James Clear - Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Full transcript: James Clear on London Real

0:00 James Clear: We live in a very outcome-focused society. Even if you are talented, you can’t succeed without having great habits.

We think the thing that needs to change is the bank account or the test score or the number on the scale, but actually the thing that needs to change are the habits that precede those outcomes. They are the portion of your life that you can influence. You can be the architect of your habits rather than the victim of them.

The things that are on your desk at home, your office at work, they influence your behaviours. If you can restructure your physical environment, then you’re more likely to actually stick with the right habit.

But the question to ask is: what are those one or two things that tend to pull the rest of my life in line? You can just build that one habit, and you know that there are going to be a lot of good side effects because of it.

Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. Once you’ve changed that internal story, you’re just like, this is who I am now.

Brian Rose: The world is changing. Inspiration is everywhere. It has never been so easy to connect, share and bring people together. We’re learning from others and finding the best in ourselves. Challenging our beliefs, sharing our vulnerability, our fears. Transforming ourselves so we can transform the world. How far can we go? This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is…

2:05 Did you realise that the results in your life are a measure of your habits? What you do every single day to be successful determines who you are, and if I look at your habits right now, I can tell the person that you want to become. It’s a hard thing to really think about, but what are you doing every single day for your health, your lifestyle, your diet, your business? Those little 1% changes can have a massive effect over time, and that’s what our guest is here to talk about today: Mr James Clear, Atomic Habits. He really structures it all out to get you what you want, and he also says that we don’t rise to our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. What systems do we have in place to get our lives to the next level? I love this book, Atomic Habits. There’s all sorts of vital information in there about how you can put routines in place that make you feel good, that make them repeatable, and they can really change the course of your life. So I know you’re going to enjoy my time with James. He’s got a whole structured layout of how you can change your life, starting today.

3:09 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is James Clear, the writer, entrepreneur, speaker and New York Times bestselling author. You’ve spent years educating millions of readers on the importance of habits, decision making and continuous improvement. You’re a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies, and your work is used in the NFL, NBA and MLB. Your new book, Atomic Habits, details your system of building good habits and breaking bad ones, showing how small changes can have a transformative effect in every aspect of your life. James, welcome to London Real.

James Clear: Thank you. Good to talk to you.

Brian Rose: It’s great to have you here. First, we’d love to get your impressions of this city we call London. What do you think about this place?

James Clear: I love London. I could definitely live here. I see all kinds of opportunities. There are fascinating people; it doesn’t really matter what industry you’re interested in, finance, fashion, publishing, whatever it is, you can find somebody cool to hang out with. Great food, which I am all about. I basically ate my way around the city for the last few days. I love visiting.

Brian Rose: And you said you’d recently been to New York and Los Angeles and Tokyo, but you wouldn’t necessarily live in those cities.

James Clear: I love all those cities and I love visiting them, but I feel like I could carve out a life in London and call it home. I don’t know what it is, there’s something a little less stressful about walking around London to me. All the neighbourhoods are different; you can find one that’s the right fit for you. It just feels more cosy to me.

Brian Rose: It really is this grouping of neighbourhoods, maybe 30 or 40 of them. You could say Manhattan has Chelsea and the West Village and every side, but to a normal civilian, when they go there, it kind of looks the same. Here you have vibes and restaurants and attitudes.

James Clear: I find London’s fairly spread out. It’s a fairly large city, whereas New York is naturally contained, Manhattan in particular, because it has to be on the island. LA is pretty spread out, and Tokyo is massive. But for someone who was born in America, I feel like London would be an interesting fit for me. I feel like I could call it home and it would still be fascinating in all kinds of other ways.

Brian Rose: Good to hear. I think you could. I came here 17 years ago and just haven’t left since. Some people describe it as LA, New York and DC rolled up in one, because in one city you’ve got government, finance, media and advertising in one place, so it doesn’t have a vibe that overarches the others too much. It’s kind of weird in that sense, and kind of cool.

James Clear: For me as an American, pretty much everywhere in Europe is interesting to travel to, and you couldn’t have a much better jumping-off point than London. You can get non-stop to anywhere, so that part would make it exciting too. You could see the rest of this interesting part of the world very easily.

Brian Rose: You can be in some very different places in about two hours.

James Clear: Right, really different places, different realities.

6:00 Brian Rose: Cool. Well, welcome. I’m really excited to talk about these habits with you, because I’ve had over 500 people sitting in that chair, and after the first two or three hundred I started asking myself: what makes this person get in this chair, as opposed to the person I just walked by on the pavement, or the person that drove my bus, or the person that served me coffee? What makes them different? I came to the conclusion that there are no high performance people, just high performance habits. But when I tell people that, when I tell my students in our Academy, a lot of the time it just goes over their heads. They’re like, “Oh yeah, sure.” Somehow, deep down inside, we always equate it with talent: that person’s a billionaire, they were always going to be that way; that person is a great actor, a great athlete. But from what I’ve seen, it usually comes down to great habits. If you really dissect their behaviour, it turns out that they’re doing some pretty granular things. I haven’t met too many people that wake up at 5am and then watch Netflix. I know Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL, and he’s getting up at 4am and posting pictures of his watch, but a lot of the time those people are being effective. So I really do think habits are important, and I hope everybody listening really plugs into what we’re going to say, because it’s not just about being high performance or getting what you want. I think it’s about having a great life. Correct me if I’m wrong.

James Clear: I agree with that point, but I think it’s even deeper than that. It’s not that luck and randomness and uncertainty don’t play a role in life. They do. Luck is a part of all of our lives to a certain degree, both good fortune and bad. But by definition you don’t have control over luck, and your habits also matter. I think the reason they’re so worthwhile to focus on and understand is that they are the portion of your life that you can influence that also determines your outcomes. It’s not just luck and it’s not just habits, but one of those you have control over, so the only reasonable strategy is to focus on what you can control. If you spend all of your time focusing on things you can’t control, you’re just going to end up frustrated. So I think habits are maybe the best lever for that.

Something that I say deeper in the book, which I also think is true, is that talent and genes play a role. I have a chapter, I think it’s chapter 18 or 19, on the role of genes and habits and how they interplay. People have natural predispositions to things that make them better, but what you find is that nearly always, when someone is a great performer in a particular domain, they are both well suited, so naturally talented or with some kind of predisposition to that area, and well trained. So even if you are talented, you can’t succeed without having great habits to execute and to fully realise the potential that you have. No matter where we’re talking, I think habits play a crucial role.

Brian Rose: We’ve all heard the story of the coach who’s just shaking his head because that one kid had so much talent but never showed up to practice.

James Clear: I played baseball all the way through college, and I think sometimes I would rather be an athlete who’s at the 90th percentile of physical talent but the 95th of execution and habits than the other way around. If you don’t have the habits and the practice routines and rituals to actually realise your potential, a lot of the time it’s just not enough. It’s enough at lower levels, but once you get to the top of any field, everybody’s talented, and the thing that separates you is often not the physical gifts but your ability to practise, get out of your own way, your mental approach, all that type of stuff.

Anyway, those are some more nuanced points, but the central thing you were getting at is true: your outcomes in life are often a lagging measure of your habits. A lot of the time people say, “I want to have more money,” or “I want to lose weight,” or they want some kind of result. But the truth is your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning and reading habits. We think the thing that needs to change is the bank account or the test score or the number on the scale, but actually the thing that needs to change are the habits that precede those outcomes.

Brian Rose: Right. And even more so, your identity and sense of self is a lot of the time all rolled up into your habits, which is even crazier, kind of messing with your brain: these little things you do that you might ignore all the time could change who you actually are.

James Clear: I had this question while I was researching the book. I think identity plays a crucial role, but my question was: how do we come to believe things about ourselves? When you come into the world as a baby, you don’t have any preset beliefs or notions. That’s not to say your genes don’t matter; they certainly matter in some sense. Your height might be more or less baked into your DNA. But we all realise that if you grew up in a different culture, a different religion, a different community or household, you could adopt completely different beliefs. So how does that happen? How does this internal story that we tell ourselves, our identity, become shaped and formed? I realised that it’s mostly through the repetition of that story.

What you come to realise is that your habits reinforce a particular identity. Sometimes this can be positive and sometimes it can be negative. The story could be things like “I’m bad at maths,” or “I’m terrible at remembering people’s names,” or “I’m not good at remembering directions.” That’s just an internal story that you tell yourself, but each time you have an experience that reinforces it, the story gets solidified. So the takeaway here is that every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person you want to become. If you can master the right actions, if you can master the right habits, then you can start to cast votes for this new identity, this desired person that you want to be.

I think that’s one of the reasons why small habits matter so much. They don’t necessarily transform your life overnight. Doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. Meditating for one minute might not give you an immediate sense of calm in your life, but it does cast a vote for being a meditator. This is why one of the things I say in the book is that the real goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book, the goal is to become a writer. Because once you’ve adopted that identity, you’re really not even pursuing behaviour change any more. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person you already see yourself to be. True behaviour change is really identity change, because once you’ve changed that internal story, it’s way easier to show up each day. You’re not even really motivating yourself that much to do it. You’re just like, this is who I am now.

Brian Rose: We’ll get into that, because the difference between goals and systems touches on this a little bit, which is important. A couple of years ago we were teaching in our Academy, teaching people how to start their own podcasts and how to start businesses from their profile, and someone said to me, “Brian, can you teach me stuff that’s non-business related?” So I looked at my life, and over the past four or five years I had picked up all of these habits from the guests who sat in that chair: habits on how to meditate, do affirmations, have a low media diet, movement practices, eating habits. I hadn’t even thought about it, but by being around them and watching them, I started practising them and picked up all these amazing habits. I also had some bad habits. About 10 or 15 years ago I had drug addictions and all this other stuff that I talked about last year in one of my movies. So it would be good to explore how these things get put in place, how you could maybe choose the good ones or the bad ones, and the psychology behind this stuff. There’s so much IP in this book; it’s an amazing book. I’d love to talk about some of the fundamentals and definitions, what’s a habit, and then I’d love to get into your sections on how to make a habit obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

James Clear: Sure.

Brian Rose: And then maybe we’ll have a chance to go into some of the advanced stuff, like you said, with DNA and things like that.

14:13 So, to start it all off: first of all, what is a habit, and why did you get obsessed with this?

James Clear: Two different questions, so let’s do the definition first. The technical definition of a habit is a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to be more or less automatic, so things that you can do pretty much without thinking about them: unplugging your toaster after each use, tying your shoes, brushing your teeth. Things where you pretty much go on autopilot when you do them.

Now, we often use the word habit to mean different things than that. You might say, “I want to get in the habit of working out,” or “I want to get in the habit of writing every day.” I know what you mean when you say that. You mean, I want to make it a regular practice, this daily ritual that I follow. But you’re never going to go on autopilot and forget what you wrote for an hour. It’s a more effortful, conscious thing. We can talk about some of that distinction, particularly with making habits easy. What you really want to do is make the beginning easy and automatic, and then the rest of the routine can follow naturally, even if you’re consciously thinking about it. So that’s what a habit is: this automatic response.

Now, why does the brain build them? What role do they play? As you go through life, you need energy to survive, and this is true not just for humans but for all organisms. Getting energy requires energy: you need to eat food to be able to walk around and find the next meal. Using energy is expensive, because the more energy you use, the less you have available for the other things that life throws at you. So your brain is looking for ways to conserve energy whenever possible, and habits are a great method for doing that.

For example, when our ancestors were roaming around the savannah, if there was a berry patch 100 metres from you, it made sense to go to that berry patch rather than one on the other side of the mountain. You would choose the path of least resistance, and eventually your brain learns: whenever I’m by this tree, that means the berry patch is 100 metres away. The tree becomes a signal that food is over there. Your brain is always picking up on these signals throughout life that indicate where things are, and the more you come across those signals, the more you automate your response. Pretty soon you’re taking a right when you get to that tree without even thinking about it. It makes that whole process of finding energy, solving the problems of life and getting through things easier. It requires less energy and attention and effort than it did before.

Brian Rose: So it’s like an algorithm the brain built for itself.

James Clear: I think that’s a good way to describe it. It’s an algorithm that you can rely on, a cognitive script, a mental shortcut that you can pull out whenever the situation is right. That’s true not just for things like finding food, which is essential for our survival, but also for daily tasks, because all these daily tasks take energy as well. Something like tying your shoes: your brain learns the context. When I have a shoe on my foot and the shoelace is untied, that means I do this little routine where I tie the lace into a knot. The first time you do it, it takes energy, but after you do it a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand times, pretty soon you’re doing it just like turning right at the tree. You can have a conversation with somebody else, listen to a podcast or think about your to-do list for the day. You free up that energy and attention to be used elsewhere. And, perhaps the biggest thing they do, you have less wasted energy. Rather than fumbling with the laces, you can do it more quickly and fluently, and that saves you energy and time for the next task. So that’s why your brain builds them.

As for why I got interested in them: similar to what I hinted at a moment ago, I started to realise that both luck and habits play a role in life, but you have control over your habits. The funny thing is we’re building them all the time, but a lot of people don’t feel like they have control over their habits. They feel like their habits are taking control of them, that they’re a victim of these bad routines. Once you start to dive in a little bit, uncover the layers and realise what a habit is and how it works, you start to develop a little more control over it. If we’re going to be building habits anyway, it makes more sense to understand how they work and how to structure them, so that you can be the architect of your habits rather than the victim of them.

18:33 Brian Rose: And you break them down into cue, craving, response and reward, which is not the traditional way. Maybe it’s good to jump into that. I think when most people think of habits, they probably think of their bad habits. Do most people not reward themselves for their good habits and stay critical of their bad habits? And some of these aren’t even habits.

James Clear: I chose that four-stage model, cue, craving, response, reward, and there’s a lot of science behind it. Three of those four stages are very common: cue, response and reward. That started in the really early 1900s, but in the 1930s it got popularised with B.F. Skinner, whose model was stimulus, response, reward. Then Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit brought it back to the forefront with cue, routine, reward, basically the same thing in different words. There are 100 years of behavioural psychology research behind the idea that if you show someone the right cue, they take an action and you follow it with a reward, you can train them to do that thing whenever the cue arises again, whenever the stimulus happens. If, whenever the light in the lab turns on, the monkey gets a squirt of juice, then it knows that whenever the light is on, it should go over and put its mouth underneath the nozzle to get some juice. You can do that for all kinds of things, and it works for human behaviour as well in many ways.

But then there was a second wave of research, with cognitive psychology over the last probably 50 to 75 years, that shows that not only do external cues and external rewards influence our habits, but internal moods, emotions, feelings, thoughts and beliefs influence our behaviours too. That’s why I added that fourth stage of craving, and I think it’s really important. I had a couple of basic questions when I was breaking habits down: why should they be organised in a particular way, and how do we understand them? One of the questions was: if it’s cue, response, reward, how come people have different responses to the same cue? There has to be something going on there.

So you have two people who walk into a room, and there’s a pack of cigarettes on the counter. One person sees it and feels this craving to smoke and pulls a cigarette out. The other person has never smoked a day in their life; they see that same visual cue, but they think, oh, it’s just a pack of cigarettes, and they move on. The key in that craving stage is that it’s really about the prediction, or the meaning that you assign to the cue, that determines whether you get a craving or not. So it comes back to those internal mood states, emotions and feelings.

Brian Rose: Interesting you bring that up, because there’s a book called Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. He’s now dead, but I read this 20 years ago or something and it actually worked. It was weird, because like you’re saying, the pack of cigarettes used to cue “OK, I’ve got to smoke,” and then after reading a book like that it cued “I’m not going to poison myself any more, and I understand the trick it’s playing on me.”

James Clear: You’re probably the fourth or fifth person who’s told me about that book now. I think this is actually quite hard to do for breaking bad habits, rewiring the story in your brain for what a cue means, but in the long run I think it’s a very robust way to break a bad habit: to teach yourself that the cue means something new. Say you walk downstairs and you see a loaf of bread on the counter each morning and you think, oh, I should make some toast for breakfast. Now that cue of the loaf of bread means make toast. But then you read a diet and nutrition book that convinces you that grain and carbs are the devil. Now you go downstairs and see that same loaf of bread, and it means something totally new. Similar to you with the cigarettes meaning “I’m poisoning myself”, now it means “I shouldn’t eat that, that’s bad for me.” It’s really the story you’re telling, the thing that’s happening in that second stage of craving, the prediction, that changes your response.

So to summarise, the reason I chose those four stages is that I was trying to create a model that accurately described both all of the robust research in behavioural psychology and the research from cognitive psychology on the influence of internal states. My hope is that those four stages accurately describe a habit and how both the internal world and the external world influence our behaviours.

22:53 Brian Rose: OK. Talk about goals and systems. Maybe this is the time to get into that, because setting goals has been a popular thing to talk about over the last few years. I’m actually a fan of them as well, but I’m also an engineer by training, so systems come naturally to me. For me, it’s always, OK, and I’m already thinking about the systems. But I think a lot of people aren’t, so can you define that?

James Clear: Before I criticise goals a little bit, I should say this is coming from someone who was very goal-oriented for a long time. I set goals for everything: the grades I wanted to get in school, the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, the revenue numbers I wanted to hit in my business. It was all goal-oriented. Then I turned around a couple of years later and realised I’d only achieved maybe 10 or 20% of these. So clearly setting the goal was not the thing that determined whether I moved forward or not, because the majority of the time I wasn’t achieving them. So then I had this question: well, what is it?

Before I describe the systems approach, I should say goals do serve a purpose. It’s not that they’re useless. They are good for setting a sense of direction and clarity, figuring out where to direct your attention, and they’re good for filtering. What I mean by that is that it’s very easy, as you go through life, for people to come to you with a different opportunity, or you find out about a new area you’re interested in, and you start to say yes to things because they’re new and exciting. If you have a goal, it’s much easier to say no to the things that intrude. If you’re training for the Olympics and your friends want to go to the bar, it’s very easy to say no, because your goal gives you a much cleaner filter to determine whether this moves you in the direction you want to go. So those are things goals do well.

But for some of the things that goals do poorly, systems are actually much better. The way I would describe it is that a goal is focused on the outcome, and a system is focused on the process: the series of habits or steps that you take to get to that ultimate goal. A couple of examples. If you are a basketball coach, your goal might be to win the championship, but your system is the way you recruit assistant coaches and players, the drills you do at practice each day, the process you have for reviewing game film and prepping for the next game. That’s your system. If you are a writer, your goal might be to write a bestselling book, but your system is the writing process you follow each day, getting your butt in the chair, your research and how you come up with new ideas to write about, the way you interview people you’re thinking about putting in your book, things like that.

The question I had was: what if you ignored the goal and focused only on the system? If you were the basketball coach and said, “We’re not going to talk about the championship at all this year. We’re only going to focus on the way we recruit, the way we practise, the way we train,” would you still get results? I think for the most part you probably would. This, I think, is the hard part, the thing that often gets overlooked: we live in a very outcome-focused society. Things are only news stories or shared on social media once they are a result. The results of success are very visible and easy to view. You’re never going to see a story that’s like, “Man eats chicken and salad for lunch today.” It’s only going to be a story a year later, when it’s “Man loses 100 pounds.” It’s only the outcome that is visible.

It’s also easy to process that thought: oh, I get it, something important happened, this event was accomplished. This is one of the things that’s challenging about building better habits: they’re very easy to dismiss on any given day. What is the difference between eating a burger and fries for lunch or eating a salad? Not a whole lot on any given day. Your body looks basically the same in the mirror; the scale hasn’t really changed. It’s really easy to dismiss it in your mind as insignificant. But you turn around two or five or ten years later and you realise those daily choices really did add up. It’s just much harder to see on a granular basis. So all I’m really calling for here is not to say that goals are useless or we should totally ignore them, but rather than making the goal the default, the thing you focus on almost exclusively, let’s make the system the default and only check in on the goal occasionally to see if we’re moving in the right direction.

Brian Rose: OK. And also just realise and admit that we all have a bias towards goals, that we see them everywhere we go, and that we need to maybe de-emphasise them a little bit and get back to looking at the system underneath.

James Clear: I think de-emphasise is a good word for that. Goals, outcomes and results are always in front of us, so maybe we just shift the attention a little bit more to the process and the habits.

Brian Rose: It’s funny, that’s what I was talking about. When people come and sit in this chair, I get to spend two hours with them, and once you deconstruct their life you actually see the systems. When they sit in the chair, you see Eddie Izzard, the famous comedian, or the 50 billion dollar man, or the champion boxer, and you think “Oh wow,” but when you go in there you realise that they’ve done the work when they didn’t want to do it. They pushed through the difficulty, all that stuff, and then you see the systems there, because there rarely is a result without a system.

James Clear: That’s one of the things that is a little bit surprising about goals: achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. It’s actually not the thing you’re looking for. We think the results are the thing that needs to change, but it’s actually the process behind the results. Let’s say your bedroom is a mess and you set a goal to clean that room. You can get motivated and do it for two or three hours, and then you have a clean room, for now. If you don’t change the messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place, then you turn around two weeks later and you have a messy room again. So actually you don’t need a clean room; you need better cleaning habits, and then your room will always be clean. You don’t need to lose weight; you need better eating habits, and then your weight will always be around where you want it to be. You don’t need more money; you just need better financial habits, and then you’ll always have enough money to manage the thing that comes up. It’s really the habits that need to change, not the result. That’s why hitting your goal can sometimes be really anticlimactic, and it can also mess with people’s lives, because they shoot for that goal, they get it, and then they stop their systems. There’s this yo-yo effect. Someone trains for a half marathon and runs the race. That race motivated them to train for the last three or four months, and then the race ends and they stop. They take a week off, then a week turns into two weeks, then two months, and they turn around four months later and think, “Man, I haven’t run in months. I need to sign up for a new race or something.” Because if it’s all about the goal, as soon as the goal is achieved you don’t have that motivating you any more. But if instead it’s about being a runner, then even once you finish the race you still have a reason to show up again the next week, because that’s what I do, I run, that’s who I am. So in pretty much any domain, true long-term thinking is really goalless thinking. It’s much more about being that person, developing that identity, following that system, and then you just happen to realise your potential along the way.

30:04 Brian Rose: OK. Talking about this 1% every day: when people hear that, in their minds they’re just like, “Oh, it’s so tiny, it doesn’t matter.” What is the thought process behind this 1% every day?

James Clear: Just a quick story that I like, which I feel illustrates the point. We’re in the UK, and for many years the British cycling team was very mediocre. They had never won a Tour de France, even though the race had been around for over 100 years. They had won, I think, a single gold medal back in 1908. Then they brought in a new performance director in 2003 or 2004, and he believed in a concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains. He described it as the 1% improvement in all the areas related to cycling. They started by making 1% improvements that other teams were probably looking at too: they put slightly lighter tyres on the bike, they had their riders wear electrically heated overshorts to keep their legs warm so they could ride for longer, and they had different biofeedback sensors that each rider would wear, and then they adjusted the programmes to each individual. But again, it’s a competitive field, and a lot of teams are doing that. So then they did a bunch of 1% changes that nobody else was thinking about. They hired a surgeon to come in and teach them how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of catching a cold or getting flu. They split-tested different types of massage gel to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They even figured out the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider, and then they brought that on the road with them to big events, like when they were at hotels for the Tour de France. So Brailsford, the coach, said, “If we can actually execute on all these little 1% changes, then I think we can win a Tour de France within five years.”

Brian Rose: Now, he must have had to really sell people on this, because you can already see the naysayers, and we’re in Britain as well, where they’re going to be like, “Come on, this is ridiculous.”

James Clear: Well, no single change seemed like very much. One of the changes they made was to have their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, because they tested them in a wind tunnel and it turned out the indoor suits were a little more aerodynamic. You think, all right, whatever, I’ve basically got skin-tight clothes on either way, how is this going to make much of a difference? Anyway, they did in fact execute on all these little changes, and they won the Tour de France not in five years but in three, and then they repeated it again in the fourth year with a different rider. After one year off, they’ve now won the last three in a row; they’ve won five of the last six, after never having won it for more than 100 years.

Brian Rose: And it’s definitely an obvious anomaly. You look at it and think, what? Because it’s not like we have a cycling culture here or anything. It was just a big anomaly when we saw them massively improve.

James Clear: I bring that story up not because I think cycling is the perfect example, but because it’s a good story that showcases the power of being committed to making those small improvements each day. I think these 1% changes are not just nice to have, not just a little cherry on top of your performance; they can actually compound and add up in a really significant way in the long run. Habits are a lot like that. They’re not exactly like compound interest, where you hit that hockey-stick portion of the curve, but they really feel like that a lot. Like we were saying a few moments ago, it feels insignificant on any day, but then you turn around 10 years later and you’re surprised by where you end up. That’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the greatest returns are delayed. Habits are like that too. They don’t feel like much on any given day, but they really add up over the months and years.

Brian Rose: And most of us overestimate the significance of the short-term stuff and underestimate the potential of the long term. Is that just another human cognitive bias?

James Clear: I don’t know why we do that, but we do tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year or a decade.

Brian Rose: Do you think it’s because we used to have shorter lifespans, where maybe this stuff didn’t play out? Because this got us somewhere; we evolved to this point.

James Clear: We do have, and this definitely plays an important role in habits, a bias towards the present, and that makes sense. Take that example I gave about finding a berry bush 100 metres away. You should in fact go and get the food that’s close by and not the food on the other side of the mountain, because that just makes logical sense; you’d rather have it now, especially when we were not in modern society. For 99.999% of human history we were just trying to survive like every other animal, so you should prioritise immediate food, immediate shelter, immediate water, immediate safety, and in fact our brains are wired to do that. But modern society is a whole different ball game, because there are all these things where you should actually prioritise delayed outcomes. You go to college now and graduate in four years. You save for retirement today and retire decades from now. You show up at work this week and get a paycheque in a month. There are all kinds of things we do in modern society that require you to delay gratification, and that runs a little counter to our wiring and our biological preferences.

Brian Rose: I just thought of the term caveman. Whenever someone talks about a caveman doing something, the caveman’s just thinking, OK, immediate gratification, what do I have to do now to survive? And we’ve now pretty much reverse engineered all that stuff out.

James Clear: It makes sense that our brain is like that, but we’re in a slightly mismatched environment. To bring this back to habits, there’s a misalignment of rewards that often happens. There’s an immediate outcome, an immediate reward, and then an ultimate reward. One reason bad habits stick so readily, that they form so easily, is that with bad habits the immediate reward is often favourable. What’s the immediate reward of eating a doughnut? It’s kind of great. It’s sweet, it’s sugary, it tastes good. It’s only the ultimate reward, if you repeat that habit for six months or a year or two years, that is unfavourable. Meanwhile, good habits are often the exact opposite. The immediate reward of going to the gym for a week isn’t really that great. Your body’s probably sore, you don’t have much to show for it, your body looks the same, your weight hasn’t really changed. But if you stick to it for six months or a year or two years, then the ultimate reward is favourable. So a lot of the challenge of building good habits and breaking bad ones is figuring out how to pull the long-term costs of your bad habits into the present moment, so you feel a little bit of that pain right now and have a reason to avoid it, and pull the long-term rewards of your good habits into the present moment, so it feels good and you have a reason to make it through that valley of death at the beginning and stick with it while you’re waiting for those delayed rewards to accumulate. I think we could summarise that whole misalignment of rewards by saying the cost of your good habits is in the present and the cost of your bad habits is in the future, and the fact that we prioritise the present over the future ends up making a lot of habit change difficult.

37:16 Brian Rose: Does that mean you have to go deeper into that identity in order to bring those future things forward, or is it just about realising them in the now?

James Clear: It’s a good question, and you’re on the right track, because I think the ultimate form of intrinsic gratification is a reaffirmation of your desired identity. If your desired identity is “I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts” or “I’m an athlete”, every time you’re doing a squat, literally in the middle of the rep, you’re already getting gratified, because you’re acting in alignment with the type of person you want to be. Oh, I just did that rep, I didn’t miss this workout, that feels good.

Now, I do think it takes a little while to get to the point where that actually feels like you. You can imagine somebody who goes to the gym for the first week or the first month doesn’t quite identify that way yet, because they haven’t spent enough time there. Steven Pressfield, the writer…

Brian Rose: The War of Art.

James Clear: Yes, I think it’s in The War of Art. He has a piece where he talks about a wolf and how the wolf develops a territory, and the only way it develops a territory is by being there, by walking around the terrain every day, and then it starts to feel like this is mine, this is my home. He talks about writers doing that: you make the chair and the computer and the desk in your office your territory; it becomes your terrain. I think that’s true for most habits too. When you walk into the gym for the first time, you feel very uncertain. It’s not your territory. But once you show up again for a week or a month or a year, at some point you cross this invisible threshold where it starts to feel like, yeah, this is for me, I belong. Once you’ve crossed that stage, it becomes more likely that you can get that kind of reaffirmation of your identity and start to instantly feel gratified.

But there are other things you can do in the short term to feel more gratified while you’re working on those habits. Here’s just one little tactic. Let’s say you’re trying to build a habit of working out or meditating. Each time you do your habit of meditating for five minutes, you have this little jar of marbles, with 100 marbles in there: 90 are red and 10 are blue. After each instance of your habit, you walk over and pull a marble out of the jar. If you pull out one of the 90, nothing happens; it’s just a pat on the back, good job, you did what you were supposed to. But if you pull out one of the 10, you get some kind of reward that’s exciting to you. Maybe you get to watch Netflix for an hour and not feel guilty, or go for a walk outside, or take a bubble bath, or buy yourself a new jacket, whatever feels rewarding. What you just did was introduce an element of immediate gratification and of surprise and delight to the whole process. That first week when you’re meditating, you still might not identify as a meditator, or you still might not have a sense of calm wash over your life, but you have this other interesting thing that is rewarding right away, which maybe gets you to stick with it while you’re waiting for those long-term rewards to accumulate.

Brian Rose: And the variable reward, is that an important part of that?

James Clear: That does introduce a variable reward. For people listening who aren’t familiar, the variable reward has been widely studied in psychology. The way they discovered it was actually an accident. B.F. Skinner, the researcher who came across it, was running low on food pellets. With the rats he was training, he would give them a pellet whenever they did the thing he wanted, and he was running low on them because he had to hand-press them each time. So he thought, maybe I’ll just give them one every other time. It turned out that actually increased the rate at which the rats would act and do the thing, because they didn’t know if they were going to get it or not. They were like, something must be wrong, I need to press this lever even more, because I thought I was supposed to get one every time. It turns out that leads to a spike in activity, so a variable reward can be a good way to increase the frequency with which you do a habit. Now, it’s worth noting it’s not a panacea. You can’t just take something you don’t want to do, make the reward vary, and then say, “Oh, now I’ll do it.” It doesn’t work that way. But if you already want to do it, then it’ll increase the rate at which you do it.

Brian Rose: There’s a great book called Hooked by Nir Eyal.

James Clear: Yes.

Brian Rose: He talks about that, and if you work in Silicon Valley you’re very familiar with the variable reward, because a lot of our apps are based on it. Maybe we can talk about that at the end.

James Clear: Sure.

41:35 Brian Rose: Something that has become really obvious: I think all of life is a game between your conscious and subconscious, and it feels like part of these habits is almost tricking your subconscious into thinking “I am this person”. Part of the way it does that is that when you repeat these habits, your subconscious says, “I guess I am a runner if I’m running four days a week.” Are there other ways to hack into that? I’ll throw you a curveball: there’s this concept of affirmations, where people say out loud every day what they are, in the hope that they become that person. Is this a way to hack into some of this habit-forming stuff, and what are your thoughts on it?

James Clear: Affirmations, or visualisation, or the idea of fake it till you make it: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things. If you get to choose what story you tell yourself, you might as well choose a positive one. But I do think my method differs a little from positive affirmations or from fake it till you make it in the following way. Fake it till you make it is asking you to believe something about yourself without having evidence for it yet. You say, “I’m a healthy person, I’m a healthy person,” even though you haven’t gone to the gym yet. We have a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence: we call it delusion. At some point your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you’re saying and what you’re doing.

So the nuance in my argument is that I think we should let the behaviour lead the way: let the behaviour drive the belief rather than the belief drive the behaviour. To be clear, it can work both ways, and it does throughout daily life; people adopt a new belief and then take a new action because of it. But if you’re trying to get yourself to latch onto a new identity or tell yourself a new story, it’s more powerful to let the behaviour lead the way, because the behaviour provides immediate evidence that you are that kind of person. If you say “I’m a healthy person”, it’s a short-term strategy; you might be able to amp yourself up or motivate yourself in the moment. But if you do five push-ups, you immediately have proof: I’m a person who works out. There’s something about that evidence that makes it easier for you to root that new story in something. It gives you a reason to actually hold on to it. So I think it’s more useful to start with the small habits and build up some evidence and proof of that new identity. The more you do that, the bigger the pile of evidence becomes, and the more reason you have to actually believe, hey, that is me.

Brian Rose: Maybe some combination of both. When you were talking about the working out story, I kept thinking of this Arnold Schwarzenegger quote from the film Pumping Iron, where he said that with every rep he was smiling, because it was getting him one step closer to Mr Olympia. You look at him and think, OK, I can see why Arnold would think that, but for most people every rep is pain and they don’t see it. Was that a way of him hacking forward those future payouts?

James Clear: I think that is similar to what you mentioned earlier about cigarettes being poison, or the story about bread and carbs being unhealthy. He was developing a new meaning for the same experience. Usually the meaning you ascribe to that experience is: my muscles are burning, this is painful, I’m not enjoying this, it requires sacrifice. He twisted that around to say: this is great, the pain means I’m growing, it means I’m moving forward, I’m getting closer to my goal. I think there’s something powerful in the idea that good habits become easy habits when you can learn to find joy in delaying gratification. He was finding a way to get pleasure out of the process of putting in the work, and that can be a really powerful motivator in the long run.

Brian Rose: Is that called reframing?

James Clear: Yes. I’ve thought about writing about this more; I haven’t written a ton about it yet. But I think there are strategies and a few different mindset reframes that can really change the likelihood that you stick with a habit. If you learn the right story to tell yourself, it becomes easier to maintain it over the long run. The tricky part is that I think it’s really easy for people to come up with total BS about what those stories should be, and just invent a bunch of stuff that nobody can verify or check, and then we say all these things that maybe don’t actually move the needle. So I don’t know much about the right way to do it, but I think for sure there’s a way to tell yourself the right story, and it changes the way you act in the long run.

Brian Rose: But it also has to be credible. Otherwise I think your subconscious can see BS coming a mile away and it’s just like, “Nah, I don’t think so,” and then maybe you revert back.

James Clear: That’s my point about letting the behaviour lead the way rather than the belief. If it’s not credible to you that you’re a healthy person, you look at yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “No, you’re not. You don’t have any proof of that.” But if it’s, “Well, I did five burpees today, so today I was healthy,” then you actually have a reason for that to be a credible story in your mind.

Brian Rose: Definitely. Going back to that book, which I’m sure I’m going to get you a copy of, the Allen Carr stop smoking book: it’s something that doesn’t even make sense, because smoking is something we’re all told, and it’s true, is very addictive short-term gratification. So how would a book tell me this stuff? But in a weird way it makes you look at it in a whole other way, as if I’m getting tricked every time I’m doing this. I’m tricking myself, taking myself down this road of weirdness and pain. So now, when I look at those cigarettes, I see a con, and I see I’m conning myself every time I go down that route, so it just cuts it off. And it’s weird, because it worked for a while, and then about eight years later I decided to smoke a cigar, because it wasn’t a cigarette, and a few weeks later I was back in the hole again, and it took me reading the book again to get back out of it. It’s just weird how the brain works.

James Clear: That is interesting. I came across a story when I was researching the book about a woman who, in college, would go on horse rides with a friend of hers, and they would smoke when they did it. At some point she quit smoking, they went their separate ways and started different jobs, and 10 years later she got back on a horse for the first time and immediately had a craving to smoke again. I think that indicates what habits are and how they work: they get tied to a particular context. In many ways, the process of changing your habits is either learning to tie a new story to the same context or reducing exposure to that context. If you can reduce exposure to that thing, then sometimes the habit does not arise, so it’s easier to avoid in the long run.

47:55 Brian Rose: Powerful stuff. All right, I’d love to go through some of these laws, because I’d love for people to come out of this and think, OK, wow, maybe I can get a handle on these things, and believe it. Because I think when we talk to most people out there about their habits, they throw their hands up and say, “That won’t work for me, I’m still stuck in this thing.” One thing I noticed: I had a mentor in here, the guy I keep talking about, the 50 billion dollar man, and when I got back from his castle seminar… He makes everyone write down all of their behaviours every hour for the week, and when you look at it, even before you send it in, you’re like, wow, look at these horrible behaviour patterns, look how much time I’m wasting. He even told me recently, “Brian, I don’t even need to go through the mentorship programme. Once people see this for about four weeks, they’ll be shocked at what they’re actually doing, and they’ll see clearly why they’ve been unsuccessful.” I think a lot of people watching this are that way. They don’t see what they really do, they don’t believe they can change it, and then they don’t.

James Clear: There are a variety of studies that show the same thing. I mention one of them in the book: one study found that people were much more likely to lose weight just by keeping a food journal. They didn’t even have to be given diet advice. Once they saw what they were actually eating every day, and how much, it became much more apparent: oh, I need to cut some of this stuff out. So similar to wasting time, they could see how they were wasting calories.

Brian Rose: It can be very sobering.

All right, let’s talk about these things. First law: make it obvious.

James Clear: We mentioned the four stages: cue, craving, response, reward. For each of the stages I’ve come up with what I call a law of behaviour change. For the cue, the first law is to make it obvious. For the craving, the law is to make it attractive. For the response, make it easy. And for the reward, make it satisfying. To jump into the first one, the idea is that you want to make the cues of your good habits obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The more easily they catch your attention, the more likely you’ll fall into the habit. I don’t know if we’ll have time to get into this, but just quickly: to break a bad habit, you invert each of the four laws. Rather than making the cues of your bad habits obvious, you want to make them invisible. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. Make it difficult. Make it unsatisfying. Anyway, the first law is to make it obvious.

Brian Rose: OK. What is a good example of that, for good and bad habits?

James Clear: One of the places I like to suggest starting is with what I call environment design. Basically, the things that are on your desk at home, your kitchen counter, your office at work, they influence your behaviours, and if you can restructure your physical environment or your digital environment, then you’re more likely to actually stick with the right habit. As an example, a lot of people feel like they watch too much television. Walk into pretty much any living room: where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the TV. What is this room designed to get you to do? I’m not saying you have to restructure your entire house, but there is a range of choices you could make. You could take the chair, turn it away from the television and have it face a coffee table with a book on it. You could put the TV inside a wall unit or a cabinet, behind doors, so you’re less likely to see it. You could also increase the friction of the action in the environment: you could unplug the TV after each use and only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch, so you’re not allowed to just turn Netflix on and find something.

That’s an example of curtailing a bad habit with environment design, but you can also use it to promote good habits. For example, I used to buy apples and put them in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge, and I wouldn’t see them because they were tucked down there. Two weeks later they would go bad and I’d get annoyed because I was throwing food out and throwing money away. So I bought a big display bowl, put it right in the middle of the counter and put the apples in there, and now they’re gone in about three days, just because it’s obvious. The same thing was true when I built a flossing habit. I realised that for many years I would brush my teeth twice a day but only floss every now and then. Why is that? One of the reasons was that the floss was in a drawer in the bathroom and I just wouldn’t see it. So this time I bought a little bowl, put it right next to my toothbrush and put the floss in there. Now I brush my teeth, put the toothbrush down, pick the floss up, and I floss twice a day, which I’ve been told is excessive. All I needed was that environment change, and those habits were able to fall in line.

Brian Rose: I heard a similar story about Google: when they designed their workspaces, they put the healthy drinks in front and the unhealthy drinks behind. They don’t try to restrict them from you, because then everyone would be like, “What the hell is going on?” But it’s just easier to grab water, and I think fruit, and you have to reach really far back to get the sugary stuff.

James Clear: There’s a study I mention in the book from Massachusetts General Hospital. They went into the cafeteria at the hospital and did the same thing. They added water to all of the fridges, and they also added some of those little rolling carts with water in them by the food stations in the cafeteria. That was all they did. They didn’t talk to anybody, they didn’t motivate anybody, and six months later water sales were up 25% and soda sales were down 11%. I always think that’s interesting, because if you went up to any person in that room and asked, “Why are you drinking a Coke?” they’d say, “I wanted a Coke.” “Why do you have water?” “This is what I felt like having.” But the truth is some percentage of them chose it just because it was obvious, just because of what the environment nudged them towards.

You can do this not only for your physical habits but also for the digital ones. I don’t know if we’ll be able to pick this up, but this is the home screen on my phone.

Brian Rose: It’s all black. It has no icons on it. I love it.

James Clear: When I wanted to build a reading habit, I had my phone and text messages, but in these two slots I put Pocket, which lets you save articles to read later, and Audible for audiobooks. So the first thing I would see when I opened my phone was two apps that prompted me to read. I tried to make reading the most obvious habit in my digital environment as well as in my physical one.

Brian Rose: And let’s be honest, that is the world and environment for most people. How much time do we spend looking at our phones?

James Clear: I think we often talk about environment just in the physical sense, but so much of our lives is digital now. We all spend a lot of time looking at screens, so the things you see on your phone, on your desktop, the items that pop up first in your web browser, the tabs you have pinned or saved, those are things that need to be optimised, because you spend a lot of time looking at them. So you can do it for the digital environment as well.

Brian Rose: Something Tim Ferriss talks about is that you can make all the icons on your screen black and white. That simple change alone drops your phone usage by something silly, like 20%, just because they’re not these attractive candy-coloured icons, not to mention the badges and notifications. You should have all that stuff turned off anyway if you’re listening to this show. I love your home screen. I deleted Instagram from my phone about a week ago, which means I can still use it on my desktop, so it’s still there, but it’s nowhere near as sexy and addictive on a desktop. It just isn’t. If you tell yourself the story, “I use it for business, I have to,” whatever, OK, use it on your desktop, but it’s nowhere near this kind of crack device.

James Clear: It’s an interesting thing. We have access to more information and more options than ever before, so one of the biggest skills in the modern world is learning how to curate that fire hose of information coming at you. It’s almost like you need to take back control by trimming things away a little bit more. For a lot of human history we were looking for things: how do we find calories, how do we find information, how do we get good ideas? Now we’ve got so many that it’s: how do I trim back the stuff that I don’t need?

Brian Rose: This is so major. In our Academy we go on a low media diet right away. We cut out all the media; we turn it down to an hour a day. I found some of my students had nine news sites they were checking on a regular basis, literally addicted to information. And you’re right, these days it’s the complete opposite. Back on the savannah, you would literally be sitting around all day waiting for any kind of info.

James Clear: I’ll give you a little hack that I like. I’m similar: low information, low media diet, I don’t really pay attention to any of that. But at the end of each month, if you go to Wikipedia and type the month and year into the search bar, like April 2019, it will pull up the largest news stories from the last month, but only things that have lasted long enough or been important enough to have an entry written on them. So across all of the world news you get eight to 12 things, and you can read through those in about 30 minutes, and that was the stuff that actually lasted for the last month. The news happens every day, but something newsworthy or important does not happen every day; the show has to go on. So you get to the end of the month and now you actually have the things that have lasted longer than 48 hours. You can read those and be up to date, and then you can just check out of the rest of the stuff.

Brian Rose: Most people can convince themselves that the news has some effect on their life, but the truth is that none of that stuff is ever really going to affect your life day to day. Even those eight things on Wikipedia will probably never actually concern you: who the president is, what happens in North Korea. It’s not really going to affect your life. If it’s really important, someone you love might mention it to you, is the real truth.

James Clear: That’s the other thing. People sometimes say, “What if everybody did that?” Well, everybody’s never going to do that. A lot of the time you end up finding out about the news stories anyway. Somebody says something, someone shares something on Twitter, and in some way it gets to you. So you might as well take back your time and work on something else that contributes a little more value.

Brian Rose: I think there was some comedian who said that if he just doesn’t go on Twitter, it never happened. If he doesn’t check it, it actually never happened, so just don’t look at it.

James Clear: I had this moment a couple of months ago where I was on Twitter in the morning, and there were debates raging and all kinds of things happening. It just felt very noisy; there was a lot of energy. I put my phone down, walked outside and sat in the sun. Nobody was out, it was about 10.30 in the morning, it was quiet, and I just felt so much more relaxed. It made me realise there’s a whole separate world. Both of these feel like totally different worlds, and you can choose which one you want to live in. You can choose how you want to spend that day or that moment, and one of those feels like much more of a life well lived to me than the other. It’s just nice to remind yourself that you can check out from that.

Brian Rose: Very much so. It’s funny, I get stopped in the street a lot. I’ve probably been stopped by over a thousand people, and every single one of them always had something really nice to say about the show and how it changed their life. And yet if you go on my YouTube channel, it’s all this madness: “What’s going on? You got a new suit? I hate this person.” In real life I never see or hear any of that. So which world do you want to be in? Which one is real?

58:53 I know you have a habit of not checking your phone until noon. You keep it in a separate location. It’s not going to work for everybody’s job, but man, if you can do it, it makes a big difference.

James Clear: I have a home office, so I wake up, take a shower, get ready, grab a glass of water, and then leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. That just gives me a block of three or four hours where I can work on my own agenda rather than having everybody else’s agenda creep in. Similar to the story about drinking water versus Coke, that cafeteria change, I have something like that happen for me. I’m like everybody else: if my phone is next to me, I’ll check it every three seconds. But if I leave it in another room, it’s only 45 seconds away, and I never go and get it. So did I want it or not? In one sense I wanted it, because I would check it all the time if it was next to me, but in another sense I never wanted it badly enough to work for a minute to go and get it.

I think that is somewhat indicative of the role technology is playing in our lives. It has made so many actions so convenient, frictionless and easy to do that we will act on them on the slightest whim, the smallest hint of boredom. You’re standing in line for 10 seconds and you pull your phone out and check Instagram. I don’t know that actions that frictionless are productive or healthy for us in the long run. Because what surprises me is that if I leave my phone in the other room, I’ll actually do some of the hard work. I’ll write an article or work on a book chapter, and it’s like, I did actually want to do those things. Sometimes you think, oh, I must not actually want to do it, because I never make time for it. But if you’re surrounded by options that are that frictionless, you never give yourself a chance for that little hint of boredom to rise for 10 seconds, fall and pass, so that you get back to the work that matters, because you always have something to act on with the smallest change in how you feel. So removing those little options can actually help you get into the deeper work. If you remove the mental candy from your environment, it becomes easier to eat the healthy stuff, and you need to do that not only for your actual diet but also for your information diet.

Brian Rose: Could someone having their phone in the room keep them from greatness? Is it really that…

James Clear: It sounds extreme to say that, but in the same way that we said earlier those little 1% choices actually do add up and compound each day, to a certain degree I think that is probably true. It sounds extreme to say that your phone would hold you back from greatness, but I don’t think it sounds extreme to say that distractions will hold you back, that the person who gets distracted more frequently is less likely to achieve their potential than the person who stays focused. That sounds right. And if your phone is the biggest source of distractions in your life, then it seems like it probably does play a significant role.

Brian Rose: And whereas on the savannah the distraction might have been a monkey or an insect, now it’s a trillion dollars’ worth of technology, built by the greatest in the world, who now know how to distract you better than any clown in a circus. That’s hard to fight against.

James Clear: I don’t think the people who work at those companies are necessarily vindictive or have it out for you, but it’s the natural incentive of capitalism. What are they trying to do? They’re trying to create the most engaging product possible, because products that are engaging and exciting and interesting to use get used more, make more money and are more successful businesses. So they go to work each day and try to create a more engaging product. But the net effect of that on you as the user is: wow, now all of a sudden I have 15 apps on here, a game, a social media application, email, whatever, that are all interesting or have some reason for me to use them, and it’s very easy for me to get sucked in again and again, because that’s exactly what they’re designed for.

Brian Rose: It’s an attention economy now. If they can take a minute of your time, they monetise that. I’m not sure it’s vindictive, but they’re literally trying to take your time from you.

James Clear: There’s an unintended consequence, which is that you lose control of your time, and that is very productive for the companies but unproductive for you. Anyway, to wrap up this make it obvious point and the environment design impact: if you want a habit to be a big part of your life, make it a big part of your environment. Have the cues in a prevalent place, whether that’s physical or digital. Similarly, if you want to reduce the impact a habit has, make it a smaller part of your environment. Reduce exposure. If you don’t want to spend as much money on online shopping, unsubscribe from emails from Nordstrom and J.Crew and don’t follow fashion bloggers on Instagram. If you want to spend less money on electronics, don’t watch unboxing videos on YouTube or follow the latest tech review blogs. The more you can reduce those cues, the less likely it is that the habits will arise.

Brian Rose: And we’re seeing this in city planning as well. They’re building bike lanes and open spaces, and it literally changes the behaviour of the people.

James Clear: That’s an interesting question for the leaders of cities and organisations: how do you structure your offices and your city centres to promote good habits and reduce the odds that people slide into bad ones?

1:04:15 Brian Rose: OK, let’s get into the second law: make it attractive. How does this play out? And I love this whole concept of tribes around this.

James Clear: It makes sense: if a habit is more attractive or more appealing, you’re more likely to do it. We’ve actually talked about this a little bit throughout the interview already, with the idea of the story you tell yourself about what these cues mean and whether you should act on them. That plays a big role in whether you feel this craving or anticipation, this hope, this reason to perform the habit. I’ll give you a quick tactic you can use for making habits more attractive, and then let’s talk about the social influence and tribes, because I think that’s the big long-term piece.

The tactic is what scientists call a commitment device. A commitment device is just a choice that you make now that locks in your behaviour for the future. For example, let’s say that tonight you go to bed and think, all right, tomorrow morning’s going to be the day. I’m going to wake up at 6am and go for a run. 6am rolls around, your bed is warm, it’s cold outside, and you think, well, maybe I’ll just press snooze. But if you rewind the clock to today and text your friend, “Hey, let’s meet at the park at 6.30,” then when 6am rolls around, your bed is still warm and it’s still cold outside, but if you don’t get up and go for a run, you’re a jerk, because you leave your friend at the park all alone. That commitment device, the text to your friend, added a layer of accountability to the action the next morning. It suddenly made it more attractive to get up early and go for a run than it was otherwise. And this is two sides of the same coin, because it also made it less attractive to press snooze and sleep in.

So commitment devices are a way to make it more attractive to do the right thing in the future. Some other examples: automatic savings plans are a common commitment device. You choose now, and automatically 100 bucks comes out every month. Another one: whenever I want to cut down on calories, I’ll ask the waiter or waitress to box up half of the meal before they serve it to me. If they brought it out and I said I’ll just eat half, that would never work. So commitment devices are a way to lock in that future behaviour and make those habits more attractive. That’s just a quick little strategy.

But the bigger-picture piece is what you mentioned: so many of our habits are socially reinforced. I have a whole chapter in the book, chapter 9 or 10, on the influence of friends and family on your habits, but even though I wrote a whole chapter on it, I think I undersold the importance of social environment for building your habits. Think about it in general, everyday things. Why am I wearing a tie and a jacket right now? I could be wearing a bathing suit, but I’m not, because I know it violates the social norm for what I should wear during an interview. There are so many habits like that. You have a job interview and you wear a dress or a suit and tie, not a bathing suit or workout clothes, because you know that’s the expectation of the other people in the group. You walk into a lift and you turn around to face the front, even though you could face the back or the side, but that’s not what people do, so you do what everybody else does. Or you move into a new neighbourhood, walk outside on Tuesday night and see that all of your neighbours have their recycling bins out, and you think, oh, we need to sign up for recycling, because I guess that’s what people like us do in this neighbourhood. Then you stick to that habit for 20 years, mostly because it’s socially reinforced.

There are all kinds of things: the things we do at work, the way we dress, the things we do at school, the religion we do or don’t practise. They’re all reinforced by the people around us. So I think the punchline is that you want to join a tribe where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour. If it’s normal in that group, it’s going to give you a reason to stick to it, because your habits are going to be a signal to the people around you: hey, I belong too. I get it, I fit in, I’m part of this tribe as well. So social environment is a big driver of whether you stick to habits for the long run, and joining groups that have your desired habits is a great way to reinforce them for good.

Brian Rose: OK, so a practical use could be to stop going to the pub if you want to stop drinking and wasting time, or join the CrossFit group and hang out with people who don’t want to hear about you hanging out at the pub all night. What are some examples of being able to pull yourself into a tribe or distance yourself from one?

James Clear: Those are both fine examples, but they also raise an issue, a challenge, that a lot of people feel. When you join a new group, there are two things that need to happen, and both of them are a little bit hard. The first is that sometimes it means you leave an old group. If people have to choose between being right and alone, leaving that tribe, or being wrong and staying with the crowd and belonging, we would often rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. We would often rather be wrong than be alone. That is just how we’re wired. All humans care about belonging, and our ancestors needed to, because if you were on the savannah walking around in a tribe and you got ostracised from the tribe, that was basically a death sentence. We all have this deep desire to belong. So the first challenge is that sometimes you need to be very bold and courageous to step out of the tribe you’re currently a member of.

The second challenge is that you join that CrossFit gym or that new group, and you’re not friends with them yet. You don’t belong. In fact you feel like an imposter, because you’re the new one there. One strategy that might help with this is to try to find a mutual area of overlap that doesn’t have to do with the habit you’re trying to build, build friendships over that thing, and then you’ll soak up the other habits you actually came for along the way. I have a friend, Steve Kamb, who runs a website called Nerd Fitness. It’s about getting in shape, but it’s specifically organised for people who identify as nerds, people who love Batman or Spider-Man or Lego or Star Wars. If you become part of that community, you want to get in shape and lose weight, but maybe the first thing you do when you come in is, oh, Brad and Lucy love Star Wars too, so maybe I’ll just chat with them about that and we can become friends over our mutual love of Star Wars. Then down the road I’ll also start to build all these habits of working out and exercise. So mutual areas of overlap can be a good way to develop a sense of belonging in a new tribe while you’re waiting for those delayed habits to accrue.

Brian Rose: Right, because tribes bring all this social baggage that we always have to acknowledge, because it can make you do things. People stay part of groups they don’t identify with any more all the time, like political parties.

James Clear: And this, I think, is a powerful thing that I only learned. It makes sense once you hear it stated, but I think a lot of people don’t talk about it: you don’t have to adopt every belief of your tribe. You can choose to partially opt in. I think that’s a good way to look at it, especially with habits. A lot of the time friends and family are a challenge. They’re my family; I’m not going to just ditch them and never talk to them again. But if they’re not interested in doing yoga or eating the way you eat, that’s fine. You can partially opt out of that portion and be there for the rest of the time and contribute to that tribe or group in other ways. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I think that’s my point.

Brian Rose: I think most people need to trim the family and friends groups around them, because sometimes they’re not really contributing to the identity they want to be, and sometimes they’re stuck in their own loops. But that’s another discussion.

1:12:22 Talk about this concept of the anticipation of the reward motivating the action, as opposed to the action itself.

James Clear: You don’t actually do something for the reward. You do it for the image that the reward creates in your mind. If you go to Amazon and buy Atomic Habits, or buy some book, you aren’t actually buying the book. You can’t, because you don’t have it yet. What you’re buying is the image that the sales page creates in your mind. You’re buying the expectation that it will be a good book, and the reward of actually having the book or reading it only comes afterwards, after the action. This, I think, is another reason why I added that second stage to my habit loop. I believe this is true for pretty much all human behaviours and actions: it is actually the anticipation that it will be good that gets you to act. The reason I take a drink of this tea is not because I like the tea; I haven’t drunk it yet. It’s because I anticipate that having a sip will taste good. So it’s actually the anticipation, the hope, the prediction of what is to come, that motivates all actions to occur.

Brian Rose: You could write a whole book on that, couldn’t you?

James Clear: A lot of it we’ve already talked about in various ways: your prediction of what a cigarette means, or your anticipation of whether bread is favourable or unfavourable. All of those cravings, the story you tell yourself about whether you should anticipate this favourably, or avoid it, or whether it doesn’t really mean much at all: it’s that anticipation and that prediction that motivates you to respond one way or another. I think that was something a lot of the previous habit and behaviour books overlooked.

Brian Rose: We see examples of this all the time when people sign up for a gym membership, and sometimes that’s enough: oh, I’ve started to get fit. You see the show-up rates for those kinds of things, or buying a course online. You almost feel like you’ve done it because of all this anticipation.

James Clear: This is actually a much deeper point than I think a lot of people realise. The craving, that second stage, that anticipation we’re talking about, motivates you to act. Then you take the action, and then there’s the reward. The reward serves two purposes, and the first one is that it satisfies the craving that came before. If the thing that got you to buy the online course or sign up for the personal trainer at the gym was the hope that if I do this I’ll be getting fit, or I’ll be getting the ideas I need to build my business, you’ve satisfied that craving by making the purchase. So now that craving is actually gone. What you need is a different craving. Now you need the craving to make sales calls or to do a set of burpees. That’s the new craving you need to actually stick with the real thing. You fulfilled the craving that motivated the purchase, so a lot of the time people feel like that motivation evaporates after the choice has been made.

Brian Rose: It’s like a dual reward. There’s one that you actually earn and there’s one you get right away. Again, that’s a whole other book. And the one you get right away will probably, a few months later, start eating at you: oh wow, I wasted that money, I did this again. That’ll probably pull your self-esteem down lower, because you got that gratification up front. I keep talking about Tim Ferriss, but he always says plan your holidays well in advance, because the six months of anticipating a holiday is almost always better than the holiday. So have these long lead times where you can think about it the whole time, think about the safari, because when you get there and do it, it rarely is what you think it will be. That’s a way of doing it for your own benefit. The opposite way is, of course, buying something without the intention of doing it.

James Clear: You can actually track this in the brain a little bit. Dopamine gets brought up a lot when people talk about habits. It’s not the only chemical that plays a role in habit formation, but it does play an important role. If scientists track dopamine levels the very first time you do something, the first time you have a bite of a pancake or the first time you get a hit of cocaine, dopamine spikes after the experience, because you didn’t know to expect anything, and it was like, whoa, that tasted really good, that was way better than I expected. So dopamine goes up. But then your brain learns: oh, pancakes are really tasty. So the next time around, when you see a pancake, dopamine spikes in anticipation. It spikes beforehand. There have been a variety of studies on it. Gamblers get a spike of dopamine when they see the dice, not after they roll. Cocaine addicts get a spike of dopamine when they see the powder, not after they take it. Because what happens is that anticipation spikes dopamine, excitement and hope, and then you have the response: you roll the dice, take the hit of cocaine or eat the bite of pancake. If it’s as good as you expected it to be, dopamine is at baseline, because it matches your expectation; you’re not surprised. For you to have that feeling of excitement and surprise again, it needs to be better than your expectation. That’s why you start to see people develop a tolerance in a lot of addictions. They start gambling more and more money, the bets go higher and higher, or they start to use more and more, because they’re trying to outpace that anticipation so they can have that feeling of surprise and delight again.

Anyway, holidays are another example where anticipation spikes. Imagine how blue the water will be, imagine how amazing it’ll be to eat that food, imagine how awesome it’ll be to walk around Paris and see the Eiffel Tower. Then, even if it is great, it matches your expectation, so you’re not surprised by it. You’re just like, this is what I thought it would be. It needs to be so good that you’re delighted.

As a side note, relating this to business, this is one of the challenges of business. The sales team needs to ramp up anticipation for the customer, because it’s that anticipation that gets the person to purchase, but then the product team needs to make something that’s so great that people are still surprised. You see this problem all the time: sales or marketing sells something that the product can’t deliver, and then people end up disappointed rather than excited. So you actually need to both ramp up anticipation enough to get someone to purchase and provide enough value to make them feel delighted.

Brian Rose: I had a guest on who said the expression “under-promise and over-deliver” is wrong. He said over-sell and over-deliver.

James Clear: Over-selling and over-delivering. That’s interesting.

Brian Rose: It’s good for people to understand this about their psychology, because we’ve all done that, where we’re expecting a great dinner or a great holiday or a great birthday party, and you get there and you’re just like… So to know that’s inbuilt into your brain, to know what’s happening, and to try to find some way to make peace with it.

James Clear: Again, I feel like that’s another reason to break a habit into four stages, because you can actually track the anticipation. The moment dopamine spikes, we know there’s something going on between the cue and the response. It’s this feeling of hope.

Brian Rose: So just know that it’s there, embellish it while you have it, and know it’s part of the process and not coming later.

James Clear: I think just knowing that it exists probably makes it a little easier. If you know what’s going on, you can recalibrate your expectations.

1:19:30 Brian Rose: You mentioned addiction there briefly. I know this book isn’t about addiction, but I’m wondering how things apply and how they don’t, with alcoholics and drug addicts. I had a heroin addiction for many years while I was a high-performing Wall Street banker and an engineer, and I couldn’t think my way out of this thing. Even though the next day I’d always be like, “I feel horrible, this is stupid,” my identity was going down the tubes, and yet I couldn’t find a way of getting around it. What do you see or know about addictions?

James Clear: It’s a good question. I’ve heard from a lot of people who either are addicts or have a family member struggling with it since the book came out. You’re right, I’m not an expert on addiction and it’s not a book about addiction, but my current thinking is that a lot of the strategies in the book, and I say this mostly because of what readers have told me, not because of my own experience, are still useful. I think they can still help people who are struggling with something. But I do think there’s something about addiction, I haven’t quite pinned it down, that is a little different. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s such extreme behaviour.

As an example, we talked about environment design and making cues obvious or not obvious. I’ve realised that if I get a six-pack of beer and put it at the front of the fridge, in the door or on a shelf where I can see it, I’ll pull one out and have one at night just because it’s there and I can see it. But if I put it on the lowest shelf, all the way at the back, where I can’t see it when I open the door, sometimes it’ll sit there for a month and I just won’t grab it. Now, if you were actually an alcoholic, I don’t think that strategy would work. You would just look down and grab it, because you know it’s there. The desire is so great that little strategies like that don’t matter as much or don’t make as big an impact. But I think the principles are still true and can still be useful. For example, I’ve had a lot of readers who, either themselves or their children, struggle with ADHD, and they’ve said there’s a bunch of stuff in the book they’ve started to use that’s been very helpful. So there’s definitely some overlap there, but I do think addiction is a different beast.

Brian Rose: I think really big, debilitating addictions have a lot to do with your core identity, and sometimes trauma. I know you’ve talked to Rich Roll about this as well. We’ve had Rich in here, and he’s got a fascinating story about his former alcoholism. But just knowing from myself, when I could really change my identity and connect with greater human beings through what I’m doing here, a lot of my addiction issues just started dissolving. So there was more going on there than just having it in front of me, but knowing that habits were part of a belief system, that it was all integrated into self-esteem, is a helpful thing to know.

James Clear: I’ve heard that from other readers as well. They said that especially when they read the chapter on identity-based habits, they were like, this describes the process I had to go through to kick my addiction, or my smoking habit, or my gambling habit. Only once I saw myself in a new light and told myself a new story about what my identity was and who I was was I actually able to stick with this change. So I think a lot of the core principles are true and accurate, but I’m not exactly sure how they map onto addiction.

Brian Rose: You’ve got a bunch of new books to write.

1:22:43 All right, let’s get through these last two laws. Third law: make it easy. And this whole concept of motion versus action, I love it. I deal with this all the time in our Academy, getting people to just, quote unquote, pull the trigger and do things. Tell me about this concept.

James Clear: Motion versus action basically says there are all kinds of things we do that we feel are moving us towards our goals, but some of them are motion and some of them are action. The way I would describe it is that motion will never get you a result on its own, whereas action can. Going to the gym and signing up, or talking to a personal trainer, is motion. Doing a set of 10 squats is action. It doesn’t matter how many times you talk to a personal trainer, it’s not going to get you in shape. Researching potential leads for your business is motion. Sending an email or making a sales call to one of them is action. It doesn’t matter how many times you research; you’re not going to actually build a business just by researching. You have to actually move the needle at some point.

Now, this doesn’t mean that motion is useless. Planning and preparing are very helpful. But similar to systems versus goals, where goals can be useful but we tend to overvalue them while we undervalue systems, motion can be useful, but for whatever reason we default to it, or overvalue it, and are less likely to move to action as fast as we should. Basically, at some point planning becomes a form of procrastination. When planning becomes procrastination, when preparation becomes procrastination, that’s when you’re spending too much time on motion and you need to shift to action. And I think motion is safer. It’s common when you start a business: you’re like, what should our logo be? What’s our name? What kind of business card should I get? Those are all fun things to think about, and they’re also very risk-free things to think about. You can feel like, oh yeah, I’m making progress on that business idea, even though you haven’t actually done anything to build a new business. I’ve had my company for eight years now and I still have never had a business card. That doesn’t mean nobody should get them, but my point is that it’s not related to the action of building a business. There are things like that we can use as a crutch to make us feel like, oh, I’m not failing, I’m still moving forward. And the longer you stay in that zone of activity, the less likely you are to actually get a result, and the more likely it is that you’re just procrastinating on the hard thing.

Brian Rose: And do you think most people are in motion and not action?

James Clear: I fall into it too. I spent a lot of time researching this book, and at some point I had to say, “Look, that’s enough, man. You don’t need to read any more books or articles. You need to actually sit down and write the chapters.” That time was not wasted, but it can’t be the only thing you do. You have to move yourself towards a more action-oriented mindset. Because motion is safe, most people will naturally be drawn to it, so it’s probably more healthy to have a bias towards action. You’ll slide back into motion easily enough, so if you’re trying to remind yourself what to do, let’s remind ourselves to take actions that can actually generate a result.

Brian Rose: And you’ll probably give yourself dopamine rewards for the motion.

James Clear: Oh, certainly. It feels good.

1:26:02 So that’s the motion versus action debate. As far as making habits easy, there are a variety of things you can do, but the simplest one is just to scale your habits down to something that is very easy to do. I like to recommend the two-minute rule, which basically says you take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. “Do yoga four days a week” becomes “take out my yoga mat”. “Read 30 books a year” becomes “read one page”. Sometimes people resist that a little bit, because they say, “OK, I know the real thing I want to do isn’t taking my yoga mat out. I actually want to do the workout. So if it’s a mental trick and I know it’s a trick, why would I fall for it?” If you feel that way, my recommendation would be: in the beginning, for the first few weeks, limit yourself to only two minutes. All you do is put your running shoes on, step out of the door, lock the door, and then walk back inside. Or all you do is take your yoga mat out.

Brian Rose: And just show your subconscious brain that you’re serious.

James Clear: It sounds funny, but for example, I had a reader who ended up losing over 100 pounds, and for the first six weeks he only went to the gym for about five minutes and then he would leave. He’d get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car and drive home. It sounds ridiculous. You think, OK, clearly this is not going to be the thing that gets this guy in shape. But when you step back for a second, you realise he was becoming the type of person who went to the gym four days a week. He was mastering the art of showing up. I think this is a really deep truth about habits that gets overlooked a lot: a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life, your new normal, before you can worry about optimising it or expanding it. If you don’t become the type of person who goes to the gym for five minutes, you don’t have a chance to be the person who stays for 45 minutes five days a week. So often we’re so focused on finding the perfect diet plan or the ideal workout programme or the best business idea, so focused on optimising, that we don’t give ourselves permission to show up in a small way. But even if it’s only for five minutes, or five push-ups, or one sentence that you write, do something, so that you can master the art of showing up and make it your new normal. Once you become that person, you have a lot of options for expanding and improving from there. I think that’s what make it easy really looks like in practice.

Brian Rose: I think Silicon Valley calls it a minimum viable product: what’s the basic minimum that would look like a product?

James Clear: What’s the minimum viable habit?

Brian Rose: Yes. So people just have to piece together some skeleton of a new movement pattern or a new eating habit, whatever it is, be happy with that, lay it out, and then build on it.

James Clear: There are actually a lot of things that need to happen for a habit to be built that people often overlook. If you want to build the habit of going to the gym, even if it’s only for five minutes: what gym will I go to? What route am I going to take to get there? Am I going to go before work or after work? Do I need to pack my gym clothes? Will I change at home or am I going to change there? Do I have to bring a water bottle or do they have a water fountain? All that stuff sounds little, but in the beginning, when you feel uncomfortable and uncertain, you don’t really want to go anyway and your muscles are sore, something as small as “they don’t have a water fountain and I always forget my water bottle” is enough friction to get someone to quit. So starting with something really small is useful, because it allows you to figure all those logistics out, and once you’ve mastered the art of showing up for five minutes, you can figure the other things out.

Brian Rose: Plus, a lot of the time people go in and expect so much. “I’m going to go for a 60-minute spin class,” and then, like you said, they show up, they want to quit after 20 minutes, and then they quit the whole thing. We see that all the time.

James Clear: Oh yeah. You bite off more than you can chew, and once it gets really hard, you’re like, OK, never mind, I’ll just go back to what I was normally doing.

Brian Rose: Talk about technology. How can you use that to help with this law?

James Clear: I think the best thing technology can do for making habits easy is automate certain habits. The example of signing up for an automatic withdrawal for your finances, or using a website blocker to block social media or certain websites that you visit too often: that’s a way to take willpower out of your hands. It does it for you, and that can be a really effective thing that technology does. But there’s also another layer of technology that we don’t think of as technology. Technically, your mattress is a technology that helps you sleep soundly at night. So there are a lot of things that I would call one-time decisions: you invest in that technology up front and it pays off every time you repeat the habit in the future. If you want to build a better habit of sleeping each night, you can test different mattresses and see which one leads to the best night’s sleep. You can buy blackout curtains, which are a technology that keeps the light out of your room. You can buy earplugs if it’s a noisy environment, or a sleeping mask if you travel a lot. If you get too hot at night, you can buy what’s called a ChiliPad, a little pad that you put underneath your mattress pad that circulates water at a particular temperature, so it keeps the bed at whatever the ideal temperature is for you to sleep. All of those are one-time investments, one-time choices to buy those things up front, that make it easier for you to get good sleep in the future. So technology can play both of those roles: it can automate choices for you, and it can also make future habits easier for you.

The last thing I’ll add is that this doesn’t apply to every habit yet, but there’s something very powerful that technology does that we can use for good as well, and often it’s used against us. If you want to read a book, in order to flip to the next page you have to put work in to keep reading each sentence or to flip that page. It’s a little bit of work, not much, but you have to keep putting in effort to move through the book. But if you buy an audiobook and press play, you don’t have to do anything. All you have to do is stay awake and the book keeps going. What you actually have to do is the opposite: you need to put work in to stop it, to press pause. So many of our bad habits, the things that feel like they encroach too much on our daily lives, whether it’s Netflix or YouTube, are like that: once they start, you have to put effort in to slow them down. So I think Audible is an example of being able to build a reading habit in a more frictionless, automatic way. You have to put in work to stop the good habit. I don’t know where else that’s going to trickle into society, but I think that’s a big opportunity for technology: how can we take things that previously required us to put effort in to perform the habit and flip them, so that now we have to put effort in to not do the good thing?

Brian Rose: That’s powerful. I listen to a lot of Audible books, and what I’m usually doing is skipping back, skipping back, because my brain drifted for a second, or I didn’t get the point because I’m playing it at one and a half times speed and it’s a little too fast. But on the same note, at the end of a Netflix episode, the next one’s queuing up, and you literally have to lunge at the computer to stop it. It’s ready to get you to binge watch. So those are two really good examples, because with reading a physical book, a lot of the time it’s very hard to finish those pages.

James Clear: It depends on what you’re reading for. I might be less inclined to do it for fiction, which maybe I’m just reading for fun, whereas with non-fiction, if I miss three seconds, I’m still getting the core idea that they’re talking about. I can still soak up the knowledge and get through more books. But I think there’s something powerful there that technology can do: it can take the work over and do it for you. If we figure out the right way to organise those things, that could end up making us much more productive and efficient.

1:34:03 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about making it satisfying. We’ve talked a little bit about variable rewards and immediate and long-term rewards, but how do we have to re-engineer this in our brain, as far as the pros and cons for good and bad habits?

James Clear: The only reason you repeat habits is because they feel good. When an experience feels good, when it’s satisfying or enjoyable or pleasurable, it’s like a positive emotional signal in your brain that says: hey, that was enjoyable, remember this for next time, and repeat it next time around. So it’s really important to have some kind of satisfaction with habits, so that your brain has a reason to repeat them. The opposite is also true: if there’s a consequence associated with an experience, you have a reason to avoid it. You don’t want that to happen again. For a lot of people, when they try a good habit for the first time, it’s followed by a consequence. They feel uncomfortable, or it wasn’t enjoyable, or they got criticised.

As a related note, if you’re supporting someone who’s trying to build a good habit, this is a great thing you can do: praise the good, ignore the bad. I’ve seen this happen before. It was a Friday night, I was at the gym with someone, and they came in and worked out for about 25 minutes, and someone said, “Wow, kind of a short workout, huh?” What they should have said was, “It’s great that you’re here on a Friday and that you got it in.” This person is doing the thing they want to be doing, and instead they’re getting criticised for it, so the good habit is followed by a consequence. Or the introverted kid in the family comes down to dinner and shares what they did that day, and it’s, “Oh, look who showed up.” You’re criticising the very behaviour you wanted to see. You wanted them to contribute to the conversation, and now they feel like they got accosted for it. So praise the good, ignore the bad is a good way to reinforce behaviours for the friends and family around you, or your kids. But the basic idea here is that the more satisfying and enjoyable behaviours are, the more likely they are to stick.

So how do we do that? One of the most satisfying, most enjoyable feelings in life is the feeling of progress. If you feel like you’re making progress, you have every reason in the world to continue with what you’re doing, because it’s going well. So one great way to make habits satisfying is to have a way to visualise your progress. If you can see that progress each day, it feels good and you know you’re moving in the right direction, even if the long-term outcome isn’t there yet. You still haven’t lost the weight, or you don’t have the money in the bank account, or whatever it is you’re working towards. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the most common is what’s called a habit tracker. My dad, for example, enjoys swimming, so each time he goes swimming, he comes back to a little pocket calendar and puts a little X on that day. At the end of the month he adds up all the Xs to see how many times he swam and compares that to the previous month. That’s his little habit tracker. I’ve created a journal with a template and all that in it where you can do it too, but you can do it on any calendar.

The point is that you give yourself feedback faster than you would otherwise get it. The problem with a lot of good habits is that the progress, the feedback, is delayed, and it takes so long that you think, well, I guess that wasn’t worth it, or I’m not making progress, so I’ll just give up. But if you have a habit tracker and you get to track each instance, and you have some proof that you are making progress, that you are putting the reps in, that you are moving forward, then that gives you a reason to stick with it in the long run. That’s one example. I gave the example much earlier of the marbles in the jar. That’s another way to make a habit more satisfying in the moment: introduce a positive variable reward into something that would normally feel mundane.

Brian Rose: Right, progress.

James Clear: Correct. All of those are ways of increasing the immediate satisfaction or delight associated with the habit. If you can do that, it feels good enough to your brain that you’re like, hey, let’s keep going, this is going well. That’s really what make it satisfying is about.

Brian Rose: Talk about this concept of gamification. It’s something I’m not an expert on, but it’s something we do inside our Academy. I split these random strangers up into groups and they compete for gold medals that don’t actually exist except digitally, and sometimes they’re just ticking off their own boxes. It’s weird how grown adults respond to these games. Is that what this is, in a way, these small types of gamification?

James Clear: I don’t consider myself an expert on gamification either, but the way I would think through some of those things is that we talked earlier about the importance of social reinforcement for building habits. Badges, honours, points, rubies, whatever it is people are collecting, being at the top of the leaderboard: what that really is is a signal of social status. It’s status signalling. Humans are primates, and all primates seem to be wired for status and hierarchy to a certain degree, so we care about those things. Why do we buy a nice house or a nice car or wear a nice suit? Why do we care about getting a lot of likes on Instagram? Because it’s a status signal to everybody else on Instagram that this person is higher up in the hierarchy, they’re doing well. So whenever you introduce gamification, leaderboards or badges, people like to collect pins and badges, because we naturally want prestige and status.

There are a lot of examples of this, and sometimes other people don’t even see them. Take Uber. I don’t know if they still do this, but for a few years at least they had a programme where, if a driver gets complimented by riders for having good conversation a few times, they get a badge that says something like “great conversationalist”. If they get complimented on their driving or on being prompt, they get badges for that. Nobody else sees that except the Uber driver, but it feels good to add that level of prestige. So I think what’s actually being tapped into at a deep level is that people want status and to move up the hierarchy, and gamification provides an option for that to occur. Similar to how Instagram created this new world of status signals like likes, and Twitter created retweets and favourites, gamification inside your course, or somewhere else in a corporate environment, creates a new world where new signals of status can be accumulated, and we’re naturally incentivised to accumulate them.

Now, I do think it’s a little tricky. Again, I’m not an expert on it, but I have heard some people say leaderboards are actually only motivating to the top 10% of people. If you’re at the top it feels great, but for the other 90% it’s actually kind of demotivating, because you feel like you’re losing the game. So there’s probably some nuance on the best way to implement it, but I think ultimately it comes back to our preference for status and prestige.

1:41:04 Brian Rose: That’s a really good point. You said “never miss twice” as part of this make it satisfying law. This is a way to make sure you keep up a habit.

James Clear: For whatever reason, with so many habits we get very all or nothing. Diets are a very popular one. You start a new diet and do it for eight or nine days, and then on the 10th day your friends want to go out for drinks, or you binge eat a pizza, and you’re like, “Oh, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stick to this. I’ll just go back to my old way of eating.” Never miss twice is something I like to pair with the habit tracker strategy I mentioned before. You try to build up these streaks on the habit tracker, putting these Xs every day in a row, but at some point every streak ends. Your friends want to go out to eat, or you have to travel for work, or your kid gets sick, or you do something for your parents. Whatever it is, life throws an emergency your way, and once that habit streak breaks, it becomes easy to fall off course. But if you adopt this philosophy of never missing twice, then you’re like, well, I wish I hadn’t binged the pizza or gone out for drinks with my friends, but never miss twice, so let me make sure the next meal is a healthy one.

I had this happen for me with writing. For the first three years that I wrote at jamesclear.com, I wrote every Monday and Thursday, and if I missed on Thursday, well, I wish that hadn’t happened, but never miss twice, so let me make sure that next Monday I get an article out. What you start to realise is that it’s never the first mistake that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. If you can figure out how to cut that off at the source, then your slip-ups and errors are just a blip on the radar at the end of the year. But that’s only true if you never miss twice.

Brian Rose: Right, so give yourself a little bit of slack, a cushion, so you don’t just throw the whole thing out of the window and go back.

James Clear: It’s really learning the skill of getting back on track. If you can master that skill, it’s actually very powerful, because even if you performed in the worst possible way but never missed twice, so you did it, then you missed, then you did it, then you missed, you would still do it 50% of the time. So if you get really good at that skill, it can be very powerful in the long run.

1:43:16 Brian Rose: Right. Again, short term versus long term, thinking about consequences and rewards. You’ve got a whole section where you go into advanced tactics, and some of these are really interesting. You say that good habits can become routine, you can get bored with them, and you can drop them. Is that something we all need to look out for?

James Clear: I think this is one of the downsides of habits: as you build a habit, it becomes more routine and expected, and when you know what to expect, it stops being interesting. It starts to get boring, and if it gets boring, you don’t want to stick with it as much. So some of the process of mastering good habits is learning how to fall in love with boredom. You can do this in a couple of different ways. One, just knowing that it’s going to happen can be helpful: actually, the real skill I need is to be the one who can continue to show up even when it’s not exciting, because that’s when everybody else gives up. That kind of internal story can be helpful. The other thing you can do is find a new detail of your craft to get interested in.

Here’s a recent example for me. I like working out, and occasionally I’ll do front squats, where the bar sits on the front of your shoulders. I’ve been lifting for over a decade now, so just like with any habit, sometimes you get bored. All right, I’m going into the gym doing the same thing again. But I recently heard a weightlifting cue: when you’re doing a front squat, if you have your elbows up and then push them out, it naturally straightens your mid-back and upper back. Just keep your elbows out during the lift. I hadn’t heard that cue before, so next time I go into the gym and work on front squats, I have a new thing to focus on. I can focus on keeping my elbows up and out. Things like that are a great example of how you can take habits that are becoming boring and find a new little detail to get fascinated with.

A similar thing for me with writing. You’re writing articles, putting them out every week, and you do that for a year or two years, and you start to get fatigued. I’ve stuck to the process, but it’s starting to get boring. Well, find a new thing to get excited about. Maybe your new thing is: I want to master the opening line of all my articles. So you pull some of your favourite books off the shelf and look at how they open each chapter, and you put all those sentences into a spreadsheet. You go to the New York Times and look at the most popular articles and how each of them starts, and put all those into the spreadsheet. You start to build out this library of what great opening lines look like, and once you have maybe 100 or so, you go through them and think: is there anything I can learn here? Is there a pattern I can use? Can I reframe the way this one is formatted for the article I’m working on now? You just find a new detail to get interested in. You can do that for opening lines, for transitions between paragraphs, for the headline of the article, for the way you cite footnotes, every aspect of it. The more a habit gets boring, the more you need to find new details to master. Maybe that’s actually the real trick of mastery: being able to find something new to get excited about while still doing the same reps you always did before.

Brian Rose: Right, because mastery should by definition be somewhat boring.

James Clear: It almost has to be, because in order to master something you have to put in so many reps that you can do it fluently and on autopilot, and by the time you get to that point, you know exactly what to expect. So in a lot of ways mastery requires you to find new details to get interested in. At this point LeBron knows everything to do on a basketball court. He can do it all with his right hand, he can do it with his left hand, he knows how the plays are going to be run. He’s got to be at such a deep level of mastery now that he’s finding new things to get interested in. Otherwise it just becomes boring.

Brian Rose: So that’s what the great masters probably do: find little nuances to concentrate on, find some beauty in the detail, or play around. What was that great film, The Princess Bride, where the guy’s fighting with his left hand: “But I am not left-handed.”

James Clear: There’s a story, and I can’t believe it’s true, but I have to take him at his word and assume that it is. In The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, who’s a famous chess player and also a martial artist, he talks about practising for a national competition in the martial arts, and about a particular throw he does on this guy. He says he had mastered the basic movements so well that he didn’t have to think about them, and instead he spent all of his time focusing on his opponent’s eyes, and when his opponent got ready to blink, that’s when he made his throw. That seems almost impossible to anybody who’s learning something for the first time, or even who has done it for a while and is at an intermediate level. How could you know the moves, the grappling and the wrestling, so well that you could just focus on that? But I think that gives you an idea of the level of mastery we’re talking about. No matter how deep you go, there’s always some little detail you could focus on anew, even while everything else is on autopilot.

Brian Rose: And if you watch those masters, a master boxer or fighter or anything, sometimes you can see that, especially if you know what they’re doing. You can watch it and revel in that moment, where a normal person couldn’t see it and you’re like, “Oh, look at what he just did. He dragged him into the tenth round and did this, where he could have just done something else.”

James Clear: That’s like Richard Feynman’s thing: the deeper you go, the more interesting it gets. If you can buy into that, if you can find an area of life where that’s true for you, then in a sense you almost become unstoppable, because when most people get bored and quit, your curiosity is just ramping up.

1:48:58 Brian Rose: Very powerful. Other advanced stuff: the Goldilocks Rule. What is that? It’s got a cool name.

James Clear: The basic idea is that humans experience peak levels of motivation when they work on a task of just manageable difficulty. Let’s say you’re playing tennis. If you play against a professional like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, it might be cool for a minute, but it’s going to get boring pretty quickly because you’re going to lose every point. If you play against a three-year-old, it might be cute for a second, but if you’re trying to play a serious match, it’s going to get boring because you’re going to win every point. But if you play against someone who’s your equal, your peer, you win a few points, they win a few, and you have a chance to win the match, but only if you really try. That’s peak motivation. You get into the state of flow, you’re fully invested, because you’re right on the cusp of your ability. So the Goldilocks Rule says that humans experience peak levels of motivation when they work on a challenge of just manageable difficulty: not too hard, not too easy, just right. The battle with habits, and the challenge of maintaining interest in them in the long run, is to nudge that perimeter of your ability out just a little bit. OK, you’ve mastered this habit, now let’s find something just a touch beyond, and you can master that and keep going. So the process of graduating your habits from one level to the next and continuing to climb the ladder requires you to understand, or at least practise, that Goldilocks Rule mentality.

Brian Rose: And just knowing that rule is important, because then people can observe their own behaviours and their reactions to things that might have become old, or just too overwhelming.

James Clear: And the key is you still need to succeed. It’s not just about choosing something that’s going to make me fail now and then I’ll catch up to speed. I don’t know that it actually works this way in real life most of the time, but ideally, if you want to stick to that variable reward research, you would succeed about 50% of the time and struggle about 50% of the time. Enough success to keep you motivated, but enough challenge to keep you interested, and you need both of those, because if you reach too far beyond your perimeter, you just get upset and annoyed and lose motivation.

Brian Rose: I’m replaying my whole life based on this rule right now. This is totally it, whether it’s the gym and the weights, or business risks, or personal challenges. It’s between boredom and trauma, those two sides. But if you know you’re doing that dance, you could probably do it more intelligently. Same with habits.

1:51:26 Just takeaways for people who have listened to a bunch of this theory and these ideas. You must get people who still come up to you after talks and say, “OK, but James, I still don’t know where to get started. I don’t know what to do so I can have some success and then feel good.” The habit of getting habits, I guess. Where should people start?

James Clear: If I was going to give some practical takeaways, I would say the first thing you can do is probably optimise your environment, because sometimes that’s all you need to do, so you might as well start there and maybe it’ll take care of itself. Like I mentioned, putting the apples in a bowl on the counter was all I needed to do, and then the habit of eating apples every day was done. Or maybe putting your TV inside a wall unit will be enough to curb the habit. Unsubscribe from the food blogs, and now you’re not tempted to eat as many cookies.

Brian Rose: The mobile phone, super important.

James Clear: Yes, things like that: removing the applications, or like you deleting Instagram off your phone. Well, that was enough; now your Instagram habit is roughly where you want it to be. And you just look at it on the desktop instead of on your phone, and that was enough, and now you’re fixed. So environment design is a good place to start. The next thing I would recommend is the two-minute rule and scaling your habits down, making them as easy as possible. Basically, scale it down to a point where you can answer the question: can I stick to this habit 98% of the time, without fail, no matter what the conditions? If you have to say no to that, it’s probably too big to start. Pretty much every habit has an entry point, the first thing you try to do. Just focus on mastering that, and then build off of that.

The last one I’ll recommend: there’s a great story I mention in the book about Twyla Tharp, the famous dance choreographer and instructor. Even now she trains for two hours a day. She’s been training for a long time, dancing her whole career. But she doesn’t actually focus on the exercise habit. The habit she focuses on building is: I put on my workout clothes and my sweatshirt and I hail the cab at the side of the street, and if I’ve done that, then I’ve completed the habit. I think the insight she realised is that habits are often the entry point, not the end point. They’re the cab, not the gym. They’re like an entrance ramp to the bigger routines in your life. If you can master that habit, that little decisive moment that determines what happens in the next chunk of time, then the rest of it falls in line. I have this moment each morning where either I open up Evernote and start writing the next article I’m going to work on, or I go to ESPN and check the latest sports news. What happens in the next hour is really determined by what happens in the first 30 seconds. If I go to ESPN, the next hour is kind of shot, but if I start writing the article, if I master that entry point, then I’m speeding in the right direction and the momentum carries me into the rest of the task.

For me that’s a little bit inspiring when it comes to building habits, because what you realise is that there’s actually not that much to change. There may be five or ten of those little decisive moments, those little entry points throughout your day, that determine whether the next chunk of time is productive or not. If you can organise your environment, join a community or restructure your habits so that those entry points are mastered, then you’re much more likely to live a good, productive day. So I think those three things, environment design, scale your habits down and master the entry points, are some really good places to start.

Brian Rose: That’s powerful. I also think environment design means keeping the bad stuff out as well. You don’t want to be around negative people, or your own negative habits. Just skip those few times a month where you might be there. Say no to that birthday party, say no to that thing.

James Clear: Then you reduce exposure to the cues, and it’s much more likely that you’ll make productive choices. Like I said earlier, if you want a habit to be a big part of your life, make it a big part of your environment, and the inverse is also true: if you don’t want a habit to be a big part of your life, don’t make it a big part of your environment. Because in the long run your environment will overpower your willpower. At some point it’s going to suck you in, so reducing the odds that you’re surrounded by it increases your chance of success.

Brian Rose: When I wanted to get over my addiction, I left New York City. It’s extreme, but it worked. I never touched it again. There are massive examples of this behaviour all the time. When you’re talking about this stuff, I’m seeing it as well. Just get to the gym, get to the gym, and see what happens. Rarely do I want to walk out. I’m there, I start warming up, and then it’s just like, OK, this is fun.

James Clear: I love that quote by Ed Latimore, where he says the heaviest weight in the gym is the front door. Once I’m there, I’ll do the workout; the hard part was getting there. But also, to your point about seeing these themes or ideas recurring in your life, and the fact that you have some history or proof of some of those concepts: for me that’s really affirming, and I’ve heard a lot of things like that from readers. I think sometimes that’s the mark of a good idea: after you hear it, it sounds almost like common sense. Yeah, of course. It passes the logical BS test, this sense of: is that how life actually plays out? The best ideas are true but not obvious, and my hope is that most of the book was like that, that once you hear it you’re like, yes, of course that’s true, I just hadn’t heard it stated that way before.

Brian Rose: That’s some of my greatest guests here as well. I had a guy named Ido Portal, who’s a fantastic mover, a human mover, and he said that after he said it, everyone was like, “Yeah, that’s obvious,” but before he said it, no one was talking about it. And if you think about it, if we all think we have 10 moments in our day that can make this an amazing day or a crappy day, it’s not about 10 hours, because that can be overwhelming. It’s just 10 little decisions, even micro decisions.

James Clear: They’re little forks in the road.

Brian Rose: Yes. I might have the urge to go this way, but I can also just push it the other way, and then all of a sudden I’m not on ESPN, I’m not eating the junk food, I’m in the gym. My wife says, “I’ve just got to get the kids out of the house sometimes. Once I’m out, everything’s fine. I anticipate it’s going to be crazy, but it’s not. Once I’m out, everything’s fine.” It’s these little moments: if I can get these things done, it’s a good day. But we all battle against this stuff because we’re human.

1:57:53 So tell me about you. What’s a daily non-negotiable for you, even when you’re travelling, that you just have to get in, and it means you’re going to have a good day?

James Clear: That’s an interesting question. I’ve gone through different cycles when I travel. Sometimes I’ll actually programme my workouts so that my off week is when I’m travelling, so I don’t have to feel guilty about not getting to the gym, because I’m planning on it being off anyway. Then I’ll walk around the city or do some active rest. But when I’m at home, the biggest keystone habit for me is working out. I say that not just because it gives me the benefits of exercise, but because it also has this ripple effect in other areas. When I work out, I have this post-workout high for an hour or two, so I have good focus. I tend to sleep better at night because I’m tired from working out, which means I wake up the next morning with more energy. Also, for whatever reason, if I don’t work out I eat worse, but if I do, I’m like, well, I don’t want to waste it, so I naturally eat healthier. At no point was I trying to build better focus habits or energy habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits. They all came as a side effect of: let me make sure I get to the gym.

Sometimes that’s referred to as a keystone habit, and there are a variety of them. Exercise is a common one. Another one you’ll hear, especially from creatives, is taking a walk outside each day. They get outside for 10 minutes and then the rest of their day falls in line. Visualisation is a popular one, especially for performers, athletes, musicians and comedians: they visualise how the routine or the performance is going to go, and then the rest of the day goes well. Meditation is one I’ve heard from a lot of CEOs and managers: my keystone habit is that I need to meditate for 10 minutes, and if I do that in the morning, I can handle the craziness of the day better. And the last one, which I always think is interesting, a couple of readers have mentioned: budgeting or paying off debt. If people get their finances in order, then they naturally start thinking, oh, maybe I’ll go to the gym too, and that momentum builds in other areas. I don’t think you need to do all of those, but the question to ask is: what is the keystone habit for me? If I think back on my good days, what are those one or two things that tend to pull the rest of my life in line? That’s often a really good place to focus, because you can just build that one habit, and you know there are going to be a lot of good side effects because of it.

Brian Rose: Do you think any habit begets more habits, because you’ve accomplished it and you feel good about yourself?

James Clear: To a certain degree, probably. This is true of human behaviours in general: they’re bundled together or connected. You go to the bathroom and that reminds you that you need to wash your hands, and then you pick up the towel and think, oh, I need to put the laundry in, and then, oh, we’re out of laundry detergent, I need to go to the shop. That kind of chaining of human behaviour happens all day long. So certainly, if you build some positive momentum by performing a habit, that probably trickles into whatever the next action is. There’s probably some carry-over there, but certain habits or routines, for whatever reason, seem to have an even bigger impact than others.

Brian Rose: I like that keystone habit thing. For me it’s meditation, gratitude, saying my affirmations out loud, moving every day, training, sleep. If I can get all those done, I’m having a good day 90% of the time.

James Clear: Probably my biggest ones are: leave my phone in another room before work each day, exercise, and then get in bed by 10 or 10.30 or something like that. If I can do those three, a lot of other good stuff happens because of it. It means I’m getting enough sleep and I can wake up early and start the day well. Because I leave my phone in another room, I don’t get distracted and I can work on some important things. And because I get that workout in, I get all those benefits I just mentioned. Everybody’s busy, and life has a lot of responsibilities for all of us, so you don’t need to go overboard, turn into a robot and feel like you have to have every minute of your day planned out. But if you just get a couple of those big rocks in the right position, pull a couple of the levers and have them moving in the right direction, you can get a lot of good things happening for you without feeling like you have to totally redesign your whole life.

2:02:08 Brian Rose: What habit are you struggling with? What’s a habit you’ve been working on or are still trying to crack?

James Clear: First of all, I should just say that because I write and talk about habits so much, people think I have mine all dialled in. But I say this all the time: my readers and I are peers. We’re going through it together. I deal with the same things everybody else deals with. The only difference is that when I come across a strategy that works well, I write about it and share it. Otherwise I have the same challenges as everybody else. One that I’ve struggled with recently is what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call a power-down routine. I get this second wind around 9 or 10pm where I think, maybe I’ll do an hour of email or an hour of work. And of course it’s never just an hour. It spirals, and then you turn around and it’s midnight, and you’re like, ugh, I should have been in bed earlier. What am I going to do? Am I going to sleep in, or wake up tired?

I’ve been trying a couple of things to deal with that. I had a really good stretch of about six weeks recently where I was doing it the way I wanted to. You mentioned Nir Eyal, who wrote Hooked. Nir’s a friend of mine, and he has a strategy I thought was really sharp. He bought what’s called an outlet timer. You can get one for 10 bucks or so; it’s like an adapter. You plug it into the outlet, plug your device into the timer, and set the time you want it to kill the power from that outlet. Nir plugged his internet router into it and set it for 10pm. So now 10 o’clock rolls around, the internet gets cut off, you can’t watch YouTube, you can’t browse Netflix. Time to go to bed. I love little choices like that, which nudge you in the right direction. So strategies like that are helping, but that’s been one I’ve had.

Brian Rose: And that can work. Again, design your environment. It could be easier than you think, rather than relying on your willpower and then being mad at yourself because you can’t. Powering down is hard for a lot of people.

James Clear: I generally think the story, the narrative, that you just need more willpower, that if you really wanted it you would do it, that you just need discipline and grit, is not as helpful as it often sounds. It’s not that those qualities aren’t important; they’re all really important characteristics and traits. It’s just that it doesn’t really align with a lot of the research, which shows that the people who have the greatest self-control are often the ones who are tempted the least. So the way to increase your grit and perseverance and self-control and willpower is by redesigning your environment to remove temptations. You can get those qualities; it’s just that the best way to do it is not by forcing it but by redesigning.

Brian Rose: Then we have to admit that we’re all probably 99% a product of our environment, which is a struggle.

2:04:50 If I was to ask five of your friends, “What is James’s superpower? How is he able to get things done, write a book, do all the things he does?” what would they say?

James Clear: I don’t know. It’s so hard to answer questions about yourself like that, because all I see are the flaws.

Brian Rose: But you’re obviously able to write things. This book was not easy to write. I think it started off at seven or 800 pages and you boiled it down. That’s no small feat.

James Clear: That example gives maybe a few things they might say. One thing I do think I’m pretty good at is focus. If I pick a project, I’m pretty good at leaving the other stuff to the side. One thing that’s helped me with that, because I can be ambitious and want to jump on a lot of different things, or I’m excited by different things, so how do you reconcile that when all these things are pulling at you? How do you stay focused? One thing that’s helped me is the idea of seasons. Life has different seasons, and the question I’m always asking is: what season am I in now? Right now I don’t have any kids, so I’m in a more career-heavy season and I can focus more on that. It’s really mostly career and personal health; those are the two big burners that are on for this season, and family, and even friends to a certain degree, are taking a back seat a little bit more. But at some point I will have kids, and maybe that’ll signal a shift. Maybe the career burner will turn down a little bit and the family burner will turn up. That’s a different season, and my habits need to shift with it. But it’s easier for me to figure out what to focus on if I know what season I’m in. So that’s one thing.

The other thing that I think has helped me in a lot of different areas, whether it’s been sports or writing or business: I actually don’t get great results right away. The thing I really enjoy, and that has served me well, is refinement and editing. I really like the process of refining and optimising. When you mentioned the book: the first draft I turned in was 214,000 words. It was about 750 pages. The final draft that got published was about 65,000 words. So basically my thought was, well, if one out of every three words I write isn’t good, then I’ve got a real problem. But I didn’t actually cut that many sections from the book. It wasn’t like I chopped it out wholesale. There’s one chapter I removed and maybe two other topics I decided not to put in, but the rest retained the same potency as the initial draft; it was just massively refined and edited. I think that has been true for my baseball career too. After every season, I remember sitting on the back deck with my dad at our house, and we would talk about what I did well that season and where I could refine and edit and improve. Whether it was school or sports or business or the book and writing, that seems to be a recurring theme in my story. Maybe I’m a slow learner to a certain degree, but I just don’t stop trying to progress. It’s really that long-term editing and refinement. I turn around 10 years later and it’s like, well, now you’re actually in a pretty good place, even though it took a really long time to get there.

Brian Rose: 1% every day.

James Clear: Kind of.

Brian Rose: How long did it take you to write that book?

James Clear: It depends on how you define it. I’ve been writing about the topic for six or seven years now, so from the very start of building my website to publishing the book was probably six years.

Brian Rose: This helps a lot, doesn’t it?

James Clear: Oh yeah. It helped not only because I was able to build an audience to launch the book to, but because I had to develop my voice as a writer, and because I had to discover what topics were interesting to me. When I signed the book deal, which was three years in, I thought, well, I have all these ideas about habits, so maybe I’ll be able to build the book around some of those. I thought maybe it would be 50% my old stuff and 50% new, and it ended up being about 90% new and 10% old. But still, it helped a lot, because it pointed me in the right direction. So that process was really important. Then I got the book deal and spent three years from signing the deal until it came out: probably about two and a half years of researching and writing, and then six months of preparation and marketing and all that stuff.

Brian Rose: It’s a long time.

James Clear: It both is and isn’t. When you’re in the middle of it, it felt very long, and then when I got done with it I was like, three years is not that long. It’s a weird thing. Being in the thick of the work, it feels like it’s taking forever, but then you turn around and think, three years would have passed anyway, and I could have not had a book. I could still be talking about doing it. So it’s both long and short.

Brian Rose: And you’d rather have something you’re proud of, because you really will look at this for the rest of your life. You can’t unwrite a book.

James Clear: I said that to the publishers when I first walked in. I said, “Look, my only non-negotiable is that the book has to be great. The title, the exact layout, when we launch it, all these other details we can debate, but the only thing that is non-negotiable for me is that the book has to be great.”

Brian Rose: Why?

James Clear: I think part of it is what you just mentioned: I wanted to have something I felt proud of. That’s probably the deepest piece of it. The other thing, if I’m being honest, is that I wanted something my peers would praise or think was good. I recently got an email from a researcher, she’s well known, she’s produced a bunch of great books herself, and unprompted, I don’t know her, she sent an email saying, “I read this cover to cover and I loved it.” For me that felt really good, because I feel like academics in particular are going to be picky about the nuances, so if they like it, I’m like, well, I’ve probably got it right then. Maybe that’s just wanting to be praised or wanting to feel like you did a good job, but that part was a big piece. And then the other thing is: what am I doing this for at the end of the day? I’m doing it to try to help people. It has to be great. Changing your behaviour is hard. Building new habits is difficult. So it needs to be really good if you’re going to have any hope of actually making a meaningful impact for people. And part of it is also just how I’m wired. Why do something unless you’re going to do it well? Why would I want to do something average that doesn’t even register? It just seems like a weird thing. So all of that combined, I guess, were the reasons why.

2:11:25 Brian Rose: What was the best day of your life, and the worst day, in either order?

James Clear: It’s so hard to know, because it hasn’t played out fully yet. For example, what I was going to say for the worst day: I had a very serious injury, which I mention at the beginning of the book, where I got hit in the face with a baseball bat. It shattered both eye sockets and broke my nose. I had to be airlifted to the hospital and was placed into a coma overnight. It was a very long process.

Brian Rose: You were near death.

James Clear: It was bad. The book explains it in more detail. So I would think I would say that was the worst day of my life, but if you look at how the story ends up playing out, I actually learned a lot through that. That was a period of my life where I had to build small habits. I actually had to start small and use a lot of the ideas that I write about now. And I discovered something about myself through that process, which is that I can deal with a difficult challenge. If I was able to make it through that, then maybe other stuff that seems like a big deal on the day, taking a test in class or having some crisis in your business, actually isn’t that big a deal at all. So it adds a level of perspective. I think if you can take your worst days and not feel like you’re the victim of them, but that you’re learning from them, then maybe they aren’t actually your worst days. Maybe your worst day is actually a day you just waste, that goes by unused, without some kind of lesson or learning, whether it’s a painful one or an exciting one. Maybe it’s just the days where you were bored and didn’t live up to your potential. Maybe that was the worst day, but it’s so nondescript that you don’t even remember what it was.

And then best days: I don’t feel like I have one, but I can remember them; I can remember how they feel. I had this day in my junior year of college. I can remember talking to my mum on the phone, it was sunny outside, and I just felt like I was hitting my stride everywhere. It felt like everything was working. That day was great. I can remember a day in my final season playing baseball when we were playing one of the top teams in the country, and I got to pitch and threw a really great game, and gave the game ball to my dad. That was a great day. And I can remember some of the first days hanging out with my wife. Everything is magical when you’re meeting someone for the first time. Those are great days. A group of friends you’re with, and time seems like it’s standing still. In so many moments in life you’re somewhere else. You’re thinking about what your business is going to do, or what you’re going to create, or what you want to achieve, or something somebody said to you in the past, or something bad or good that happened to you. But every now and then there’s a moment where you’re just there, and maybe those are some of the best days. So I guess I feel like I have moments rather than one moment.

Brian Rose: It’s an interesting question.

It’s a good answer too. What scares you?

James Clear: Probably a lot of things, but in different ways. Certainly, like anybody else, I’m probably scared of uncertainty. Why do we save money for retirement? Probably because we’re worried about the uncertainty that the future holds. Why do I care about what others think of me? Maybe there’s some uncertainty there: what if they thought poorly of me, then what would happen? You’d probably be fine in most of these cases anyway, but we just worry and think about what could be. So uncertainty is probably something I deal with like everybody else.

Sometimes I question why I would do something like write the book. Why work on something for six years like that? I don’t know if it has to be out of fear. I guess you could twist it. On the one hand I could say, well, maybe I’m just driven to see what I can create, and that’s a really exciting thing. But you could also look at the other side of that coin and say what you’re scared of is not living up to your potential. Generally speaking, I prefer to look at the positive side of that coin and say, no, the reason I do things is because I’m really excited about them and they seem fun, and it’s great to fulfil your potential and try to figure out where your ceiling is. But you could look at it in a darker way and say, oh, actually he’s really scared of not becoming something. So it depends on how you frame it.

There’s an interesting exercise I came across one time. You’re going to write the story of your life, and you write out only the facts. You’re not allowed to say anything about how you feel; it’s just the facts of what has happened. In the first version, you write the best story of your life, only the positive facts. In the second version, you write the worst story of your life, only the negative facts. Both of those, if you do the exercise right, are true. You can’t deny them; you’re just listing facts. But you get to choose what story you tell yourself. So I’m sure there are plenty of elements of fear that drive me, like everybody else, but I’d rather tell myself the positive story and focus on those facts instead.

2:16:49 Brian Rose: What would we be surprised to learn about James? Something you do that we would be surprised at?

James Clear: I get into weird things. I’m really interested in travel bags, optimising my packing strategy, travelling light, that kind of stuff. A recent one I really got into is urban planning, architecture and design, partially because I thought, what if I built my own house? What would that look like? Would I design it? Then I started spiralling out of control and thought, what if you designed a city? What should that look like? It ties in a little with my work, because you could design a city for good habits, so there’s some overlap there. So maybe people would be surprised by some of the varied interests I have, things on the periphery. I think people would also be surprised by how unstructured my day is. Because I talk about habits a lot, I think people would assume he must be very robotic and have each hour blocked out, time blocking or something. But in fact my favourite thing is a blank calendar day, and I put a lot of effort into not having anything scheduled. So maybe that would be a little counterintuitive as well.

Brian Rose: Habits don’t equal structure, though, right? Those are two different things.

James Clear: I think this is actually a common myth about habits, or a criticism: well, if I build these habits, I don’t want to become a robot. What about spontaneity and freedom? I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into one lifestyle. My response is always that habits don’t restrict freedom, they create it. It’s actually the people with the worst habits who often have the least freedom. The people with the worst financial habits are always wondering where the next dollar will come from. The people with the worst learning habits always feel like they’re behind the curve. It’s by getting those things mastered that you actually have the opportunity to spend more time or money, or feel like you have the freedom and creative space to do some of the other random stuff that comes up in life.

Brian Rose: I totally agree. What keeps you awake at night?

James Clear: It’s usually good things, not bad things. Usually it’s ambition. There’s this very opaque question that I haven’t been able to shake. I say it’s opaque because nobody has a good answer to it. I’ve researched a lot and tried to figure out how to answer it, but it’s really hard. Basically it’s: what should I do with my life? But the version I’ve been asking is a little more detailed than that: what is the most effective way to spend a life, or what are the most important problems to work on? If you just google “what are the most important problems of our time”, it’s really hard to find anybody with a decent answer. Nobody really knows. There are different ways to try to answer it, but none of them feel really satisfactory to me. So wrestling with that opaque question has been something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Basically, if you accept the fact that your time is limited, and you want to make some small contribution in your little corner of the universe and make the world a slightly better place, it really makes sense to ask that question. Especially because hard work is incredibly important, and I think you should work as hard as you can, but let’s say you push it even more: maybe you can work 10% or 20% harder than you’re working now. But if you work on the right thing, you can actually make a 10x or 20x or 1,000x impact. So choosing the right thing to work hard on is much more important than working hard itself. That’s basically what the question is trying to get at: what is the right thing to work hard on? I don’t know that I’m physically lying in bed staying up every night thinking about it, but it has definitely occupied a lot of my headspace. It’s that kind of what-keeps-you-up-at-night question, because I know that if I’m going to pour myself into something, and give it my best effort, I want it to make the biggest impact it can. I want to help the most people I can with the limited time that I have. So trying to figure out the answer to that question has been something I’ve thought about a lot recently.

Brian Rose: You don’t want to get to the end of your life and have someone tell you, “You were over here digging, and you could have been over there, and it really would have made a big difference.”

James Clear: A friend told me a phrase one time. He said, “My biggest fear is becoming successful at the wrong thing.” If you’re going to give your best effort anyway, you might as well give it to the best thing, but figuring out what that is is a challenge.

Brian Rose: It’s a deep statement. Also, a lot of the time you see people do things they’re talented at, and that’s not always necessarily the right choice in their life, maybe because sometimes it’s not difficult.

James Clear: Well, you can be talented at a variety of things.

Brian Rose: Right, and sometimes people just choose one thing they’re talented at, but it doesn’t have much overlap with what benefits the rest of society. You want that Venn diagram where you’re both talented and it provides a great contribution and is very meaningful. And sometimes, just because you’re good at it, it doesn’t stretch your mind. You don’t go to that beginner’s mind, you don’t have the difficulty.

James Clear: It’s a tricky situation. You kind of need something that you’re both talented at and that fascinates you, because there are a lot of things you might be talented at that don’t fascinate you, and you just do them because you can get decent results. But at the end of the day you’re never going to maximise your potential compared to someone who is fascinated and curious about it, because when you start to mail it in or get bored, they’re just getting started.

Brian Rose: And it also has to be challenging in some way, but maybe you can figure that out by looking at that third-order, Josh Waitzkin, when-they-blink type of thing. Because if it’s not challenging, you can get bored. I was really good at science and maths and even finance, but it got boring after a while.

James Clear: This is that Goldilocks Rule piece we talked about earlier. If you keep doing the same thing, it’s not challenging you. You want to be on the edge of your ability so you can maintain that curiosity.

2:22:44 Brian Rose: James, I always ask a few questions at the end, and I’m going to hit you with them. If you could pick up a magic phone and call the 20-year-old James Clear and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?

James Clear: I don’t have much that I regret, but I think I would tell him to move fast. If I look at all the biggest things I’ve done, launching my business, writing the book, getting married, they were all preceded by really long periods of debate and overthinking, in some cases for three or four or five years. If I had told myself to move faster, I still would have had that default to think about things a lot, but maybe I would have moved a year quicker or something. Maybe we would have been sitting down here two years ago rather than now. I think that’s something I’m trying to learn. I don’t think it hurts me in a lot of ways, because it’s good to think about things carefully and it’s good to be strategic. I think that’s a good tendency generally, but I can take it too far, so maybe that would pull me back a little more towards the centre.

Brian Rose: Hence the motion and action thoughts. OK, on the same note: the best advice you ever received. It could have been about writing or baseball, or something from your dad.

James Clear: I’m sure it’s actually something other than this, but the one that comes to me is something someone told me during my first year of starting my company, which is: try things until something comes easily. The business I run now is actually the third or fourth thing I tried. The first two or three didn’t go that well, and when I tried the fourth one, it finally moved. The needle moved, people subscribed, things grew, and it was like, oh, this is what it looks like when something comes easier. It doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and it doesn’t mean you stop working. It just means that for whatever reason you’ve hit your stride a little bit more and the results come faster. I think you can apply that to a lot of different areas of life. Try a variety of relationships until something comes easily. Try a variety of business ideas until something comes easily. Try a variety of types of exercise until something comes easily. There are many versions of the same habits or experiences, and it doesn’t make sense to settle on one that feels like a grind if there is something out there for you that comes easily. So I’ve internalised that one in a variety of different ways.

Brian Rose: What about baseball? Can we learn anything from baseball that works as a metaphor for life?

James Clear: My dad used to tell me before any big competition or event, “Trust your preparation.” I’d be nervous or jittery before the game, or just excited or amped up, and he would just say, “Trust your preparation.” I always remember that phrase because it’s twofold. On the one hand it teaches you: calm down, you’re in the moment, you prepared for this, you’ll be fine. Don’t let it get in your head too much, just go out there and play. On the other hand, it also reinforces that the preparation is actually the most important thing. You are here right now because of the work you put in beforehand. This is the game, this is the result, this is the thing everybody sees, but the only reason this happens, the only reason you have something to trust, is because you put the hours in beforehand. I could say that about the book. October 16th 2018 rolled around, that was launch day, and I didn’t know how the world would receive it, but I could say trust your preparation, because I’d spent five or six years making this thing a reality. It was actually all of that work and the days that came before that made it a bestseller, not the launching of it on that day.

Brian Rose: I guess a professional is someone who shows up and does the work regardless, and does the preparation.

James Clear: I think it’s that Chuck Close quote, where he says amateurs work when it’s easy, and professionals just show up and do it on schedule. Anybody can do it when they feel motivated, but it’s the consistency, treating it like a pro, that ends up leading to the results in the long run.

2:27:03 Brian Rose: The last part of that question: to the 20-year-old who’s watching or listening to us, who is feeling a little confused, maybe doesn’t understand how habits are important or doesn’t know how to really put this stuff into their life. Any advice for them, especially that young?

James Clear: There are a couple of things that come to me, and some of this comes from Paul Graham, the famous startup investor and founder of Y Combinator. He wrote a good essay, I think it’s called What You’ll Wish You’d Known. He was asked to give a speech to high school students. He ended up never giving it, but it was the speech he wrote, so he just published it. It has a couple of good ideas in there that I think are useful to internalise. One is that you should choose things, especially if you’re young, if you’re 20 or early on in your life or your career, that are upwind of other options. One thing he talks about in that speech is: if you go to university and you’re deciding between majoring in maths or economics, choose maths, because if you get an undergraduate degree in maths, you can easily get into a graduate programme in economics, but if you get an undergraduate degree in economics, it can be much harder to get a graduate degree in maths. So you open up more options. Maths is upwind of economics; it gives you greater optionality in the future. So I would say, if you’re young, focus on some of those things: what are the things that give you greater optionality down the road? One example could be to spend your 20s focused more on building a network and getting to know people than on earning money. Earning money is important, and you should probably earn a decent amount, but you should probably focus more on setting yourself up for optionality in your 30s and 40s by developing a very robust network and getting to know a lot of people.

Another thing you can do, and this is more from my book than from Paul’s speech, is use what’s called the explore/exploit trade-off. This basically says that in any process, and you can think about it on a short timescale, like a six-month project with a deadline, or on a really long timescale, like the 40 years of your career, early on you should focus on exploring widely and seeing a lot of options. In relationships we call that period dating. In business or your career, maybe you’re trying a variety of different roles or a couple of different businesses. In the case of one project, maybe you look widely at five or six or ten different ways to do the task. Then, as the timeline continues to move and you get closer to the deadline, or deeper into your career, you start to exploit the best option you’ve found so far. So explore widely in the beginning, filter ruthlessly, and then obsessively focus on the best thing you’ve found. You explore in the beginning, and then you exploit. You never stop exploring totally; you can still do it for maybe 10 or 20% of your time. But the closer you get to that deadline, or the deeper you get into your career, you start to get some results. And early on, if you’re in your early 20s, that level of exploration is really important, so that you can try to find something that is a great fit for you.

Brian Rose: Right, and just be conscious of it. I think a lot of the time, especially these days with social media, everybody wants that success now, when it can be just an investment in your future.

James Clear: This is what I mentioned with the book: the next three years are going to pass anyway. Your 20s are going to pass anyway. You can either chase something short term and get to your 30s without having explored very widely, or you can do a lot of that, get to know a lot of people and build a network. Your 20s are going to pass anyway, and then you turn around in your 30s and you have a lot of options. You’ve seen a lot of things, you know a lot of people, and now you can really choose where you want to focus and where you want to double down. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get any results along the way; it’s just a different way of approaching the problem.

2:31:02 Brian Rose: James, thank you for the conversation, and thank you for the book. People go to atomichabits.com for the book, and then jamesclear.com for more of your writing, blogs and newsletters?

James Clear: Yes. You can find all my writing at jamesclear.com. If you click on articles, they’re organised by topic, so you can dive in and see what interests you. And if you want to go straight to the book, atomichabits.com is the place to go.

Brian Rose: It’s great stuff, really actionable things to get your head in the right place. And again, like I said at the beginning, I’ve had over 500 people in that chair, and I’m telling you, it’s all down to habits. If I look at my own personal life, when I had bad habits I had a bad life, and when I had good habits I almost always had a good life. Not always, but there was a massive correlation. And I still haven’t met too many people who wake up at 5am and don’t get things done. So sometimes even reverse engineering some of these things can lead to a lot of success and a lot of happiness. And like you said, I had a similar conversation with David Allen when he was sitting there, and he said, “Brian, what I teach you is the structure, so you can have a better life.” So this isn’t about trying to make you a robot, like you said. It’s about giving you all this great creative time and space and fulfilment. So thanks for doing the hard work. It shows.

James Clear: Thank you.

Brian Rose: And I’m looking forward to your next book. I was trying to push you to write a few books in there.

James Clear: My agent will appreciate that.

Brian Rose: I think, honestly, the whole affirmation thing is really interesting, and how it fits in there. There’s a bunch of things, and I’m sure you’re going to be going deeper, so I look forward to the next book. Great meeting you.

James Clear: Thank you.

Brian Rose: Cool, thank you.