Barbell Shrugged - BS INTERROGATION SERIES - EP4 w/ James Clear

Episode Date: June 30, 2013

Habit formation expert and olympic weightlifter James Clear joins Doug for this episode of the BS Interrogation Series to discuss forming habits that stick.

All right, guys, welcome back to the Barbell Shrugged interview series. Today we're interviewing a man named James Clear. James is a competitive weightlifter, but he's also an expert in habit formation and behavior change. If you're a person that has had a lot of trouble doing one very specific thing like eating breakfast every day or making it to the gym five days a week, James is going to help us today find out a way to make these little things habitual. That way they're easier to accomplish over time. That way you can have these structures put in place that make all of these goals that you're going after a lot easier to attain.

So James, thank you very much for coming on today. I appreciate your time and how are you doing? Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, man. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here. Hopefully we'll cover some exciting stuff. Yeah, you bet. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you kind of got into this world of habits and behavior change and also maybe touch on your Olympic weightlifting career just a little bit as well. Sure, absolutely. So I've had a lot of different touch points with health and fitness and wellness. I grew up as an athlete. My dad played minor league

baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. So when I was growing up, I was like always looking at him and wanted to be a baseball player myself. And I ended up playing a lot of different sports throughout my childhood. And then I ended up going and playing baseball in college. My senior year, actually actually I had a really serious injury before I went to college, which I won't get into now, but I ended up making my way all the way back and in my senior year I was an academic All-American, which is like a big, I learned a lot about myself through that process of like having to recover from injury. So anyway, it was good. It was a great transformative experience but once I got done playing,

I was looking for something else, right? Like how else can I compete? How else can I sort of be connected to this fitness industry and health industry and so I went and got my MBA and while I was in business school, I worked at a medical practice for a little bit so that was a really exciting experience.

I got to go in on like 30 surgeries or so, orthopedic surgeries and sports medicine stuff and learned a lot of really exciting things. I was also a biomechanics major in undergrad, so I sort of had like a science background. And then I got my CSCS, and I did some training with, you know, anywhere from like eight-year-olds to up to some professional volleyball players and stuff like that. So just a range of athletes, mostly high school. And then once I got done with that, I started looking at, I was working in the Center for Entrepreneurship while I was in grad school. And I was looking at all these people starting these exciting companies.

And I was like, you know what, I might like to do this myself. This could be a really cool way to sort of, I don't know, build something that I'm really excited about. And so I started my entrepreneurial career. I've been self-employed for about two and a half years now. And I learned a lot through that process. But one of the things that was most critical to what we're talking about today is that I take a particular action, whether it's buying a product or signing up for an email list or just answering a message that you send them, you need to understand how people work. And when I started getting into this behavioral psychology stuff and

copywriting and all these different things, I was naturally going to start applying that to health because I had a background in health and fitness and I was interested in and excited about it. So as those two worlds started to merge a little bit more, I got really excited about this idea of behavioral psychology, behavior science, habit formation, and how we can use all these principles to make it easier for us to live healthy and to achieve our goals, to optimize our performance, and hopefully to master our habits so that we can achieve the things we want to achieve rather than being the victim of, I don't have enough time or I don't have enough energy or things never seem to get done even though I say they're important to me.

That's where I came from and why I love sports and athletics and also how I brought the behavioral piece into it. Okay. You just mentioned not having enough time, not having enough energy. Those seem to be common excuses regardless of what area you're going into. When someone's getting into something new, they often procrastinate. Those are the excuses that they use. That's certainly the case in the fitness and training world or the nutrition world.

I don't have time. I don't have money. I don't have energy. It's been my experience that usually that just means I'm not quite sure how to do it. Instead of just saying, oh, I'm unsure, I say I just don't have time. I'm too busy with other things. But really it's I don't have a routine put in place that makes what I'm doing habitual. And so maybe touch on that about how putting these routines in your life makes everything just a little bit easier. And then talk about how you can start that process.

I think we see this a lot, right? You bring up a good point that a lot of times the excuses we make, regardless of whether it's in health or in business or other areas of our life, they're often an indicator that either we don't trust the abilities that we have because we haven't built these routines yet, or we're not sure what's important to us. We just haven't committed yet and said like this is what I really want. So I think both of those things are important. But to speak on the habits piece, you're right.

If we have these routines built in, then everything else becomes much easier. And you see this in other areas of your life, right? When you go to the grocery store, every time you show up, you typically turn right or left. You don't think about it, you just go one way. And you have this process, this way that you go about things. Same thing when you wake up in the morning, you either put your right shoe or your left shoe on first. And that happens 99% of the time, you do it the same way. And the reason that our mind does these things, that we set things up this way, is because if we had to decide every little thing throughout our day, we wouldn't have enough energy left to

make the important decisions that pop up randomly, right? Well, the power of this is that if you understand how habits work and you can optimize your behavior so that you start to do the right thing automatically without thinking about it, then your results are much, much better over the long term. And so we can dive into some of the strategies and ways for doing that and setting up a schedule so that you perform on a consistent basis rather than just erratically doing the things that you think are important to you and chalking it up saying I'm not motivated enough or I'm too lazy or whatever else. So we're trying to consciously control our habits rather than just subconsciously

going through our day? Yeah, exactly. Kind of what you're saying. And if you think about it, a good place to start with this or to think about this is from motivation and willpower. So a lot of times people will say things like, oh, I can't get to the gym because I'm just not motivated enough, or I'm too lazy to eat healthy all the time, or I just don't have the willpower that I need to lose weight.

But really these aren't the things that determine whether or not you make these choices. You look at people who are actually living healthy lives and who are doing things on a consistent basis the right way, and it's not like they have some superhuman dose of willpower. They just have routines and behaviors built into their day that make these decisions easier. For example, one example from my own experience as an athlete, I didn't always feel like showing up and doing... The thing about baseball is that there's a lot of games and because you play so often, it's hard to be up for every game, right? Like coaches talk about all the time,

like you guys need to find a way to get motivated for this game. And so if you show up at the ballpark and you're not ready to play that day, you got to figure something out to get you in a mode where you're ready to compete and perform at your peak level. And for me, I found out that developing this like pregame routine was what did it for me. Like I wouldn't always feel at my best when I showed up at the ballpark each day, but I had this pattern, this habit, this 20-minute routine of getting ready.

By the time I got done with that, I was like, alright, I'm ready to play. And each time I did that routine, it was like a signal to my mind saying, okay, this is what you're going to do right now. Let's go ahead and get in like game mode, so to speak. You can use the same thing for any habit that you're trying to approach, right? I do this now when I go to the gym. I have the same routine where I walk in, I take my shoes off, I put my Olympic shoes on, I put my wrist wraps on, I do like 10 squats without the bar, then I do 10 with

the bar, and I do the same thing every single time. It's not because it's like the optimized way to get my body ready, it's because my mind needs that to get myself in the right sequence so that I'm ready to roll and ready to lift at my best ability each time. So you can use this- So there's something that- What's that?

I'm sorry. If there's something that people are trying to accomplish that they keep screwing up every day, having something right at the beginning that's the same every time, that can just kind of give them a little on-ramp into that event is a good way to start structuring a habit. In your case, it's kind of like a warm-up for weightlifting or what have you, but that could be something that you could put in front of anything, not just working out. Absolutely. And I do this,, like, for example, for my writing, right? I write new articles every

Monday and every Thursday about behavior change, habit formation, all this stuff. And so each Monday and Thursday, I know I need to put something out. Well, I wake up, I get a glass of water, and I start my writing routine. And like grabbing that glass of water is the signal to my brain that like, this is what you're doing now. And so exactly, you're exactly on it. And I love that phrase, the on-ramp idea, right? Because that's what you're doing. You're giving yourself a trigger or, you know, some signal that initiates the behavior. And then it becomes less about motivating yourself and more about just starting the routine.

And the important thing to realize about this is that a lot of times motivation comes after starting. There's like an inspiration, there are two types of inspiration. There's passive inspiration where we like watch YouTube videos or read an article and try to get jacked up and ready to do something. And then there's active inspiration where we motivate ourselves by the behaviors that we do. So it's like you get something done, you get your shoes on, you get into the gym, and then you start to feel a little bit more motivated to finish the workout.

Or you don't feel that good that day and you're kind of wondering if you can get five sets of squats done, but once you get through two, you're like, all right, I got this. And so there's that inspiration that comes with getting yourself moving and starting that momentum, and that's what that pregame routine, so to speak, is there for. It's for initiating that and making it easier to continue. Okay. Another thing I've heard you say before is having the right environment will kind of

trigger the habits. Do you have any examples of that concept? Yeah, absolutely. So this idea of environment design, I'm glad you brought it up because I think it's really important. There are, you know, often times we sit around and we think about, okay, the people that I hang out with, like that can impact me, right? Like with the people, you know, if I have good friends or smarter friends, then maybe

I'll become smarter. But what we don't think about as much is that the environment that surrounds us also impacts our behaviors. The things that we have on our desk at work or the things that we have on our kitchen counter at home, the signs that are hanging on the wall or the things that we see throughout our day, these are all triggers that impact our actions. And actually, I'll go ahead and give you a story, an example on this that sort of illustrates it well. There's a researcher at Duke University, his name is Dan Ariely,

and he did this study where he looked at this graph. And you can imagine this graph in your mind. On one side of the graph are a lot of countries that are all up really high, like 97, 98, 99%. On the other side of this graph are countries that are down around 10, 11, 15%. They're all very low.. The graph is looking at the percentage of people in each country that have chosen to be organ donors. He looked at these groups, and it was kind of strange because in one group on the very high end was Sweden at 97 percent. Then in the other group was Denmark, which is right next door to it, but it was down at 5 percent. He was like, what's the next door to it, but it was down at like 5%. And so he was like, well, what's the difference

between these countries? They're very similar socially and economically and culturally. Is it that the people in Denmark are just jerks and the people in Sweden aren't? What's the deal here? And when they looked into it further, they found out that this was the difference. The people in the high countries in 97, 98,

99% were sent a form that said if you'd like to be an organ donor, or if you don't want to be an organ donor, check here. So it was an opt-out. And the people in the very low countries, it was if you do want to be an organ donor, check here, opt-in. Now, if you were going to ask the people in those countries, oh, did you choose to be an organ donor?

You are, you aren't, they would probably back into some reason for why they chose to be or to not be, right? It would be like, oh, yeah, like that's the type of person I am. But the truth is whether or not they chose to be an organ donor had more to do with the type of form that they were sent than anything else. And this is true of our behaviors all over the place. Like the environment, the signs that we read, the things that we see, they impact the choices we make. So if you can optimize the things that are at your house or the signals that you get

from your environment each day, it makes those behaviors much, much easier even if you would be able to back into a reason or convince yourself that actually it's some other reason why you did this. So to give you two examples for how you can do this, a lot of people want to eat healthier. They want to eat vegetables, more green vegetables, whatever. There are plenty of studies that show that if the size of your plate is smaller, then you'll go ahead and eat less. You can reduce your calories just by getting smaller plates. I think if you go from 12-inch plates to 10-inch plates,

over the course of the year, you should lose about 10 pounds just from the calorie change from that. You just fill your plate up in both cases. What's that? Because you just fill your plate up in both cases. What's that? Because you just fill your plate up in both cases and you just... Exactly. They find that most of the time you're going to fill your plate to the brim. So if you just have smaller plates then you'll eat less food.

And they also... Some people say, well, oh, I'll just serve myself less or I'll just eat less of what's on my plate. That doesn't work out either. Research studies find that 90% of the time you eat everything on your plate and you fill your plate up. So whatever size plate you have, that's how much food you're going to be eating basically. So if you reduce the size of your plate, it makes it easier to lose weight.

But they also found out that the color of your plate impacts the decisions you make. So actually it's to the point where if the color of your food matches the color of your plate, you'll naturally eat 30% more. So they had two groups of people. One was in a line, they were handed white plates. Another one was in a line, they were handed red plates. And then they had two types of pasta they could have. They could either have a pasta premixed with a red sauce or a pasta premixed with a white

sauce. And they found that when people served themselves pasta, like white pasta on a white plate or red pasta on a red plate, they naturally put 30% more on there because their brain had trouble distinguishing the size of the portion from the color of the plate. It just doesn't look as big because they match, and so you naturally serve yourself more. I got to thinking about this, and I was like, well, how can we use this to eat healthy? Well, if you have dark green plates, you're naturally going to over serve yourself broccoli, spinach, leafy greens.

You'll give yourself larger portions and you'll naturally serve yourself less of things that people often want to limit. Pastas, grains, potatoes, things like that. So by choosing, if you're looking to lose weight, by choosing smaller plates and making them green, you should make it easier for yourself to eat more vegetables and reduce the number of calories that you're looking to lose weight, by choosing smaller plates and making them green, you should make it easier for yourself to eat more vegetables and reduce the number of calories that you're eating. So that's one example of how you can design your environment to make it easier to make the right choices.

Will it do everything for you? No. But imagine if you make 50 of those little changes throughout your kitchen, how much easier is it to live healthy? Sure. I'd imagine that's one of those things where if you ask somebody, would you do this, they would say, no, that wouldn't affect me. They'd imagine that's one of those things where if you ask somebody, would you do this, they would say, no, that wouldn't affect me. They deny it to the bitter end. But when they study it and they actually measure it, that's really what's happening.

You know, I actually, I wrote an article about this and I had someone respond to me and send me an email and say, well, you know, I know the color of my plate, like obviously this isn't going to impact me. I was like, no, this is the point of the study. It's not, it doesn't matter if you know, it's this isn't going to impact me. I was like, no, this is the point of the study. It doesn't matter if you know. It's like a psychological response. It's a subconscious thing that we all do. And so realizing that we respond to the environment in that way,

you can optimize the environment to make things easier. I did this, you know, another example. I did this with flossing as well. You know, I was really, I couldn't get in the habit of flossing. I know you're supposed to. I know it reduces cancer. You know, I always brush my teeth, but I just never remember to floss. So I never remember to get it out of the drawer and just buy it or wrap it around my fingers. I didn't like the whole process. So instead, I just bought those pre-made flossers, bought

an extra bowl, and put it right next to my toothbrush. And it sounds so simple and stupid and like how did that make a difference? but I never forget now because I have like a visual cue that it's right there on the counter rather than in the drawer. So just by making a couple changes on where things are can be a big impact too. I see the same thing with like cookies on the counter. If they're sitting on the counter, I'll eat them. I don't even have to be hungry. I'll just eat them when I walk in the kitchen because they're sitting on the counter, I'll eat them. I don't even have to be hungry. I'll just eat them when I walk in the kitchen because they're there. But if they're in a Tupperware

in the pantry, I won't eat them. Same thing with healthy snacks. Eat fruit and vegetables in sight and take all your junk food. Don't buy it so it's not in your house or just hide it in the back of the pantry for when you have to actively go seek it out. Yes, exactly. Don't buy it is the biggest suggestion, right? A lot of times, this is another behavior hack. If people are looking to eat healthier, sometimes I'll set a rule.

You're not allowed to go down any aisles in the grocery store. The only thing you can do is stay on the outer ring, and that's where all the meat, produce, and vegetables are anyway. So just go ahead and challenge yourself. Next time you go to the grocery store, don't walk down any aisles. You can buy food that's on the outside edge, and then are anyway. So just go ahead and challenge yourself. Next time you go to the grocery store, don't walk down any aisles. You can buy food that's on the outside edge and then you leave. And it makes it easier to not be tempted

and see these boxes and make random purchases for, you know, processed crap. But yeah, exactly. You want to make things... Another way of thinking about this general idea is that for the behaviors and the habits that you want to make easier, reduce the number of steps that you need to do to do them.

For flossing, step one would have been opening the drawer and taking the floss out and doing it. I eliminated that step by putting it on the counter. For eating fruit, if you have to remember to open your fridge and get it out of the fruit drawer, exactly. Like you said, put it on the counter. Reduce the number of steps. For bad behaviors that you want to limit,

increase the number of steps. You know, if you want to stop smoking, but you have cigarettes sitting on the kitchen table, how much easier is it for you to do that, right? It's like right there. But if you don't have them in the house, and you have to drive down the street to the gas station to buy some,

it's a lot harder to do that behavior because there are more steps involved. So you'll make it more likely that you'll prevent the bad behaviors by increasing the number of steps and promote the good behaviors by decreasing the number of steps. Okay. I remember hearing something about that where someone wanted to read more and so they took the batteries out of their TV remote control and then put the batteries in one closet and the remote control in another closet and then they put a book on the coffee table.

Yes. And all of a sudden all TV watching went away and then they put a book on the coffee table. Yes. And all of a sudden, all TV watching went away, and they read all the time. Yeah, that's great. I actually have done the same thing. I just took – I don't watch that much TV to begin with. I wouldn't even have a TV here, but my roommate wants one. But I moved the remote and took it away, and then I put a stack of books in the place where the remote typically lives,

so that when you look... A lot of times, TV's a great example, because people don't really turn it on half the time because they want to. They just turn it on because they're bored. So if you take away that stimulus and put a different one there, you pick up a book when you're bored

instead of turning it on the TV. Another way of thinking about designing your environment, when you walk into your living room, people are like, oh, I wish I didn't waste so much time watching TV. But you look at where all the couches and chairs are facing, they're all facing the TV. So it's like, what thing are you naturally going to look at and do when you get in there? If you rearrange your furniture slightly so that not everything is facing your TV, you can sit on something else and maybe you look at a coffee table with a book and pick that up rather than sitting on your couch and looking directly at

your TV and you're like, well, I guess I'll watch that. Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. I mean, it's something so simple. You hear something like that, you think, why did I think of that? That makes sense. Right. Well, and that's what I mean about this environment design stuff. It's very small tweaks, but you can make these choices in hundreds of different places throughout your work and your kitchen and your home. And all of a sudden it's so much easier to live healthy because all these things are working for you rather than you needing to rely on will power to choose the right thing all the time. Right. I had something come to mind when you mentioned opting in versus opting out. A while ago, when I was in college rather, I was always

good about eating meat. I still am good about eating meat and maybe having like a side, like I'll have an avocado or something, but I'm not very good about having broccoli or asparagus or any other amount of vegetables in my diet. But if I make a lot of soups, chilies, and stews where it's one dish and the dish always has meat and vegetables mixed together and I would have to actively take them out and pick them out of chili or stew to get them out of my diet, then no matter what, I always eat the portion of meat and vegetables that I put in the very first time when I did it on purpose. Then when I come home and I'm hungry right away, I don't just skip the vegetables anymore

because I can't. You know what? This is a great point that you bring up. What you're talking about in some facet is that you're front loading the difficult choices, right? So like when you make the stew or when you make the soup, then you make the choice to put the broccoli in or the spinach in or whatever the vegetable is that you're putting in all this stuff, right, the carrots and everything. And then you have this sitting in your fridge for the next three meals if you want to heat it up or whatever.

And so rather than forcing yourself to make hard decisions over and over again, you front load the hard decisions, do it all at once, and then it's so much easier for you. And I like that idea as well. I'm actually I have it on my list of things to write about, this idea of front loading hard choices

and thinking about where we can optimize our performance and behavior throughout other areas, not just eating, so that we make it easier for ourselves to stick to things down the line. That's a great example that you brought up. Okay. What about the concept of having a keystone habit? That's one of my favorite concepts of yours. Can you dive into that a little bit, too? Yeah.

It's an interesting idea. I think for anybody who, once I explain this, you'll be like, oh yeah, I've seen this in my life, but we often don't take advantage of it. So the idea behind the Keystone Habit is that we all have these behaviors that sort of naturally pull our life in line. For me, it's fitness. So like on days when I go to the gym, you know, I go to the gym, I get my lift in, I naturally want to eat healthier because I've already lifted. It's like this response I have. I could eat crappy if I wanted because I exercise, but I naturally want to eat healthier. I tend

to have better mental focus and clarity after I work out, so I'm able to do better work. I get to sleep earlier because I'm tired, so as a result, I sleep better. Then the next morning, I wake up and I'm more productive. So all of these things are like responses to the one habit of working out. I didn't have to think about forming a habit for better sleep and better eating and better focus. I didn't have to do any of those. They were just a natural result that sort of cascaded down from this one behavior that I did. And if you look at top performers in other areas,

for example, CEOs a lot of times will reference like a meditation habit that they have. They wake up, they start each day with 10 minutes of meditation, and when they do that, their mind's optimized, they feel better, they reduce stress, and all of a sudden they tend to have a better day and they're more productive. But if they don't do that, it seems like things are scattered.

They can't quite think as clearly, they tend to be more stressed by the time they get into work. And the rest of the day sort of seems off kilter a little bit. Now, whatever the keystone habit is for you, you probably have already seen it in some sense. Like you can probably think a little bit and be like, all right, what do I do on my best days? Like what are the things that I tend to do when life sort of works out or I feel better or things fall in line? And so you probably have one or two behaviors that pull things together for you. The power of this is that a lot of times we look at our life and we think about either the behaviors we want to optimize or the goals we want to achieve or I wish I could lose weight or get stronger or whatever or I wish I had a better job or a better spouse or all these things.

And we look at them and we think about all the stuff we have to change at once and we get overwhelmed because we feel like, man, I want better things for my life but it just seems like there's so much to do. Keystone habits are powerful because you can just focus on one or two things and the rest of your life works itself out for you. I think that's the power of that. The suggestion I would have for this is to spend a little bit of time,

maybe even pull out a sheet of paper and write down what are the things that you do on your best days? Like when do you tend to be most productive? What are you doing? What behaviors are you doing? Where do you find yourself? And that'll probably help uncover a few of those keystone habits.

And then you can pick one or two things to focus on rather than being overwhelmed and feeling like you need to change 10 things at once. Okay. I think I heard Evan Pagan talk about Bill Phillips at one point. Bill Phillips wrote Body for Life, one of the best-selling fitness books of all time. He was saying that one of the things that Bill Phillips suggested for the people, I believe, in that book was that if you eat breakfast every day, you start the day off on the right foot, then you don't want to screw it up the rest of the day so everything else will fall in line. If you skip breakfast, you're kind of like, I want my days kind of shot, whatever, I'll

eat a shitty lunch, maybe I won't work out today, and everything falls apart after that. So if you can start off with that good breakfast, then everything else will take care of itself. Yeah, I actually, I wrote about this idea of a morning routine just a couple weeks ago. In the average lifespan, give or take, we have about 25,000 mornings as an adult. That's about how many you get. And so I heard that number and started looking at the math, and I was like, man, like how many of these have I wasted already, right? Like how many mornings have sort of slipped by,

and I find myself at lunch and I'm like, I got to get something productive done today now. And I think Bill Phillips is sort of hinting at that idea, right? That if you start your day off on the right foot, if you have a good morning routine, if you have something that can initiate a wave of good behavior, it's so much easier to find yourself doing the right things in the afternoon and the evening just as a result. So I like to think about that idea of a morning routine. I know some people, like I've practiced intermittent fasting, and other people like to skip breakfast or whatever. Whatever your routine is, whether it's starting the day off with a healthy breakfast, or whether

it's starting your day off with writing an article that you think is powerful, or whether it's starting your day off with a good workout, whatever it is, think about the behaviors that set you up well for success the rest of the day, these keystone habits, these things that sort of pull you in the right direction so that you naturally, you know, by the time lunch gets around, you're already running in a positive direction rather than having to reverse direction and figure out how to, you know, how to make something productive of the day. So I think Bill Phillips is totally on to something there. If you look at, actually

for example, another kingpin of the fitness industry, Jack LaLanne, he had his morning routine where every day for 60 years he did this. He woke up at 4 a.m., then he worked out with strength training for an hour and a half, then spent 30 minutes doing either swimming

or running. His first two hours of his day were done with, you know, this fitness block, basically. And then he ate breakfast, and then he was on with his day. So by the time it hit 7 a.m., he already had two hours of exercise and a healthy meal in him. And it's like, yeah, he became one of the most famous fitness, like, kingpins. He also developed the longest running fitness show of all time, sold all these products, everything else, very successful in other areas of life.

But it's easy to see how that naturally extended from this morning routine, this habit, this ritual, that he was always in. And so if you start your day in a way like that, I mean, how much easier is it to be like, all right, I'm going to be productive today because I've already got so much momentum. Okay, I like that a lot.

What other kind of major points do you focus on when you're consulting with somebody about how to get them to make a behavior change? Yeah, so I think one idea or concept that I like to share with people is that a lot of times they'll say, oh, I procrastinate on things that are important to me, or I can't get around to making my fitness goals happen. There's this rule from the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. He calls it the two-minute rule. The basic idea is if it takes less than two minutes, then go ahead and do it now.

Things like washing the dishes after you finish your meal, or putting the laundry in, or sending that email that you've been procrastinating on for two weeks. If you can get it done in two minutes, then just do it right now. Do it right away. I think it's a great rule for many small things in life, but it's also a great rule that we can apply to building better habits. So I mentioned earlier this idea of a pre-game routine or some type of ritual that like pulls you into the right frame of mind so that you can make things happen.

With the two-minute rule, you can use this same concept to get yourself going in the right direction. So maybe you don't feel like working out or, you know, let's say you're going to go on a run, right? You don't feel like running for the next 45 minutes but you can use the two minute rule and just forget about the 45 minutes and say all right what can i do in the next two minutes i can put my shoes on and i can get my running shorts on and get out the door and you'll find a lot of the times that if you just stick to that two minute rule and it's like don't even worry about doing the run just get your shoes on and

get out the door and if you do that, you achieve the goal. That's it. You're going to end up running like 90% of the time. I don't know what the action is. More often than not, you're going to finish the behavior. The power of this is that motivation often comes after starting something. That's this active inspiration idea that we motivate ourselves by the actions that we take. It's kind of like the baby steps from What About Bob. Have you seen that movie?

Yeah, yeah. Baby steps just does the next thing no matter what it is, and he's an idiot, but he can get a lot of stuff done. Yes, exactly. It's almost like turning yourself into that, right? But you can use the two-minute rule because you can't accomplish your goals in two minutes, but you can start almost any behavior in two minutes. And so the idea is, you know, most people say, oh, I just can't get this stuff done.

You want to make it so easy that you can't say no to starting, right? Like, you know, maybe you could say no to running three miles over the next half hour, but you can't say no to putting your shoes on and walking out the door, right? Like, that's so easy you can do that right now. It doesn't matter who you are. You can get that done. If you can make the initial behavior so easy that you can't say no to it, you'll find that you often do the rest of the behavior

as well. I've heard people say things like, my goal is to work out for one minute, five days a week. If you work out for a minute, you're going to keep working out the rest of the time, more than likely. Or at least for 10, 20, 30 minutes, maybe up to a full hour, but you're going to do more than that minute. It gets you started, and then once you're started, then it's not so bad. It's just getting started is the hardest part.

Yeah, it is. It's interesting because I think I was at the US Open in New York, and Lindsay Davenport was there, a popular tennis player. She's ranked number one in the world for a long time. And we had this Q&A with her, and I was asking her, what did you learn from being a professional tennis player that you didn't learn from being an amateur? And she was like, well, I had to grow up fast, and I had to live my life in front of the media and everything. But at the end of the conversation, what she got to basically was

all of the important lessons I learned from sports, I learned when I was a kid and when I was growing up about teamwork and hard work and work ethic and effort and believing in yourself and all that. So what I'm getting at here is that a lot of times we dismiss behaviors because we think, oh, if I can't be the best in the world or if I can't be number one, if I can't be really good at this, why should I even try? Why should I get started? But getting started with behaviors is usually where the learning happens.

So even if you don't end up being great at something, choosing to get started and being willing to get going, it's not only the hardest part, it's also where the most learning happens. So it's the most beneficial part of the experience is that beginning stages. So a lot of times we look at it and we say, oh, it's just so difficult, it sucks. But that's where you really discover stuff about yourself as well. So if you can find ways to make it easier to get started and start learning and getting through that phase, not only do you get to enjoy the benefits of getting healthier or

whatever you're working on, but you also get all these learning experiences that are pretty much front loaded in this initial part of the phase of the goal or the achievement. Okay. Actually, similar to that, I've also heard you talk about if you don't have enough time to do the whole event that you had planned for, maybe you planned for an hour working out but you only have 20 minutes left, you still do it anyway. You just change the scope a bit. So that's kind of the last closing thought here before we wrap up.

Can you touch on that? Absolutely. So the general idea behind this is that in the little phrase that I like to use is to reduce the scope but stick to the schedule. And the idea is that if you look at top performers anywhere in life, whether it's musicians or athletes or managers, they're the people who show up every day. They have a schedule, right? They're practicing music every day. They're at the gym every day. They're on the field every day.

It's not the result. It's not the championship that sets them apart. It's training like a champion that sets them apart. And if you look at the way that a lot of us approach our goals, you know, let's take the running example again, right? If you want to go running and you want to run for a half hour run, three or four miles or whatever, you

might, you know, plan on doing that this afternoon but then you look at the clock and the day got away from you and you don't have that much time left. You're like, I only got 20 minutes, you know, it's not enough time to get my shoes on and get out the door and run three miles. Like, I might as well do something else. And I have been guilty of this just like everybody else, right?

Like, I would tell myself, all right, you know what? Let's not waste this time. I'll use this answering emails for my business or doing something else that's important, right? You, like, convince yourself that you're spending your time in a good way. But the opposite way of going about this is saying, you know what, 20 minutes isn't enough time to get my three mile run in, but it's enough time to get changed and run 10 sprints, right? Or like, you know, do 20 burpees or whatever your workout you want to choose, right? You can get something in. And the idea is, sure, you didn't achieve

the same scope of a workout, right? But you still stuck to the schedule. You kept the pattern. And the individual impact of doing that, like on a one-time basis, on an individual basis, not that big. But the cumulative impact of never missing workouts, of always showing up, of always sticking to that schedule, of always training like a champion, that's huge. Each time you do that, each time you choose to hold the schedule rather than making an excuse for changing it, you prove to yourself mentally, you know what, the situation wasn't optimal, this isn't the best circumstance, but I still made it happen. I still stuck to my schedule, I still stuck to my goal. Eventually you start believing different things about yourself because you see that you can

make this happen even if the situation isn't optimal. Before you know it, running those 30 minutes is a routine, the pattern that you do every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for example, and you don't miss because that's just what you do then. You stick to the schedule. Right. I'd imagine

even if you only run for five minutes, still, you're that much more likely to train the next day because you don't want to break your schedule. If you only run for five minutes, I'd imagine even if you only run for five minutes, still you're that much more likely to train the next day because you don't want to break your schedule. Like if you skip it all together, maybe you just skip the next day too. No big deal. I have a buddy named Nathan Berry who just wrote three books in like nine months. And the way that he did it was by writing 1,000 words a day for 253 straight days. So 1,000 words is like two to three pages.

There's nothing like sexy or impressive about that, right? But he just stuck to the schedule every single time, and the result of that cumulative effort was huge. And that's what we're talking about here, right? Like, sure, the scope, not that big. Maybe you have to reduce it every now and then. Maybe it's not as, you know, maybe your achievement that day isn't as grand or as big or as wonderful as you would like,

but you always stuck to the schedule and the cumulative result of that is huge. Right. Okay. We'll close it out with that. If people want to hear more of this type of stuff from you, obviously, jamesclare.com is on the screen. Go ahead and tell a little bit about what they can find at your site and how they can get a hold of you if they need to.

Yeah, absolutely. I write about this type of stuff, how to have formation and behavior change, behavior science, and how we can use it to live healthy and optimize our performance. I put up a new article every Monday and Thursday on JamesClear.com, so you're welcome to check that out. There's a contact form on the website if you have questions, so I'm happy to answer and respond. But I also know that some people are going to be looking for more information about this stuff, whether it's seeing their habits or designing their environment, optimizing, all

the stuff that we talked about today. So I went ahead and put together a download page just for you guys so you can just get it all. It's just easy. And that's at jamesther.com slash BSP for Barbell Shrugged Podcast so jamesther.com slash BSP and it'll all just be right there that way you don't have to search around the web for it

okay well I appreciate you coming out man I appreciate your time