Daily Motivations - The Art of Systems

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems - James ClearIn this powerful motivational video, The Discipline Expert, James Clear, shares the brain trick that creates INSTANT discipline! Welcome to the Art of Systems, a way to live your life so you fulfill your dreams, goals, and your everyday expectations.• Speaker: James ClearJames Clear is the author of Atomic Habits, Creator of Habits Academy, and is a global photographer in over 30 countries.Instagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

So if you're building a habit, there are roughly four different stages that every habit goes through. Q, craving, response, and reward. So pretty much every habit follows that cycle. And you can see that, you know, this paperclip strategy does kind of play into this a little bit. I came across this guy named Trent Dursman. He had this job where he was a stockbroker in Abbotsford, Canada. And he had this one simple habit that he used to end up becoming the top performer in the firm and building the biggest book of business there over like the next couple years.

And it was this simple strategy of paper clips. So all he did is whenever I make a call, I'm going to make a sales call, and then I'm going to take one paperclip and then I'm going to make another sales call. I'm going to take another paperclip and move it over. And he had 100 paper clips in the jar. And his goal every day was to move 100 from one jar to the next. And that was all he did.

And with that one simple habit, he ended up building this huge book of business. Q, you have the paper clips on the desk, Right. So like not only do you want to make the sales calls for a business standpoint, but you also have these staring at you every morning when you come into your desk. And so it's a little bit of a visual reminder. Reminds you, prompts you just think, okay, all right, I do want to make these calls and try to drive more business or, you know, build, build up the, make another successful sales call. That craving gets you to pick up the phone, which is the actual response.

And then the reward is I get to move the paper clip over. And now I feel like, yeah, you get the little ting jingle in your ear of the paper clip hitting. And, you know, it just gets to the. reward effect. What I think is most interesting is how do we take this, how do we take these four steps that basically all behaviors go through, and then translate it into something that we can use and apply in daily life and work? I literally when you said that, you know, ambitious people, they have lots of aspirations, lots of habits they want to start. I was thinking about myself and thinking there's probably 30 habits that I would like to acquire. I'd want to be better at writing.

I want to be a runner. I want to be better at speaking. I want to be a better friend and be more attentive with my friends and all of these new habits that I want to pursue. How does one know which one to aim for first? Is there a framework for knowing? I do think there's some level of strategy, which is a good place to start is by asking yourself which habits are upstream from other good things happening. So for example, I know that if you were maybe the, maybe the question to start with is when you live a good day, when you feel dialed in, when things are like rolling along well for you,

what tends to be part of that day? Sleep. Okay, great. So that's, you know, I would say for me, sleep, sleep is definitely one. I would say getting my workout in. And usually reading and writing are a part of it, but I think I could just boil it down to reading. If I just read like 10 pages, that often sparks the writing. So reading is like the fuel for writing for me.

So I could say get a workout in and read for five minutes or 10 minutes. Those are the two things that are part of a good day. And what happens is they're upstream from a lot of other good things happening. For example, if I get the workout in, yeah, I feel good. I get the benefits of the workout. But I also have a post workout high for like an hour or two. So my focus and concentration is better. I sleep better at night because I got the workout in.

Now I'm tired. I tend to eat better when I work out. It's when I'm not working out that I eat terribly. I don't know. It's kind of like I don't want to waste it or something. So at no point was I trying to build better focus habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits. Those just came kind of a natural consequence of getting the workout in. So what are those things that you do that are upstream?

from other good things happening. I think those are good like anchor habits to start and focus on. If I could add another one for myself, I would say it's a little bit of time, it's really just time to think, but it's time to reflect and review. There's this interesting thing that happens if you have a really good work ethic, if you have a strong work ethic and working hard has gotten you far in life, it kind of becomes a crutch. You know, you, for a long time I was like, if I ever had a problem, I was like,

well, I'll just work my way out of it. You know, just work harder on it. I figured it out. And that's great. That's really powerful for a lot of things. But at some point, it breaks. You know, like you can maybe, if you really try, maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder, but there's some limit. But if you work on the right thing, well, you could get 100x the result or a thousand X the result. And so if you just keep your head down and work hard, it's very unlikely that you'll be spending your time in the highest and best way. And the only way to figure that out is to have time to reflect and review, time to think.

You know, so you need enough time to think to figure out what should I be focused on next. And so I think that is almost, it's almost, reflection and review is almost like the meta habit that is above all others. Because if you give yourself time to reflect and review, then you can troubleshoot your habits and figure out how to adjust them. You start thinking, even if you don't say this explicitly, you think like, what would peak performance look like? You know, if I could really get my habits dialed in, what could I do?

And you start imagining five, six, seven things that you would do and what all of them would look like in their perfect form and so on. And I think instead of asking ourselves, what could I do on my best day, it's better to start by asking, what can I stick to even on the bad days? And that becomes your baseline. That becomes the first step. And now that you have this floor that is achievable, even when you're tired, even when you're exhausted, even when you don't have much time, now you can show up and feel like you're succeeding. You know, and then you can progress from there. One of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is a feeling of progress.

If you feel like you're making progress, even if it's smaller than what you ultimately hope to do, you have every reason to move forward. But often we become like a victim of our expectations. We spend all this time optimizing the perfect plan and then expect things to go perfectly out of the gate. And you had it so built up in your mind that once you don't hit that mark in the first or second or third day, it falls apart. You know, really what we're talking about there is you just need to be okay with being inconvenienced or uncomfortable for like five. to 10 minutes, getting dressed, getting through the rain, getting to your car, getting to the gym. The workout is the same that it's always been. It's the same, you're in the same gym

that you are in the summer when the weather's beautiful or whatever. So it's really, can you handle that like five minutes of inconvenience? And so many things in life are like that, can you master that little moment. And if you can and you can still get started, that's when you gain an advantage. Everybody works out in the good days. But on the days when you feel stressed and tired, on the days when the weather's bad and it's kind of inconvenient, on the days when you don't really feel like it. Can you show up? Even if it's in a small way, one of my little mantras that I try to keep in mind is reduce the scope but stick to the schedule. So the normal scope might be I write for 30 minutes and then you look up at the clock and you're like,

I only have 15. And sometimes what happens in your head is like, oh, I don't have enough time to write today. Or you're like, oh, I was planning to work out for 60 minutes and you look up and you're like, time got away from me. I only have 20 minutes now. I don't have time to go to the gym. It's easy to talk yourself out of it. But reduce the scope, but to the schedule. It's like, well, I only got 20 minutes instead of 60, so I'll just get in there and do a couple sets of squats, and that's it. And I've had so many workouts that have been like that, where you're like almost, you know, it's easy to be kind of disappointed that you weren't able to do the whole thing that you wanted to do, but you didn't throw up a zero. And if you don't throw up a

zero, you maintain the habit. And if you maintain the habit, all you need is time. And so the bad days are more important than the good days in that sense. You need to figure out how do you show up even if when it's not optimal. Is there anything that you've learned, any frameworks, any tactics for making sure you get past that first five minutes so you can get into the flow of the habit? Yeah, there's multiple things. So first thing is try to prime the environment to make the first action easy. Prime the environment to make the first action easy.

So let's say writing, for example. I find that for myself, the biggest point of friction is choosing what to write about. Once I've actually finally settled, this is the thing I'm writing today. then I can get into it and I'm off and running. But I'll sit there for two hours just debating whether it's the right thing to be focused on writing or not. Should it work on this chapter? Should I work on something else or whatever? So what I've started to do is sometimes I will write the first sentence of what I'm going to write and just leave it on the Google Doc right there.

And then leave. And the next day when I come back, I'm already in. Right? Like it's already the first sentence is already written. So now I'm just writing the next piece of what's coming rather than trying to choose what to write about. Another one that I've done sometimes is I will write, sometimes we'll write the topic or I'll write the sentence on a post-it note and I'll put it on top of the keyboard. And so when I come into the office, it's right there in front of it. I can't, you know, I got to pick it off the keys to log on to the computer.

And so it's like, remember, this is what you're writing about right now, you know, so it's just trying to make it easy to get in. I have a bunch of readers who do stuff like set there running out, running clothes out the night before, you know, so they're right next to the bed. You got your clothes and your shoes there. One woman I just talked to her at an event, she came up afterward and she said, I actually sleep in my running clothes and just get out and put her shoes on and goes right out the door. But you're trying to prime the environment to make the action easy. Okay, so how can you set up the spaces that you're in to prime those habits? I think one really interesting question to ask, walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, your office, your living room,

your bedroom, and then look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are easy here? What behaviors are obvious here? And the good habits that you say you want to build, are those the path of least resistance? Is that the obvious thing in this environment? And if not, maybe you can make some adjustments to try to make the good habit easier and the distractions maybe a little bit harder. So that's the first thing, prime the environment to make the action easy. Second thing is if there's like one principle that is probably the single most important for building habits, it's make it easy. Just scale it down and make it easy. I refer to it sometimes as the two minute rule. So take whatever habit you're trying to work on, you scale it down to something

that takes two minutes or less to do. Read 30 books a year, becomes read one page. Or do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat. Sometimes I will mention this to people, and they resist a little bit. You know, they're like, okay, buddy, like, I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. You know, I'm actually trying to do the workout. So some kind of mental trick, and I know it's a trick, then why would I fall for it, basically? But there's this guy, I mentioned him in Atomic Habits.

His name's Mitch. And he went to the gym, and for the first six weeks, he had this strange, little rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And you're like, this sounds silly, right? Clearly, this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants. But what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. And so I think this is kind of a deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved.

It has to become the standard in your life before you optimize and scale it up into something more. There's that quote from Ed Latimore where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. There are a lot of things in life that are like that. And so by trying to make it easy to master, to easy to get started, then you're in the game. Now you're in the arena. There's all kinds of things you can improve from there. A lot of the time when someone sits down and they want to build a new habit, they don't say this, but what they kind of assume is, what it would mean to be successful with this habit is that I do it for the rest of my life. You know, and that if at some point I'm not doing it, then that must mean that I failed or I quit on it. But that's not how

it is at all. Like, things have a season, you know, and so habits have to change shape over time. Let's take my writing habit, for example. The habit that launched my career was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years. So the first three years, 150 articles, you know, write twice a week. That was a great habit. They were like 2,000 word pieces or so. But then I signed the book deal for Atomic Habits. I didn't have the capacity to do that and also write the book. So that had to change. I wrote the book for like three years. And then the book came out. And now I write a newsletter once a week. And that's much shorter. But I kind of feel like my writing habit is maintained that whole time. It just changed shape.

But that's fine. It just needed to shift based on the season. But I don't know. People, they get so attached to one form of a habit sometimes that they don't want to. realize that it's no longer serving them. And I think that's the one of the trickier things to give up is a habit that used to be good for you, that used to work well, but no longer serves you in your current season. I find that I'm kind of a slow learner with that. A fundamental part of life is tradeoffs and you cannot be good at everything at the same time. So this is true across projects. You choose try to do seven things at once, spreading yourself thin in seven different ways. Very hard to be excellent. For me, what I think about is life has a series of seasons and life

a series of sequences. So let's say it's not always exactly 10 years, but let's say the big movements in life are roughly 10 year buckets. So like for me building my first business, that was kind of like a 10 year thing and eventually it led to the launch of atomic habits. You maybe get five or six of those in your adult life. Some of those things make sense to do in a different order than others. Like if you want to travel the world and see a bunch of places and party in a visa, you're probably not going to do that in your 60s. You know like I mean you can. There's Nobody's saying you can't, but some things are probably better sequenced in other, you know, in other spots. Obviously, there's, you know, especially for women, there's a certain limit on if you want to have a family, what decades that happens in.

So, yeah, it's just a matter of sequencing and prioritization. If you look at the like tapestry of your life, what do you want the big movements to be? And where do those seasons need to slot in? Yeah, it's a, there is no right answer. But it's interesting with as soon as you realize it's a finite number. and as soon as you realize that tradeoffs are always going to be a reality, you'd have to deal with that in some way.