Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #54 James Clear

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Entrepreneur, photographer and Author of Atomic Habits, James Clear stops by to talk about habits and human potential. How we can reshape our identity, options for breaking bad habits by redesigning the space around us, reducing the friction and creating good habits by changing our environment and making them attractive. Habits are the foundation for mastery, they don’t restrict freedom they create it.  Check out Atomic Habits https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits James Clear on: Website | https://jamesclear.com/ Twitter | https://bit.ly/2RkGEFD Instagram | https://bit.ly/2P4T2YV Facebook | https://bit.ly/2OAvfTF Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit       Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe on  Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify  | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

I'm really, really fucking excited for this podcast. We have James Clear on the podcast today to talk about habits. And I read this book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg back in the day, and it made a lot of sense to me. Certain things stuck out, certain things were like, eh, all right, but overall, a great book and I encourage people to read it. Now I started following this guy, James Clear, because someone, I think that I had started following because of Tim Ferriss, who I consider to be a highly intelligent person, retweeted one of James Clear's tweets. And James Clear has a pretty big

following online. I think he's got 110,000 followers on Twitter. It's nothing to scoff at. But this tweet was one of the most solid tweets I've ever read from top to bottom. And we go over this in the intro of the podcast, so I'm not going to state it twice. But let's just say I was very excited getting into this podcast and getting to sit down with James. He has a new book coming out, Atomic Habits, which I haven't been able to read yet, but I have a copy and I've skimmed through it and it is absolutely phenomenal. I think it's an absolute game changer.

I know you're going to love, and it is absolutely phenomenal. I think it's an absolute game changer. I know you're going to love this podcast. Check it out. Well, we are here with my man, James Clear. Didn't mean to make that rhyme. I want to start with this real quick. I've been following you on Twitter for a while. I don't know if it was like Naval Ravikant, somebody that I started following through Tim Ferriss retweeted your pinned tweet.

Yeah. Habits that have a high rate of return in life. Sleep eight plus hours each day. Lift weights three times a week. Go for a walk each day. Save at least 10% of your income. Read every day. Drink more water and less of everything else.

Leave your phone in another room while you work. It's fucking powerful i mean if you actually did all that stuff right but what's crazy is not no single one of those is actually that hard right which is those are kind of the habits that i like to um to focus on or ones that are like fairly easy to implement but have like a lot of leverage you know like you just do these little things, they end up compounding over time. Yeah. You get the most bang for your buck out of that. And it's, you know, I'm, I've been into biohacking for lack of a better term, but really like, how do we hack life? Well, that usually comes down to how do I get the most bang for my buck in the shortest amount of time? Right. Right. So if I had to choose between a cold bath versus a sauna, I'll do a three minute cold bath instead of an hour long sauna session and it's not going to equate to the exact same thing because they're two different

elements but similar benefits plus you get 57 extra minutes exactly exactly so uh and you did you know you touched on a point here i i just got to skim through your bound galley book and uh you just dropped me off this this gorgeous see if we can show that for the camera here. Atomic Habits, which we'll release, shit, when will it release? It's going to release. October 16th. On the 16th. All right, great.

So we've pushed you ahead of all the other guests to come out Monday before the 16th. Thank you. I appreciate it. No problem, man. We're stoked to have you on. So you'll be on the 8th, October 8th. This podcast is going to air.

But in flipping through, looking at the chapters, I do pride myself on being able to read author's books before I have them on. Haven't had that chance yet. But you talk about like, make it easy in that. Can you break that down? So in the book, I break down a habit into kind of four quadrants or four stages. And actually, you could probably look at most human behaviors this way, not just habits. So if you map out human behaviors on a spectrum, so something you do once, it's just an

individual behavior. And then the more you do it, you know, you do it 100 times or 500 times, then it becomes more habitual. And then maybe at the real far extreme end of the spectrum are like addictions or things that you can't even stop doing. But pretty much any behavior falls into these four quadrants. And so the third quadrant is make it easy. And so these are what I call the four laws of behavior change in the book. And they're kind of like four different levers that you can pull for making habits easier to stick with or making bad habits less likely to occur. And make it easy is all about friction. You know, like a lot of the behaviors that we perform, we either do or don't do them

because of the amount of friction involved. And if you can adjust the amount of friction associated with any particular habit, you're more or less likely to fall into it. So let me give you two examples. So just a really simple one, like flossing. For a long time, I would brush my teeth twice a day, but I wouldn't floss consistently. And I realized there were two main issues. One was the floss was hidden away in the drawer in the bathroom,

so I just wouldn't see it half the time, wouldn't think about it. The other issue sounds kind of weird and stupid, but I didn't like the feeling of wrapping the floss around my finger. And so there's just like a little bit of friction associated with it. So I bought some of the pre-made flossers and got a little bowl and put it right next to the toothbrush and then put the flossers in there, brush my teeth, put the toothbrush down, pick flosser up, done. That was pretty much all I needed to change. And now I've been doing that twice a day for years. On the other side, take like too much screen time or watching TV. A lot of people will feel like they get home and watch too much TV or whatever. But if you walk into pretty much any living room in America, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face

the television. So it's like, what is that room designed to get you to do? It's the lowest friction, easiest, most obvious behavior in that room. So if you just redesign the space, you have a couple options. Like you could take a chair and turn it away from the TV so you're less likely to see it. Take the remote control, put it in a drawer, take the television, put it inside a wall unit or cabinet. So it's behind doors, less likely to see it. But you could also increase the friction associated with the task. So you could like take the batteries out of the remote control. So that takes five or 10 seconds more to turn it on. And you can ask yourself, do I really want to do this? Or am I just turning it on mindlessly? Or you can unplug the TV and only plug it back in. If you can say the name

of the show that you want to watch. So you can't just like mindlessly turn Netflix on and find something. If you really want to be extreme about it, you could take the TV off the wall, put it in the closet, and then only take it out when you want to watch something that bad. I have one reader who they decided that her husband loved watching, you know, whatever the big game was, but he was watching stuff so much that they were like, well, let's just get rid of the TV, and if we want to watch the game enough to drive 15 minutes down the road to the bar, then we'll watch it there.

If we don't actually want to put 15 minutes of work in to watch the game, we don't really want to watch it. But the point here is just to increase the number of steps between you and the bad behaviors and reduce the number of steps between you and the bad behaviors and reduce the number of steps between you and the good ones. And what you find is that the lowest friction task is often the one you fall into. I mean, just take like phones, you know, I, so I have this thing, you just mentioned those high rate of return habits. So I try to keep my phone in another room outside of my office each day before lunch. So I get like a four hour block where at least I

can do some work. I have a home office. It's not far away. It's, you know, I only need to walk up the stairs like 45 seconds if I want to go get it. But what's funny is if the phone is next to me, I'll check it like every three minutes. But if it's out of the room, I'll never walk upstairs to get it. So it's like it was never worth 45 seconds of work, but I was doing it all the time anyway. And you find this with a lot of habits that if you just increase the friction a little bit, they'll fade away. It's not, it's not true for actual addictions, but, um, for a lot of our bad behaviors, if we can just cut it off at the source or increase the friction, then, um, they'll fade away without much extra work.

Yeah. I love it. You touched on so many good things there. Um, my wife and I did a psilocybin mushroom ceremony and she saw that we didn't have a TV because we have a three-year-old son and he was like, I don't know, two at the time. And he was addicted to TV already. Anytime he'd walk by and he'd say, mom, watch TV, mom, watch TV. And he'd get all fucking pissed. Isn't it crazy? It's like crack for little kids. They see the screen and they can't look away. Fuck, man. Like we can hide the iPad. We have the computer in a different room, those kinds of things. And so we ended up giving the TV away to a friend. And now

we just bring out the iMac if we want to watch a UFC or if we want to have movie night or something like that, but it's planned. It's like, Oh, I want to watch, you know, Joe Rogan's new comedy special. It's out on Netflix right now. So we'll, we'll set aside the time to do that. But it's never this thing where you walk by it and talking about how the seating arrangement just fucking is absorbed by the television. It's crazy. I remember when I was a kid walking in and if somebody had enough wealth to have two, like a living room and a family room, generally you'd have the living room with everything facing the TV and the family room would have two couches a living room and a family room. Generally, you'd have the living room with everything facing the TV

and the family room would have two couches or more facing one another with like a coffee table in between. And I remember walking in those rooms as a kid thinking like, this is the dumbest fucking room on the planet. Who would want to sit across from one another with a fucking tea in front of them?

Like, this is stupid. And I remember parents telling me every time like, no, this is really cool. Like when you get older, you're going to want to have conversations with people. And it's nice to not have distractions. It's nice to not have TV in the room. And you can just really get involved in the conversation with whoever you have over. It's important, especially as you get older.

And I never got that. But now that's the exact setup of our living room without the TV. We've set up a bed across with the different things behind it. And then, of course, the couch. And it just makes it easier than to draw into that good habit of engaging with whoever's over. I think the key is, it's not that any of this stuff is bad or evil. It's just that you want to do it more mindfully rather than have it pull you in. I mean, so many of the technologies that we're surrounded by now are so frictionless.

They're so convenient that you'll do them without even thinking about it. So it's just about like designing a more conscious environment. And any one of those changes is not going to like radically transform your life. But imagine the cumulative effect of living or working in an environment where you've got like 100 of those little choices that are all kind of nudging you in the right direction. You know, another stupid little one for me, I've noticed that if I get beer, and I put it in the fridge, and it's at another stupid little one for me, I've noticed that if I get beer and I put it in the fridge and it's at the front of the fridge where I can just see it as soon as I open the door, I'll drink one every night just because it's there. But if I get a six pack and

put it in the back of the fridge underneath like the lowest shelf so that I can't see it right when I open the door, sometimes it'll sit there for like a month. I'm like, well, did I really want a beer or not? You know, like it is in many ways, our choices are just driven by what is available and obvious to us. And so if you can make the right things more obvious and more frictionless, then you're more likely to fall into those behaviors. This is excellent because I think it gives such a, an easy approach to how we change. I remember reading the power of habit by Charles Duhigg and he talked about a lot of the science, the neuroscience behind how our brain wants to form habits.

That way it doesn't have to think as hard moving forward because the brain is so taxing on the body's energy resources, right? It takes a lot to learn something for the first time. By the time you've done that a hundred times, your brain's on autopilot. It's not working very hard to complete that task, right? Right. So his theory is that you cannot just squash a habit and never do it again. You have to change the habit, right? But that's also kind of loosely implied on how you change the habit. And I think he goes through this concept of a mom who's overworked and doesn't have enough time to make dinner each night. So one night a week, she takes her kids to McDonald's and that quickly becomes three nights a week. And then to break that habit,

she can't just say, all right, we're going to absolutely cook dinner each night. She has to change that to maybe a healthier option. Like we're going to go to Whole Foods, hot food bar. We're going to go to Chipotle on those nights and we'll eat something that's a higher food quality. Right. Yeah.

So I think we actually have like three options for breaking bad habits. So the first option is to reduce exposure. Um, so something like, you know, if you want to stop spending so much money on electronics, then don't follow all the latest tech review blogs, you know, like you're, or if you want to lose weight, don't follow a bunch of food bloggers on Instagram. Um, you're constantly being triggered by that and having to like overcome the prompts. Now that doesn't always work, but if you can cut a habit off at the source, then a lot of the time, like the craving won't arise naturally. So in atomic habits in the book, I talk a little bit about this woman who she smoked while she was

in college and she would always smoke while riding horses with a friend. And so eventually at some point she quit smoking and she's also stopped, you know, like seeing that friend and graduated from college and so on, wasn't riding horses. And then like 10 years later, she got back on a horse for the first time and suddenly craved a cigarette. And she was like, what is going on here? And it's your habits are often tied to a context. They're tied to a situation or some kind of cue. And so if you can reduce exposure to that cue, then in many cases, the craving won't arise. So that's the first option for breaking a bad habit. The second

option, which kind of sucks, but is like to sit with the craving long enough to like, let this wave of desire ride itself out. And so you basically just resist temptation. It's possible. It's easier if, if your hand is forced, if you use what I call a commitment device. So brief story real quick, Victor Hugo, um, famous author who wrote like Hunchback of Notre Dame and a bunch of other things. Well, when he got the book deal for Hunchback of Notre Dame, he just procrastinated for like a year. He hosts a bunch of house parties, has friends over. He went traveling for a little while. Yeah. He, he, he got the book deal. He did nothing, no work. Um, and, uh, eventually his publisher got pissed off. They

were like, you know, can you please like actually work on this? And so they set this ultimatum for him and they said, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna cancel the book in six months if you don't have it done by then. And so he, um, he got his assistant to come in, put all his clothes into a chest and they locked him up and took him out of the house. And the only thing he was left with was this shawl, this large robe. So basically, he had no clothes that were suitable for hosting guests or for leaving the house or going on trips or anything else. So he more or less put himself on house arrest. And what ended up happening was each time procrastination arose, he was able to kind of sit with that feeling and let it ride because he didn't really have many other options.

And then he'd get back to work on the book. And it ended up working. He got the book done like two weeks early. But things like that where you can lock in your future action and it becomes really hard to go to your friend's party or go out to travel to a different place or whatever just because you don't have the option. If you can increase the friction, then sometimes you can sit with the craving of a bad habit and let it ride out. So that's your second choice. And then the third choice is the one that you just mentioned, which is you take the solution that the bad habit is providing, the way that it's serving you, and you find a new behavior that delivers that same outcome. So one way to think about habits is that they are the solutions

to the recurring problems that you face in life. So, you know, in a sense, if you put your shoe on, your shoe is untied, that's a problem that you need to figure out, right? And so at some point, the first time, maybe that requires some effort, but once you tie your shoes 100 or 500 times, you can pretty much automate that solution and do it on autopilot. The same is true for pretty much every area of life, right? Like if you come home from work and you're stressed and exhausted, that's a problem that you need to figure out. But there are a variety of solutions that could solve it. You could play video games for an hour. You could smoke a cigarette. You could go for a run for 20 minutes. You could meditate for 10 minutes and any of those solutions, solutions, whatever one that you come into,

your brain starts to fall into that. Like the mom who's going to McDonald's where she's like, I have a problem. I need to feed my kids. It's 530. And McDonald's is now a solution. And you're like, hey, this was easy. I should just automate the solution as much as I can. And so the key is to try to find a solution that delivers the same outcome, that solves the same problem, but is also about as convenient as the previous one. Otherwise it's really hard because then you're just, you're trying to opt for a less convenient solution and the brain doesn't want to do that. It wants to automate and conserve energy, not spend more energy. That makes a ton of sense, you know, to your second solution, being able to sit with it, I think that's what is so critical. And you hear about this in books like The Obstacle is the Way and other books similar

in nature where when you're able to face certain challenges consistently and sit with those challenges like an ice bath or an extended water fast, in those experiences, they can be extrapolated out to all experiences. Yes. Right? So like if I can go without food, which is one of the most primal messages my brain will tell my body, like, oh, I'm hungry, especially because it's around us 24-7. Right. And we're inundated with ads and smells and all these things. But if I can figure out a way to carve out a four-day block of water only, that gives

me strength going into all sorts of other things that are going to come up for me. Intermittent fasting is funny that way. I've been doing it for like, let's see how, uh, seven or eight years now. And, um, there are a lot of solutions that sound really easy at first, but then are actually hard to implement. You know, uh, it's like, just do, do P90X or do insanity and you'll get fit. And people are like, oh yeah, all right. I'll get really motivated. And then it's like, they fall off course after like two weeks or whatever. Intermittent fasting is like the opposite. It's hard for people to wrap their head around it at first. Like, what do you mean? I don't eat breakfast. It's like very difficult for them

to get over that because we've been conditioned that way. But then it's actually really easy to do. Like you just, you don't do anything. You just don't eat. You just go to work, like just get started. There's nothing, there's no action to take um so i don't know i need like a phrase for for things like that but it is nice that um what i've noticed is just small benefit that has nothing to do with fasting itself is that it does translate to other areas you know it's like no i don't need the meal like i was flying yesterday and it's like well i don't need to eat any of the crap food that's in the airport you know like oh they only got shit peanuts it's fine i'll be it's gonna be six hours i'll be fine you know like it's not a big deal you're not gonna die yeah i remember thinking the same thing i played baseball all the way through college and

you know like many sports we had this kind of like hell week in the beginning we're you know training conditioning everything before the season starts and um i remember doing that in the morning we we it started at like 6 a.m and then you, we got done and I was in class at like, you know, nine or something and we had a test and everybody's freaking out. And I was like, this is so stupid to be worried about this. The, like what I just did to my body two hours ago or three hours ago was so much harder than whatever this quiz is going to be. Um, it just helps like recalibrate your mind a little bit. I think that's one reason, you know, I mean, I've spent the last couple of years writing about habits and thinking about the stuff, researching the science, like really working mentally difficultly. But what I've

noticed is that I need the physical outlet too, because I don't think that you, if you only push yourself mentally, I don't think you get the full effect. I think you need both. And there's something about pushing yourself physically that strengthens yourself mentally and also helps you just keep perspective and recalibrate on all the other stuff that you face in life. It helps you put things in their proper place. You realize that most of the things you're worried about are not actually that big of a deal. Yeah. And we have so many challenges now that we bring upon ourselves because there's a lack, there's a scarcity of actual

real world challenges right so we have like in in the past maybe we had to run from another predator because we weren't the highest thing on the food chain maybe we had food scarcity where we would be able it was feast and famine we had periods of eating a plenty and then periods of no food at all let's find decent water supply right to get by you know now we don't have that we don't even have to battle the supply to get by. Now we don't have that. We don't even have to battle the temperature. Everything's climate controlled. We don't have to deal with summer heat. I went to school at Arizona State, and you go from the air-conditioned car

to the air-conditioned classroom to the air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned house. You're never really dealing with the heat for more than 30 seconds walking in a parking lot. If you think about air conditioning, it's crazy that that is like a standard for most of the Western world now. I mean, it's just like, it's not normal at all. There's nothing normal about it to be able to set the exact weather that you live in all day long. But yeah. So we often have to choose those challenges, right? And I think if we are mindful of the choices we make, we can create habits that are going to build up

our life. They're going to help us deal with real stress when it does come, as opposed to, let me try to sugarcoat and put myself in this candy-ass bubble that makes everything perfect all the time. I think I talk about my story a little bit in the introduction to the book, but my parents, when they were my age, they had three kids. My sister was three years old and had cancer. They had a house that they were dealing with, they had three kids. My sister was three years old and had cancer. They had a house that, you know, they were dealing with all this stuff at once. So occasionally, and this is true for everybody, if you live long enough, life will come for you at some point, right? Like something's going to happen. So occasionally life will stress you.

But when life doesn't challenge you, I think it's important to challenge yourself because otherwise you're just living in this optimal environment, air conditioning, and you know, everything else is super easy. You can get all the information of the world at your fingertips. You never have to like, if you think about how crazy just eating is in the modern world. So previously when we lived in tribes, you, you had to expend energy to get calories. Um, at a minimum you were foraging for berries, but otherwise you probably had to like run something down and kill it or part of a group hunt or all kinds of other things. Now you can get calories without expending any. All you have to do is just tap like Uber Eats on your phone or something.

It'll show up at your door and you can just sit on the couch, which is, of course, like a recipe for poor health. But also just it's the game has completely changed. Now we've transcended a lot of our evolutionary programming and natural um situations and so you need to be careful about designing that to serve you rather than to work against you because it can very easily nudge you in the other direction yeah i think it was tom segura in his latest comedy special on netflix that was talking about how there's an option when he goes for the drive-thru at In-N-Out to eat in your car. And how embarrassing that is.

Like, I'm a fat, pathetic loser. I'm going to eat this on my lap in the parking lot. Like, here's extra napkins. You know, that kind of shit. You're leaving in shame to go find a parking space and eat in your car. You don't want to get out of your car to eat. Think about the visual of sitting in your car, right? I mean, if you just could look at it from the profile view,

the human is not moving at all, right? So we just get this vehicle to shuttle us around across the streets, pull in, someone hands us food, we eat it, we'd go back to our place. We've never moved from the sitting position. It's very, yeah, it's definitely not a natural way to capture and consume calories so what else do we have here in terms of like the low-hanging fruit that pays the most back in return and i think there's i don't know if this is exactly the correct uh science or math

on this but 20 that equals you do the 20 that equals 80 of the return right yeah Pareto principle the like we're the highest points of leverage there. Okay, so we've talked a little bit about making habits obvious. That's one way to redesign your environment and make it easier to do the right thing. We talked a little bit about reducing the friction associated with a habit and making it easier.

So two other key areas that I cover in the book are making habits attractive and making them satisfying. So let's talk about both of those. So the first thing is that every habit is preceded by a prediction. Every behavior is preceded by a prediction. It sounds kind of weird because we often think life is reactive, but actually in many ways it's predictive. So if you buy a book, if you buy Atomic Habits, you aren't actually buying the book. And what I mean by that is you can't because you don't have it yet. So what you're buying is the image that the book creates in your mind. You're buying your expectation of the book. Same is true for any

product you buy online, right? Like you can't, if you buy a trampoline on Amazon or something, you're not actually buying the thing. It isn't with you yet. You're buying the picture of it. You're buying the sales page. And so the key lesson here, and this is true for all of human behavior, is perceived value motivates action. Actual value motivates repetition. So the perceived value of the product motivates you to act the first time. Whether you find it attractive or not is what gets you to take action. Now, whether you enjoy it, whether you find it satisfying, the actual value, that's what gets you to return the next time and try it again. So in that way, making habits attractive is key for getting them to stick. And there are

a variety of ways we can talk about doing this, but I'll just focus on one for right now. So one way to make a habit attractive is with the social environment. We are all parts of multiple tribes. So some of the tribes that we're a part of are big, like to be American or to be Australian or to be French or whatever. Some of them are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or someone who volunteers a local organization or whatever. But all of these tribes, large and small, have a set of shared expectations that are part of them, like a set of shared behaviors. And just take like a couple, I don't know, common human habits. Like you go, you walk on an elevator and when you get on, everybody turns around to face the front.

Or if you have a job interview, you wear a suit and a tie or a dress or something nice. There's no reason that it has to be that way. You could face the back of the elevator, you could wear a bathing suit to a job interview, but we don't do that because it violates the shared expectations of that tribe, of that group. And so the lesson here is that when habits go with the grain of the expectations of the tribe, when they go with the grain of the group, they're very attractive. When they go against the grain of the tribe, they're very unattractive. And so the perceived value of a particular action, how much you think it's going to get you and whether you're motivated to do it is often contingent on who you're surrounded by. And so the punchline for building better habits is you want to join a group where your

desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal there, then suddenly it becomes very attractive. It doesn't go against the grain of the people that are around you. You know, there are for many people getting in shape and going to the gym, it feels like a lot at first. It feels like they feel uncomfortable. They feel out of place. But there are tons of people who going to the gym four days a week is just normal. It's not a sacrifice. It's just what they do. And if you can surround yourself with people like that, then it becomes much more normal

for you to see it as a common action as well. The other thing here is that if the option is I have to leave my current tribe to do the habit that I want to do and be on my own, or I get to stay with my tribe and not do the habits I want to do, we would often rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. If the option is loneliness or worse behavior, we'd often choose the worst behavior and not be lonely. So in many ways, asking people to change their habits is actually asking them to change their tribe. And it's a lot easier if you have a new tribe to go to, if you have someone else to hang out with, a new place to become a part of. So it's important to try to find that group. And I think one way to do that, the process of changing tribes is never easy, but one way to make it easier is to join a group where the desired behavior is a normal behavior and you already have something

else in common with the group. So the example I always give for this is my friend, Steve cam, he runs a nerd fitness, which is this website about getting in shape, but it's specifically organized for nerds, for people who like love uh, love Batman and star Wars and Legos and all kinds of stuff like that. And so if you show up there, um, you still might feel uncomfortable going to the gym for the first time, but you can connect with everybody over like your mutual love of star Wars or something. And so it's like, Hey, we're, we're already friends and they work out three days a week. So I, I could probably do that too. Um, so if you can find that like shared context, that mutually beneficial

areas of interest, then you can become friends over that stuff. And then you can start to adopt the new habits because it's really belonging that makes you want to stick with the habits of the tribe. If you don't belong, if you're not friends with them, then you're probably not going to take on the habits of that new tribe. Yeah. And it won't stick, right? Right. There's, I forget how to word this exactly exactly but the crabs in a bucket scenario what is it i don't know well you no crab will ever make its way out of the bucket because if it makes its way to the top all the crabs trying to get out will pull that crab back down and try to shuffle right and that's that's true of a lot of scenarios especially if you're

trying to get in shape and your significant other is not on board because now you're surrounded with shit food and tasty desserts and you're finding an uphill battle. And a lot of people take whatever is standard as their own identity. So this is the way that I've always lived. We've always had dessert. We've always done X, Y, and Z. And now you're trying to do A, B, and C. And that frightens me because you're not the person i married or you're not the friend that i grew up with right so it's challenging their own identity and what they perceive as their identity because now you're starting to make waves and go a different direction are we going to grow apart are things going to change and there's often a lot of fear based around the unknown like who will i find i don't know who i'll find i don't know what that other group looks like i don't know what that other group

looks like i don't know what the other bucket is right right so and i've had a number of friends a good buddy of mine who lives here in austin um retired crossfit guy looks great totally jacked and um he has a summer home in idaho and you know last year he's having fun he's golfing every day drinking a lot we do some some work on some work on the consciousness side of things with plant medicine. And he shows up this year with 20 pounds less muscle. He's more into mobility, yoga, breath work, meditation, also not drinks. You know, he's not asking about it. Everyone was asking his wife about it, which was a concern for her. It's like, I'm tired of answering all these people what's going on with you, right? So there are uphill battles. But if you understand that the juice is worth the squeeze, then it makes it OK. I can go into this thing that's a little scary.

It's a little unknown. And in doing that, I will find, it's not like the secret, but I will attract those people into my life that make sense to me, that are on the same path, that are working towards the same goals that I have. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's true for businesses too. Ultimately, your brand is the work that you do. You can say it's whatever slogan or tagline, but what the actual experience is, the product you create, that's what the real brand is. And that attracts a certain type of customer. Same thing is true for individuals, like the way you live your life, the things you do attract or push away certain types of people. And so if you want to find that tribe, one way to do that is to be it. And then, you know,

it'll naturally start to gravitate that way. But I'm glad you bring up identity, because this is something I talked about in the second chapter of the book. And I think it's really crucial. And it's actually like the ultimate reason that habits really matter. So here's the way that I would describe it. Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. So every day that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Every day that you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Every day you sit down to write a sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer. And so in a sense, your habits are, it's like every action you take is a vote for the type of person that you think that you are.

And as you cast more votes for that particular type of identity, it's like the evidence builds up and you start to believe it about yourself. You know, if you, if you kick like a soccer ball one time, you don't think you're a soccer player, but if you show up every afternoon at soccer practice and kick a ball around, you do this for three months or six months or a year or whatever, at some point you kind of cross this invisible threshold and you're like, Hey, I guess I'm a soccer player. Same thing is true for any habit. And so in that sense, your habits create or build up evidence of your identity. And eventually the things that you believe about yourself are reinforced by the actions that you take. And the weird thing is that once you start to adopt a particular identity, this becomes a two-way street because then your belief about yourself becomes a reason to do it again. You go to church every Sunday for 20 years and then you think, oh, I guess I'm religious. And then you're like, well,

because I'm religious, I need to go to church next week. And the same thing is true for like all these other habits. Right. And so in a sense, habits are the path through which you can reshape your self image. Because if you, and this is one reason why I believe in small habits, you know, if you save a really crazy day at work and you don't have time to do a full workout, well doing five pushups, it's easy to like dismiss that and be like, well, that's not going to do anything. It doesn't get me in shape. But if you do five pushups, then you reinforce, you cast a vote for the identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. Even if it wasn't ideal, even if I didn't have much time, even if the best I could do after this 12 hour flight was to do five pushups and then crash in

the hotel bed. I still didn't miss a workout. And the cumulative effect of that of reinforcing your desired identity, I think is really big in the long run. And if it's if it's meaningful, then it actually is big, even if the action is small. And so that's one reason I believe in small habits is that they are the pathway through which you can like reshape your self image. And that I think is the real reason habits matter. It's true, they can like habits can help you get in shape or be more productive or reduce stress or make more money. And all those external results are great. But the real thing that they do is they reinforce and embody the identity of the type of person that you want to be. And that I think is worth more than anything else in the long run.

Yeah. Jocko Willink has a famous quote, discipline equals freedom. And when I first heard him say that, I was kind of like, yeah, sure, military man, that kind of thing. I have a misconception of what the word discipline means, but it's 100% true, right? And so the more often we get into that, those small habits and their whatever, fill in the blank, right? But it's the decision that you make to do something good for yourself. And it could be anything. It could be saving if you are financially irresponsible and you don't pay bills on time. It could be, I'm going to hit the five pushups like you were talking about. But those build upon themselves. And in that, there is freedom, right?

There is a way where you can take a deep breath and be like, I'm on track. I may not be where my goal is right now, but you can look back however long that timeline is and the evidence has built in the direction you want it to be. Right, right. This is one of the most common, I guess,

criticisms or complaints that people ask me about with habits is like, well, you know, I don't want to be robotic, right? What about spontaneity? What about the freedom and doing what I want? I don't want to pigeonhole myself in this lifestyle. But it's this false dichotomy because habits don't restrict freedom, they create it. It's often the people who have the worst habits that have the least amount of freedom. It's the people who have terrible financial habits that are always wondering like where the next dollar will come from. Or it's the people who have poor learning habits that are always feeling like they're behind the curve. Or people who have poor fitness habits that are always struggling to find energy.

But on the other hand, if you have your habits dialed in, if you have your fitness habits figured out, if you've got your finances handled, then you actually have way more freedom than you did before. Now you actually have the space to, you have the energy to do what you want. You have the strength to do what you want. You have the financial ability to spend time in areas that you want. Um, and all of that comes from getting your habits handled. So it's, it's, uh, it is a little counterintuitive, this idea that discipline equals freedom or habits do not restrict freedom, they create it. But it's true that if you can handle that stuff, if the fundamentals of life are dialed in,

then you've got space for spontaneity and creativity and freedom and all the other stuff. Yeah, and I would say, if you use whatever the goal is and it's more of a broad application, it allows that spontaneity to remain. So I've had a goal to meditate every day for the entire year. And I haven't done it every day. But I do it was Paul Cech, if you ask Paul Cech, who's a health and wellness guru and also very spiritual, he would say, if people ask him, what's the best form of meditation?

It's the one that you'll do every day. Right? That's the fucking form. You could say that about habits, too. What's the best habit? It's the one that you'll do. Yeah. And so it's not a matter of, like, there's so many fucking forms, right?

You've got mindfulness. You've got sit quietly in a room. And you can direct intention many fucking forms, right? You've got mindfulness, you've got sit quietly in a room and, and, you know, you can direct intention or any of those things. You've got breath work. You've got Tai Chi, Qi Gong. I just, I just fucking choose out of the hat based on feel. Right. So, oh, I've only got two minutes.

I'm going to hit some breath work. I got 10 minutes. Let me go outside, take my shoes off, be in the sun for a minute and do some Qi Gong or some Tai Chi. Right. Or I got 45 minutes and I'd like to sit for this, you know, so I the sun for a minute and do some Qigong or some Tai Chi, right? Or I got 45 minutes and I'd like to sit for this, you know, so I'll go into a dark, quiet room, maybe throw in some binaural beats and do it that way. It doesn't have to look the same every day and it doesn't

have to be the same exact time every day. Now those habits can create that space. If I know every morning at 9am, I'm never going to have a meeting here at work. I can get a lot accomplished in that hour. Then maybe that's the time that works best for me. But point is it can be a little bit looser and you can kind of draw out of that hat. I'm going to do this. And same thing goes with like movement, which is really what working out is your movement practice can be anything. It can be, I didn't get to lift weights today, but I got to do yoga or I got to do some form of warmup, stretch, cool down. Maybe I just jump on the trampoline for a little bit. Right. But if I can check that box off each day, that's what's building. Yeah. Um, kudos to you as well for,

even though you didn't do it every day, you still keep coming back to it. Cause this is a real pitfall for a lot of people with habits is they have this like all or nothing mentality. They'll like start this diet, and then they go binge eat with their friends for, you know, like happy hour or something. And then they're like, oh, well, you know, I blew the diet. Guess I shouldn't even bother, right? And I think that this is a mantra that I like to keep in mind with habits. I mean, the truth is every habit streak is going to end at some point.

You know, like when I launched my site, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday for three years. But then I signed this book deal and I needed to change that. And so that streak ended. And you've probably had a variety of times this year where you've done meditation for five days in a row or seven days in a row or 12 days in a row. But then at some point that streak broke. And the key is never miss twice. You know, like if you can get back on track quickly,

then that's a huge win. I've seen this in a lot of areas now as I started to study people who are like top performers, whether it's sports or business. But it's not that they don't make mistakes. People at the top levels, they make mistakes too, but they just get back on track more quickly. So it's almost never the first mistake that ruins you. It's like

the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Um, I think in the book, I have a line, something like missing once is a mistake. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. And what you don't want is to start that new habit. You want to never miss twice and just get back on track as quickly as possible. And if you can keep that in mind, mind, it can end up being pretty powerful for consistency. It's like, even if you only did that, if you never missed twice, if you did it and then missed and they're like, well, I'm not going to miss twice.

You did it again and then you missed and you do it at least 50% of the time. So anyway, yeah, I think that says something about your mentality that you keep coming back to it, even though every now and then it doesn't work out. Yeah, and I think a lot of that boils down to self-talk. And I'm not a big self-talk guy. I don't know if you ever remember watching SNL in the 80s and 90s.

They had that guy on, and he was talking about, I forget how it went. It was like, doggone it, people like me. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'd always be looking in the fucking mirror while he said it, right? Yeah, yeah. in the fucking mirror while he said it right yeah like i don't think it's to that that extent but if your typical mental chatter is oh yeah i knew i was gonna fucking eat it you know i'm a fat loser and i can't help myself and the first cupcake that i see i'm always gonna say yes to and then that spirals into the next day oh man there's this plate of rice and i can't say no and you just beat yourself up over and over again that talk drives the motor and the

engine and steers the ship that direction whereas if you if i fall off like i do i'm about to start six months keto and i'm going to do 60 days of the carnivore diet to kick it off just to be the guinea pig here and we're going to document it with blood work and everything you know in that there will be a strict period of 60 days after that that, when I go into ketosis, if I'm out to eat and somebody's got gluten-free pizza, I might eat it. But it's not going to be I eat that and then the next day, well, I ate carbs last night, so I'm going to eat carbs again. Circle back. Get back on the horse. And then build that back.

And if you do that, it's surprisingly easy. And then it's less constrictive. It's less robotic. And, oh, fuck, I can't do that thing, right? I forget which study it was. It said something along the lines. It was a dietary study. If you said, I can't have that food,

you were far more likely to eat it than if you said, I don't eat that food. Yeah, I read about this one. Because that's a decision, right? I think it was in Ferris' four-hour body. Yeah, they brought people in. They had them do some test that was just fake. They thought that was the actual experiment, but of course in psychology experiments, it's never the actual experiment. But anyway, as they walked out of the room, they offered them either a chocolate out phrases that were like, I don't eat ice cream or I don't, you know, miss workouts or things like that. Or I won't or I can't.

I don't or I can't. I can't eat ice cream. I can't work out. I can't miss a workout, that kind of thing. And all the people who said I can't who felt restrictive were far more likely to opt for the chocolate bar than the people who said, I don't, which again comes back to this form of identity. You know, imagine, this is an example I mentioned in the book. Imagine you have two people who are trying to quit smoking and you offer both of them a cigarette. And the first person says, oh, no, thanks. I'm trying to quit. And the second person says, oh, no, thanks. I'm not a smoker. Same thing. They're both turning

down the cigarette, but the first person still identifies as a smoker. Same thing. They're both turning down the cigarette, but the first person still identifies as a smoker. They identify as someone who's trying to do something that isn't them. Whereas the other person signals the shift in identity. Oh, no, thanks. I'm not a smoker. They no longer see themselves in that way. And it's one thing to say, I'm the type of person who wants this. It's another thing to say, I'm the type of person who is this. And in a sense, true behavior change is actually identity change. Because once you believe that that's who you are, you're not even really trying to change your habits anymore. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person you already believe yourself to be. It's like, no, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. So

I'm not like convincing myself to go to the gym. That's just who I am. I just work out, you know? So identity change is at the root of pretty much all behavior change yeah Paul check calls that the echo test like if you were to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and yell I want to lose 20 pounds and feel great that's what gets echoed back to you I want to lose 20 pounds and feel great and you're always chasing that thing it's like a carrot that's in front of the horse's mouth it's always out in front of you versus I've lost weight and I feel amazing and And that gets echoed back to you. Now that, that does seem a little woo woo. It does seem, but it is that it's the embodiment

of that action and belief in yourself that translates to the actual fucking result. It's not, oh, I wish this and it's going to just fall on my lap and I magically lose 20 pounds. There is action necessary for any type of intention made. But when the intention made is there's a belief that this has already happened and I'm already embodying the thing that I want, those seem to turn out better results than the other one. The thing is, it's not, I mean, in a sense, it is kind of woo-woo to say stuff like that. But the point is that we interpret the stimuli and the data, the cues in our life differently based on what our viewpoint is at that time, based on what our personality or our, sorry, not our personality, our personal viewpoint

is based on what you believe your self-image. So, you know, I mean, you see this all the time with politics. You have the same news story that runs on the TV, but then a liberal and a conservative interpret that data in completely different ways. And it's because of what's getting echoed back to them, because of how they see themselves, because of what filter they're running that data through. And the same thing is true if we're talking about weight loss or whatever else. If you see a particular number on the scale and the thing that's being echoed back to you is, I want to lose 20 pounds and feel great, then suddenly you don't feel good about that number. If the same thing, if the thing that's getting echoed back to you is I've stuck to workouts for seven days in a row and I feel more energetic and healthy, then you see the number in a totally different way. Same number, just different interpretation. So I think it, it's important, but it's not the whole story. And some of the things that also influence things are, you know, like what we talked about,

making things obvious and making them easy. Um, but making it satisfying the, which is the fourth kind of major lever that I talk about in the book, that's crucial for getting people to come back. Um, and that can come in many different forms. Um, there's a, so I guess I'll just lay the context for this real quick there. This is really interesting to look at with a lot of products. So chewing gum is a good example. For many years, for hundreds of years, chewing gum was around, but it was like kind of this bland resin. It was just chewy, but it wasn't tasty.

And Wrigley launched in like 1880, 1890, and they came out with Juicy Fruit and Spearmint and Doublemint. And suddenly gum was chewy and it had this immediate flavor. There was like this immediate reward to chewing it. And it took off. They became the biggest chewing gum company in the world. And today, many companies are doing the same kind of thing where they're trying to layer in a little bit of extra satisfaction with the product.

So a couple of years ago, BMW came out with a car that when you press on the accelerator, it'll pipe extra engine growl through the stereo in the, in the car. So it's like more satisfying to step on the gas. Um, Ford just came up with another one where they, uh, they, the engine noise is still there, but they have this valve that it'll only open and let the engine noise into the car interior, um, and past all the soundproofing. If you really slam on the gas and like, you know, rev the RPMs up. But if you just drive like normal, it'll keep it soft and quiet. And so the point there is that

all of those products, cars or chewing gum and many others, they find ways to layer immediate satisfaction into the experience. And when you do that, people want to repeat it more. Anytime you have some kind of enjoyment or a satisfying ending to a behavior, it's like this positive signal in your brain that says, hey, that felt good. You should do this again next time. And that's what really gets a habit to stick. All the other stuff that we talked about, making habits attractive, making them more obvious, make it more convenient to do, that gets a habit to start the first time or makes it easier for you to do it right then. But the only reason you come back to it is because it's satisfying. And it's really about the speed of the satisfaction. And this is

something that I call the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated and behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided. And the more that you can have that positive emotional feeling right away, the more reason you have to come back to a habit in the future. Yeah. And I think, I mean, that's absolutely beautiful. And I think that minimum effective dose plays in that reward as well. And so many things we often think, all right, I'm going to start running. And I've done this to myself countless fucking times. But if I just get the minimum effective dose, that might be a two-mile walk, or it might be a half-mile jog, or a one-mile jog at a snail's pace where I can breathe through my nose the whole time. If I get that

endorphin rush and I feel good and it's positive and I'm not too beat up after, I'll circle back. I'll run again that week. But if I go out and crush myself running like a hard three miles on concrete or hitting trail, you know, a trail run or sprint repeats up a hill, and I'm fried for the whole week, the odds of me circling back to that the following week, even if it's just once a week, they're pretty slim. And then oftentimes when we have this new goal or this new idea of a habit we want to create, we think it's the same all or nothing idea. So I got to go, I got to do what everyone else is doing. My buddy just did five miles on Strava or, you know, uh, you sign up for CrossFit and rather than take the beginners classes, you're like,

you know, I used to lift weights in college. I got this right. I played sports. I'll do the intermediate. Yeah, exactly. You know, and you get fucking, hopefully you don't get injured from it, but even if you don't, you don't want to beat yourself up. You don't want it to be so taxing that you're like, fuck, I'm not doing that again. And then your whole associate, like my whole association with running, if that's all I knew was, oh, this kicks my ass, then I may not love it. Right. But if I do just that minimum to get that positive response, then I'll always want to come back to that because I know where it is. And then I kind of have this, this field line where I can say, oh, if I do just enough, I feel good. And if I overdo it, I don't feel good. But if you start with overdoing it, you don't really know where that beautiful sweet spot is. Satisfaction is just your expectations minus the experience. So it's like

earlier I said, perceived value motivates you to act. Actual value motivates you to repeat an experience. And it's really the difference between those two that determines whether it's satisfying or not. You know, if your expectations are sky high, you know, like if you set, I have a friend who's a writer and his goal is to write one sentence every day. And it sounds absurd, but if you set the expectation that low, then he can feel successful pretty much every day. He always can feel satisfied by sticking to the habit, which gives him a reason to come back again the next day. And sometimes he writes a full page and sometimes it's just a sentence. But if he had

set a goal of writing a thousand words a day, there would be some days where he couldn't do that. And then suddenly he's feeling bad about that. Like what if he wrote one sentence that day, he would feel bad about it, even though he still wrote that day, but it's just because of his expectation. So there's a little bit of like mental play that's going on there in how we kind of, we sabotage ourselves by setting the bar so high. That's especially true in the beginning. I think that it becomes less true for maybe the one or two areas where you really want to be a master in life. Like if something's really important to you and you want peak performance, you want to be a professional athlete, you want to be, you know, among the best authors or something like that, then maybe your strategy needs to change. But for most people, most of the time, the strategy is probably better to set the bar low, find a way to be satisfied and show up each day.

And then once you've built the habit, then you optimize from there. This is, um, I had a reader who ended up losing over a hundred pounds. And one of the things that he did was he went to the gym, um, but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. And so it sounds so weird because it's a complete opposite of what most people do to build a habit. But he, what he was doing was he was mastering the art of showing up. Um, and so for six weeks he went to the gym, he'd go in, do like half an exercise and then five minutes would be up and he'd go home. And eventually he got to the point where he was like, you know, I'm coming here all the

time. I kind of feel like staying longer. Right. But that's, that's the opposite of the person who takes the intermediate CrossFit class and like kills themselves for three weeks. And then it feels totally fried and, you know, gives up. And then three months later, they're like, oh, I got to get back in shape. And so a habit must be established before it can be improved. Often we optimize for the finish line. We think about the outcome that we want. We think about like, oh, I want to

lose 20 pounds or want to earn six figures this year, whatever the thing is. But instead, if you just focus on the first two minutes of the behavior, or in this guy's case, the first five minutes of the behavior, and you optimize for the starting line, you master the art of showing up, but then you have options, then you can you actually have something that you can improve. If you're not the type of person who shows up at the gym, even if it's just for five minutes, it doesn't even matter what your ideal workout plan is or whatever. Like you can't do anything because you're not there. And so in that sense, I think that it's often helpful for people, especially in the beginning to scale a habit down to the first two minutes, master the art of showing up. And then once you're the type of person who does it every day, figure out a way to improve. I love it, man. There's a quote that we

grew up hearing saying, shoot for the stars and you'll land on the moon. And that would work if the goal was just to get out of the Earth's atmosphere, right? But so often as humans, we would make it to the moon and be like, fuck the moon. I wanted to go to the stars. Like, fuck this place. I didn't want to go here. Right. There's no satisfaction in that. If your, if your aim was for the stars, that's what that really looks like. Right. If your goal is to lose 20 pounds and you only lost 10, you might be pissed and throw in the towel because you set that in a finite timeline, as opposed to my goal is health. Right. And I'll take the 20 pound loss whenever it fucking happens. Or maybe I gained muscle, and I only lost 10 pounds overall, and I didn't realize that I had lost the 20 pounds of fat and just gained 10 pounds of muscle.

I think Dan John, who's a famous strength coach, said, just show up. That was his number one piece of advice for anyone he was training. Just show up. You're tired. You're beat up. You don't want to lift that day. Just fucking show up. And if you do that, then you can work on the things that are going to help you get better. Maybe it's just a mobility day. Maybe you're just going to foam roll and stretch for a

little bit and get a little, get a little sweat on the treadmill and call it. That's fine, right? It doesn't have to be, I'm going to crush myself every single day. I, um, I've worked with this really great powerlifting coach for the last couple months and it's been great My programming's been more dialed in I've had somebody who can pay attention to you know All the little mistakes i'm making that I would otherwise overlook And i've made progress and that's been nice But after training for a decade now what i've realized is that the biggest thing is just get in the gym and don't miss reps You know, like put your reps in if you do do that, then the actual program that you're on,

it might help you a little bit in the short run. And maybe if it's really dialed in, you got a great coach, then it could help you in the long run too, a little bit. Maybe your peak would be a little higher. But if you just put your reps in and don't miss workouts, and you do that for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, I don't know how, how far would you get? As long as you're doing a reasonable program, probably pretty far,

even if you're doing, you're on the best coach, probably get 95% of your potential out. And I think a lot of times this is true, not just for habits, but like any kind of endeavor that people go into, they try to optimize the last, the things that make like the last 2% of difference, you know, like people want to get in shape and they're like, what knee sleeves do I need? What's the best protein powder? Um, you know, what workout shoes should I buy? What running shoes should I wear? And it's like, dude, just don't miss workouts for two years and then get back to me. You know? I mean, that's the thing that, that makes 98% of the differences. Are you putting your reps in? And, um, it can be easy to lose sight of that. And the fundamentals also are like

the least sexy part of the process. And so it's easy to kind of take your eye off the ball in that sense. But you always have to bring yourself back to that because habits are the foundation for mastery. You cannot master any particular area without having mastered the fundamentals of it. You know, like take chess.

You need to know how all the pieces move automatically without having to think about it before you can start thinking about strategy and like, okay, I'm going to make this move and they're going to do this, then I'll do that. You don't have the mental space for that if you don't even know where the pieces go and you can't do that on autopilot. Same thing is true for basketball. You need to know how to dribble with both your dominant and non-dominant hand before you start worrying about offensive sets and defensive schemes and what kind of move you should make based on this defender's position and all this other stuff. And it's really, in many cases, it's the people who have habitualized more of the experience

that have the mental capacity to focus on the next level. I remember reading, I don't know much about the martial arts personally, but I remember reading about Josh Waitzkin in his book, The Art of Learning. And he talks about doing Thai push hands. And he had practiced the move so much that while he was grappling with an opponent, he could feel where their weight was shifting

and know exactly where to throw. But because he was grappling with people who were also really good, they knew that too. And so the way that he found an advantage was by habitualizing so much of that, by internalizing it so well, that he would just pay attention to their eyes. And when they got ready to blink is when he would make his throw. And for people who have never done martial arts, that's like, that sounds absurd to me. You know, like how could you be in the middle of wrestling with somebody and have enough attention to think about when someone's about to blink? But the answer is you need to habitualize all the fundamentals and then you have the mental space open for that kind of mastery. And I think that's true for pretty much any area. So the more you

habitualize the, the easy stuff, uh, then you can start to worry about what knee sleeves to wear and what protein powder and what weightlifting shoes and all the extra stuff. And probably other things that actually make more of a difference, like where are my hips located on the squat or something like that. Yeah. So much of this stuff, whatever the goal is or the thing that we're trying to attain, we want it right now.

That's the culture we live in. And I want it fast. I don't want to have to wait it out. I don't want to have to pay my dues and really stick with this thing for a long time. But all mastery takes a long time. And I think it helps if people really look at this as a marathon, whatever their goal is, look at it as a marathon instead of a sprint. In the book, i talk about this idea that i call the plateau of latent potential and basically it's this concept that a lot of the time when we try to make change we do exactly what you just said we want to uh we want results quickly uh and we also in our mind we envision that it's going to be kind of this like linear experience i'll put in a little bit of work and then i'll get a little bit of results so if i put a lot of work in then i'll get a lot of results

we think it's going to be this straight line. But actually, in many cases, the process of improvement is more like this hockey stick curve where there's this valley of death in the beginning. You don't see anything. And then all the returns are delayed. So I compare it to the process of heating up an ice cube. So say you have an ice cube sitting on the table. It's cold.

It's like 25 degrees. You can see your breath. You start to heat the room up, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, still ice cube sitting there, 31. And then you get to 32 degrees and suddenly the ice cube melts. And so one degree shift, no different than all the other shifts that came before it, but suddenly you get this phase transition. And the process of mastering an area of improvement is often like that. And people will put in work for three months or six months or whatever and complain about not getting results, which is kind of like heating an ice cube from 25 to 31 degrees and complaining about it not melting. The work was not wasted. It's just being stored. And so you just

need to keep showing up until you hit that phase transition and all that is released and you finally reach that point. But people aren't patient. They want things to happen right now. And so then they're like, well, I don't want to heat an ice cube from 25 to 28 degrees. You know, like that's just boring. It's wasting my time. That's still sitting there. Nothing's changed. The San Antonio Spurs have this great quote that hangs in the locker room that says, whenever I feel something to the effect of, you know, whenever I feel down or whenever I feel like I'm not working hard enough, I think about the stone cutter who's been pounding on a rock a hundred times without it breaking. And then on the 101st blow, it splits in two. And I know that it wasn't the 101st that did it, but all the hundred that came before. And that's like the real

idea behind any of this work. You know, I mean, people want to crack a rock once and have it split. It's like, no, you need to show up another hundred times. Um, and if you're, if you're impatient about that, then mastery is never going to come. And in that sense, mastery is often like a goalless process that, you know, it's not about getting the rock to split into. It's about showing up and like taking good swings. Um, it's not about getting the rock to split into. It's about showing up and like taking good swings. Um, it's not about getting the ice cube to melt. It's about showing up and making a one degree shift each day. Uh, and if you can embrace that idea, then the results come naturally. Fuck yeah, brother. This has been an excellent hour with you. Uh, where can people find you online? You have an amazing Twitter account. Thanks dude. Yeah. So, um, I, uh, I've

just finished this book called atomic habits. Uh, it talks about a lot of the things we talked about today, but in much more depth. Um, and, uh, you can find that at atomic habits.com. The, the book is there, but I also have a couple extra bonuses as well. There's like a secret chapter that isn't included in the book. There are some bonus guides on how to apply the ideas to business or how to apply the ideas to parenting. Um, anyway, all that stuff is at atomic habits.com. And then if you just want to poke the ideas to parenting. Anyway, all that stuff is at atomichabits.com. And then if you just want to poke around and see my other work, you can go to jamesclear.com, see my articles there.

I've got links to Twitter and Instagram, Facebook, and all that stuff. So yeah, thanks, man. Awesome, brother. Yeah, we'll include it in the show notes. Thank you very much. Cool. Thank you so much for listening to James Clear on the Human Optimization Hour. We've got links in the show notes to his websites where you can follow him online,

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