Modern Wisdom - #064 - James Clear - How To Build Habits That Last

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

James Clear is an author, entrepreneur and speaker focused on habits, decision-making and continuous improvement. James' new book Atomic Habits has been my most recommended of 2019 (and probably 2020 too). I honestly can't describe how impactful, actionable and brilliant it is and I'm beyond excited to share some key learnings from it in today's episode with you. Our successes or failures in life are lagging measures of the actions we take on a daily basis. The often unseen force driving these actions are our habits, and today we're going to learn how to build & break habits from one of the foremost authorities in the field. From stopping smoking to starting meditating, tying your shoes to becoming a world champion basketball player, learning how habits work will assist you in achieving whatever your goals are in life. Also expect to learn how to discover your passion and connect with your purpose. Don't sleep on this episode. Extra Stuff: Buy Atomic Habits - https://amzn.to/2Uhym1x James' Website - https://jamesclear.com/ Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JamesClear Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, hello friends. I hope you are sitting comfortably and fully strapped in for today because it's a big one. James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits and has half a million people subscribed to his newsletter. You will have heard myself, John Yonusif, mentioning Atomic Habits a lot so far this year. So if you don't trust our opinion, then the opinion of half a million other people hopefully will encourage you to believe that we know what we're talking about James is episode with myself today is nothing short of one of the most actionable and most important episodes that I've done I'm aware I keep on saying this but it genuinely is our lives are

shaped by the actions that we do every day Anything that we accomplish from the small to the great is a lagging measure of the daily actions that we take. And today, James is going to take us through exactly how we build habits and how we break them, how you can use a proven methodology to make your habits stick and to get away from things that you wish you would stop doing. We're also going to talk a lot about finding purpose in life and how your genetics do not predetermine, but they do predispose where to look for your passion

when it comes to work and also hobbies. It's fantastic. This blend of the conceptual and philosophical with the actionable is exactly why I started doing this podcast. If you only recommend one episode to a friend ever, I suggest that it's this one. And I would really appreciate it if you do just that. There's three dots on the bottom right hand corner or there'll be a little up arrow with a share button. Copy the link and send it to a friend who you want to help improve themselves.

They'll benefit from it. And so on my play count, so please do it. I would really appreciate it, but'm joined by Mr. James Clear. How are you today? Hello. Yeah, good to see you. I'm doing well. Welcome to the show. A lot of the listeners will have heard us talk at length about how much we love to Tomic Habits. It's been an absolute game changer for us this year. Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, it's really is a big paradigm shift for a lot of the things that we've been reading recently. It wasn't, they say that the best books are ones that tell you things that you already know.

And a lot of the things in Atomic Habits, it pieced together in a way that I hadn't ever seen before, a lot of the ansitiri little bits and pieces and then compiled them into just stop being an idiot. This is what you need to do. So I'm super excited to go through it today. Great.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it too. Brilliant. So first and foremost, why do we need to be bothered about habits? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, on one hand, everybody has habits, right? We're all building them all the time, whether you're thinking about it or not. So that part, I think, provides a little bit of a reason why. If you're building habits anyway, then it kind of makes sense to understand what they are

and how they work, so that you can maybe build them in a way that benefits you rather than in a way that hinders you. And I think that is a deeper truth about habits that they're kind of like a double-edged sword. They can either build you up or tear you down. And you need to understand the kind of fundamental pieces of them and how to adjust them so you can make sure they're working for you. Which kind of naturally leads to a question of like, what is a habit and why do we bother for me at it all? And I think like a simple way to describe it is that habits allow you to solve the problems of life with less energy and effort than you would otherwise need. And, you know, all life requires energy to exist.

If you don't have energy, then you don't survive. And so, energy is very precious for that reason. And your brain is looking for ways to conserve it whenever possible. This makes just logical sense. If you imagine our ancestors living on the savannah, if you could forge for berries in a patch that's 100 meters away, then why would you bother foraging for berries in a patch that's like 10,000 meters away or on the other side of the mountain or whatever? You're going to seek the path of least resistance to get the results that you want. Habits are a shortcut, a mental shortcut, that your brain uses to do that kind of thing on a daily basis.

Take the habit of tying your shoe. The first time you do it, you don't know how to tie your shoe and you have to think carefully about how to make the knots and so on, and so on. After you do it a hundred times, or or 1000 times or 10,000 times, pretty soon you can tie your shoes while you're talking to somebody or thinking about your to-do list for the day, you just pretty much can do it on autopilot. And so in a small sense, tying a shoe is like a problem that you face on

a daily basis and your brain has automated the solution. And habits allow you to do that in all different areas of life all the time. You automate the solutions to the recurring problems in life, which means you can focus on other things and direct your attention elsewhere. So for that reason, habits are so central to our experience that we often overlook them. Like you don't even really think about brushing your teeth

or tying your shoes or unplugging the toaster after each use or all these other things that you do each day, but your habits are the thing that help you function and operate in the world in a more efficient manner. Then there's also like the deeper or bigger impact that habits have, which if you think about like the results that you want in life, most of your results are like a lagging measure of the habits that precede them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits, or your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits, or your knowledge is a lagging measure of your

learning habits. And so by a lot of the time people think what they need is a different outcome. They think they need a bigger bank account or a lower number on the scale or more intelligence and wisdom, but actually what they need are the habits that precede those things. And so I think that's another reason why habits are really important and why to focus on them, which is that habits are the leading indicator of all the lagging results that we really want and aspire to achieve in life. I totally get it. Can you talk about systems versus goals, please? It was something that I'd seen in Chasing Excellence by Ben Burjeron and a couple of other books

and hadn't really put it together, but it was incredibly succinctly and brutally delivered to remind me just how many mistakes I sometimes make in atomic habits. Yeah, thanks. Well, I mean, I think this is these are pitfalls that we all fall into. Humans tend to be very goal oriented. And sometimes that makes sense, right? For like our survival, you need essentially like the goal of finding food and water in order

to motivate yourself to actually go get that and to survive. But in modern society and just in daily life, we often kind of take that to the extreme. So before I criticize or point out the flaws and goals, I should say like, I think goals are useful. It's not that they don't serve a purpose or entirely useless. Like, one of the things that having goals does is it provides clarity. I think goals are useful. It's not that they don't serve a purpose or entirely useless. One of the things that having goals does is it provides clarity. It shows you what direction to focus on or where to direct your attention.

Goals can also act as like a filtering mechanism. It's much easier to say no to something when you know what your goal or your purpose is. Otherwise different opportunities come your way during life and you're like, yeah, I'll. But if you know what your goal is, and that opportunity doesn't relate to that, then you can much more easily say no. So those are some of the things that goals do well. But there's a lot of things that goals don't do well, or that we kind of overvalue the importance of goals for making progress. And so one of the things is that, and I've actually talked to Ben Berseran about this before, one of the things is that winners and losers

often have the same goals. So in any particular domain, like in the Olympics, pretty much every Olympian has the goal of winning the gold medal. It's not the goal that separates them, or if you're applying for a job, pretty much every candidate who applies for a job has the goal of getting that job. So the goal is not the thing that makes the

difference. And so the question is, well, what is it? And it's the process and the habits and the preparation that precede the goal or in some cases follow after you've set your sights on something. And so that collection of habits and processes, the collection of habits that you follow and use to prepare, that's what I call your system. And so I think that we should place more value on the system and less value on the goal. And there are a couple of the reasons

are why this distinction between the two are important. So like let's just lay out kind of in clear examples. What's the difference between a system and a goal? So your goal, if you're a basketball coach, your goal might be to win the championship. But your system is the way that you recruit players and assistant coaches, the drills that you do at practice each day, your process for reviewing film. And you know, if you're a, if you're a writer, your goal might be to write a bestselling book. But your system is how you research topics, you know, you're writing habit and how you show

up and write each day, the editorial process and how you review your writing and improve it. And on and on, right? So the goal is the outcome that you want, the system is the process that you follow for getting there. And goals can be helpful for clarity, but systems are good for actually making progress. And so when you wanna actually move forward, you need to shift your attention.

You kinda need to like metaphorically put the goal on the shelf and then pour all of your energy into building a better system. The other interesting thing is, if you think about this in a long-term standpoint, so true long-term thinking is really goalless thinking. Because if you achieve a goal, it only changes your life for the moment, right? Like you could set a goal to, like let's say your bedroom is messy and you set a goal to clean your room.

Well, you could get motivated for a few hours in clean your room and you do have a clean room for now. But if you don't change the sloppy messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place, then you just turn around a week later or a month later and you end up with a dirty room again. And so it's actually, you think you need a clean room but actually what you need are the habits that precede a clean room or the habits that deliver a clean room. And this I think is true in so many areas of life, we think that we need to change our goals, but actually we need to change

our system. Actually, we need to change the habits that we're following each day. And so this is why I say, you don't rise to level your goals goals. You fall to level of your systems. You can have whatever goal you want. Every candidate has the goal to get the job. Every Olympian has the goal to win the gold medal. But if you don't have the systems to support that, if you don't have the habits and rituals to actually make it a reality, then your goals are going to fall flat. And so having the vision is one thing, but it's probably the easier thing. It's actually the habits that make you move forward and make progress. One of our friends, George recently sent a message saying that he has a project that he's

going to begin working on, and he was really excited about it, but he knows that he gives himself a degree of dopamine kick just by talking about the goal, that verbalizing of the goal and the communicating of it is almost like a masturbatory kind of action that gives him this sense of, oh, I'll have achieved something, whilst also having actually achieved nothing. And I think that's a very delicate balance that you need to strike. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Sometimes when people talk about projects that they want to achieve, it creates a form of accountability for them. So telling somebody about it, they feel like,

oh, I don't want to fall flat on this promise that I made. So they find it more motivating. But I've often experienced what George is mentioning, where you tell somebody about something, and you feel like it did something about it because you're talking about it. This is the kind of thing where you tell somebody about something and you feel like you did something about it because you're talking about it. This is the kind of thing where you have a business idea, so you work on it on the weekends, you tell people, oh yeah, I'm like, think about starting this thing, but you never actually

go anywhere. It's just like talking about it or debating, like, what should the company be named or what should our business cards look like or what should the logo be? It provides the illusion of making progress. It reminds me of this quote. I just saw this quote for the first time the other day from Bob Knight, the famous basketball coach, where he said, the will to win is not what you need. Like, having the will to win is easy. Everybody wants to win. What you need is the will to prepare to win. And I think that is kind of What you need is the will to prepare to win.

And I think that is kind of like it distinguishes a little bit the difference here. Like yeah, everybody wants to have a successful business or start some cool project or like do something interesting. But are you actually fascinated with all the aspects of preparing for that? Right? Like are you it's not writing a book that is like everybody is like, yeah, be cool to have a best selling book. But the book is the easy part like the the harder part the thing that you really need to be fascinated with is Do you love researching stories? Do you like editing your own writing? Do you like sitting down and writing for you know 20 minutes every morning or whatever And it's the people who And this is this is kind of a strange thing about a lot of various life which is

The people who get the best results in a particular area are actually often not the people who are doing it for the results, is the people who love the process of doing the thing. The people who read about early retirement and the best investing strategies and figuring out how to optimize their money, they don't actually need the financial advice a lot of the time. They already have their act together financially, but the reason they have their act together is because they love the process of reading about that stuff and implementing it utilizing those ideas.

And so often the people who need the advice are not the ones who love digging for it and the ones who love digging for it don't even really need it anymore, but that's the very reason why they don't need it is because they love the process of it. Yeah, I suppose that that highlights a big difference between people that do things for passion and do things to get a grind or to complete it, something as a task that needs to be fulfilled. Ben Burjorn again in Chasing Excellence touches on this a lot where he says that the people who love the process will always beat the people who have to force themselves and use willpower to get up and do it because the people who feel like this is their life and who don't have to reach into that

willpower pot to go and do something that it just comes naturally to them the same as breathing. I think Katrin David started to go ask you like how do you train seven hours a day and sleep all the time and do all of this sort of stuff And she said well if you gave me any life in the world this exactly what I am doing right now and what you think is hard is Exactly what I would choose to do and how much easier is it going to be for Katrin David's daughter to train seven hours a day Then for someone who hates the gym like it. It's infinitely more easy Yeah, I think you used an example about a basketball coach as well, who said something similar to do with it's not the players who have the most skill, but the ones who get bored the least with training.

Yeah, I was a weightlifting coach that I had met in some of my training where he said, I asked him, what's the difference between the people at the top of the field and the people who just kind of had talent but fizzle out. And he was like, well, certainly like talent and jeans and nutrition and all that plays into it. But at the end of the day, it just comes down to who can handle the boredom of doing the same lifts over and over again every day. And I think that's true in so many areas of life for many people it feels boring, but

for occasionally they find someone finds a way to love the boredom, to fall in love with it, to make it the thing that's enjoyable to them. And I think the way that I would just building off of your example of Catherine and kind of like how she loves the process, loves the fact of years from a lot of top athletes. Like it's actually not an obligation to them, to live the light, to train the way that they're training. It feels like what they want to do. And in fact, this is exactly the opposite of what you hear

from many athletes when they retire. They specifically say that they retire because it starts to feel like an obligation because it no longer feels fun. So I think that, you know, the world, this is how I would break this down. So it's not the talent doesn't matter, and it's only about passion and motivation and trying hard. Both nature and nurture matter, both talent and effort,

make a difference. But in a world of seven billion people, you can pick any domain you want, and you're going to find somebody who is willing to sacrifice everything for that particular area, for that particular domain. You're going to find somebody who is both talented and it doesn't feel like an obligation to them. It just feels great. And they're a very dangerous, very dangerous individual. Yes, right. Like that's a good luck competing with somebody like that. If you feel like you need willpower to make it work because they're both even if you're talented, there is talented as you are and it feels like fun. And so that's like a really hard combination to strike. I,

I always think of Steffi Graaff, the famous tennis player. So when she was a kid in Germany, she was part of this study, just random. She had to be part of the study of young German tennis players. And they measured, I think she was maybe 12 to 14, somewhere in that range. And they measured all kinds of things. They measured their physical characteristics,

aerobic capacity, strength, explosiveness. And she tested high-est on all those scores. But then they also measured the psychological traits, and she tested high-est on competitive desire. It was like, well, it literally doesn't matter if you're as talented at her because she wants it more, and it doesn't matter if you wanted it as much as her, because she's better than you. So that combination is just like a beautiful thing. And I think that the world is becoming,

it's developing infinitely more niches than it ever did before. This is what the internet is enabling, right? There are more and more little pockets for people to find the thing that's just right for them. And so what's hopeful in my mind is that almost anybody can try to find something like that for themselves, something that they are naturally suited to do, that they tend to be very good at,

and that they, that feels like fun to them, that doesn't, that doesn't feel like an obligation. And so what you're really looking to do is you're looking to align your ambition with your ability. And if you have both of those things working for you, then you can really make some progress. So I feel like that's something that, you know, Catherine happens to for her, it happens to be CrossFit for other famous, you know, Steppy Graph or whatever, like we see there's some of these very visible examples in sports, but there are probably a lot of other examples of people we never have heard their names, but they found their thing too. And so you just need to try to figure out, where is that niche where my ambition is aligned

with my ability? Because I think at the top of pretty much any domain, you find people that are not only well suited and talented, but also well-trained. And so you kind of have both where you match up your effort and your a bit your natural ability. For anyone who's listening who thinks I haven't quite found my natural calling maybe or

whatever feels fun to me, are there any mechanisms or any bits of advice that you could give to them? Yeah, so this is hard, right? I, in a lot of ways, I feel like I'm still searching for it. I've had seasons in my life where I feel like I've it, but then nothing long-term that's like really stuck. So I talk about this a little bit later in the book. This whole idea of what's called the Explorer Exploit Trade-Off. And so Explorer Exploit Trade-Off basically says early on, and it depends on what timeline you're looking at. You could say, for example, I have 30 years to work.

So early on in my career is maybe the first five years or something, or you could say, we have this project that we're working on and the deadline is six months away. So early on is the first two to three weeks. But early on, what you should do is you should explore widely. You should look for as many options as possible to solve the problems that you're facing. So maybe should look for as many options as possible to solve the problems that you're facing. So maybe you look for a bunch of options for getting this project done or new

pieces of software you could use or different strategies that you could follow for implementing the ideas that you want to execute on in the project. For your career, sometimes we call this internships or like exploring a couple different fields doing some kind of rotational management program, maybe it's trying like three or four different careers over the first five years. But you want to explore widely. Then as time starts to get tighter and you get closer and closer to the deadline, the project, or you get deeper and deeper into your career, you've already explored a lot. And so what you want to do is start exploiting the best option that you found so far so that you can get some results. You know, like you're getting deeper in your career, explore the best thing you've exploit the best thing you've found so that you can make

some money and start saving for retirement and accumulating wealth. Or you're getting closer to the project headlines. So let's use the best idea that we found so that we can get some results and get this thing finished. It's like a split test. Let's split test in marketing. Yeah, it is like split testing. It's like split testing and then doubling down on the winners as you start to find them, right? But similar to split testing where like Google or Facebook or whatever, they've figured out a lot of winners at this point, but they have, they remember quits split testing entirely.

They still run some tests to maybe 10% of the audience and 90% of the time they do the thing that they know is best already. And Explore Exploit is asking you to do the same thing in your life. So you continue your career and you're focused most of the time, maybe even 90% on the thing that's the best solution you've found so far. But you still spend 10 to 20% of your time, 20 with side projects or reading about a different career or seeing if you can come across something else that lights you up even better. And so that's one strategy for trying to find that that niche, that area that is best for you. But the other thing that you can do, I don't think I don't think most people perhaps, you know, I kind of know it's true, but even I don't even know if I have capitalized on it enough.

The internet has opened up way more things than you could ever imagine that could be a job now. You don't, most things that people talk about being jobs, like there are all kinds of stuff that's a job that doesn't seem like it could be. Like there's, you know, there's this very popular website called Pro Football Focus. Subscription Product it analyzes all the stats in the NFL and then ranks in grades players by position. Well, whoever the guys were that started that, that was just some nerd side project that they loved because they were really into football and wanted to calculate stats and rank the players and stuff. And now that's their full-time job. It's the successful business. Same thing with, you know, there are a bunch of things on basketball and other

sports. Ben Thompson's subscription newsletter and blogs for Techory is a good example of this. He just loved writing about technology and how it was changing businesses. And so he started blogging about it and then he started charging a newsletter that was like 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks a year. And now he's got tons of subscribers on a really successful website just blogging about how technology impacts Amazon or Google or Facebook or whatever.

And that's like kind of a new form of like tech journalism but even like different in some way where he can do long form or he can just focus on the company's he cares about or write about whatever he wants. And you know, those are some examples that are like more data driven and writing based, but it's true for all kinds of stuff. I came across a woman the other day who has a company that all she does is make yarn and sells yarn. And she just had, you know, she's got a bunch of employees. She just had her first $10,000 day.

Like, I mean, there's, it's a huge business. And my point is that there are like an infinite range of niches like that available on the internet. And so digging around and looking for that and thinking like, what comes easily to me already? What is easily to me already? What is enjoyable to me already? And then trying to find a way that you can make money from that. If you're passionate enough about it, now you can probably find enough people to make a

job out of it. And the thing is as well, even if you can't make enough money out of it, it's going to feel so much fun. It's going to feel like so much fun that you don't even really care. So we did, and for the listeners at home, they may be able to do this little thought experiment for themselves, but we're going to run through it in an upcoming episode a little bit more thoroughly. But here's a brief overview. If you were to take your take home wage from a typical job, which is something that you don't necessarily love, and I was to say to you, you can give back some of your wage in return for an allowance to do with your job.

So let's say you are allowed to wear whatever you want. So you can come into work in wearing pajamas and you're like, okay, there you go. There's, I'll give you 1,500, 1,500 quid back. You're like, right, okay. Now you can work from home. You never need to go in the office. You're like, oh, fucking hell. Right. Okay. Well, you can have, you can have 2,000 pounds back for that. You're like, right, fucking hell. Right, okay, well, you can have, you can have 2000 pounds back for that. And like, right, now you can choose your own working hours. And you're like, oh my God, like, oh, another 2000 pounds back.

And we sat around a dinner table and we managed to get it to the point where the guy that we were running this experiment on was paying us to come to work. So we chopped away. Or all of the, and we were like, look man, like it's evident that you hate your job so much. You're so unfulfilled with this that you would literally pay to not have to go and do it.

And then, just to book end this particular part, in terms of finding purpose and things that you really enjoy in life, Gretchen Ruben used this really cool example about what did you do between the ages of eight and 14? What was it that you spent your time doing around about then? And she used this example of one of the best color pickers in the world, so this woman who matches up very unique, different shades. It's for interior design,

and she does stuff for clothing companies and branding companies and marketing, and all these sort of things. Someone wants ask her like, so what qualifications have you got? She says, well, I really, I don't have anything. I kind of learned on the job. But when I was nine years old, I had the biggest Crayola set that was available and I spent all of my time just playing around with colors and similar to myself between the age of like six and 14, I loved listening to audiobooks. I just used to pound audio books like 20 cassette audio books and listen to that. And what is the podcast platform if it's not the

modern day version of an audio book? Right. So, you know, as a bit of a canary in the coal mine, that might be a good place for for some people to start, I think, moving forward. So yeah, those are good examples. Thank you. We've talked about the kind of big picture stuff. Now, let's get into the nitty-gritty, the murky world of actually how habits are set and how that comes. Could you take us through it?

So I divide a habit into four different stages. And so just from a high level, those stages are Q, craving, response, and reward. So the Q is something that gets your attention, like you see a play to cookies on the counter. That's a visual Q, or the ambulance comes behind you on the street and you hear it and say, you pull to the side of the road, like that's an auditory Q, or your phone buzzes in your pocket. That's like a physical or a tactile Q. And so it can be any of the senses, but usually it tends to be visual. Humans are very visual creatures, so that tends to be the most predominant sense. But the queue gets your attention.

The second step is the craving, which is dependent on how you interpret the queue. So whether you get a craving or the motivation to act, whether you predict that it would be useful to take a response, depends on the meaning that you assigned to the queue. So if you have two people who walk into a living room and they see a pack of cigarettes sitting on the table, the first person might, they've been a smoker for 10 years

and they see it and they get this craving of, oh, I want to pick a cigarette up and smoke. So they interpret that visual cue is favorable. The second person is never smoked today in their life, and so they see the cigarettes, and they just think, oh, it's just a pack of cigarettes, and they move on. And so it's really about the meaning that you assign to that visual cue

that determines whether you act on it or not. Then there's the response, and finally, the response is the actual habit or action itself, and then finally, there's the response, and finally, the response is the actual habit or action itself, and then finally, there's the reward or the outcome. So, visual cue, you see a plate of cookies on the counter, craving, you interpret them as favorable, you predict, oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty. So, you response, grab one, take a bite, and then finally, the reward, and the reward serves two purposes. The first is it satisfies the craving that came before the action. So you predicted that the the cookie would be tasty and sweet. And once

you take a bite, it is in fact sugary, tasty, sweet. So that resolves that craving. And then the second thing that it does is it teaches your brain what to repeat for next time. Because when actions are followed by a feeling of pleasure, when it's enjoyable or you've got, you solve the problem you were facing or you had some kind of successful feeling at the end of the habit, it feels good. Your brain's like, hey, that was enjoyable. I should do this again next time when I'm in a similar circumstance. And so it's actually closing the feedback loop and training your brain what to do again

and again. And once you've done something enough times and gotten the outcome that you hoped from it again and again and again, the feedback loop gets really tight and you can do it pretty much an autopilot. You don't even really think about it. You're just sort of automatically whenever you put a shoe on and see a shoe on tied on your foot, that's the cue. And you know, oh, I just go ahead and tie the shoe and that's how I get this reward that I'm looking for having a shoe securely on my foot and so on. The example that I give to kind of wrap all this together and show you how common it is for your brain to do this and how quickly we proceed through all those stages without thinking

is the process of flipping out a light switch. So when you first move into a new home or an apartment, you don't even think, you don't know where all the switches are or what switch turns on which light, right? Like you're kind of, oh, now I need to figure out, okay, it's not exactly that one, whatever. And then over time, after a few days, you start to learn, okay, this is the light that's in the kitchen, you know, I flip this switch. And pretty soon, you walk into a room, it's dark, so Q, the room is dark. Craving, I want to be able to see.

Response, I reach exactly for the right switch and flip it on, reward, I'm now able to see. And of course, you never think about those four stages when you're doing it, it happens in a fraction of a second, but all four are being completed right away. And so that's an example of what it looks like once the habits formed and you're doing it pretty much on autopilot. Yeah, I totally get that. I think you could probably place me anywhere in my bedroom in total blackness and I'd be able to find the light switch. It's one of those very bizarre like home in home in signal things. And so I wanted to talk about making good habits and breaking bad habits

because the process is similar but also completely opposite for both of them. Right? Could you take us through making good habits so someone may want to begin the process for writing a book or they may want to spend more time outside or they might want to do get into an exercise routine or whatever it might be. How do you make a good habit? So once you understand those four stages, you kind of have four different points of intervention for building a habit or breaking a bad one. And so I call these the four laws of behavior change, but the the basic way to think about it is for the Q, the first law of behavior change is to make it obvious.

You want the Q's if your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier they are to spot and get your attention, the more likely you are to act on them. The second law of behavior change is related to the craving, so you want to make your habits attractive. The more attractive or appealing a habit is, the more likely you already feel motivated to do it. For the third law of behavior change, the response, make it easy, and the easier, more convenient, frictionless habits are, the more likely they are to occur and easier they are going to be to perform. And then finally, the fourth law of behavior change is to make it satisfying, and that's related to the reward or the ending of the habit. You want the

ending to be satisfying, enjoyable, pleasurable, because it will give you a reason to repeat it again in the future. So those four laws make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. They give you kind of like a simple, easy to understand, framework for how to adjust a habit to make a good habit stick.

And of course, I go over all kinds of methods in the book for doing each one of those and we can talk about some here if you'd like. Then for breaking a bad habit, you just invert those four laws. Rather than making the cues obvious, you want to make the cues of your bad habits invisible, rather than making it unattractive, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying.

By having those four guiding principles, now you can start to look around your habits, investigate them, and try to figure out how can I do that, how can I make the cues invisible, or how can I make it more difficult to perform, or how can I add a consequence, so it's unsatisfying to do this habit, and so on. Basically, I like those four laws because they give you a simple line of questioning that you can use for inspecting your own habits and trying to figure out where exactly should I try to apply the pressure or make a change?

I think, certainly when, before reading atomic habits, and again, like I say, individually a lot of this stuff had already appeared in my consciousness through one form or another, but until there is that framework, it's so nebulous and kind of just cloudy and difficult to grasp, that without the step-by-step process that you're going through, it's a habit for building habits in a way or a framework that you can wrap building habits around, I suppose. Well, I think a lot of people have had this experience where you make a change or two, but it kind of, it almost feels like you're just making random changes and they never amount to anything. And so my, and this comes back to what we talked about earlier about systems. You know, I chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons. So the first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small. And that is like a, you know, like an atom.

That's a key part of my philosophy habit should be small and easy to do. The second meaning of the word atomic is the one that's often overlooked, which is the fundamental unit of a larger system. So like atoms build into molecules, molecules build into compounds, and so on. And then the third and final meaning is the source of immense energy and power. And I think that if you understand all three of those, then you kind of get the narrative arc of the book, which is you make changes that are small and easy to do, and then you layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system.

And if you do that, then you can end up with some really powerful and remarkable results in the long run. And it's really the layering that on top of them, the, as you just mentioned, seeing the whole framework and trying to make a variety of these little changes, rather than just doing them haphazardly and kind of one off, that leads to changes that actually stick in the long run. And so having those four laws of behavior change and those different questions, you can ask yourself, how can I make it obvious, how can I make it attractive, how can I make it easy,

how can I make it satisfying. They all kind of work together to form a more robust framework and increase the odds that you're actually going to be able to stick to the habit in the long run. I get that. So can we run through some examples for making and breaking? So, well, let's start with the first loss of making it obvious. So, one of the things you can do here is what I call environment design. And I'll give you some examples for both building good habits and breaking bad ones. So for good habits, you want to make the cues obvious. You want to read, read, either remove the distractions or add different elements to the environment that are more likely to catch your attention. So for example, for a long time I would buy apples and put them in the crisper in the bottom

of the fridge and then I would forget they were there because I wouldn't see them. And then two weeks would pass and they'd go bad and then I'd throw them out and I'd be annoyed because I'm wasting food and wasting money. And so eventually I bought this large display bowl and I put it right in the middle of the counter and put the apples in the bowl. And now they're gone in like three days just because I walk by them all the time and they're just, they're obvious, they're easy to see. So you can imagine a lot of changes, you can make to your kitchen like that, right?

Like put the healthy snacks, like the nuts and the fruit and stuff out on the counter or in easy to see locations and then hide the unhealthy stuff in the bottom of the pantry or the back of the freezer or the top shell for things like that. Similarly, when I wanted to build a flossing habit, so for many years, I would brush my teeth consistently, but I would only floss every now and then. And I realized one of the issues was that the floss was tucked away in a drawer in the bathroom. And so I just wouldn't see it, no one think about it.

So I bought a little bowl and I put it right next to my toothbrush on the sink and put the floss in there. And now I brush my teeth and put the toothbrush down and I pick the floss up because right next to it. And that one little change of making it obvious was basically all I had to do to stick to that habit. You know, now I've been doing it for years and it's just interesting to me how little it takes sometimes for a habit to stick. So that's an intervention only at the first stage, which is actually the downstream effect. Right. You don't always need all four, right?

Sometimes it just depends on how much friction you're facing and how difficult it's been for you to stick with it and also how complicated the habit is. Flossing actually isn't really that complicated the habit, so it only needed a little bit of a nudge to stick with that. So those are some examples of good habits. You can also think about on the other side for breaking a bad one. So let's take, for example, a lot of people feel like they watch too much Netflix or spend too much time watching television. Well, if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? Like they all face the TV. So

what is that room designed to get you to do? And you know, I'm not saying you have to redesign your entire home, but there's like a spectrum of choices that you have here. You know, you could take a chair and turn it away from the TV and have it face a coffee table to book on it, or you could put the remote control inside a drawer and put a book in its place. You could also put the TV inside a wall unit or a cabinet so that it's kind of like behind doors and you're less likely to see it. I had one reader who she and her husband watched a ton of sporting events and they realized they were spending so much time on that that they decided they just were going to get rid of their TV and their new metric would

be if we don't care enough about a game to drive 15 minutes down the street and watch it the sports bar that we don't actually want to watch it. So varying levels of difficulty there. So those are examples of making it invisible rather than making it obvious. But you could also employ the, so this is where I think this is where things start to get a little more powerful. You can start to layer things on top of each other. So that's making it invisible, but you could also make it difficult.

So this is the inversion of the third law. So you're trying to increase the friction associated with the bad habit. So you could say unplug your TV after you choose and then only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch. So you're not allowed to turn it on and find something mindlessly. Or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it takes an extra 10 seconds to turn the TV on and maybe that's enough time for you to be like,

do I really want to watch something or am I just mindlessly browsing here? To interject there as a one for social media that again another pearl of wisdom from George who's part of the Modern Wisdom project, he deletes Instagram from his phone but also turns off the notifications deletes Instagram from his phone, but also turns off the notifications when it's on his phone. So when it's on, it's invisible.

And when it isn't, it's really difficult. Like if anyone's navigated to the App Store, I got a download it, I got a re-log back in. You know, that's costly. For a while, I did something similar where I started at each time I would finish using the app, I would log out. So then I'd have to at least type my password and whatever to get back in.

But then I started just deleting the app after each use. And so yeah, you can use Instagram, but do you want to wait 60 seconds to download it? And it's funny how many times you don't actually care enough, you're like, I don't actually want to wait for this. Like I just wanted to browse it mindlessly, you know? So just a little bit of friction there can really help. Now, if you, you know, sometimes you can find ways around that, right? You're like, oh, I just didn't delete it that time or something like that.

So you can also be more strict about it and use what scientists call commitment device. So commitment device is a way to kind of lock in your future behavior. So to choice the make now that makes it easier to stick with a habit in the long run. So for the social media one, I realized when I was about a year into writing atomic habits that like, okay, this is going too slow,

I'm spending too much time on social, I need to make sure that I like say more focused hearing to get this book done. So I had my assistant every Monday, she would log me out of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, reset all the passwords. I would work all week. On Friday, she would give me the passwords,

and then I'd log in over the weekend and use social media, and then on Monday, we'd do it all over again. And so that system forced my hand. It took will power out of the equation. I couldn't log in. I mean, I guess I could have gone and reset the password or something, but then she would know. And so there's this accountability aspect there too. So anyway, element commitment devices can be a useful way to adjust that too. They

also can be an example of the second law of behavior change. So the second law is to make it attractive, right? The more attractive or appealing a habit is, the more likely you are to stick with it. So let's take like a common example, like going for a run in the morning. Well, you might go to bed tonight and think, all right, tomorrow's the day, I'm going to wake up early, I'm going to go for a run at 6am. So you say you're alarm alarm and then 6am comes around and your bed is warm and it's cold outside and you're like, well, maybe I'll just press news.

But if you rewind the clock and go back to the previous day and you send your friend a text and you say, hey, let's meet at the park at 6.30. Well, now 6am comes around and your bed is still warm and still cold outside. But if you don't get up and go to the park, you're a jerk because you leave your friend there all alone. And so it was actually that text that became the commitment device for your future action. What it did was it changed the equation in your mind. So now it's actually more appealing, more attractive to get up out of bed than it was before because there's an immediate cost associated with it. So you've increased the attractiveness of the behavior. So that's sometimes people ask that like how do you do that?

How do you make a habit more attractive? That's one way to do it. I certainly think that the attractiveness for me making a habit more attractive, especially one that's potentially difficult, having followed the protocol that you lay out in atomic habits, that does seem sometimes to be one of the more difficult points to go through. Making it obvious is because I'm going to forget to say it, how many visual cells have we got in the body, visual sensory cells? Is it like 14 million cells that sense and 10 million of them are for the visual field? Yeah, it's actually even a higher percentage than that. It depends on how it's analyzed and there are some questions about the layout of it, but basically there are 11 million or so sensory receptors in the body and 10 million of them are dedicated to vision. So we're incredibly

visually biased. We're very visual creatures. It's definitely the strongest. Yeah, completely blew my mind to add to that. So yeah, making it obvious is one, but the making it attractive one, that's a great example about texting a friend, that external accountability is a big trigger. Yeah, so I think you're right. Making it obvious, adding more cues,

it tends to be a more external thing. And so I think it's easier to understand. The making it obvious, adding more cues, it tends to be a more external thing. And so I think it's easier to understand, it's easier to see. Whereas the craving, it's, like I said, it's all about the meaning that you assign to the queue, which means it's a very internal thing, which makes it a little bit maybe harder to pin down

or figure out like how would I actually do something to make that happen. So the commitment device, that's one option. The other thing that you could do though is that essentially a craving is a story that you're telling yourself about what something means. And so if you can change that story, then you can change the craving

that is associated with that queue or you can change the response that you wanna take. So for example, let's say that you wake up every morning and you make a piece of toast. So when you walk into the kitchen, you see a loaf of bread, and you interpret that cue as favorable. I'll make some toast, it'll be enjoyable. But then you read a book that commences, you know, some diet or nutrition book that commences you that grain is the devil. And so now you walk into the kitchen and you see the same loaf of bread, but suddenly it means something different. You have a different story in your mind about what that is. Now you don't want to make a piece of toast. Now you think, oh, this is unhealthy. I

should stay away from this. And so, you know, I'm not advocating for particular diet or anything here, but my point is that education, reading, exploring and hearing about new world views is a way to change the story that you tell yourself about the same cues of the same experiences in your life. And if you change the story, then you've effectively changed the craving and what is attractive and what isn't attractive. So reading widely can actually be a way to change the cravings that you have associated with particular habits. It can be tough because

just readings about something once might not change like a lifetime of evidence and experience for that. And this is also, it comes back a little bit to something I talk about early in the book, which I call identity-based habits. And it's this idea that every action is like a vote for the kind of person that you want to become. And so if you want to change the story that you're telling yourself about a particular queue, if you want to change the craving that you have, then what you need to do is you need to provide evidence

of that new story, evidence of that new identity. And so you can do it in a small way and start casting votes for that identity, start building up evidence and proof of this new story. And then eventually, if you get enough proof, you'll start to believe it. So for example, if your current story is, oh, I always give up whenever I start a workout routine or I never stick with anything or whatever, well, now you can focus on like just doing one push up a day.

So it doesn't, it's not enough to transform your body, it's not going to get you the results that you want of, you know, losing a bunch of weight on the scale or something. But it does cast a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. It does reinforce this new story of I am a healthy person. I'm the type of person who's consistent or I'm the type of person who works out every day. And in the beginning, I think that counts for a lot because you're just trying to build up evidence

of this new story that you're telling yourself, this new identity that you're trying to build. And so I think in the long run, that's another way to change your craving and change whether a habit is attractive to you or not. And then the final thing I'll say on that is that your social environment can be a big influence on what habits are attractive or what you're unattractive. You know, like you have eaten pork all your life and then you join a new religion where it isn't allowed, and so now pork is very unattractive in comparison to what it was in the past, because eating

it would get you ostracized from the group and you would lose your friends and so on. The social reinforcement there is a very strong driver of whether that habit sticks or not. The same thing is true on a much more everyday scale. Let's say you move into a new neighborhood and you walk outside on Tuesday night and you see that all your neighbors have their recycling bins out.

And you think, oh, we need to sign up for recycling. That's what people like us do in this neighborhood. And you stick with that habit of recycling every week for 20 years, largely because it's socially reinforced because the expectation to act that way from your neighbors and so on. So that suddenly makes the habit of recycling much more attractive to stick with because

it means it's a signal that you belong to the group or that you get it, that you're part of the community. So, I guess just combining all that commitment devices can be a short-term way to change the attractiveness of a habit and identity and social reinforcement are more long-term ways to kind of shift which habits are attractive in the long run. I understand. So we're moving on to response now. We've got Q, we've got the craving, and now we're onto the response. So you know, this is mostly about making your habits easy, convenient, simple to do, making them the path of least resistance.

And, you know, there are a variety of things you do here, but the one that I usually start with recommending is what I call the two-minute rule. So you basically take whatever habit you're trying to build, and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So you're just making it very simple. So, read 40 books a year, becomes

a read one page, or do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes people like resist that, you know, they're like, well, I know the real thing I want to do is actually do the workout. Like I'm not just looking to take my yoga mat out every day. And so they kind of feel like it's this mental trick. But if you feel that way, then I would encourage you just to limit yourself to like the first two minutes or three minutes. I had a reader actually who, he ended up losing over a hundred pounds.

And one of the first things that he did was, he went to the gym, but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he would get in his car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds silly to people at first, right? It sounds ridiculous. It's like this is not going to be the thing that gets the sky in shape. 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 I think that that's like a deeper truth about how habits work, which is that a habit must be established before it can be improved. You need to make it the standard in your life before you worry about optimizing and expanding and upgrading from there. And so often we're focused on finding like the perfect diet plan or the ideal workout program

or the best business idea. We get so caught up in doing it perfectly from the start that we don't give ourselves permission to show up in a small way. And I think it mostly starts with that. Like allow yourself to show up and be there making your new normal, even if it's only for two minutes. And then you can upgrade and expand afterward. It's a common citation from trainers that say the best workout program is one that you stick to. And the same thing for meditation. And I'm struggling day by day to develop a more sophisticated reading habit. So for me, I did exactly that,

although this was before I read a time in cabbage, at the start of last year, I was like, look, just five minutes after my morning routine, which is quite kind of himatic as it is. So it was good. I was like, look, I'm struggling at a concentrate. I'm used to a high degree of stimulus from electronic devices, looking at a piece of paper makes me feel agitated physically because there's not enough stimulus going on.

Just read like five minutes after you've finished your meditation. The book's there. It's next to you. It's obvious. it's easy because I can reach for it, etc., etc. And that's now built up to the point where the flight over, I'm currently in San Bernardino in California, and the flight over from London to LA, which is 10 and a half hours, and I just read the whole time. That's one year on. The plane is a very specific example in that there is like fuck all else that you can do on a plane

really, unless you want to watch like Mission Impossible 4 over and over again. But Sure. So yes, we've got the Q-crabing response. We've got the response for, good habits, how about for bad? Well, so this is mostly about increasing friction. So the harder it is to do the action, the less likely you are to do it.

So if you find yourself biting your nails, then you could like wrap bandages around your fingertips or you could wear oven mitts, which I've heard about people doing, things like that, right? It's now so hard to do it. It's not so hard to do it that you can. Now, I bring that example up because I think it illustrates the fact that like, well, that would be ridiculous to wear oven mitts all day long. So sometimes it's more effective to focus on other areas, like the three other steps, rather than, right? And you'll see this for most habits

that there are probably one or two areas of intervention that are like the low hanging fruit. And you should probably start there. But anyway, so you could increase friction that way. You could also imagine like say you're trying to quit smoking. Well, if there's pack of cigarettes on the table 10 feet from you, that's much harder to resist than if the closest pack of cigarettes is like 15 miles away down the road at like the gas station, right? So you want some friction there. You can

also do, you know, I mentioned some of the eating examples earlier about like putting fruit on the counter, you know, nuts in an obvious place, things like that. There's a story from BJ Fogg, who's a professor at Stanford. He also writes about habits. And he said, he enjoyed eating popcorn. He liked eating it. He just didn't want to eat as much of it. And so he took it out of this pantry, walked down the hallway, went to the garage, and put it on the highest shelf in the garage.

Now, if he really wants it, he can just go out and get it. It's only going to take 60 seconds. But if he's designing for his lazy decision, for his default action, like, what is he going to do when he's exhausted and tired after a long day of work, he's not going to go out and get it. And that really kind of captures the essence of this idea of like making it difficult.

You want to put more steps between you and the bad behaviors and fewer steps between you and the good ones. And if you're operating and working in an environment that's like that, no single choice is going to transform your habits. But when you put them all together, imagine how much easier it would be to make the right choice if you have like 30 of those little decisions that are kind of nudging you in the right direction. So it's mostly about increasing the number of steps or increasing the friction of the

action. Got you. And finally, the reward. How are we working on that? Well, so the basic idea here is that the reason HabitStick is because the ending of the Habit is satisfying. And you can sort of divide this on a timeline. So there's sort of an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome, an instant gratification and a delayed gratification

associated with habits. Now with bad habits, the immediate outcome is often favorable, and this is one of the key reasons why we stick with them. So like, what is the immediate outcome of eating a donut? Well, it's great. It's sweet, it's sugary, it tastes good. It's only the ultimate outcome if you keep eating donuts for six months or a year or two years, that's unfavorable. And with good habits, it's off in the reverse, right? Like, what's the immediate outcome of going to the gym for a week? It's kind of unfavorable. Your body's probably sore. You haven't really changed at all. You look the same in the mirror, the scale is basically the same. So you don't have a whole lot to show for it. It's only once you've stuck with that habit for six months or a year or two years that

you start to get the changes in your body that you were hoping for. So with good habits, the immediate outcome is often unfavorable or has some kind of cost and the ultimate outcome is where the reward is actually why. And I think you can just summarize this by saying, the cost of your good habits is in the present, the cost of your bad habits is in the present, the cost of your bad habits is in the future. And so much of the battle of building good habits and bringing bad ones is figuring out ways to pull a little bit of that reward into the present moment for good habits so that you have a reason to stick with it while you're kind of working through this like

valley of death where you're waiting for it to accumulate. And for bad habits, pulling some of the consequences from the future into the present moment, so you feel a little bit of that pain right now. So you have a reason to avoid it. So, in the case of like one example for a good habit, let's say that you're trying to send sales emails for prospecting emails for your business,

or you are meditating for 10 minutes a day or you're going to write one page a day or a thousand words a day. And whenever you do that habit, you have a jar of marbles in front of you. And that jar of marbles has like 90 blue marbles and 10 red ones, for example. And each time that you do the habit, you pull a marble out of the jar. And if you pull out one of the 90, then nothing happens. Just like pound on the back,

good job you do what you're supposed to. But if you pull out one of the 10, then you get some kind of reward that's exciting to you. Maybe it's a piece of chocolate, maybe you get to take a bubble bath, maybe you get to go for a walk outside, maybe you get to watch an hour of Netflix for whatever you want,

whatever it is that's interesting to you. But what you've done is you've introduced some element of surprise and instant reward an hour of Netflix for whatever you want, whatever it is that's interesting to you. But what you've done is you've introduced some element of surprise and like instant reward into that habit. So now you have a reason to feel good about it in the moment. You wrote your thousand words and your book still isn't finished, but you got to pull out one of the fun marbles and so you get to watch Netflix for an hour. So there's a little bit of an immediate reward there that that's a little angry with the ultimate thing

that you're working toward. And then the key, the caveat that I want to add to this is that you want to choose a form of reinforcement, a form of reward, that aligns with your desired identity. So like some people will go to the gym and then reward themselves with a cup of ice cream. And it's like, well, you're casting one vote for a healthy person and one vote for an unhealthy one

so it's sort of like a wash, you know? So you want, instead, maybe you could say, you get to have a bubble bath, which both going to the gym and taking a bubble bath are a vote for taking care of your body. And so it's kind of like reinforcing the same identity. But even at a minimum, I think, you know, it doesn't, they don't always have to align perfectly,

but at a minimum, it shouldn't conflict with your desired identity. So anyway, that's an example of how to like, make it satisfying in the moment and try to overcome that misalignment of the immediate and ultimate outcome of your habits. And how about FABAT? So this is mostly about adding some kind of consequence

to the behavior. One good example is what we talked about earlier about the idea of texting your friend to go meet to run at the park. So previously, sleeping in didn't have any kind of consequence. You could press snooze and it wasn't a big deal. But now suddenly you press snooze and you're a bad friend. And so there's some immediate outcome that's changed the equation a little bit.

So this also shows you, I mentioned very early on when we talked about the four stages about the reward satisfies the craving that came before the action. So the second stage and the four stage are kind of tied to each other. The second stage is your anticipation of the outcome and the fourth stage is the realization of that outcome.

And so for that reason, the strategies that make habits more attractive also simultaneously make it more satisfying or make the, if you skip the habit, they make it unsatisfying. So they kind of like, they work with each other. So texting your friend not only makes it more attractive to get up, it makes it unsatisfying or adds a consequence to sleeping in. So they kind of like work with each other there. I totally get it. James, I can't sing enough praises about atomic habits. A genuinely can't we have created the mother fuck a duo, which is Deep Work by Cal Newport,

and that's how I got this. I guess so. That's great. Well, Cal does great work, so I'm happy to be in company with him. That's very, very good. I challenge anyone to read those two books and not come out of it as a complete Motherfucker,

but today's been fantastic. Anyone who is interested, I will link your website in the show notes below. Am I right in thinking you've nearly got half a million and use that as subscribers now? Yeah, it's been crazy, but it's great and really happy and grateful to have that many readers and I'll just do my best to keep sharing useful ideas there. How does it feel to have half a million people,

like you press a button and when that button gets pressed, that half a million people see something. Yeah, I try not to think about it because when I just get in my head too much and start spiraling into perfectionism and worrying about it not being good enough, but on my good days, I feel really grateful for it and it's just, it's cool, you know, like I write ideas because I hope that they make the world a little bit of a better place or make some small impact in my little corner of the universe. And so to have people reading and enjoying and finding it useful and using them in their daily lives, like that's what it's all about. So yeah, I'm really happy and grateful for it.

Fantastic. Genuinely do think that you are making a really big impact. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me on. Good talk.