You've written one of the best-selling books in history about habits because people always need more practical help with implementing their habits. And I have different strategies and different tools to get habits to stick, including one principle that is probably the single most important for building habits, but so much of it is about mastering the art of getting started. James Clear is one of the world's leading habit experts, educating millions to build lasting habits, master goal setting, and ultimately redesign their lives.

There are four different stages that every habit goes through: Q, craving, response, and reward. So, first, we want to make it obvious. Easier it is to see or get your attention, the more likely you are to act on it. The second is about the craving. It's all about making it attractive. And the more engaging or exciting it is, the more likely you are to stick with it. The third is to make it easy. The easier a habit is to perform, the more likely it is to happen. And then the fourth and final one is to make it satisfying. And that's about increasing the odds that you do it next time. And there's some tools that we can go through.

So, first, we want to make it obvious. Easier it is to see or get your attention, the more likely you are to act on it. The second is about the craving. It's all about making it attractive. And the more engaging or exciting it is, the more likely you are to stick with it. The third is to make it easy. The easier a habit is to perform, the more likely it is to happen. And then the fourth and final one is to make it satisfying. And that's about increasing the odds that you do it next time.

But one of the big takeaways from Atomic Habits is it's easier to build a new habit if you stack it on top of the habit you're already doing. So let's say that your current habit is you make a cup of coffee. And the new habit that you want to build is you want to start meditating. So then you could say, "All right, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds." And you can do it for anything.

There's also a framework that I call hats, haircuts, and tattoos: the secret to winning, habit shaping, and real lesson of getting 1% better every day. And we can talk about all of them.

Yeah, there's multiple things. So first thing is try to prime the environment to make the first action easy. Prime the environment to make the first action easy. So let's say writing for example. I find that for myself the biggest point of friction is choosing what to write about. Once I've actually finally settled, this is the thing I'm writing today, then I can get into it and I'm off and running. But I'll sit there for two hours just debating whether it's the right thing to be focused on writing or not. You know, should I work on this chapter? Should I work on something else or whatever. So, what I've started to do is sometimes I will write the first sentence of what I'm going to write and just leave it on the Google doc right there and then leave. And the next day when I come back, I'm already in, right? Like it's already the first sentence is already written. So now I'm just writing the next piece of what's coming rather than trying to choose what to write about. Another one that I've done sometimes is I will write sometimes I'll write the topic or I'll write the sentence on a post-it note and I'll put it on top of the keyboard and so when I come into the office it's right there in front of I can't you know I got to pick it off the keys to log onto the computer and so it's like remember this is what you're writing about right now you know so it's just trying to make it easy to get in. I have a bunch of readers who do stuff like set their running out running clothes out the night before, you know, so they're right next to the bed. You got your clothes and your shoes there. I one woman I just talked to uh her at an event. She came up afterward and she said, "I actually sleep in my running clothes and just get out and get put her shoes on and goes right out the door." But you're trying to prime the environment to make the action easy. Okay. So, how can you set up the spaces that you're in uh to prime those habits?

I think one really interesting question to ask, walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, your office, your living room, your bedroom, and then look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are easy here? What behaviors are obvious here? And the good habits that you say you want to build, are those the path of least resistance? Is that the obvious thing in this environment? And if not, maybe you can make some adjustments to try to make the good habit easier and the distractions maybe a little bit harder. So that's first thing, prime the environment to make the action easy.

Second thing is if there's like one principle that is probably the single most important for building habits, it's make it easy. Just scale it down and make it easy. I refer to it sometimes as the two-minute rule. So take whatever habit you're trying to work on, you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. Read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.

Sometimes I will mention this to people and they resist it a little bit. You know, they're like, "Okay, buddy." Like, I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. You know, I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So, this is some kind of mental trick and I know it's a trick. Then why would I fall for it? Basically, but there's this guy, I mentioned him in Atomic Habits, his name is Mitch. And he went to the gym and for the first six weeks, he had this strange little rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than 5 minutes. So, you get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And you're like, "This sounds silly, right? Clearly, this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants." But what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up, right? He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes.

And so, I think this is kind of a deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, has to become the standard in your life before you optimize and scale it up into something more. There's that quote from Ed Latimore where he says, "The heaviest weight at the gym is the front door." There are a lot of things in life that are like that. And so, by trying to make it easy to master, to easy to get started, um then you're in the game now. You're in the arena. There's all kinds of things you can improve from there.

I remember um Jordan Peterson saying talking about his some of his clinical um patients and referring to one in particular who was in a room full of junk and couldn't leave the room because of a certain fear and certain psychological problems he had. And Jordan saying that day one they just brought the Hoover into the room and that was it. Day two they plugged the Hoover in and that was it. And then by day like 30 the guy is out of the room, the room is clean and he's walking around outside for the first time in in months or years. And he goes on to say that the reason why people don't get started is because the first step is so embarrassing. People think that it's not worth it or that it's like shameful to do. It's like almost like patronizingly embarrassing. And um I've always kept that in mind uh since then and when from your work as well just that assume the first steps are like embarrassingly small.

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

But there's this thing that happens when people think about building better habits. I think particularly ambitious people, it's very easy to get excited about all the changes you can make. You start thinking, even if you don't say this explicitly, you think like, what would peak performance look like? you know, if I could really get my habits dialed in, what could I do? And you start imagining five, six, seven things that you would do and what all of them would look like in their perfect form and so on. And I think instead of asking ourselves, what could I do on my best day, it's better to start by asking what can I stick to even on the bad days? And that becomes your baseline. That becomes the first step. And now that you have this floor that is achievable even when you're tired, even when you're exhausted, even when you don't have much time, now you can show up and feel like you're succeeding, you know, and then you can progress from there.

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

And you talked earlier on about sitting there for two hours thinking about what to write. I I think I've learned through through business and in the first iteration of my career where I worked with CEOs and executives that were planning marketing campaigns that actually in hindsight often the biggest cost wasn't being wrong. It was the time you waste making a decision. You see this if you've ever you've interacted with so many big corporations. Yeah. Like they spend 18 months thinking about get waiting for Joanna to come back from annual leave to get procurement to sign off the thing. And I worked with this one particular founder during that season of my life who where I was working with his dad and him and his dad would take nine months because the company was so big. His son would interrupt me halfway through the idea and call us all in and say do it now. And he taught me that actually in life that the biggest cost is the time you waste making the decision. And I think about that with my own habits. I think sometimes sitting around thinking about whether I'm going to run today is costing me much more than just [ __ ] And do you think about how you kill that mental debate? Like is that an effective strategy to try and kill the debate and not make a decision per se?

Yeah. So speed is perpetually undervalued. That's for sure. Life is short and so the sooner that you make decisions, the sooner you get information. Now, I will say I I have a little framework that I call hats, haircuts, and tattoos. And this is how how I kind of think about it. So, a lot of decisions are like hats. Just try you try one hat. If you don't like it, take it off. You can try another. It's just real quick. You you know, you get some information. Speed is most important. Move quickly, get some information, learn something. If it was wrong, it's not that big of a deal. Just take it off and put a new hat on. Haircut is a little bit trickier. It's a It's a decision that you have to live with for a little bit. you know, like you're okay if you get a bad haircut, but you're gonna you're gonna have to live with it for a month or two. You know, it's it's going to take a little bit of time for it to grow out. And so, it's probably not a big deal to be scared of getting a bad haircut. I think a lot of people probably talk themselves out of it. It's like, you'll be fine in a month. It's it's fine. Tattoos are trickier. You know, you get a tattoo, you got to live with that choice. It's permanent.

And so, if a really what we're getting at here is, is the choice reversible or is the choice irreversible? If the choice is easy to reverse, speed is most important. You should move fast. If it's hard to reverse and you got to live with it, then you need to think carefully before you make the call. Um, and I think probably what you're seeing uh through some of your experiences is that most decisions in life are hats and haircuts. It's very rare that you end up with a tattoo, but we treat them all like tattoos. We Yeah, we uh I think in particular we are we are scared, particularly the bad haircuts. I think the ones that like linger for just a little bit, but not that long. It's like it's going to take you a month to fix this if if you get it wrong, but like that's fine. a month's going to pass anyway. Um, and so it's not that big of a deal, but we we act like it's a bigger deal than it is.

There's not a single one. There are lots that I'm like proud of or really excited by, ones I'm surprised by. Um, I heard from a guy the other day, he was the head coach at St. Olaf's University in Minnesota and men's soccer. And when he came in, their record was something like five and 13 and they were, you know, like near the bottom of the standings. And he was like, I read Atomic Habits right around the time I took this job. And we came up with systems for everything we did. We taught our players systems for how they tie their shoes and cleats to get ready for the game. We taught them systems for how they prepped for practice. We taught them systems for their role on the field. And uh, you know, gradually they improved each year, five and 13. Then they went like eight and eight. And then the next year after that they won the conference. And then the year after that they went to the NCAA Sweet 16 and then five years later they won the national championship. You know, of course stuff like that's awesome to hear about, right? You're like they went from they went from five wins uh in and then in five years later they win the national title. But the ones that matter to me the most are the ones that I hear from somebody and they say um I finally feel better. You know, I feel different. I look in the mirror and I'm like proud of who I am or uh my kids tell me that they're excited to see, you know, the change in me or things like that. And that's what it's always been about, you know, it's always been about becoming the type of person that you want to be. And so I think uh anytime I I hear stories like that, I think it's exciting.

It definitely does. I mean, repetition is how habits form. Uh the 66 days number comes from one study that came out that found that on average it took about 66 days to build a habit. If you look at the study, the range is pretty wide. So, if you pick something really simple like drinking a glass of water um at lunch each day, that might only take two or three weeks to form. If you look at something more complicated like um going for a run after work every day, that might take seven or eight or nine months to form. And so, I don't know that 66 days really tells you anything. It doesn't it doesn't tell you that this is how long it's going to take for your habit to stick. I mean, it the range is wide. Sometimes when people ask me how long does it take to form a habit, my answer is forever. Because if you stop doing it, then it's no longer a habit. And what I'm kind of getting at with that is that habits are not a finish line to be crossed. They're a lifestyle to be lived, you know?

And so we approach our habits as if it's a finish line. Oh, let me do this 30-day cleanse and then I'll be healthy. Let me do this 90-day sprint and then the product will be shipped. I won't have to worry about it anymore, you know? And it's like most things in life, especially the big important things, they're endless. They're endless battles, you know. So, just because you went to the gym yesterday earns you no bo bonus points for tomorrow. Like, you still have to show up tomorrow. Just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. You still have to be loving and caring again. Um, and so all the things that really matter are endless battles. And it's not about crossing a finish line. It's about living that kind of lifestyle. And so, yes, it is true that repetition matters. And yes, it is true that the habits will become more seamless and automatic and maybe a little less effortful as you repeat them more, but that doesn't mean that you'll never have to think about them or, you know, worry about them again.

That's a tricky question because um if you were to talk to an academic and they would tell you like a habit is this automatic non-concious behavior. Really quick simple things like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongs, you got to tap them together twice, you know, like stuff that you don't even really think about. Okay, that's actual habitual behavior. But if I were to ask you, what are some habits you're trying to build? you would say, "I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week or I'm trying to write every morning or I'm trying to meditate, you know, five days a week or whatever." And I know what you mean when you say that. You mean I want it to be this routine, this practice that I do consistently. But like writing every day is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth is. You know, going to the gym is not going to be automatic the way that tying your shoes might be. And so the things that we there's a little bit of sloppiness in the word habits and how we use it in life. It's not they're not automatic mindless routines most of the time. Most of the things that we want to be habits are not like reflexes. They're routines and rituals that we do consistently.

So having said that, it is true that after you've gone to the gym for a month or two, it does start to get easier. And I think there's a number of forces that kind of work in your favor there. One is you figured a lot out about uh what it takes to get into the gym. What time am I going? What route do I take? How do I pack my bag? Do I need to bring a water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym? Like all those sorts of things are little one-time costs that you got to figure out early on that once you're into a pattern, you already know them. You know, the water bottle thing sounds like a small thing. I heard from someone who said, "I always forget to bring my water bottle and they don't have water fountains at this gym." So like I I sometimes I skip the workout because of that. You know, it's like it's remarkable how little friction it takes to pull us off course. Mhm. And so figuring out all of those things is something that once you're a month or two in, you've crossed all you've, you know, you've fought all those battles and now you know how to do it. So that makes it easier. The other thing is you start to build friendships, start to build connections, you start to know the people there, you feel comfortable there. There's this concept Steven Presfield talks about where u you know if you have a wolf and it's roaming around uh eventually it starts to feel like it has its territory and early on in a process a creative process writing a book or whatever you go into the office the first time to write the first chapter of the book and you kind of feel uncomfortable it feels like it's not you yet you go to the gym on the first day you feel like people are judging you do I look stupid I don't know how to do this but after a while it becomes your territory it's just like the wolf it starts to feel like your home court and so That familiarity I think also makes it much easier to stick to the habits, you know, once you start to feel comfortable there and that takes a little bit of time. And then the last piece is identity. The more that you start to follow this habit, the more you repeat a habit, the more you reinforce being that type of person, the more you start to have that element of your story. I think this is one of the most important things for building habits and getting habits to stick, which is how your habits reinforce your desired identity. We often start by asking what do I wish to achieve? But I think what we really should start with is who do I wish to become? What are my actions reinforcing? What are my actions taking me closer toward? In a sense, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So, no, doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence does not finish a novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. And no, sending one bit of positive feedback does not make you like the world's best leader, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of leader who cares about their teammates. And individually, those are small things, but collectively you build up this body of evidence for being that kind of person.

It's a little bit different than what you often hear. Like you often hear people say something like um fake it till you make it. And I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. Like it's um asking you to believe something positive about yourself. But behavior and beliefs are a two-way street. And so what you believe influences the actions you will take. And the actions you take also influences what you will believe. And my encouragement, my suggestion is to start with the action. To let the behavior lead the way. To make one sales call or meditate for one minute or do one push-up and let that in that moment be evidence that you were that type of person. You know, if you go outside today and you shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don't instantly think, "Oh, I'm a basketball player." But if you do it every day for next three months or six months or a year, at some point you cross this invisible threshold where you have to admit, I guess playing basketball is like kind of an important part of who I am. You know, I guess it's part of my identity. And once you adopt a habit as part of your story, once it becomes part of how you see yourself, it's not just like I need to go for a run. It's like I am a runner, you know, I go I do this because this is part of who I am. Then you'll fight to maintain the habit, right? Like then then it becomes easier for it to stick. And so the connection between habits and identity I think is ultimately how you really get habits to stick for the long run.

It reminds me of a study I was reading recently that said if you speak to someone in terms of giving them an identity versus using a word as an adjective the behavior occurs. So an example would be if I you do something for me and I say do you know what James you are a kind person in the studies people become more kind. But if I say that was kind or that action was kind people are less kind. So if I if I can give you feedback that embodies your identity, then you're more like likely for that behavior to occur. So with my team, and this is maybe giving a bit of the game away, I will often refer to them as an identity. I will say you are an innovator. You are an experimental because from the studies I've read that increases the probability that they embody that identity. There's another study that um did it for voting. So people were more likely to go and vote if you said like I am a voter. You got them to identify as I'm a voter rather than are you voting today? Um, and so same same thing. There's an example in Atomic Habits I talk about. Imagine two people who are trying to quit smoking, you know, and so the first person gets offered a cigarette and they say, "Oh, no thanks. I'm trying not to smoke." Um, and the second person gets offered and they say, "Oh, no thanks. I'm not a smoker." And so the first person is trying to resist something that they still see themselves as, but the second person no longer sees themselves as the type of person who smokes. And um yeah, some of the evidence and research suggests that once you adopt those identities, it's it's easier for you to stick to the behavior. Reminds me of the research from Leon Festinger, the guy that came up with the term cognitive dissonance. The way that I understand the concept of cognitive dissonance is that if I have a perceived identity of myself and something external threatens that or challenges it, we're not good at living in contradiction. I'm not good at So, for example, I'm a an accountant right now and I hear that AI is doing accountancy work amazingly well. Now, I've invested 10 years in that accountancy degree. I see myself as a great accountant. My my my sort of initial reaction will probably be to either dismiss my current identity as a great accountant that that's going to have a great career in the future or to dismiss the AI. And he talks, well, people that have studied his work talk about how we're very poor at being able to hold two contradictory things to be true at the same time. So, um we tend to protect our identity.

Yes. Um, there's something incredibly powerful about this that also ties into habits, which is that a lot of our identity, not not the whole thing, but large portions of our identity are tied to our relationships. You know, I'm a father, I'm a, you know, husband, I'm a, you know, and so like it's the connection that we have with others. Our social bonds influence the picture that we have of ourselves. This is something that widely influences our habits, you know. So, we are all part of multiple groups. Sometimes that group is large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be British. Sometimes that group is small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of this family or a member at the local CrossFit gym. But all of the groups that you belong to, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act. Have a set of social norms for what you do in that group. And when your habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group, they're pretty attractive. You know, like you want to stick to them. You get praised and rewarded for it. You fit in. And when they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, they're kind of unattractive. You get criticized and it doesn't feel good.

And so if people have to choose between, I have habits that um I want, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized, or I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something. Most of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to improve. And so you want to do something different, but you also know you're going to be heavily criticized for it or you're going to at least add friction to your relationships. And we don't want to live with that dissonance. That dissonance of I could have this, but I also create friction here. One of the lessons I think one of the big takeaways if you want to build better habits and get habits to stick particularly for the long run is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. join groups where you can rise together, where the people that you're surrounded by have the type of habits that you want to have.

It reminds me of this um this thing that appeared in Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter about resisting the equilibrium. H I I didn't know about this. Go ahead. So, in Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter, he writes to shareholders that when referring to Amazon's ability and desire and need to innovate through the future, he says he makes a comparison to Richard Dawkins book called the I think it's a blind clock maker. Uh yeah the yeah blind watchman blind watchman. Yeah yeah yeah yeah and says that essentially all living organisms live in this constant battle to resist their equilibrium and actually death itself is when we become our environment because right now me and you have huge amount of energy expenditure to be different from our environment in terms of temperature in terms of acidity etc. And he he's making the comparison which sounded a lot what like what you just said that if you want to that all living organisms are in this constant battle to be different from our environment. Um and that the more different our environment is the harder the fight. So if I go to the desert my body has to put put out even more energy to be a different temperature to be a different sort of acidity than the environment. But if I want to make my life easier and make that fight easier, then go into an environment where my environment is the same as my internal my internal state. That's great. The I think that punchline of the more different your environment is from the habits that you want to build or from whatever equilibrium you're trying to achieve, the harder you will have to fight to maintain. And that is a fight that you can do for I don't know a day, a week, a month, but it's some limited amount of time. At some point it just is draining to try to grind against the environment all the time.

Sometimes I view environment both physical and social almost like a form of gravity. You know, like the the physical environment that we're in right now, okay, that's always nudging you in certain directions. Like I'm I'm sitting in this chair right now talking to you. I could be sitting anywhere else, but I would have to sit on the floor, right? The the environment of the chair is ushering me to this spot. It's almost like a form of gravity pulling me here rather than getting me to go somewhere else. When we leave this room, if I wanted, I could try to do something crazy and break through a wall or climb through the ceiling or whatever, but I'm going to go through the door because that's where the environment is naturally nudging me toward. It's the where that behavior happens easily. And all of our spaces are like that. You're always being kind of pulled toward what is natural and easy and consistent in that environment. So, how can you prime your environment to make those the things you want to do? That's for physical environment. Social environment is the same. You know, it's all you're always kind of being pulled toward what the behaviors are that are natural there. What are the social norms? What are the things that people get praised and rewarded for? What are what is the culture typically calling you to do? And that's where I think the answer is you want to surround yourself with groups who have the behaviors you want to have. Join groups where your desired behavior is normal.

If it's normal in that group, then you can rise together. So, I mean that that must mean getting rid of certain people in one's life. And sometimes those people are hard to get rid of because their families, their moms, their dads. Sure. And I, you know, I'm a little uh sometimes you hear people say things like, "Fire your friends," you know, or whatever. Like, and I I I'm not I'm not all the way there. Uh I I think that yes, it is true. Sometimes you have um an extreme circumstance where it's a particularly toxic person or something like that. And yeah, like you know, you probably maybe should not be around them and that that those can lead to very hard decisions. But I would say for the majority of life and the majority of your relationships, what we're really talking about here is not getting rid of relationships. We're talking about finding specific places where that habit can thrive. So here are some examples. There's a number of studies that have shown that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. So for example, if you Well, first let me back up. There's an interesting way to define what a habit is, which is that it is a behavior that is tied to a particular context. So, for example, your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the context of your couch at 7 p.m. And whenever you walk into your living room and you're by your couch and it's in the evening, you're kind of naturally being pulled toward picking up the remote and doing that because that's the context the habit happens in.

So, if you want to build a new habit, and again, these studies have found that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. Well, let's say you want to start a habit of journaling. Well, you walk into your living room in the evening and you sit down on the couch and you're like, I'm going to start journaling. But you're naturally, you know, your brain is kind of like, well, it's time to pick up the remote and turn on the TV. That doesn't always mean that you need a brand new space, like a new building or a new room to do every habit in. But you could do something like you could get a chair and put it in the corner of the room and that becomes the journaling chair and the only thing that you do when you sit in that chair is you journal for five minutes. So now you have a new context that is tied to the behavior that you want to perform. And in the social sense, so this is what we were talking about previously. You want to be able to create a space that is a safe place for that envir for that habit to live or for that habit to thrive. say um sometimes there those spaces are ready made like uh let's say you want to do yoga four days a week but you look around your family or your friends in your apartment that you're living nobody else is interested they don't want to do it too you do it in the living room you kind of get made fun of or you're stepping on other people's space they're like I'm trying to do stuff in here too you know it's just kind of inconvenient well you can go to a yoga studio and that's a place where for that hour you can be surrounded by a group where your desired behavior is normal you don't have to fire any of your friends um and you can just go to the place where that happens that can thrive. And I think each habit likes to have that. It likes to have somewhere where it can exist in a way that it's going to be supported or in a way where the environment makes it easy. Sometimes the environment is readyade like that. Other times it's not.

So for me, one of the most useful things that I did in my entrepreneurial career, I had I had no entrepreneurs in my family, no authors. So I had this thing that I kind of wanted to do, but I I didn't have anybody close to me that I could like look to. first six months that I was an entrepreneur, I sent like 300 cold emails just to other people that were like a year or two ahead of me. Someone who seemed like you're actually doing this thing where, you know, you've got this online audience and you're you're writing about stuff you like. Um maybe 30 people got back to me. I did like a little, you know, Zoom call or whatever and, you know, we chatted and connected and then I met some of them at a conference like six months later. So I was six months in. I knew like maybe 10 people that I had met in person and I had like 30 that I had reached out to. So now it feels like okay at least I know a couple people who have done this thing and I started hosting these retreats every once or twice a year I'd get six or eight authors together and I'd say let's just rent an Airbnb. We'll split the cost and we can talk about how to build an audience and how to grow your you know email list and how to write a book and launch it and you know all the stuff that we were kind of focused on. It was almost always like the best six month uh best weekend of my year. Um because I would have six months worth of stuff that I need to execute on after that was done. That's kind of like going to a yoga studio for yoga, but you had to create the space. I was always worried that I was going to look like some dork, you know, and like invite everybody and they would all say no or whatever. But everybody wants the same thing. You know, they're all waiting for somebody to create the space for like-minded people to get together. So sometimes you need enough courage to create the space yourself. But the punch line is the same, which is you're trying to surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

How does this work if you're trying to break a habit? So for each of these there are there are many ways to do each of these things. You know there's many ways to make habits obvious. There are many ways to make them attractive and so on. And what I'm giving you is just kind of the overview of how to build a good habit or how to install a new behavior. If you want to break a bad habit then you just invert these four. So rather than making it obvious make it invisible. Okay? Unsubscribe from emails. Don't keep junk food in the house. Reduce exposure to the queue. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. That's the hardest one. We can talk about that in a second. Rather than making it easy, make it difficult. So, increase friction, add steps between you and the behavior. I find like here's two examples for me. I've tried this new thing where I keep my phone in another room until lunch each day. So, usually it's like 9 to 11 or so in the morning. My phone is down the hall. It's in a different room and I'm in my office. And it's just a chance for me to work on my own priorities rather than whatever's, you know, coming in through the phone. I'm like everybody else. If my phone is right next to me, I will check it every 3 minutes just because it's there. But if it's down the hall, it's only 30 seconds away, but I never go get it. And I always think that's interesting. You know, it's like, did I want it or not? In the one sense, I wanted it badly enough that I would check it every 3 minutes when it was right by me, but I never wanted it so bad that I'd go work 30 seconds to go get it. And I found that a lot of habits are like that. if you just introduce a little bit of friction, they kind of curtail themselves to the desired degree. So, beer is another one. I I don't think this would work if you like, you know, actually have an addiction or something. But, I've noticed that if I get like a six-ack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge and I open it up and it's like right there and I can see it. I'll have one at dinner just cuz it's there. But, if I put it like on the lowest shelf in the fridge, like all the way in the back, I kind of got to bend down to even see it. Sometimes I'll forget. I'll have it. It'll be there for two weeks. I won't even remember that it's in there. Um, and so I think that's all about like, you know, inversion of the first law, make it invisible, and inversion of the third law, make it difficult. The the less likely you are to see it, the harder it is to do, the more steps that are involved, the less likely it is to occur. And then the final piece is the inversion of the last law, which is rather than making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying. So layer on some kind of cost or a consequence. And I in atomic habits, I call this the cardinal rule of behavior change. It's like so pervasive of a teacher, which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated. And behaviors that get immediately punished get avoided. And so obvious, but you have to ask yourself, do you have a good feeling when you do the thing that you're you want to do, the habit that you want to build? Are you getting immediately rewarded for that? And if you have a habit you're trying to avoid, what is the cost? What is the consequence? Is there something that you know feels like a punishment there? If so, then you're more likely to avoid it. If not, it gets tricky.

It's hard, isn't it, with like there's cookies on the counter out there. You might have noticed them as you walked in that you've got them on a little plate. Loads of No, but I'm going to grab one on the way out. But but I was just thinking about that like if I have the cookie now, I'm not going to get an immediate punishment. The only sort of immediate punishment is a bit of guilt that I might start to feel that I'm now one step further away from the goals that I've set myself in terms of fitness. Is there any way to bring forward the the punishment in areas not the punishment but the the lack the downside yeah the cost of your good habits is in the present the cost of your bad habits is in the future and so for a lot of your quote unquote bad habits it feels good in the moment you know like eating a donut feels great now playing the video game feels great now doing you know whatever like it's only later that you realize oh there was a cost associated with this even something like the classic bad habit of smoking Maybe you get to stand with friends outside and socialize or maybe you reduce stress in the moment after a long day of work. It's only, you know, five or 10 or 20 years later that you have this consequence. So, um, a lot of the game of building better habits is finding ways to pull the rewards of your good habits into the present moment so you feel good now. You don't have to wait three years for it to happen. M and pulling the consequences of your bad habits into the present moment so that you feel a little bit of the pain right now and you realize this isn't actually serving me. Which I guess is why they put the uh the photos of people's lungs on the cigarette packets. That's yeah like one of the things it's trying to do right.

What about this um habit scorecard over there? Is that what your parents use with for swimming? So the habit scorecard just a this is just a simple like assessment. The insight behind this practice is that intentional behavior change starts with self-awareness, right? So you will you will change your habits all the time whether you think about them or not. You're you're building habits whether you focus on it or whatever. Like your your brain and body is built for it. Now the more interesting question is can you design your behavior? Can you shape your habits in the way that you want? And that's where self-awareness comes in. It's very hard to shape your habits without being aware of them. And so there have actually been some studies that have found that just the act of becoming more aware of a behavior will change it on its own. For example, there was one study that looked at people who journaled about their they created food journals for what they were eating. No tracking of anything. There's no they were not on a diet. They're not trying to eat certain way. They don't care about how many calories you have. There's no tracking or anything. All they did was simply write down what they ate each day. And just the act of journaling about it changed what people ate and reduced the the number of calories that they had and so on just because they were aware of what was happening. Um and so this is true for most habits which is once you start to notice them then you start to notice ways that you could improve them or ways that you could refine them or ways that maybe you want to do things differently. You're not operating as on autopilot in quite the same way. So the habit scorecard is just a simple way to do this. It's very it's very simple. You just write down all the habits that you're doing each day. So you can start usually there's like a package of behaviors in the beginning and maybe around lunch and then like a power down routine at the end of the day. But you know it could be something like wake up, drink a glass of water, take a shower, you know, check my phone, get dressed, whatever. Like you just, you know, go through the list of what your normal day looks like. And then once you have the behaviors written down, you give them a score. And the score is just uh if it's a good habit or a habit that you like that's contributing to your life, you put a plus sign. If you it's a habit that you feel like you want to get rid of. Um like maybe say I wake up and then I scroll on my phone for 10 minutes before I get out of bed. You're like, well, do I really want to be doing that? Maybe not. I'll give a minus sign. And then some stuff's just neutral, you know, like get dressed, you know, sure, whatever. Just put a put an equal sign. And the idea is not to judge yourself for it. It's more like sometimes I tell people it's almost like imagine when you like go to the zoo and you like, you know, look at the lions and you're like, "Oh, wow. How interesting that they would do that." You kind of like do that with yourself and you're like, "Oh, how interesting that I spend my time that you know, you're not like trying to judge yourself or analyze it. It's just let me see what I'm actually spending my time on. And then once you have that list, I think the and this is like later in the book, but there's um it becomes very useful for building habit stacks for for layering your new habits on top of the things that you're already doing. And so some of it self-awareness, some of it is priming for habit stacking.

Look at this. I like these props. This is great. All right. So, first let me let me uh just unpack the idea. Habit stacking is this concept that came from Stanford professors named BJ Fog. And his insight, which I think is great, is that it's easier to build a new habit if you layer it or stack it on top of an an old habit, a habit you're already doing. Um he calls it the tiny habits recipe, I think. But it's the insight is just that we all have habits that we're performing each day and those can become anchors. they can become cues that prompt the new behaviors that we're going to perform. So let's say that your current habit is you make a cup of coffee, right? So you're already doing this. You're going to start each day. You're going to make a cup of coffee. And the new habit that you want to build is you want to start meditating. So then you could say, "All right, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds." So that this is just like a basic habit stack, right? So you start you start with coffee and then you meditate after. Now, once you get good at this, you can start to chain them together. So, for example, you could say after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will write my to-do uh I will meditate for 60 seconds and then I will write my to-do list for the day. After I write my to-do list for the day, I will prioritize them and start working on, you know, my first task or whatever. And now you have this little stack that you do the same way each morning each time. And it just is a way to like build simple momentum and get you in.

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

Let's take my um my writing habit for example. I the habit that launched my career was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday and I did that for three years. So the first three years 150 articles you know write twice a week. That was a great habit. They were like 2,000 word pieces or so. But then I signed the book deal for Atomic Habits. I didn't have the capacity to do that and also write the book. So that had to change. I wrote the book for like three years and then the book came out and now I write a newsletter once a week and that's much shorter. But I kind of feel like my writing habit is maintained that whole time. It just changed shape. But that's fine. It just needed to shift based on the season. But I don't know, people, they get so attached to one form of a habit sometimes that they don't realize that it's no longer serving them. And I think that's the one of the trickier things to give up is a habit that used to be good for you, that used to work well, but no longer serves you in your current season. It's I find that I'm kind of a slow learner with that.

I guess parents can probably really relate because they're forced to basically change their goals and therefore their systems would have to I mean you're a father of three so you probably know this much better than I do but have has there been systems that you've had to sort of I think there's lots of uh inflection points in life so having kids is one of them uh starting a new job moving to a new city you know it can be big stuff like that I just talked to a mother who her kids moved out so she's now an empty neester you know she's like last 25 years I've been parenting all these kids and now finally they're all out, but it feels in some sense it almost feels like a loss of identity. You know, you're like, I I thought I was one thing and now, you know, feels like things have shifted. Um, but also it just signals an inflection point in life and a new season that you're in. And when your seasons change, your habits often need to change with it. And you talk about this um four burners theory which I guess dovetailes into what we're talking about here where you you use this to kind of think about what habits to pursue in any season of life but also a phrase that I've heard um so often specifically from mothers on the show comes to mind which is that you can't have it all at the same time and I've heard that I think four or five times different mothers in particular which is I mean says something about society yeah have said to me that they've had to realize that they can't have it all at the same time for sure. So this is not my concept. This this idea that I came across. It's called the four burners theory. And it breaks life into these four burners on a stove. So you have work and career as one. You have family, friends, and then personal health or you know uh yourself basically as the other. The idea is that for the burners to really be going well, you can't have all four on at the same time. And burning stove. The stove. Yeah. Yeah. The stove top. So you you have you can choose you could have three going on at kind of like a mid level, but if you really want them to do well, you can only have two on at the same time. And you know, who knows? I I don't know if it's true or not or whatever, but it's an interesting idea. And what it does is it gets you to realize, yeah, a fundamental part of life is trade-offs. And you cannot be good at everything at the same time.

So this is true across projects. If you choose try to do seven things at once, spreading yourself thin in seven different ways, very hard to be excellent. For me, what I think about is life has a series of seasons and life has a series of sequences. So, let's say it's not it's not always exactly 10 years, but let's say the big movements in life are roughly 10-year buckets, right? So, like for me, building my first business, that was kind of like a 10-year thing and eventually led to the launch of Atomic Habits. You maybe get five or six of those in your adult life. Some of those things make sense to do in a different order than others. Like if you want to travel the world and see a bunch of places and party in a visa, you're probably not going to do that in your 60s, you know? Like I mean, you can. There's no nobody's saying you can't, but some things are probably better sequenced in other, you know, in other spots. Obviously, there's, you know, especially for women, there's a certain limit on if you want to have a family, what decades that happens in. So, yeah, it's just uh it's just a matter of sequencing and prioritization. If you look at the like tapestry of your life, what do you want the big movements to be and where do those seasons need to slot in? Um, yeah, it's a it's a that there is no right answer, but it's interesting. As soon as you realize it's a finite number, and as soon as you realize that trade-offs are always going to be a reality, you have to deal with that in some way. Um, I've decided that right now while my kids are young, like I'm I'm going to turn the career burner down. And that's fine. It's not going to be how it was for the last 10 years. But that's okay because they're only five once, you know? They're only turning six once. They only go to second grade once. And I I want to be there for all that. So, um, there are always trade-offs.

I was very goal driven for a long time. I I mean, I probably still am. You know, I don't think there's any way to get around the fact that we all have goals and think about the outcomes we want and so on. But a goal is about the outcome that you want to achieve and a system is about the process for getting there. And so your goal is the target, the outcome, the thing you're shooting for. Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win, you know.

Goals are best for people who care about winning once. Systems are best for people who care about winning repeatedly. If you really want to make progress again and again, if you want to get to the top and stay at the top, you need some process for staying up there. Some collection of habits that's going to keep uh this machine running. So this is why, you know, I say in the book, we don't rise to level of our goals, we fall to level of our systems.

As you were talking, I was thinking so much about about business and founders and entrepreneurs because they all have big goals. We want to build the best AI app or the best I don't know restaurant and we they stay really focused on those. But the great the greatest founders that I think I've met and interviewed on this show are actually really orientated on like what you call in the book first principles and systems. Mhm. Is there a way to to become more orientated towards systems and and thinking about first principles like the the habits that lead to the goal is or is it just just so that some people have it cuz like Elon Musk is always talking about first principles and he thinks in terms of building the system. I do think some of it is personality and like what you what's exciting to you to think about like some people are very future oriented and like thinking about what the systems are and what that would lead them to and and so on um or more processoriented but there are a number of questions that you can ask that can help you figure out like what systems you should be focused on you know so like a couple of the ones I like one question is can my current habits carry me to my desired future so you have a bunch of habits you're following right now what what path are you on you know can your current habits take you there? And they could be either way. Like sometimes the answer is yes. And what you need is patience. You just need to keep, you know, staying on the path. But sometimes the answer is no. And then obviously something needs to change. You know, you're hoping for one outcome, but then you're following a different lifestyle.

So to want the outcome without the lifestyle is to like torture yourself. And what really matters is not do you want the the result. Anybody would like the result if you just hand it to them. The question is do you want the lifestyle? One of the little things I try to do whenever I have a new business project that I'm thinking about or something I'm I'm excited about potentially doing, the first question I ask is how do I want to spend my days? And so then you like draw a box and inside that box, how can we make the most money, reach the most people, make the biggest impact, you know, make the contribution that you want to make, but not outside of it. And what happens a lot of the time is people do that in reverse. They start by asking how can we make the most money or reach the most people or make the biggest impact and then they decide oh well this is what I want to do but it's actually outside of how they want to spend their days and it's not going to work out well because you know it goes back to our point uh previously about is this fun you know if the if they don't want to spend their time that way you're just grinding for a little while and eventually it's not going to work. That's the key for building systems that really work is is this how you want to spend your days. the person who wants to live the lifestyle is much better positioned to get the result.

You say that um there are multiple problems with with goals as a I guess as a rubric for thinking about what to do or what to aim for. One of them is that winners and losers have the same goals. Everybody wants the results. Let's say you have a 100 people apply for a job. You got a new job opening. Presumably, every candidate has the goal of getting the job. The goal is not the thing that determines the outcome. So the person who wins and the 99 people who lose, they have the same goals. You look at the Olympic Games, presumably any event, everybody who's competing has the goal of winning the Olympic medal, right? Of winning the gold. So the goal is not the thing that makes the difference. So again, winners and losers have the same goals. So if they have the same goals, they cannot be the thing that make the difference in their performance. It has to be something else. Maybe having a goal is part of it. Maybe it's necessary, but it's not sufficient for the outcome that you want. And for that, what you need is a system. You need a collection of habits that are going to make the difference um and uh and accumulate into a bigger outcome.

And you say goals restrict your happiness. There's some implicit promise internally that once I get to this goal, then I'll be happy. You know, once I write a New York Times bestseller, then I'll feel better about it. You know, once I achieve this certain number on the scale, then I'll be happy with my body. Once I get to a million dollars in revenue, then I'll be happy with the business. And so you're kind of constantly pushing happiness off to the next milestone and thinking that once you get there, then finally you'll be satisfied. But I think in fact the better way to do it is to fall in love with the process, to fall in love with the lifestyle, then you can be happy along the way and still achieve the goals as you go, still achieve the milestones.

For a long time, I wrestled I had trouble with this question of do I have to be dissatisfied if I want to be driven? Yeah. Do you have to be dissatisfied to be driven? Because to me, I felt like there's where I'm at right now and there's where I want to be. And so there's this gap and there there that gap is dissatisfaction. That gap is, you know, you're you want it to change. You want it to close. And it's also what is motivating and driving you is to try to close that gap. And so the healthiest answer, maybe the answer is yes, I don't know. But uh the healthiest answer that I've come up with is imagine like an acorn falls from a tree. it manages to take root, becomes a seedling and then a sapling and eventually grows into this mature oak tree. And at no point in that process when it was just an acorn, it wasn't criticizing itself for not being a sapling. You know, it was just a sapling, it wasn't criticizing itself for not being an oak. Um, it wasn't dissatisfied with where it was at. And nobody came over and was criticizing it for, "Oh, I can't believe you're not a full-grown tree yet." But it kept growing the whole time. So simultaneously you have this thing where it was both perfect at each stage that it was at. Nothing was wrong and yet it continued to grow. And the reason is because that's just what an oak tree does. That's what it is encoded to do. It is encoded for growth. And so when I look at myself, I think if I put myself in the right position, that's how I feel about it. You know, I I am perfectly happy with where I'm at at each stage. And yet I'm encoded to grow, right? I'm encoded to keep going. And so I can both be driven and be satisfied. I can both be appreciative of the moment and still moving forward. And I think that works best when you find that thing. Sometimes we call it your strengths. Sometimes we might say it's what you're encoded to do. Uh but when you find that thing that is well aligned for you and if you do find that, then you can have both of those.

I love that. I love that. And I think with with age and maturity, I've gotten closer to being in that region where I'm well aware nothing is going to make me happier at all. like no accomplishment future nothing's going to change anything but at the same time I'm still striving and that does feel like a contradiction to some degree it feels like how can those two things be true at the same time that you're striving for things that you know won't really move the needle in any any way the difference I see between like me and something in nature is that I the thing in nature probably isn't comparing itself on Instagram to like everyone else and I understand humans to be like comparison machines kind of how we understand the value of things like I understand the value of the steak on a menu by the the cheap steak and the most expensive one. So I think the middle one is probably right. Do you think much about comparison as a motivating or demotivating force in this picture? I think it can be very helpful and also it can also be very harmful. So it's just sort of a a sense of how you use it. I tend to find it better if you compare small things. So if you compare marketing strategies or squat form or you know writing style or you know the first sentence of each chapter like how do I have a good intro? If you compare tactics, then that can be really helpful for building skills and for developing your ability. If you compare big things, marriage, net worth, you know, things like that, it's like that's just kind of a recipe for ending up unhappy. Um because they as the scale gets bigger, things get more vague. There's so many things involved in marriage and so you know, or net worth or whatever. You you just see one little slice and you are trying to compare these two big things, but you don't even know what the full picture is. Uh, and so comparison is like the teacher of skills when it's applied narrowly, but it's the thief of joy when it's applied broadly.

That makes sense. Yeah. Early on, when you said that, you know, ambitious people, they have lots of aspirations, lots of habits they want to start. I was thinking about myself and thinking there's probably 30 habits that I would like to acquire. I'd want to be better at writing. I want to be a runner. I want to be better at speaking. I want to be a better friend and be more um attentive with my friends and make sure I text them on their birthdays and sh you know all of these new habits that I want to pursue. How does one know which one to aim for first? Is there a framework for knowing? Yeah, there there's some things that you can do. I don't think um to your point earlier about uh sometimes the riskiest things just take a long time making a decision. You know, if you maybe you should just pick one and work on it and then you can get on to the next one. But I do think there's some level of strategy which is a good place to start is by asking yourself which habits are upstream from other good things happening. So for example I know that if you were maybe the maybe the question to start with is when you live a good day when you feel dialed in when things are like rolling along well for you what tends to be part of that day sleep. you know, okay, great. So, that's, you know, I would say for me, sleep, sleep is definitely one. I would say, uh, getting my workout in. And usually reading and writing are a part of it, but I think I could just boil it down to reading. If I just read like 10 pages, that often sparks the writing. So, like to me, reading is like the fuel for writing for me. So, so I could say get a workout in and read for 5 minutes or 10 minutes. Those are the two things that are part of a good day. And what happens is they're upstream from a lot of other good things happening. For example, if I get the workout in, yeah, I feel good. I get the benefits of the workout, but I also have a post-workout high for like an hour or two. So, I my focus and concentration is better. I sleep better at night because I got the workout in. Now, I'm tired. I tend to eat better when I work out. It's when I'm not working out that I eat terribly. That's why I don't know. It's kind of like I don't want to waste it or something. So, at no point was I trying to build better focus habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits. those just came kind of a na as a natural consequence of getting the workout in. So what are those things that you do that are upstream from other good things happening? I think those are good like anchor habits to start and focus on.

But if I could add another one for myself, I would say it's a little bit of time. It's really just time to think, but it's it's time to reflect and review. There's this interesting thing that happens if you if you have a really good work ethic, if you have a strong work ethic and working hard has gotten you far in life. It kind of becomes a crutch. You know, you for for a long time I was like, if I ever had a problem, I was like, well, I'll just work my way out of it, you know? I'll just just work harder on it until I figure it out. And that that's great. That's really powerful for a lot of things. But at some point it breaks, you know, like you can maybe if you really try maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder, but there's some limit. But if you work on the right thing, well, you could get 100x the result or thousandx the result. And so if you just keep your head down and work hard, it's very unlikely that you'll be spending your time in the highest and best way. And the only way to figure that out is to have time to reflect and review. Time to think, you know, so you need enough time to think to figure out what should I be focused on next. And so I think that is it's almost reflection and review is almost like the meta habit that is above all others because if you give yourself time to reflect and review then you can troubleshoot your habits and figure out how to adjust them.

I was thinking as you were saying that that that that time to reflect and review is actually also a review of are my current systems moving me closer because when when when you're talking about that I was thinking of times in my life where I was so close to like the picture and I was so in the trenches doing the thing that I hadn't come up to even say actually is there a system I could put in place to solve this problem over the next five or 10 years like for example is there a person I need to hire so actually should I go into the hiring process versus be in there fixing the problem myself should I spend 10 hours this week hire on hiring a candidate to do this or should I be doing it but sometimes you get so caught up in the trenches when especially when things are tough and and difficult and moving very quickly that you don't review your systems and also when you're talking about systems I thought about how systems sometimes expire. Sure. Yeah. Because things change. That's a great point and I think this is probably one of the most overlooked things with habits. A lot of the time when someone sits down and they want to build a new habit, they don't say this, but what they kind of assume is what it would mean to be successful with this habit is that I do it for the rest of my life, you know, and that if at some point I'm not doing it, then that must mean that I failed or I quit on it. But that's not how it is at all. Like things have a season, you know, and so habits have to change shape over time.

I have this little theory that the secret to winning is actually learning how to lose. It's that the secret to winning is knowing how to lose. Um and what I mean is that it's knowing how to handle a loss. It's knowing how to rebound and bounce back from that. I think that I learned it through sports. I don't think sports is the only way you can learn it. I think probably anything that you do with some level of public visibility could teach you. you know, musical performance or being in a fitness group with your friends or there's lots of ways you do it, speaking publicly. But one thing about sports is that you're going to fail in front of the rest of the team, you know, like the ball will come to you'll start make the strikeout to end the game or like you know, you go uh into the gym and work out with the team and like you miss a lift or you're the weak one or whatever. Like that doesn't feel good, but then you realize life moves on and you got to go on to the next set and you have to show up again the next time. And each little instance where there's like a little failure like that is practice for you to bounce back again. And I think it's important to have something in life that's like that that's teaching you how to respond to failure. That you're learning how to lose and how to bounce back from a loss so that you can ultimately win.

I got to the point at the end of my career um my senior year where I was basically like listen I don't want to lose but if we're going to lose I'd rather it be me. I'd rather be out there. Give it put it on my shoulders. I can take the loss, you know, I can I can handle it. I I'll give you everything I have to try to get us to win, but if we lose, like, I'll be able to bounce back from it. And I think that that ended up serving me really well in my entrepreneurial career because stuff is never going to go your way all the time. Um, and you need to be able to try, be willing to try things and be willing to sometimes look foolish because of them and still find a way to show back up the next time.

Reminds me of watching Roger Fedra's commencement speech. He's arguably the best tennis player of all time. And shockingly, in his commencement speech, I don't know if you saw it, he talks about how in his career he's missed something like 47% of the points. So, he's the best to ever do it. And he's he only in his career has won 53% of the points, which means that half the time he's taking L's. But the difference is what he does when he takes the L and not allowing that L that that missed point to compound into what his next shot. M and I was in LA with my friends for my birthday. My friend Ash, who's had the most paddle training. We were playing paddle. We do, that's what we do basically all the time when we see each other, our group of friends. He'd had the most paddle training. He's been in Spain with a coach. But when he lost a point, he would then start losing easy points. And there's this photo of me watching him play and I'm like, "What the hell's going on with him?" Like, he's the best. He's meant to be the best player. He's got the most practice, most repetitions. But when he loses a point, this downward spiral takes place where he just starts missing easy shots. So when he sat down, I told him about Rod Roer Fedra's thing. And I gave him this little idea in his head to to handle the loss. And I said to him, when you lose the point, say in your head, that point doesn't matter. I'm going to win this game anyway because I am the better player. And I still get goosebumps when I say it because he went from being the fifth best in our group of five to beating all of us immediately. And there's there's it's so funny cuz my girlfriend and everyone here knows like he was like dancing through the house the same day. He beat all of us. I had never been beaten by him. I have a pal in my garden. Like he beat me immediately. And all it was was was making sure that when he took an L, he didn't spiral into his emot the emotional center of his brain and start catastrophizing which he's susceptible to if you know him. He went straight back into the prefrontal cortex, the rational center of his brain. And he and he said he and you know he's posted about it online and I actually part of my Asia tour recently was I showed all the videos and all the WhatsApp messages of this whole thing happening. But it just goes to show that actually it's how you take the L.

I love those mindset shifts. It's just a it's living life with a next play mentality, you know? It's like you don't let the last play dictate you or like ruin you. It's we have to move on and make the next best choice now. We have to we have to live for the next play. Um and how much emotion just like ruins our training. Sure. You know. Yeah. I feel like a lot of this is there's a great book Inner Game of Tennis um that came out many many years ago. Might even be 50 at this point. Um but it's basically all about this. It's about not getting in your head. And it's it's specifically for tennis, but it applies to life, you know. It's it's just about um yeah, it's moving on and having this next play mentality.

So David Braford said that to me as well about one of his main objectives when he had the cycling team was to get them not to think about the race while they were on the race. And he said, I think it was Chris Chris Hoy or someone. He said my entire training with Chris Hoy was getting him to stop thinking about the current race he was in. and that when Chris was hit his personal bests, he would get off the the bike and have no recollection of cycling. He goes to the point that it was like he was asleep on the bike because when the alternative meant that Chris would start thinking about his time and then cycling too hard and exhausting himself and fall out of his his training. So, fascinating fascinating um you talk about daily mental mindsets as well. Is it important to adopt a particular daily mental mindset?

Well, I um I had this thought that uh one time I had this thought that it would be cool to be able to hire a mental performance coach who just did one thing. So you you hire this coach and then they call you up each morning like 8 a.m. or something and they give you like a five minute pep talk, you know, or just they give you like a five minute mindset shift, just something little kind of like what you said to your friend, you know, and just like you get this little mindset shift to reset your day and go into it with momentum and they hang up and you just go do your thing. Um, and you know, I I couldn't find anybody who, you know, could do that, but I've been working on this little project where I've been trying to figure out how to do it. And so, I came up with, it sounds almost kind of silly, but I'm really excited about it. I came up with this Atomic Habits daily calendar. And the idea is just, it's actually like a blend of Atomic Habits, Principles, and 321, which is my weekly newsletter. And I just have like one little mindset shift that's on each page. And it's just one page for each day of the year. You just look at it, read that page, boom, go into your day. And like it's just intended to be a little mindset shift. Anyway, it's a it's just a small thing, but I like I like the idea of priming yourself to start the day in the right way. And um I don't know. I didn't think that I would be excited about a calendar, but I'm I'm kind of excited about it. I kind of feel like it it could be good. So, is it coming out? Yes, it'll be out in uh it'll be out soon. Yeah. Okay. And where where would we find that? Do we sign up to the uh It's on Amazon. You can you can go there or you know, you can go to jamesclair.com and you'll you'll find it there. But um yeah,

On that point of um doing things in the morning and generally having less energy later in the day, do you do you think much about h how to manage your own energy? It's I spoke to Dr. Lisa Feldman who's a neuroscientist who came up with this concept of like the the body budget that we have this finite amount of energy. And since then it's really had a big impact on me because I start in so many ways that we've talked about. One of which is I try I try to not try and take on too much because if in a world where my energy on a daily basis is finite I don't want to get to the end of my body budget but also the order of things like do I put my most important tasks today at the beginning of the day etc etc

I would layer so yes I do think about this a little bit uh and I've heard this like you want energy management not time management you know construct the other thing that I would add to it that I don't know that I've ever heard anybody talk about is control so the Um, the standard thing that everybody says is, "Oh, we all only have 24 hours in a day." Which obviously is true, but if you were to break that into like 24 1-hour chunks and just look at your day laid out that way, you have different levels of control over certain 1 hour chunks than others. Um, so for example, the, you know, what I said a minute ago, like if you have a bunch of kids and you're getting them dressed from like 7:00 to 8 a.m., that hour isn't that much under your control. It's not a good time to meditate. It's not a good time to work out. There's other responsibilities that tend to happen in that hour. And so I think that's an interesting thing too is to map your day out and look at this and say, "All right, which hours are is my energy the best and which hours are most under my control?" And then you can start to see like where you're ultimately what I think you're getting to is what are the good hours for me? You know, like where do those live throughout the day? And then the next step is to ask what is getting my best hours and what's getting my leftovers. And I I have had a couple different times where I've looked at things and said, "I say this is important to me, but really it's only getting my leftover hours." And so then you're like, "Okay, something might need to change." So I I think about all of that. I think about where's uh how much time do I have in general? Where are the pockets where I have the most energy or the best energy? Um and then also where are the pockets where I have the most control? And then you try to figure out how to slot stuff in. And theoretically, you'd want to put the new hard habits you're trying to form in areas where you have the highest degree of control versus like 11 p.m. at night. Uh, right. I Yeah, I think I think in general, that's right. It's it's so tricky when you have multiple things that really matter to you. You know, it's it's like, all right, you're choosing between family, you're choosing between work, you're choosing between personal pursuits and these new habits you're trying to build. Like, everything's got to kind of work together. And so, it's a balance of of shaping all of that.

There's I ultimately chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons. There's there's three meanings to the word atomic. The first is tiny or small like an atom which obviously I think your habit should be small and easy to do. The second meaning is the one we're talking about now and the one people often forget which is an atom is a fundamentally unit in a larger system. So atoms build in molecules, molecules build in compounds and so on. And your habits are kind of like the little units of your day. You know, collectively you put them together and you have your daily routine. And then the third meaning is the source of immense energy or power.

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

Powerful impressive life. Do you think that we should all be aiming at this is a bit of an interesting word but happiness is that should that is that the north star that our habits should ladder up towards or fulfillment or whatever one might say or meaning for first of all I think we should distinguish between happiness and meaning you know or happiness and purpose or something fulfillment I don't think they're necessarily the same you know like there are many moments in my life when I am happy uh and that can be in the moment and a lot of the most meaningful things that I worked on you know atomic habits was one of the most meaningful projects that I've worked on. It seems to have made a big difference for a lot of people or helped a lot of people. I feel great about that. But I wasn't necessarily happy every minute that I was working on it. You know, like it was it was quite difficult in lots of different times and it took a long time and it was arduous and so on, but it provides a lot of meaning. So, I definitely think it was worth it even if I wasn't always happy in the moment. So, I don't know that you should necessarily optimize for any of that all the time. Um, you know, I don't think your habits will lead you to some place where you are just permanently happy. Um, but they will definitely take you on a journey where happiness is part of it and where meaning can be part of it. Um, and there are lots of other things that are parts of life too. But, uh, yeah, I I think that you will be well served to invest in them for sure.

James, thank you. Thank you for um changing so many people's lives. You must hear this all the time, but what a remarkable remarkable um impact you must have had on so many people you'll never get to meet. Getting them to quit habits that would have otherwise been fatal for them. You know, my dad is a prime example of someone who was smoking for 20 odd years of his life. He starts reading about these habit cycles in your work, but in other people's work as well, and he's quit smoking and that's probably extended his life to some degree. And that's one such example of I'd say 25 million because I know the Atomic Habits has sold 25 million, but you've reached many many many millions of people through your newsletter as well, 321. um which is the I mean the newsletter has kind of created a blueprint for anyone that writes a newsletter. Frankly, I think everybody looks up to your work and what you've built as the the framework for starting their own newsletters. And you know, you never get you'll never get to see the downstream impact of the work you've done. But on behalf of everybody who's had their life ch changed because of the hard work you've put in and your obsession and your focus and your passion and these incredible works of art that you've written and that you didn't rush. Um, thank you and thank you on behalf of myself because your h your work has been super formative in how I think about business, how I think about my team. Um, and many of the phrases that we use in our office every single day to build the companies we've built have come from your work as well. Everybody needs to go out. I mean, if you don't have Atomic Habits, then I don't know what you've been doing with your life. But, um, now that the Atomic Habits workbook is here, you now have a much more um, self-awareness inducing, practical, hands-on framework for implementing some of the stuff you've read in Atomic Habits. Now, I'm going to link both of them below so everybody can go grab them. But also, your James' newsletter is phenomenal. So, I'll link that below as well. We do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.

Question that has been left for you. Dear next person in the chat, what do you believe is the best way to unify people of differing or even conflicting beliefs? Let me know your thoughts. Best Kamal Harris. I think the best way is to scale it down. You know, if you say, "How can we have a more unified nation, it's big, it's vague, it's it's almost impossible, it's like an intractable level." But if you scale it down now, you can come up with things. You know, how can you have a more unified neighborhood? You could start a book club or do a block party or you can come up with all kinds of things that you could do. And what you find is that in many cases in life, problems are intractable at a certain level, at a certain scale. And if you shift what level you're at, suddenly it reveals itself and there's a new solution. And so I think that is obviously true uh with big picture things like like the question I was asked but it's also true for your habits. You know if you think about your life in general and you say how can I have a better life or how can I figure out my purpose? How can I figure out you know how to have a life of meaning? These are big hard questions. They're sometimes they're almost intractable. They're too vague. They're too broad. But if you can scale it down and say how can I live a good day today or how can I have a good week? How can I have um you know a good next hour? how can I make this minute as perfect as possible? Well, those those levels are much more achievable. And so, I think if you scale your habits down to a level that's more solvable, you'll often see that there's a path forward there.

What's interesting with your neighborhood analogy as well is that neighborhoods are interconnected. So, if I if I focus on making my neighborhood good, then that kind of just crosses over with the next neighborhood. Like thinking about my street where I used to live and so if that neighborhood becomes good, it's going to then hit the next domino, which is the neighborhood next door. and then eventually called which is also true for your personal life. You know your each unit of time each little habit is connected. You know you put your habits together and you kind of end up with this system of behaviors that influence your day and your week. So mastering this hour makes the next hour a little bit better as well.