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

what's the two-minute rule? take whatever habit you're trying to focus on and scale it down to somebody takes two minutes or less to do you know i have this reader he started going to the gym and he lost over a hundred pounds it's kept off for more than a decade now but when he first started to go he had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes right it sounds like kind of ridiculous so i go clearly this is not going to get the guy the results he wants well you realize as he was mastering the art of showing up a habit must be established before it can be improved you need to standardize before you optimize and then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate what is the mechanism by which we can do that broadly speaking i think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit and i think one of the best things you can do early on this is if i could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't it it would probably be this what is the role that identity plays in terms of habit formation ultimately i feel like identity may be the most important thing with habits your habits are how you embody a particular identity so when you make your bet you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized if you study biology for 20 minutes on Tuesday night you embody the identity of someone who is studious the act of doing it is proof that you are that type of person and eventually you start to build up this body of evidence for being that way you have every reason the world to believe it so one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become so when you show up at the gym today you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts when you sit down and make one sales call you are casting a vote for being a salesperson when you write one sentence you are casting a vote for being a writer and no doing one push up does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for that identity it does provide evidence for being that type of person and eventually as you build up that body of evidence you start to take pride in being that way and I think that's where you get to this really resilient place in terms of building your habits when you start to take pride in being that type of person you will fight to maintain the habit you know it becomes the opposite situation now instead of trying to force yourself to do it you're trying to maintain it because it's a part of your identity that you believe in that you you know want to to keep you know if you take pride in the size of your biceps you never skip arm day at the gym no if you take pride in how your hair looks you have this long hair care routine you do it every day we would know it's like and so really the goal is not to read a book the goals to become a reader you know the goal is not to run a marathon it's to become a runner the goal is not to do some silent meditation retreats to become a meditator is to install and adopt this identity that this is the type of person that I am and I think ultimately that's why small habits matter so much you know behavior and belief is like a two way street you know what you believe will influence the actions that you take but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself and you know every time you show up and do it in some small way you proved yourself a little bit hey maybe I am that kind of person and so my encouragement my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way to start with some small action and then prove to yourself and you're in that moment that you were that kind of person and as you start to foster and build that identity sticking with the habit becomes easier I like the idea of the small you had one percent better in your book to the small changes leading to big results I think where people go astray is the lack of patience sort of changes the outcome so I know I want to be healthier but I know it's a lot of work and a lot of time if I eat healthier I go to the gym more I just live a healthier lifestyle and that's where we get in trouble but we do with everything it's not a lack of patience changes the outcome that's a good phrase it's definitely true I think there are two ways people can go astray so there's there's what you just mentioned which is not being patient enough and sticking with it we'll talk about that in a minute the other one is small changes can really matter but only if they're oriented in the right way you know we know we all know people who spend time on minutia and trivial things you know you kind of waste time on small stuff that doesn't really matter and I think one of the distinctions is are your small actions accumulating or are they evaporating you know are you doing small things each day that are oriented toward a larger outcome or are you doing small things each day that are just kind of like one-offs and don't really add up in a lot of ways I feel like the two time frames that matter most in life are 10 years and one hour you know so like 10 years is just shorthand for the big meaningful things that you want to do in life where do you want to be in a decade you know I sometimes I like to encourage people to don't let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade and one hour is how can I do something today right now that is oriented toward where I want to be in 10 years and if you can kind of live in that simultaneously in those two modes of thought if you can both be thinking long term but acting short term then you start looking for little changes little adjustments that do add up that do accumulate that are not trivial and you know meaningless so I think that's one way people go astray is there their small actions are not oriented toward the larger outcome they're not accumulating the second way that they go astray is what you just mentioned which is lack of patience changes the outcome I one of the examples I give an atomic habits is thinking about an ice cube you know so you walk into a room it's cold you can see your breath and ice cubes sit on the table we start heating the room up one degree another degree another degree ice cube still there eventually you get to this tipping point this phase transition the ice cube starts to melt this is like one degree shift no different than the shifts that it come before but you hit this transition and things change and habits are like that a lot of the time you know you'll hear people say things like yeah I've been running for a month I can't see a change in my body or we've been meeting every Friday for six months we still haven't shipped this feature yet and it's like yeah that work is not being wasted it's just being stored you know it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube up a little bit and not melting yet it's like well you just haven't hit the phase transition so that's where people give up yes yes I the San Antonio Spurs have a quote hanging in their locker room where it says you know they've won five NBA championships and it says when I think about giving up I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock a hundred times without it splitting into and at the 101st blow it cracks and I know that it wasn't the 101st that did it but all the 100 that came before and so many and things of life are like that you know it's not the last workout that got you fit it's all the 100 that came before it's not the last sentence that finishes the novel it's all the 100 that came before it's not the last conversation that closes the sale it's all the 100 that came before it's this willingness to keep showing up and hammering on the rock and knowing that at some point you are going to hit that phase transition you are going to hit that you know that new level but you need enough persistence to keep doing it are there tips or tricks you have because like when I'm working out I'm getting better but I'm getting better internally I just don't I can't visualize not visible but it is in it like I can't see it but it's happening yes are there tips or tricks you have that we can use either psychologically or practically speaking this is one of the big lessons for habits which is just because improvements aren't noticeable doesn't mean improvement isn't happening you know that you're not going to see a change on the scale every time you work out you're not going to see a change in the number of subscribers every time you publish an episode or whatever like it's you know it takes a while but the tricky part is if something's not working it also takes while you know you just keep banging your head against the wall so how do you know when you need to be patient and how do you know when you need to try something different and sometimes you'll hear people say like try try try again I actually think it should be rephrased to try try try differently you need to keep trying but you need to keep trying different lines of attack this is I think Naval has something where he says you know it's not 10,000 attempts it's 10,000 iterations no an iteration is a different way of doing it so you need you need some adjustment to the approach and I don't think you need to do it 10,000 times usually just doing it five different ways or 10 different ways is enough to see oh one of these is working better than the other yeah so this is the this is the second kind of insight which is when something goes well usually it goes pretty well from the beginning it's not now that does not what that does not mean is that you'll always have the results you want right away or that you will immediately get the outcome that you're you're hoping for but what it does mean is that you should this was one of the best pieces of advice given to me early in my entrepreneurial career somebody told me you should try things until something comes easily now that doesn't mean that it will be easy but it does mean that it results will come easier than the other things that you have been trying and so in a lot of ways I think what you kind of one of the big quests for life is to experiment enough to find what comes easy for you and then work really hard on what comes easy because if you work hard on the thing that you have some skill set for some strength for some natural aptitude for then you're very hard to compete with so it's just your classic explore exploit trade off you know early in the process you need to explore more and experiment more and then eventually you start to discover okay the 10 things I've tried these the two that work best now you need to double down on what's working and start exploiting some of the things that are actually getting your results Peter Till gave a talk a while ago and one of the things he said that really stood out to me was we underestimate when something's working we underestimate how long it can go for and how powerful it can be so often we change habits that are working for us too or we think we tinker with things that are working man there's so many places in life where this is true like I so two examples one in the gym I have a friend who was very strong really good lifter squad over 500 pounds and we were trained together and he was doing the squat program and it went great he made a lot of progress over like this three month span and then I had to travel or something I didn't see him for a little while whatever I came back maybe I saw him like six months later and I said oh hey are you still doing that squat program he's like no as I oh did it like did you stall out or something he was like no I just got bored and you're like man it like all the time you know it happens everywhere people just the quest the desire for novelty overpowers the you know the desire to get results it's like we just can't keep sticking with it so doubling down on what's working in a lot of ways I feel like the process is actually quite simple try a number of things right so experiment with a number of things run a number of small experiments once you find something that works double down on it and then keep doing it until it stops working which is the step that a lot of people skip and then once it stops working go back to the start and try a lot of small experiments again and it's really it's really not more it doesn't need to be more complicated than that but people shortcut each step they either don't try enough experiments they try one or two things they say well this didn't work for me you're like well he's not enough to try two like maybe you need try 20 you know and then once they find something that's working they maybe they don't double down on it enough that seems once you've tried a lot of things you're kind of diversified doubling down feels kind of risky you know to just go all in on something but you need to be able to flip that switch and fully commit and then once you're fully committed people get bored and so they don't stick with it until it stops working keep doing it if it doesn't work this is part of the reason why I have not published another book yet atomic habits is working really well and so I'm trying to take my own advice and don't stop until it stops working do that might be forever yeah eventually eventually you realize that it's not just about results right it's also about how do you want to live your life what do you want to spend your time on but but yeah so I think those those three steps probably should be taking more seriously than they are how do we create an environment that makes behavior change inevitable I think that's one of the best questions how can I create the conditions for success you know how can I how can I design an environment where my desire change is easy in a lot of ways that's one of the driving questions of atomic habits is to say there's this I came across this body of research when I was working on the book about willpower and self-control and a lot of the surface level conversations about habits that people have are about discipline and willpower you know people will look at a professional athlete and they'll say man if I was just as disciplined as them but I you know I talked to one guy who played for the Philadelphia Eagles and he said you know during my career everything was designed for us you know we went we would go to the stadium and we have professional trainers and nutritionists the food is prepared for us the you know all the workouts are designed coaches are on us every day to do the right drills and the right order and to you know like everything is there's this environment where the conditions for success have been fully created and he's like after I retired that was the hardest time for me to stick to it like people would look at me as a professional athlete and think wow how disciplined are you but in fact you know what I was as I was benefiting from my environment and all of us are like that and so I think you can look around your own environment and say how can I do a better job of creating the conditions for success let's forget about me being a more disciplined person or being you know someone with superhuman willpower and let's try to make it as easy as possible for me to do the things I want to do each day so a couple questions I think are helpful one is walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day your office your living room your kitchen bedroom and just look around and ask yourself what is this space designed to encourage you know what behaviors are obvious here what behaviors are easy here and you'll start to notice that it's designed for certain things you know a lot of people feel like they watch too much TV but walk into any living room you know like where do all the couches and chairs face what is this room designed to get you to do and I'm not saying you need to rearrange your entire house but you know you can notice that if you put the healthy food out on the counter and it's visible you're much more likely to eat it like I wanted the examples in the book is that I used to buy apples and I would put them in the crisper in the bottom of the fridge and I would kind of like forget that they were there they were just tucked away in the drawer and then I'd find them in like a week and like two of them gone bad and I'm like I'm wasting food and I'm wasting money so instead I just bought this little display bowl and I put them in the counter on the counter just visible and now you grab one whenever you walk in and they're like gone in two days and so it's just a change in the environment what is obvious you know are you creating conditions where the change that you want or the behavior that you want is obvious attractive easy and satisfying and the more that you can do that the more likely it is that you'll fall through you want to you want to be able to walk into the rooms that you're in each day and the good habit is the path of least resistance it's the easiest thing to do and in a lot of the time you walk into rooms and it's the distractions that are easier to do and you feel like you're swimming up stream and trying to fight your environment to make a change happen so that was one question what's the other one you had around environment I like am I creating the conditions required for success what is this room designed to encourage and then how can I make this behavior more obvious and there are there are a number of ways that you can do that like some of it is just you know if you want to go for a run take your running shoes and you're closed set them out the night before I have one guy who he sleeps in his running shorts so he just gets up all he has to do is put a shoes and a shirt on then he's out the door you know he's just trying to make it as frictionless as possible I found that to give you like another example if I buy a six pack of beer and I put it on the you know shelf where I can just see it as soon as I open up the door I'll grab one each night and have one in dinner just because it's there but if I tuck it down in the lowest shelf and like put it in the back I got to like bend down to see it sometimes I'll forget that it's there it'll be there for like two weeks you know it's just about what is obvious what is in front of you just like the apples yes right and yeah it's just the inverse of that and so I'm not saying that that's enough to change like an addicted behavior or anything like that but so many of your behaviors will curtail themselves possibly to the desired degree if it is less obvious if it's not as successful another little rule that I follow is I take my phone and I try to leave it in another room until lunch each day so that just gives me from like nine to noon ish where I can work on my own agenda and not respond to everybody else's agenda you know I'm not interrupted and if if I have my phone next to me I'm like everybody else I'll check it every three minutes just because it's there right but I have a home office and so I put it in a different room it's just down the hall it's only like 30 seconds away but I never go get it and so many behaviors are like that it's like well did you want it or not you know like in the one sense you wanted it so bad that you would check it every three minutes when it was next to you but in another sense you never wanted it bad enough that you would work for 30 seconds and walk down the hall to get it and so a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior what would you say to somebody who doesn't have the confidence to start anytime you do something new by definition you are doing something you're unqualified for it can't it can't be if you've already done it if you already have some kind of qualification or skill set or experience then you're qualified for it it can't be new it's just something you're repeating that you've done before so you have to realize that there is some level of uncertainty that comes with anything that is new so I think just accepting that is a good starting place the the second thing is that you don't need to figure it all out today like one of the frameworks that I like I think I heard this originally from Sean Peary he said a b z okay so a is an honest assessment of your current situation look try to look at your current's reality with clear eyes z is where you ultimately want to end up and b is your next step and all you need to know is a b and z you don't need to know step c through y but so often people will convince themselves well I don't know what step c through y are or even if they realized they're not going to plan it all out they're like yeah but I kind of want to know what cd and e are you know they want to be able to see a little bit further into the future but you have to be come comfortable with some level of uncertainty there's that quote I just shared in my newsletter recently I think it's from Ian Wilson he was a GE executive where he said no amount of information is going to lay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future it's just a fundamental reality of life knowledge is purely about the past and what has been learned and decisions are purely about the future and what cannot be predicted and so you have to become okay with with that reality in a lot of ways I actually think the most powerful form of mental toughness the most powerful or resilient form of preparation is a mindset that can handle uncertainty you know it's the we all we all try to resist this you know we try to control reality we try to predict scenarios and outcomes we try to figure out what's going to happen ahead of time but really all you need is not to predict the future what you need is the confidence that you can handle uncertainty that that whatever happens I will be able to figure it out I think if I was going to encapsulate entrepreneurship and a nutshell I would say it is the trust and the willingness that you can figure it out it's the it's there's always going to be some point on the curve with your business where like well we're not quite sure what the future is going to bring you know I have a podcast and who knows how AI is going to change that but if you're if you trust that you can figure it out great you can be an entrepreneur you'll make you know you'll figure it out one way how do we develop that mindset practically like I think that it's practiced in small ways and then it accumulates over time so I don't think sports is the only way to do this but it's the way that I did it so I'll use it as an example there are many ways you could do it one thing that's great about sports is that you have to fail publicly you know so you I played I played baseball the way through college played it for 17 years of my life and you know the early years you're in tea ball or little league or whatever and you're playing and then you make an air that does not feel good right like you let the whole team down but you realize that life goes on you failed publicly and you move forward later when I was in college you know we're not only playing games together we're also training together in the gym you show up in the gym you look at the guy next to you you realize he's a little bit stronger than you that doesn't feel great you see that then you're like well let me try to set a new PR I'll throw five more pounds on the bar you fail in front of everybody you miss that lift yeah that doesn't feel good but you move on 30 seconds later you get back to it and you go do the next thing and it happens again and again in small ways but failing publicly trains your mind it teaches you that what matters most is not that you always win but that you always keep reaching that you always keep striving in a lot of ways the real important question to ask is not what can I succeed on or what can I achieve but what is worth reaching for you know and that's really what you want is to keep reaching to keep striving and as you train that muscle and develop it in all those little small ways eventually you get to a point where you can handle it in big ways you know I remember my senior year my my final season um I said like I don't want us to lose but if we're going to lose I want to be the one who's playing you know like put me out there I can handle I can take the loss you know I don't want to lose but I can handle it and I feel that way now too about stuff that I do you know in business I put everything that I had into the atomic habit launch you know like I we started planning that launch 15 months ahead of time and I in a lot of places in life good enough is good enough but every now and then you find an area where good enough is not good enough and you want to do it the best you can do it and I decided that for me that was one of those things that I was going to try to do as good as I could possibly do it and that comes with risk that comes with vulnerability now you're going to spend your next year and a half promoting and pushing and talking about this thing that you poured three to five years of your life into what if people hate it what if the reviews aren't any good you know what if you secure big interviews and you go on morning shows and then the book flops and it doesn't sell um what if the publisher is mad at me because they paid me in advance or they were expecting it to do well then it doesn't perform and like you sit with all those questions and my thought I think partially because I had trained that muscle uh over time was I can handle it you know like if it if we lose I'll I'll deal with it you know and you'll be fine um but you have I think once you have that confidence then you have the confidence to go for it fully you know the problem is if you don't have that confidence you start talking yourself out of it you water it down you know you don't promote it all the way you don't do all the things you could do because you're kind of scared of what the result could be what if it doesn't go well so then I don't go all the way in and then it's kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because it for sure isn't going to work that well if you don't give it everything you have as you're saying that the thing that comes to mind is like the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose and the hesitation that comes with playing not to lose versus like just going for it yeah there's uh in the world cup final women's world cup a couple of years ago uh the usb Japan and Carly Lloyd scored like three goals in that game um and I think the third of her goal she kicked from midfield it was like just super long but she the cool thing about that play is that she saw the opportunity to go for it and she went for it right away she never talked yourself out of it it was a shot that you would never take in most circumstances it's not a good shot it's on a high percentage shot um but she saw an opening and she went for it there was no hesitation um similarly totally different domain uh one time my wife and I my wife's I'm not very musical at all but my wife is and we were listening to a Zach Brown band play a song and she was like one thing I love about listening to him sing is that there's no hesitation in his voice when he when it comes time to sing the lyric he's like fully in it um he's not like second guessing himself or doubting himself is just like singing with confidence and so in all these different domains sports, music, business you can't have that hesitation you know you don't want to be the one talking yourself out of it I think uh for me I tried to not be my own bottleneck you know I I don't want to have I don't want to be the first person to tell myself no you know I want the world to tell me no first and then I'll and then I'll adjust based on the feedback that I get but I don't want to talk myself out of it one of my little things internally is like I try to work backwards from magic so what would the magical outcome be and then let me try to figure out a couple different paths that could potentially get me there and I'll start to take steps forward and then I'll get feedback from the world you know I don't tell myself no maybe the world will tell me no and I need to adjust the course but I start with the magical outcome and then go from there and what you find uh I mean I see you with family I see you with friends like so many people that I'm around almost always you talk yourself out of it before the world actually prevents you from doing it there is very rare that you truly run up against a hard stop in the world where they say sorry this is impossible what you're trying to do is it can't happen there's almost always somebody else you could have talked to another approach you could have taken another attempt you could have gone for and you're the one who talks yourself out of doing it um not the world and so I try to not be that person I try to you know give myself permission to go for it and then adjust along the way I love these little sayings you have you move yeah under you know work backwards from magic what other internal sayings do you have that really resonate with you in this moment um one of the biggest things I learned from my grandfather was he his little saying was PMA positive mental attitude so in any scenario you try to have a positive outlook regardless of the current circumstances and that sounds a little kind of woo woo sometimes or you know always think positive or whatever but I have tried to become better at practicing it and teaching my kids how to practice it so one way that you can do it is when you run up against something that feels kind of difficult or feels like you don't feel confident about it you try to rehearse it visually and you emphasize the good portions of what could happen and this can this can happen either in retrospect or it can happen pre visualization before the thing happens so I'll give you two examples in retrospect when I played baseball and I was like 10 or 12 or 14 after each season we would go sit on the back deck in my parents house and my dad and I would talk about the the year and we would talk about the good plays from the year my best plays my best games the games that we won we would we would try to highlight I didn't know this at the time but what he was doing was he was helping me highlight the wins from you know small and big from that last season and I can remember some of the conversations that we had like one I got into high school and I was never the best player on any team that I was on but he was like look if you just keep sticking with it where you're going to find is that guys will drop off each year you know and so by just by there's this power of longevity of staying in the game that will benefit you and he was right I became a better player every year than I played so that's like a retrospective one or you are you emphasizing your wins and then the looking forward if you do like a pre visualization version of it so I have a couple kids one of them is three and starting preschool and he went to preschool on the first day he had a hard drop off he didn't like it don't you know don't leave me I don't know what this place is it feels you know scary whatever so he had a tough day getting dropped off first time second day comes same thing kind of cries a little bit has a tough day when he gets dropped off so the third day I get them up in the morning can I get get them ready and get them breakfast and stuff so I'm in the kitchen and I said all right guys today's a preschool day and immediately he was like and I was like hold on hold on hold on um you like your teachers right miss Jaylen miss Caitlin don't you like them he's like yeah I was like okay um what did you guys do yesterday you got to play with the crayons and the glue sticks like that was fun wasn't it he was like yeah um I said you have snack time and lunch like that those are good things he's like yeah and then I said after school you go play in the playground so you get to go down the slides and everything is like yeah yeah and that was all I said you know but what I'm trying to do is to get him to emphasize the positive portions of what's about to come to imagine what it would be like for the day to be good and um he went I don't know maybe we just got lucky but he went and he had a great drop off that day you know and he's he's loved it every day since he's he's been fine and so you can see how that skill can be applied throughout life you know they're in fourth grade and they're getting ready to give their first presentation they feel nervous about talking in front of the class great let's walk through this and emphasize what the good parts are going to be um or you know they're getting they're in eighth grade and they're going to go to their fourth school dance and they feel weird and awkward about it like let's talk about what a good night would look like and so so many of your problems in life come from your brain over emphasizing minor details the wrong minor details and what I'm trying to do with both myself and my kids and people around me is to encourage them to emphasize good minor details you know to what what portion of the day are you latching on to and what story are you telling yourself and so the more that you can do that I think it's kind of like a muscle the more that you do it the better you get at it and that's ultimately that goes back to that PMA positive mental attitude you know my grandpa taught me um and so that's another one of my little I love that I want to talk about reputation and I want to hear maybe I'll just say the word and like you can riff on it for a few minutes reputation like my reputation or how I think about it or think about reputation I don't really think about it that much um I'm not I'm not that worried about it um I guess the main way that I think about it is I want to be known as someone who is useful you know like useful is a word that I come back to a lot if you if you if you uh Josh Kaufman has a good framework it's like three things I think it's true useful and clear um you know it's like you want to write things that are true and accurate you want to write things are useful and actionable and you want to be clear and understandable and how you do it I think that that does describe a lot of my approach and how I'm trying to focus on you know putting work into the world um all right so I guess I don't think about my reputation that much but this is how I generally think about reputation status brand whatever ultimately your reputation will be the work the quality of the work that you do so it is I think Brent be sure said at one point it's like the range of outcomes that you can expect from a brand um and so the more that you do things that are high quality and useful and valuable and actionable the more that you will become known for that now there is a little bit of priming that can go on so like at the top of 321 my newsletter it says uh the most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web I'm trying to set that expectation there right like it's when somebody signs up and subscribes and they read that now you see that and you're like okay I'm about to read something that has a lot of wisdom and it's like dense and informative there's a lot of signal and very little noise that's the tone I'm trying to set now the flip side of that is you have to deliver yeah and so if you if you set that expectation and you don't actually deliver well there's not going to go very well and so I'm also putting the responsibility on me a little bit you know there's like nothing to hide behind I do this with my Instagram accounts like a very weird Instagram account you know there's no photos of me it's just text um but it's kind of like a peacock's tail you know in the sense that it's a very useful hindrance like it's very visual visual and it shows which peacocks are strong enough to have this kind of superfluous tail to still survive and escape predators those are the ones that have gray jeans well when you can't hide behind anything else on your Instagram account and it's just words the ideas have to be good enough you know it's a it's a useful hindrance it's a useful um blockage to getting people's attention and so I'm like well if it's just going to be words they better be pretty good so um I think about setting those priming those expectations and setting those standards and then also trying to reach them but ultimately it's just about the quality of the work that you do and so the more that you show up with value and useful ideas the more you become known for that um I think I also this is kind of connected to reputation but I I don't think about shaping it for me that much but the lens should be mostly focused on the reader not on yourself I think if you if you think a lot about reputation and you're trying to like cultivate this image that's the energy is focused in the wrong direction um if you're focused on the reader then you start asking different questions how can I create something that's incredibly useful for somebody how can I make it more actionable how can I make it easier to understand simpler how can I make it easy enough that I can teach it now all those questions are focused on the readers you know view or they're from their position and then there's also just questions like what do people need right now you know like what what does what does somebody what would yeah what are people asking for um I'm trying to pay attention to that so for the most part I think reputation takes care of itself if you try to take care of other people um and if you're if your lens is focused on them then it ends up you know working just fine for you I love that thanks what about positioning positioning is critical um positioning is something that I think a lot about I don't think I haven't figured out yet but I have seen how powerful it can be um so let me give you a couple examples I'll start with positioning for books and then I'll start talking about positioning for life so any product the way that is positioned and packaged is probably 50 percent of its success um a couple examples from books atomic habits has a chapter later in it where I talk about deliberate practice it could have been a book about deliberate practice where I talk about habits yeah but instead it's a book about habits where I talk about deliberate practice and I think the way those two books would sell the difference is enormous um if you don't know what deliberate practice is it takes 30 seconds to unpack it and describe it how is it different than regular practice and so on you don't get 30 seconds when somebody's thinking about buying a book you're not there at the store to explain to him so the packaging the positioning of the book which I would describe is pretty much anything that you see on the cover has to sell itself in seven seconds you know um and just by virtue of growing up in society and being part of the world you know that having good habits is favorable and having bad habits is unfavorable and I don't need to sell anybody on that all I need to sell you on is hey if you only read one book about habits atomic habits should be the one and that's a much different pitch um and so the positioning of packaging makes a big difference another example one that um so author's equity is this book publisher that I helped co-found we have a book coming out uh called the overthinkers guide to making decisions and that is basically a book about choices it's a book about choosing and making decisions it could have been called something else you know it could have been called the decision guide or the power of choice or something you know it could have been called that but the overthinkers guide to making decisions is a great package it's a great frame I have told multiple people about it and they the reply to me has been oh I need that um and that's usually a sign that you got the packaging right is that you know people are interested in that way so um those are two examples of positioning for products and I think any any product the positioning and packaging is a critical part of the success um before I go into positioning about life I just want to mention a few things that make uh for good positioning so a lot of this is our principles from direct response copywriting it's a good domain to study or good a good place to look for examples but one of the core principles of direct response copywriting is that you should try to solve or address a timeless and enduring desire that people have and so many books and other products but I think a lot about books so many books um are kind of adjacent to a desire people have they're not the actual desire and then you're kind of in this uphill battle where you're trying to convince somebody to pay attention to something that they don't actually care about but you want to address a timeless and enduring desire so um a lot of what makes for a really good book title is part of what makes for good packaging so good book titles usually have three or four qualities the first quality is it addresses a timeless or enduring desire the second quality is it tells you what the book is actually about which sounds kind of obvious but a lot of the time people were people kind of like keyword stuff titles you know they say like how to make millions be happy and live the dream and you're like that's not even always focusing on whatever um the second thing that are the third thing that they do is that they are an unmistakable or an onable phrase so what that usually means is that it's a little bit weird when you first hear it a lot of the really iconic book titles they are phrases that you do not hear elsewhere in life so um man search for meaning basically you only hear that in the book title nobody uses that phrase in daily life how to win friends and influence people even to even now describing as winning friends sounds kind of odd you know but it's it's odd enough that there's no mistaking what you're talking about they can own the real estate in the reader's mind atomic habits before the book came out you would not describe a habit as a atomic you might say it was little or small or tiny or something like that but you wouldn't say atomic it's a weird way to describe a small habit but that's good because you can own that phrase so unmistakable addresses a time a certain during desire tells you what the book is actually about and the final piece is that usually there's an element of contrast some element of surprise so rich dad poor dad or the life changing magic of tidying up I thought tidying up as a small thing now you're telling me it's life changing atomic habits tiny changes remarkable results you know you want some kind of contrast between you sometimes it's small to big sometimes it's the easy thing the easy thing you can do to accomplish the hard thing but there needs to be some form of contrast a good example that's not like a self-help book or a business book is astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson yeah I thought astrophysics was something that was going to take seven years in a PhD yeah no actually just read this book in a day and a half and so the contrast is is something that's compelling so if you have those four elements that usually leads to good positioning and packaging all right so that's just on the product side separately there's a whole other discussion about positioning which is like life positioning yeah how can you put yourself in good positions for things to happen and there are so many ways that you could do this I'm sure that you can think of many too sometimes it's just about putting yourself in positions for good things to happen so we talked earlier about sharing your work publicly every episode that you publish every blog post that you put out every social media post you put up is a little bit of surface area that somebody could discover and you could you know have some interesting interaction for atomic habits on launch day I had an interview on CBS this morning and yeah it was it was a big it was a big moment for me because it changed the launch of the book from hey some guy is releasing a book to this is a thing you know here's a piece of national media it's in people are paying attention basically it made it feel credible and real and the way that it happened is I wrote an article a blog post on my site four years earlier called the physics of productivity and it was just me trying to be clever taking Newton's three laws and applying them to productivity and it sat there for four years and it was fine it was an average article it didn't go viral or anything but it did find and then a year before atomic habits came out a reporter at the New York Times stumbled across my website and liked it and they linked to it in an article well some producer at CBS read that article and was like hey can we have you come on and talk about those productivity principles so I went on and I did a segment for CBS about a year before the book came out it was it was maybe like 10 months or something and I did that segment for like three minutes just a little interview and as soon as it got done I went to Gail King and I said I have a book coming out in 10 months and I want to come back on the show and talk about it when it's ready and she said sure we'll have you back on you just need to be make sure that we're your first interview like we want to have the first you know release and I said deal what's your email address and so I got our email and I sent it to my publisher and we got it all linked up so when I wrote that article four years earlier I had no idea that that was going to work out like that you know but it was a little bit of surface area I was putting myself in a position for good things to happen by trying to create something of value in an enduring format you know again we talked about what has a long half life that blog post had a half life of at least four years and I put myself in a good position for things to break my way you don't know how it's going to happen but you know if you try your best each time and you keep creating some surface area you're going to catch a break at some point so that's like a business example there are tons of examples with margin of safety especially with finances you know if you give yourself a large margin of safety in other words your expenses for your life are much less than what you're taking in you can handle a lot of things coming your way and so that is positioning yourself well for the unexpected elements of life you know we have a family situation with some medical stuff and there were you know there was some customized medical equipment that somebody needed because of what they were dealing with and it's $200,000 and it's like some huge expense but if you give yourself a huge margin of safety and you've been saving for years you don't know what that's going to be right it could be that it could be I so one of my little things that I'll say sometimes is like life is going to come for you you just don't know when you don't know when it will be your turn but it will come for you there will be something so that that expense was not our turn but a couple years later my wife fell and broke her knee into four pieces and I had to take six months off of work I'm like super thankful to previous James right like James from 10 years earlier that built this business where I could actually take six months off of work to take care of her and the kids because what was I going to do if I didn't have that margin of safety but I put myself in a position where I was able to make that happen and so each year I look at my position both in terms of like flexibility and in terms of finances and I just I don't really even care about our net worth that much what I care about is am I in a stronger position this year you know like as long as each year it's getting a little bit stronger the margin of safety gets a little bit larger the ability to handle stress or uncertainty gets a little bit better then you know you're positioning yourself better each year and so there are lots of ways to apply that positioning concept just a slate off track here how are you investing that money these days um yeah I don't know that uh I don't know that I want to talk about my personal investments but I will talk about my personal philosophy I guess I'll say that yeah I um eventually I realized uh that you can beat the market but you will lose your life um and so what I mean is that it is possible to get outsized returns but you have to spend all your time doing it and I don't want to be a VC or an investment advisor or you know like somebody who's I don't know trying to be the next buffet or munger or whatever it's not how I want to spend my time you know you only get one precious life and I want to spend it on other things I want mostly I want to spend it creating you know trying to make things that didn't exist before um and spending time with family and so I'm kind of optimizing for that so if you can be okay with that then you realize well maybe there's very different ways or simpler ways to invest your money like um I'm a huge advocate of jail Collins and the simple path the wealth that that book um he his approach I think is great which is mostly just like dump it in vanguard and let it ride um but it's incredibly simple and I get all my time back and if I'm making 12% a year rather than 15% a year who cares um you know like I'd rather trade the 3% a year and get to spend my hours the way that I want so um a lot of my a lot of my approach is based around that around simplifying and trying to make sure that I protect my time more than trying to squeeze out additional percentage points beyond what the market makes you know there I heard this other phrase once which is remember that the goal is not to beat the market the goal is to end up wealthy um you know like so many people are focused on beating the market that they lose all their time um and uh end up I don't know in many cases not even beating the market but yeah so um it just gives you gives you a little bit of a different approach and I think also I investing in vanguard is incredibly diversified because you got a slice of every company I have realized that I do not have the ability to predict what is going to go well yeah and I feel even more that way now than I did a year or two ago things are moving so fast the rise of AI whatever like I really I cannot tell you what companies are going to be at the top of the Fortune 500 in three years or 10 years like I I have no confidence they may not even exist yeah I I'm no confidence in it so um I I would rather not try to pick the winners and instead just play the general trend I wanted to ask you about your reading habit and how you take what you're reading and incorporate it into what you're doing or thinking about or make a top of mind it's so easy to read something and sort of put it down and then forget about it I wrote two articles a week for three years when I started out um every Monday and Thursday and about a year in I hit a hundred thousand subscribers and I had this conversation with myself I don't know why but I got kind of in my head about that number and I thought well now a lot of people are paying attention so it needs to be really good yeah what I should have just said was things are going very well just keep doing what you're doing right but um but I thought well if I really want to make it good then I should spend more time writing it right and what happened is things got worse not better and eventually what I realized is that um if I want to be a better writer what I needed was not to write more but to read more and it's kind of like uh filling a car up with gas you know reading is like filling the car up writing is like driving and going on a journey and you need both you know like the point is not just to sit at the gas station all day and keep filling the car up like the tank is already full yeah you should go go out and see something but if you just keep driving you end up stranded on the side of the road and so for me reading is the primary way that I generate inspiration and ideas almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume it's so rare there's there's even a debate among neuroscientists whether it's even possible to have a spontaneous thought truly spontaneous thought you know you say something to me or ask me a question and that sparks a thought or somebody cuts you off in traffic and that makes you feel a certain way or whatever but it's just an endless string of you responding to the situations and inputs that come to you throughout the day so we don't usually give it this amount of weight but when you choose who you follow on social media when you choose what podcasts to listen to when you choose what books to read you're choosing your future thoughts yeah and if you want better more productive more creative thoughts you need better more productive more creative inputs and so choosing what to read or choosing what to listen to or who to subscribe to is actually a very weighty decision it's a very important decision I I find that my reading habit now there's there's some quote about Emerson I think where he says he reads like a hawk flying over a field scanning for prey and I kind of feel like that's how I read a lot of the time I'm almost reading for like ideas or for chapters not for books you know I'm looking for the piece that is relevant to what I'm writing about at the time or what I'm trying to learn at the time I'm not just sitting down and saying well let me read the unpack this argument for fun I maybe when I do if I am at a stage in my life at some point where I'm doing less writing maybe I will read for that that way more you know just for enjoyment or for knowledge for knowledge is sake but right now I'm kind of reading more for knowledge for an outcome which is for me to distill it and apply it in some actionable way and then share it with the world so what does that look like like you're reading a book are you highlighting are you taking that highlight and putting it into like a word document like if I read a book that's really good and relevant to what I'm working on at the time it's very hard for me to make progress on it I will it might take me like seriously I might spend I mean at this point I'm not I'm not working as much because that we have these kids but but I like it might take me four hours to get through three pages like it because there's I'm reading I'm at a point in the book where it's just really hitting on what I've been like kind of stewing on and thinking about and it's sparking ideas I'll read a sentence or a paragraph and then like I got to write about this for a second and then I you know I I may end up writing two pages and then I go back and I read some more and then I you know write some more when it's not as intense as that then it'll be more what I do is I I prefer to read physical books I also audio can also be helpful for me especially if I'm in the car a lot or something it's just you know obviously it's a better way to do that but it can be helpful for me especially if a book is kind of dense I find audio is better because it doesn't if the book is really dense I will slow myself down too much as I'm reading it right in print but audio just keeps rolling and I still get the idea but I don't slow myself down through the writing so I find some authors to be better for me an audio but my preference is to read the physical book as I roll through I find passages that interest me and I put a parentheses open parentheses at the beginning of the passage close it at the end and then I put a star in the margin so that if I just leave through the book I find the stars and I can easily identify those passages and then once I finish the book I will go back through and take photos of each of those and highlight the photo on my iPhone and just copy and paste it into like an Evernote file or you know Google Doc or wherever I'm storing that stuff at so that's my typical approach so that's how I end up with like usually if I read a book that I highlight a lot on maybe it'll have 50 or something passages and all those get dumped in at the end I just have to ask one follow up to that which is and then what so it goes into Evernote now a lot of people do this they capture these notes but then they never yeah revisit them they never do anything with them I don't like having I tried this for a while I've tried I mean also I've never known I've been well I've been doing it for a long time it's just it's just 12 years old you know notion wasn't even around when I was getting started but so I just have a lot of stuff in there now but I tried for a little while doing it based on the book so I would I would finish a book and then I would put all the highlights into the book doc and so I just have all the notes from that book in one place but what happened was what you just described which is then it would just sit there and I would never really look at it occasionally I would work on an article and I would like search for terms in Evernote and then find a passage from a book and maybe pull it in or something but it was pretty rare that that would happen instead what I find more useful now is to have a project that I'm working on and a a doc for the project so like the next book I'm writing for example and then I'm reading books that are relevant to that project and I take the passages and I drop them into the appropriate place in that doc so usually the way that I start writing a book I try to have the concept the big picture concept nailed at the start like I knew atomic habits was going to be a habits book from the beginning it's going to be a book about building good habits and rigged battles that can go at the top of the doc then I start at first at the very very beginning I just collect notes and ideas and maybe it gets to be 20 or 30 pages and it's just a bunch of random stuff but eventually once you get enough material in there I start grouping it by section and eventually those sections become chapter chapters and that's usually for most of the process that's usually what the doc looks like is it's just sort of a loosely structured chapter this is a chapter about leverage this is a chapter about tailwinds this is you know whatever and when I read and I have something that's relevant to a chapter it gets copied and pasted into there so it starts to the chapters end up the part of my process that's that part is just a lot of fun what I just described to you that that's just fun to me I get to read I'm excited about it I dump it all in it gets organized that that part can be great I have two manuscripts right now one is 500 pages one is 600 pages that is just that is just a bunch of stuff that I've read that is organized around the book concept the very unfun part is taking it from 600 pages of roughly organized notes and turning it into chapters that can be readable and it gets compressed along the way from 600 pages down to 200 and so that takes a lot more work but that work is what makes it so easy for the reader to read yeah yeah that's what makes it good yeah and that's that's also what's hard I mean sometimes people will complain and say oh you know writing is hard and like yeah writing is hard but also that's kind of the point you know like it's it's also like lifting it be like complaining about lifting weights and the weights being heavy you know like yes the weights are heavy and that's what's getting you stronger you know like writing is hard because it's making you a better thinker is forcing you the act of writing is forcing you to clarify your thoughts the act of lifting the weight is forcing your muscles to get stronger and so it only works because it is hard if it was easy it would not require much thought which means it also doesn't require much reorganization in your mind and you're not learning very much or clarifying very much after the success of atomic habits the inbound must be crazy how do you maintain the focus on the things that you want with all these opportunities available to you I'm kind of a slow learner honestly like I it took me a while to figure it out and I don't know that I have it fully figured out now it seems like the bar keeps changing or moving you know partially I think it's a good thing if you're really successful and things are going well then every year your opportunity cost should increase but what that also means is every year you should be saying no to things that you're saying yes to the previous year and so I feel like I'm always three to six months behind on what I should be saying no to when the book came out it it did well from the start but it really didn't take off till about a year in so it hit the bestseller list the first week then nothing until New Year's week and then nothing for like six more months and it wasn't really to like the summer of the second year that it started appearing every week so 2019 was the year 2018 it came out 2019 was the year that like everything changed and there was a stretch in like 2019 in early 2020 where I just felt like I'm on the hook for all these things that I should have said no to eventually I had to do like harder things like put the email in box on an auto responder and they're like oh like they runs like kind of counter to what I wanted to do you know like I for the first 10,000 people who signed up to my email list I emailed each of them individually and said like hey thanks so much for joining you know I love to have you in the community I'll be writing about this you know whatever and then you know you get to a hundred thousand or a million or you know you just can't do that stuff anymore so yeah it's like best possible outcome right like you don't want to complain about it's what could be better but also it just takes a lot of learning and reminding yourself that you have to continue to increase that filter are there any lessons that you took away that you wish you would have known sooner about filtering or selecting opportunities there are lots of things that I think about now strategically for what I want to focus on that I didn't really have a language for at the time you kind of like follow your gut are you in your intuition but so I'll give you a couple not everything that you do can match all the qualities that check all the boxes that I'm about to cover but I think about each of these boxes and how do they weave together so like one thing is leverage how can I get more output out of each unit of effort and so some things are much higher leverage than others you know like writing let's just take writing as an example writing in a journal or a diary is fine it's very useful for you it might help you think more clearly like writing has lots of benefits but if you choose to take what you write and share it publicly well now all of a sudden you have a lot more leverage with that other people can find it it becomes this kind of like honey pot that attracts like minded people you know I like to say that sharing your work publicly is like a magnet and it just draws other people to you who are interested in the same thing it's probably one of the most useful things you can do for networking is it's not actually networking it's just sharing your knowledge and trying to be useful in public so leverage is one thing to think about how can I get more output out of the hours that I'm putting in one question that I really like is what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done so like doing this podcast interview is a good example I when a time of cabins came out I did like 200 interviews in like six months and summer podcasts and summer radio and I don't really do radio interviews anymore and it's not really because I have something personal against radio it's just that once we get done with that five-minute segment or ten-minute segment we're off the air and that work is not working for me anymore you know the the time I just put in evaporated but this will get recorded you know and somebody will watch it today and then somebody watching the month and you know it's it's almost like there's two versions of James out there you know there's like the version that's out there living his daily life and then there's the one that got recorded right now that can keep working each hour after it's done so that's that's one filter another thing that I think about is sequencing so doing things in the right order or doing things in an order where it accumulates for you I debated about whether to self-publish atomic habits or traditionally publish for like a year year and a half I was like really close to trying to self-publish and ultimately at the time it's a little bit easier now but still quite hard to hit a bestseller list as if you're self-published and I decided well if I'm really going to go for it and try to hit the New York Times list I might as well do it with my first book because then I can be a New York Times bestling author for the rest of my career there's no guarantee I was going to do it but it's like if you're going to try you might as well try early and then you can get the benefit of that status marker for the next 50 years rather than self-publishing your first like five books and then doing it you know in 20 years so that's just kind of a you know a sequencing thing the other thing that I think about a lot is how do I like it when the work that I'm doing every project that I'm touching feeds each other in some way they kind of like cross-pollinate so a few examples I you know I'm writing there's there's uh it's almost fractal the way that you can think about this so like the small version is I write an idea that idea could go on Twitter and be used as a tweet it could be in a newsletter that I publish each week it could get repurposed on to Instagram as like a quote card or something maybe if it's good it could become the seed of something it's a chapter in a book or whatever but it gets repurposed in lots of ways so that one hour again kind of like leverage it's working for you in more ways how does it how does it accumulate how does it cross-pollinate you can also do it with platforms so like all of the platforms that I have from my business point to each other you know like when I post on Instagram at the bottom of each post says you know want to learn more ideas like this sign up for the newsletter at jamescler.com/321 or go to jamescler.com for more um the book points to things you know you read atomic habits and then at the end of each section it says you know if you want to get a PDF guide that summarizes these key ideas go to atomic habits.com and you know you can download it or whatever so the books pointing to the website the websites pointing to the book the newsletter is pointing to social media social media is pointing to the newsletter it's all like this web where everything is kind of cross-pollinating I think some people that people get that and they do it like once or twice or seven times but like you need to do it every time you know like you're building this very tight web it's in your building this network of things that all accumulate together and then you can do it in even larger levels like we get we have the the writing idea the tweet idea you have the platform idea that's still within one business but you can even do it across businesses like I have my business as a writer you know I'm an author and I have my platforms but I also co-founded a publishing company author's equity and so now the brand that I have as an author helps me meet other authors and talk to them and if it's a good fit they can come and publish with us and so those two things feed each other I publish my books through author's equity like it's you know it's a way for those two businesses to help each other um and then I have a I even have like a side project which is this cabin in the woods that I built you know I'm building this cabin and it can be a retreat center for authors you know like we can bring authors out there and we can meet for two or three days and talk about how to write books and launch books and build your platform and some of those people can publish with author's equity and you can like see how everything kind of feeds each each other so it doesn't all work perfectly together like that every time but I like when things can kind of check multiple boxes and then one of the one of the other ones that I'll mention in the middle take a break for a second is um tailwinds so like I always think about email lists I don't we you know you and I both have lots of friends who have email lists and people are growing at different rates but basically everybody I know is list is getting bigger I don't I don't know that I know anybody who's list is shrinking um unless it's like they're intentionally you know trimming subscribers or something but uh more and more people come online each day more they're still like you know a billion people in the world that need internet access and are coming on so it's just this huge tailwind of readers that and the internet continues to grow and people continue to subscribe to things and so it's just a good like place to play um because there are lots of forces working for you so if you put all of those things together you're like all right there's a big tailwind on the internet and building an audience if you share your work publicly you gain leverage and you can attract more people to your work and you can you know become more known or your work can get out there um if your platforms cross pollinate they can kind of grow each other that same dynamic of a tailwind for you know email list is also true for social media and you know other platforms online and if you do this early in your life and you build an audience early then you have tons of flexibility and how you can use that and where you can direct the attention or what you know what businesses you want to build or what projects you want to work on so all of that collectively just makes it feel like all right if you're doing things are in that zone then it's probably a really high leverage way to spend your time and I'm not saying that's the only way you should spend your time probably the the single biggest thing that we haven't talked about is are you excited about it you know are you interested are you passionate about it but um those are some of the ways that I think about focus and prioritization and selecting and when things blew up you know we put all this together and atomic habits did really well and then when things blew up my time got tight you're like okay you have all these it felt like for 10 years it was me trying to knock on every door and wouldn't know and be like hey will you please pay attention maybe like can you read this and then all of a sudden overnight it was like whoa way too many people are paying attention um and so now I have to be more strict about which things check those boxes and where where I direct my time and attention I love a couple of the themes we talked about I just want to circle back to longevity of content um we published in interview this summer republished an interview that was recorded six years ago and nobody had any idea so when you think of like content and the long tail of it it's really fascinating we don't talk politics we don't talk anything topical yeah one of the reasons we do that is we have great longevity of content yeah I think that that's really important so that's one that I didn't mention but I do think about a lot this I think this is a little bit more of my style and what I'm interested in personally but it does you know there are ways that you could apply it probably whatever you're focused on which is what's the half-life of this idea you know you want I like to work on things that have a very long half-life they they just persist and I even like to work in formats that have a long half-life like social media has a very short half-life and that's fine it can serve a role in the business but I'm never gonna make up my central thing because something like a blog post has a little bit longer half-life but a book really has a long half-life and so I like formats that are durable and persist in that way and so you can yeah you start to put all those different elements together and I think you can end up with something that's pretty evergreen one thing you mentioned that I thought was really interesting was the word sequencing and I'm wondering how you think about that in terms of accomplishing your goals but also in terms of like different areas of your life are your 20s different than your 30s your 30s and your 40s and your 40s and your 50s yeah that's a great question I I don't know why but I've been thinking a lot about this recently I guess you could call it like life strategy or something but think about most of the big really meaningful things in your life you know like raising a family that you're proud of building a great marriage creating a successful company getting in the best shape of your life you know starting some new initiative or you know giving back in some big way like whatever it is it's probably a multi-year thing you know all the those really big meaningful movements in life of three five ten sometimes longer you know it's like it's a lot of years and if you just look broadly at your adult life you're like well if I'm lucky enough to get to live to say 80 I've got maybe five or six of those you know 10-year movements in there so what are you going to spend those five or six on you know they it's a limited number whatever it is some things it five or six alone it is limited but it's even more limited than I think you realize at the beginning because certain things don't make sense in certain decades you know like if you want to travel around the world for a while and party in a visa like you probably aren't going to do that in your 70s you know like it's probably better for your 20s or 30s and so the sequencing of things starts to to matter too building a company I think is another one you can do it whenever you want you know like there's no there are no rules but manager is nice to like do it early and then you get some of the advantages of that as you go on it seems that responsibilities and obligations tend to increase throughout life each day that goes by is an opportunity for a responsibility to come into play or an obligation or an obstacle that you didn't foresee to come up and so if you're waiting till your 40s or 50s to start a company again there are no rules you can do it then it's just that you're playing the game on hard mode a little bit or a harder mode I always say like I started my first business when I was 24 and I had no kids and I wasn't married it was as easy as it could be and it was still really hard yeah um you know so anyway that's I think about sequencing in that way um and some of the questions I like to ask they're two that really feel relevant to this the first is what season am I in right now you know life has different seasons and um sometimes you want to focus on earning money sometimes you want to focus on time of family sometimes you want to focus on creativity or you know creative freedom the ability to choose what projects you work on sometimes you just want it to be a personal season you know it's less about work but whatever the answer is it's probably really specific to you and um it helps to figure out what season you're in right now because when your seasons change your habits often need to change you know what you focus on the off and needs to change and so the the question that I think is closely tied to this which is a good one from Derek Sivers is what am I optimizing for right now and so I you know if I don't know what to optimize for I feel like it's good to optimize for enthusiasm but what lights me up but whatever that answer is right now what are you optimizing for it helps you determine what season you're in and I found that a lot of the time when I'm struggling or I'm facing some sort of uh I feel like I'm facing a lot of friction it's because I'm trying to force fit old habits into a new season you know I keep trying to keep trying to do things the way I was doing it and then eventually realize oh okay stop being a dummy about this like you're in a new season now so I think sequencing um starts with self-awareness it starts with knowing what season you're in and what you're optimizing for what's important you at the stage of your life and then once you realize that you can start to figure out you know which pieces should I focus on next let's explore habits a little um what exactly is a habit the one one that I like is that a habit is a recurring solution to a recurring problem in your environment so something comes up again and again and your brain is trying to solve it another way to describe it is that it's like an automatic or a mindless behavior if we were talking to a researcher or an academic they would probably say a habit is like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes or biting your nails you know something you do really fast and mindlessly and you don't even really think about it but if I were to ask you hey Shane what are some habits you're trying to build like you're probably going to say oh you know I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week or I want to write every day or I'm trying to meditate for 10 minutes or something like that and I know what you mean when you say that you know you mean you want to be this regular practice this ritual now technically in some kind of academic sense maybe that's not you know a habitual automatic behavior but in a cultural sense that's exactly what we mean when we talk about habits is we want them to be reliable repeated routines and then the third way you could define it and this one I think is quite useful is that it's a behavior that is tied to a context in your environment behavior that's tied to a particular context so like your habit of watching Netflix at 7pm is tied to the context of your house and your couch at that time of day and so what we start to see is that behaviors have a very strong link between environment and context and that's a good way to adjust behaviors but I think all of those are our potential ways to define what a habit is ultimately it's really just your brain trying to automate the problems and solutions of life and do things with more efficiency you mentioned seasons and tying that to habits I'm wondering how do we know if a habit is working for us or if it's working against us there's some debate among researchers about is there even such a thing as a good habit or a bad habit like all habits serve you in some way you know you smoke a cigarette because it serves or resolves some you know need that you have and I understand what they're saying but I think that we all know what we mean when we say good habit or a bad habit and the way that I like to define it is that the cost of your good habits is in the present the cost of your bad habits is in the future and so what you find is that a lot of things that typically get categorized as a bad habit eating too many donuts or smoking a cigarette or something like that feels good in the moment but it creates some kind of cost or consequence in the future whereas a lot of good habits going to the gym right now you require sweat and effort and it's hard it has a payoff in the future I think one way to determine whether a habit of serving you or not is is it giving me more of what I want in the future or less of what I want it's almost like it's first order negative second order positive if it's a good habit and then the inverse is I think as a general rule that probably can be true the real trick is to figure out how to make it first order positive and second order positive and you know a lot of atomic habits is about this which is trying to make habits as easy as possible to do so that you don't feel as much friction in the moment while also aligning them with your identity and the type of person that you want to be and so working out as like a classic example but everybody wants to work out so that they look better in the mirror and so that they get fit they want the results of it which is fine the second order outcome is going to be great but it's hard in the moment and you don't always feel like going and sometimes it's you know difficult or whatever the real trick and where I have eventually gotten to myself after 10 or 15 years of training is I like how I feel when I'm working out and so it's not even I yeah I want the same results everybody else does but it's also about being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and I know that if I'm in the middle of a set I can feel good about being that person and being who I am so now all I have to do is do the thing and I don't have to wait for the outcome the outcomes are also good for the damn line but it's more about showing up and being that type of person is there like a specific framework that you use to evaluate if this habit is serving you or getting in your way and then you should replace it with a different habit I said earlier that habits are the repeated solutions to recurring problems in your environment right so let's say that you go to work and it's a long day you get home it's like 536 and you're exhausted that happens again and again and you feel tired after a long day of work so that is a recurring problem that's resurfacing and people have different solutions that problem you know one person might play video games for 30 minutes somebody else might go for a run a third person might smoke a cigarette but you can see some of these they're all solving the same recurring problem but some solutions are better than others and what you find is that like early in your life a lot of the solutions that you come up with are just things that you either inherited from your parents or saw modeled and started to repeat and you get to be about 22 or 25 or something like that and what are the odds that your current solution is the best solution I just mathematically is very unlikely that the way that you're solving the repeated problems in your life right now is the optimal way to do it so as soon as you have that realization it becomes your responsibility to try to figure out a better way and I think one of the best things you can do early on this is if I could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't in it it would probably be this which is to ask what would this look like if it was fun you know like for any habit that you're trying to build just sit down and ask what would it look like if it was fun and try to brainstorm 10 or 20 or 50 different solutions to it there's not always a thousand ways to do everything but there's almost always more than one way and so a lot of people the most common New Year's resolution is to go to the gym and work out and I kind of feel like a lot of people are in the gym in January just because they feel like they should be in the gym or society wants them to be in the gym or something like that but we can come up with a long list of what it looks like to live an active lifestyle your rock climb or kayak or you know do all kinds of stuff and I think it's worth it to spend 20 minutes and try to come up with that list and then look at it and say which one of these sounds like the most fun to me and so that helps I think that helps you get closer to what the optimal answer is for you because if it's not fun if it's not engaging or interesting if it doesn't feel good you're not going to stick with it when it gets tough I mean this is probably one of the great lessons for life which is if you're having fun then then you're dangerous right then you're hard to compete with you don't want to you don't want to go up against the person who's having a good time doing it because if it feels like a hassle or a chore that's the person who gives up when it gets difficult but the person who's having a great time at the start they're much more likely to stick with it when it gets hard do you think of fun as binary or is it how do I make I want to work out so like how do I make working out more fun versus like fun yeah it's so well everything in your life is not going to feel like going to a concert or something right like it's never going to be it may not be the most fun thing in your day or something like that but anything can be more engaging or more fun than maybe the default would be and so I think about it more like that how can I try to make this more enjoyable not necessarily saying it's going to be the most fun part of my day and then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate what is the mechanism by which we can do that broadly speaking I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit and this is true if you want to replace an old one and install a new one so roughly speaking what you want is your habit to be obvious so you want it to be easy to see easy to notice easy to do you know get your attention you want it to be attractive so something it's appealing or fun to you as we were just saying you want it to be easy simple frictionless you know easy to apply and install and you want it to be satisfying the more enjoyable or satisfying a habit is the more likely are to stick with in the future so I call these the four laws of behavior change make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying and you don't need all for every single moment of the day or every habit that you build but the more that you have those four forces working for you the more likely you are to stick with it and in fact we can actually learn something very compelling about our habits by looking at behaviors that we often call bad or like that we waste time on and you see what do those things have in common they often are very obvious attractive easy and satisfying those are the things that get them to stick um you know like if you just take scrolling social media for example it's obvious because your phone is on you all the time it's off in the first app that your thumb gravitates to and you tap open it's attractive because the algorithm is curated content for your very interests um it's it's so easy that like a couple of years ago Instagram when you would scroll and somebody put up an album they and if you came back to Instagram like five minutes later if you had already seen that post they would auto swipe to the second slide so you don't you don't even need to use your thumb anymore right they would just keep showing you new content for you they were trying to make it that easy to consume and then it's satisfying because it kind of satisfies the interests that you have and so on um get that dopamine hit and whatever so uh I'm not trying to like criticize Instagram too much or anything but I'm just saying if you wonder why is it so easy for me to do that you know nobody's sitting around saying how can I just find the willpower and the motivation to check Instagram or you know but a lot of people are saying oh I wish I just had the willpower and the discipline to go to the gym or something like that well you know one of these is obvious attractive easy and satisfying and one of them is not and so you need to try to find ways to make your habits more obvious attractive easy and satisfying and then the opposite being make the ones that you don't want harder you just and you just invert each of those four so rather than making it obvious make it invisible so unsubscribe for me emails don't keep junk food in the house for the social media example I have so I've done this for the last year I just deleted all social media apps off my phone and I what I told myself was if you really want to use them you can just download them and log in and I I don't even know that I've really done that much but maybe I've done it once or twice um I log in I use it and then I delete it after I get done so I log out and delete it again and then the next time I want to use it I gotta download it again but it's just it's not obvious anymore you know um rather than making it attractive make it unattractive that one is the most difficult of the four and probably the place that I would recommend focusing on the least because it's hard to change your desires it's hard to change your expectations about what things are attractive or what or not it is possible we can talk about it if you want but it's it's hard the third um is to make it difficult instead of making it easy so increasing friction adding steps between you and the behavior again deleting the app off of those good example that and then the fourth is rather making it satisfying making unsatisfying need to layer on some kind of consequence or cost to the behavior and um if you do those four things you're much more likely to avoid before we keep going with habits I do want to take a little sidetrack here into social media sure so you're not reading anything online you're sort of like ignoring all the it's been awesome it's been it's been so great um I it's one of those things that I find that there are some changes that sound easy but actually are very hard in practice and then there's other things that sound like they would be difficult but actually they're not hard at all the hard part is convincing yourself to do it um deleting social media off my phone was one I did that for like a year about six months in I was like what if I did it for email and so I deleted email off my phone that sounded like it was going to be really hard to me but it has been so so much easier than I thought um again I just have the same rule which is if I really need it I'll download the app and log into Gmail and do what I didn't do and I you know I've only downloaded it twice in the last like year once I was at the airport and I had to send an email before my flight and the other time I was getting ready to go to a show and I needed to download the tickets while we were in line um but after I get done I just delete the app again and then like I'll just download it if I need it and it has been so nice because if you had looked at my behavior on the phone before that I think my average time on Instagram before I deleted it was like 42 minutes a day or 48 minutes a day something like that so you look at that and you're like well there's only 24 hours in the day this is getting like one 20th or one 30th of this time um you would look at that and think this must be pretty important in you know this must be a pretty important part of his life and in fact it just evaporated as soon as I deleted it it wasn't it wasn't actually that difficult so I didn't miss it no and now I think the one interesting question to play with is what do you do when there's nothing to do so a lot of people when they are standing in line at the grocery store or they're waiting for the gas to fill up in the car or something I fat what do they do well they pull their phone out you know um last night I went to a restaurant every single person who was waiting in line for a table you go in and check in you okay we'll see you in five minutes every single person pulled their phone out um and so what do you do when you have nothing to do and for most of us a lot of the time it's check your phone check your uh you know check social media so you do need something to fill that space so maybe you know what I did was I moved audible to the home screen of my phone and I just said well I'll just listen to an audiobook when you know what I'm usually doing that and you try to you need something frictionless to fill that gap um and I don't know what it should be for each person but I think it's it's good to have a question an answer to that question because otherwise you're gonna have to just sit with you know there's nothing to do and what are your strategies on a desktop instead of a phone desktop I'm okay with having social media um I actually stay logged in on most of uh the social media accounts except for uh twitter X I just again I can't I'll spend too much time on it so I force myself to be logged out um I also have tried to install um some additional barriers which is I can't log in to any of my social accounts on my own I have to text my assistant to send me the login because it's tied to a separate phone um it's I can't even get past the two factor um because it doesn't go to my phone anymore so there's just uh yeah it's just me trying to like moderate my own behavior I love it what upstream habits are most important for people to think about or create that so that I I didn't mention this earlier but I think this is also related to sequencing which is just asking you know what things are upstream from the outcomes that I want or from the habits that I want it's a good it's a good way to good frame for thinking about what you should focus on you should generally try to do the things that are upstream first um probably the single most important habit that is upstream of all the other ones is some kind of habit of reflection review the habit of thinking um it is so unlikely that whatever you are working on now is the best use of your time is it's almost impossible and so I think Sam Altman has some line where he says you should have a very high bar for working on anything other than thinking about what to work on um because that's that's that's going to be the biggest point of leverage is choosing a better thing to focus your attention on and so many people are you know I I was like this too if you have if you're the type of person who has a very good work ethic and hard work has benefited you a lot in your life you get to a point where you start to use it as a crutch because you're like well I'll just work my way out of it you know I'll just I'll just work harder and that's a way to solve this problem but you cannot outwork the person who's working on a better thing and so um it is possible if you really grind maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder than you are now but if you work on the right thing you get a hundred ex of the results or a thousand ex of the results and so what you need I I almost feel like we should change the definition of what it means to work hard it should not only mean putting in the hours it should also mean outthinking the other person if you're not outthinking them you're not outworking them and so um a habit of reflection review is probably the single most important habit you need to create some time in your week to sit down and think am I spending my precious time energy my one precious life on the things that I want to be spending it on and I don't know any other way to do that then to make some space to think you know if you just keep your head down and work hard it's just really unlikely that you're going to be spending them the right way so I have a couple different ways I do it um I do a weekly review every Friday where I sit down that's mostly related to business stuff so you know it's looking at metrics and how things are going and you know subscribers and revenue and expenses and all that stuff it's just a quick check-in most weeks nothing happens I just look at stuff and it's fine but occasionally you'll get a week where you see a trend and it's like oh that's been going down for three weeks straight like what's going on there or something like that so it's just a way to kind of notice red flags when they come up um the more important one is I do an annual review and the annual review is more about values it's more about what do I say is important to me who am I the type of person or you know who am I trying to be as a person and then looking at how I spent my last year and saying well did that match up or not my calendar plays a really critical role there I'll go through my calendar in detail I look at how many workouts did I do last year how many did I do each month what was my average per month I look at how many places did I travel to how many nights I spend away from home is that enough or not enough like how did that feel um I look at how many articles I published or newsletters I published you know things like that and so it's kind of the chance for me to check in on my production and time for them last year and then you look at your values and you say well you said this was important to you is that actually where you spent your time and so it's a way to course correct um the last two years it's been kind of interesting because I usually do that in your review in December and I have continued to keep the document open all year long and I keep coming back to it and trying to write like new principles at the top of it or whatever to help me course correct um like one of my I don't even know if it really makes sense but one of my principles for the last year was like move like thunder um and so it's like you don't really see it but then all of a sudden there's this big crash and um that's the that's kind of like I'm trying to do fewer things but with a bigger impact and so I just have little lines like that that are at the top to try to keep me on track with we know what I'm hoping to do about your do you have a check in with your wife yeah we um we don't have like a formal check in I don't treat it like a one-on-one that you would do like an accompaniment or something like that but what we have did I like to board me yeah yeah I don't know it just feel it just feels like too structured and weird you know um but the biggest thing that we've done the last couple years is a monthly date night and just making sure that that actually happens every month which we have for like probably probably yeah 24 to 30 straight months now um has been huge it's the one time what we say is it's the one time that we actually talk which sounds silly because we're talking all the time right but everything is logistics it's all tasks and figuring out what to do with the kids and you know it's like there's all these things that need to be done it's all jobs to be done and then um you go out for a couple hours and you're like oh now we it's actually we can actually talk you know so I think that has been uh that's been really valuable I think that's so important what popular habits do you think are garbage hmm the only one that's coming to me right now is consuming the news um and browsing social media those are the two that I just feel like I wonder you know we have a uh one of our grand parents is in their her 90s and um we talked her and it's kind of like oh yeah we smoked when we were younger but like nobody knew you know like they're like we didn't realize like everybody did it it wasn't you know it was just like how it was and I wonder like when I'm 94 like what am I gonna be saying where it's like we were all on social media nobody knew you know like we didn't realize and I don't mean to criticize social media too much because like obviously there are benefits from it but um I do I do wonder what we're gonna look back on and be like yeah we didn't quite realize the full effect of all of it um and it was kind of like you know messing with our minds so increasingly I mean we're moving to a world I don't think people quite realize it yet where you and I open the same article in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times it's gonna be two different versions of that article that's based on our browsing history or political preferences I'm not saying they're doing that today but you can see the technology is sort of formally I kind of feel like the only way to win is to not play the game you know so that that's why I've sort of checked out in a lot of ways um we have two friends who are R.H. who have never had social media accounts and I'm like man I kind of wonder what it's like sometimes like that's kind of I I don't necessarily like envy them but I do look at that and I'm like well that's kind of a refreshing way to live you know and it is interesting how uh essential it feels in the moment it feels like oh I can't really give this up because it's a really big important part of my life but if you can get yourself to give it up for a month or something you realize actually life goes on just fine um there's you can still live a very rich and full and fulfilling life and it plays no no role in it so um yeah giving I think giving that up has been has been good what's the two minute rule two minute rules very simple it just says take whatever habit you're trying to focus on and scale it down to somebody takes two minutes or less to do so read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat you know sometimes I mentioned those examples to people and they kind of resisted a little bit you know I was like okay buddy you know like I know the real goals and just to take my yoga mat out you know I'm actually trying to do the workout so I understand where people are coming from but the two minute rule does something important you know I have this reader his name was Mitch I mentioned an atomic habits and he started going to the gym and he lost over 100 pounds kept off for more than a decade now but when he first started to go he had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes so he get in the car drive the gym get out do half an exercise get back in the car drive home and it sounds silly right it sounds like kind of ridiculous so I go clearly this is not going to get the guy the results he wants but what you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up you know he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for five minutes and I think this is a very deep truth about habits which is a habit must be established before it can be improved you know it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize an turning in something more you need to standardize before you optimize yeah and the two minute rule helps you do that helps push back on that perfectionist tendency that feeling that you need to have it all figured out or to do it perfectly to do it at all I don't know why we do that with our habits we get very all or nothing about them you know we're so focused on finding the best sales strategy the perfect business idea the ideal diet plan we're so focused on optimizing that if we can't find the perfect one we're like well I need to keep researching but you need to master the art of showing up you know like if you can't go to the gym for five minutes four days a week who cares how good the 45 minute workout plan is you know it's just a theory at that point Ed Latimore has that phrase or that quote where he says the heaviest way to the gym is the front door yeah like there are a lot of things in life they're like that you know the hardest step is the first one the most difficult action is the first movement so you need to master the first step master stage one and then advance I just like this principle you should try to use your current advantages to gain new advantages so you know early on like if I look at my entrepreneurial career early on I had very few advantages you know I had no money no resources no connections but what did I have I had time and so for the first three years I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday and I would spend on average I would spend between like 15 and 20 hours on each article the short the fastest I ever did one was eight hours the longest was like 40 something but that was rare but you know if you if you spend 20 hours on two articles we guess 40 hour week right there and most people are not spending that much time on a 2000 word article and so my mission was just to try to make it the most useful valuable actionable article it could be and if you do that a hundred times you end up with a lot of really good content on there and that helped the audience grow so then I then I used my current advantage which was time to create something of value that helped grow the audience now I have a hundred thousand email subscribers now I have a new advantage which is I have an audience and so then that kept growing I think once I got to around 200 is when I got the book deal for atomic habits so you use your new advantage to gain another one now I have the book deal and spend the next three years writing the book then you have a best selling book that's another advantage and you can just you know you see how you try to like lever up one after the other and you start to accumulate these these new advantages and it puts you in a much different position now there's obviously some patience that needs to come with that right like I just described something in 30 seconds that took like seven years you know so it takes a while but sometimes people will say oh how did atomic habits become this best seller or whatever and really what you're seeing when the book comes out is the release of potential energy that was built over like five years prior you know it's not like it happened overnight it was the five years of building an audience of hundreds of thousands people meeting other authors going on podcasts and doing interviews you know all that stuff was released around the same time but it was it took a while for it to get built up so anyway that's just one another one of my little principles which is use your current advantages to gain new advantages one of the things that prevents people from doing things is they just don't feel like it how do we become stronger than our feelings I think it's okay if you don't feel like it I think sometimes it's a signal you know like you should procrastination is not always a bad thing if you're procrastinating on something sometimes it's a signal that you don't actually want that thing which is fine I for a long time I so I I was good in school I got good grades I was like a game for me that I tried to win you know I didn't really care about whether I was learning I cared about was I getting A's you know am I am I succeeding which may not be the way that you want to go through school but that's you know that's how I treated at the time and so for a long time if you asked me when I was in college what are you gonna do I said I was gonna go to medical school it was something that I I light I do think I would like a lot about being a doctor or a surgeon there's I think there's a lot about that profession that would I would align with who I am but there's also probably 30% or 40% that would not have been a good fit for me and I kept saying that because it's the type of thing that you can say and never be criticized for you know like you go home with Thanksgiving or Christmas and people are like what are you gonna do and you're like I'm gonna go to medical school and everybody says that's great you know and you know some people should be doctors but what I kept procrastinating on was studying for the MCAP the entrance exam and that was kind of a sign you know it was a sign that I didn't really want to do this because I wasn't fully in and I ignored that for a long time and took it and didn't do that well and you know but it's like yeah and like this wasn't that wasn't necessarily a bad thing it was a sign that I realized at some intuitive level that this isn't actually what I wanted and it was just a story that I kept saying um whereas other stuff like writing about habits for example I I was interning at a orthopedic medical practice over the summer and I got to do a lot of cool stuff I went in on like 35 surgeries and got to like shout at that and watch it that was really neat I did some back-end billing stuff for the practice but each afternoon I usually ended up with about two hours where I was supposed to be working till five and I didn't have anything to do and so I sat down and I started writing about habits I just had this word doc it was just kind of like James's thoughts on habits and it got to be about 60 pages long and I was like you should publish something of this you know this is kind of ridiculous keep writing about all this like what are you gonna do it for kind of back to my earlier point about you should share your work publicly and nobody asked me to do that you know but I so it's kind of like what are you what are you doing on nights and weekends what are you doing with your free time maybe that's what you should be doing during the week and it was like very much that sort of energy and so you look at medical school and you're like well I was procrastinating on a key part of it and then you look at the habits and like writing part and you're like well you were doing this and nobody was even asking you to and so those are two very different forms of energy and I think trying to find the things where you are running toward the next thing not away from the last thing like same same direction totally different energy what are you naturally running toward what is naturally pulling you in and those are the places that you should double down on one of the things that you said that stood out to me there was nobody could argue with the fact that I was I was pursuing this goal and so many people seem to optimize their life in this way right where I'm not standing at I'm not spiky I'm nobody can what will you not be criticized for how do we develop the courage to I mean the book the courage to be just like but basically the courage to yeah it's kind of the I have started to call it internally to myself I've started to call it the tyranny of labels you know it is the tyranny of being beholden to a label it's the need to be described in a certain way to need to be called a best selling author or a surgeon or lawyer or whatever the label is if you need that label then you are beholden to doing it that way but if you can release yourself from the label and instead ask yourself what type of lifestyle do I want or what type of impact do I want to make regardless of what the actual label is now all of a sudden a ton of options open up so as an example like I have a couple friends and family members who are professors if you need to be a professor if you need to have that label you're very limited in what your job options are but if instead you ask yourself well what kind of lifestyle do I want okay well professors off in the summer I like the flexibility of that lifestyle or what type of impact do I want to make well professors get to teach the teach concepts other people well if you say if you just say I want a flexible life where I get to teach people there are tons of options you could be a podcaster you could be a youtuber you could write you could do you know you can do almost infinite you could be a coach there's so many different ways to teach and to have a flexible life but if it needs to be about the label now all the sudden your subset of options is very limited and I have seen this again and again with people who I think are very talented and intelligent but they kind of restrict themselves because they have to have the label and so I think if you can give that up if you can release that need to be described in a certain way to have a certain status marker but instead ask yourself what type of impact do I want to make what type of lifestyle do I want to have now all of a sudden you have a lot more options from making it happen a lot of people consume the gist of something so if you think of James you know you read a full book you might take away one idea from that book you you can press that idea into a thought you post that thought on twitter yeah somebody reads that thought and they think that they understand at the same level that you do but you've distilled all this experience into that how do you think about when it's okay to have the gist of something versus when you need to deep dive and it's actually important to go into the weeds on things it seems I'll put this in context it seems more and more people are refusing to deep dive and we're just sort of like skimming on the surface of knowledge that's absolutely right a lot of that is kind of a is it the medium or the message the medium is the message sort of thing but when you get forced into it by the shape of twitter or the shape of instagram or whatever it's not it's not a place where you can unpack a book length argument or even a 30 minute argument you know it's everything is compressed to a headline or a tweet so it's hard to it's hard to play that game to be browsing on there for 30 minutes or 60 minutes or an hour and a half a day and also be nuanced you know you need to you need to play a different game if you want the new ones um but separately thinking about this for me you're right that is a big part of what I do is I try to so I when I was working on atomic habits I had 12 chapters at the time they're ended up being 20 but at the time there were 12 and I wrote the chapter title on an index card for each of them I laid all 12 out on the floor and then I went to my bookshelf and I grabbed each book that was relevant to that chapter and usually there were like four or five or six for each chapter so I had these little stacks of books by each and next card and then I looked at each of those books and I said how can I take everything that is genuinely useful from this book like when you sit down you read these 200 pages what are the two or three ideas that you actually remember that made an impact or what are the 20 pages that really drove that point home can I take everything that's actually useful about this book and compress it into this chapter and so that if you read this one chapter now you don't have to read those six books and I actually think that is a good measure for what makes a great nonfiction book is how many other books can you make a relevant by writing this now that you've read atomic habits you don't need to read these other 30 and I don't know if I actually hit that measure or not right like that's for the readers to decide but you're never going to hit it unless you strive for it and so that was part of the objective was to take everything that was useful and to compress it into this higher signal you know peace the first draft of atomic habits was like 712 pages or something like that the final one was you know 230 or whatever and so it got compressed a lot and my goal was for it to be as high signals as it could possibly be so that is a big part of what I do and you're right that if you just read the compressed version you don't necessarily have the same nuance or depth that somebody else has it's tricky to figure out like when do you need that and when can you just have the the short version because like I said earlier in many areas of life good enough is good enough and so giving somebody the compressed and actionable version is enough for them to get what they want and then really the way to honor that is to let them have all the rest of their time back you know like that's one of my big principles is that don't waste the readers time you need to have an extreme respect for the reader's time almost like a obsession over the reader's time every word that you write is actually an obstacle that the reader does not want to have to go through your book is an obstacle between them and the result that they want and so every word needs to earn its place in that way and if you take that seriously then it forces you to make sure that the book is even better but certainly there is a time for nuance and depth and I think that's one of the nice things about books is that they provide that space so my strategy for it is I try to have the compressed version which is like the sound bite that's sticky and the people can remember they can walk around with it in their mind so things from atomic habits like every action you take as a vote for the type person you wish to become great that's kind of sticky you can remember that as you go throughout your day whether you're working on a fitness habit or parenting habit or writing habit you know you can be like okay I'm trying to cast a vote for who I am it's like a little shorthand that you can take with you but then the whole chapter is 20 pages you know unpacking why identity is powerful and how habits and identity intertwined with each other and why that's useful in some of the research and so on so the book gives you the space to make the argument but the sound bite gives you something sticky that you can walk around with you know or like you don't rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems I mean a lot of people like that phrase or you know a lot of companies or teams have used to get 1% better every day it's so it's good to have the compressed versions because they it's nice to have that shorthand as you go through your day to keep you on track but the book gives the real estate to unpack the full argument why do you think that we focus on complexity when simplicity usually carries most of the outcome we have a very strong desire to believe that there's a secret you know people people want to know what the secrets are um like the athletic ran this article a couple years ago about um Michael Phelps and his breathing techniques and it was one of the most popular articles that you know they had and people people want to believe oh there's a secret that he's doing that I'm not doing and if I knew what that was then you know it would make the difference and I'm not saying that they don't make a difference they probably did help him but also you know he's six foot six and built like a fish and you know like he's perfectly designed for this you know for this outcome um and so uh yeah was it the breathing techniques or was the fact that he like didn't miss a swim for like you know 16 straight years he's in the pool like you know there's there's so many other pieces of it um so we want to believe that there's some secret behind it but a lot of it is like sometimes when people will come to me and ask about building an audience or you know launching a newsletter or writing a book getting in shape even a lot a lot of habits are like this um I'll say like well you know don't miss a workout for two years and then get back to me you know like go right right two articles a week for two years and then get back to me you know like have you done the simple version yeah you know like have you done the very I'm trying to go for 99.8 to 99.9 but they're they're actually at 45 yeah yeah um you need to I guess the one way to think about it is especially in the beginning the primary bottleneck to results are are you doing the obvious things you know do do the obvious stuff first there's probably only two or three pieces that you just need to do it like are you showing up consistently are you do you know just do the obvious things and that will get you 80% of the way there and then once you're there now you're in the arena now you're showing up each day you've got plenty to optimize but by trying to make it too complicated at the start you have kind of like shortcut yourself or short-circuit it and you've also put yourself in a you put yourself in a worst position because now you're focused on the wrong things and you're not doing the things that are going to get you the majority of the result so master the basics to start and then advance from there somewhat related to that and actually related to the investing conversation we're having is how do you think about the relationship between outcome and ego so our ego wants us to be the investor that beats the market but the actual outcome we want is maybe if the outcome is beating the market over a long period of time and we can do that in a way but there's no ego in buying Vanguard yeah well sometimes I think we we think the outcome we want is one thing but actually the outcome we want is the ego to be stroked you know it's like I wonder if like how many people would be VCs if you weren't allowed to tell people what you invested in yeah like if you couldn't tell people I was an early investor in Uber you know if you couldn't tell them I you know I invested in Facebook would you still do it or you like how much of it how much of it is that label that you like so certainly some of it is the returns but a lot of it is the social status in the praise so there's and that's fine I'm not necessarily criticizing that like we are social creatures you know we are primates that want to climb the social hierarchy like there's nothing there's nothing odd about it it's part of human nature but um I think we should at least admit it you know admit admit what's what's actually going on um we create the the status as much as we create the outcome so but back to your point about trying to balance ego and outcome and figuring out how to like walk that delicate dance between the two and not let your ego lead you astray some of the little phrases I try to remind myself of are like I've been saying this a lot recently with one of the projects I'm working on I'll sit down to with the team and I'll tell them I don't need to be right I just want us to get it right okay so it doesn't I'm going to generate a lot of ideas and I'm going to share my thoughts on it but I don't need us to pick my idea that is not the goal is not for we us to do what James says the goal is for us to get it right so what do we need to do you know to get there and then another follow up question that I will often ask I find it helpful for me to keep asking this question if I only ask in one meeting it doesn't do it but if I ask it again and again it's what is not being said right now that needs to be said you know like what there's so many times when people you know I look at them I say what are you thinking right now that in two years because I'm a slow learner and I don't know yet but I'll figure it out and then you're going to be like it James isn't going to like that in two years you know but you can see it right now I just I'm just not smart enough to ask about it yet so what needs to be said that isn't being said and I find that that question helps but doing both of those things saying I don't need to be right I just want us to get it right and then what needs to be said right now that's not being said it sets the table so that people can you know open up and share what they need to share so I come back to those two a lot the other one that I come back to is telling myself is mostly just a reminder for myself that I am not right I am trying to be less wrong and if you start with the position that I am already wrong I don't know everything I'm getting something that I believe right now is off but I'm trying to become less wrong then you're you're more in a position where you're trying to learn and less in a position where you're trying to defend you know if you believe that you're right what's that line it's like the fastest way to stop learning something is to believe you already know it yeah you know it's like if you already believe that you're right now you're not open to receiving but if you believe that you're wrong you're just trying to improve now now you can come at it from a much more humble place and it doesn't need to be about you so those are I don't always get that stuff right but those are those are things that I try to center myself with Jeff Bezos had this saying that stuck with me ever since I heard it which is basically and I'm paraphrasing that the people who are right a lot change their mind a lot and they're rarely right at the beginning but they're right at the end and there's a huge difference between being right at the start and being right at the end. Well that's great because it's so hard to be right at the start so unlikely that your first idea is the one that works you know or the one that's correct I mean you need to be willing to adjust along the way and so that that level of flexibility is I think critical how do you think about the relationship between consistency and intensity intensity makes for a good story you know it's like oh I went to silent meditation retreat for a week you know or I ran a marathon you know we launched this product faster than any other had been launched you know intensity makes for a good story but consistency makes progress you know it's not about like oh I did a silent meditation for treat for a week it's not you know I have a meditation practice I do it for five minutes each morning it's part of how I start my day you know that's when it's kind of part of your identity or you know I go for a run three days a week I really love how it makes me feel you know that now it's it's part of your lifestyle so I think you can kind of draw this distinction between intensity is often about the story that you get to tell consistency is about the lifestyle that you live and really what matters is how do you want to spend your days you know how do you want to show up as a person what kind of identity do you want to have and the great thing is that if you do a good job with the consistency it develops your capacity to manage the intensity or to handle it you know I like this saying consistency enlarges ability by being more consistent you enlarge your ability to handle the intense moments to do the peak performances to do the more impressive things but it needs to start with a focus on consistency and lifestyle and by doing it in that way you flex those muscles sometimes literally and develop that ability one thing you've written on recently is the relationship between the longing and accuracy and I'm wondering if you can riff on that for a second humans are very social creatures you know we care a lot about what other people think about us we are focused on status and prestige we want to rise up the social hierarchy and be praised and rewarded and all of that is very natural makes a lot of sense you know people a lot of the time people will tell you don't care what other people think about you but we all care what other people think often for a very good reason which is if people think well of you it benefits you in life it you know it puts you in a good position you are rewarded for it it helps you accomplish things it makes you safer it it just feels good and so belonging is a critical part of being human however especially in the modern world the desire to belong can offer often run counter to the desire to understand or be accurate and so if you have to choose between well I could believe this thing and be ostracized or criticized or outcast from my community or I could believe this other thing which may not be that accurate but it will get me praised and rewarded and accepted by my community a lot of the time the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand it puts you in a position where you're like well you know I could believe this fact that may or may not impact my daily life or I could keep a good relationship with my wife and my best friend and my you know co-workers and so on and a lot of people choose the belonging over the accuracy do you think that applies outside of social groups too to our identity like if I identify as a Republican or Democrat then this thought has the exact same impact so earlier in this conversation we talked about the power that identity can have and building habits right like as you start to practice a habit you foster an identity and that puts you in a stronger place because once you take pride in being that kind of person you will fight to maintain the habit you fight to be the type of person who doesn't miss workouts the type of person who meditates each day or the type of person who writes consistently or whatever it is because it's part of who you see yourself to be but now we see that there's also a flip side to this or a dark side a shadow side to identity which is the tire you cling to an identity the harder it becomes to grow beyond it and so once you have started to identify as a certain type of person once you adopt that label oh I am a member of this group right and the type of person who believes this thing it becomes hard to stretch and grow outside of that and so eventually what you realize is that you simultaneously need to have two things you need to be casting votes for the type of person that you wish to become building up evidence of that identity that you want but you also need to realize that your identity does not have to be fixed you know identity is an interesting word because there's pieces of it that you can't really get around like I am a male and a father and tall and those are all aspects that I'm not going to change about my identity but there are other aspects of my identity that can be adjusted and can be you know refined so you know I'm a writer I don't always have to be a writer that's part of my identity right now I could shift to something else and so I sort of view it as like a painting that's always being retouched and kind of edited and so you're you're slightly adjusting the picture and what you realize is that progress both physical progress but also mental internal progress requires unlearning it requires the willingness to unlearn some of the identities that we have and you see that when people are not willing to do that they often get stuck you know it's like the it's the surgeon who you can imagine a surgeon who's done an operation a certain way for 20 years and then all of a sudden a new form of robotics comes in or something that changes it and they say well look I have all these patients that I've served well for 20 years who had good outcomes I'm not going to switch but five years later they're behind the curve or a teacher who has the same lesson plan they've been doing for 15 years and then all of a sudden they should update and use new tools or bring YouTube in or whatever and they don't and now some they're starting to lose the students and it goes back to that that line where the only bad mindset is the one that you're fixed in you know it's the one that you can't get out of if you're stuck in this one way of thinking or one form of an identity then you're not growing anymore and so identity is both a powerful driver of change and a force that can help you establish a habit but it also can be a pitfall to the next round of change and a reason that you use to prevent yourself from moving forward what's your exact process for learning new subjects as an adult I don't know that I have an exact process although now that you say that so okay this is kind of interesting I don't have an exact process in the sense that I haven't written it down I don't have I don't have like some template to give you but I do have a pattern that I go through very consistently when I'm trying to learn something new I think some of this is my personality and how it gets expressed or maybe maybe like a strength even and some of it is probably applicable to everybody so I really like living by this little principle of broad funnel tight filter and so I try to cast a really wide net when I'm learning something new I want to read and consume an enormous amount of information it's very common for me to have like 40 taps open you know I just I'll do a search like here's an example from when I was working on atomic habits I I found Reddit really helpful when I was working on certain sections of the book so I would search things like what's the best habit you've ever built Reddit or what's one habit that you struggled with Reddit and if you you search those terms it'll pull up you know 20 or 30 different threads and so I would open all of those so I'd have like 50 tabs open on there and then I would go through and I would read all the comments in each thread and a lot of it wasn't really that relevant but I would probably find after I do that I would probably find six or seven or eight phrases that I really liked that I was like oh that's a good description of like a real problem somebody had and then I put all those into a list together and so what I'm doing I mean what I'm learning is I'm learning what people struggle with what happens I'm learning you know where do they succeed and where do they fail and so I do that broad funnel and then I have a really tight filter for what gets out look at 50 tabs end up with eight senses and I just would run that cycle again and again and again so maybe I do it on Reddit for some stuff I do it on I ran a survey with my audience for another look at social media comments look at comments on I used a long long time ago I used to have comments on my website so maybe look at that go to the newsletter go to my inbox look at the replies that I've gotten from people through the newsletter like that's another one so you just do these really broad data sets and then you have a really tight funnel for what for what gets through and you end up with some really high quality stuff that way the tricky part about learning that way is it requires a lot of persistence this is where I said like I think some of it's my personality one strength for me something I'm good at is I can concentrate on something for a very long time so I I could do that for eight 10 12 hours in a day and I would just spend it doing that and I will just go through all those tabs and do the whole thing a lot of people don't like that the flip side of that a weakness for me is I'm not as good at compartmentalizing so if I had that same eight hour day but it was split up on like six different meetings I don't I don't like that I don't I'm not good at the task switching between each one it's too much my mine feels really scattered but if I can lock in and just do one task for the whole time that feels great so my approach to learning is usually something like that let me let me get a really broad data set and just read super widely and then I'm just going to try to identify the most meaningful piece in each one and gradually like collect that into one area I don't know if it was you that told me this or somebody else but you had went through Amazon reviews for all these books as well that was another big piece I so I went through you know I am not the first person to write about habits right and I won't be the last and so I looked at some of the books that had come out before me power of habits seven habits a highly effective people you know books like this that have already been written on habits and I went to the three star reviews on Amazon one star review everybody hates it often for some stupid reason like the book showed up and it was dirty on the dust jacket or whatever five star review everybody loves it but the three star reviews are the four star reviews those are pretty useful you know it's it's usually a person who liked the book but they had some complaint about it and so I would look at all these different reviews not just for those two books but other ones as well and I was just trying to map the like habits book universe what what have what has already been written what do people like about what's been written and what feels like it's missing and the primary thing that came up is these books are really good at explaining habits or they help me understand them but I still am left wondering how do I apply it and so once I saw that enough times I thought all right I can be the practical guy you know I can be the one who translates this and makes habits actionable and so my little objective was I'm going to try to write the most useful actionable guide on building good habits and bringing bad ones that's ever been written and I don't know that I actually achieve that or not but that was the objective right it's to back to what we talked about earlier if you don't strive for that you're never going to just stumble into that outcome you know you're not going to be like well I just decided to write a book and it turns out it was the most actionable whenever you know like it's not you need to actually try to reach for that and so I I decided that that was one project where I was going to do that and research methods like looking at those reviews is one way to try to accomplish that you don't get out of bed and become Michael Jordan right yeah yeah I mean it's you know it's so it's it's like the classic like I don't want to work out too much because I don't want to look like a bodybuilder and you're like you know I'm like I've been trying to look like a bodybuilder 15 years I still am not there yet you know it's like it takes a long time you need a lot of effort how do you think about prioritization a lot of it comes back to what we talked about earlier about can I find things that have tailwinds that have leverage that accumulates that feed each other and so if I find something it checks a lot of those boxes that feels pretty high priority I have this new thing I've been trying which is I I bought a bunch of wooden clothes pins you know the little like yeah they're like kind of flat on one side so you can write on them and I hung a string from my office ceiling and on so I got like 50 of these and on each clothespin so I wrote each my kids names on one and then I wrote working out on another one and then I have all these projects that I want to do you know I've got I've got stuff that makes sense that you would want to do like you know writing another book or things that you would expect and then I got like totally other stuff like a film idea that I would like or like some idea for a music label or you know things that are like outside of my my normal focus but trying to write all these ideas down and then I put like a red line across the string and the question is what earns its way about the line obviously my kids are going to go above it obviously working out is going to go above it but I have an increase if what feels like I have every year especially with each additional kid you add it feels like you have fewer and fewer hours right and so the time is precious and so I look at the rest of these projects and I say is this good enough to earn its way above the line and I need that visual reminder one of the there are a lot of things in life that are like this but one of the challenging things about the really important stuff in life is that they're endless battles you know if you do a good job focusing today and prioritizing today you pick the right thing to focus on it earns you no bonus points for tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow you show up and if you spend all that time on YouTube we're getting distracted or whatever like that day has gone and so other things are like that too like just because you worked out two weeks ago doesn't mean you don't need to do it today you know just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for today you still need to show up for them and so I'm trying to get comfortable with that endless nature of those things a lot of the time we try to resist the endless nature with that stuff oh I wish it wasn't that way we want it we try to convince ourselves that it's like a finish line oh if I just do this 21 day cleanse then I'll be a healthy person and I won't have to think about it anymore you know oh if I just you know buy here something nice for her anniversary then I can like stop worrying about it and I don't have to you know it's like no it's not like that it's you know it's endless and as soon as you accept the endless nature then you start looking at it differently you say okay it's not about getting to a particular finish line it's about living a daily life that feels sustainable and that I like and then I'm fully engaged in so it's about liking my days so I use all of that lens as I look at this string and ask myself which closed pins get to go above the line and that's one that's one way to prioritize it and I find that having the visual marker helps remind me the next day when I forgot that I just did that exercise and I feel like getting pulled into you know the next shiny thing I love that because it visualizes what so many of us are dealing with one of the really key pieces of building a habit then getting it to stick is finding ways to visualize your progress so if you look at technologies that are really good at building habits they're great at visualization you're playing a video game you have a score in the top corner of the screen it's increasing all the time as you go through the level every time you pick up a weapon or a ruby or a jam or whatever there's a little jingle or a chime there's some kind of power up even the pitter patter of footsteps as you run through the level is a signal that you're progressing so you have all these signals of progress visual audio like it's very the feedback is immediate and if you compare that experience of just like playing this level for 15 minutes to what it's like to sit down and try to write a blog post or record a podcast interview or do anything in the normal world is very different the feedback comes much slower in real life you know my parents they like to swim and you know one of the challenges of swimming is your body looks exactly the same when you get out of the waters that did when you jumped in if they if they're doing it for the visual results I mean it takes two years for your body to change in the mirror and so they have a little habit tracker where they just put an x down for each day they do their workout and then at the end of the month they count up how many workouts they did and compare that to the month before and putting that x down at the end of the workout is like such a small little thing but it's one little visual signal that we showed up and we did the right thing today you know that I did what I was supposed to do it's a way of visualizing your progress and so finding ways to visualize your progress as you go through your habits is important because a whole mark of almost any compounding process is that the greatest returns are delayed you know it's it's not to later that you get to the hockey stick portion so the in the moment right now you do the right thing and you feel like I have nothing to show for it so finding ways to visualize that can be helpful for getting habits to stick we always end with the same question which is what is success for you I think the short version of success is having power over my days that's you know if I if I have the the freedom and the ability to choose how I'm spending my days that sounds that sounds great what more could you want than that you know that means I would get to choose to spend time with my kids if I have kids before I had kids it meant I could choose to travel or to work on projects that I wanted you know after my kids are grown it'll mean that I can choose to dive into new things like it you know what what more could you want than that than to have control over your time so I think to have power over my days is the version for me internally and then to contribute my little bit to the world around me is the external focus what is what does success look like on the outside I think it's adding your little bit to the pile of knowledge for humanity I mean what are the one of the great gifts of humankind is that you get to inherit the lessons of the hundred billion people that have come before you you know my kids are going to school now and they start 30 years ahead of where I got to start you know all the things we've learned from the last 30 years are going to be taught to them when when they go and that's what helps them kick the ball of humanity forward and so you know if I could add just some little bit to that then I feel like that's definitely a success I love that thank you this was awesome this was a great conversation you bet thanks so much for having me