THE ED MYLETT SHOW - Small Habits, Big Results w/ James Clear

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Whether you realize it or not, most of the THOUGHTS and ACTIONS you take daily are based on HABITS you’ve developed over time. Your brain is wired to CONSERVE ENERGY whenever possible, and one of the ways it does this is by falling back to what it already knows. AND WHAT YOUR BRAIN KNOWS ARE HABITS. For the past 10 years, JAMES CLEAR has sought the answer to a single question we’ve all asked at one time or another…HOW CAN WE LIVE BETTER?  As you’ll discover, much of the answer lies in our HABITS.   In fact, through his ongoing research, James has become a groundbreaking EXPERT this subject. His book, ATOMIC HABITS, has sold more than 5 MILLION COPIES worldwide and been translated into more than 50 LANGUAGES. Developing the right habits is an ESSENTIAL BUILDING BLOCK of my success and something I still work on daily, so I was pumped up for this week’s episode. You will be, too. Like any other way to improve your life, there’s a right way to develop good habits, and James lays out a detailed 4-STEP STRATEGY for doing so.   From my experience, I’ve learned you don’t need to make massive changes in your habits.  Often you just need to change ONE MORE HABIT to propel you to new and much higher levels of success.  When you stack up small improvements by executing the right habits, you create a COMPOUNDING EFFECT that produces tremendous results. We also get into how your habits are affected by your physical and social environments, James’ 4 Laws of Behavior Change, and why “NO” is the ultimate productivity hack.  Let’s face it, saying NO is a problem we often struggle with (including me!), so this is a part of our exchange you’ll really want to FOCUS on. If you have problems breaking bad habits, lack the motivation to change your habits, or struggle with life in general, it’s time to hear what James has to say so you can change your habits and start CHANGING YOUR LIFE.  

This is the end my let's show. Welcome back to the show everybody. Excited to talk to this gentleman today because his works fascinated me for a long time. The reason his work is fascinated me for so long. I went through this string for a while where so many would I call high performing successful friends of mine would say, if you read Atomic Habits, you're at Atomic Habits, I'm talking about athletes, business people, entertainers,

and I'm like, the heck is Atomic Habits? And I finally find out there's this guy, James Clear, turns out he's written this book, like five million people have bought it. And I'm like, well, why have five million people read this book on habits? Because you're supposed to have them. And then I read it.

I'm like, oh, it's not one of these like, have a habit book. It's like how your brain works, how to create habits, how to eliminate bad ones, and physically, why in your brain you can do these things and why it's so necessary. So I've wanted James on for a long time. We finally put it together.

I'm so grateful to share him with all of you today. So James, clear welcome to the show, brother. Hey, thanks for having me on, great to talk to you. Yeah, and I don't want to just talk habits today. I'm going to talk about some of your productivity hacks as well. Sure. Your work, Rose, is I think I'd call it groundbreaking, because I don't think anybody's really approached habits

the way that you have. But let's back up a little bit just for a second, because I think it's important for people to understand this concept you teach that everyone's always talking about taking massive action. You're going to take massive action towards what you want. And you're like, yeah, you should do that, but your concept of getting 1% better is much more believable for most people. And so just address that for a second. Why, why 1% better every day? And how does a habit do that? Sure. So first of all, I think there's no reason that you can't be really

ambitious. Right. Like I consider myself to be a very ambitious person. I think it's just that you're oscillating or switching between these two modes, you know, like when you're in planning mode, when you're in strategy mode, sure, you can be very ambitious and be very aggressive and, you know, stretching yourself and reaching. But when it comes time to take action and execute, you have to scale it down to something you can achieve that day. You know, like in one sense, the biggest unit of time you could ever do something is about a single day because they got to go to sleep, you know, and then you have to wake up again and

do it the next day. So, when I started playing, you know, at some point there's a limit. You can only stay up for 48 hours, just 72 hours, like, you know, and then you break. So that's the largest possible unit that you could ever do a single thing in. And I think more realistically, most of the time the truth is, you know, you got about an hour, maybe you got two hours to work on this and then you got to go move on to something else. So we don't have big chunks of time available to us.

We need to scale things down into pieces that we can actually work on and execute. So the way that I think about it is, when making plans think big, when making progress, think small. And getting 1% better each day is a way to encourage that. The story that I like to tell, and this is something that I kind of kick atomic habits off with, it's the story of the British cycling team.

And for many years, British cycling was very mediocre. They had never won a Tour de France, which is the premier race in cycling. They had won a single gold medal over like a hundred years span. And they brought this new performance coach in. They did Braille's Ferd. And he had this concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains, the aggregation of marginal gains. And the way that he described it was the 1% improvement in nearly everything that we do related to cycling. So they started looking at a bunch of things you would expect a cycling team to focus on. Like they put slightly lighter tires on the bike or they designed like an ergonomic seat

for the riders. They had the riders wear a little feedback sensor, little chip to see how each individual responded to training. Then they would adjust the practice schedule. But then they started doing like these little 1% changes, the small improvements that nobody else was really thinking about. Like they hired a surgeon to come in and teach the riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of catching a cold or getting the flu. They have this big trailer, like a semi-trailer

that carries a lot of bikes in it to major events and they painted the inside of that truck trailer white so that it could spot little bits of dirt and dust that might get in the gears and degrade the performance of the bikes. They had two different types of fabrics. They've got indoor racing suits and outdoor racing suits. And they tested those fabrics in a wind tunnel. And they found out that the indoor fabric was lighter

and more aerodynamic. So they asked all of their riders to wear that fabric. They even had all their different riders tests, you know, like a bunch of like maybe a dozen different types of pillows. And then they see which one led to the best night sleep for each person. And then once they figured that out, they brought that on the road with them to hotels for the Tour de France and so on. And, you know, Braille's for it said something like, we can actually do this, right? We actually make all these 1% improvements related to cycling,

then I think we can win a Tour de France within five years. You know, not being wrong, they won the Tour de France in three years, and then they repeated again the fourth year with a different rider, and then after one year break, they won three more in a row. So after having never won for like 110 years,

you know, they win five of the next six. And I like to use that story as an introduction to this idea of getting a little bit better, making these 1% improvements. For a couple of reasons, the first is it shows you that excellence a lot of the time, maybe we can even say most of the time, is not actually about radical change. It's about a commitment to accruing small improvements day and day out. Secondly, and I think this is also crucial, it encourages you to focus on trajectory rather than position.

There's a lot of discussion about position in life. How much money is in the bank account? What is the number on the scale? What is the current stock price? What are the quarterly earnings? Is all this measurement around our current position? But what getting 1% better each day encourages is to focus on your trajectory instead. Am I getting better? Is the error pointed up

into the right or if we flatlined? Am I getting 1% better? 1% worse. Because if you're on a good trajectory, all you need is time. If you have good habits, time becomes your ally. You just need to let time work for you. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And every day that clicks by, you kind of dig the whole little bit deeper. And so it's very much at the core. It's about encouraging you to focus on trajectory rather than position. How did you get to the 37.78 times better? Like where'd that ratio number come from?

Yeah, yeah. It's just math, right? So if you get 1% better each day for a year, so 1.01 to 365 power, then it gets 37 times better by the end of the year. If you get 1% worse, 0.99 to 365 power, then you drive yourself almost all the way down to zero. You know, look, real life is not exactly like a mathematical

equation, right? Your habits are not exactly like this formula. But I do think that it highlights an important concept, which is the difference between making a choice that's 1% better or 1% worse on any given day is relatively insignificant. It's very easy to dismiss. And this is, I think, one of the things that makes it underappreciated or underestimated. You know, like, what is the difference between eating a burger in fries for lunch today or eating a salad or, you know, going to the gym for 30 minutes or not? Well, on any given day, not a whole lot, you know, your body looks the same in the mirror at the

end of the night. Scale hasn't really changed. It's only two or five or 10 years later that you turn around. You're like, Oh, you know, those daily choices really do add up. And I think you see this pattern again and again throughout life, like take knowledge, for example. The person who always reads for an extra 10 minutes each day. Well, look, reading for 10 minutes a day does not make you a genius, right? It's very easy to dismiss, but the person who always does that over five or 10 or 20 years, yeah, really meaningful difference in wisdom and insight. Productivity is the same way, you know, like the person who gets one extra task done each day, doing one extra thing does not make you an all-star. But again, over 10 or

20 or 30 year career, that can be a really meaningful difference in output. So, this pattern shows up again and again, what starts out small and relatively easy to dismiss, compounds or turns into something much more significant over time. The biggest word, bro. I don't think most people take into account, even our both college baseball players, good ones, but neither one of us were, you know, surefire first round draft pick major league players. And I think most people don't take into account in their like the compound effect. I don't think they understand it money. I don't think they understand it in their bodies. Most positive and negative, and I don't think they understand it in their bodies, most positive and negative, and I don't think they understand

their identity or in just an inhabit. The compound effect in life of allowing small things to stack up over time has a multiplier effect. And one of the things that I feel like in your work, and by the way, your work is, I'm all work, a few minutes in here and I'm like, this is so good. And the reason is, is, one, I believe, most people believe they can get 1% better every day.

I don't think most people believe that they can completely transform everything in one big leap. I think there's a multiplier, though, do you agree that between doing the right things, 1% or just better habitually every single day, not only you actually making deposits of doing things correctly or better, but there's a part of your identity

that starts to change over time about how you view yourself, that I am that guy who doesn't eat the hamburger in fries when he can choose to eat the other one. And you stack those choices and behaviors up over time and you start sort of believing maybe you deserve something that you didn't deserve prior. Doesn't there a factor of that? Don't you think as well? This is a huge part of kind of my philosophy in book, this idea of what I call identity-based

habits, but essentially the concept is, and, and I think this is the real reason that habits matter. The surface-level reason that habits matter is they help you be more productive, they help you make more money, they help you lose weight and get fit. Look, habits can do all those things, and that's great. But I think the deeper reason that they matter is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. And so when you perform these small habits, when you take these little actions, you're casting votes for a certain aspect of your story or a certain element of your identity. In a sense, every time you perform a habit, that's how you embody that aspect of your identity. So when you make your bed in the morning, you embody the identity of someone who's

clean, organized. Or if you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer. And this is why it can be valuable, even to do one push up. It's like, no, that does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And eventually, as you build up evidence of that story, as you start to cast more votes for that identity, you have like actual proof to believe this, right? This is, I think it's a little bit different than you'll often hear

something like fake it till you make it. And I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. It's asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence. We call that delusion, right? Like at some point your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you're actually doing. And so my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to start by meditating for one minute or doing one push up or writing one sentence and letting that be undeniable proof that in that moment you were a meditator or an athlete or writer or whatever it is. And ultimately, I think this is the real value that happens to provide, which is they reinforce your desired identity.

Boy, it's just so good, brother. So good. I don't know why I'm just meeting you now because our, our overall belief system about changes is so very, very similar. And you know, we're going to talk about how to actually begin to establish habits. But before we do that, I want to talk about the concept of establishing one because you said something about the one push up, reading or listening to something you're talking about about the guy who would go to

the gym for just five minutes and work out and leave. And you said something about this casting the vote for who you want to be or who you're going to be. That was powerful, right? But you're saying before a habit can be, and I don't want to quote you incorrectly, but I want you to elaborate on it. Because this is profound to me. I mean, it's obvious, but if you don't step back and get away from it and look at it,

you just really don't realize the truth of it. Before a habit can be improved, it has to actually be established. And I think what happens is you tell me what you think. Beginning of the year, I'm going to lose 50 pounds. I'm going to do this. I'm going to start myself to 500 calories. So it's not a 1% improvement. I want to get up earlier. I'm going to get two hours earlier starting tomorrow instead of get up 15 minutes earlier. Right. Get up a minute earlier. So talk about it from just the the concept for one to just they can take control of their life

right now by just the establishment of a habit, right? Or, or right? Yeah, definitely right. I, um, so one of the concepts I talk about in the book is this, uh, one of the strategies is this idea of what I call a two minute rule where I encourage people to, uh, build a habit that takes two minutes or less to do. So you take whatever you're trying to do, read 30 books a year, becomes a read one page, or do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes when I mention that idea, people resist a little bit because they're like, okay,

buddy, you know, I know the real goal is in just to take my yoga mat out. I know I'm actually trying to do the workouts. So this is some kind of mental trick than like, why would I fall for it, basically. Well, I tell the story of this guy Mitch, the dimension, this guy who I meant, I talk about him in atomic habits, he went to the gym, he's lost over 100 pounds, kept it off for more than a decade. And when he first started going to the gym, he wouldn't stay for five longer than five minutes. He had this little rule he had to leave after five minutes. So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise,

get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds silly. You're like, obviously he's not going to get the guy of the results that he wants. But if you take a step back, you realize that he was mastering the art of showing up, right? 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 this gets us to that deeper truth about habits that you just mentioned, this idea that a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize it and scale it up into something more. And, you know, I don't know why we do this. Like, we get very all or nothing about our habits. We're like, we're so focused on finding the

perfect business idea or the best workout program or the ideal diet plan that we spend all our time theorizing and researching and looking for a better way. And instead, if we could just master the art of showing up, even if in the beginning, it was less than what you had hoped to do, you're establishing a foothold. You're building some small progress that you can advance off of. And it reminds you of Ed Latimore has that great quote where he says, the heaviest way to the gym is the front door. And man, there are a lot of things in life that are like that, you know, like the hardest part is getting started. The hardest part is establishing

the routine, even if it's a lower level baseline than what you ultimately hope to achieve. But the reality is, if you can't become the type of person who masters the art of showing up, even if it's just for five minutes, then it doesn't matter how good the plan is. It doesn't matter how great your theory is. And so I think the two-minute rule pushes back on that perfectionist tendency a little bit and just encourages you to master the art of showing up. So good. I'm right. Just finish right in the, called One More. And I get asked that sometimes too. And one of the things that I wasn't thinking about it from this perspective when I wrote it,

but you can become the kind of person that, look, I'm going to do, it's my bench press. I'm going to do 10. You do one more, you do 11. I even say, you're riding the treadmill for 45 minutes, you can build that habit of, okay, I'm going one more minute, I do 46. What's the difference in that minute?

Well, you stack up that minute over a year, there's the difference, but also your identity being instant changes. And I'm not telling you, you go from 45 minutes to three hours on a treadmill. So the fact that I was doing this, I wasn't thinking of it from this perspective. But now that I'm thinking about it,

it actually our work is sort of converging, you know, almost in the exact same space. Now establishing habits. I think very few things in books are actually life-changing. Because this is life-changing thing. Tim Grover's a good friend of mine. He's like, my life, not every show you do is life-changing.

It is the main, man. Everyone in my window would put it out if it wasn't life-changing. And I go, well, which ones are? He goes, mine. What do you have me on? He's been on a couple times. But the truth is, I actually think this is life changing work you did when you talk about

habit loops. And so I've discussed in life. In fact, I learned it in baseball. I learned in baseball about triggers. You know, we put your batting gloves on triggering a state. I teach it with my athletes. I've talked about it on the show before. You know, I know sometimes even walking into a room or a song can trigger something

if there's a memory that happened in a space. But I never thought about it at all as it related to habits. And you call it, so I want you to use your terminology. But let's talk about how do we create habits? And what is a habit loop? Because I feel like to some extent, that's the foundation of, for me in the book,

what I went, oh my gosh, this is unbelievable. This is actually how you do this. No one's ever explained this before. So explain. So I like to divide habits into four different stages, four steps. And I think if you understand those four steps, then you not only get like what a habit is from a scientific standpoint, you understand like how the process works. You also have four different places where you can intervene. So it's like a practical application. You have four different ways that you can adjust to habit and make it more likely to build a good one or break a bad one.

So the four stages just from a real high level are Q craving response and reward. Q craving response and reward. Q, Craving, Response, and Reward. Q, Craving, Response, and Reward. So, the Q is, like you said, some kind of trigger that tells your brain to initiate the habit. It's like a prompt or something that gets you started. So, like, the ambulance driving down the road, when you hear the siren, that's an auditory Q that starts the habit of pulling to the side of the road.

Or, if you see a play to cookies on the counter in the kitchen, that's a visual Q, starts the habit of eating a cookie. Now, the next stage is the craving. And the scientific way to describe this is it's a prediction that your brain makes about what that cue means. So you see the play to cookies on the counter. Without even really having to think about it, your brain sort of makes this automatic prediction. Oh, those cookies will be sweet, sugary, tasty, and enjoyable. And it's that favorable meaning that you assign to the queue that motivates you to take the third step, which is

you walk over, you pick the cookie up and take a bite. And then finally, there's the fourth stage, the reward, oh, it is in fact sweet sugary tasty enjoyable. And so that's rewarding. Now, not every behavior in life is rewarding, right? Sometimes things have a cost or a consequence. Sometimes they're just kind of neutral, and don't really mean a whole lot. But if a behavior is not rewarding, it's unlikely to become a habit. Because your brain needs some kind of positive

emotional signal, some reason to repeat that experience in the future. You need some way to market and say, hey, that felt good, that was worth it. You should do this again when you're in a similar situation next time. So, Q Craving Response Reward, and that's kind of how we go around the loop and explain what that habit loop is, and pretty much all behaviors go through those stages in some way. And the more that you go around them, the tighter the feedback

loop becomes. It's like it reinforces the behavior, and eventually you're tying your shoes or grabbing a cookie or unplugging the toaster after each use, and you're just doing all this things kind of automatically, you know, I'd have been really thinking about it. Can you give me a practical application of that? If we just walked through any habit, doesn't matter, I want to establish.

Can you give me a practical application of that, a strategic application of how I would do it? Sure. So once we have those four stages, I like to try to operationalize it. How do we make this actionable? How do we apply it to happen? Like you're asking. And to do that, I've come up with what I call the four laws of behavior change. And so there's one law for each stage. And if you follow these, they give you kind of like a high level framework for building a good habit or breaking a bad one. So from a real quick again from a high level, the four laws are the first laws make it obvious. You want the cues of your good habits to be obvious available, visible, easy to see, easier to do is for to get your attention, the more likely you are to act on it. Second laws to make it attractive. So again, this one connects to the craving, right?

The more attractive or appealing or exciting or enticing. Habit is more likely to be able to perform it. The third law is to make it easy, the easier, more convenient, frictionless, simple, a habit is, the more likely you are to do it. We've already talked a little bit about that. The two-minute rule is an example of making it easy. And then the fourth law is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable, or rewarding, or pleasurable, have it as the more likely you are to repeat it. So those four laws make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. They give you a high-level framework for building a habit. If you're ever not sure what to do, if you say, how can I make this

more habitual, or how can I do a better job of doing this consistently? You can just go through those four and ask yourself, how can I make it obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And you'll start to find opportunities to do those things. And of course, the whole book is organized around sharing different strategies for doing that. Let me just give you a couple personal examples so you can see how this might be applied. When the pandemic started, I knew that I was gonna wanna start,

I was just, I wasn't gonna have to be driving or traveling as much, so I wanted to spend that time, so that time I was spending traveling previously that I wanted to use it productively and read more. So I opened up my phone, and I downloaded Audible for audiobooks, and I moved the app to the first screen on my phone.

I moved all the other apps to the second screen. So the only thing I saw when I opened my phone up was audible. Now, that's a very small thing does not radically transform your behavior, but it was a way of making reading more obvious. Right. So that's the first law making it obvious. Let me get it in front of me. I also sprinkled books kind of around the house around my desk. I've got I've three on my desk right now. I have a couple of, you know, by the bed. I've got a couple in the living room. And the point for me was I never wanted to be far from a good idea. You know, like I always wanted to be kind of surrounded by something that was interesting or useful to read. And odds are it's more likely that I pick it up and take a look at it. On the flip side, this also applies this first law of making obvious. It also

applies to many of the bad habits that we have. So for example, a lot of people feel like they watch too much television, but walk into any living room where do all the counters and chairs face. You know, it's like, what is this room designed to get you to do? And so I think the question that you can ask yourself for this first law on making your habits obvious is, what does this space encourage, Right? What behavior is encouraged in this area? And you want to design your life, design the spaces that you live and work in to encourage the good habits and discourage the bad ones to make the path of least resistance or the obvious choice, the good habits. So the healthy

food is on the counter, not the junk food, books are around you, not the TV remote, and so on and so forth. And no individual choice like that is going to radically transform things, but you can see how making a dozen or two dozen or 50 little tweaks like that, now all of a sudden you're living in a space that always is kind of like nudging you toward the more productive behavior. Bro, you're brilliant. This is so good. I often feel that changes, you know, changes as a mental, change oftentimes is much more environmental than it is mental.

And anybody that's ever had a baby around their house, you know, not to leave certain things on the floor. Yeah, you know, to get up to block the staircase, there's things you do in their environment to protect them. This just becomes a particular age where we think no longer an environment dictates any of our choices or our behaviors. The other thing your environment can do is it can dull your senses as to what is a healthy

environment or what our healthy choices. So it might not be obvious cookies on something, but it could be environment the people around you. Their behavior choices, the noise level, auditories which you talked about earlier. And sometimes they can just dull what we think is normal compared to an extraordinary environment. And so, if you walk into any really fit person's home, for the most part, their environment looks a little bit different than an unfit person's home. Your point earlier about making your bed, most successful people that I know make their bed every day, most of them do.

And most of the people that I know that aren't successful don't make their bed every single day. These seem like ridiculous things environmentally, but there's a messiness, there's a clutter to not making a bed that starts a day. There's a structure, and I guess it's a clean, tight, organized thing about just habitually doing that daily. So I think these things are huge. And I just think the way that you describe it, by the way, you can tell it's a book you need to get if you've not gotten it, five million people plots already have. But James also has a newsletter.

But I want to make sure I promote because it's just there's just only so much good ideas out there in the world and James is full of them. And so where they go get it, James, how do they get your newsletter? Yeah, it's called three two one and each week I share three short ideas for me, two quotes from other people and then one question to think about. And you can just go to JamesClear.com and click on newsletter. Get it, guys. I thought you brought up a really good point with the structuring the environment for like a baby or young child. You know, it's very obvious for us to do that because we're trying to set them up for success, right? Like you don't want to put the baby in an environment where yeah, they're surrounded by sharp objects or things that could fall on them or ledges they could trip over or whatever. And that seems so straightforward when you think about it with a child, but like, why would you not

want to do that with yourself as well? You know, set the environment up for success, stack the odds in your favor by putting yourself in an environment where the good outcome is the more likely one. I think people don't do a change because they look at someone like yourself that's a high performer or myself. They think we are, and I think they think we're just altered discipline. And discipline comes in a lot of different forms.

And so discipline is, for me, I would sell people, show me your habits and show me your calendar. I can pretty much show you what your life's gonna look like. Right? Your calendar looks like crap. You're not loaded with enough stuff that you should be doing that serves whatever your goals and outcomes are.

Obitually, you don't do the right things. You're gonna end up long-term with a particular result. But I think the notion I used to think of, this person is just so much more disciplined than me. The truth is I'm not. I love Cheetos. I love television. I love Netflix. I love not thinking. I like not working. So because I lack natural discipline, as an athlete, I was disciplined, but there were more discipline guys. I like to work out, but if you said, and you could be jack, sexy, ripped, lift, you 150 years old and not lift all this heavy stuff and eat clean. I'd probably eat

the pizza and the cheetos, right? So it's my lack of discipline that's caused me to create habits and an environment around me that supports them that allows me to get some of these things done. It's the lack of discipline actually, in my case, that causes me to know I need these structures around me. So we're not different than you. There's a chapter in the book called The Secret Self Control and I talk about some of the studies and research around willpower and so on.

And one of the key findings is that people who exhibit high willpower who appear on the surface to have a great deal of willpower, the primary thing that is different between them and people who appear to have low levels of willpower is that they are in environments where they are tempted less. So their environment is primed for them to be high willpower. And I think that alone should inform a lot of your strategy. Again, how do we stack the deck in your favor? How do you design an environment where you don't need to be a superhero just to get something

done? Like if you're constantly putting yourself in a tough position where you're fighting against the friction of the environment you're in, it's almost like a form of gravity. You know, it sort of pulls you toward it. The other thing that I wanted to mention that you kind of brought up talking about like putting yourself in an exceptional environment. And actually, so we've talked about the first law making obvious. This actually connects directly to the second law making it attractive. So far, we've mostly talked about physical environment, but the social environment is also

crucial. And I think this is, if I could pick one topic that I think is even more important than I realized when I wrote the book, I would probably say it's this. We are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, what it means to be American or what it means to be French. And some of those tribes are smaller, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local CrossFit gym or a volunteer at the elementary school or whatever, but all of those tribes, all those groups that you belong to, they have a set of shared expectations, a set of social norms for how you act in that group and the type of habits that you perform. And like if we take the neighbor on your street example and say you walk outside on like

Tuesday night and you see that your neighbor is mowing their grass or cutting their lawn and you're like, Oh, I need to mow the grass too. Well, you might stick to that habit for 20 or 30 or 40 years, like how long you live in that house, you wish you had that level consistency with some of your other habits. And why do you do it? Partially, you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn. But mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And so it's actually the social expectation of that group, that tribe of neighbors on your street, that it's kind of underlying that habit and the consistency that you have. And so the expectations of the group often influence in a very strong way, which habits we find attractive and which ones we find unattractive and which

ones we stick to consistently and which ones we don't. And I think the practical takeaway here, the punchline is, you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if you're surrounded by people who are doing that thing on a normal basis, it's a part of that tribe's culture or expectation. It suddenly becomes much easier for you to stick to that too. You know, you hear stories about this from entrepreneurs all the time. I have one as well, which is when I started out as an entrepreneur, I had nobody around me that was doing that. I don't have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn't have like

this, you know, network of people who'd started businesses to tap into. And so for the first six months, I just sent tons of emails to different people who were doing what I already wanted to do. I probably sent about 300 emails or so. Most people didn't get back to me, but maybe 30 or so did. And I set up calls with them and chatted on Skype. And then about a month later, I met five or six of them in a conference. And so now I had a group of people that were already doing the thing I wanted to do that

I actually knew that I could go to with questions that I could look at. And they were doing these things. It wasn't weird for me to do it anymore. You know, it wasn't weird for me to try to do this business stuff because now I had people around me I had a tribe where the desired behavior was the normal behavior.

And that made a huge difference. So social environment also is a crucial factor and habit formation. So good, brother. I take two things from that one ad, and then I wanna ask you something, some just fascinating to ask you about, but I'm enjoying this very much, by the way, very much.

I can do this all day with you. When I was 25, I paid a bunch of money to go to a seminar that I didn't have, it was like a week long. And I came back, you know, and my dad said to me, so it was a big takeaway from this raw rough thing you went to, you know, it was like a week long deal. And I said, Dad, just the fact that you use these words, bro, just blows my mind, the actual word.

I said, Dad, I figured out that my life's gonna be a direct reflection of the expectations of my peer group. You just sort of stared back at me real quiet and you just, that's actually really good. And I said, I actually believe that, Dad, I think my life will end up being a direct reflection of what my peer group expects of me. And I need to find the right peer groups.

And pretty much the rest of my life, whatever I've wanted to go try to achieve or become or feel or experience. I've sought peer groups that expect that out of themselves in their own lives. Nothing is one of the most powerful things what you just said. Anyone has ever said on my show and I haven't said in a very long time. The second thing I was thinking when you're talking about these environments to support our habits and our choices, is that if I were a leader of any organization listening to this, if I were an entrepreneur, CEO,

the leader of a division somewhere, the leader of a family, a coach, I'd be thinking about that real heavy again, evaluating that. What's the environment that I'm raising my organization in? Am I supporting if I was leading a church? I was leading a any type of a business. I think you should look at all elements of that. Or is that environment in every single way supporting your outcomes and your goals, because the way you describe that James doesn't just apply to individual applies to an organism or an organization as well. So I just want to make sure that I second that for those you listening to this, there's two ways to hear this stuff. I'm hearing it for me, that I'm hearing it for the people that I try to lead and I start to support. You mentioned earlier the phone thing, and I wanted to ask you the sense I read the book. And by the way, I read the book a while ago.

Right. And then I prepped for the interview, getting to know more, and it reminded me of things. I actually think I read the book, and then I read it again, like six weeks later on a vacation, because I thought it was that good. And I don't reread books. I bet I've reread, for I've put my religious texts, four books in my life, thinking, grow rich, and your book, and probably two more, but I can't recall right now. That's how much I think there's value in the book, just for at least it, for me, in my stage. Your phone, or people's phones, it's become a great pattern interrupt.

It's become something that we can get into, even myself, where I wake up and I've lost an hour of my life. Is there anything you do or would recommend in your phone? What you said earlier about Audible was the only app on there that led you there. But that in and of itself, the smartphone thing gives us access to, here's what I, my theory on it is, I want to say it really quickly. Obviously, technology, the internet phones, access smartphones have allowed all of us to become far more productive. I don't even think that's arguable. But then you have to ask yourself, now you're being measured against the mean. So as cultures become more accessible information, can get things done

faster. There's still a mean. There's a median of which people are productive. And so some people use their phone in a way that puts them below the average or near the average, other people are able to navigate all those distractions and become hyper productive. So is there something you recommend with a phone or you do in your phone? What apps do you have? Do you not have anything like that you would share? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, smartphones are a huge part of our daily routine now. And you're right, they have strong pauses, but they also can have strong negatives. A couple of little patterns I have around my phone usage. So the first one is, whatever

possible, I try to leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. And that just gives me a block of time so that I can just respond to my own agenda, right, and do like a deep creative block or focus on my stuff before everybody else starts squeezing things onto my plate. And, you know, that doesn't work for every job, and it also doesn't work for me every day, but I do it most days. And the days when I do, I almost always have a better morning. One, some little interesting insight with that, by the way, just as an aside, I have a home office. So if I leave my phone in another room, it's like 45 seconds away, but I never go get it. And yet, if it's right next to me, I'm like, everybody else, I check it every three seconds. So I'm like, well, did I want it or not, you know, like in one sense, I wanted it bad enough to check

it every three seconds when it was next to me. And in another sense, I never wanted it so bad that I would go work 45 seconds to get it. And I think that there's a lesson in this about habit formation, which is sometimes you just need a little bit of friction to curtail the behavior to the desired degree. It's not that I never want to use my phone again. It's just that I don't want to use it all the time and let it interrupt like some of these deeper working sessions that I have. And so that 45 seconds is just enough friction to keep it in place. Something similar happens with like beer. If I get like a six pack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge where I can see

it like as soon as I open the door up, I'll have one every night at dinner just because it's there. But if I put it down in the lowest shelf and like tucking the back of the fridge or I can't really see it, I got to kind of bend down to spot it Sometimes it'll be there for weeks. I won't even remember that we bought it and so same thing like did I want it or not and so Finding ways to introduce a little bit of friction to your habits. I think to be very helpful. Wow. It's good On that same note, you know, I'll go through different periods of friction with social media. So I think there's a big discussion we could have here about social media.

I don't think that most people are using it to its full power. It can be incredibly powerful. Twitter in particular is like a great source of ideas for me at this point, but it's only because I've spent a lot of time curating who I follow. And so my feed is very productive. I'm like in the flow of good ideas all the time. People don't really think about it this way, but when you choose who to follow on Twitter or Instagram or wherever, you're choosing your future thoughts, right? Like you're choosing

the flow of information that you're going to put yourself in front of. And pretty much every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. And so it's really, if you want to have better thoughts, if you want to be a sharper thinker, it's really about making sure you're consuming better pieces of information. And so curating your feed in a careful way is a good way to do that. Now, even so, there are still periods when I spend too much time on social media. I'm working on a new book and I need to have a block of time where I'm just not being bothered by that. So I usually fall into one of two strategies. Either I will delete the app from my phone after each time I use it. So when I get done using Twitter, I'll just delete it. And that means the next time I need to download the app again

and that's going to take a minute. And often that's enough friction for me to be like, I'm just doing this. I'm just doing this because I got 10 seconds free in a board. And often that's enough friction for me to be like, I'm just doing this mind. I'm just doing this because I got 10 seconds freeing a board. It's not because I actually want to check it and so I won't, I won't download it again. Occasionally, I do want to download it and actually see what's going on, but a lot of the time it's just enough friction to avoid it. And then if I really get extreme and I did this with the time of habits when I was working on the book, the last nine months, I just like really had to be focused and need to make sure I wasn't getting distracted. So every Monday, my assistant would log me out

of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, reset all the passwords. I would work all week, and then on Friday, she would send me the passwords like I'm logging over the weekend. And then we'd pretty get on the way. And I did that for like nine months straight. So I don't know, it worked. I got the book done, but that's a very extreme version.

No, brother, it's an extreme example, though, of the fact that you're not relying on some sort of mystical discipline to get things done in your life. And I really believe most people think high achievers are just these super crazy discipline people. That is an extreme move. It's probably something I should have done when I was writing my book

and you would already be reading it by now. That means just in saying writing it's making me really think. I've done a much better job of managing that stuff, but I have to tell you, I think it's one of the great distractions of all time. I hadn't thought about it as in depth as you describe it in terms of future thoughts though. And again, I go back to children. We want to monitor what our children consume and what they look at. Somehow we think we can pick an age and we're immune to the things that we're watching that impact our thoughts

and our feelings and our emotions and our energy. And I got to tell you, I mean, you're 100% right. I watch people get transformed by what they're consuming on there and become so, so distracted. So I'm reading an article you wrote that resonated with me. And I don't know that this gets worse as maybe you achieve more. But you're like the ultimate productivity hack is saying no.

So this isn't part of the book, this is something a little bit different, right? And I have, I think most people have a hard time saying no. And I know I do. There's so many days now, I'm 50 years old. And I'm just being transparent with friends of mine that listen to this because this most, you know, I look at, this is like my family, our audience. A lot of days, man, where I look at my counter, I'm like, why didn't I agree to this? Why didn't I agree to this? Why couldn't I just say politely? No. I mean, I why did I agree to this? Why did I agree to this? Like, why could they just say politely no? I mean, I mean, it should have got to a point of my life by

now where like, I'm allowed to say, I don't want to do that. And yet, I've done that all my life. And it's been a hindrance to achievement. So talk about that a little bit. Like, you want to be more productive. This article, by the way, I guys Google it. It's so good. It actually teaches you how to say no as well in the article, but are you good at this? Or did you write it for your own benefit? Well, pretty much everything I write is a reminder to myself of what I should be doing. So no, it's not that I'm great at it. It's that I'm trying to learn to be better at it.

I felt this very acutely after Tom and Cabot's came out and over the course of the next, the first like three months that it was out, I was doing okay. And then the book really started to take off and I was constantly feeling like I'm a very slow learner and that I should have been upgrading the level of which I was saying no to things. And I was always like two or three months behind. I was always on the hook for more stuff than I should have been. And it was because I was saying yes to many things And there's this weird dynamic where a success starts to eat itself

so the the thing that was getting me all of these opportunities is because I was focused and I wrote a good book and Because of that people were very interested and talking to me or sharing these new ideas and like there's all There's all these interesting new opportunities to come your way. Do you want to speak at this thing or what about these TV rights or how about this interesting opportunity or would you like to come to this cool conference or retreat or whatever. And individually, each of them sounds really fun and interesting. But collectively, if you start to say yes to all those things, you don't have any more time to do the thing that got you those opportunities in the first place, which is thinking clearly and writing a good book. And so success like eats itself, all these new opportunities come in and they squeeze

out the thing that you were good at in the first place. So it's a, I don't know, the other thing that's difficult about it and I still, you know, I'm close enough to the beginning of my career that I can still appreciate this and feel this for the first decade of my career. I was trying to say yes to everything. I was trying to capitalize on every opportunity so that I would have the chance now to say no to basically everything because you got a bunch of stuff coming your way. So at first, it's like outbound and you're trying to like capitalize on every opportunity you can. And then there's this rapid switch, where now all of a sudden everything's inbound,

and you have to put up a tight filter. And that can be a difficult lesson to learn. It's almost a book, bro. The success can eat itself. I watched it happen over and over and over to people. But the very thing that got them successful, in your case, the discipline and focused are right in incredible book.

They somehow lose over time with saying yes to all of these other things that we're ancillary to it at one point. You know that quote, there's a quote from Brianino, the he's a musician, he says, the way to get rich is to have one good idea and to never have another one. And it's like, you just keep capitalizing on that thing

and you don't distract yourself. You know, you don't keep saying yes to all this other stuff that's on the fringe, but it's easy to say it's hard to do long term success man is not always easy because of things like success Can't eat itself a couple of things I want to ask you we're gonna run out of time But I just like I'm fascinated by your work brother. What do you do when you're slipping? You feel yourself slipping on some of your habits is there something that you do immediately or that you notice are you? Yeah, I guess even as they're a part of your awareness, is like, I'm more vigilant to see if I'm slipping

than I used to be. What are your thoughts on that? I do think my sense of it has improved over time. I do think I've become a little more vigilant. Maybe early on, like my early 20s, maybe I didn't realize it. When it was happening, I'd be a little late. It would take a week or two before I'd see it. Now, I think I actually usually can tell

within that day or the next day, like pretty quickly, if it's like, oh, you're starting to get off course, like you missed a workout or you missed, you know, like you missed a deadline with the writing this time or whatever. And what I found, it almost, it works so well for me that it's almost a crutch,

which is the number one thing that will always get me back on track is to have a good workout. That will, it will always, it will just save every bad day that I have. If I feel terrible, if I have in a bad mood, if I'm not productive, if I'm not getting things done, if I go to the gym and I get one good hour in, then the whole day is kind of like rescued. And it also resets my mind. And I'm like, after a hard workout

and a good night's sleep, your problems adjust to their appropriate size. You know, it's like, it doesn't mean that it's not a problem still. It just means that you see it clearly and you understand like the scope of it and where it fits. But I say that it's almost a crutch because sometimes I know that now

and so if I'm having a bad day, I'm like, well, I just need to work out. And then I'll go to do that. But that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. I still haven't fixed the root cause yet. So I can't rely on that too much. But that's definitely the thing that does it best for me. Andy, too. Is there something that two questions left by the way? Thank you for this. I'm joined of them. We'll do something together. You're outstanding. Is there something that your top achievers do that you work with, that you talk with, that you interact with, that the people that aren't achieving at their level do? I know that's a broad question, but does something come to your mind, Ryo? Yep, this

is what they do. Yeah, I know. I'll give you two things. So, first thing is they, we could put this different ways, but they reclaim their habits faster than most people or they get back on track quickly. So top performers make mistakes like everybody else, but I think most of us know this or have felt this from going through life, which is it's almost never the first mistake that ruins you. It's the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. It's like it's letting slipping up become a new habit. That is the real problem. And if you make one mistake, you miss a workout or you miss a deadline or you flop on a speech or a presentation. If you get back on track quickly, if the next time, the next iteration you don't miss and you're right back where you were before, then your progress is generally maintained. And you can just continue to advance from there. But if you miss a workout and then one more missed workout becomes two weeks and that becomes two months, well,

now all of a sudden you have backslided a fair amount and you got to regain all that ground. And so I would say, you know, another way to think about this is like, a lot of people are focused on what can I achieve on my best day? And that's kind of how they select their habits. Like what's the best thing I could do when I'm at my best? But instead, you could ask yourself, what can I stick to even on my worst day? And I think that that could be your baseline. If you try to raise that baseline a little bit so that your bad days are a little bit

better than they were before, then you never eat in to the compounding as much. You don't lose that progress as much. So I think that's pretty good. They respond from mistakes quickly. And then the second thing is more of a mantra or mindset, a way to think about things than a specific action, but this is a phrase that comes from Frank Sloopman, he's the CEO of Snowflake, the software company. And basically, it's something to the effect of narrow the focus up the quality, increase the speed. So narrow the focus, do less. Stop trying to do so much. It's very hard to be at all, but we could maybe even say it's impossible to be a top performer

in a dozen different things. Like you have to choose what matters most. So do less narrow the focus. Up the quality, once you have selected those few things that truly matter, do the mat and exceptional degree, right? Do them in a very high level way. And then finally, increase the speed.

Only once you have selected a few things to focus on and you do them at a high level, then you can worry about shipping more consistently or increasing the volume or scaling the project or whatever. And those are simple ideas, but I think that top performers take those simple ideas very seriously, and you'd be surprised how far they can take you if you do take them seriously. So freaking good, bro. So good. All right, last question. I run into you in a Starbucks somewhere. I'm a buddy new entrepreneur with some dreams. That could be 50 years old, that could be 25 years old. I said, James, just tell me where I should just give me one thing to start with. One thing that you

haven't said to Ed my let's so far in this interview that you know, I want to create some change. Can you give me some place to start? one thing to do, one thought to have one action to take, whatever it might be, what would you say to them? Well, so again, I'll say two things. The first is a piece of advice that was given to me when I was in that situation. So when I was starting out, one of the best things that somebody said to me early on was try things until something comes easily. And I think if you break that phrase down, there are two important pieces. The first is

trying things, which means you need to have a philosophy of experimentation. This is actually quite different than what a lot of people do when they start out. A lot of people feel like what they need to do is read more and research more and try to, I don't know, discover everything that's out there. And it's not that you shouldn't plan, it's not that preparation isn't useful, it is useful, but at some point planning becomes its own form of procrastination. And when that happens, it's not useful anymore. And so you have to have some willingness to experiment, to try things, to test stuff out, and see what works specifically for you. What matters most is not if it's like the best strategy that's ever been designed. What matters is will it work for you and for

your situation? And you can only figure that out by experimenting. So that's the first part. And then the second piece is until something comes easily. Now the key distinction here is that does not mean that it is easy, right? It doesn't mean that it's going simply or smoothly. It just means that the results are coming more easily than the other stuff that you had tried. You may still have to work very hard to get that outcome. But this, I also think, helps reveal like your strengths in the situation. So a lot of people think like your strengths are just something that like must come effortlessly

to you or something. But actually, in many cases, your strength is the thing that's challenging or the suffering or the pain that you can handle better than most people. So it's not that it's not challenging for you. It's just that you seem to be able to handle that form of pain a little bit better than most people. And I think if you look at a lot of top performers, they're like that. You know, it's not that athletes aren't working hard. It's not

that not sweating. It's not that it's not tough to be in the gym and like doing the next rep. It's just that they can kind of handle that pain, you know, like that, that form of suffering isn't that bad for that relative to the average person. And so you're looking for those two qualities, a philosophy of experimentation and the ability to get results in a way that allows you to handle that struggle a little bit better than others. No, what an incredible conversation today. I'm telling you, incredible conversation. I can't wait to listen to this back. It's so good. I think you're incredible. I really think you're incredible. I think you're outstanding. I want you guys to follow them.

You're mainly a Twitter guy, right? Mainly Twitter. Twitter and Instagram. Yep. Twitter and Instagram. So you guys make sure that you're following James. You're going to want to get whatever he's working on right now when it comes back out. I just want to say everything to my audience. First, I want to thank James Clear for being here today. That was an extraordinary conversation. And I appreciate you, bro. So thank you. And then to my audience, share this. I don't know if you all will wear this stuff, but there's all kinds of incentive and rewards now to share the show. Some of you are going to earn the right to come watch me do one live in the studio. You're going to come spend a day with me to, you know, be with one of me and one of my guests very soon.

It's all kinds of rewards out there to share the show. And I know you're compelled to do it. Anyway, it's the fastest growing show in the world. That's why we're in this new agreement and new deal that we're doing. And I'm grateful to our max out family for doing that. So God bless all of you. I hope you enjoyed today's program. Take care. This is The End My Let's Show. you