trivial things. You know, you kinda waste time on small stuff that doesn't really matter. And I think one of the distinctions is are your small actions accumulating or are they evaporating?
You know, are you doing small things each day that are oriented toward a larger outcome?
Or are you doing small things each day that are just kind of like one-offs and don't really add up? In a lot of ways, I feel like the two time frames that matter most in life.
Are ten years and one hour.
You know, so like 10 years is just shorthand for the big meaningful things that you want to do in life. Where do you want to be in a decade? You know, I sometimes I like to encourage people to don't let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade.
Um, and one hour is how can I do something today, right now, that is oriented toward where I want to be in 10 years. And if you can kind of live in that simultaneously in those two modes of thought, if you can both be thinking long term but acting short term.
then you start looking for little changes, little adjustments that do add up, that do accumulate, that are not trivial and, you know, um
Meaningless.
So
Um, I think that's one way people go astray is their their small actions are not oriented toward the larger outcome. They're not accumulating.
The second way that they go astray is what you just mentioned, which is um
Lack of patience changes the outcome.
I one of the examples I give in atomic habits is thinking about an ice cube.
You know, so you walk into a room, it's cold, you can see your breath.
And the ice cube sitting on the table, you start heating the room up one degree, another degree, another degree. Ice cube's still there. And eventually
You get to this tipping point, this phase transition, the ice cube starts to melt. And so it's like one degree shift, no different than the shifts that had come before.
But you hit this transition and things change.
And habits are like that a lot of the time.
You know, you'll hear people say things like
You know, I've been running for a month. I can't see a change in my body. Or we've been meeting every Friday for six months and we still haven't shipped this feature yet.
And it's like, yeah, that work is not being wasted. It's just being stored. You know, it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube up a little bit and then not melting yet. It's like, well, you just haven't hit the phase transition.
So
That's where people give up.
Yes.
Yes.
I the San Antonio Spurs have
uh a quote hanging in their locker room where it says, you know, they've won five NBA championships.
And it says when I think about giving up
I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock a hundred times without it splitting in two.
And at the hundred and first blow, it cracks.
And I know that it wasn't the hundred and first that did it.
But all the hundred that came before.
And so many in things in life are like that. You know, it's not the last workout that got you fit, it's all the hundred that came before. It's not the last sentence that finishes the novel, it's all the hundred that came before. It's not the last conversation that closes the sale, it's all the hundred that came before. It's this willingness to keep showing up and hammering on the rock and knowing that at some point you are gonna hit that phase transition. You are gonna hit that, you know.
that new um level.
But you need enough persistence to keep doing it.
Are there
Tips or tricks you have because like when I'm working out, I'm getting better, but I'm getting better internally. I just don't, I can't visual. It's not visible. But it is in it like I can't see it, but it's happening. Yes. Are there tips or tricks you have that we can
uh use either psychologically or practically speaking. This is one of the big lessons for habits, which is just because improvements aren't noticable doesn't mean improvement isn't happening.
You know, you're not gonna see a change on the scale every time you work out. You're not gonna see a change in the number of subscribers every time you publish an episode or whatever. Like it's you know, it takes a while.
Um
But
The tricky part is
If something's not working.
It also takes a while, you know, you just keep banging your head against the wall. So how do you know when
you need to be patient and how do you know when you need to try something different.
And um
Sometimes you'll hear people say like try, try, try again.
I actually think it should be rephrased to try, try, try differently.
You need to keep trying, but you need to keep trying different lines of attack. This is I think Naval has something where he says, you know, it's not 10,000 attempts, it's ten thousand iterations.
No, an iteration is a different way of doing it.
So you need you need some adjustment to the approach.
And
Um
I don't think you need to do it ten thousand times. Usually just doing it five different ways or ten different ways is enough to see
Oh, one of these is working better than the other. Yeah. So this is the this is the second kind of insight, which is
When something goes well.
usually it goes pretty well from the beginning.
It's not now that does not what that does not mean is that you'll always have the results you want right away.
or that you will immediately get the outcome that you're you're hoping for. But what it does mean is that you should this was one of the best pieces of advice given to me early in my entrepreneurial career.
Somebody told me you should try things until something comes easily.
Now
That doesn't mean that it will be easy.
But it does mean that it results will come easier than the other things that you have been trying. And so in a lot of ways, I think what you
kind of one of the big quests for life.
is to
Experiment enough.
to find what comes easy for you and then work really hard on what comes easy.
Because if you work hard on the thing that you have some skill set for, some strength for, some natural aptitude for, then
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So
It's just your classic explore exploit trade off.
You know, early in the process, you need to explore more and experiment more. And then eventually you start to discover, okay, of the 10 things I've tried, these are the two that work best.
Now you need to double down on what's working.
and start exploiting some of the things that um that are actually getting your results.
Peter Thiel gave a talk a while ago and one of the things he said that really stood out to me was
We underestimate
when something's working, we underestimate how long it can go for and how powerful it can be. So often we change habits that are working for us too, where we change we tinker with things that are working. Man, there's so many places in life where this is true. Like I so um
Two examples. One in the gym.
I have a friend who was very strong, really good lifter.
Um, squatted over five hundred pounds.
And we were trained together.
And he was doing the squat program and
It went great. He made a lot of progress over like this three month span.
And then I had to travel or something. I didn't see him for a little while. Whatever. I can't I came back. Maybe I saw him like six months later.
I said, Oh, hey, are you still doing that squat program? He's like, No. I was like, Oh, did it like did you stall out or something? He was like, No, I just got bored. Um, and you're like, Man, it like all the time. You know, it it happens everywhere. People just um the quest, the desire for novelty.
um overpowers the, you know, the desire to get results. It's like we just can't keep sticking with it. So
Um
Doubling down on what's working.
In a lot of ways I feel like the process is actually quite simple.
Try a number of things.
Right. So experiment with a number of things, run a number of small experiments.
Once you find something that works.
Double down on it.
And then keep doing it until it stops working, which is the step that a lot of people skip.
Um, and then once it stops working, go back to the start and try a lot of small experiments again.
And it's really it's really not more it doesn't need to be more complicated than that. But
People
Shortcut each step.
They either don't try enough experiments, they try one or two things and they say, Well, this didn't work for me. You're like, Well
It's not enough to try two, like maybe you need to try twenty, you know. Um
And then once they find something that's working, they maybe they don't double down on it enough. That seems once you've tried a lot of things, you're kind of diversified, doubling down feels kind of risky, you know, to just go all in on something. But you need to be able to flip that switch and fully commit.
And then
Once you're fully committed, people get bored.
And so they don't stick with it until it stops working. Keep doing it, if it doesn't work. This is part of the reason why I have not published another book yet.
Um
Atomic habits is working really well. And so I'm trying to take my own advice and don't stop until it stops working.
Um until that might be forever. Yeah. Eventually eventually you realize that it's not just about results, right? It's also about how do you want to live your life, what do you want to spend your time on. Um but uh
But yeah, so I think those those three steps
probably should be taken more seriously than they are.
How do we create an environment that makes behavior change inevitable?
I think that's one of the best questions. How can I create the conditions for success?
You know, how can I how can I design an environment where my desire change is easy?
In a lot of ways, that's one of the driving questions of atomic habits is to say
There's this uh I came across this body of research when I was working on the book about willpower and self control.
And a lot of the surface level conversations about habits that people have
Are about discipline and willpower. You know, people will look at a professional athlete and they'll say, Man, if I was just as disciplined as them.
But I you know, I talked to one guy who played for the Philadelphia Eagles.
And um he said, You know, during my career
Everything was designed for us. You know, we went we would go to the stadium and we have professional trainers and nutritionists, the food is prepared for us, the you know, all the workouts are designed, coaches are on us every day to do the right drills in the right order and to, you know, like everything is there's this environment where the conditions for success.
have been fully created.
And he's like after I retired.
That was the hardest time for me to stick to it. Like people would look at me as a professional athlete and think, wow, how disciplined are you? But in fact, you know, I what I was is I was benefiting from my environment.
And all of us are like that.
And so I I think you can look around your own environment and say, How can I do a better job of creating the conditions for success? Let's forget about me being a more disciplined for person or being, you know, someone with superhumpower. And let's try to make it as easy as possible for me to do the things I want to do each day.
So
A couple of questions I think are helpful. One is
Walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, your office, your living room, your kitchen, bedroom.
And just look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage?
You know, what behaviors are obvious here? What behaviors are easy here? And you'll start to notice that it's designed for certain things. Um
You know, a lot of people feel like they watch too much T V, but
walk into any living room. You know, like where do all the couches and chairs face? What is this room designed to get you to do? And I'm not saying you need to rearrange your entire house, but you know, you can notice that if you put the healthy food out on the counter and it's visible, you're much more likely to eat it. Like I one of the examples in the book is that
I used to buy apples and I would put them in the
Crisper in the bottom of the fridge.
And I would kind of like forget that they were there. They were just tucked away in the drawer. And then I'd find them in like a week and like two of them have gone bad. And I'm like, I'm wasting food. I'm wasting money. So instead I just bought this little display bowl and I put them in the counter, uh on the counter, just visible. And now you grab one whenever you walk in. They're like gone in two days.
And so it's just a change in the environment. What is obvious, you know, are you creating conditions where
The change that you want or the behavior that you want is obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
And the more that you can do that, the more likely it is that you'll follow through. You want to
You want to be able to walk into the rooms that you're in each day.
And the good habit.
is the path of least resistance. It's the easiest thing to do. And a lot of the time
You walk into rooms and it's the distractions that are easier to do.
And you feel like you're swimming upstream and trying to fight your environment to make a change happen.
So that was one question. What's the other one you had for an environment?
Am I creating the conditions required for success?
What is this room designed to encourage?
Um, and then how can I make this behavior more obvious?
And there are there are a number of ways that you can do that. Like some of it is just, you know, uh if you want to go for a run.
Take your running shoes and your clothes set'em out the night before. I have w I have one guy who um
He sleeps in his running shorts.
So he just gets up, all he has to do is put his shoes and a shirt on, then he's out the door. You know, he's just trying to make it as frictionless as possible.
I found that uh to give you like another example.
If I buy a six pack of beer.
And I put it
on the you know shelf where I can just see it as soon as I open up the door. I'll grab one each night and have one at dinner just'cause it's there.
But if I tuck it down on the lowest shelf and like put it in the back, I gotta like bend down to see it.
Sometimes I'll forget that it's there. It'll be there for like two weeks, you know, and it's just about what is obvious. Um, what is in front of you. Just like the apples.
Yes. Right.
And yeah, it's just the inverse of that.
Um and so
Uh
I'm not saying that that's enough to change like an addicted behavior or anything like that.
But
so many of your behaviors will curtail themselves.
Possibly to the desired degree.
If it is less obvious, if it's not as successful.
Another little rule that I follow is I take my phone and I try to leave it uh in another room until lunch each day.
So that just gives me from like nine to noon ish.
where I can work on my own agenda and not respond to everybody else's agenda. You know, I'm not interrupted. And if if I have my phone next to me,
I'm like everybody else. I'll check it every three minutes just because it's there, right?
But
I have a home office and so I put it in a different room. It's just down the hall. It's only like thirty seconds away.
But I never go get it.
And so many behaviors are like that. It's like, well, did you want it or not? You know, like in the one sense, you wanted it so bad that you would check it every three minutes when it was next to you.
But in another sense, you never wanted it bad enough that you would work for 30 seconds and walk down the hall to get it. And so a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior.
What would you say to somebody who doesn't have the confidence to start?
Anytime you do something new.
By definition, you are doing something you're unqualified for.
It can't it can't be if you've already done it, if you already have some kind of qualification or skill set or experience, then you're qualified for it. It can't be new. It's just something you're repeating that you've done before.
So
you have to realize that there is some level of uncertainty that comes with
Anything that is new.
So I think just accepting that is a good starting place.
The
The second thing is that
You don't need to figure it all out.
A day.
Like the one of the frameworks that I like, I think I heard this originally from Sean Puri. He said A B Z.
Okay, so
A is an honest assessment of your current situation. Look try to look at your current s reality with clear eyes.
Z is where you ultimately want to end up.
And B is your next step.
And all you need to know is A, B, and Z.
You don't need to know step C through Y.
But so often people will convince themselves, well, I don't know what steps C through Y are. Or even if they realize they're not gonna plan it all out, they're like, Yeah, but I kinda wanna know what C, D, and E are.
You know, they wanna be able to see a little bit further into the future.
But you have to be come comfortable with
Some level of uncertainty. There's that quote.
I just shared in my newsletter recently, I think it's from Ian Wilson. He was a GE executive, where he said, No amount of information is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.
It's just a fundamental reality of life. Knowledge is purely about the past and what has been learned.
And decisions are purely about the future and what cannot be predicted. And so you have to become okay with that reality.
In a lot of ways, I actually think the most
Powerful form.
Of
Mental toughness the most powerful or resilient form of preparation.
is a mindset that can handle uncertainty.
You know, it's the we all we all try to resist this. You know, we try to control reality, we try to predict scenarios and outcomes, we try to figure out what's gonna happen ahead of time.
But really all you need
is not to predict the future. What you need is the
Confidence.
that you can handle uncertainty.
The that whatever happens, I will be able to figure it out.
I think if I was gonna encapsulate entrepreneurship in a nutshell, I would say it is the trust and the willingness that you can figure it out.
Um it's the it's there's always gonna be some point on the curve with your business where like, Well, we're not quite sure what the future's gonna bring. You know, I have a podcast and who knows how AI is gonna change that, but
If you're if you trust that you can figure it out.
Great. You can be an entrepreneur. You'll make you know, you'll figure it out along the way.
How do we develop that mindset practically? Like I think that it's
practiced in small ways and then it accumulates over time.
So
Um
I don't think sports is the only way to do this, but it's the way that I did it. So I'll use it as an example. There are many ways you could do it.
Um
One thing that's great about sports is that you have to fail publicly.
Um, you know, so you I played I played baseball all the way through college, played it for seventeen years of my life.
And um, you know, the early years you're in T ball or little league or whatever and you're playing and then you make an air.
That does not feel good, right? Like you let the whole team down.
But
You realize
That life goes on.
You failed publicly.
And you move forward.
Um
Later when I was in college, you know, we're not only playing games together, we're also training together in the gym.
You show up in the gym, you look at the guy next to you, you realize he's a little bit stronger than you. That doesn't feel great. You see that.
Then you're like, Well, let me try to set a new PR. I'll throw five more pounds on the bar. You fail in front of everybody. You miss that lift. Yeah. That doesn't feel good, but
You move on.
Thirty seconds later, you get back to it and you go do the next thing.
And
It happens again and again in small ways, but failing publicly
trains your mind. It teaches you that
What matters most is not that you always win, but that you always keep reaching.
That you always keep striving.
In a lot of ways, the real important question to ask is not what can I succeed on or what can I achieve, but what is worth reaching for.
You know, and that's really what you want is to keep reaching, to keep striving.
And as you train that muscle and develop it in all those little small ways
Eventually you get to a point
Where you can handle it in big ways.
You know, I remember my senior year, my my final season.
Um
I said like
I don't want us to lose.
But if we're gonna lose, I wanna be the one who's playing, you know, like put me out there. I can handle, I can take the loss, you know. I don't want to lose, but I can handle it.
Um, and I feel that way now too about stuff that I do, you know, in business.
I put everything that I had into the Atomic Habits launch. You know, like I we started planning that launch fifteen months ahead of time.
Um and I in a lot of places in life
Good enough is good enough.
But every now and then.
you find an area where good enough is not good enough and you wanna do it the best you can do it. And I decided that for me, that was one of those things that I was going to try to do as good as I could possibly do it.
And
That comes with risk. That comes with vulnerability. You know, you're gonna spend your
Next year and a half.
promoting and pushing and talking about this thing that you poured three to five years of your life into.
What if people hate it? What if the reviews aren't any good? You know, what if you
secure big interviews and you go on morning shows and then the book flops and it doesn't sell.
Um, what if the publisher is mad at me because they paid me in advance or they were expecting it to do well and then it doesn't perform? And like you sit with all those questions.
And my thought
I think partially because I had trained that muscle uh over time was
I can handle it.
You know, like if it if we lose, I'll I'll deal with it.
You know, and you'll be fine.
Um
But
you ha I think once you have that confidence, then you have the confidence to go for it fully.
You know, the problem is if you don't have that confidence, you start talking yourself out of it. You water it down. You know, you don't promote it all the way, you don't do all the things you could do because you're kind of scared.
of what the result could be. What if it doesn't go well, so then I don't go all the way in.
And then it kinda c becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Because it for sure isn't gonna work that well if you don't give it everything you have.
As you're saying that the thing that comes to mind is like the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose.
And the hesitation that comes with playing not to lose versus like just going for it. Yeah.
There's uh in the World Cup final, women's world cup a couple of years ago, uh the US beat Japan.
And Carly Lloyd scored like three goals in that game. Um
And I think the third of her goals she kicked from midfield, it was like just super long. But she the cool thing about that.
Play.
Is that she saw the opportunity to go for it and she went for it right away. She never talked herself out of it. It was a shot that you would never take in most circumstances. It's not a good shot, it's not a high percentage shot. Um, but she saw an opening and she went for it. There was no hesitation.
Um
Similarly, totally different domain.
Uh, one time my wife and I, my wife's I'm not very musical at all, but my wife is, and we were listening to Zach Brown band play a song, and she was like, One thing I love about listening to him sing is that there's no hesitation in his voice.
When he when it comes time to sing the lyric, he's like fully in it. Um, he's not like second guessing himself or doubting himself, there's just like singing with confidence.
And so in all these different domains, sports, music, business.
You can't have that hesitation. You know, you don't want to be the one talking yourself out of it. I think uh for me, I try to not be my own bottleneck.
You know, I I don't wanna have
I don't want to be the first person to tell myself no.
No, I want the world to tell me no first.
And then I'll and then I'll adjust based on the feedback that I get. But I don't want to talk myself out of it.
One of my little
sayings internally is like I try to work backwards from magic.
So what would the magical outcome be?
And then let me try to figure out a couple of different paths that could potentially get me there.
and I'll start to take steps forward and then I'll get feedback.
From the world.
You know, I don't tell myself no, maybe the world will tell me no and I need to adjust the course.
But I start with the magical outcome and then go from there.
And what you find
I I mean, I see it with family. I see it with friends, like it's so many people that I'm around.
Almost always you talk yourself out of it before the world actually prevents you from doing it.
There it's very rare that you truly run up against a hard stop in the world where they say, Sorry, this just isn't possible. What you're trying to do is it can't happen. There's almost always
Somebody else you could have talked to.
Another approach you could have taken, another attempt you could have gone for, and you're the one.
Who talks yourself out of doing it.
Um not the world. And so I try
to not be that person. I try to, you know, give myself permission to go for it and then adjust along the way.
I love these little sayings you have. You mood like Thunder, you know, work backwards from magic. What other internal sayings do you have?
That really resonate with you in this moment.
Um
One of the biggest things I learned from my grandfather was he his little saying was P M A.
Positive mental attitude.
So in any scenario, you try to have a positive outlook regardless of the current circumstances.
And that sounds a little kind of woo-woo-y sometimes, or you know, always think positive or whatever, but I have tried to become better at practicing it and teaching my kids how to practice it.
So
One way that you can do it is when you run up against something that feels
kind of difficult or feels like um you don't feel confident about it.
You try to rehearse it visually.
And you emphasize the good portions of what could happen.
And this can this can happen either in retrospect or it can happen uh pre visualization, before the thing happens. So I'll give you two examples.
In retrospect
When I played baseball
And I was like ten or twelve or fourteen.
After each season.
We would go sit on the back deck at my parents' house and my dad and I would talk about the g the year.
And we would talk about the good plays from the year. My best plays, my best games, the games that we won. We would we would try to highlight. I didn't know this at the time, but what he was doing was he was helping me highlight the wins.
from you know small and big from that last season.
And
Uh I can remember some of the conversations that we had. Like one I I got into high school
And I was never the best player on any team that I was on.
But he was like, Look, if you just keep sticking with it, what you're gonna find is that guys will drop off each year.
You know, and so by just by there's this
power of longevity of staying in the game that will benefit you.
And he was right, I I became a better player every year that I played.
Um
So
That's like a retrospective one. Are you are you emphasizing your wins?
And then the looking forward, if you do like a pre visualization version of it. So
I have a couple kids. Um, one of them is three.
And starting preschool.
And uh he went to preschool on the first day. He had a hard drop off. He didn't he didn't like it. Don't you know, don't leave me. I don't know what this place is. It feels, you know, scary, whatever.
So
Had a tough day getting dropped off the first time. Second day comes, same thing. Kind of cries a little bit, has a tough day when he gets dropped off. So the third day,
Um, I get them up in the morning and I get get them ready and get them breakfast and stuff.
So I'm in the kitchen. I said, All right, guys, today's a preschool day. And immediately he was like and I was like, Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Um
You like your teachers, right? Miss Jalen, Miss Caitlin, don't you you like them? He's like, Yeah.
I was like, Okay, um, what did you guys do yesterday? You got to play with the crayons and the glue sticks. Like that was fun, wasn't it? He was like, Yeah.
Um, I said, Do you have snack time and lunch? Like that, those are good things. And he's like, Yeah. And then I said, After school, you go play on the playground. So you get to go down the slides and everything. He's like, Yeah, yeah.
And that was all I said, you know, but what I'm trying to do is to get him to emphasize the positive portions of what's about to come, to imagine what it would be like for the day to be good.
And um
He went, I don't know, maybe we just got lucky, but he went and he had a great drop off that day, you know, and he's he's loved it every day since. He's he's been fine.
And so
You can see how that skill can be applied.
throughout life, you know, they're in fourth grade and they're getting ready to give their first presentation and they feel nervous about talking in front of the class.
Great, let's walk through this and emphasize what the good parts are gonna be. Um, or you know, they're getting they're in eighth grade and they're gonna go to their first school dance and they feel weird and awkward about it. Like let's talk about what a good night would look like.
And so
So many of your problems in life come from your brain.
Overemphasizing
Minor details.
The wrong minor details.
And what I'm trying to do with both myself and my kids and the people around me is
is to encourage them to emphasize
good minor details. Um, you know, to what what portion of the day are you latching on to
And what story are you telling yourself?
And so the more that you can do that, I it's kinda like a muscle. The more that you do it, the better you get at it. And that's ultimately that goes back to that PMA positive mental attitude that you know my grandpa taught me.
Um
And so that's another one of my little
I love that. I want to talk about reputation. I want to hear maybe I'll just say the word and like you can riff on it for a few minutes. Reputation. Like my reputation or how I think about it. How you think about reputation.
I don't really think about it that much. Um I'm not I'm not that worried about it. Um
I guess the main way that I think about it is I want to be known as someone who is useful.
You know, like uh useful is a word that I come back to a lot. If you if you uh Josh Kaufman has uh a good framework, it's like three things. I think it's true, useful, and clear.
Um, you know, it's like you want to write things that are true and accurate. You wanna write things that are useful and actionable, and you wanna be clear and understandable in how you do it. I I think that that does describe a lot of my approach and how I'm trying to focus on, you know.
putting work into the world.
Um
All right, so I guess I don't think about my reputation that much, but this is how I generally think about reputation, status, brand, whatever.
ultimately your reputation will be the work, the quality of the work that you do.
So it is I think
Brent B Shore said at one point, it's like the range of outcomes that you can expect from a brand. Um
And so the more that you do things that are high quality and useful and valuable and actionable, the more that you will become known for that.
Now there is a little bit of priming that can go on. So like at the top of three two one, my newsletter.
it says uh the most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web. I'm trying to set an expectation there, right? Like it's uh when somebody s signs up and subscribes and they read that.
Now you see that and you're like okay.
I'm about to read something that has a lot of wisdom and is like dense and informative. There's a lot of signal and very little noise. That's the the tone I'm trying to set.
Now
The flip side of that is you have to deliver.
Yeah. And so if you if you set that expectation and you don't actually deliver, well, that's not gonna go very well. And so I'm also putting the responsibility on me a little bit.
You know, there's like nothing to hide behind.
I do this with my Instagram account. It's like a very weird Instagram account. You know, there's no photos of me. It's just text.
Um
But
It's kind of like a peacock's tail.
You know, in the sense that it's a very useful hindrance. Like it's very visual visual and it shows which peacocks are
uh strong enough.
to have this
kind of superfluous tale.
to still survive and escape predators, those are the ones that have great genes.
Well
When you can't hide behind anything else on your Instagram account.
And it's just words.
The ideas have to be good enough.
You know, it's a it's a useful
uh hindrance. It's a useful um
blockage to getting people's attention. And so I'm like, well, if it's just gonna be words, they better be pretty good.
So
Um
I think about setting those priming those expectations and setting those standards and then also trying to reach them.
But ultimately it's just about the quality of the work that you do.
And so the more that you show up with value and useful ideas, uh, the more you become known for that.
Um
I think I also this is kind of connected to reputation, but I I don't think about
Shaping it for me that much. But
The lens should be mostly focused on the reader, not on yourself.
I think if you if you think a lot about reputation and you're trying to like cultivate this image.
That's the energy is focused in the wrong direction.
Um
If you're focused on the reader, then you start asking different questions. How can I create something that's incredibly useful for somebody? How can I make it more actionable? How can I make it easier to understand and simpler? How can I make it easy enough that I can teach it?
Um, not all those questions are focused on the reader's, you know, view or their from their position. And then there's also just questions like, what do people need right now?
You know, like what what is what is somebody what would
Yeah, what are people asking for? Um I'm trying to pay attention to that.
So
For the most part, I think reputation takes care of itself if you try to take care of other people.
Um, and if your if your lens is focused on them, then it ends up, you know, working just fine for you.
Love that, thanks.
What about positioning?
Positioning is critical.
Um
Positioning is something that I
Think a lot about. I don't think I have it figured out yet, but I have seen how powerful it can be.
Um
So let me give you a couple examples.
I'll start with positioning four.
books and then I'll start talking about positioning for life.
So
Any product.
The way that it is positioned and packaged is probably fifty percent of its success.
Um
A couple examples from books. Atomic Habits has a chapter later in it.
Where I talk about deliberate practice.
It could have been a book about deliberate practice.
Where I talk about habits.
But instead it's a book about habits where I talk about deliberate practice.
And I think the way those two books would sell.
The difference is enormous.
Um
If you don't know what deliberate practice is
It takes 30 seconds to unpack it and describe it. How is it different than regular practice and so on. You don't get 30 seconds when somebody's thinking about buying a book. You're not there at the store to explain it to them. So the packaging, the positioning of the book, which I would describe as pretty much anything that you see on the cover.
has to sell itself in.
Seven seconds. You know?
Um, and just by virtue of growing up in society and being part of the world.
You know that having good habits is favorable and having bad habits is unfavorable, and I don't need to sell anybody on that.
All I need to sell you on is hey, if you only read one book about habits.
Atomic habit should be the one.
And that's a much different
pitch.
Um and so
the positioning and packaging makes a big difference. Another example, one that um
So Authors Equity is this book publisher that I helped co-found. We have a book coming out uh called The Overthinker's Guide to Making Decisions.
And
That is basically a book about choices. It's a book about choosing and making decisions.
It could have been call something else. You know, it could have been called
the decision guide or the power of choice or something, you know, it could have been called that, but the overthinkers guide to making decisions is a great package. It's a great frame. I have told multiple people about it and they the reply to me has been
Oh, I need that.
Um, and that's usually a sign that you got the packaging right, is that, you know, people are interested in that way. So
Um
Those are two examples of positioning for products. And I think any
Any product.
The positioning and packaging is a critical part of the success.
Um
Before I go on to positioning about life, I just want to mention a few things that make
Uh for good positioning.
So
A lot of this is
our principles from direct response copywriting. It's a good domain to study or g a good place to look for examples.
But one of the core principles of direct response copyrighting is that you should try to
solve or address
A timeless and enduring desire that people have.
And so many books and other products, but I I think a lot about books.
So many books um
Are kind of adjacent.
A desire people have, they're not the actual desire. And then you're kind of in this uphill battle where you're trying to convince somebody to pay attention to something that they don't actually care about.
But you want to address a timeless and enduring desire.
So
Um
A lot of what makes for a really good book title.
is part of what makes for good packaging. So good book titles usually have three or four qualities.
The first quality is it addresses a timeless or enduring desire.
The second quality is it tells you what the book is actually about, which sounds kind of obvious, but a lot of the time Pew people kinda like keyword stuff titles, you know, they say like How to Make Millions Be Happy and Live the Dream. And you're like, that's not even what this book is about, but whatever. Um
The second thing that or the third thing that they do is that they are
An unmistakable or an ownable phrase.
So uh what that usually means is that it's a little bit weird when you first hear it.
A lot of the really iconic book titles, they are phrases that you do not hear elsewhere in life.
So
Um, man search for meaning.
Basically you only hear that in the book title. Nobody uses that phrase in daily life.
How to win friends and influence people. Even to even now, describing it as winning friends sounds kind of odd. You know, but it's it's odd enough that there's no mistaking what you're talking about. They can own the real estate in the reader's mind.
Atomic habits.
Before the book came out
You would not describe a habit as atomic. You might have said it was little or small or tiny or something like that, but you wouldn't say atomic. It's a weird way to describe a small habit.
But that's good because you can own that phrase.
So
Um
Unmistakable.
Uh addresses a timeless or enduring desire.
Tells you what the book is actually about.
And the final piece
Is that
Usually there's an element of contrast.
Some element of surprise. So rich dad, poor dad.
Or um
The life changing magic of tidying up.
I thought tidying up was a small thing, now you're telling me it's life changing.
Um
Atomic habits, tiny changes, remarkable results. You know, you want some kind of contrast between
Sometimes it's small to big, sometimes it's the easy thing, the the easy thing you can do to accomplish the hard thing, but there needs to be some form of contrast. A good example that's not like a self help book or a um business book is um astrophysics for people in a hurry.
by Neo DeGrasse Tyson. Yeah. I thought astrophysics was something that was gonna take seven years and a PhD. Yeah no actually just read this book in an hour and a half. And so the contrast is um is something that's compelling.
So if you have those four elements, that usually leads to good positioning and packaging.
All right, so that's just on the product side.
Separately.
There's a whole other discussion about positioning, which is like life positioning. Yeah. How can you put yourself in good positions for things to happen?
And there are so many ways that you could do this, I'm sure that you can think of many too.
Um
Sometimes it's just about
putting yourself in positions for good things to happen. So we talked earlier about sharing your work publicly.
Every episode that you publish, every blog post that you put out, every social media post that you put up is a little bit of surface area that somebody could discover and you could, you know, have some interesting interaction.
Um, for Atomic Habits on launch day.
I had an interview on CBS this morning.
And uh yeah, it was it was a big um
It was a big moment for me because it changed the launch of the book from, hey, some guy is releasing a book to this is a thing, you know, here's a piece of national media. It's and people are paying attention, basically. It made it feel credible and real.
And the way that it happened is I wrote an article, uh blog post on my site.
Four years earlier.
Uh called the physics of productivity.
And it was just me trying to be clever, taking Newton's three laws and applying them to productivity.
And it sat there for four years and it it was fine. It was an average article. It didn't go viral or anything, but it did fine.
And then a year before Atomic Habits came out.
A reporter at the New York Times.
Stumbled across my website.
and liked it and they linked to it in an article.
Well, some producer at CBS read that article and were was like, Hey, can we have you come on and talk about those productivity principles?
So I went on and I did a segment for CBS about a year before the book came out. It was it was maybe like 10 months or something.
And um I did that segment for like three minutes, just a little interview. And as soon as it got done, I went to Gail King and I said, I have a book coming out in 10 months.
And I want to come back on the show and talk about it when it's ready. And she said, sure, we'll have you back on. You just need to be make sure that we're your first interview. Like we want to have the first, you know, release. I said, Deal, what's your email address? Um, and so I got our email and I sent it to um my publisher and we got it all linked up.
So
When I wrote that article four years earlier.
I had no idea that that was gonna work out like that, you know, but it was a little bit of surface area. I was putting myself in a position
For good things to happen.
By trying to create something of value.
In an enduring format, you know, again, we talked about what has a long half life. That blog post had a half life of at least four years. Um
And um
I put myself in a good position for things to break my way. You don't know how it's going to happen, but you know if you try your best each time and you keep creating some surface area.
You're gonna catch a break at some point.
So
That's like a business example.
Um
There are tons of examples with margin of safety, especially with finances.
You know, if you give yourself a large margin of safety
In other words, your expenses for your life are much less than what you're taking in.
You can handle a lot of things coming your way. And so that is positioning yourself well for the unexpected.
Elements of life.
Um
You know, we have a family um situation with some medical stuff and there were you know, there was some
customized medical equipment that somebody needed because of what they were dealing with. And it's$200,000. And it's like some huge expense.
Um
But
If you give yourself a huge margin of safety and you've been saving for years, you don't know what that's gonna be, right? It could be that. It could be
I so one of my little things that I'll say sometimes is like life is gonna come for you.
You just don't know when you don't know when it will be your turn, but it will come for you. There will be something. Um
So that that expense was not our turn.
But a couple years later
My wife fell and broke her knee into four pieces.
And I had to take six months off of work.
I'm like super thankful to previous James, right? Like James from 10 years earlier that built this business where I could actually take six months off of work to take care of her and the kids.
Because what was I gonna do if I didn't have that margin of safety? But I put myself in a position where I was able to make that happen. And so
Each year.
I look at
my position both in terms of like flexibility and in terms of finances. And I just
I don't really even care about our net worth that much. What I care about is am I in a stronger position this year? You know, like as long as each year it's getting a little bit stronger, the margin of safety gets a little bit larger, um, the ability to
handle stress or uncertainty gets a little bit better.
then you know, you're positioning yourself better each year.
And so there are lots of ways to apply that positioning concept.
Just a slight off track here. Um, how are you investing that money these days?
Um Yeah, I don't know that uh I don't know that I want to talk about my personal investments, but I will talk about my personal philosophy. I guess I'll say that. Yeah.
I um
Eventually I realized
uh that you can beat the market, but you will lose your life.
Um, and so what I mean is that it is possible to get outsized returns, but you have to spend all your time doing it.
And I don't want to be a VC or an investment advisor or, you know, like somebody who's
I don't know, trying to be the next buffet or munger or whatever. It's not how I want to spend my time. You know, you only get one precious life and I want to spend it on other things. I want mostly I want to spend it creating, you know, trying to make things that didn't exist before. Um
and spending time with family. And so I'm kind of optimizing for that.
So
If you can
Be okay with that.
then you realize well, maybe there's very different ways or simpler ways to invest your money.
Like um
I'm a huge advocate of J.L. Collins and the Simple Path to Wealth, that that book. Um he his approach I think is great, which is mostly just like dump it in Vanguard and let it ride. Um
But
It's incredibly simple, and I get all my time back.
And if I'm making twelve percent a year rather than fifteen percent a year.
Who cares?
Um, you know, like I'd rather trade the three percent a year and get to spend my hours the way that I want. So
Um a lot of my a lot of my approach is based around that, around simplifying and trying to make sure that I protect my time more than trying to squeeze out.
Um
additional percentage points beyond what the market makes. You know, there I heard this other phrase once, which is
Remember that the goal is not to beat the market, the goal is to end up wealthy.
Um, you know, like so many people are focused on
beating the market that they lose all their time um and uh end up, I don't know, in many cases not even beating the market. Yeah. So
Um
It just gives you gives you a little bit of a different approach. And I think also
I

Investing in Vanguard is incredibly diversified'cause you got a slice of every company.
I have realized that
I do not have the ability to predict what
is gonna go well. Yeah. And I feel even more that way now than I did a year or two ago.
Things are moving so fast, the rise of AI, whatever, like I really I cannot tell you what companies are gonna be at the top of the Fortune five hundred in three years or ten years. Like I I have no confidence. They may not even exist.
Yeah, I I I have no confidence in it. So um
I
I would rather not.
try to pick the winners and instead just play the general trend.
I wanted to ask you about your reading habit and how you take what you're reading
and incorporate it into what you're doing or thinking about or make it top of mind. It's so easy to read something and sort of put it down and then forget about it.
I wrote two articles a week for three years when I started out.
Um every Monday and Thursday.
And about a year in, I hit a hundred thousand subscribers.
And
I had this conversation with myself. I don't know why, but I got kinda in my head about that number. And I thought, well, now a lot of people are paying attention, so it needs to be really good. Yeah. What I should have just said was things are going very well. Just keep doing what you're doing. Right. But um
But I thought, Well, if I really want to make it good
Then I should spend more time.
writing it. Right. And
What happened is things got worse, not better.
And eventually what I realized is that um if I want to be a better writer, what I needed was not to write more, but to read more.
And it's kind of like uh filling a car up with gas.
You know, reading is like filling the car up.
Writing is like driving and going on a journey.
And you need both.
You know, like the point is not just to sit at the gas station all day and keep filling the car up. Like the tank is already full. Yeah. You should go go out and see something. But if you just keep driving, you end up stranded on the side of the road.
And so for me reading is the
primary way.
That I generate.
Inspiration and ideas.
Almost every thought that you have
is downstream from what you consume.
It's so rare. There's there's even a debate among neuroscientists whether it's even possible to have a spontaneous thought, truly spontaneous thought.
You know, you say something to me.
Or ask me a question and that sparks a thought. Or somebody cuts you off in traffic and that makes you feel a certain way, or whatever. But it's just an endless string of you.
responding to the situations and inputs that come to you throughout the day.
So
We don't usually give it this amount of weight.
But when you choose who you follow on social media, when you choose what podcasts to listen to, when you choose what books to read.
You're choosing your future thoughts.
Yeah.
And
If you want better, more productive, more creative thoughts.
You need better, more productive, more creative inputs.
And so
Uh, choosing what to read or choosing what to listen to or who to subscribe to is actually a very weighty decision. It's a very important decision.
Um
I
I find that my reading habit now, there's there's some quote about Emerson, I think, where he says he reads like a hawk flying over a field scanning for prey. Um, and I kinda feel like that's how I read a lot of the time. I'm almost reading for like ideas or for chapters, not for books. You know, I I'm looking for
the piece that is relevant to what I'm writing about at the time or what I'm trying to learn at the time. Uh I'm not just sitting down and saying, well, let me read then and unpack this argument for fun.
I maybe when I do, if I am at a stage in my life at some point where I'm doing less writing.
Maybe I will read for that w that way more, you know, just for enjoyment or for uh
Knowledge for knowledge's sake.
But right now I'm kind of reading more for knowledge uh
For an outcome, which is
for me to distill it and apply it in some actionable way and then share it with the world. So what does that look like? Like you're reading a book, are you highlighting, are you taking that highlight and putting it into like a Word document? Like if I read a book that's really good and relevant to what I'm working on at the time, it's very hard for me to make progress on it.
I will it might take me like seriously, I might spend I mean at this point I'm not I'm not working as much because that we have these kids, but um uh but I like it might take me four hours to get through three pages. Like because there's I'm reading I'm at a point in the book where it's just really hitting on what I've been like kind of stewing on and thinking about.
And it's sparking ideas. So I'll read a sentence or a paragraph and then I'm like, I gotta write about this for a second. And then I, you know, I I may end up writing two pages, and then I go back and I read some more, and then I, you know, write some more.
Um
When it's not as intense as that.
uh then it'll be more what I do is I I prefer to read physical books.
I also audio can also be helpful for me, especially if I'm in the car a lot or something. It's just a you know, obviously it's a better way to do that.
But um it can be helpful for me, especially if a book is kind of dense.
I find audio is better because it it doesn't if the book is really dense, I will slow myself down too much as I'm reading it in print, but audio just keeps rolling and I still get the idea.
but I don't slow myself down through the writing. So I find some authors to be better for me in audio.
But
Um
My preference is to read the physical book.
As I roll through.
I find passages that interest me.
And I put a parentheses, open parentheses at the beginning of the passage, close it at the end, and then I put a star in the margin so that if I just leaf through the book, I find the stars and I can easily identify those passages.
And then once I finish the book
I will
go back through and take photos of each of those.
And highlight the photo.
uh on my iPhone and just copy and paste it into
uh like an Evernote file or Google Doc or wherever I'm storing that stuff at.
So
Um that's my typical
approach. So I that's all I end up with like usually if I read a book that I highlight a lot on, maybe it'll have fifty or something passages and all those get dumped in at the end.
I just have to ask one follow up to that, which is and then what? So it goes into Evernote. Now a lot of people do this, they capture these notes, but then they never yeah revisit them. They never do anything with them. I don't like having I did I tried this for a while. I've tried also Evernote. I've been well, I've been doing it for a long time. Um
It's just it's just twelve years old, you know. Um, Notion wasn't even around when I was getting started. But um
So I just have a lot of stuff in there now. But
Um
I tried for a little while doing it based on the book.
So I would I would finish a book and then I would put all the highlights into the book.
Doc.
Yeah. And so I just have all the notes from that book in one place.
Um
But what happened was what you just described, which is then it would just sit there and I would never really look at it. Occasionally I would work on an article and I would like search for terms in Evernote and then find a passage from a book and maybe pull it in or something, but it was pretty rare that that would happen. Instead, what I find more useful now is
is to have a project that I'm working on.
And a um
A doc for the project. So like the next book I'm writing, for example, and then I'm reading books that are relevant.
to that.
Project.
And I take the passages and I drop them into
the appropriate place in that doc. So usually the way that I start writing a book.
I try to have the concept, the big picture concept, nailed at the start. Like I knew Atomic Habits was gonna be a habits book from the beginning. It was gonna be a book about building good habits and bringing bad one. So that can go at the top of the dock. Then I start at first, at the very, very beginning, I just collect notes and ideas. And maybe it gets to be 20 or 30 pages and it's just a bunch of random stuff.
But eventually, once you get enough material in there, I start grouping it by section. And eventually those sections become chapter chapters.
And that's usually for most of the process, that's usually what the doc looks like, is it's just sort of a loosely structured chapter. This is a chapter about leverage. This is a chap about tailwinds. This is, you know, whatever.
And when I read
And I have something that's relevant to a chapter, it gets copied and pasted into there. So it starts to
The chapters end up
The part of my process that's that part is just a lot of fun. What I just described to you, that that's just fun to me. I get to read, I'm excited about it, I dump it all in, it gets organized. That that part can be great.
Um, I have two manuscripts right now. One is five hundred pages, one is six hundred pages. That is just that. It's just a bunch of stuff that I've read that is organized around the book concept.
The very unfun part.
Is taking it from six hundred pages of roughly organized notes.
And turning it into chapters that can be readable. Um, and it gets compressed along the way from six hundred pages down to two hundred. And so
That takes a lot more work.
But that work is what makes it so easy for the reader to read. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what makes it good.
Um
And that's that's also what's hard. I mean, sometimes people will complain and say, Oh, you know, writing is hard.
And like, yeah, writing is hard, but also that's kind of the point.
You know, like it's it's also like lifting it'd be like complaining about lifting weights and the weights being heavy. You're like, Yes, the weights are heavy and that's what's getting you stronger. You know, like writing is hard because it's making you a better thinker. It is forcing you, the active writing is forcing you to clarify your thoughts. The act of lifting the weight is forcing your muscles to get stronger. And so
It only works because it is hard. If it was easy, it would not require much thought.
Which means it also doesn't require much reorganization in your mind and you're you're not learning very much or clarifying very much.
After the success of atomic habits, the inbound must be crazy.
How do you maintain the focus on the things that you want?
Um with all these opportunities available to you.
I'm kind of a slow learner, honestly. Like I it took me a while to figure it out and I don't know that I have it.
fully figured out now. It seems like the bar keeps changing or moving, you know?
Partially, I think it's a good thing. If you're really successful and things are going well, then every year your opportunity costs should increase.
But what that also means is every year you should be saying no to things that you were saying yes to the previous year. And so I feel like I'm always three to six months behind on what I should be saying no to.
Um
when the book came out, it it did well from the start, but it really didn't take off till about a year in. So it it hit the bestseller list the first week, then nothing.
Um until New Year's Week.
And then nothing for like six more months.
And it wasn't really till like the summer of the second year that it started h appearing every week.
Um
So twenty nineteen was the year. Twenty eighteen it came out. Twenty nineteen was the year that like everything changed.
And
Um there was a stretch in like twenty nineteen and early twenty twenty where I just felt like
I'm on the hook for all these things that I should have said no to.
Um
Eventually I had to do like harder things like
put the email inbox on an autoresponder. And like, oh like that runs like kind of counter to what I wanted to do, you know, like I for the first 10,000 people who signed up to my email list, I emailed each of them individually and said like, hey, thanks so much for joining. You know, I love to have you in the community. I'll be writing about this, you know, whatever.
And then you know, you get to a hundred thousand or a million or you know, and you just can't do that stuff anymore.
So
Um
Yeah, it's like best possible outcome, right? Like you don't want to complain about it. What could be better. But um also it just takes a lot of learning and reminding yourself that you have to continue to increase that filter.
Are there any lessons that you took away that you wish you would have known sooner about filtering or selecting opportunities? There are lots of things that I think about now strategically for what I want to focus on that
I didn't really have a language for at the time. You kinda like follow your gut or you in your intuition, but so I'll give you a a couple.
Um
Not everything that you do.
Can match all the
qualities that check all the boxes that I'm about to cover, but I think about each of these boxes and how do they weave together. So like
One thing is leverage.
How can I get more output out of each unit of effort?
And so some things are much higher leverage than others, you know, like writing, let's just take writing as an example. Writing in a journal or a diary is fine. It's very useful for you. It might help you think more clearly. Like writing has lots of benefits.
But if you choose to take what you write and share it publicly, well, now all of a sudden you have a lot more leverage with that. And other people can find it, it becomes this kind of like.
honey pot that attracts like minded people. You know, I I like to say that sharing your work publicly
is like a magnet and it just draws other people to you who are interested in the same thing. It's probably one of the most useful things you can do.
for networking is it's not actually networking, it's just sharing your knowledge and trying to be useful in public.
Um
So leverage is one thing to think about. How can I get more output out of the hours that I'm putting in?
Um
One question that I really like is what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done?
Mm-hmm.
Like doing this podcast interview is a good example.
I when Atomic Abbots came out, I did like two hundred interviews in like six months.
And um some are podcasts and some are radio.
And I don't really do radio interviews anymore. And it's not really'cause I have something personal against radio, it's just that
Once we get done with that five-minute segment or 10-minute segment, we're off the air and that work is not working for me anymore. You know, the the time I just put in evaporated.
But this will get recorded, you know, and somebody will watch it today and then somebody will watch it in a month and you know, it's um
It's almost like there's two versions of James out there. You know, there's like the version that's out there living his daily life, and then there's the one that got recorded right now that can keep working each hour after it's done.
So that's that's one filter.
Another thing that I think about is sequencing.
So doing things in the right order or doing things in an order where it accumulates for you.
I debated about whether to self-publish Atomic Habits or traditionally publish for like a year, year and a half. I I was like really close to trying to self-publish.
Um
And ultimately at the time, it's a little bit easier now, but still quite hard to hit a bestseller list as if you're self-published.
And I decided well
If I'm really gonna go for it and try to hit the New York Times list, I might as well do it with my first book, because then I can be a New York Times best selling author for the rest of my career. Um there's no guarantee I was gonna do it, but it's like if you're gonna try, you might as well try early, and then you can get the benefit of that status marker for the next fifty years.
rather than self publishing your first like five books and then doing it, you know, in twenty years.
So that's just kind of a you know, a sequencing thing.
The other thing that I think about a lot is how do
I like it when the work that I'm doing, every project that I'm touching feeds each other in some way. They kind of like cross pollinate.
Um, so a few examples. I you know, I'm writing there's there's uh
It's almost fractal.
The way that you can think about this.
So like the small version is
I write an idea.
That idea.
Could go on Twitter.
And be used as a tweet. It could be in a newsletter that I publish each week. It could get repurposed onto Instagram as like a quote card or something. Maybe if it's good, it could become the seed of something. It's a chapter in a book or whatever, but it gets repurposed in lots of ways. So that one hour, again, kind of like leverage, it's working for you in more ways. How does it?
How does it accumulate? How does it cross pollinate?
You can also do it with platforms. So like all of the platforms that I have for my business point to each other. You know, like when I post on Instagram, at the bottom of each post says, you know, want to learn more ideas like this, sign up for the newsletter at JamesClear.com slash three two one or go to JamesClear.com for more.
Um
The book points to things. You know, you read Atomic Habits and then at the end of each section it says, you know, if you want to get a PDF guide that summarizes these key ideas, go to atomichabits.com and you know, you can download it or whatever. So the book's pointing to the website.
The website's pointing to the book, the newsletter is pointing to social media, social media is pointing to the newsletter. It's all like this web where everything is kind of cross-pollinating.
I think some people
They people get that and they do it like once or twice or seven times, but like you need to do it every time. You know, like you're building this very tight web. It's you're building this network of things that all
accumulate together.
And then you can do it at an even larger level. So like we we have the the writing idea, the tweet idea, you have the platform idea, that's still within one business. But you can even do it across businesses. Like I have
my business as a writer, you know, I'm an author and I have my platforms.
But I also co-founded a publishing company, Authors Equity, and so now the
brand that I have as an author helps me meet other authors and talk to them. And if it's a good fit, they can come and publish with us. And so those two things feed each other. I publish my books through authors equity. Like it's, you know, it's a way for those two businesses to help each other.
Um
And then I have a I even have like a side project, which is this cabin in the woods that I I built, you know, I'm building this cabin, and they can be a retreat center for authors, you know, like we can bring authors out there and we can meet for two or three days and talk about how to write books and launch books and build your platform.
And some of those people can publish with author's equity. And you can like see how everything kind of feeds each each other.
So
It doesn't all work perfectly together like that every time, but I like when things can kind of check multiple boxes.
And then one of the one of the other ones that I'll mention in the
Take a break for a second as um
Tailwinds.
So like I always think about email lists.
I don't we you know, you and I both have lots of friends who have email lists.
And people are growing at different rates.
But
Basically everybody I know's list is getting bigger. I don't I don't know that I know anybody whose list is shrinking, um, unless it's like they're intentionally, you know, trimming subscribers or something.
But
Uh
More and more people come online each day.
More there still are like, you know, a billion people in the world that need internet access and are coming on. So there's just this huge tailwind of readers.
that and the internet continues to grow and people continue to subscribe to things. And so it's just a good like place to play.
Um because there are lots of forces working for you.
So if you put all of those things together, you're like, all right.
There's a big tailwind on the internet and building an audience.
If you share your work publicly, you gain leverage and you can attract more people to your work and you can, you know, become more known, or your work can get out there.
Um
If your platforms cross pollinate, they can kind of grow each other. That same dynamic of a tailwind for, you know, email list is also true for social media and, you know, other platforms online.
And
If you do this early in your life and you build an audience early, then you have tons of flexibility and how you can use that.
and where you can direct the attention or what you know what businesses you want to build or what projects you want to work on.
So
All of that collectively just makes it feel like all right, if you're doing things that are in that zone.
then it's probably a really high leverage way to spend your time. And I'm not saying that's the only way you should spend your time. Probably the
The single biggest thing that we haven't talked about is are you excited about it? You know, are you interested? Are you passionate about it?
But
Um
Those are some of the ways that I think about focus and prioritization and selecting.
And when things blew up, you know, we put all this together and atomic habits did really well. And then when things blew up and my time got tight, you're like, Okay, you have all these it felt like for
Ten years.
It was me trying to knock on every door and window and be like, Hey, will you please pay attention? Maybe like can you read this? And then all of a sudden overnight it was like, Whoa way too many people are paying attention.
Um
And so
Now I have to be more strict about which things check those boxes and where
Where I direct my time and attention.
I love a couple of the themes we talked about. I just want to circle back to longevity of content.
Um we published in
interview this summer, republished an interview that was recorded six years ago.
And nobody had any idea.
So when you think of like content and the long tail of it.
It's really fascinating. We don't talk politics, we don't talk anything topical. Yep. One of the reasons we do that is we have great longevity of content. Yeah.
Um
I think that that's really important. So that's one that I didn't mention, but I do think about a lot. This I think this is a little bit more my style and what I'm interested in personally, but it does, you know, there are ways that you could apply it probably whatever you're focused on.
Which is what's the half-life of this idea. You know, you want I like to work on things that have a very long half life. They they just persist. And I even like to work in formats that have a long half life. Like social media
has a very short half life. And that's fine. It can serve a role in the business, but I'm never going to make it my central thing because
Something like
A blog post has a little bit longer half life.
But a book really has a long half life. And so um I like formats that are durable and persist in that way. And so you can yeah, you start to put all those different elements together and I think you can end up with something that's pretty evergreen.
One thing you mentioned that I thought was really interesting was the word sequencing. And I'm wondering how you think about that.
in terms of accomplishing your goals, but also in terms of like different eras of your life.
Are your twenties different than your thirties, your thirties and your forties and your forties and your fifties? Yeah.
That's a great question. I I don't know why, but I've been thinking a lot about this recently. I guess you call it like life strategy or something, but
Think about most of the big really meaningful
things in your life, you know, like um
Raising a family that you're proud of, building a great marriage, creating a successful company, getting in the best shape of your life, you know, starting some new initiative or you know, giving back in some big way. Like whatever it is, it's probably a multi-year thing. You know, all the those really big meaningful movements in life are three, five, ten, sometimes longer, you know.
It's like a it's a lot of years.
And
If you just look broadly at your adult life, you're like, Well, if I'm lucky enough to get to live to say eighty
I've got maybe
five or six of those, you know, ten year movements in there.
Um, so what are you gonna spend those five or six on? You know, they uh it's a limited number, whatever it is.
Some things it five or six alone is limited, but it's even more limited than I think you realize in the beginning because
Certain things don't make sense in certain decades.
You know, like if you want to
travel around the world for a while and party in a visa.
Like you
probably aren't gonna do that in your seventies, you know, like it's probably better for your twenties or thirties.
And um so the sequencing of things starts to to matter too.
Um, building a company, I think, is another one. You can do it whenever you want. You know, like there's no there are no rules.
But
Man, it sure is nice to like do it early.
And then you get some of the advantages of that.
Uh as you go on.
Responsibilities uh and obligations tend to increase throughout life. Each day that goes by is an opportunity for
A responsibility to come into play or an obligation or an obstacle that you didn't foresee to come up.
And so if you're waiting until your forties or fifties to start a company, again, there are no rules you can do it then. It's just that you're playing the game on hard mode a little bit, uh, or a harder mode. I always say like I started my first business when I was twenty.
Uh four.
And
I had no kids and I wasn't married. It was as easy as it could be.
And it was still really hard.
Yeah um you know, so anyway, that's I th I think about sequencing in that way. Um
And some of the questions that I like to ask
Two there are two that really feel relevant to this. The first is
What season am I in right now?
You know, life has different seasons and um sometimes
You want to focus on
Earning money.
Sometimes you wanna focus on time with family, sometimes you wanna focus on creativity or, you know
Creative freedom, the ability to choose what projects you work on.
Sometimes you just want it to be a personal season, you know, and it's less about work. But whatever the answer is, it's probably really specific to you.
And um it helps to figure out what season you're in right now.
Because when your seasons change, your habits often need to change.
you know, what you focus on often needs to change.
And so the the cl question that I think is closely tied to this, which is a a good one from Derek Sivers, is what am I optimizing for right now?
And so I, you know, if I don't know what to optimize for, I feel like it's good to optimize for enthusiasm.
But what lights me up.
But
Whatever that answer is right now, what are you optimizing for? It helps you determine what season you're in.
And I found that a lot of the time when I'm struggling
Or I'm facing some sort of uh I feel like I'm facing a lot of friction.
It's because I'm trying to force fit.
Old habits.
Into a new season.
No, I keep try I keep trying to do things the way I was doing it, and then eventually I realize, oh, okay, stop being a dummy about this. Like you're in a new season now.
So
I think sequencing
Um
starts with self awareness.
It starts with knowing what season you're in and what you're optimizing for, what's important to you at this stage of your life. And then once you realize that, you can start to figure out.
You know.
Which pieces should I focus on next?
Let's explore habits a little.
Um, what exactly is a habit? Well the one one that I like is that a habit is a recurring solution.
to a recurring problem.
in your environment.
So something comes up again and again and your brain is trying to solve it.
Another way to describe it is that it's like an automatic or a mindless behavior. If we were talking to a researcher or an academic, they would probably say a habit is like
brushing your teeth or tying your shoes or biting your nails, you know, something you do really fast and mindlessly and you don't even really think about it.
But if I were to ask you
Hey, Shane, what are some habits you're trying to build? Like you're probably gonna say, Oh, I'm you know, I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week, or I wanna write every day, or I'm trying to meditate for 10 minutes, or something like that.
And I know what you mean when you say that. You know, you mean you want it to be this regular practice, this ritual.
Now, technically, in some kind of academic sense, maybe that's not
you know, a habitual automatic behavior. But in a cultural sense, that's exactly what we mean when we talk about habits, is we want them to be reliable, repeated routines.
And then the third way you could define it, and this one I think is quite useful, is that it's a behavior that is tied to a
context in your environment, beh behavior that's tied to a particular context.
So like your habit of watching Netflix at seven PM.
is tied to the context of your house and your couch at that time of day. And so
Um, what we start to see is that behaviors have a very strong link between environment and context, and that's a good way to adjust behaviors. But I think all of those are
are potential ways to define what a habit is.
Ultimately, it's really just your brain trying to automate the
problems and solutions of life.
And do things with more efficiency.
You mentioned seasons and tying that to habits. I'm wondering how do we know if a habit is working for us or if it's working against us?
There's some debate among researchers about is there even such a thing as a good habit or a bad habit, like all habits serve you in some way. You know, you smoke a cigarette because it serves or resolves some, you know, need that you have.
Uh, and I I understand what they're saying, but I think that we all
know what we mean when we say a good habit or a bad habit. And the way that I like to define it is that the cost of your good habits is in the present.
The cost of your bad habits is in the future.
And so what you find is that a lot of things that typically get categorized as a bad habit
eating too many donuts or smoking a cigarette or something like that feels good in the moment.
But it
create some kind of cost or consequence in the future.
Um whereas a lot of good habits
going to the gym right now you require sweat and effort and it's hard.
Has a payoff in the future. I think one way to determine whether a habit is serving you or not is it giving me more of what I want in the future or less of what I want.
It's almost like it's first order negative, second order positive, if it's a good habit, and then the inverse.
It's true. I th I think as a general rule, that probably can be true. The real trick is to figure out how to make it first order positive and second order positive. Yeah. And you know, a lot of atomic habits is about this, which is trying to make habits as easy as possible to do so that you don't feel as much friction in the moment, while also aligning them.
with your identity and the type of person that you want to be.
And so uh working out is like a classic example, but
Everybody wants to work out so that they look better in the mirror and so that they get fit. They want the the results of it, which is fine. The second order outcome is gonna be great.
But
It's hard in the moment and you don't always feel like going and sometimes it's, you know, difficult or whatever.
The real trick and where I have eventually gotten to myself after ten or fifteen years of training is
I like how I feel when I'm working out.
And so it's not even I yeah, I want the same results everybody else does, but it's also about being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts.
And I know that if I'm in the middle of a set, I can feel good.
about being that person and being who I am. So now all I have to do is do the thing.
And I don't have to wait for the outcome. The outcomes are also good further down the line, but it's more about show up and being that type of person.
Is there like a specific framework that you use to evaluate if this habit is serving you?
or getting in your way and then you should replace it with a different habit.
I said earlier that habits are the repeated solutions to recurring problems in your environment. Right. So
Let's say that you go to work.
And it's a long day. You get home, it's like five thirty or six and you're exhausted.
That happens again and again and you feel tired after a long day of work. So that is a recurring problem that's resurfacing. And people have different solutions to that problem. You know, one person might
Play video games for thirty minutes.
Somebody else might go for a run.
A third person might smoke a cigarette.
But you can see some of these, they're all solving the same recurring problem, but some solutions are better than others.
And what you find is that
Like early in your life, a lot of the solutions that you come up with are just things that you either inherited from your parents or saw modeled and started to repeat.
And you get to be about twenty two or twenty five or something like that. And
What are the odds?
That
your current solution.
Is the best solution.
uh just mathematically it's very unlikely that the way that you're solving the repeated problems in your life right now is the optimal way to do it. So as soon as you have that realization, it becomes your responsibility to try to figure out a better way.
And I think one of the best things you can do early on, this is i if I could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't in it, it would probably be this, which is to ask, what would this look like if it was fun?
You know, like for any habit that you're trying to build.
Just sit down and ask, what would it look like if it was fun and try to brainstorm ten or twenty or fifty different
Solutions to it.
Um
There's not always a thousand ways to do everything.
But there is almost always more than one way.
And so
A lot of people the most common New Year's resolution is to
Go to the gym and work out.
I kinda feel like a lot of people are in the gym in January just because they feel like they should be in the gym or society wants them to be in the gym or something like that.
But we can come up with a long list of what it looks like to live an active lifestyle.
You rock climb or kayak or you know, do all kinds of stuff.
Um
And I think it's worth it to spend
twenty minutes and try to come up with that list and then look at it and say which one of these sounds like the most fun to me.
And so that helps I think that helps you get closer to what the optimal answer is for you. Because if it's not fun.
If it's not engaging or interesting, if it doesn't feel good.
You're not gonna stick with it when it gets tough.
I mean, this is probably one of the great lessons for life, which is if you're having fun, then then you're dangerous, right? Then you're hard to compete with. You don't wanna you don't wanna go up against the person who's having a good time doing it. Because if it feels like a hassle
Or chore.
That's the person who gives up when it gets difficult.
But the person who's having a great time at the start, they're much more likely to stick with it when it gets hard.
Do you think of fun is binary or is it how do I make I wanna work out? So like how do I make working out more fun versus like fun? Yeah. So well
Everything in your life is not gonna feel like going to a concert or something, right? Like it's never gonna be it may not be the most fun thing in your day or something like that.
But anything can be more engaging or more fun than maybe the default would be. And so I think about it more like that. How can I try to make this more enjoyable? Not necessarily saying it's gonna be the most fun part of my day.
And then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate.
What is the mechanism by which we can do that?
Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit. And this is true if you want to you know replace an old one and install a new one.
So
Roughly speaking, what you want is your habit to be obvious. So you want it to be easy to see, easy to notice, easy to uh um, you know, get your attention.
You want it to be attractive, so something that's appealing or fun to you, as we were just saying.
Um, you want it to be easy.
Simple, frictionless, you know, easy to apply and uh install.
And you want it to be satisfying. The more enjoyable or satisfying a habit is, the more likely you are to stick with it in the future. So
I call these the four laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.
And you don't need all four every single moment of the day or every habit that you build, but the more that you have those four forces working for you, the more likely you are to stick with it.
And in fact, we can actually learn something very
compelling about our habits by looking at behaviors that we often call bad or like that we waste time on. And you see what do those things have in common? They often are very obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Those are the things that get them to stick.
Um
You know, like if you just take scrolling social media, for example, it's obvious because your phone is on you all the time. It's often the first app that your thumb gravitates to and you tap open. It's attractive because the algorithm has curated content for your very interests.
Um, it's e it's so easy that like a couple of years ago, Instagram when you would scroll and somebody put up an album.
they and if you came back to Instagram like five minutes later, if you had already seen that post, they would auto swipe to the second slide. So you don't you don't even need to use your thumb anymore, right? They would just keep showing you new content for you. They were trying to make it that easy to consume.
And then it's satisfying because it kinda satisfies the interest that you have and so on. Um get that dopamine hit and whatever. So
U
I'm not trying to like criticize Instagram too much or anything, but I'm just saying if you wonder why is it so easy for me to do that, you know, nobody's sitting around saying, How can I just find the willpower and the motivation to check Instagram more? You know, but a lot of people are saying, Oh, I wish I just had the willpower and the discipline to go to the gym.
Or something like that.
Well, you know, one of these is obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying, and one of them is not.
And so you need to try to find ways to make your habits more obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.
And then the opposite being make the
The ones that you don't
One harder. You just in you just invert each of those four. So rather than making it obvious, make it invisible.
So unsubscribe from emails, don't keep junk food in the house. For the social media example, I've so I've done this for the last year. I just deleted all social media apps off my phone. And I what I told myself was if you really want to use them.
You can just download'em and log in.
And I I don't even know that I've really done that that much, but maybe I've done it once or twice. Um I log in, I use it, and then I delete it after I get done. So I log out and delete it again. And then the next time I want to use it, I gotta download it again. But it's just it's not obvious anymore, you know?
Um
Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive.
That one is the most difficult of the four, and probably the place that I would recommend focusing on the least.
Because it's hard to change your desires, it's hard to change your expectations about what
things are attractive or what or not. It is possible. We can talk about it if you want, but it's
It's hard.
The third um is to make it difficult instead of making it easy. So increasing friction, adding steps between you and the behavior. Again, deleting the app off the phone is a good example of that.
And then the fourth is rather making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying. You need to layer on some kind of consequence or cost to the behavior.
And um
If you do those four things, you're much more likely to avoid.
Before we keep going with habits, I do want to take a little sidetrack here into social media and sure.
So you're not reading anything online, you're sort of like ignoring all the It's been awesome.
This f it's so great.
Um, I it's one of those things that I find that there are some changes that sound easy, but actually are very hard in practice. And then there's other things that sound like they would be difficult, but actually they're not hard at all. The hard the hard part is convincing yourself to do it. Um
Deleting social media off my phone was one. I did that for like a year. About six months in, I was like, What if I did it for email? And so I deleted email off my phone. That sounded like it was gonna be really hard to me.
But it has been so so much easier than I thought.
Um again, I just have the same rule, which is if I really need it, I'll download the app and log into Gmail and do what I need to do. And I, you know, I've only downloaded it twice in the last like year. Once I was at the airport and I had to send an email before my flight, and the other time I was getting ready to go to a show and I needed to download the tickets while we were in line.
Um but
After I get done, I just delete the app again and I'm like, Well, I'll just download it if I need it.
And it has been so nice because
If you had looked at my
behavior on the phone before that. I think my average time on Instagram before I deleted it was like 42 minutes a day or 48 minutes a day, something like that. So you look at that and you're like, well, there's only 24 hours in the day. This is getting like one twentieth or one thirtieth of his time. Um, you would look at that and think, this must be pretty important to him. You know, this must be a pretty important part of his life.
And in fact, it just evaporated as soon as I deleted it. It wasn't it wasn't actually that difficult. So you didn't miss it.
No. And now I think the
One interesting question to play with is what do you do when there's nothing to do?
Mm so a lot of people when they are standing in line at the grocery store.
Or they're waiting for the gas to fill up in the car or something like that. What do they do? Well, they pull their phone out, you know? Um
Last night I went to a restaurant.
Every single person.
Who was waiting in line for a table. You go in, you check in, you okay, we'll see you in five minutes.
Every single person pulled their phone out.
Um, and so what do you do when you have nothing to do? And for most of us, a lot of the time it's check your phone, check your uh, you know, check social media.
So you do need something to fill that space.
So maybe you know, what I did was I moved Audible to the home screen of my phone.
And I just said, Well I'll just listen to an audio book.
when you know, when I'm usually that you some try to you need something frictionless to fill that gap.
Um
And I don't know what it should be for each person, but I think it's it's good to have a questi an answer to that question because otherwise you're gonna have to just sit with, you know, there's nothing to do.
And what are your strategies on a desktop instead of a phone?
Desktop I'm okay with having social media.
Um
I actually stay logged in on most of
uh the social media accounts except for uh Twitter.
I just can't I can't I'll I'll spend too much time on it. So I force myself to be logged out. Um
I also have tried to install um
some additional barriers, which is
I can't log in.
to any of my social accounts on my own, I have to text my assistant to send me the login because it's tied to a separate phone.
Um, it's I can't even get past the two factor.
Um'cause it doesn't go to my phone anymore.
So
There's just uh
Yeah, it's just me trying to like
Moderate my own behavior. I love it.
What upstream habits are most important for people to think about or create?
That so the I I didn't mention this earlier, but I think this is also related to sequencing, which is just asking, you know, what things are upstream from the outcomes that I want or from the habits that I want. It's a good it's a good way to good frame for thinking about what you should focus on. You should generally try to do the things that are upstream first.
Um
Probably the single most important habit that is upstream of all the other ones is some kind of habit of reflection review.
The habit of thinking.
Um
It is.
So unlikely.
That
Um
Whatever you are working on now.
Is the best use of your time.
Is is almost impossible.
And so I think Sam Altman has some line where he says, You should have a very high bar for working on anything other.
than thinking about what to work on.
Um, because that's that's gonna be the biggest point of leverage, is choosing a better thing to focus your attention on.
And so many people are
You know, I I was like this too. If you have if you're the type of person who has a very good work ethic
and hard work has benefited you a lot in your life.
You get to a point where you start to use it as a crutch.
Because you're like, Well, I'll just work my way out of it.
You know, I'll just I'll just work harder and that's a way to solve this problem.
But
You cannot outwork the person who's working on a better thing.
And so um
It is possible if you really grind.
Maybe you can work ten percent harder or twenty percent harder than you are now.
But if you work on the right thing, you get a hundred X of the results or a thousand X of the results. And so what you need, I I almost feel like we should change the definition of what it means to work hard.
it should not only mean putting in the hours, it should also mean outthinking the other person.
If you're not out thinking them, you're not outworking them.
And so
Um
A habit of reflection and review.
is probably the single most important habit.
You need to create some
time in your week.
To sit down and think, am I spending my precious time and energy, my one precious life?
on the things that I want to be spending it on.
And I don't know any other way to do that than to make some space to think. You know, if you just keep your head down and work hard, it's just really unlikely that you're gonna be spending it in the right way. So
I have a couple of different ways I do it. Um I do a a weekly review every Friday.
Where I sit down, that's mostly related to business stuff.
So you know, it's looking at metrics and how things are going and you know, subscribers and revenue and expenses and all that stuff. It's just a quick check-in. Most weeks.
Nothing happens. I just look at stuff and it's fine. But occasionally you'll get a week where you see a trend and it's like, Oh, that's been going down for three weeks straight. Like what's going on there, or something like that. So it's just a way to kind of notice red flags.
when they come up.
Um, the more important one is I do an annual review.
And the annual review is more about
Values.
It's more about what do I say is important to me.
Who am I the type of person or you know, who am I trying to be as a person?
And then looking at how I spent my last year and saying, Well did that match up or not?
My calendar plays a really critical role there. I go through my calendar in detail. I look at how many workouts did I do last year, how many did I do each month, what was my average per month.
I look at how many places do I travel to, how many nights do I spend away from home? Is that enough or not enough? Like how did that feel?
Um
I look at how many articles I published or newsletters I published, you know, things like that. And so it's kind of a chance for me to check in on my production and time for the last year. And then you look at your values and you say, Well, you said this was important to you. Is that actually where you spent your time?
And so it's a way to course correct.
Um
The last two years
It's been kind of interesting because I I usually do that annual review in December.
And I have continued to keep the document open all year long.
And I keep coming back to it.
And trying to write
like new principles at the top of it or whatever to help me course correct. Oh
Like one of my I don't even know if it really makes sense, but one of my principles for the last year was like move like thunder. Um and so it's like you don't really see it, but then all of a sudden there's this big crash. And um, that's the that's kind of like I'm trying to do fewer things, but with a bigger impact.
And so I just have little lines like that.
that are at the top to try to keep me on track with you know what I'm hoping to do that yeah. Do you have a check in with your wife?
Yeah, we um
We don't have like a formal check in. I don't treat it like a one on one that you would do like in a company or something like that.
But what we have like a board meeting. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It just feel it just feels like too structured and weird, you know? Um but
The biggest thing that we've done the last couple of years is a monthly date night.
And just making sure that that actually happens every month, which we have for like probably probably twenty four to thirty straight months now. Um
Has been huge.
It's the one time what we say is it's the one time that we actually talk. Which sounds silly because we're talking all the time, right? But everything is logistics. It's all tasks and figuring out what to do with the kids. And you know, it's like there's all these things that need to be done.
It's all jobs to be done. And then um
You go out for a couple of hours and you're like, Oh
Now we it's actually we can actually talk, you know. So I think that has been uh that's been really valuable.
I think that's so important.
What popular habits do you think are garbage?
Hm.
The only one that's coming to me right now is consuming the news.
Um and browsing social media. Those are the two that I just feel like I wonder, you know, we have a uh
One of our grandparents is in their nineties.
And
Um
We talked to her and it's kinda like, Oh yeah, we smoked when we were younger, but like nobody knew, you know, like they're they're like we didn't realize, like everybody did it. It wasn't, you know, it was just like how it was. And I wonder, like when I'm ninety four, like what am I gonna be saying where it's like
We were all on social media. Nobody knew, you know, like we didn't realize. And I don't mean to criticize social media too much because, like, obviously, there are benefits from it.
But um
I do
I do wonder what we're gonna look back on and be like, Yeah, we didn't quite realize the full effect of all of it.
Um, and it was kinda like, you know.
Messing with our minds.
So
Increasingly. I mean we're moving to a world
I don't think people quite realize that yet, where if you and I open the same article in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, it's gonna be two different versions of that article.
that's based on our browsing history, our political preferences. And I'm not saying they're doing that today, but you can see the technology is sort of formulating. I kind of feel like the only way to win is to not play the game.
Yeah. You know, so that that's why I've sort of checked out in a lot of ways.
Um
We have two friends who are our age who have never had social media accounts.
And I'm like
Man, I I kinda wonder what it's like sometimes. Like that's kinda I I I don't necessarily like envy them, but I do look at that and I'm like, Well, that's kind of a refreshing way to live, you know? And it is interesting how
Uh
Essential it feels in the moment.
It feels like oh I can't really give this up because this is a really big important part of my life.
But
If you can get yourself to give it up.
For a month or something, you realize
Actually life goes on just fine.
Um, there's you can still live a very rich and full and fulfilling life and it plays no no role in it.
So
Um
Yeah, giving I think giving that up has been
Has been good.
What's the two minute rule?
Two minute rule is very simple. It just says take whatever habit you're trying to focus on.
And scale it down to something 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 map.
You know, sometimes I mention those examples to people and they kinda resist it a little bit. You know, I one guy who's like, Okay, buddy, you know, like I know the real goals and just to take my yoga mat out. You know, I'm I'm actually trying to do the work out.
So I understand where people are coming from, but
The two minute rule does something important.
You know, I have this reader, his name was Mitch, I mentioned Atomic Habits.
And he started going to the gym.
And he lost over a hundred pounds, kept off for more than a decade now.
But when he first started to go
He had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes.
So you get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise.
Get back in the car, drive home.
And it sounds silly.
Right. It sounds like kinda ridiculous. Like oh clearly this is not gonna get the guy the results he wants.
But what you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up. You know, 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 this is a very deep truth about habits, which is
A habit must be established before it can be improved.
You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize it and turning it into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize.
Yeah.
And
The two-minute rule helps you do that. It helps push back on that perfectionist tendency, that feeling that you need to have it all figured out or to do it perfectly to do it at all.
I don't know why we do that with our habits. We get very all or nothing about them. You know, we're so focused on finding the best sales strategy, the perfect business idea, the ideal diet plan. We're so focused on optimizing that if we can't find the perfect one, we're like, well, I need to keep researching.
But
You need to master the art of showing up.
You know, like if you can't go to the gym for
Five minutes four days a week.
Who cares how good the forty five minute workout plan is? You know, it's just a theory at that point.
Ed Lattimore has that phrase or that uh quote where he says, The heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. Yeah.
Like there are a lot of things in life that are like that.
You know, the hardest step is the first one. The most difficult action is the first movement. So you need to master the first step, master stage one.
And then advance.
I I just like this principle of you should try to use your current advantages to gain new advantages.
So you know, early on, like if I look at my entrepreneurial career.
Um
Early on, I had very few advantages, you know, I had no money, no resources, no connections, but what did I have? I had time.
And so for the first three years, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday.
And I would spend on average, I would spend between like 15 and 20 hours on each article. The short the fastest I ever did one was eight hours.
Um, the longest was like forty something, but that was rare.
Um, but you know, if you if you spend twenty hours on two articles a week, that's 40 hour a week right there. And most people are not spending that much time on a two thousand word article. And so my mission was just to try to make it the most useful.
valuable, actionable article it could be.
And if you do that
A hundred times.
you end up with a lot of really good content on there, and that helped the audience grow. So then I then I use my current advantage, which was time.
to create something of value.
That helped grow the audience. Now I have a hundred thousand email subscribers. Now I have a new advantage.
Um, which is I have an audience. And so then that kept growing. I think once I got to around two hundred is when I got the book deal for Atomic Habits. So you use your new advantage to gain another one. Now I have a book deal, um
And
Spent the next three years writing the book.
um then you have a best selling book. That's another advantage. And you can just, you know, you see how you try to like lever up um one after the other and you start to accumulate these these new advantages. And it puts you in
A much different position.
Um
Now
There's obviously some patience that needs to come with that, right? Like I just described something in thirty seconds that took like seven years, you know? Um, so it takes a while, but
Sometimes uh people will say, Oh, how did Atomic Habits become this bestseller or whatever?
And really
What you're seeing when the book comes out is the release of potential energy.
That was built over like five years prior.
You know, it's not like it happened overnight. It was
the five years of building an audience of hundreds of thousands of people, meeting other authors, going on podcasts and doing interviews, you know, all that stuff was released around the same time, but it was it took a while for it to get built up.
So
Anyway, that's just w another one of my little principles, which is use your current advantages to gain new advantages.
One of the things that prevents people from doing things is that just don't feel like it.
How do we become stronger than our feelings?
I think it's okay if you don't feel like it. Um
I think sometimes it's a signal.
You know, like you should procrastination is not always a bad thing. If you're procrastinating on something, something sometimes it's a signal that you don't actually want that thing.
Uh which is fine.
I
For a long time, I so I I was good in school. I got good grades. It was like a game for me that I tried to win, you know. I didn't really care about whether I was learning. I cared about was I getting A's, you know, am I am I succeeding? Um, which may not be the way that you want to go through school, but that's you know, that's how I treated it at the time.
And um
So for a long time, if you asked me when I was in college, what are you gonna do? I said I was gonna go to medical school.
Um
It was something that
I I liked I do think I would like a lot about being a doctor or a surgeon. There's I think there's a lot about that profession that would
I would align with who I am.
But there's also probably thirty percent or forty percent that would not have been a good fit for me.
And um
I kept saying that because it's the type of thing that you can say and never be criticized for.
You know, like you go home at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and people are like, What are you gonna do? And you're like, I'm gonna go to medical school. And everybody says, That's great, you know? Um
And you know, some people should be doctors.
But what I kept procrastinating on was studying for the MCAT, the entrance exam.
And that was kind of a sign.
You know, it was it was a sign that I didn't really want to do this because I
wasn't fully in. Um and I ignored that for a long time.
Um and took it and didn't do that well and you know, but but it's like
Yeah, like this wasn't
That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was a sign that I realized at some intuitive level.
That this isn't actually what I wanted.
And it was just a story that I kept saying. Um
Whereas other stuff like
Writing about habits, for example.
I I was interning at an orthopedic medical practice over the summer.
And I got to do a lot of cool stuff. I went in on like 35 surgeries and got to like shadow that and watch it. That was really neat. I did some back end billing stuff for the practice, but each afternoon, I usually ended up with about two hours where I was supposed to be working till five and I didn't have anything to do.
And so
I
Sat down and I started writing about habits. I just had this word doc. It was just kind of like James's thoughts on habits.
And it got to be about sixty pages long.
And I was like
You should publish something of this. You know, this is kinda ridiculous. Keep writing about all this, like what are you gonna do it for? Kinda
back to my earlier point about you should share your work publicly.
And nobody asked me to do that, you know?
Um, but I so it's kinda like what are you
What are you doing on nights and weekends? What are you doing with your free time? Maybe that's what you should be doing during the week. And it was like very much that sort of energy. And so
You look at medical school and you're like, Well, I was procrastinating on a key part of it.
And then you look at the habits and like writing part and you're like, Well, you were doing this and nobody was even asking you to.
Um, and so those are two very different forms of energy. And I think trying to find the things where you are
uh running toward the next thing, not away from the last thing.
Like same same direction, totally different energy. What are you naturally running toward? What is naturally pulling you in? And those are the places that you should double down on.
One of the things that you said that stood out to me there was nobody could argue with the fact that I was
I was pursuing this goal, and so many people seem to optimize their life.
in in this way, right? Where I'm not standing out, I'm not spiky, I'm nobody can what will you not be criticized for?
How do we develop the courage to I mean the the book, the courage to be disliked, but basically the courage to
Um
Yeah, it's kind of the
I have started to call it internally to myself, I've started to call it the tyranny of labels.
You know, it is the the tyranny of being beholden to a label.
It's the need.
To be described in a certain way.
To need to be called a best selling author or a surgeon or lawyer.
or whatever the label is. If you need that label
Then
you are beholden to doing it that way. But if you can release yourself from the label
And instead ask yourself, what type of lifestyle do I want?
Or what type of impact do I want to make?
regardless of what the actual label is.
Now all of a sudden a ton of options open up.
So, as an example, like I have a couple of friends and family members who are professors. If you need to be a professor, if you need to have that label.
You're very limited in what your job options are.
But if instead you ask yourself
Well, what kind of lifestyle do I want? Okay, well, professors off in the summer. I like the flexibility of that lifestyle. Or what type of impact do I want to make? Well, professors get to teach. They teach concepts to other people. Well, if you say, if you just say, I want a flexible life where I get to teach people.
There are tons of options.
You could be a podcaster, you could be a YouTuber, you could write, you could do, you know, you can do almost infinite, you could be a coach. There's so many different ways to teach.
Um and to have a flexible life.
But if it needs to be about the label
Now all of a sudden your subset of options is very limited.
And um I have seen this again and again with people who
I think are very talented and intelligent.
But they kind of restrict themselves.
Because they have to have the label. And so I think if you can give that up, if you can release that need to be described in a certain way to have a certain status marker.
But instead ask yourself, what type of impact do I want to make? What type of lifestyle do I want to have.
Now all of a sudden you have a lot more options for making it happen. A lot of people consume
The gist of something. So if you think of
uh James, you know, you read a full book.
You might take away one idea from that book. You you compress that idea into a thought, you post that thought on Twitter. Yep. Somebody reads that thought.
And they think that they understand at the same level that you do, but you've distilled all this experience into that. How do you think about
when it's okay to have the gist of something versus when you need to deep dive and it's actually important to go into the weeds on things. It seems
Yeah.
I'll put this in context. It seems more and more
people are refusing to deep dive and we're just sort of like skimming on the surface of knowledge. That's absolutely right. Uh a lot of that is kind of a is it the medium or the mess the medium is the message sort of thing.
W you get forced into it by the shape
Of
Twitter.
Or the shape of Instagram or whatever. It's not a it's not a place where you can unpack a book length argument or even a 30 minute argument. You know, it's it everything is compressed.
to a headline or a tweet. So
It's hard to
It's hard to play that game.
to be browsing on there for thirty minutes or sixty minutes or an hour and a half a day.
And
Uh
Also be nuanced.
You know, you need to you need to play a different game if you want the new ones.
Um
But separately, thinking about this for me, you're right. That is a big part of what I do is I try to so I I
When I was working on atomic habits.
I had
twelve chapters at the time. There ended up being twenty, but at the time there were twelve.
And I wrote the chapter title on an index card for each of them. I laid all twelve out on the floor.
And then I went to my bookshelf.
And I grabbed each book that was relevant to that chapter.
And usually there were like four or five or six for each chapter. So I had these st little stacks of books by each index card.
And then I looked at each of those books and I said, How can I take everything that is genuinely useful from this book?
Like when you sit down and you read these two hundred pages, what are the
Two or three ideas that you actually remember that made an impact, or what are the 20 pages that really drove that point home? Can I take everything that's actually useful about this book?
And compress it into this chapter.
And so that if you read this one chapter, now you don't have to read those six books.
And I actually think that is a good measure for what makes a great nonfiction book is how many other books can you make irrelevant.
by writing this, now that you've read Atomic Habits, you don't need to read these other thirty.
Um and I don't know if I actually hit that measure or not, right? Like that's for the readers to decide. But you're never gonna hit it unless you strive for it. And so that was part of the objective was to take everything that was useful and to compress it into this higher signal.
Um
You know.
Peace.
The first draft of Atomic Habits was like seven hundred and
twelve pages or something like that. Um the final one was, you know, two hundred and

And so
Um
It got compressed a lot. And I my goal was for it to be
Um
Yeah.
So
That is a big part of what I do.
Um
And you're right that if you just read the compressed version.
you don't necessarily have the same nuance or depth.
That somebody else has.
It's tricky to figure out like when do you need that and when can you just have
the the short version.
Because
Like I said earlier, in many areas of life, good enough is good enough.
And so giving somebody the compressed an actionable version
Is enough for them to get what they want. And then really the way to honor that is to let them have all the rest of their time back. You know, like that's one of my big principles is that.
Don't waste the readers' time. You need to have an extreme respect for the reader's time, almost like a obsession over the reader's time.
Every
word that you write.
is actually an obstacle.
That the reader does not want to have to go through. Your book is an obstacle between them and the result that they want. And so
Every word needs to earn its place in that way. Um and if you take that seriously,
then it forces you to make sure that the the book is even better.
Um
But certainly there is a time for nuance and depth.
And I think that's one of the nice things about
Um
books is that they provide that space
So my strategy for it.
is I try to have the compressed version, which is like the sound bite that's sticky and that people can remember. They can walk around with it in their mind. So things from atomic habits like
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Great. That's kind of sticky. You can remember that as you go throughout your day. Whether you're working on a fitness habit or a parenting habit or a writing habit, you know, you can be like, okay, I'm trying to cast a vote for who I am. It's like a little shorthand that you can take with you.
But then the whole chapter is 20 pages, you know, we're unpacking why identity is powerful and how habits and identity intertwine with each other and why that's useful in some of the research and so on.
So the book gives you the
space to make the argument, but the sound bite gives you something sticky that you can walk around with, you know, or like
You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I mean, a lot of people like that phrase, or you know, a lot of companies or teams have used get one percent better every day. It's so it's good to have the compressed versions because they it's nice to have that shorthand as you go through your day to keep you on track.
But the book gives the real estate to
Unpack the full argument.
Why do you think that we focus on complexity when simplicity usually carries most of the outcome?
We have a very strong desire to believe that there's a secret.
You know, people people want to know what the secrets are.
Um
Like
The Athletic ran this article a couple of years ago about um Michael Phelps and his breathing techniques.
And it was one of the most popular articles that, you know, they had. And people people want to believe, oh, there's a secret that he's doing that I'm not doing. And if I knew what that was
Then you know.
It would make the difference.
And I'm not saying that they don't make a difference. They probably did help him, but also, you know, he's six foot six and built like a fish. And, you know, like he's perfectly designed for this, you know, for this outcome. Um, and so uh
Yeah, was it the breathing techniques or was the fact that he like didn't miss a swim for like, you know, sixteen straight years. He's in the pool. Like it you know, there's there's so many other pieces of it. Um
So
We want to believe that there's some secret behind it, but a lot of it is like
I sometimes when people will come to me and ask about building an audience or
Um, you know, launching a newsletter.
Or writing a book.
getting in shape even a lot a lot of habits are like this. Um
I'll say like well
You know.
Don't miss a workout for two years and then get back to me.
Yeah, like go write write two articles a week for two years and then get back to me. You know, like have you done the simple version yet? You know, like have you done the very ninety nine point eight to ninety nine point nine, but they're they're actually at forty five. Yeah.
Yeah.
Um you need to
I I guess the
One way to think about it is
Especially in the beginning.
The primary bottleneck to results are
Are you doing the obvious things?
You know, do do the obvious stuff first. There's probably only two or three pieces that you just need to do. Like, are you showing up consistently? Are you doing you know, just do the obvious things.
And that will get you eighty percent of the way there.
And then y once you're there.
Now you're in the arena.
Now you're showing up each day. You've got plenty to optimize.
But by trying to make it too complicated at the start.
you have kind of like shortcut yourself or short circuited it. Um and you've also put yourself in a
Um
You put yourself in a worse position'cause now you're focused on the wrong things and you're not doing the things that are gonna get you the majority of the result. So
Uh master the basics to start.
And then
Advance from there.
somewhat related to that and actually related to the investing conversation we were having is
How do you think about the relationship between outcome and ego?
So our ego wants us to be the investor that beats the market, but the actual outcome we want
is maybe if the outcome is beating the market over a long period of time and we can do that in a way, but there's no ego in buying Vanguard. Yeah. Well somet sometimes I think we
We think the outcome we want.
Is one thing, but actually the outcome we want is the ego.
to be stroked, you know? It's like, I wonder if like how many people would be VCs if you weren't allowed to tell people what you invested in?
Oh yeah. Like if you couldn't tell people I was an early investor in Uber.
You know, if you couldn't tell them I you know I invested in Facebook.
Would you still do it?
Or you like how much of it how much of it is that label?
Um that you like.
So certainly some of it is the returns, but a lot of it is the social status and the praise.
So there's and that's fine. I I'm not necessarily criticizing that. Like we are social creatures, you know, we are primates that want to climb the social hierarchy. Like there's nothing there's nothing odd about it. It's part of human nature. But um
I think we should at least admit it.
you know, and admit admit what's what's actually going on. Um, we crave the the status as much as we crave the outcome.
So
But back to your point about trying to balance.
Ego and outcome and figuring out how to like
walk that delicate dance between the two and not let your ego lead you astray.
Some of the little phrases I try to remind myself of are like
I I've been saying this a lot recently with one of the projects I'm working on. I'll sit down to with the team and I'll tell them.
I don't need to be right. I just want us to get it right.
Okay, so it does not, I'm gonna generate a lot of ideas and I'm gonna share my thoughts on it, but I don't need us to pick my idea. That is not the goal is not for we us to do what James says. The goal is for us to get it right.
So what do we need to do?
you know, to get there. And then another follow up question that I will often ask, I I find it helpful for me to keep asking this question. If I only ask it in one meeting, it doesn't do it. But if I ask it again and again, it's
What is not being said right now that needs to be said.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, like what w there's so many times when people, you know, I look at them, I say, What are you thinking right now that
In two years,'cause I'm a slow learner and I don't know yet.
But I'll figure it out. And then you're gonna be like, uh, James isn't gonna like that in two years. You know, but you can see it right now. I just don't I'm just not smart enough to ask about it yet.
So what needs to be said that isn't being said.
Um, and I find that that question helps.
But doing both of those things, saying, I don't need to be right, I just want us to get it right.
And then what needs to be said right now that's not being said, it sets the table so that people can
you know, open up and share what they need to share.
Um
So I come back to those two a lot.
The other one that I come back to is
Telling myself is mostly just a reminder for myself.
That I am not right, I am trying to be less wrong.
And if you start with the position that I am already wrong
I don't know everything. I'm getting something that I believe right now is off.
But I'm trying to become less wrong.
Then you're
You're more in a position where you're trying to learn.
And less in a position where you're trying to defend.
You know, if you believe that you're right, uh what's that line's like the fastest way to stop learning something is to believe you already know it.
Yeah. You know, it's like if you already believe that you're right, now you're not open to receiving.
But if you believe that you're wrong and you're just trying to improve, now all now you can come at it from a much more humble place. And it doesn't need to be about you.
So
I those are I don't always get that stuff right, but those are those are things that I try to
Center myself with. Jeff Bezos had this saying that stuck with me ever since I heard it, which is basically.
And I'm paraphrasing that
The people who are right a lot.
Change their mind a lot. Mm-hmm.
And they're rarely right at the beginning, but they're right at the end. And there's a huge difference between being right at the start and being right at the end. Well, that's great.
Because it's so hard to be right at the start. So unlikely.
that your first idea is the one that works, you know, or the one that's correct. I mean you need to
Be willing to adjust along the way.
And so that that level of flexibility is I think critical.
How do you think about the relationship between consistency and intensity?

Intensity makes for a good story.
You know, it's like, Oh, I went to a silent meditation retreat for a week.
You know, or I um
I ran a marathon.
Um
Yeah, we launched this product faster than any other had been launched, or what you know the intensity makes for a good story.
But consistency makes progress.
You know it's not about like
Oh, I did a silent meditation for treat for a week. It's no, I you know, I have a meditation practice. I do it for five minutes each morning. It's part of how I start my day.
You know, that's when it's kind of part of your identity.
Or, you know, I I go for a run three days a week. I really love how it makes me feel. Um, you know, that now it's it's part of your lifestyle.
So I think uh you can kind of draw this distinction between intensity is often about
The story.
That you get to tell?
Consistency is about the lifestyle that you live.
And really what matters is how do you want to spend your days? You know, how do you want to show up as a person? What kind of identity do you want to have?
And
The great thing is that if you do a good job with the consistency
It develops your capacity.
To manage the intensity or to handle it.
No, I I like the saying consistency enlarges ability.
By being more consistent, you enlarge your ability to handle the intense moments, to do the peak performances, to do the more impressive things.
But it needs to start with a focus on consistency and lifestyle, and by doing it in that way.
You
Flex those muscles sometimes literally, uh, and develop that ability.
one thing you've written on recently is the relationship between
Belonging and accuracy. And I'm wondering if you can riff on that for a second.
Humans are very social creatures.
You know, we care a lot about what other people think about us. We are focused on status and prestige. We want to rise up the social hierarchy and be praised and rewarded.
And all of that is very natural and makes a lot of sense. You know, people a lot of the time people will tell you, Don't care what other people think about you, but we all care what other people think.
Often for a very good reason, which is if people think well of you, it benefits you in life. It, you know, it puts you in a good position. You are rewarded for it. It helps you accomplish things. It makes you safer. It it it just feels good.
Um and so
Belonging is a critical part.
Of being human.
Um
However.
Especially in the modern world.
The desire to belong.
can offer often run counter.
to the desire to understand or be accurate.
Um
And so
If you have to choose
Between
Well, I could believe this thing.
And be ostracized or criticized or outcast from my community.
Or I could believe this other thing, which may not be that accurate, but it will get me praised and rewarded.
And accepted by my community.
A lot of the time the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand.
It puts you in a position where you're like, Well, I you know, I could believe this fact that may or may not impact my daily life.
Or I could keep a good relationship with my wife and my best friend and my, you know, co-workers and so on.
Um, and a lot of people choose the belonging over the accuracy. Do you think that applies outside of social groups too to our identity? Like if I identify as a Republican or Democrat, then this thoughts has the exact same impact.
So earlier in this conversation, we talked about the power that identity can have in building habits.
Right. Like as you start to practice a habit, you foster an identity.
And that puts you in a stronger place because once you take pride in being that kind of person, you will fight to maintain the habit. You fight to be the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, the type of person who meditates each day, or the type of person who writes consistently, or whatever it is.
Um, because it's part of who you see yourself to be.
But now we see that there's also a flip side to this or a dark side, a shadow side to identity, which is the tighter you cling,
to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.
And so once you have started to identify as a certain type of person, once you adopt that label.
Oh, I am s a member of this group, or I am the type of person who believes this thing.
it becomes hard to stretch and grow outside of that.
And so
eventually what you realize is that you simultaneously need to have two things.
You need to be casting votes for the type of person that you wish to become.
building up evidence of that identity that you want.
But you also need to realize
That your identity does not have to be fixed.
No, identity is an interesting word because there's pieces of it that you can't really get around. Like
I am a male and a father and tall, and those are all aspects that I'm not going to change about my identity.
But
There are other aspects of my identity.
that can be adjusted and can be, you know.
Uh refined. So
You know.
I'm a writer. I don't always have to be a writer. That's part of my identity right now. I could shift to something else.
And so I sort of view it as like a painting that's always being retouched and kind of edited.
And so you're you're slightly adjusting the picture.
And
What you realize is that progress

physical progress, but also mental internal progress.
Requires unlearning.
It requires the willingness to unlear some of the identities that we have. And you see that when people are not willing to do that.
They often get stuck.
You know, it's like the it's the surgeon who you can imagine a surgeon who's done an operation a certain way for 20 years, and then all of a sudden a new form of robotics comes in or something that changes it. And they say, Well, look, I have all these patients that I've served well for 20 years who had good outcomes. I'm not gonna switch, but five years later, they're behind the curve.
Um or a teacher who has the same lesson plan they've been doing for fifteen years. And then all of a sudden they should update and use new tools or bring YouTube in or whatever, and they don't.
And now all of a sudden they're starting to lose the students.
And it goes back to that.
That line where
The only bad mindset is the one that you're fixed in. You know, it's the one it's the one that you can't get out of. If you're stuck in this one way of thinking or one form of an identity,
then you're not growing anymore.
And so
Identity is both a powerful driver.
Of change.
and a force that can help you establish a habit.
But it also can be
A pitfall.
Two
The next round of change.
and a reason that you use to prevent yourself from moving forward.
What's your exact process for learning new subjects as an adult?
I don't know that I have an exact process, uh, although now that you say that
So
Okay, this is kinda interesting. I don't have an exact process in the sense that I haven't written it down. I d I don't have I don't have like some template to give you.
But
I do have a pattern that I go through.
very consistently when I'm trying to learn something new.
Um
I think some of this is my personality and how it gets expressed, uh or maybe maybe like a strength even.
Um
And some of it is probably applicable to everybody.
So
I
Really like
living by this little principle of broad funnel tight filter.
And so I try to cast a really wide net.
when I'm learning something new. I want to read and consume an enormous amount of information. It's very common for me to have like 40 taps open. You know, I just I'll I'll do a search. Like here, here's an example from when I was working on atomic habits. I
I found Reddit really helpful when I was working on certain sections of the book. So I would search things like
Uh, what's the best habit you've ever built? Reddit.
Or what's one habit that you struggled with, Reddit. And if you you search those terms, it'll pull up, you know, twenty or thirty different threads.
And so I would open all of those. So I'd have like 50 tabs open on there. And then I would go through and I would read all the comments in each thread.
And a lot of it wasn't really that relevant, but I would probably find after I do that, I would probably find
six or seven or eight phrases.
that I really liked that I was like, oh, that's a good description of like a real problem somebody had. And then I put all those into a list together. And so what I'm doing, I mean what I'm learning is I'm learning what people struggle with with habits. I'm learning, you know, where did they succeed and where do they fail? And so I do that broad funnel and then I have a really tight filter for what gets out.
look at fifty tabs, end up with eight sentences. And I just would run that cycle again and again and again. So maybe I do it on Reddit for some stuff. I do it on I ran a survey with my audience for another. Um
Look at social media comments, look at comments on I used to a long, long time ago, I used to have comments on my website. So maybe look at that.
go to the newsletter, go to my inbox, look at the replies that I've gotten from people through the newsletter. Like that's another one. So you you just do these really broad data sets and then you have a really tight funnel for what um
For what gets through.
And you end up with some really high quality stuff that way.
The tricky part about learning that way is it requires a lot of persistence.
This is where I I said, like I think some of it's my personality.
Uh one strength for me, something I'm good at, is I can concentrate on something for a very long time.
So I I could do that for eight, 10, 12 hours in a day, and I would just spend it doing that. And I will just go through all those tabs and do the whole thing.
A lot of people don't like that. The flip side of that, a weakness for me.
is I'm not as good at compartmentalizing. So if I had that same eight hour day, but it was split up on like six different meetings, I don't, I don't like that. I don't, I'm not good at the task switching between each one. It's too much, my mind feels really scattered. But if I can lock in and just do one task for the whole time, that feels great. So
My approach to learning is usually something like that.
Let me let me get a really broad data set.
And just read super widely, and then I'm just gonna try to identify the most meaningful piece in each one and gradually like collect that into one area.
I don't know if it was you that told me this or somebody else, but you had gone through Amazon reviews for all these books as well. That was another big piece. I so I went through um
You know, I am not the first person to write about habits, right? And I won't be the last. And so I looked at some of the books that had come out before me, Power of Habit, Seven Habits of Highly Affective People, you know, books like this that have already been written on habits.
And I went to the three star reviews on Amazon. One star review, everybody hates it, often for some stupid reason, like the book showed up and it was dirty on the dust jacket or whatever. Um
Five star review, everybody loves it. Um, but the three star reviews or the four star reviews, those are pretty useful. You know, it's it's usually a person who liked the book, but they had some complaint about it.
And so I would look at all these different reviews, not just for those two books, but other ones as well.
And I was just trying to map the like habits book universe.
What what have what has already been written? What do people like about what's been written and what feels like it's missing? And the primary thing that came up is
These books are really good at explaining habits or they help me understand them, but I still am left wondering how do I apply it.
And so once I saw that enough times.
I thought
All right, I can be the practical guy.
You know, I can be the one who translates this and makes habits actionable. And so my little
objective was I'm gonna try to write the most useful
actionable guide on building good habits and bringing bad ones that's ever been written.
And I don't know that I actually achieved that or not, but that was the objective, right? It's back to what we talked about earlier. If you don't strive for that,
you're never gonna just stumble into that outcome. You know, you're not gonna be like, well, I just decided to write a book and it turns out it was the most actionable whatever. You know, like it's not you need to actually try to reach for that.
Um and so
I I decided that that was one project where I was gonna do that and research methods like
Looking at those reviews is one way to try to accomplish that.
You don't get out of bed and become Michael Jordan, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's you know
So it's it's like the classic like I don't want to work out too much because I don't want to look like a bodybuilder. And you're like, you know, I'm like I've been trying to look like a bodybuilder for fifteen years. I still am not there yet. You know, it's like it takes a long time. You need a lot of effort. How do you think about prioritization?
Um
A lot of it comes back to what we talked about earlier about
Can I find things that have tailwinds, that have leverage, that accumulate, that feed each other?
Um, and so if I find something that checks a lot of those boxes, that feels pretty high priority.
I have this new thing I've been trying.
Which is
I I bought a bunch of wooden clothes pins.
Uh you know the little like they're like kinda flat on one side so you can write on'em.
And I hung a string from my office ceiling.
And
On so I got like fifty of these.
And on each clothespin, so I wrote each of my kids' names on one.
And then I wrote Working Out on another one.
And then I have all these projects that I want to do. You know, I've got I've got stuff that makes sense that you would want to do, like, you know, writing another book or things that you would expect. And then I got like totally other stuff, like a film idea that I would like, or like some idea for a music label, or you know, things that are like outside of my my normal focus.
But try to write all these ideas down.
And then I put like a red line.
Across the string.
And the question is
What earns its way above the line.
Obviously my kids are gonna go above it. Obviously working out is gonna go above it.
But
I have an incre if what feels like I have every year, especially with each additional kid you add, it feels like you have fewer and fewer hours. Yeah. Right. Um, and so the time is precious.
And so I look at the rest of these projects and I say, Is this good enough to earn its way above the line?
And um
I need that visual reminder.
One of the there are a lot of things in life that are like this, but one of the challenging things about
the really important stuff in life.
Is that they're endless battles.
You know, if you do a good job focusing today and prioritizing today, you pick the right thing to focus on, it earns you no bonus points for tomorrow.
So tomorrow tomorrow you show up and uh if you spend all that time on YouTube or getting distracted or whatever, like that day is gone.
And so
Other things are like that too. Like just because you worked out two weeks ago doesn't mean you don't need to do it today. You know, or just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for today. You still need to show up for them. Um and so
I'm trying to get comfortable with that endless nature of those things. A lot of the time we try to resist the endless nature of that stuff. Oh, I wish it wasn't that way. We want to we try to convince ourselves that it's like a finish line. Oh, if I just do this 21 day cleanse, then I'll be a healthy person and I won't have to think about it anymore. Yeah. You know? Oh, if I just, you know.
buy her something nice for her anniversary, then I can like stop worrying about it and I don't have to, you know, it's like, no, it's not like that.
It's you know, it's endless.
And as soon as you accept
The endless nature.
then you start looking at it differently. You say, okay, it's not about getting to a particular finish line.
It's about living.
a daily life that feels sustainable and that I like and that I'm fulgaged in. So it's about liking my days.
Um
So I use all of that lens as I look at this string.
And ask myself which clothespins get to go above the line. Um, and that's one that's one way to prioritize it. Uh, and I I find that having the visual marker.
helps remind me the next day when I forgot that I just did that exercise and I feel like getting pulled into, you know, the next shiny thing. I I love that because it visualizes what so many of us
uh are dealing with.

The really key
pieces of building a habit than getting it to stick.
Is finding ways to visualize your progress.
So if you look at
technologies that are really good at building habits, they're great at visualization. You're playing a video game, you have a score in the top corner of the screen. It's increasing all the time as you go through the level.
Um
Every time you pick up a weapon or a ruby or a gem or whatever, there's a little jingle or a chime, there's some kind of power up.
Um, even the pitter patter of footsteps as you run through the level is a signal that you're progressing. So you have all these signals of progress, visual, audio, like it's very
the feedback is immediate.
And if you compare that experience of just like playing this level for 15 minutes to what it's like to sit down and try to write a blog post or record a podcast interview or do anything in the normal world.
Um
It's very different. The feedback comes much slower in real life. You know, my parents, they like to swim.
And
You know, one of the challenges of swimming is your body looks exactly the same when you get out of the water as it did when you jumped in.
If they if they're doing it for the visual results, I mean it takes two years for your body to change in the mirror.
Um, and so they have a little habit tracker.
where they just put an X down for each day they do their workout.
And then at the end of the month.
They'd count up how many workouts they did and compare that to the month before.
And putting that X down at the end of the workout is like such a small little thing.
But it's one little visual signal.
That
We showed up and we did the right thing today.
You know, that I I did what I was supposed to do. It's a way of visualizing your progress.
And so
finding ways to visualize your progress as you go through your habits. Um
Із інказ алмарк в омостні компони процес.
Is that the greatest returns are delayed.
You know, it's it's not till later that you get to the hockey stick portion. So the in the moment right now.
you do the right thing and you feel like I have nothing to show for it. So finding ways to visualize that can be helpful for getting habits to stick.
We always end with the same question, which is what is success for you?
I think the short version is success is having power over my days.
That's you know, if I if I have the the freedom and the ability to choose how I'm spending my days, that sounds
That sounds great. What more could you want than that? You know, that means I would get to choose to spend time with my kids if I have kids. Before I had kids, it meant I could choose to travel or to work on projects that I wanted. Um, you know, after my kids are grown, it'll mean that I can choose to dive into new things. Like it, you know, what what more could you want than that than to have control over your time?
So
I think uh to have power over my days is the version for me internally.
And then um to contribute my little bit.
To the world around me.
is the external focus. What is what does success look like? Um
On the outside, I think it's
adding your little bit to the pile of knowledge for humanity. I mean one of the one of the great gifts of humankind
is that you get to inherit the lessons of the hundred billion people that have come before you.
You know, my kids are going to school now and they start thirty years ahead of where I got to start. You know, all the things we've learned from the last thirty years.
are gonna be taught to them when when they go. And that's what helps them kick the ball of humanity forward. And so you know if I could add just some little bit to that.
Then I feel like that's that's definitely a success.
I love that. Thank you.
This was awesome. This was a great conversation. You bet. Thanks so much for having me.