The Daily Stoic - How James Clear Would Start 2026 If He Were You

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

The first few weeks of 2026 will decide far more than you think. In this episode, you’ll hear the best of James Clear’s most important advice from his past conversations with Ryan on how to start the year the right way before bad habits lock in. James shares what to focus on first, what to ignore, and how to build momentum without burning yourself out. They talk about why systems matter more than goals, how to design habits to stick in real life, and how to avoid the common January mistakes that keep people stuck in the same loop year after year.James Clear’s 2025 interview: Apple Podcasts,  Spotify, and YouTubeJames Clear’s first interview on The Daily Stoic Podcast: Apple Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube. James Clear is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Atomic Habits and his latest book, The Atomic Habits Workbook. Make 2026 the year where you finally bring yourself closer to living your best life. No more waiting. Demand the best for yourself. The Daily Stoic New Year New You challenge begins January 1, 2026. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge.👉 Get The Daily Stoic New Year New You & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/lifeSupport the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, it's Ryan. I try not to make too many puns on my last name because I've been hearing it my whole life. But if you want to give a holiday gift of me, Ryan Holiday, and the Daily Stoic, well, you can. We have a special offer. If you want to give Daily Stoic premium as a gift, you can do that. Your friends, your family members, coworkers, whoever you give it to can get ad-free episodes, early access, and exclusive bonus content. Plus, we'll even throw in premium episodes of the Daily Dad Podcast. You can get both premium plans together for 25% off. It's a limited offer available now through the end of the holidays. That's through December 31st.

You can click below to get it for them today. Happy holidays. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation in inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoak Pocket. I was on YouTube the other day. I was just watching something. I forget what it was. And, you know, like it suggests the little other videos on the side. I recognized a familiar face. And it was my friend James Clear.

He had just been on CBS this morning. And I said, oh, whoa, that is. It's awesome. I've known James for a long time. I've actually known James since before Atomic Cabots came out. I remember I gave a talk at this writing conference or this sort of entrepreneur's conference. And he was there thinking about doing a book. And he had some questions about how book publishing worked. And then he went and wrote one of the best selling books like of the century to date. His interview on CBS mornings was actually really good. Let me bring you a little chunk of it. It's almost time for New Year's resolutions, oh, God, but there's no need to be too every year. Every year I try to think of something and every year it doesn't work. Author and speaker, James Clear believes even small changes can help us get one percent better every day. Okay. And you say it's not about inspiration, it's about momentum. Yeah, what's the difference? Well, inspiration is good for getting started. It's good for learning things. Good for getting you excited. But consistency enlarges ability. Consistency in large's ability. Consistency in large's ability. The more that you practice something, the better you get at it. And so what we need is momentum.

We need progress. We need the ability to build momentum and make gains, you know, even if they're smaller than what you want to make gains day in and day out. And so my hope is that the workbook does that. I like the 1% that he says because we can all do something. Yes, 1% better for sure. You know, as a former athlete, I love quotes because they're easy to remember. And they're like mantras.

You can repeat them in your head whenever you're going through a moment on or off the field for me. And I feel with these inspiring quotes, small changes compound into remarkable results. No is a decision. Yes, is the responsibility. I love that. Love it. Plan for failure and recover quickly. Do you feel like it's equally as important to take these as motivational teachings versus like educational tools?

Sure. In a lot of ways, I feel like the secret to winning is learning how to lose. What I mean is it's learning how to bounce back from a loss. And so many of the strategies in atomic habits and in the atomic habits workbook are giving you ways to bounce back from a loss. You know, we all have that. Like, we all try things and we experiment with habits.

It's inevitable. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And what you see is even for the top performers in any given domain, they make mistakes like everybody else. They're not perfect, but they do tend to get back on track quickly. And so if the reclaiming of a habit is fast, the breaking of it doesn't matter that much.

It's just a little blip at the end of the year. But you need to figure out how to do. to get back on track quickly. The one that hit me was you open the book by divulging what you say is the biggest single, most important piece of advice you can give, which is always work with your life. Explain what that is and what it looks like in practice. I think we have this version of mental toughness and discipline that it's one path and I'm going to force this path no matter what I'm going to make it happen.

But I think there's a different, maybe more powerful version of mental toughness, which is the openness to many paths. It's the ability to, no matter what I face, I can deal with it. it. No matter what resources I have, I can work with this. No matter what I'm, you know, a situation I'm facing today, I can thrive. And the ability to be flexible and adaptable to work with your life, not against your life, is one of the things that makes habits stick in the long run. There's basically nobody who knows more about habit formation than James. And certainly no one better at expressing it concretely and practically and memorably. Like, that's what he did.

like an academic research where he draws on great research from a bunch of different people, but he finds a way to put it in a framework that makes sense. And I made a bunch of changes in my life from James's stuff. I think Atomic Habits was like one of the first books we ever sold in the bookstore. Like it had just come out and the first customer through the door bought that book, which was like such a cool, full circle thing. So James has been on the podcast a couple times. And last year, I called him, and we did kind of like a little refresher update thing. So today's episode is basically a best of James Clear, which I think is a fit in choice here at the end of 2025. This is coming out on the last day of the year. 2025 is dead and gone. So the

question is, who do you want to be in 2026? What do you want to do in 2026, right? What habits do you want to stop? What habits do you want to start? I think there's nobody better to give you some advice on that than James Clear. So you can grab his book. We've got it in the Painted Porch. It's a great audiobook as well. But if you want to start tomorrow to challenge yourself with some better habits, in fact, if you want to start 2026 with 21 days of good habit formation, which is supposedly how long it takes to really ingrain a new habit, well, then I would invite you to join us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which starts tomorrow. You can sign up for that at daily stoic.com slash challenge.

I'm ready to go. I'm excited. We already did kind of a warm-up day today. So if you haven't signed up, you missed that. But it's not too late. You'll get all that stuff plus the 21 days one per day as soon as you sign up. It's going to be awesome. I'm pumped.

It's kind of a refresher for me. It helps me go back to best practices. gets me out of my comfort zone. I just think, like, if I pick up one new habit each year from doing this thing, what's that worth? And in fact, and it's not just for that year, right? We've been doing the Daily Stoke New Year and New Year Challenge for like eight years now.

So I have challenges that I picked up eight years ago and seven years ago and six years ago. So it's like, what are those habits worth as they compound overtime? Which is the whole point of the challenge. I won't belabor it. You're either going to sign up or you won't. I'd love to see you in there.

It's going to be awesome. and if you haven't read Atomic Habits, well, you should also do that. You can watch his episodes on the Daily Stoic channel. I'll link to that. You can follow him on Instagram and on Twitter at James Clear. He has a great email newsletter that goes out, what is it, every Thursday, that is worth reading as well. He's a great thinker, a great dude. Here is he and I talking about habits.

And without further ado, I'll bring you that and see you tomorrow in the Daily Stoic, New Year, New Year, Challenge, Dailystoic.com slash challenge. So I have this habit that I do every year, which is I try to pick like a word that I want to use as my sort of like, not mantra for the year, but a word that I want to influence all the decisions that I, that I make. So like a couple of years ago. A theme for the year. Exactly. A couple of years ago, it was stillness. This year it was systems.

I haven't come up with a good word for 2025. But do you do that? Or what do you think of that as a practice? I don't do it. But I know many people who do, in some and my personal family who do. Yeah, I think it's a cool practice. I think it's a good idea to give you a, sometimes I think about, you know, you look at life through, it's almost like you're looking through different windows.

You know, it gives you a different window to view all the, the opportunities that you have and the challenges that you face for the year. And that's kind of nice to have a little bit of a different frame to run things through. Maybe it, you know, reveals something. Yeah, it gives you like a value to check your decisions against. Yeah. You know, people talk about the, like, the law of attraction, you know, It's like you want more money, think about money, you want more, whatever.

But I think actually we should call it the law of attention because all it really is is when you start thinking about something. Once you start paying attention to it, you naturally notice opportunities for it and areas where it pops up. And this is like that. You know, you pick stillness and you start seeing areas where, you know, that can apply in life. You pick, you know, like one thing I'm thinking a lot about recently is like leverage or how do I get more out of each unit of time or how do I get more out of each unit of effort? And when you have that frame, it gives you. different way of thinking about that, of seeing the things that you face each day. So, yeah, I like it. That's a great word. I might actually steal that leverage because sometimes you're thinking about,

like, yeah, for me, it would be how can I get more out of what I'm already doing as opposed to just trying to do more and more. That one year, the word was less, but I think leverage is actually a more positive way of expressing that same idea. Right. I don't do the theme thing or the word thing for each year, but if I did, that probably would have been my word for this year. And I, my little shorthand for it is fewer moves but bolder strokes. So, like, how can I, how can I get the same outcome in fewer moves? Or how can I get, perform the same type of moves rather than working harder, but get a better output from them.

So, yeah, it's not always possible, but if you approach life with that lens, then you start to notice areas where it can, you know, it can turn out to be a reality. Well, I think that's very common is we say we want. certain things or we want our life to be a certain way, but then if we look at our individual choices, they're often not in accordance with getting closer to that. They often take us further away. So people say stuff like, you know, family is the most important thing. But if you actually looked at their day-to-day choices, they're valuing many things over family. Now, some of that is just a reality of life. You have to do it. But we want certain outcomes or we say we're adhering to

certain strategies, but then we're making tactical decisions that are not in alignment with that priority or that strategy at all. It's really natural. One of the questions I try to ask myself a lot is, what do I, I approach it in different ways, but you could say one version of the question is, what am I optimizing for? So sometimes you optimize for free time or time with family, sometimes it's for making money, sometimes it's for creative freedom. But the answer changes for not not just across people it will change within you you know like i'm optimizing for different things now that i was five years ago or 10 years ago so that question i find helpful another question is what season am i in right now you know sometimes you're in a season where the work burner is cranked

on high and you're really focused on you know performing well there other times the friends or family burners cranked up but when your season changes your emphasis or your habits often need to change you know what value you're emphasizing is going to shift. And then the last way that I think about it is, basically the question is, what do I want my daily lifestyle to look like? Not do I, what do I want my results to look like?

Because if you do it based on results or you do it based on the opportunities that come your way, that's when it's really easy to get into talking yourself into, oh, let me do this because it's a cool thing. But if you do it based on what you want your daily lifestyle to look like, and then you say, I'm going to draw a box around what I want my day to look. look like. And inside of that box, how can I make the most money, reach the most people,

make the biggest impact, you know, and so on. But not if it's outside of it. But most people start the other way around, which is they say, how can I make the most money or reach the most people or make the biggest impact or, you know, get the result that I want? And then they kind of draw the box around that and convince themselves, oh, I would be okay with living that lifestyle. And what you end up with is talking yourself into a lifestyle that you don't actually enjoy that much just because you were chasing the outcome. Or you've told yourself that your day-to-day life now is not what you want, but it's so you can get to a point where in the future, you will have that day-to-day life, and it doesn't

tend to work out that way. So people will set up a day-to-day life for the bulk of their existence that they don't enjoy, that doesn't prioritize the things they want so that, yes, someday when they can retire, they can move to the place they want to live, or organize their day around the things they want to. Now, of course, life is about delayed gratification, but there is something about sort of presuming a tomorrow or a golden years or whatever that I think the Stokes would say is a tad arrogant, you know, there's the humility of delayed gratification. And then there's also the arrogance of, oh, I can get to that later or someday I'll be able to. Your last point is a good one.

You know, delayed gratification is a big part of life. And I think what is it that allows people to strike this balance well and gracefully and what is it that you know kind of prevents people from doing it i think a lot of it is patience and persistence you know most people so if we kind of layer on the things we're talking about here so we've got you have a certain kind of lifestyle that you'd like to live day to day but you also make these promises to yourself and you realize delay gratification and investing in the long term is a big part of life and that's how we do get better results and life is easier when you get better results and then what we're talking about a minute ago with leverage. How do I get more output from each unit of time I'm putting in? How do I get more

out of less? If you kind of start to layer all those things together, what you realize is there aren't actually that many things in life that allow you to check all those boxes that allow you to both have a good daily life and generate the long-term returns that you want and have, get a, you know, get a great output from the effort that you're putting in. And so I think a lot of people just get impatient with the answers. They don't come up with a good answer for it right away because there aren't that many things that can do all that. And so then they kind of give up and they settle for something less. And I think one of the lessons is reflection and review is a really critical part of living a good

life. You need to carve out a lot of time to think about what type of day do I want, what type of lifestyle do I want, what are my opportunities and what's available to me, what resources do I have at hand, and how can I piece these things together and align them with my personal interest in a way that allows me to live a good daily life and also get the long-term rewards that I want. And there probably aren't going to be just like a hundred things that pop up as an answer to that question. You're probably going to need to think about it and lean against it. I mean, in a sense, it's something that you never fully get an answer to. It's a process. It's a

question that you continue to lean against for your whole life and you kind of figure out the art of living as you go. But by having the question, just by walking around and carrying that ambitious, question in the back of your mind, you go a long way toward getting an answer. And I think a lot of people give up on it too soon, and that's why they end up with, you know, substandard answers and kind of have to settle for something less. I have a little quote that I have framed in my office. It's from Seneca. He says, too many people lack the fickleness to live as they should and instead simply live as they have begun. So I think one of the things that happens is a set of assumptions or a path made sense at a time or a setup or an arrangement made sense at a time where we just didn't have anything

better. And so we start doing a thing. And then we lack that sort of fickleness is an interesting word because we see it mostly as a negative word. But we lack the ability to tweak and to change and to experiment to try to potentially find something better. So we just keep going down the path that we always went. We were choosing majors in college and one seems slightly more interesting than another. And then 40 years later, we're still lawyers, even though we don't actually like this thing anymore. And we didn't even know that much about it when we decided to go to law school or whatever. Insert any path that you can take in your life for law school and being a lawyer there. But this idea of like, I moved here because it made sense at the time,

does not mean you have to continue out your days that way. Or you're a person who wakes up early. maybe you're actually a night hour, your business keeps you up late, and so you don't know that actually you're a morning person. But this willingness to tweak an experiment and try different ways of doing things, that's how you ultimately do get to that day-to-day satisfaction that we're talking about. Yeah, Seneca says fickleness, but maybe in modern language, you would say like adaptability or being flexible. You know, it's, you don't have this rigid way of living life. Like, if you need things to be a certain way, then you're being held hostage by the situation. You know, you're, it's actually the, what's that quote?

It's something like the oak tree fought against the storm and broke, but the willow tree bent and survived. It's like you need some amount of, you know, flexibility and adaptability. It's actually the flexible and supple things in life that survive and it's the rigid and fixed things that break and are brittle. I think there's that line by Lao Zhu where he says like the way of the living is to bend and to adjust and the way of the dead is to, you know, be brittle and rigid. and so there's a lot of there's a lot of that sometimes we talk about consistency as like this rigidness you know this discipline oh to be consistent it means to be the type of person who always grits through it always makes it happen no matter the conditions of the situation but in real life i think consistency is often adaptability it's flexibility it's when you don't

have enough time you do it in the short way or the smaller way when you don't have enough energy you do it in the easy way when you don't have the skills you figure out a way to do it you know in a more beginner style. And so it's the ability to flex and adjust to the circumstances but not throw up a zero for that day and still show up. That is actually what consistency looks like.

And of course, we all want to perform better and to try to do more, but it's actually not letting zero days creep in that is what consistency really looks like. Yeah, I read about this NFL kicker once who, like, he was anti-ritual. Like he didn't ever want to be like, these are my lucky socks.

This is the way I trot on the field. Like he was really almost paranoid about not creating patterns because then you need them to be a certain way. And I think if you're a habit oriented person or a routine oriented person, it can almost become like a sort of a religious thing or a compulsion where you're like, I have to have it this way. And that's great insofar as you can control your environment day to day. But the reality is you can't. Like when I talk, I try to think, here's the system or the order of things that I like to do it in to get the best performance, but I also kind of lean into those days where that gets blown apart because the flight is delayed or I'm sick or something happened. I go like, this is me getting practiced doing it in a different way. So I can feel comfortable knowing that whatever the circumstances are, I can perform that I'm not so rigid that I'm actually fragile.

There's an interesting story about Josh Waitskin, you know, him, the chess guy and then martial arts and whatever. He was doing this martial arts competition. It was like the national championships or something. And I think he was in Thailand or Taiwan or somewhere where English was not the primary language. And there was a mix-up in the schedule. He thought that he was performing at a later time. And so he was taking a nap on the bleachers. He thought he was competing like six hours from then.

And they came up and woke him up and they said, hey, actually, you're supposed to be on the mat in like five minutes. and you need to walk across the, you know, the stadium or whatever. And so he went from being asleep to need to compete in this high-level competition, like, right away. And he said earlier in his career, he had this pre-game routine, this ritual, like you had mentioned, like a lot of athletes do, where it was like 12 minutes or 10 minutes. And then eventually what he started to do was he started to compress it. And, you know, in that moment, he didn't have 12 minutes, but he had already practiced compressing it down. Eventually, I think he got it down to something under like 30 seconds. and he could just do that little ritual in, you know, 15 seconds and be ready to compete.

And I like that, you know, that kind of thinking of like, okay, it is nice to have an on switch where you feel like, okay, I need to be ready to go now and I need to have some signal to my brain that we're getting started. But the more that you can compress that sequence, the less brittle, as you say, you are. You know, if you need to step on a leaf and walk counterclockwise three times and go through some mantra, like you don't have time for that, you know? Especially when you have kids because your life is just. just an endless series of your routines being blown apart. And not only if, you know,

sort of religiously sticking to those routines, it's not just unrealistic. If you were to somehow manage to do it, it's coming at the expense of someone else, right? You, you, by nature, your comfort and your way of doing things is no longer the priority. So you have to kind of get good at being, like, resilience to me is the ability to perform and continue to operate no matter what's happening. And so if you needed to be a certain way, you're not resilient. You're the opposite of resilient. Right. Yeah, the more, you are more mentally tough if your mood and your performance is not dependent on your conditions. You know, if you, if you're dependent on favorable conditions, you're actually not that tough. So I don't know. It's a tricky thing, but I think this also comes back

to that theme that I've kind of had for the year, which is fewer moves in bolder strokes. It's like, okay, I don't have time for a lot of moves. You know, it forces you to choose very carefully. If I have limited hours, if I have unfavorable conditions, if I'm not in an ideal situation, I don't have time for 20 moves. I have time for two. And how can I make sure that those are getting me the output that I want? I was thinking about one of those for this year. I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to come up with one meal. And this is going to be like my go-to meal. I'm not going to eat it every day. But it's going to be the, if I don't know what's order, if I don't have much time to cook, if there's not much in the fridge, like this is my thing.

Like this is my go-to, it's decently healthy, it doesn't take a lot of time, it doesn't have a lot of, you know, and I'm just going to be like, that's my thing. So whatever happens, that's kind of like, I talked to Lesneed the GM of the Rams once and he said, like, you have to have panic rules. Like, what do you do when coverage gets blown or, you know, something happens? Like, this is going to be like my panic meal. When I don't know what my normal thing is, when I don't get to decide, this is, I'm just going to hit this button and do that thing.

Yeah. I like the idea of having good defaults, you know. Sometimes the way I phrase it is, what do you do when you have nothing to do? So, like, for a lot of people, when they have nothing to do, when they've got a 10 second break while they're standing in line at the store, or when they have five minutes in between a meeting, what they do is they scroll on their phone. They pull up social media.

They look at, you know, whatever. They have a default mode that they go into when they have nothing to do. And what I've really tried to do, I'm still working on this. I definitely don't have this figured out. But what I've tried to do is have a better answer to what do I do when have nothing to do. And right now, my answer is I have this book that I'm working on. And so when I don't know what to do, when I've got an in-between moment between meetings, when I don't have anything that's instantly happening, I've opened up that dock and I start editing. And so it's just

a much better thing for me to do in those in-between moments. And you're kind of describing that for food, which is when I don't know what to eat or when I'm not sure what I'm having for lunch, I'm having this. And it's nice to have a couple good answers to things like that in life. Because you, what happens is you turn around, you know, in three months. And if you were just scrolling your phone, 47 minutes a day was eaten up on Instagram and you didn't really feel it at all. And it didn't do anything. And instead, 47 minutes a day is spent editing this document and all of a sudden the book is finished and you're surprised by how much progress you've made. Yeah, it's kind of actually, it's like you're, it's your version of that word. Like,

you're like, I work on the book. When I don't know what I'm doing, I work on the book. And for me, it's usually like my note cards. If I don't know what I'm supposed to do, if I somehow have a magical day where I have more time, it's like, I have this big stack of books that I have to process that I've read that I have to do my note cards on. And I'm just going to do a couple pages. And if you can kind of have the idea of like you have this big thing that you're chipping away at and it gets your extra time, yeah, that's a, that's a good thing because you always know what to do. You know what to do. Right. Yeah. If you don't know what to do, then you end up choosing whatever. is in front of you.

But if you have something that can guide you, then, you know, you end up using that time much more effectively. It's amazing to me how we, it's like we start out with really clear intentions, but we can't follow us true. Yeah. It's so common.

So true. I also like, you know, I've had this happen to me many times it's not like I'm immune to the to the phenomenon like we all get excited and amped up about things early on and then it comes time to execute and life happens and things like

taper off. This is what you're kind of getting at though this whole discussion about New Year's resolutions. This is one of the central things I talk about in atomic habits is this idea of like starting with identity rather than results. I do think there's something to that that like at the beginning of the year people are very excited

about the results they can imagine for themselves, losing weight or making more money or, you know, meditating every day or whatever. But they still don't see themselves in that way. They don't consider themselves to be a meditator or a writer or an athlete or whatever, the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And so I usually encourage people start there. Like start with the identity that you want to have or start with the lifestyle that you

want to live and then start doing small habits that reinforce that identity. rather than just being like, oh, I'm going to lose 40 pounds. And then when that doesn't happen in three weeks, you inevitably feel demotivated. Well, that's something that they talk a lot about in sports. So people have heard about it a thousand times and we pay lip service to it. But then in our own lives, we don't actually follow it, which is a New Year's resolution.

The problem with that is that you are focusing, you're starting with the result. I want to lose 40 pounds. I want to know, I want to know Spanish. You know, like you're picking a thing and you're saying, I want to get that result. when really when you're talking about identity, you're also talking about process. It should be,

I want to eat better meals on a daily basis as opposed to I want to get a certain thing or I want to write a book is not the right goal. It should be I'm going to start writing. Like, you know, it's doing the thing versus focusing on the outcome. Well, and this is kind of one of the, I don't know, discoveries I had as I was working on the book and writing about the topic more is that when you stick to the

process like you're saying right now when you like perform habits consistently every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become and so by doing those habits you're casting these little votes for the type of person that you are the identity that you believe you have you're sort of reinforcing that internal narrative and so by building small habits by sticking to the process you are in that moment reinforcing that identity and ultimately once you get to that point where you say, hey, actually, you know, I've done this enough times, I think this is part of my story. Like, I am a basketball player, or I am a meditator, or I am a writer, or whatever it is, you're no longer pursuing behavior change at that point, because you're already, you're not trying

to be someone new. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be. And, you know, like take, you know, you're a great example. This is, say, someone who has the identity of a writer or an author. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the task of writing is easy for you or that it doesn't require any effort. But the act of writing every day is in alignment with how you view yourself. The internal narrative of I'm an author or I'm a writer, you're not like trying to convince yourself

or in the case of many habits or New Year's resolutions, people say things like, I need to get motivated or I need to get amped up or like I need the willpower to do it. And like, you don't necessarily need to get motivated to be a writer. You already view yourself in that way. Now, you still need to stick to the habit.

You still need to do the work. But I think it's the work takes on a deal different characteristic at that point once you start to identify as the type of person who does that consistently. And it's sort of paradoxical. So I get why it's hard for people to understand. Like you, you hear Bill Belichick or someone talk about the process and you're like, but you've won the most games out of anyone. Or in Zen and the Art of Archery, you know, he talks about, you know, put the target out of your mind, you know, what's the point of archery if you're not aiming at the target, right? So it feels insane. And that's probably why people have resistance to it. And I think

where I've come down is like, okay, obviously having goals is better than someone who has no goals. But then it's like once you have the goal, philosophically, you get to a place where the goal becomes not important. So it's a weird contradiction that you're asking people to wrap their heads around. Well, and I kind of feel like if you really care about the goal, you'll focus on the system. You know, like if you actually care about getting the result, which supposedly is what we all are doing this for, the archers trying to hit the bull's eye, the football players trying to win the championship and so on. Supposedly, results matter so much and we care so much about them.

And this is coming, by the way, from someone who is very results oriented. Like, I've kind of had to, you know, do therapy on myself or whatever to get myself to focus on the process more and not be so hung up on the outcome. But if you do care about the outcome so much, then you need to focus on the system in the process because that's how you actually achieve it. And furthermore, being outcome focused will help you achieve a goal one time. But if you want to keep winning again and again, you have to be focused on the system.

And so goals are good for one-time wins. Systems are for people who want to win repeatedly. And I feel like that's kind of where I, how I think about the distinction between the two. Yeah, what's that joke where it's like, once you're lucky, twice you have good systems, you know, or twice you're good. You know, it's like doing it once is easy or it can be random,

but if you're trying to replicate it, there needs to be some sort of process. Right. And I'd be curious, too, as an author, like, again, this is because the sports thing is you have, you want your book to be successful. No one writes a book and then they hope nobody reads it. But then they also, the place this, this process comes in, Marks you really talks about this. He goes like, sanity is tying your happiness to your own actions. You know, like if you're a goal on your book, it like, you can't really have a system that guarantees you too much of the external results. Like you can't have a system that is going to make your book a number one. in New York Times to sell it. You can have a system that should generate a good book. You know, like you can have the system to focus on the parts that are in your control.

And then you also have to get to a place where you write off the parts that are not in your control as being much less consequential. Yeah. I kind of think about it like you have things that you don't control at all, the weather, for example. Then you have things that you influence, but you don't control them. You know, like if you're playing someone in tennis, you can influence the outcome.

You can't control how they play or where they shoot, hit their shots or whatever. And then you have things that you're like fully under your control, you know, what you choose to wear today or whatever. And most of the things that really matter in life fall in the middle category. You can influence them, but you can't totally control them. And so at some point, at least for myself, like with writing atomic habits, I had to kind of be at peace with the effort that I put in or something. Like I didn't want to get to the end of it, you know, depending on how you measure. it took somewhere between three to five years to finish the book. And I didn't want to get to the end of that process and feel like I hadn't given the best

effort I could. Now, I hoped it would do well and hit a bestsellers list and sell a bunch of copies and all that. But I can't control that. But I just wanted to feel like I had influenced every bit of that process that I could. And then, you know, then we'll see what happens. And, you know, there's always something more you could have done. but I'm at peace with the effort I gave, you know, and I feel like that's, that was probably

the most important thing for me. And then the fact that it has worked out well, you know, just makes it all feel much better afterward. Yeah, that's, that's the extra. But I mean, imagine if you'd gotten the results, but you knew that it wasn't as good. Like, you know, like that's, that's a weird position to be in that I've been in at different times in my life. And I'm sure you've seen it with articles or something where you did a pretty good job, but it wasn't like your best. There's a, there's a weirdness to it. I mean, you still enjoy it because success is nice.

There's something about the struggle that makes the outcome more, you know, enjoyable. Like I think about, imagine if you had spent your whole career, you played football as a kid and through high school and college, and you're finally like the kicker on the Super Bowl winning team and you kick the field goal to win the game and how that would feel after spending 25 years of your life dedicated toward that goal versus being like a professional soccer player and then you retire and you're like hey you know what I might try out for a team and then you turns out you can be the kicker and then the starter gets hurt and you end up kicking

the game winning field goal in the Super Bowl and it's like it would still be really cool but I don't know that it would be the same because you don't have the struggle before it and so there needs to be some kind of yeah the height of your joy is tied to the depth of your sorrow in that sense and the more that you the more effort that you put in the the better it feels when you do have some success. There's a, there's a story I just found, and you can't steal it because it's going to be in my next book, but Jimmy Carter was a, was a nuclear engineer before he was a politician and before, I guess, before he was a peanut farmer, but he went to the Naval Academy and he was sort of up for this promotion as a naval officer, and he was, he was interviewed by Admiral Rickover,

who single-handedly basically invents the idea of a nuclear submarine. And anyways, he's in this, he's in this long interview and these are these notoriously like insane interviews. He was like a really difficult guy to please. And so he's asking Jimmy Carter about all his accomplishments and he goes, you know, you know, how did you do in your class at the Naval Academy? And he says, oh, I was 59th in my class of 400, which is extremely difficult. And he said, how did you do on this posting? And he goes through and he's like sort of beaming, listing all his accomplishments.

And Rick overlooks at him and he just goes. goes, did you always do your best? And he was like, he was going to be like, yes, you know, look at all my accomplishments. And then he thought about it and he said, no, I didn't always do my best. And then Rickover just got up and left the room. And he, Jimmy Carter said the rest of his life was trying to provide a better answer to that question. And so it was interesting to me to go like, he'd had this incredible career as one of the top people in the Navy, top of his class, but as soon as he had to look at it from the side of, like, was it actually the best he was capable of doing? The accomplishment became totally meaningless. And I think that's a good,

that's a good microcosm of life. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's a wonderful example of this idea. And it also encourages you to measure outcomes in a different way. You know, like we spend so much time measuring outcomes on how they are relative to everyone else. You know, how much money am I making relative to the person next to me or what is the number on the scale relative to the other people on the team or in my class or whatever all these other things that are like status symbols of some sort and this is like an internal measure which is um also interestingly both of those are about feelings one is about how you feel compared to others and one is about how you feel with like your self-esteem and reputation with yourself and um i don't know there's

I think there's probably a strong encouragement to measure it more in the second way than the first. Well, it's funny because both our mutual friend, Mark Manson, and I use the story of Dave Mastain in our, I did an ego's the enemy and he did it in the subtle art. But, you know, here's this guy. He gets, he's the lead guitarist and founder of Megadeth. That seems like a great accomplishment. But in light of the fact that he was kicked out of Metallica, that's not an accomplishment. And it's like so many people would kill to have sold the amount of books that you've sold,

but then you so you can and if I told you at the beginning of your book this is what you're going to have you'd be like that's an unmitigated success but you can still but but that's the problem with comparison and and focusing on things that are outside your control is you can immediately render your own accomplishment meaningless by by looking at someone who sold one more than you and that's like the shitty thing we do to ourselves I don't know why we do that you know like I've fallen to that just as much as everybody else you could get like whatever you're current level of output is or successes that becomes your new baseline and then you just look at whoever is slightly above that and then you you feel the way you did before and it's like you need to

remind yourself when you wanted what you currently have you know like there's so many things about my current lifestyle that I've spent the last decade working toward and like I thought that was the thing I really wanted you know and then you get to hear and you feel differently so I don't know I there's some kind of recalibration that goes on there. There's some kind of encouraging type of encouragement that we all need to like focus on those good bits that we have earned already rather than always looking toward the next milestone.

And I think this also connects back to what we were talking about in Mindago with process versus goals or systems versus outcomes, which is that this is one of the downsides of being goal oriented is that you're always looking at the next milestone versus being process oriented or system oriented, which is, you know, I can feel really good about myself right now because I got two good hours of writing in this morning.

And that was an accomplishment. And it felt like a good day already. You know, like the day has already been a victory. I don't need to like be thinking about all these other huge goals and then all of a sudden turn it into a failure. It's easy to be disciplined. It's easy to be on top. of it. It's easy to be consistent when you are living in what we're currently living in,

which is a literal bubble. Like, you can't go anywhere. No one can come over. You're not supposed to do anything. Every day is exactly the same. And the unpredictability has gone way, way, way, way down. And I think about that as someone who's into habits and into routines is these things can almost, they almost become like a level of OCDness where you almost become fragile and you're not able to deal with life. So to be able to have good habits. it's in good systems while you travel while life is crazy is actually really good practice and you don't want to be someone who can only like you can only eat well work out when you have a personal chef and a trainer and you're renting a house on the beach like of course everyone

can be good there can you you can stay sober in prison because you can't get access to stuff what happens when you're in the real world now you need some resiliency too yeah i actually have a passage from the Tao Te Ching and atomic habits that says something of like the way of life is to be supple and flexible, the way of death is to be brittle and hard. And so, like, the flexible prevail. And you need to have

some element of that in your, both your mindset and just your ability to adapt to different situations. But then when you're, I kind of, Daria Rose has a good concept that she calls home court habits and away court habits. When you're at home, you're on your own court, you can design it and optimize it for you.

Like, let's make that as optimal as possible. Reduced distractions, give you exactly what you need to perform at the highest level possible. When you're on the away court, when you're traveling around or whatever, you need to be flexible and, you know, able to make something happen even if it's suboptimal. Yeah, I talk about Russell Westbrook in stillness. Like he's this guy has insane habits, routines, rituals. And then he gets traded twice in two years. You know, how do you, you know, he had like a parking spot. He had a chapel.

He had like a trainer who made him the same thing every day. And that was great when he spent the vast majority. of his career on one team where he was the top guy and then life throws you a couple of curve balls that's where you backslide and not that he did but you know what I mean you have to be able to absorb the uncertainty and the changes or you're just very fragile a little detailed add to that I always thought this was a good example in the art of learning Josh wateskin talks about how he took his um so he competitive chess player also competitive martial martial martial artist and for his martial arts performances and competitions

before he would go out he had like a little ritual that he did and a lot of athletes had this kind of pregame routine or whatever and gradually over the course of a few years he started pairing it down and compressing it making it smaller and smaller until he got it down to where it was just like 30 seconds or so and it ended up serving him really well because he was at an international competition

and he either was given the wrong information or misread the schedule or whatever and he was taking a nap on one of the benches and they were like, hey, you're supposed to wrestle in like three minutes. And he woke up like groggy and kind of like goes through his 30 second routine and he was ready to compete. And I've tried to develop something kind of like that with writing where, you know, if I'm at home, I face a wall that doesn't have any windows. I put on my headphones and listen to the same playlist every time. I grab a glass of water.

Like I try to set up the environment in the optimal way. But the one thing that I have to do is I have to put my headphones on. I have to play the same playlist every time in the same order. And I can do that basically anywhere. I do it when I'm on a plane. I do it in a hotel room. And by compressing it down to something that's really short like that, I make it easier for myself to like get into this state of flow and perform at a high level,

even if things aren't optimal. And so it's nice to be able to not rely, you know, I think about like the what Russell Westberg example. I don't know what his routine is. But I'm like, man, if you have to go to the same chapel and parking the same parking lot and do all, you've got to do all that stuff. it's actually kind of brittle. And so you need to be able to have, like, something that you can carry with you

and utilize that to get into your flow state or get ready to go. And that leads me to my next question, which is, I know you became a father. And that sort of blows up your whole life, right? It just blows up your life in ways you can't possibly imagine. And so I'm curious, how have you kept those systems or routines or what have you learned about habits and routines that maybe you weren't thinking about when you're writing this book as, as what's, there's that. there's that expression. There's like an acronym that's like a dual income, no kids,

a dinks, I think is what it is, where you're just like, you're just living the fucking life, you know? And it's easy to be an artist or creative person or have good systems when you're only responsible for yourself. Yeah, I just didn't try. I took, I took three months off and that was a huge, huge benefit, you know, just to be able to spend that time. There have been a lot of lessons, but I would say probably the two that come to mind immediately. The first is for me, I've had to change the way that I write books. When I wrote Atomic Habits, I did it, you know, I didn't have kids. It was kind of like this all-consuming project. I did it at all hours. It was like the thing that I thought about all day. I went to bed. I

dreamt about it. I woke up. I worked on it more. Like there was, it was just this kind of all-consuming project. And it's not possible for me to operate that way right now as a parent. And so I've changed to I just make sure that I have two sacred hours every morning where I do my writing. And so first, it's the first thing I do in the morning. Like I wake up, take a shower, get a glass of water, and then I do that. So I try to fit it in before everybody else's agenda, like creeps into my agenda. Secondly, I do that whole ritual that I just mentioned a minute ago about like, you know, putting on my headphones, listening to music, et cetera.

And the idea is by not facing windows, I reduce like just visual distraction. by putting on headphones, I reduce auditory distractions, and I want to just live in the document, basically, for those two hours. And finally, I picked a length of time, two hours, which is long enough for me to actually get into the work and actually get something done because you kind of have this startup cost with any creative work, but short enough that I finish the session

and I feel energized, good, and I can go to sleep and wake up again, and I know that I can do it tomorrow. So in other words, I'm not trying to do like six hours, hours of writing because then, like, I don't know if I could actually do that again the next day. It's also a reasonable amount of time to ask for, right? So I would point that out because lots of people who are thinking about doing their first book or thinking about some project for like, I can't dedicate myself totally to do something. But it's like, it's not impossible

to carve out two hours. That's waking up an hour earlier and, you know, staying up an hour later, let's say, or that's hiring a help for two hours or that's just asking your spouse or your partner to take over for two hours it's not you know what you think goes into being an NFL player so it's not as insane as you think it is yeah and you know that's just what works for me like people can find whatever is sustainable for them but that was the the frame I had was like what can I actually sustain and you know atomic habits was easily the longest project I had ever worked on um and when you get on the other side of a really big project like that you realize that you can do these big things, but you do have to show up every day.

And so I knew that that was something that I could sustain and would actually show up and that I just need to be patient and like, but I know that the project will finish itself at some point. And I will say that is probably, there are many things, you know, people like to criticize books as not being a great business model or whatever. I actually love books and think they're an amazing business model. But all of the great things that books can provide, there is one massive trade-off, which is that all of the work is up front. You have to do the reading, the research, the writing, prepare the marketing plan, record a bunch of interviews. You have to do all of that before you've even sold a single copy. Before you have sold even a single

copy. Everything is all that work is stacked up front, it's all delay gratification. But if you can do all of that, then the outcome can be really, really great. But many people, most people possibly don't have the patience for that. And the other really challenging part of it is that like today, I showed up and I worked for two hours and I have this huge manuscript and it was a mess when I started and it's still a mess right now. And then you need to wake up again tomorrow and do the same thing again. And this process of showing up every day for two or three or four years and working on something that feels like a mess 96% of the time, that can be a draining thing if you're not in the right mindset.

And so I think you really have to scale down and focus on the process and just getting a couple of good hours in each day. So last question, because I think it pertains to that, and here we are sort of at the end of the year. How do you think about New Year's resolutions? If you had to give someone a better way of thinking about it than just starting on January 1st,

I'm not drinking anymore, starting on January 1st, I'm taking a walk every day. What's a better way to frame this idea of resolutions? Because I do think seasons are important. And the idea of a new year and starting over, there is something psychologically important there, but there's a reason most resolutions don't stick. Well, there's actually some research around it that shows that, you know, they call the research calls it the fresh start effect.

But what they found is the beginning of a week, so Monday, the beginning of the month, first day of the month, or the beginning of the year, January 1st, they give you this feeling, the psychological feeling of a fresh start. And that can be a good time to start. something new. So, you know, obviously one lesson there is you don't have to wait until January 1st. You could start the first of the next month or the first of, you know, Monday of next week or whatever. But I don't think there's anything wrong with using the natural energy of the season to get you going. So if, you know, if that's motivating to you, great. Like motivation rises and

falls. So if you happen to have it, capitalize on it and go ahead and use it. But I think the tricky part is there's this standard for New Year's resolutions, this way we think about it where we're like, oh, I'm going to, you know, pick this thing and, you know, whatever. But I would encourage you rather than start by saying, what are the results I want this year? I mean, the most common New Year's resolution is do some form of exercise. So everybody sits there on December 27th, and they think, I'd like to lose 40 pounds. So my resolution's going to be, I'm going to exercise. And, you know, I'm going to do, I'm going to go to the gym four days a week or whatever.

And instead, I would encourage you to say, rather than starting by asking yourself, what do I wish to achieve? let's start by asking who do I wish to become. So who is the type of person that would not, you know, that would go to the gym four days a week? Well, maybe it's the type of person that doesn't miss workouts. And this gives you, you can see how this gives you a different lens going into the year. Rather than saying, I'm going to try to lose this amount of weight by this date and to work out four days a week. Instead, you say, I'm going to try to be the type of person who doesn't miss workouts.

And I'm going to try to foster that identity. And it doesn't matter if it's two minutes or if it's 20 minutes or if it's an hour. But I'm going to try to find a way to show up today and build, you know, my little phrase is every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So how can you cast a vote, even if it's a small one, for being that type of person? And I think if you have that lens for your New Year's resolutions, it gives you a different way of thinking about it for, you know, for the next year. It just has to be more often than not.

Yeah, exactly. Amazing, man. Well, this is awesome. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

Thank you.