Habit Formation Expert James Clear on DOAC Podcast (Transcript)

You’re more likely to persevere. The person who’s having fun is actually the person who’s dangerous. Like, you don’t want to compete with them because they’re having a good time.

When it gets difficult, they’re way more likely to stick with it. The person who it felt like a hassle at the start is kind of, you know, annoying. They sort of have a negative frame around the behavior to begin with. Well, as soon as it gets difficult, they didn’t want to do it in the first place, so they’re much more likely to give up.

David Epstein, who’s the author of Range and Sports Genes, friend of mine, he told me once, “Grit is fit, grit is fit.” And what he means is that everybody wants to be gritty. They want to persevere. But the way that you display that grit and discipline and perseverance is in areas where you are well suited, where it’s a good fit for you.

If it’s a good fit, if you’re well suited for it, if you’re having fun, if you’re interested and engaged, then you’re way more likely to stick with it. And so in a lot of ways, I feel like the biggest hurdle to clear, and this is true maybe for life in general, but definitely for habits, because everybody wants to be consistent with their habits, everybody wants to stick to them.

The biggest hurdle to clear is, are you interested, are you engaged, are you having fun? And so the more that you can get closer to that, the more fun it can be, the more likely you are to persevere and stick with it.

Creating the Conditions to Out-Persist

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was just thinking about this idea actually the other day because I was writing when we hit a subscriber milestone. I was trying to think about what actually mattered the most. And the first thing I wrote was “creating the conditions to out-persist.”

And what I mean by that is like create the conditions so that you can do this for long enough that things start compounding in your favor. Like learning starts compounding in your favor, like the returns, like the subscribers, or that could be your finances, whatever. Start compounding in your favor.

JAMES CLEAR: The question that you asked is very similar to one that I ask myself a lot, which is, “Am I creating the conditions for success?”

So I had a really good stretch of training in the gym, and then about two and a half years ago, I was in pretty good shape. And then I had a year where it was just, like, really inconsistent. I missed a lot of workouts. Things sometimes would go well, sometimes it wouldn’t, whatever.

And after that year, I was like, okay, so I got to change something. And on the surface, you look at it and you think, I’m having trouble with the workouts. You think there’s some problem with, you know, exercise. But that was actually not the problem. The problem was I wasn’t creating the conditions for success.

And so there were lots of other things that were intervening and, like, making, interrupting my day and making it easy for me to miss. So this last year, I hired a trainer, and he shows up at 11am every, you know, four days a week. And when he gets there, every single time, it’s a hassle because I’m in the middle of something, right?

Every time I’ve got something going on, and I kind of am, like, annoyed by it that he’s there. But we’re creating the conditions for success, and it makes sure that I get down there and I do it. And then every time when I get done with the workout, I’m like, I’m glad I took the time to do that.

And so nothing really needed to change with the workout. That was not the problem. The problem was I didn’t have the right conditions to start the workout. And so I think this actually reveals a really deep and important thing about habits, which is so much of it is about mastering the art of getting started.

It’s making it easy to start in a way. Like, probably 70% of what’s in Atomic Habits are different strategies and different ideas and different tools that help you get started or makes starting easier.

The Five-Minute Edge

This trainer who I’ve been working with now, he came over the other day and he told me, “Yeah, I had a class in the morning. Eight people were supposed to come, but it was like, it was a pretty gross day. It was, like, rainy and wet and kind of cold, and only two people showed up.”

And I was talking to him about it, and I said, “What’s interesting to me about that is how little of an edge you need to gain an advantage.” You know, really what we’re talking about there is you just need to be okay with being inconvenienced or uncomfortable for, like, five to ten minutes.

Getting dressed, getting through the rain, getting to your car, getting the gym. The workout is the same that it’s always been. It’s the same. You’re in the same gym that you are in the summer. Or when the weather’s beautiful or whatever. So it’s really, can you handle that? Like five minutes of inconvenience?

And so many things in life are like that. Can you master that little moment? And if you can, and you can still get started, that’s when you gain an advantage. Everybody works out on the good days, but on the days when you feel stressed and tired, on the days when the weather’s bad and it’s kind of inconvenient, on the days when you don’t really feel like it, can you show up, even if it’s in a small way?

One of my little mantras that I try to keep in mind is “reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule.” So the normal scope might be, I write for 30 minutes and then you look up at the clock and you’re like, oh, I only have 15. And sometimes what happens in your head is you’re like, oh, I don’t have enough time to write today.

Or you’re like, oh, I was planning to work out for 60 minutes. And you look up and you’re like, time got away from me. I only have 20 minutes now. I don’t have time to go to the gym. It’s easy to talk yourself out of it, but reduce the scope but stick to the schedule.

It’s like, well, I only got 20 minutes instead of 60, so I’ll just get in there and do a couple sets of squats and that’s it. And I’ve had so many workouts that have been like that, where you’re like, almost, you know, it’s easy to be kind of disappointed you weren’t able to do the whole thing that you wanted to do, but you didn’t throw up a zero.

And if you don’t throw up a zero, you maintain the habit. And if you maintain the habit, all you need is time. And so the bad days are more important than the good days in that sense. You need to figure out, how do you show up, even if, when it’s not optimal.

Winning the First Five Minutes

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that first five minutes. Yeah, I was thinking about all the first five minute battles that I’ve won over the last week because I lost track of my workout. I’ve been traveling through Asia on this tour I’ve been doing. Got back, fallen off. The motivation doesn’t seem to be quite the same as it was before I left.

So it’s like I’m dragging myself there. The workouts are 4 out of 10, but I went, yeah. And now I think the momentum is building. But that first five minute point. Is there anything that you’ve learned, any frameworks, any tactics for making sure you get past that first five minutes so you can get into the flow of the habit?

Systems vs. Goals: Understanding the Difference

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, there’s multiple things. So first thing is try to prime the environment to make the first action easy. Prime the environment to make the first action easy.

So let’s say writing, for example. I find that for myself the biggest point of friction is choosing what to write about. Once I’ve actually finally settled this is the thing I’m writing today, then I can get into it and I’m off and running. But I’ll sit there for two hours just debating whether it’s the right thing to be focused on writing or not. You know, should I work on this chapter, should I work on something else or whatever?

So what I’ve started to do is sometimes I will write the first sentence of what I’m going to write and just leave it on the Google Doc right there and then leave. And the next day when I come back, I’m already in, right? Like it’s already, the first sentence is already written. So now I’m just writing the next piece of what’s coming rather than trying to choose what to write about.

Another one that I’ve done sometimes is I will write, sometimes I’ll write the topic or I’ll write the sentence on a post-it note and I’ll put it on top of the keyboard. And so when I come into the office, it’s right there in front of me. I can’t, you know, I got to pick it off the keys to log onto the computer. And so it’s like, remember, this is what you’re writing about right now. You know, so it’s just trying to make it easy to get in.

I have a bunch of readers who do stuff like set their running out, running clothes out the night before, you know, so they’re right next to the bed. You got your clothes and your shoes there. One woman, I just talked to her at an event, she came up afterward and she said, I actually sleep in my running clothes and get out, out and put her shoes on and goes right out the door.

But you’re trying to prime the environment to make the action easy. Okay, so how can you set up the spaces that you’re in to prime those habits? I think one really interesting question to ask, walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, your office, your living room, your bedroom. And then look around and ask yourself, “What is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are easy here? What behaviors are obvious here?”

And the good habits that you say you want to build, are those the path of least resistance? Is that the obvious thing in this environment? And if not, maybe you can make some adjustments to try to make the good habit easier and the distractions maybe a little bit harder. So that’s first thing, prime the environment to make the action easy.

The Two-Minute Rule

Second thing is, if there’s like one principle that is probably the single most important for building habits, it’s make it easy. Just scale it down and make it easy. I refer to it sometimes as the two-minute rule. So take whatever habit you’re trying to work on. You scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do.

Read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. Sometimes I will mention this to people and they resist a little bit. You know, they’re like, okay, buddy. Like, I know the real goal isn’t just to take my yoga mat out, you know. No, I’m actually trying to do the workout. So some kind of mental trick. And I know it’s a trick, then why would I fall for it, basically?

But there’s this guy I mentioned in Atomic Habits, his name’s Mitch, and he went to the gym and for the first six weeks he had this strange little rule for himself where he wasn’t allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he’d get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home, and you’re like, this sounds silly, right? Clearly this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants.

But what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up, right? 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 so I think this is kind of the 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 optimize and scale it up into something more.

There’s that quote from Ed Lattimore where he says “the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.” There are a lot of things in life that are like that. And so by trying to make it easy to master, to easy to get started, then you’re in the game, now you’re in the arena. There’s all kinds of things you can improve from there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember Jordan Peterson saying, talking about some of his clinical patients and referring to one in particular who was in a room full of junk and couldn’t leave the room because of a certain fear and certain psychological problems he had. And Jordan saying that, day one, they just brought the Hoover into the room, and that was it. Day two, they plugged the Hoover in, and that was it.

And then by day, like 30, the guy is out of the room, the room is clean, and he’s walking around outside for the first time in months or years. And he goes on to say that the reason why people don’t get started is because the first step is so embarrassing. People think that it’s not worth it or that it’s, like, shameful to do. It’s, like, almost like, patronizingly embarrassing.

And I’ve always kept that in mind since then and from your work as well. Just that assume the first steps are, like, embarrassingly small.

Habit Shaping and Starting Small

JAMES CLEAR: There’s this process called habit shaping, which is basically like that. You know, like, if you want to run a half marathon, the first day, the step might be to put on your running shoes. And then the second day, the step is to, like, walk outside the front door. And the third day, the step is to go around the block. And, you know, you’re just, like, gradually shaping into this larger habit.

But there’s this thing that happens when people think about building better habits. I think, particularly ambitious people, it’s very easy to get excited about all the changes you can make. You start thinking, even if you don’t say this explicitly. You think, like, what would peak performance look like if I could really get my habits dialed in? What could I do? And you start imagining five, six, seven things that you would do and what all of them would look like in their perfect form and so on.

And I think instead of asking ourselves, “What could I do on my best day,” it’s better to start by asking, “What can I stick to even on the bad days?” And that becomes your baseline. That becomes the first step. And now that you have this floor, that is achievable. Even when you’re tired, even when you’re exhausted, even when you don’t have much time. Now you can show up and feel like you’re succeeding, you know, and then you can progress from there.

One of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is a feeling of progress. If you feel like you’re making progress, even if it’s smaller than what you ultimately hope to do, you have every reason to move forward. But often we become, like, a victim of our expectations. We spend all this time optimizing the perfect plan and then expect things to go perfectly out of the gate. And you had it so built up in your mind that once you don’t hit that mark in the first or second or third day, it falls apart.

The Cost of Indecision

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you talked earlier on about sitting there for two hours thinking about what to write. I think I’ve learned through business in the first iteration of my career, where I worked with CEOs and executives that were planning marketing campaigns that actually, in hindsight, often the biggest cost, it wasn’t being wrong. It was the time you waste making a decision.

You see this. And if you’ve ever, you’ve interacted with so many big corporations, like, they spend months thinking about waiting for Joanna to come back from annual leave to get procurement to sign off the thing. And I worked with this one particular founder during that season of my life who, where I was working with his dad, and him and his dad would take nine months because the company was so big. His son would interrupt me halfway through the idea and call us all in and say, do it now.

And he taught me that actually in life, that the biggest cost is the time you waste making the decision. And I think about that with my own habits. I think sometimes sitting around thinking about whether I’m going to run today is costing me much more than just. And do you think about how you kill that mental debate? Like, is that an effective strategy to try and kill the debate and not make a decision per se?

Hats, Haircuts, and Tattoos

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah. So speed is perpetually undervalued, that’s for sure. Life is short. And so the sooner that you make decisions, the sooner you get information.

Now, I will say I have a little framework that I call hats, haircuts, and tattoos. And this is how I kind of think about it. So a lot of decisions are like hats. Just try. You try one hat. If you don’t like it, take it off. You can try another. It’s just real quick, you know, you get some information. Speed is most important. Move quickly, get some information, learn something. If it was wrong, it’s not that big of a deal. Just take it off and put a new hat on.

Haircut is a little bit trickier. It’s a decision that you have to live with for a little bit. You know, like, you’re okay if you get a bad haircut, but you’re going to have to live with it for a month or two. You know, it’s going to take a little bit of time for it to grow out. And so it’s probably not a big deal to be scared of getting a bad haircut. I think a lot of people probably talk themselves out of it. It’s like, you’ll be fine in a month. It’s fine.

Tattoos are trickier. You know, you get a tattoo, you got to live with that choice. It’s permanent. And so if really what we’re getting at here is, is the choice reversible or is the choice irreversible? If the choice is easy to reverse, speed is most important. You should move fast. If it’s hard to reverse and you got to live with it, then you think carefully before you make the call.

And I think probably what you’re seeing through some of your experiences is that most decisions in life are hats and haircuts. It’s very rare that you end up…

STEVEN BARTLETT: With a tattoo, but we treat them all like tattoos.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah. I think in particular we are scared, particularly the bad haircuts. I think the ones that, like, linger for just a little bit, but not that long. It’s like it’s going to take you a month to fix this if you get it wrong, but that’s fine. A month’s going to pass anyway. And so it’s not that big of a deal, but we act like it’s a bigger deal than it is.

Impactful Stories from the Atomic Habits Community

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a particular case study or story from Atomic Habits community member or someone that reads your newsletter that has been the most impactful for you?

JAMES CLEAR: There’s not a single one. There are lots that I’m, like, proud of or really excited by, ones I’m surprised by. I heard from a guy the other day. He was the head coach at St Olaf’s University in Minnesota and men’s soccer. And when he came in, their record was something like 5 and 13, and they were near the bottom of the standings.

And he was like, I read Atomic Habits right around the time I took this job. And we came up with systems for everything we did. We taught our players systems for how they tie their shoes and cleats to get ready for the game. We taught them systems for how they prep for practice. We taught them systems for their role on the field.

And, you know, gradually, they improved each year, 5 and 13, then they went like 8 and 8. And then the next year after that, they won the conference. And then the year after that, they went to the NCAA Sweet 16. And then five years later, they won the national championship. You know, of course, stuff like that’s awesome to hear about. Right? You know, like, they went from they went from five wins, and then five years later, they win a national title.

But the ones that matter to me the most are the ones that I hear from somebody and they say, “I finally feel better.” You know, “I feel different. I look in the mirror and I’m like, proud of who I am.” Or “My kids tell me that they’re excited to see, you know, the change in me” or things like that. And that’s what it’s always been about, you know, it’s always been about becoming the type of person that you want to be. And so I think anytime I hear stories like that, I think it’s exciting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when this was a coach, or was it…

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, Travis Wall, he’s the head coach at St Olaf’s, he’s the head coach at Kenyon now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So he talked about systems there. Most of us think about to-do lists and goals and those kinds of things. What is the difference between a system and a goal?

The Power of Systems Over Goals

JAMES CLEAR: I was very goal driven for a long time. I mean, I probably still am. You know, I don’t think there’s any way to get around the fact that we all have goals and think about the outcomes we want and so on. But a goal is about the outcome that you want to achieve, and a system is about the process for getting there.

And so your goal is the target, the outcome, the thing you’re shooting for. Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win.

And so, almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. If you want to see where you’re going to end up, just follow the trajectory of your habits. What’s the process you’ve been running for the last six months or a year or two years, and they’ve carried you almost inevitably to the outcomes that you have right now.

Now, I’m not saying that habits are the only thing that matter in life. Like strategy matters. Luck, randomness, misfortune—those things can influence the outcome. But by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, and your habits are. And the only reasonable, rational approach in life is to focus on the pieces that are within your control.

So I think goals can be good for setting a sense of direction. They’re good for clarity, you know, especially if you have a team, get everybody rowing in the same direction. But once you’ve decided what the goal is, you should basically set it on the shelf, metaphorically speaking, and spend the vast majority of your time focused on building a better system.

How are the habits we’re executing each day moving us closer to this outcome that we want? And so where I’ve come after talking about this for five or six years now, since the book’s been out, where I’ve come down on it is goals are best for people who care about winning once. Systems are best for people who care about winning repeatedly.

If you really want to make progress again and again, if you want to get to the top and stay at the top, you need some process for staying up there, some collection of habits that’s going to keep this machine running. So this is why I say in the book, “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”

Thinking in First Principles and Systems

STEVEN BARTLETT: As you were talking, I was thinking so much about business and founders and entrepreneurs, because they all have big goals. We want to build the best AI app or the best, I don’t know, restaurant, and they stay really focused on those. But the greatest founders that I think I’ve met and interviewed on this show are actually really orientated on what you call in the book first principles and systems.

Is there a way to become more orientated towards systems and thinking about first principles like the habits that lead to the goal, or is it just so that some people have it? Because Elon Musk is always talking about first principles and he thinks in terms of building the system.

JAMES CLEAR: I do think some of it is personality and what’s exciting to you to think about. Some people are very future oriented and like thinking about what the systems are and what that would lead them to and so on, or more process oriented. But there are a number of questions that you can ask that can help you figure out what systems you should be focused on.

You know, so a couple of the ones I like—one question is, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? You have a bunch of habits you’re following right now. What path are you on? You know, can your current habits take you there? And they could be either way. Sometimes the answer is yes, and what you need is patience. You just need to keep staying on the path.

But sometimes the answer is no. And then obviously something needs to change. You know, you’re hoping for one outcome, but then you’re following a different lifestyle. So to want the outcome without the lifestyle is to torture yourself. And what really matters is not, do you want the result? Anybody would like the result if you just hand it to them. The question is, do you want the lifestyle?

One of the little things I try to do—whenever I have a new business project I’m thinking about or something I’m excited about potentially doing, the first question I ask is, how do I want to spend my days? And so then you draw a box, and inside that box, how can we make the most money, reach the most people, make the biggest impact, make the contribution that you want to make, but not outside of it.

And what happens a lot of the time is people do that in reverse. They start by asking, how can we make the most money or reach the most people or make the biggest impact? And then they decide, oh, well, this is what I want to do. But it’s actually outside of how they want to spend their days. And it’s not going to work out well, because it goes back to our point previously about is this fun?

You know, if they don’t want to spend their time that way, you’re just grinding for a little while and eventually it’s not going to work. That’s the key for building systems that really work. Is this how you want to spend your days? The person who wants to live the lifestyle is much better positioned to get the result.

Why Winners and Losers Have the Same Goals

STEVEN BARTLETT: You say that there are multiple problems with goals as a, I guess as a rubric for thinking about what to do or what to aim for. One of them is that winners and losers have the same goals.

JAMES CLEAR: Everybody wants the results. Let’s say you have 100 people apply for a job. You got a new job opening. Presumably, every candidate has the goal of getting the job. The goal is not the thing that determines the outcome. So the person who wins and the 99 people who lose, they have the same goals.

You look at the Olympic Games, presumably any event, everybody who’s competing has the goal of winning the Olympic medal, right? Of winning the gold. So the goal is not the thing that makes the difference. So again, winners and losers have the same goals. So if they have the same goals, they cannot be the thing that make the difference in their performance.

It has to be something else. Maybe having a goal is part of it, maybe it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient for the outcome that you want. And for that, what you need is the system. You need a collection of habits that are going to make the difference and accumulate into a bigger outcome.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you say goals restrict your happiness.

JAMES CLEAR: There’s some implicit promise internally that once I get to this goal, then I’ll be happy. Once I write a New York Times bestseller, then I’ll feel better about it. Once I achieve this certain number on the scale, then I’ll be happy with my body. Once I get to a million dollars in revenue, then I’ll be happy with the business.

And so you’re kind of constantly pushing happiness off to the next milestone and thinking that once you get there, then finally you’ll be satisfied. But I think, in fact, the better way to do it is to fall in love with the process, to fall in love with the lifestyle. Then you can be happy along the way and still achieve the goals as you go, still achieve the milestones.

Being Both Satisfied and Driven

For a long time I wrestled, I had trouble with this question of do I have to be dissatisfied if I want to be driven? You have to be dissatisfied to be driven. Because to me, I felt like there’s where I’m at right now and there’s where I want to be. And so there’s this gap. And that gap is dissatisfaction. That gap is, you know, you want it to change, you want it to close. And it’s also what is motivating and driving you is to try to close that gap.

And so the healthiest answer, maybe the answer is yes, I don’t know. But the healthiest answer that I’ve come up with is imagine an acorn falls from a tree, it manages to take root, becomes a seedling and then a sapling, and eventually grows into this mature oak tree. And at no point in that process when it was just an acorn, it wasn’t criticizing itself for not being a sapling, it was just a sapling.

It wasn’t criticizing itself for not being an oak, it wasn’t dissatisfied with where it was at. And nobody came over and was criticizing it for, oh, I can’t believe you’re not a full grown tree yet. But it kept growing the whole time.

So simultaneously you have this thing where it was both perfect at each stage that it was at, nothing was wrong, and yet it continued to grow. And the reason is because that’s just what an oak tree does. That’s what it is encoded to do. It is encoded for growth.

And so when I look at myself, I think if I put myself in the right position, that’s how I feel about it. You know, I am perfectly happy with where I’m at at each stage. And yet I’m encoded to grow, right? I’m encoded to keep going. And so I can both be driven and be satisfied. I can both be appreciative of the moment and still moving forward.

And I think that works best when you find that thing. Sometimes we call it your strengths. Sometimes we might say it’s what you’re encoded to do. But when you find that thing that is well aligned for you, and if you do find that, then you can have both of those.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I love that. I love that. And I think with age and maturity, I’ve gotten closer to being in that region where I’m well aware nothing is going to make me happier at all. Like, no accomplishment future, nothing’s going to change anything. But at the same time, I’m still striving.

And that does feel like a contradiction to some degree. It feels like, how can those two things be true at the same time that you’re striving for things that you know won’t really move the needle in any way?

The difference I see between me and something in nature is that the thing in nature probably isn’t comparing itself on Instagram to everyone else. And I understand humans to be comparison machines, kind of how we understand the value of things. Like, I understand the value of the steak on a menu by the cheap steak and the most expensive one. So I think the middle one is probably right.

Do you think much about comparison as a motivating or demotivating force in this picture?

Comparison: Teacher of Skills or Thief of Joy

JAMES CLEAR: I think it can be very helpful and it can also be very harmful. So it’s just sort of a sense of how you use it. I tend to find it better if you compare small things. So if you compare marketing strategies or squat form or writing style, or the first sentence of each chapter, like, how do I have a good intro? If you compare tactics, then that can be really helpful for building skills and for developing your ability.

If you compare big things—marriage, net worth, you know, things like that—it’s just kind of a recipe for ending up unhappy because as the scale gets bigger, things get more vague. There’s so many things involved in marriage. And so, you know, or net worth or whatever, you just see one little slice and you are trying to compare these two big things, but you don’t even know what the full picture is.

And so comparison is like the teacher of skills when it’s applied narrowly, but it’s the thief of joy when it’s applied broadly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That makes sense.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah.

Choosing Which Habit to Start With

STEVEN BARTLETT: Earlier on when you said that ambitious people, they have lots of aspirations, lots of habits they want to start. I was thinking about myself and thinking there’s probably 30 habits that I would like to acquire. I’d want to be better at writing, I want to be a runner, I want to be better at speaking. I want to be a better friend and be more attentive with my friends and make sure I text them on their birthdays and, you know, all of these new habits that I want to pursue.

How does one know which one to aim for first? Is there a framework for knowing?

The Upstream Habit Strategy

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, there’s some things that you can do. I don’t think—to your point earlier about sometimes the riskiest things just take a long time making the decision—you know, maybe you should just pick one and work on it and then you can get on to the next one. But I do think there’s some level of strategy which is a good place to start is by asking yourself which habits are upstream from other good things happening.

So for example, maybe the question to start with is: when you live a good day, when you feel dialed in, when things are rolling along well for you, what tends to be part of that day? Sleep, you know. Okay, great. So I would say for me, sleep is definitely one. I would say getting my workout in and usually reading and writing are a part of it. But I think I could just boil it down to reading. If I just read like 10 pages, that often sparks the writing. Reading is like the fuel for writing for me.

So I could say get a workout in and read for five minutes or 10 minutes. Those are the two things that are part of a good day. And what happens is they’re upstream from a lot of other good things happening. For example, if I get the workout in, yeah, I feel good, I get the benefits of the workout. But I also have a post-workout high for like an hour or two. So my focus and concentration is better. I sleep better at night because I got the workout in. Now I’m tired. I tend to eat better when I work out. It’s when I’m not working out that I eat terribly. So it’s kind of like I don’t want to waste it or something.

So at no point was I trying to build better focus habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits. Those just came kind of as a natural consequence of getting the workout in. So what are those things that you do that are upstream from other good things happening? I think those are good anchor habits to start and focus on.

The Meta Habit: Time to Reflect

If I could add another one for myself, I would say it’s a little bit of time. It’s really just time to think, but it’s time to reflect and review. There’s this interesting thing that happens if you have a really good work ethic. If you have a strong work ethic and working hard has gotten you far in life, it kind of becomes a crutch.

JAMES CLEAR: For a long time I was like, if I ever had a problem, I was like, “Well, I’ll just work my way out of it. Just work harder on it until I figure it out.” And that’s great, that’s really powerful for a lot of things. But at some point it breaks, you know. You can maybe, if you really try, maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder, but there’s some limit.

But if you work on the right thing, well, you could get 100x the result or a thousand times the result. And so if you just keep your head down and work hard, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be spending your time in the highest and best way. And the only way to figure that out is to have time to reflect and review, time to think. So you need enough time to think to figure out, what should I be focused on next?

And so I think that is—it’s almost reflection, review is almost like the meta habit that is above all others, because if you give yourself time to reflect and review, then you can troubleshoot your habits and figure out how to adjust them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking as you were saying that, that time to reflect and review is actually also a review of all my current systems moving me closer. Because when you’re talking about that, I was thinking of times in my life where I was so close to the picture, and I was so in the trenches doing the thing that I hadn’t come up to even say, “Actually, is there a system I could put in place to solve this problem over the next five or ten years?”

Like, for example, is there a person I need to hire? So actually, should I go into the hiring process versus being there fixing the problem myself? Should I spend 10 hours this week on hiring a candidate to do this, or should I be doing it? But sometimes you get so caught up in the trenches when, especially when things are tough and difficult and moving very quickly, that you don’t review your systems. And also when you talk about systems, I thought about how systems sometimes expire.

JAMES CLEAR: Sure. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because things change.

When Habits Need to Change Shape

JAMES CLEAR: That’s a great point. And I think this is probably one of the most overlooked things with habits. A lot of the time when someone sits down and they want to build a new habit, they don’t say this, but what they kind of assume is what it would mean to be successful with this habit is that I do it for the rest of my life. And that if at some point I’m not doing it, then that must mean that I failed or I quit on it. But that’s not how it is at all. Things have a season, you know, and so habits have to change shape over time.

Let’s take my writing habit, for example. The habit that launched my career was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years. So the first three years, 150 articles, you know, write twice a week. That was a great habit. There were 2,000-word pieces or so. But then I signed the book deal for Atomic Habits. I didn’t have the capacity to do that and also write the book, so that had to change.

I wrote the book for three years, and then the book came out. And now I write a newsletter once a week, and that’s much shorter. But I kind of feel like my writing habit is maintained that whole time. It just changed shape. But that’s fine. It just needed to shift based on the season.

But I don’t know, people get so attached to one form of a habit sometimes that they don’t realize that it’s no longer serving them. And I think that’s one of the trickier things to give up—is a habit that used to be good for you, that used to work well, but no longer serves you in your current season. I find that I’m kind of a slow learner with that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess parents can probably really relate because they’re forced to basically change their goals, and therefore their systems would have to. I mean, you’re a father of three, so you probably know this much better than I do. But has there been systems that you’ve had to sort of—

JAMES CLEAR: I think there’s lots of inflection points in life. So having kids is one of them. Starting a new job, moving to a new city. You know, it can be big stuff like that. I just talked to a mother who—her kids moved out, so she’s now an empty nester. She’s like, “Last 25 years, been parenting all these kids, and now finally they’re all out.” But it feels—in some sense, it almost feels like a loss of identity. Like, “I thought I was one thing, and now, you know, feels like things have shifted.”

But also it just signals an inflection point in life and a new season that you’re in. And when your seasons change, your habits often need to change with it.

The Four Burners Theory

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you talk about this Four Burners theory, I guess it dovetails into what we’re talking about here where you use this to kind of think about what habits to pursue in any season of life. But also a phrase that I’ve heard so often, specifically from mothers on the show comes to mind, which is that “you can’t have it all at the same time.” And I’ve heard that, I think four or five times. Different mothers in particular, which is—I mean, says something about society.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have said to me that they’ve had to realize that they can’t have it all at the same time for sure.

JAMES CLEAR: So this is not my concept, this is the idea that I came across called the Four Burners theory. And it breaks life into these four burners on a stove. So you have work and career as one, you have family, friends, and then personal health or yourself basically is the other. The idea is that for the burners to really be going well, you can’t have all four on at the same time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And burner being the stove.

JAMES CLEAR: The stove, yeah, yeah, the stovetop. So you can choose. You could have three going on at kind of a mid-level, but if you really want them to do well, you can only have two on at the same time. And you know, who knows? I don’t know if it’s true or not or whatever, but it’s an interesting idea and what it does is it gets you to realize, yeah, a fundamental part of life is trade-offs and you cannot be good at everything at the same time.

So this is true across projects. If you try to do seven things at once, spreading yourself thin in seven different ways, very hard to be excellent. For me, what I think about is life has a series of seasons and life has a series of sequences. So let’s say it’s not always exactly 10 years, but let’s say the big movements in life are roughly 10-year buckets. Right?

So for me, building my first business, that was kind of a ten-year thing. And eventually it led to the launch of Atomic Habits. You maybe get five or six of those in your adult life. Some of those things make sense to do in a different order than others. Like if you want to travel the world and see a bunch of places and party in Ibiza, you’re probably not going to do that in your 60s. I mean, you can, there’s no—nobody’s saying you can’t, but some things are probably better sequenced in other spots.

Obviously, especially for women, there’s a certain limit on, if you want to have a family, what decades that happens in. So, yeah, it’s just a matter of sequencing and prioritization. If you look at the tapestry of your life, what do you want the big movements to be and where do those seasons need to slot in?

Yeah, there is no right answer. But it’s interesting. As soon as you realize it’s a finite number and as soon as you realize that trade-offs are always going to be a reality, you have to deal with that in some way. I’ve decided that right now, while my kids are young, I’m going to turn the career burner down. And that’s fine. It’s not going to be how it was for the last 10 years, but that’s okay because they’re only five once. They’re only turning six once, they only go to second grade once. And I want to be there for all that. So there are always trade-offs.

Sequencing Your Life Seasons

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think that sequence point is super, super interesting. It got me thinking because you’re right, there are sort of some constraints, whether they’re biological constraints, where in the case of your kids, just natural constraints that mean this season can only happen now.

JAMES CLEAR: Right. Yeah. There’s also some things like, you know, both of us are fairly young entrepreneurs. I’m so glad that I started a business in my 20s rather than my 50s. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it in your 50s. There’s no—nobody’s saying you can’t. It’s just that it makes things a lot easier for the next decade.

It’s easier for me to be there for my kids now because I have control of my time because I did the business part in the previous decade. And so the risks—yeah, and that doesn’t mean it’s always going to work out or whatever. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to perfectly plan it all. But you just see how the sequences can stack up in that way.

The Role of Repetition in Habit Formation

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how important do you think, when we’re talking about habits, do you think repetition is? Because there’s so many of these sort of well-known concepts or frameworks in habit formation. One of them is that habits take roughly 66 days. One of them is that it’s about repetition. Does repetition really matter?

The Science Behind Habit Formation: Beyond the 66-Day Myth

JAMES CLEAR: It definitely does. I mean, repetition is how habits form. The 66 days number comes from one study that came out that found that on average it took about 66 days to build a habit. If you look at the study, the range is pretty wide.

So if you pick something really simple like drinking a glass of water at lunch each day, that might only take two or three weeks to form. If you look at something more complicated, like going for a run after work every day, that might take seven or eight or nine months to form.

And so I don’t know that 66 days really tells you anything. It doesn’t tell you that this is how long it’s going to take for your habit to stick. I mean, the range is wide.

Sometimes when people ask me, how long does it take to form a habit? My answer is forever. Because if you stop doing it, then it’s no longer a habit. And what I’m kind of getting at with that is that habits are not a finish line to be crossed. They’re a lifestyle to be lived.

And so we approach our habits as if it’s a finish line. Oh, let me do this 30 day cleanse and then I’ll be healthy. Let me do this 90 day sprint and then the product will be shipped. I won’t have to worry about it anymore.

And it’s like most things in life, especially the big important things, they’re endless. They’re endless battles. You know, so just because you went to the gym yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. Like, you still have to show up tomorrow. Just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. You still have to be loving and caring again.

And so all the things that really matter are endless battles. And it’s not about crossing a finish line. It’s about living that kind of lifestyle. And so, yes, it is true that repetition matters. And yes, it is true that the habits will become more seamless and automatic and maybe a little less effortful as you repeat them more. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll never have to think about them or worry about them again.

What Happens in Your Brain When Habits Form

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think much about what’s going on in the brain when repetition occurs? Like, what is it that’s making it easier? If I’ve been on a roll with the gym, I’ve been going for 60 days in a row. Why does it feel easier on day 61?

JAMES CLEAR: That’s a tricky question. Because if you were to talk to an academic and they would tell you, a habit is this automatic, non-conscious behavior. Really quick, simple things like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongs, you got to tap them together twice. You know, stuff that you don’t even really think about. Okay, that’s actual habitual behavior.

But if I were to ask you what are some habits you’re trying to build, you would say, I’m trying to go to the gym four days a week, or I’m trying to write every morning, or I’m trying to meditate five days a week or whatever. And I know what you mean when you say that. You mean, I want it to be this routine, this practice that I do consistently.

But writing every day is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth is. You know, going to the gym is not going to be automatic the way that tying your shoes might be. And so the things that we—there’s a little bit of sloppiness in the word habits and how we use it in life. It’s not—they’re not automatic, mindless routines most of the time. Most of the things that we want to be habits are not like reflexes. They’re routines and rituals that we do consistently.

So having said that, it is true that after you’ve gone to the gym for a month or two, it does start to get easier. And I think there’s a number of forces that kind of work in your favor there.

One is you figured a lot out about what it takes to get into the gym. What time am I going? What route do I take? How do I pack my bag? Do I need to bring a water bottle, or is there a water fountain at the gym? All those sorts of things are little one-time costs that you got to figure out early on that once you’re into a pattern, you already know them.

You know, the water bottle thing sounds like a small thing. I heard from someone who said, I always forget to bring my water bottle. And they don’t have water fountains at this gym. So sometimes I skip the workout because of that. You know, it’s remarkable how little friction it takes to pull us off course. And so figuring out all of those things is something that once you’re a month or two in, you’ve crossed all—you’ve fought all those battles, and now you know how to do it. So that makes it easier.

The other thing is you start to build friendships, start to build connections. You start to know the people there. You feel comfortable there. There’s this concept Steven Pressfield talks about where if you have a wolf and it’s roaming around, eventually it starts to feel like it has its territory.

And early on in the process of creative process, writing a book or whatever, you go into the office for the first time to write the first chapter of the book. And you kind of feel uncomfortable. It feels like it’s not you yet. You go to the gym on the first day, you feel like people are judging you. Do I look stupid? I don’t know how to do this.

But after a while, it becomes your territory. It’s just like the wolf. It starts to feel like your home court. And so that familiarity, I think, also makes it much easier to stick to the habits once you start to feel comfortable there. And that takes a little bit of time.

Every Action Is a Vote for Your Identity

And then the last piece is identity. The more that you start to follow this habit, the more you repeat a habit, the more you reinforce being that type of person, the more you start to have that element of your story.

I think this is one of the most important things for building habits and getting habits to stick, which is how your habits reinforce your desired identity. We often start by asking, what do I wish to achieve? But I think what we really should start with is who do I wish to become? What are my actions reinforcing? What are my actions taking me closer toward?

In a sense, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for “I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.” And no, writing one sentence does not finish a novel, but it does cast a vote for “I’m a writer.” And no, sending one bit of positive feedback does not make you the world’s best leader, but it does cast a vote for “I’m the type of leader who cares about their teammates.”

And individually, those are small things, but collectively, you build up this body of evidence for being that kind of person. It’s a little bit different than what you often hear. You often hear people say something like, “fake it till you make it.” And I don’t necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. It’s asking you to believe something positive about yourself.

But behavior and beliefs are a two-way street. And so what you believe influences the actions you will take. And the actions you take also influences what you will believe. And my encouragement, my suggestion is to start with the action, to let the behavior lead the way, to make one sales call or meditate for one minute or do one push-up and let that in that moment be evidence that you were that type of person.

You know, if you go outside today and you shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don’t instantly think, oh, I’m a basketball player. But if you do it every day for next three months or six months or year, at some point you cross this invisible threshold where you have to admit, I guess playing basketball is kind of an important part of who I am. You know, I guess it’s part of my identity.

And once you adopt a habit as part of your story, once it becomes part of how you see yourself, it’s not just like, I need to go for a run. It’s like, I’m a runner. You know, I do this because this is part of who I am. Then you’ll fight to maintain the habit. Right? Then it becomes easier for it to stick. And so the connection between habits and identity, I think, is ultimately how you really get habits to stick for the long run.

The Power of Identity-Based Language

STEVEN BARTLETT: It reminds me of a study I was reading recently that said if you speak to someone in terms of giving them an identity versus using a word as an adjective, the behavior occurs. So an example would be if you do something for me and I say, do you know what, James? You are a kind person. In the studies, people become more kind. But if I say that was kind—

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or that action was kind, people are less kind. So if I can give you feedback that embodies your identity, then you’re more likely for that behavior to occur. So with my team, and this is maybe giving a bit of the game away, I will often refer to them as an identity. I will say, you are an innovator. You are an experimenter. Because from the studies I’ve read, that increased probability that they embody that identity.

JAMES CLEAR: There’s another study that did it for voting. So people were more likely to go and vote if you said, I am a voter. You got them to identify as I’m a voter, rather than, are you voting today? And so, same thing.

There’s an example in Atomic Habits. I talk about—imagine two people who are trying to quit smoking. You know, and so the first person gets offered a cigarette, and they say, “Oh, no, thanks, I’m trying not to smoke.” And the second person gets offered, and they say, “Oh, no, thanks, I’m not a smoker.”

And so the first person is trying to resist something that they still see themselves as, but the second person no longer sees themselves as the type of person who smokes. And, yeah, some of the evidence and research suggests that once you adopt those identities, it’s easier for you to stick to the behavior.

Cognitive Dissonance and Identity Protection

STEVEN BARTLETT: Reminds me of the research from Leon Festinger, the guy that came up with the term cognitive dissonance. The way that I understand the concept of cognitive dissonance is that if I have a perceived identity of myself and something external threatens that or challenges it, we’re not good at living in contradiction.

I’m not good at, say, for example, I’m an accountant right now, and I hear that AI is doing accountancy work amazingly well now. I’ve invested 10 years in that accountancy degree. I see myself as a great accountant. My initial reaction will probably be to either dismiss my current identity as a great accountant, that that’s going to have a great career in the future, or to dismiss the AI.

And he talks, the people that have studied his work talk about how we’re very poor at being able to hold two contradictory things to be true at the same time. So we tend to protect our identity.

The Power of Social Bonds in Habit Formation

JAMES CLEAR: Yes, there’s something incredibly powerful about this that also ties into habits, which is that a lot of our identity, not the whole thing, but large portions of our identity are tied to our relationships. You know, I’m a father, I’m a husband. I’m a, you know, and so, like, it’s the connection that we have with others. Our social bonds influence the picture that we have of ourselves.

This is something that widely influences our habits. You know, so we are all part of multiple groups. Sometimes that group is large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be British. Sometimes that group is small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of this family or a member at the local CrossFit gym.

But all of the groups that you belong to, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act, have a set of social norms for what you do in that group. And when your habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group, they’re pretty attractive. You know, like, you want to stick to them, you get praised and rewarded for it. You fit in.

And when they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, they’re kind of unattractive, and you get criticized, and it doesn’t feel good. And so if people have to choose between “I have habits that I want, but I’m cast out, I’m ostracized, I’m criticized,” or “I have habits that I don’t really love, but I fit in, I belong, I’m part of something,” most of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to improve.

And so you want to do something different, but you also know you’re going to be heavily criticized for it or you’re going to at least add friction to your relationships. And we don’t want to live with that dissonance. That dissonance of “I can have this, but I also create friction here.”

One of the lessons, I think one of the big takeaways if you want to build better habits and get habits to stick, particularly for the long run, is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Join groups where you can rise together, where the people that you’re surrounded by have the type of habits that you want to have.

Resisting Equilibrium: The Battle Against Your Environment

STEVEN BARTLETT: It reminds me of this thing that appeared in Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letter about resisting equilibrium.

JAMES CLEAR: I didn’t know about this guy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So in Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letter, he writes to shareholders that when referring to Amazon’s ability and desire and need to innovate through the future, he says he makes a comparison to Richard Dawkins’ book called the, I think it’s the Blind Clock Maker.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, the Blind Watchman.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Blind Watchman.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And says that essentially all living organisms live in this constant battle to resist their equilibrium. And actually death itself is when we become our environment. Because right now me and you have huge amount of energy expenditure to be different from our environment in terms of temperature, in terms of acidity, etc.

And he’s making the comparison, which sounded a lot like what you just said, that if you want to, that all living organisms are in this constant battle to be different from our environment. And the more different our environment is, the harder the fight.

So if I go to the desert, my body has to put out even more energy to be a different temperature, to be a different sort of acidity than the environment. But if I want to make my life easier and make that fight easier, then go into an environment where my environment is the same as my internal.

Environment as Gravity: How Your Surroundings Pull You

JAMES CLEAR: That’s great. I think that punchline of the more different your environment is from the habits that you want to build or from whatever equilibrium you’re trying to achieve, the harder you will have to fight to maintain. And that is a fight that you can do for, I don’t know, a day, a week, a month, but it’s some limited amount of time. At some point, it just is draining to try to grind against the environment all the time.

Sometimes I view environment, both physical and social, almost like a form of gravity, you know, like the physical environment that we’re in right now. Okay. It’s always nudging you in certain directions. Like I’m sitting in this chair right now talking to you. I could be sitting anywhere else, but I would have to sit on the floor. Right. The environment of the chair is ushering me to this spot. It’s almost like a form of gravity pulling me here rather than getting me to go somewhere else.

When we leave this room, if I wanted, I could try to do something crazy and break through a wall or climb through the ceiling or whatever, but I’m going to go through the door because that’s where the environment is naturally nudging me toward. It’s where that behavior happens easily.

And all of our spaces are like that. You’re always being kind of pulled toward what is natural and easy and consistent in that environment. So how can you prime your environment to make those the things you want to do? That’s for physical environment.

Social environment is the same. You know, it’s all, you’re always kind of being pulled toward what the behaviors are that are natural there. What are the social norms? What are the things that people get praised and rewarded for? What is the culture typically calling you to do?

And that’s where I think the answer is. You want to surround yourself with groups who have the behaviors you want to have. Join groups where your desired behavior is normal. If it’s normal in that group, then you can rise together.

When Relationships Hold You Back

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, I mean, that must mean getting rid of certain people in one’s life. And sometimes those people are hard to get rid of because they’re families, they’re mums, they’re dads.

JAMES CLEAR: Sure. And I, you know, I’m a little, sometimes you hear people say things like “fire your friends,” you know, or whatever, like. And I’m not, I’m not all the way there. I think that, yes, it is true sometimes you have an extreme circumstance, there’s a particularly toxic person or something like that. And yeah, like, you know, you probably maybe should not be around them and that those can lead to very hard decisions.

But I would say for the majority of life and the majority of your relationships, what we’re really talking about here is not getting rid of relationships. We’re talking about finding specific places where that habit can thrive.

So here are some examples. There’s a number of studies that have shown that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. So, for example, if you, well, first let me back up. There’s an interesting way to define what a habit is, which is that it is a behavior that is tied to a particular context.

So, for example, your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the context of your couch at 7pm and whenever you walk into your living room and you’re by your couch and it’s in the evening, you’re kind of naturally being pulled toward picking up the remote and doing that, because that’s the context the habit happens in.

So if you want to build a new habit, and again, these studies have found that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. Well, let’s say you want to start a habit of journaling. Well, you walk into your living room in the evening and you sit down on the couch and you’re like, “I’m going to start journaling.” But you’re naturally, you know, your brain is kind of like, “well, it’s time to pick up the remote and turn on the TV.”

That doesn’t always mean that you need a brand new space, like a new building or a new room to do every habit in. But you could do something like you could get a chair and put it in the corner of the room and that becomes the journaling chair. And the only thing that you do when you sit in that chair is you journal for five minutes. So now you have a new context that is tied to the behavior that you want to perform.

Creating Spaces Where Habits Thrive

And in the social sense, so this is what we were talking about previously. You want to be able to create a space that is a safe place for that environment, for that habit to live or for that habit to thrive.

Let’s say sometimes those spaces are ready made. Like, let’s say you want to do yoga four days a week, but you look around your family or your friends in your apartment that you’re living in, nobody else is interested. They don’t want to do it too. You do it in the living room, you kind of get made fun of, or you’re stepping on other people’s space. They’re like, “I’m trying to do stuff in here too.” You know, it’s just kind of inconvenient.

Well, you can go to a yoga studio and that’s a place where for that hour you can be surrounded by a group where your desired behavior is normal. You don’t have to fire any of your friends, and you can just go to the place where that habit can thrive.

And I think each habit likes to have that. It likes to have somewhere where it can exist in a way that it’s going to be supported or in a way where the environment makes it easy. Sometimes the environment is ready made like that. Other times it’s not.

So for me, one of the most useful things that I did in my entrepreneurial career, I had no entrepreneurs in my family, no authors. So I had this thing that I kind of wanted to do, but I didn’t have anybody close to me that I could look to.

First six months that I was an entrepreneur, I sent like 300 cold emails just to other people that were like a year or two ahead of me. Someone who seemed like, “you’re actually doing this thing where, you know, you’ve got this online audience and you’re writing about stuff you like.”

Maybe 30 people got back to me. I did like a little, you know, Zoom call or whatever and, you know, we chatted and connected and then I met some of them at a conference like six months later. So I was six months in. I knew like maybe 10 people that I met in person and I had like 30 that I had reached out to. So now it feels like, okay, at least I know a couple people who’ve done this thing.

And I started hosting these retreats. Every once or twice a year I get six or eight authors together and I’d say, “let’s just rent an Airbnb. We’ll split the cost and we can talk about how to build an audience and how to grow your email list and how to write a book and launch it and all the stuff that we were kind of focused on.”

It was almost always like the best weekend of my year because I would have six months worth of stuff that I need to execute on after that was done. That’s kind of like going to a yoga studio for yoga. But you had to create the space.

I was always worried that I was going to look like some dork, you know, and like invite everybody and they would all say no or whatever. But everybody wants the same thing. You know, they’re all waiting for somebody to create the space for like minded people to get together.

So sometimes you need enough courage to create the space yourself. But the punchline is the same, which is you’re trying to surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve had so many founders speak to me and say, “why didn’t this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?” Maybe the copy wasn’t good, the creative wasn’t strong. But usually the problem is they’re not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person.

And if you’re in B2B marketing, that is much of the game. And this is where LinkedIn ads solves that problem for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry and even someone’s skill set.

And their network includes over a billion professionals. About 130 million of them are decision makers. So when you use LinkedIn ads, you’re putting your brand in front of the right people. And LinkedIn ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks, in my experience.

If you want to give them a try, head over to LinkedIn.com/diary. And when you spend $250 on your first LinkedIn ads campaign, you’ll get an extra $250 credit from me for the next one. That’s LinkedIn.com/diary. Terms and conditions apply.

Breaking Free from the Golden Handcuffs

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m thinking about all the people that are currently sat in a job that they don’t like. They’re sat in a job in the middle of a big city. They’re miserable. They want to go do something else. They want to go be an author, they want to go follow in your footsteps, they want to build a business in a media business, for example.

But they’re so far away from that. They’re held in place by their parents’ expectations, they’re held in place by a mortgage and all the things that, you know, life, when they get home every day, they’re tired. Really, really tired. So it’s remained a dream.

You must have so many of those people that write to you, that message you, because of what you’ve produced and because of the content that you make. What do you say to those people? Where does one, one such person start?

The Power of Leveraging Your Current Advantages

JAMES CLEAR: One is, I don’t think it serves you in any way to just kind of wallow in how hard it is or to talk about how tough. Talking, complaining about how hard it is just makes it harder, you know, so the act of complaining makes a bad situation worse.

The act of emphasizing the things that are going well or trying to take. It’s kind of this endless game of trying to take your current advantages and gain new advantages. So early on, most people don’t have many advantages. I didn’t know anybody in the industry. I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any experience.

But the one advantage that I did have was I had time. And so I could use that time to try to gain new advantages. So in my case, I used the time to write two articles a week. And I did that for two years. I did freelance gigs on the side to pay the bills and stuff. And eventually that’s how I built the audience.

And then once I had the audience two years later, then I had a new advantage, right? I not only had time, I also had an email list. Now I can go from there, and I could get a book deal, and then I have a new advantage. I have a book deal. And then, you know, you can just continually use your current advantages to gain new advantages.

And I just talked about this for about 20 seconds. That was about seven years of my life, the span of all that, right? It goes slower than what you want, but it’s kind of just that endless game.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It goes slower than you would want. Makes me think about this whole idea of being 1% better every day.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are the most sort of pertinent parts of understanding that graphic?

The Compound Effect: Getting 1% Better Every Day

JAMES CLEAR: Two things stand out, right? So, first is this chart. What this is showing is if you get 1% better each day for a year, so 1.01 to the 365th power, you get 37 times better by the end of the year, right? So that’s this curve. If you get 1% worse, 0.99 to the 365th power, you drive yourself almost all the way down to zero.

Now, a chart like this is just compound interest, right? This is just a compounding curve. And real life is not exactly like compound interest. You know, your habits are not exactly like this mathematical formula. But I think this chart does a good job of encapsulating what the process of behavior change feels like. You know, what it’s like to try to get a little bit better each day, because two things are true. These are the two things that stand out.

First, any compounding curve, the hallmark of any compounding process is all the greatest returns are delayed, right? You are 80% of the way through this curve before it really starts to take off. So all the greatest returns are delayed. The early stuff doesn’t feel that impressive.

The second is on day one, the separation between 0.99 and 1.01 is very small, right? 1% better or 1% worse is very minor. So on any given day, it’s very easy to dismiss. You know, what is the difference between eating something healthy for lunch or eating something unhealthy today? Basically nothing. Your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night. The scale hasn’t changed.

What is the difference between the person who reads for 10 minutes today and the person who doesn’t? Basically nothing. Reading for 10 minutes does not make you a genius. But the person who always goes to bed a little bit smarter than they were when they woke up, the person who always takes a little bit of time each day to learn something new. Yeah, two or five or 10 years later, that’s a meaningful difference in wisdom and insight.

And so you see this same pattern again and again throughout life, which is what starts out small, and it’s pretty insignificant, easy to dismiss on a daily basis. It compounds, it multiplies. It improves over time. And so the effects of your habits are delayed.

Time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes your ally. And every day that goes by, you put yourself in a stronger position. If you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And every day that goes by, you dig the hole a little bit deeper.

Focus on Trajectory, Not Position

And so the real lesson of a chart like this, the real lesson of getting 1% better every day, is not to get wrapped up in the number. It’s not like, oh, is it a 1% improvement or 1.6% or whatever? It’s not about that. It’s an attitude. It’s an approach. It’s a focus and emphasis on trajectory rather than position.

You know, there’s a lot of discussion about position in life. How much money’s in my bank account? What’s the number on the scale? What’s the stock price? What are the quarterly earnings? We have all these measurements and metrics for assessing our current position. And then if the position isn’t what we want it to be, we get frustrated or we feel guilty or we judge ourselves or we get annoyed or whatever.

And what I’m encouraging is to say, listen, just for a minute, let’s stop worrying so much about our current position and instead focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. Am I getting 1% better or 1% worse? Is the arrow pointed up and to the right or have we flatlined? So if you’re on a good trajectory.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or in use time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This has almost become a religious belief, because I think for everything you’ve said, it has to become a religious belief because the results are hard to see in the near term, but it is most certainly a religious belief. In our team, I have multiple readers.

JAMES CLEAR: Who got tattoos of it, which I was not expecting. I drew this on an index card, and now it’s on somebody’s body. Yeah, that was definitely surprising.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it needs that religion because that first part where you’re doing something and there’s no progress, there’s no evidence of progress.

Meaningful vs. Meaningless Small Changes

JAMES CLEAR: There is something tricky about this that I think is important. So we all have made this mistake before, which is you can make 1% improvements that accumulate and you can make 1% improvements that evaporate. Right? You can spend your time on trivial stuff, meaningful. You know, it can be meaningful small changes or it can be meaningless small changes.

And so how do you decide the difference between the two? That’s kind of tricky. And I don’t know that you can always get it perfectly right. But to me the dividing line is, does this action accumulate into something larger or not? You know, you can spend your time doing all small stuff, whatever, day in and day out, but are you building towards something bigger?

And so in a lot of ways, I think the two time frames that matter most in life are 10 years and one hour. You know, 10 years is just shorthand for what’s the big meaningful stuff you’re working toward? You think about most of the stuff that people really get, the meaningful movements in life, most of them are multi-year things.

You know, build a business that you’re proud of, raising a successful family, you know, having a happy marriage, getting in the best shape of your life, whatever it is, contributing to some cause that you care about. They’re usually big multi-year, sometimes multi-decade things. So 10 years is shorthand for that.

But if you can do one thing each day that’s going to serve you well in 10 years. If you can find one hour sometime today to do something that’s going to pay off in a decade, you usually don’t even need to wait 10 years for it to really start to show up. You know, usually you get two or three or four years into that and you’re like, wow, I can’t believe how this stuff’s accumulating already.

Systems vs. Goals: The Next Hour and 10 Years

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it makes me think again about your idea of systems versus goals. Because the most exceptional founders I know, they’ll think about what can I do in the next hour so that in 10 years time we’re in a different place.

Which again, it sounds, I’ve said this a few times, but one of the most important things in business, I mean the definition of the word company, is hiring. So most, I think all, nearly all problems I face in business are a people problem. It’s a people mistake that I have or haven’t made yet.

So the further I’ve got in my career, I’ve started to think that actually most of my, the next hour of my life should be working on people. Because that corrects what happens in 10 years time. If we want my company to go public in 10 years time, in the next hour I should really be thinking about a hiring process which will find the CFO, which will build the business.

JAMES CLEAR: And here you are talking to me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but I’m learning. And I’m going to go take it out. And I’m going to go, no, but it’s really, it’s really useful speaking to you about this because it’s given me the wording to which will create memorability, which will create the repetitions and the habits, if you know what I’m saying.

And I wasn’t thinking in terms of systems and goals. I always refer to it with people. I say what’s furthest upstream.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this can also be what we’re saying about sleep. And I see hiring, for example, in business or actually generally in your personal life, selecting people is the single most important factor to everything that happens downstream.

The Undervalued Power of Relationships

JAMES CLEAR: Relationships in general are probably, it’s obvious to everybody that they matter and yet they still are probably perpetually undervalued. So it’s true in a business sense, which is what you’re talking about here. Almost every business problem at some level could be a people problem or there’s a person who could unlock it and solve that problem.

It’s true in a personal sense. The most important decision you probably will make is whether or who you get married to that will dramatically shape your life.

It’s also true in just a luck business life sense, which is that there is no such thing as an opportunity that is not tied to a person. Right. Opportunities come through people. And so when you say, oh, I wish I could just have some good luck or I wish I could catch my lucky break, what you’re probably talking about is there’s a person who carries that opportunity with them that you need to interface with or get to know.

And so in all of these ways, relationships dramatically shape our lives. And yeah, people are probably the most important thing in that sense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think with age that becomes more apparent for most people. It becomes most apparent that the best decisions I’ve made in my life were people. And the worst decisions I made in my life were also people.

But we don’t think about that. We think, I’ll work Saturday and Sunday in the office, I’ll have some great idea. If I read a book, I’ll have some great idea which will make me lucky and successful. Whereas with time I realized that the smart work versus the hard work is focusing much more on people.

Building Confidence Through Habits

How does your work dovetail into things like self-esteem and confidence? Because everybody wants to build confidence. And for some people, they’re in a bit of a downward reinforcing confidence spiral, which I guess would look something like this, something happened in their life, so they’re less likely to raise their hand or to step outside of their zone of comfort.

And even when and if they do, they interpret it negatively, and that knocks their confidence. They see it, they’re wearing sunglasses that interpret the things that are happening as negative, and they’re in this sort of downward compounding spiral. And there’s other people that seem to be going the other way.

The Power of Displayed Ability and Building Confidence

JAMES CLEAR: First is, I had a high school basketball coach that told me confidence is just displayed ability. And what he meant was, if you want to feel more confident about your ability to make a free throw, go out there and shoot for an hour, and once you knock down 10 in a row, you’re going to feel a lot better about it.

And so what you realize this is true for everything, which is once you have started to display your ability in any given area, give a successful speech or make a nice presentation for work or whatever it is, you feel better about it. And so what you realize is you need reps. You need practice. Whatever the thing is, you need enough repetition to start to learn how to do the thing.

And so this is why sometimes I’ll say, motivation comes after starting, not before. We think we need motivation to get started, but in fact, you should try to scale it down and make it so easy that you’ll do it even if you don’t feel that motivated about it. Start, get some reps in. And then once you perform the repetitions, you start to build up some confidence because you know that you have some evidence that you can do it. So confidence is displayed ability. Let’s try to scale it down, make it easy, start to display our ability, and then the confidence comes as a side effect.

Emphasizing Your Wins

The second thing, though, and this might even be the more important piece, you mentioned this idea of someone who interprets things in a negative frame. They get caught in this downward spiral. They see evidence of things working against them or the world is tilted against them, or they’re emphasizing the pieces of the story that aren’t serving them that well.

I played baseball for a long time. I played through college and when I was younger, I was 10, 12, 14, after each season we would do this thing. My dad and I would go out and sit on the back deck. And we would talk about the wins, the good parts of the biggest games that our team won, or my best plays from the year, or just things that I got better at from the season before.

And I was never the best player on any team that I was on. But you finish each season with a sense of positivity, a sense of confidence, this feeling of momentum going into the next year. And I think I played for a long time partially because of that. It was a practice of emphasizing your wins.

And so I think that’s an interesting thing that more people should try is when you look back on your last year, what are some of the wins that you’ve had, and try to use that. Tell yourself that story, emphasize that story, and use that to move into the next moment.

Navy SEAL Mental Performance Training

I was talking recently, so I have this publishing company that I co-founded, Author’s Equity, and we’re publishing this book from this guy named Brandon Webb, who is a former Navy SEAL. He trained the Navy SEAL sniper unit in mental performance. And so he would teach them all kinds of things. I was talking to him about the book and some of the strategies, and I was trying to learn what they would do.

And two things stood out to me. The first thing he said is a positive outlook, no matter the scenario. So the first thing we train them on is positive outlook, no matter what situation or scenario they’re in. The second thing is visualizing things going well.

One time a sniper came up to him and said, “What’s a good score on this course?” They would give them these little courses to test, they have to make eight or 10 or 12 different shots or whatever. And he said, “A good score is 100%.” He was like, now in reality, almost nobody gets 100%. But I wanted to set that standard, to set that outcome in their mind as the thing they were shooting for. And he had two guys he was training. One of them got a 96, one of them got 100.

Anyway, the point is that in life there are always things that go well and things that go poorly. There will always be days that things are stacked against you and days when things seem to go your way. And the question is, which story are you telling yourself? Which version of the events are you emphasizing?

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should ignore reality. If there’s a problem that needs to be addressed, then you still need to address it. But as long as you’re not ignoring reality, I feel like the only thing that makes sense is to emphasize the empowering version, to emphasize the wins, to sit down and reflect on what you’ve done and think about what the wins were and how that feeds into your momentum going forward and to visualize the next step and how it’s going to go.

The Psychological Momentum of 1% Gains

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, it reminds me of something Sir David Brailsford said to me, who I know is prominent in the first chapter of your book. He was talking a lot about 1% gains, et cetera. And he says the thing that he doesn’t get to talk about enough is the psychological momentum that’s created from accomplishing these 1% gains and celebrating them amongst the team.

He said to me that when he was in the British cycling team and he went in there and they were down and out and depressed and kind of being ridiculed for being this terrible team, he goes, “We started stacking up the 1% et cetera and the crazy thing that happened is we started to feel like we were going somewhere and people stopped leaving the bike shop at 5pm and started staying till 2am because they felt like they were going somewhere.”

It dovetails into your point about progress, but also just the power of being intentional about celebrating those wins and the psychological momentum it creates in a group of people and yourself.

JAMES CLEAR: That’s great. I think you do need to be a little bit more intentional about it in the real world. So if you look at some of the most habit forming technologies or some of the most habit forming things, like let’s take video games for example.

In a video game there are continual, constant forms of progress. So your score is increasing in the top corner of the screen. Whenever you pick up a weapon or a ruby or a gem or whatever, it’s a little jingle or a chime or some musical note. Even the pitter patter of footsteps as you run through the level is a signal that you’re making progress, that you’re moving forward, that you’re going somewhere.

And so if you compare all of that immediate feedback that you’re getting, all in the same moment when you’re playing this level and then you walk outside and you think about most of the things you’re working on in real life, you’re like, this committee’s been meeting every Friday for six months. We still haven’t shipped this feature. I’ve been running every day for the last month and I still don’t see a change in my body.

And so it’s very hard to compare the digital world and all the progress that we get there through our screens to the physical world and the habits that we’re trying to build and foster in our lives and businesses. And I think that’s one reason why it is nice to be more intentional about it, to try to think about what are the 1% improvements or the small gains that we can make today and then celebrating those wins so that you have some feeling of progress there.

Because in the real world, progress is often delayed. My parents like to swim. Well, if they were swimming for the change that they’re going to see in their body, it takes two years. The problem is they jump into the water and their body looks exactly the same when they get out. And so you need something in the moment that gives you some signal of progress. They use a habit tracker, so they have a little template where they just put a little X on that day. But you need something that visualizes your progress that gives you some signal that you’re moving forward.

Progress as the Best Day at Work

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was reminded then of Harvard Business Review, did the study where they asked people what their best day in work was, and they asked them to keep work diaries. I think it was about a thousand people. And the majority of people pointed out a day in their work diary in that week where they had a feeling of progress, even if it was tiny.

And this goes to your point about making it fun as well. So highlighting one’s progress and celebrating it makes it fun, but also that psychological momentum. And then also you can do this stuff. You can do the 1% better every day.

Activation Energy and Scaling Down Habits

JAMES CLEAR: You put yourself in a position to experience the feeling of progress if you scale your habits down. So let’s say sometimes in chemistry, there’s this concept of activation energy, how much energy it takes to activate a reaction. If the activation energy is high, you have to put a lot of heat or a lot of energy into the reaction to make it occur. I think habits kind of have an activation energy too.

So let’s say that your habit is to do 100 pushups a day. The activation energy for that’s kind of high on the first day when you’re really pumped about it. Maybe you’re doing sets of 10 all throughout the day, and you get to 100 and you feel really good. Maybe you can do that for a couple days or a week or whatever, but at some point, you get to a day where you’re tired or you had a lot to do at work or whatever. And then you turn around, it’s 9:30 and you’re like, “I need to go to bed soon. Do I feel like doing 100 push ups?” And then you skip it.

But if you’re something much smaller, like your goal is to do one push up or 10 pushups, well, that is a lot easier and the activation energy is much lower. And so then you get to that day, eight or nine or 10 days in, when it’s 9:30, you can still do 10 pushups before you go to bed. And so you still get the feeling of progress. You still get the feeling that you’re moving forward simply because you set the bar lower to start.

If the bar is perfect at the beginning, it’s really hard to maintain that for very long. But if the bar is getting you in, now you build momentum and you get the feeling of progress. And you get a month or two months or three months in and you still have a streak going and you feel pretty good about yourself.

And at some point you start doing it enough that you realize, okay, there will probably be a day in here where I miss, but I still feel good about who I am and how much I’ve shown up here. And you’ve proven a lot to yourself. And so I think sometimes scaling it down and making it easy gives yourself a better opportunity to feel progress.

Habit Tracking and Streaks

STEVEN BARTLETT: Two words you said in the last couple of minutes. One of them was your parents use a habit tracker and the other one was use the word streak.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you understand the context of this jar that’s in front of me with paperclips? Could you explain to me habit tracking and streaks and why they matter?

The Paper Clip Strategy: A Simple System for Massive Results

JAMES CLEAR: So when I was working on Atomic Habits, I came across this guy named Trent Durshmid. He had an interesting story. He’s an entrepreneur now, but early in his career he had this job where he was a stockbroker in Abbotsford, Canada. And Abbotsford in the 90s was like pretty small town. It wasn’t, you know, some big city.

He was supposed to just drive more business. But like, you know, they didn’t have a lot of advantages. It wasn’t like he was in New York or whatever. He had this one simple habit that he used to end up becoming the top performer in the firm and building the biggest book of business there over the next couple years. And it was this simple strategy of paper clips.

So all he did—a lot of his stockbroker friends who were also working in this job, they would read analyst reports, they would look at the news, they would try to analyze companies’ financial statements. They were doing all this other stuff. And he said, “I’m not going to do that. All I’m going to do is I’m going to make a sales call.”

And whenever I make a call, whenever I make a call, I’m going to take one paper clip and I’m going to move it over. And then I’m going to make another sales call, I’m going to take another paper clip and move it over. And he had 100 paper clips in the jar, and his goal every day was to move 100 from one jar to the next. And that was all he did. And with that one simple habit, he ended up building this huge book of business.

Two things about this. One, obviously, he has a visual marker of the progress that he’s making, right? So moving paper clips to the other jar is a way to see that he’s progressing throughout the day. It also makes it a little bit into like a little game, you know, it’s like, okay, how quickly can I move the paper clips over? How much progress am I making? Do I have 50 over by the time lunch rolls around? You can start to see how you have a little bit of these progressive markers throughout the day.

But the other thing that I think is interesting about it is he boiled it down to just what was the one thing that really moved the needle, you know, and he just focused on that. And there are so many things in life that it’s really easy to get focused on the optimization. It’s so focused on finding the perfect sales strategy, the best business plan, the ideal diet to follow. You’re so focused on optimizing.

Sometimes people will come to me and they’ll say they want to build an audience, and they ask about all the tactics and the strategies. And I say, “Just write an article every week for the next two years and then get back to me.” Like, let’s not skip that part. Can we start there? Let’s start there. Or like, let’s not miss a workout for two years. And then we can talk about whether the program’s working or not, you know? And it’s like that. So I think this helps you focus on what is the big thing that’s really moving the needle.

Understanding the Habit Cycle

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking about it through the frame of the habit cycle as well. Because as I look at this habit cycle, I’m seeing reward being hit. I’m seeing a desire for an outcome as well.

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, yeah. This is interesting. So we haven’t talked about this yet, so let me just break it down real quick. So if you’re building a habit, there are roughly four different stages that every habit goes through. So I call them in the book, in Atomic Habits, I call them cue, craving, response, and reward.

So the cue is just something that you notice. So let’s say, for example, you see the plate of cookies on the counter in the kitchen. That’s a visual cue. The craving is the prediction that your brain makes about what that cue means. So you see the plate of cookies, your brain predicts, “Oh, that’ll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable.” So that favorable prediction motivates you to take the response. That’s the third step. You walk over, pick it up, and take a bite. And then finally, the fourth step is the reward. Oh, it is, in fact, sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. So cue, craving, response, reward.

These steps are basically what every habitual behavior is going through. Even really automatic stuff. Like, let’s say you walk into a room and the lights are off. So cue, it’s dark. Craving, I want to be able to see. Response, I flip on the light switch. Reward, the lights come on, now it’s visible out there. So even really fast stuff like turning on a light switch is going through those four steps. So pretty much every habit follows that cycle.

And you can see that, you know, this paper clip strategy does kind of play into this a little bit. Cue, you have the paper clips on the desk, right? So, like, not only do you want to make the sales calls for a business standpoint, but you also have these staring at you every morning when you come into your desk. And so it’s a little bit of a visual reminder, reminds you, prompts you to think, “Okay, all right, I do want to make these calls and try to drive more business or build up the—make another successful sales call.”

That craving gets you to pick up the phone. It’s the actual response. And then the reward is, I get to move the paper clip over. And now I feel like, yeah, you get the little ting jingle in your ear of the paper clip hitting. And, you know, it just adds to the reward effect.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change

What I think is most interesting is, how do we take this? How do we take these four steps that basically all behaviors go through and then translate it into something that we can use and apply in daily life and work? So I call this the four laws of behavior change. So there’s one for each step. Yeah, you got them right here.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll give them to you.

JAMES CLEAR: So I call these the four laws of behavior change. Right. So for the cue, the first law is you want to make it obvious. All right? You want the cues. You want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. Easier it is to see or get your attention, the more likely you are to act on it. So a lot of that’s about environment. It’s about making things obvious. But it’s the cue gets your attention, something you notice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So let’s put this in the context of me wanting to make sure I have my supplement routine every day.

JAMES CLEAR: Sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because that’s something I think about. Yeah, I want to have my creatine every day.

JAMES CLEAR: So it’s like, where’s the creatine? In the kitchen? You know, is it tucked up in a high shelf and it’s behind, like, a cabinet door and you don’t really see it, or is it, like, out on the counter? It’s one of the first things that you see. So there, you know, there’s varying degrees of what you want to do here and, like, what you want to place out. But you’re just trying to make the good habit obvious. You want to make it easy to notice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Reminds me of when I started DJing, and the DJing equipment was upstairs in the spare room out the way, and I had a conversation with my girlfriend who’s through there, and I was like, “I really want to learn DJing, so can I put it on the kitchen counter for the next year?” Because then I’ll be walking past one day and go, “Oh, DJ.” You know, and then I put it on the kitchen counter, and I started DJing.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change

JAMES CLEAR: I have a reader who would go to his guitar lessons, and he would practice with his teacher, and then he’d give him some homework to practice certain scales or whatever. And then he would come back and he would take his guitar, put it in the case at the end of each session, and put it in the closet.

Well, he’d forget it was there for a week, and then the next week would roll around. He’d pick it out and go to practice, and he’d be like, “You weren’t… you know, you didn’t do this throughout the week.”

So he bought a guitar stand and put it in the center of the living room. Now he passes it 30 times a day. Much more likely to pick it up and play for five minutes. So it’s just making your habits obvious.

The second law is about the craving and it’s all about making it attractive. And this is where I mentioned earlier, like that question of “What would this look like if it was fun?” You want your habits to be fun, compelling, attractive, interesting to you, and the more engaging or exciting it is, the more likely you’ll stick with it.

So I had one woman who wanted to stop going out to eat for lunch at work every day and start bringing her lunch in because she felt like it would be healthier. But the idea of making a salad for lunch wasn’t that exciting to her. So she came up with this phrase of “a party in a bowl.”

And so in the beginning, she would do all kinds of stuff. She would take potato chips and crumble them up and put them in there. Or she would chop up Snickers bars and put them in with the salad or whatever. She was just trying to find a way to make it fun.

And then once she was already bringing lunch in every day after she did this for a month or so, then she was like, “All right, I’m in the habit of bringing lunch in. How can I start to make lunch healthier?” So find a way to make your habit attractive.

Making Habits Easy and Convenient

The third law is to make it easy. This is all about making it simple, frictionless, easy to do. The more convenient or frictionless your habits are, the more likely they are to occur. We’ve talked about this a lot already, but it’s scaling your habits down, it’s using the two minute rule to make it as easy as you can. But the easier a habit is to perform, the more likely it is to happen.

Daniel Kahneman, the famous psychologist, I think he once said that if you were to boil behavior down to a single principle, a single thing that drives human behavior, it’s convenience, it’s ease. What is the easy thing to do?

We are biological organisms and we expend energy to live. And it is in your best interest to try to conserve energy whenever you can. And so your brain is wired for it, you’re always looking for it.

In fact, many of the largest businesses in the world basically just take a human desire that we already want to do and try to make it even more convenient. Like DoorDash is just like, “You need food, just tap a couple times with your thumb and we’ll give it to you.”

I mean, in fact, the whole arc of human history and how we get food has just been one long path of making it more and more convenient. It used to be that we were hunter gatherers and had to kill our food or forage for berries in the bush.

And then we started growing it so it was right next to our house and we didn’t have to move. We could just harvest the corn or the beans or whatever and eat it. And then we started just shipping it to grocery stores. Now you don’t even have to grow it yourself. You’ll just come over here and you can buy it and take it home.

And then we said, “Forget it. You don’t even need to drive to the grocery store anymore. We’ll just deliver it through Instacart or grocery delivery or whatever.” And now we say you don’t even have to cook it in your own house anymore. You can just order it on DoorDash. You just tap with your thumb and we’ll bring it ready made to you right here and you can just eat it.

It’s all just one continual long arc of making it easier and easier. And the more that you can make your habits more convenient, the more likely it is that you’re going to stick to it and follow through.

The Power of Satisfaction

And then the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying your habits are, the more likely you are to stick to them in the future and return to them again.

The first three laws—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—are all about making your habit more likely to occur this time. Make it satisfying is about increasing the odds that you do it next time. Because by the time you get to this step, the habit’s already occurred, right? It’s already over now.

But was it rewarding or not? Was it beneficial or not? Did it serve you in some way? If it serves you, if you feel like it benefits you somehow, that marks the experience in your brain and says, “Hey, this was useful. Let’s come back to this next time. Next time you’re in a similar situation, let’s repeat this again.”

And so make it satisfying. The reward kind of closes the feedback loop of learning. It increases the odds that you’re going to follow through on it.

I use that word “learning” intentionally. We’re talking about building habits, but in a way, what we’re really talking about is the process of learning. It’s the process of how your brain and body learn what to do as you go through life.

You go throughout life and you experience different things and you come across different strategies and you try them out. You know that at some point there’s the first time that you take a bite of a pancake and then you’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of tasty. Maybe I should take another bite.”

And other times you try things and you’re like, “I don’t really like that that much. Or it didn’t really do anything. It was kind of neutral.” And your brain’s like, “Well, maybe try something different next time.”

So the behaviors that are rewarded, the behaviors that are satisfying, the behaviors that are enjoyable are likely to stick.

Social Accountability and Group Dynamics

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I guess there’s lots of different ways one can make it rewarding. I was thinking about our fitness group, which we have on WhatsApp, where it’s called Fitness Blockchain. And every month one person is evicted.

Every day that you go to the gym, you take a screenshot of your workout and drop it in there. And then someone who’s a freelance data science person just kind of compiles it all into a document and sends screenshots every day with our combined workouts.

The whole game is consistency. So it doesn’t matter how hard you worked, it’s just that did you go. And that has kind of made… I don’t know where that appears on this cycle, but I think of it as accountability. It also makes it fun. But where is that sort of social pact element on this cycle? Is that the part of the reward of it?

JAMES CLEAR: I think it influences all of the behaviors. So the fact that you see other people working out is a cue, right? You might get a text of somebody else’s screenshot and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I need to get my workout in today. I don’t want to forget.” So that’s a cue that triggers the behavior.

There’s something attractive about being part of it as a group. You know that once you post your screenshot that other people are going to see it and you might get kind of rewarded for it or like you did your thing. So that’s kind of exciting and feels motivating. That motivates you to show up and do it.

Sometimes you may work out with somebody, right? And so there’s something there that’s improving the response. It’s more fun to do it together, but it also gets you moving. And then finally there’s the reward of sticking to the streak or being part of it or not getting…

STEVEN BARTLETT: We actually… there’s actually a big metal belt, a physical belt that’s handed out every year. But every week there’s… every month there’s a winner that gets the display picture as their face.

JAMES CLEAR: And that’s perfect. I want the belt. That sounds cool.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I want another. It’s got my name engraved in it. It’s like a wrestling belt.

JAMES CLEAR: That’s awesome.

Breaking Bad Habits: The Inversion Strategy

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does this work if you’re trying to break a habit?

JAMES CLEAR: So for each of these, there are many ways to do each of these things. There are many ways to make habits obvious. There are many ways to make them attractive, and so on. And what I’m giving you is just kind of the overview of how to build a good habit or how to install a new behavior.

If you want to break a bad habit, then you just invert these four. So rather than making it obvious, make it invisible. Unsubscribe from emails. Don’t keep junk food in the house. Reduce exposure to the cue.

Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. That’s the hardest one. We can talk about that in a second.

Rather than making it easy, make it difficult. So increase friction. Add steps between you and the behavior.

I find… here’s two examples for me. I’ve tried this new thing where I keep my phone in another room until lunch each day. So usually it’s like 9 to 11 or so in the morning. My phone is down the hall, it’s in a different room, and I’m in my office. And it’s just a chance for me to work on my own priorities rather than whatever’s coming in through the phone.

I’m like everybody else. If my phone is right next to me, I will check it every three minutes just because it’s there. But if it’s down the hall, it’s only 30 seconds away. But I never go get it. And I always think that’s interesting.

It’s like, did I want it or not? In the one sense, I wanted it badly enough that I would check it every three minutes when it was right by me. But I never wanted it so bad that I’d walk 30 seconds to go get it. And I found that a lot of habits are like that. If you just introduce a little bit of friction, they kind of curtail themselves to the desired degree.

So beer is another one. I don’t think this would work if you actually have an addiction or something. But I’ve noticed that if I get a six pack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge, and I open it up, and it’s right there and I can see it, I’ll have one at dinner just because it’s there.

But if I put it on the lowest shelf in the fridge, all the way in the back, I kind of got to bend down to even see it. Sometimes I’ll forget I’ll have it. It’ll be there for two weeks. I won’t even remember that it’s in there.

And so I think that’s all about the inversion of the first law—make it invisible—and inversion of the third law—make it difficult. The less likely you are to see it, the harder it is to do. The more steps that are involved, the less likely it is to occur.

And then the final piece is the inversion of the last law, which is, rather than make it satisfying, make it unsatisfying. So layer on some kind of cost or a consequence.

And in Atomic Habits, I call this the cardinal rule of behavior change. It’s so pervasive of a teacher, which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated, and behaviors that get immediately punished get avoided.

And so obvious. But you have to ask yourself, do you have a good feeling when you do the thing that you want to do, the habit that you want to build? Are you getting immediately rewarded for that? And if you have a habit you’re trying to avoid, what is the cost? What is the consequence? Is there something that feels like a punishment there? If so, then you’re more likely to avoid it. If not, it gets tricky.

The Challenge of Immediate Consequences

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s hard, isn’t it, with… there’s cookies on the counter out there. You might have noticed them as you walked in, that you’ve got them on a little plate. Loads of…

JAMES CLEAR: No, but I’m going to grab them all the way out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I was just thinking about that. If I have the cookie now, I’m not going to get an immediate punishment. The only sort of immediate punishment is a bit of guilt that I might start to feel that I’m now one step further away from the goals that I’ve shown myself in terms of fitness. Is there any way to bring forward the punishment in areas… not the punishment, but the lack…

JAMES CLEAR: The downside.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The downside, yeah.

The Cost of Good and Bad Habits

JAMES CLEAR: The cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And so for a lot of your quote unquote bad habits, it feels good in the moment. You know, like eating a donut feels great. Now playing the video game feels great. Now doing it, you know, whatever. Like, it’s only later that you realize, oh, there was a cost associated with this.

Even something like the classic bad habit of smoking. Maybe you get to stand with friends outside and socialize. Or maybe you reduce stress in the moment after a long day of work. It’s only, you know, five or 10 or 20 years later that you have this consequence.

A lot of the game of building better habits is finding ways to pull the rewards of your good habits into the present moment so you feel good now, you don’t have to wait three years for it to happen, and pulling the consequences of your bad habits into the present moment so that you feel a little bit of the pain right now, and you realize this isn’t actually serving me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which I guess is why they put the photos of people’s lungs on the cigarette packets.

JAMES CLEAR: That’s, yeah, like one of the things that it’s trying to do. Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about this habit scorecard over there? Is that what your parents use for swimming?

The Habit Scorecard

JAMES CLEAR: So the habit scorecard, this is just a simple, like, assessment. The insight behind this practice is that intentional behavior change starts with self awareness. Right? So you will change your habits all the time, whether you think about them or not. You’re building habits whether you focus on it or whatever. Like your brain and body is built for it.

Now the more interesting question is, can you design your behavior? Can you shape your habits in the way that you want? And that’s where self awareness comes in. It’s very hard to shape your habits without being aware of them.

And so there have actually been some studies that have found that just the act of becoming more aware of a behavior will change it on its own. For example, there was one study that looked at people who journaled about their food journals for what they were eating. No tracking of anything. There’s no, they were not on a diet. They’re not trying to eat certain way. They don’t care about how many calories you have. There’s no tracking or anything.

All they did was simply write down what they ate each day and just the act of journaling about it changed what people ate and reduced the number of calories that they had and so on, just because they were aware of what was happening. And so this is true for most habits, which is, once you start to notice them, then you start to notice ways that you can improve them or ways that you could refine them or ways that maybe you want to do things differently. You’re not operating on autopilot in quite the same way.

So the habit scorecard is just a simple way to do this. It’s very simple. You just write down all the habits that you’re doing each day so you can start. Usually there’s a package of behaviors in the beginning and maybe around lunch, and then a power down routine at the end of the day. But, you know, it could be something like, wake up, drink a glass of water, take a shower, check my phone, get dressed, whatever. You just go through the list of what your normal day looks like.

And then once you have the behaviors written down, you give them a score. And the score is just if it’s a good habit or a habit that you like that’s contributing to your life, you put a plus sign. If it’s a habit that you feel like you want to get rid of, like, maybe say I wake up and then I scroll on my phone for 10 minutes before I get out of bed. You’re like, well, do I really want to be doing that? Maybe not. I’ll give out a minus sign. And then some stuff’s just neutral, you know, like, get dressed, you know, sure, whatever. Just put an equal sign.

And the idea is not to judge yourself for it. It’s more like sometimes I tell people, it’s almost like, imagine when you go to the zoo and you look at the lions. You’re like, oh, wow, how interesting that they would do that. You kind of do that with yourself. And you’re like, oh, how interesting that I spend my time that way. You’re not trying to judge yourself or analyze it. It’s just, let me see what I’m actually spending my time on.

And then once you have that list, I think that, and this is later in the book, but it becomes very useful for building habit stacks, for layering your new habits on top of the things that you’re already doing. And so some of it’s self awareness, some of it is priming for habit stacking.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Habit stacking?

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is habit stacking?

Habit Stacking

JAMES CLEAR: Hey, look at this. I like these props. This is great. All right, so first, let me just unpack the idea. Habit stacking is this concept that came from Stanford professor named BJ Fogg. And his insight, which I think is great, is that it’s easier to build a new habit if you layer it or stack it on top of an old habit, a habit you’re already doing.

He calls it the tiny habits recipe, I think. But the insight is just that we all have habits that we’re performing each day, and those can become anchors, they can become cues that prompt the new behaviors that we’re going to perform.

So let’s say that your current habit is you make a cup of coffee, right? So you’re already doing this. You’re going to start each day, you’re going to make a cup of coffee, and the new habit that you want to build is you want to start meditating. So then you could say, all right, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds. So this is just a basic habit stack, right? So you start with coffee, and then you meditate after.

Now, once you get good at this, you can start to chain them together. So, for example, you could say, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds, and then I write my to do list for the day. After I write my to do list for the day, I will prioritize them and start working on my first task or whatever. And now you have this little stack that you do the same way each morning, each time.

And just as a way to build simple momentum and get you in, I’ve got readers who have made all kinds of habit stacks. One of the funny ones that I remember is one guy, he was really into working out, and he was always drinking protein shakes, but his finances were kind of a mess. And so anytime that he would make a protein shake, he would check his finances and check his budget for the day. He would like, when I make a protein shake, I fill out my daily budget. That was his habit stack. But you can do it for anything, right?

And the idea is that you want to find a good place for this new habit to live. Sometimes, let’s say, let’s take the meditation example as a general rule, as a very broad stroke rule, it tends to be better to do habits earlier in the day rather than later, because the later it gets in the day, the less your day is under your control. Right? More things interrupt. There’s just, you know, you run lower on time, lower on energy, and so on.

So, yeah, I in general like the idea of maybe doing meditation in the morning. So you make your cup of coffee and then you meditate. But if you have three little toddlers that you’re chasing around, you’re trying to get pants on your kids, then maybe that’s not a good time to meditate. Right? It’s not a good space for that habit to live.

So I think once you’ve done that habit scorecard and you have all of your normal habits laid out there, you can start to think about the new habit that you want to build and look at that list and then say, okay, what’s the appropriate place to insert this new habit? Where should that new habit stack live? What’s a good trigger for that new behavior to occur?

And so you create these little stacks, and then it just, eventually, it doesn’t take that long, but eventually you get used to just doing it in the same order each time. I have one woman who, she’s like, every day I walk into my office, I hang up my purse, I hang up my jacket, I go fill up my water bottle, I sit down at the desk and I answer the first email. And that’s like, she just does that sequence every time she comes in.

Finding the Right Place for New Habits

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have one. I think that’s kind of related, which is, and this sounds very strange, people don’t think I’m weird, but whatever is, I wanted to learn how to meditate. But in my day, the way that my day was currently constructed, there was no great opportunity where I’m alone for 10 to 20 minutes and I’m uninterrupted and I’m in that position.

And so what I started doing is I started meditating in the shower. I’m there anyway, getting clean. It’s great. It’s private.

JAMES CLEAR: No longer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, long showers. My girlfriend’s like, what the f* is going on in there? Sat on the floor. But I started just meditating in the shower. And it was really, it was in the morning alone. I’m going to do it anyway. So that really helped for me. And then when that started to stick and I started to get a bit of progress and see the benefits, I can move out of the shower, per se.

JAMES CLEAR: That’s great. I had, you’re reminding me, I had a woman who came up to me after a talk one time and told me that she, when she brushes, she wanted to work on her balance. She’s getting older. She’s getting into her 60s. And she said, each day when I brush my teeth, I brush on one leg and I do 10 little kind of half squats on that leg, and then I switch to the other leg and I do 10 more on that. And she was like, my balance is better, my legs are stronger and my teeth are very clean.

Takes a while, but yeah, you can pair it up in all kinds of ways.

Managing Your Energy Budget

STEVEN BARTLETT: On that point of doing things in the morning and generally having less energy later in the day, do you think much about how to manage your own energy? I spoke to Dr. Lisa Feldman, who’s a neuroscientist who came up with this concept of the body budget, that we have this finite amount of energy.

And since then it’s really had a big impact on me because I start in so many ways that we’ve talked about, one of which is I try and I try to not try and take on too much because if in a world where my energy on a daily basis is finite, I don’t want to get to the end of my body budget. But also the order of things, like do I put my most important tasks today at the beginning of the day, etc. etc.

Energy Management and Control Over Your Time

JAMES CLEAR: I would layer. So yes, I do think about this a little bit. And I’ve heard this like, you want energy management, not time management, you know, construct.

The other thing that I would add to it that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody talk about is control. So the standard thing that everybody says is, oh, we all only have 24 hours in a day, which obviously is true. But if you were to break that into like 24 one hour chunks and just look at your day laid out that way, you have different levels of control over certain one hour chunks than others.

So for example, you know what I said a minute ago? Like if you have a bunch of kids and you’re getting them dressed from like 7 to 8am that hour isn’t that much under your control. It’s not a good time to meditate. It’s not a good time to work out. There’s other responsibilities that tend to happen in that hour.

And so I think that’s an interesting thing too is to map your day out and look at this and say, all right, which hours is my energy the best and which hours are most under my control? And then you can start to see like where you’re ultimately, what I think you’re getting to is what are the good hours for me? You know, like, where do those live throughout the day?

And then the next step is to ask what is getting my best hours and what’s getting my leftovers. And I have had a couple different times where I’ve looked at things and said, I say this is important to me, but really it’s only getting my leftover hours. And so then you’re like, okay, something might need to change.

So I think about all of that. I think about where’s, how much time do I have in general, where the pockets where I have the most energy or the best energy. And then also where are the pockets where I have the most control? And then you try to figure out how to slot stuff in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And theoretically you’d want to put the new hard habits you’re trying to form in areas where you have the highest degree of control versus like 11pm at night, right?

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, I think in general, that’s right. It’s so tricky when you have multiple things that really matter to you. It’s like, all right, you’re choosing between family, you’re choosing between work, you’re choosing between personal pursuits and these new habits you’re trying to build. Everything’s got to kind of work together. And so it’s a balance of shaping all of that.

Consistency vs. Intensity

STEVEN BARTLETT: So many of us are pursuing passive forms of income and to build side businesses in order to help us cover our bills. Did I ever tell you about the data breach that we had at my previous company?

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, I remember hearing about that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The first time we made our little fitness group on WhatsApp, it was about how many calories you could burn. And that was what awarded you the points and won you the competition. Didn’t last long, didn’t last long for a number of reasons. Kind of toxic, unfair, because I have, I weigh more than anyone in the group, so I burn more calories just by standing up.

And then it moved to this, this idea of consistency. How do you think about what is better? Is it better to be consistent or is it better to be something else?

JAMES CLEAR: I feel like there’s the story that people tell themselves a lot, which is they want to do the big impressive thing. You know, like you want to do, you want to run a marathon, you want to do a week long silent meditation retreat, you want to, you know, write the best selling book, whatever.

And I think about it as this balance between consistency and intensity. So intensity is a good story. I ran the marathon, I did the silent meditation retreat. Consistency actually makes progress. You know, I meditate for five minutes each day. I run three days a week or whatever.

And so people need consistency more than they need intensity. And in fact, what I would say is consistency enlarges ability. Consistency enlarges ability. It’s the act of showing up consistently that builds your capacity to do something that fosters the skill development and growth that you want. And so showing up, even if it’s just in a small way, is the way that you actually create the opportunity to do something more intense or more impressive down the line.

I also think that there’s this deep, important lesson that comes from appreciating consistency and what’s required there. Consistency is often adaptability, it’s flexibility. There’s this story about like mental toughness and being disabled, like being a disciplined person that we tell ourselves that something like, you know, I grind to make sure this happens. I will make it happen. No matter what the circumstances like that the mentally tough person pushes through regardless of what they face.

But I think that in real life, a lot of the time consistency is actually being flexible. It’s being adaptable. You know, if you don’t have enough energy, you do the easy version. If you don’t enough time, you do the short version. You find a way to not throw up a zero that day. You find a way to show up even if it’s not ideal. And that is actually being very mentally tough.

And so the adaptable person is the one that. What’s that line? “It’s when the storm came, the oak tree fought it and broke, but the willow bent and survived.” And so it’s like you need a way to manage the storms of life and bend with them while still showing up.

If you purely fight against it, you’d think that being tough, that being mentally tough is like, I’m going to make sure this happens. But it actually makes you somewhat brittle. You know, you need it to be a certain way. And when you need life to be a certain way to succeed, you become held hostage by the situation. You need it to be just like that.

But if in fact you can be adaptable and you can be flexible now, you are actually more resilient. And so I think there’s a balance to strike there. And it feeds into the consistency that will ultimately enlarge your ability.

Never “Cracking” Fitness

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think this is such an important point. I don’t often hear people talk about it. Reminds me of my friend, my friend, one of my best friends. He has a tendency to feel like he’s cracked fitness. And what tends to happen is he’ll work out and go to the gym for like three months and he’ll then announce that he’s finally cracked it. Like the consistency, the motivation, and the minute he does that is like 30 days before he falls off again because I think he gets complacent.

Life is going to happen. And I remember saying to him one year, I mean, I’ve known him for 15 years now. I was like, the thing I’ve come to learn about the gym and fitness is that you never crack it. And actually the mindset that every single day I could fall off and that life happens has helped me be consistent.

Whereas a version of me in 2017 set this ridiculous goal, which was I was going to go to the gym every single day without fail. And then five months in where life happened and I missed a day, my motivations was gone and I fell off.

JAMES CLEAR: You see this a lot with top performers in many different domains. Which is, it’s not that they don’t make mistakes or they don’t slip up. Everybody slips up, but they tend to get back on track quickly.

And so really what you need is not a perfect plan or like a system that never fails. What you need is a good plan for getting back on track. You need, if the reclaiming of a habit is fast, the breaking of it doesn’t matter that much. You get to the end of the year, and it’s just like a little blip on the radar.

But you need a good plan for getting back on track quickly. So I think that some of the balance, some of the strategy is actually knowing what to do when you fail. Yeah. And if you figure that out, then you’re in a good position to bounce back quickly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Funnily enough, when I fail, when I fall off my gym workout or whatever, what I do is I set the display picture on my iPhone to red. And I guess this is a point of self awareness. It just reminds me that we’ve currently fallen off. That means every time I look at my phone, it’s a reminder that this is code red.

JAMES CLEAR: Wow, that’s great. What a strong visual sign.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And I need to start doing the small steps, doing the s* workouts again.

The Secret to Winning is Learning How to Lose

JAMES CLEAR: You know, so I have this little theory that the secret to winning is actually learning how to lose. It’s that the secret to winning is knowing how to lose. And what I mean is that it’s knowing how to handle a loss. It’s knowing how to rebound and bounce back from that.

I think that I learned it through sports. I don’t think sports is the only way you can learn it. I think probably anything that you do with some level of public visibility could teach you, you know, musical performance or being in a fitness group with your friends, or there’s lots of ways you do it speaking publicly.

But one thing about sports is that you’re going to fail in front of the rest of the team. You know, like, the ball will come to you. You’ll start, make the strikeout to end the game. Or like, you know, you go into the gym and work out with the team and like, you miss a lift or you’re the weak one or whatever. Like, that doesn’t feel good.

But then you realize life moves on and you got to go on to the next set and you have to show up again the next time. And each little instance where there’s like a little failure, like, that is practice for you to bounce back again. And I think it’s important to have something in life that’s like that, that’s teaching you how to respond to failure, that you’re learning how to lose and how to bounce back from a loss so that you can ultimately win.

I got to the point at the end of my career, my senior year where I was basically like, listen, I don’t want to lose, but if we’re going to lose, I’d rather it be me. I’d rather be out there. Give it, put it on my shoulders. I can take the loss, you know, I can handle it. I’ll give you everything I have to try to get us to win. But if we lose, like, I’ll be able to bounce back from it.

And I think that that ended up serving me really well in my entrepreneurial career, because stuff is never going to go your way all the time. And you need to be able to be willing to try things and be willing to sometimes look foolish because of them and still find a way to show back up the next time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Reminds me of watching Roger Federer’s commencement speech. He’s arguably the best tennis player of all time. And shockingly, in his commencement speech, I don’t know if you saw it, he talks about how in his career he’s missed something like 47% of the points.

JAMES CLEAR: Points.

The Power of Moving On: Lessons from Roger Federer

STEVEN BARTLETT: He’s the best to ever do it. And in his career he’s only won 53% of the points, which means that half the time he’s taking Ls, but the difference is what he does when he takes the L and not allowing that L, that missed point to compound into his next shot.

And I was in LA with my friends for my birthday. My friend Ash, who’s had the most paddle training, we were playing paddle. That’s what we do basically all the time when we see each other, our group of friends. He’d had the most paddle training. He’s been in Spain with a coach, but when he lost a point, he would then start losing easy points.

And there’s this photo of me watching him play and I’m like, what the hell’s going on with him? Like, he’s the best. He’s meant to be the best player, got the most practice, most repetitions, but when he loses a point, this downward spiral takes place where he just starts missing easy shots.

So when he sat down, I told him about Roger Federer’s thing and I gave him this little idea in his head to handle the loss. And I said to him, when you lose the point, say in your head, “That point doesn’t matter. I’m going to win this game anyway because I am the better player.”

And I still get goosebumps when I say it because he went from being the fifth best in our group of five to beating all of us immediately. And it’s so funny because my girlfriend and everyone here knows, like, he was dancing through the house the same day. He beat all of us. I had never been beaten, but I have a paddle court in my garden. Like, he beat me immediately.

And all it was, was making sure that when he took an L, he didn’t spiral into his emotion, the emotional center of his brain, and start catastrophizing, which he’s susceptible to, if you know him. He went straight back into the prefrontal cortex, the rational center of his brain. And he’s posted about it online. And actually, part of my Asia tour recently was I showed all the videos and all the WhatsApp messages of this whole thing happening. But it just goes to show that actually, it’s how you take the L.

The Next Play Mentality

JAMES CLEAR: I love those mindset shifts. It’s just living life with a next play mentality. You know, it’s like, you don’t let the last play dictate you or ruin you. We have to move on and make the next best choice now. We have to live for the next play.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how much emotion just ruins our training? You know?

JAMES CLEAR: Yeah. I feel like a lot of this is—there’s a great book, Inner Game of Tennis, that came out many, many years ago, might even be 50 at this point. But it’s basically all about this. It’s about not getting in your head. And it’s specifically for tennis, but it applies to life. You know, it’s just about moving on and having this next play mentality.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So David Brailsford said that to me as well, that one of his main objectives when he had the cycling team was to get them not to think about the race while they were on the race. And he said, I think it was Chris Hoy or someone. He said, “My entire training with Chris Hoy was getting him to stop thinking about the current race he was in.”

And that when Chris hit his personal bests, he would get off the bike and have no recollection of cycling. He goes to the point that it was like he was asleep on the bike. Because the alternative meant that Chris would start thinking about his time and then cycling too hard and exhausting himself and fall out of his training. Fascinating.

You talk about daily mental mindsets as well. Is it important to adopt a particular daily mental mindset?

Daily Mindset Shifts and the Atomic Habits Calendar

JAMES CLEAR: Well, I had this thought one time. I had this thought that it would be cool to be able to hire a mental performance coach who just did one thing. So you hire this coach and then they call you up each morning, like 8am or something, and they give you like a five minute pep talk, you know, or just they give you like a five minute mindset shift.

Just something a little kind of like what you said to your friend, you know, and just you get this little mindset shift to reset your day and go into it with momentum and they hang up and you just go do your thing. And, you know, I couldn’t find anybody who could do that.

But I’ve been working on this little project where I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it. And so I came up with—it sounds almost kind of silly, but I’m really excited about it. I came up with this Atomic Habits daily calendar. And the idea is just—it’s actually like a blend of Atomic Habits principles and 3, 2, 1, which is my weekly newsletter.

And I just have like one little mindset shift that’s on each page. And it’s just one page for each day of the year. You just look at it, read that page, boom, go into your day and it’s just intended to be a little mindset shift. Anyway, it’s just a small thing, but I like the idea of priming yourself to start the day in the right way.

And I don’t know, I didn’t think that I would be excited about a calendar, but I’m kind of excited about it. I kind of feel like it could be good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So is it coming out?

JAMES CLEAR: Yes, it’ll be out and it’ll be out soon. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. And where would we find that? Do we sign up to the—

JAMES CLEAR: It’s on Amazon. You can go there or, you know, you can go to jamesclear.com and you’ll find it there. But yeah.

The Atomic Habits Workbook

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this book, the Atomic Habits Workbook, Simple Exercises for Building the Life You Want, is now out. It came out this week. What is the distinction between these two books? If I’ve read Atomic Habits already.

JAMES CLEAR: So Atomic Habits is the culmination of basically 10 years of work and effort for me. It’s like my objective was to write the best book that’s ever been written on habits. Now, I don’t know that I achieved that or not. That’s for the readers to decide. But I don’t think you’re ever going to just stumble into that result. You have to at least strive for it.

And so that was the hope, is that everything that you could possibly need to know about building good habits and breaking bad ones should be in Atomic Habits. So then you’re like, okay, why would I need a workbook?

But what I’ve learned over the last seven years of this being out and selling 25 million copies is that people always need more tangible, practical help with implementing their habits. So Atomic Habits is the full guide and the philosophy and the approach on how to do it. Then you finish this book and you sit there and you say, “All right, great, I have some habits I want to build. How do I do that?”

And the exercises in the workbook are intended to help you do that. They help you look at your environment and figure out how do I optimize it. They help you look at your goals and how do I translate it into a system. They help you look at your desired identity and how are my habits reinforcing it. So it’s just a series of exercises that help you apply and implement the ideas from Atomic Habits.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The great thing about the way that you write is it’s so unbelievably accessible, so unbelievably accessible in the context, which means that you don’t need to be a scientist or an expert to understand the concepts. And I think that’s why the book, Atomic Habits, has been so unbelievably successful.

But this book, the workbook, follows in the same vein. It allows people at all levels of their knowledge of habits and intellectual to get going and to start sort of holding themselves accountable. I’d say accountability is a huge part of this. I kind of see elements of that fitness group I described, Fitness Blockchain.

Just because you’re reflecting and you’re writing down what happened. And like you said earlier about how just journaling increases the likelihood of a behavior, this book will raise your self awareness.

JAMES CLEAR: Yes, that’s a good—that’s actually a great summary of it. I think it makes you more aware of your habits and your environment and what you’re trying to do specifically, rather than just understanding the concepts.

A Thank You and Closing Thoughts

STEVEN BARTLETT: James, thank you. Thank you for changing so many people’s lives. You must hear this all the time, but what a remarkable, remarkable impact you must have had on so many people. You’ll never get to see them getting them to quit habits that would have otherwise been fatal for them.

You know, my dad is a prime example of someone who was smoking for 20 odd years of his life. He starts reading about these habit cycles in your work, but in other people’s work as well. And he’s quit smoking and that’s probably extended his life to some degree. And that’s one such example of, I’d say 25 million because I know Atomic Habits has sold 25 million.

But you’ve reached many, many, many, many, many millions of people through your newsletter as well. 3, 2, 1, which is the—I mean the newsletter has kind of created a blueprint for anyone that writes a newsletter. Frankly, I think everybody looks up to your work and what you’ve built as the framework for starting their own newsletters.

And you know, you’ll never get to see the downstream impact of the work you’ve done. But on behalf of everybody who’s had their life changed because of the hard work you’ve put in and your obsession and your focus and your passion and these incredible works of art that you’ve written that you didn’t rush, thank you, and thank you on behalf of myself, because your work has been super formative in how I think about business, how I think about my team, and many of the phrases that we use in our office every single day to build the companies we’ve built have come from your work as well.

Everybody needs to go—I mean, if you don’t have Atomic Habits, then I don’t know what you’ve been doing with your life. But now that the Atomic Habits workbook is here, you now have a much more self awareness inducing, practical hands on framework for implementing some of the stuff you’ve read in Atomic Habits.

And I’m going to link both of them below so everybody can go grab them. But also James’s newsletter is phenomenal, so I’ll link that below as well.

We do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. A question that has been left for you. “Dear next person in the chair, what do you believe is the best way to unify people of differing or even conflicting beliefs? Let me know your thoughts best, Kamala Harris.”

Scaling Down to Solve Big Problems

JAMES CLEAR: I think the best way is to scale it down. You know, if you say, “How can we have a more unified nation?” It’s big, it’s vague, it’s almost impossible. It’s like an intractable level. But if you scale it down now, you can come up with things. How can you have a more unified neighborhood? You could start a book club or do a block party, or you can come up with all kinds of things that you could do.

And what you find is that in many cases in life, problems are intractable at a certain level. At a certain scale. And if you shift what level you’re at, suddenly it reveals itself and there’s a new solution.

And so I think that is obviously true with big picture things like the question I was asked, but it’s also true for your habits. You know, if you think about your life in general and you say, “How can I have a better life? Or how can I figure out my purpose? How can I figure out, you know, how to have a life of meaning?” These are big, hard questions. Sometimes they’re almost intractable. They’re too vague, they’re too broad.

But if you can scale it down and say, “How can I live a good day today? Or how can I have a good week? How can I have, you know, a good next hour? How can I make this minute as perfect as possible?” Well, those levels are much more achievable. And so I think if you scale your habits down to a level that’s more solvable, you’ll often see that there’s a path forward there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s interesting with your neighborhood analogy as well is that neighborhoods are interconnected. So if I focus on making my neighborhood good, then that kind of just crosses over with the next neighborhood, like thinking about my street where I live. And so if that neighborhood becomes good, it’s going to then hit the next domino, which is the neighborhood next door.

The Philosophy Behind Atomic Habits

And then eventually, which is also true for your personal life, you know, each unit of time, each little habit is connected. You know, you put your habits together and you kind of end up with this system of behaviors that influence your day and your week. So mastering this hour makes the next hour a little bit better as well.

I ultimately chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons. There’s three meanings to the word atomic. The first is tiny or small like an atom, which obviously, I think your habits should be small and easy to do.

The second meaning is the one we’re talking about now, and the one people often forget, which is an atom is a fundamental unit in a larger system. So atoms build into molecules, molecules built into compounds, and so on. And your habits are kind of like the little units of your day. You know, collectively, you put them together and you have your daily routine.

And then the third meaning is the source of immense energy or power. And so if you put all three of these together, you kind of understand the narrative arc of the book, which is you make changes that are small and easy to do. You layer them together like units in a larger system, and collectively you get this powerful, remarkable result as a process, and so or as a consequence. And that is the idea behind Atomic Habits. You make these small changes, and it’s not just one, it’s like 100 or a thousand of them. And collectively they come together to create this powerful, impressive life.

Happiness vs. Meaning

STEVEN BARTLETT: Powerful, impressive life. Do you think that we should all be aiming at—this is a bit of an interesting word—but happiness? Is that the North Star that our habits should ladder up towards, or fulfillment, whatever one might say, or meaning?

JAMES CLEAR: First of all, I think we should distinguish between happiness and meaning, you know, or happiness and purpose or something. Fulfillment. I don’t think they’re necessarily the same, you know, like, there are many moments in my life when I am happy, and that can be in the moment.

And a lot of the most meaningful things that I worked on, you know, Atomic Habits is one of the most meaningful projects that I’ve worked on. It seems to have made a big difference for a lot of people or helped a lot of people. I feel great about that. But I wasn’t necessarily happy every minute that I was working on it. You know, like, it was quite difficult in lots of different times, and it took a long time and it was arduous and so on, but it provides a lot of meaning.

So I definitely think it was worth it, even if I wasn’t always happy in the moment. So I don’t know that you should necessarily optimize for any of that all the time. You know, I don’t think your habits will lead you to someplace where you are just permanently happy, but they will definitely take you on a journey where happiness is part of it and where meaning can be part of it. And there are lots of other things that are parts of life, too, but, yeah, I think that you will be well served to invest in them, for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: James, thank you so much.

JAMES CLEAR: Thank you. And thank you so much for saying those kind things. That’s very nice of you. I have been incredibly lucky and blown away by the reception to the book, and it just feels—it feels great to know that people are finding it useful. You know, all I wanted to do was try to be useful and helpful, and I appreciate you saying that. And I’m grateful that many other people have found it helpful as well.

The Ripple Effect of Impact

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I don’t think you’ll ever realize. You know, you see, 25 million people have bought the book, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s billions of people have been impacted by that because everybody is like a pebble thrown into the ocean. Right. There’s these ripple effects that go on, and it changes their professional life, their personal life, their health, their friendships, relationship. So it’s unbelievable. Thank you, James.

JAMES CLEAR: Thank you. Thank you.

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