The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - James Clear: How to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits, a global bestseller that has shaped how millions of people think about habits, consistency, and long-term change. In this conversation, James explains how habits shape identity, why progress often stays invisible before it compounds, and how to design your environment so good behavior becomes the default. You will learn how to stay consistent when motivation fades, stop quitting too early, and build habits that work across different seasons of life. ----- Approximate Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (00:56) The Role of Identity in Habit Formation (03:38) Lack of Patience Changes the Outcome (07:20) Seeing Invisible Progress (09:58) Why Do We Change What's Working? (13:46) Creating Conditions for Success (17:44) Finding the Confidence to Start (23:55) Playing to Win vs. Playing Not to Lose (26:29) Internal Sayings to Live By (30:36) Reputation (34:32) Positioning in Business and Life (44:36) Investment Philosophy (47:18) Turning Reading Habits into Action (50:31) Taking Notes While Reading... (52:36) ...And Then What? (56:06) Maintaining Focus on What You Want (58:01) Lessons on Filtering Opportunities (01:06:06) Longevity of Content (01:07:21) Sequencing Through the Eras of Your Life (01:11:22) What is a Habit? (01:13:03) Is a Habit Working For You or Against You? (01:15:20) Evaluation Framework for Habits (01:18:32) Building or Replacing a Habit (01:22:19) Social Media Detox (01:25:34) The Most Important Upstream Habits to Create (01:29:58) Relationship Check-In (01:30:57) Thoughts on Popular Habits (01:37:31) Become Stronger Than Your Feelings (01:42:59) When Should You Deep Dive into an Idea (01:48:12) Complexity vs. Simplicity (01:54:40) Consistency vs. Intensity (02:01:11) Learning New Subjects as an Adult (02:06:40) Prioritization (02:11:53) What is Success For You? ----- Upgrade: Get a hand edited transcripts and ad free experiences along with my thoughts and reflections at the end of every conversation. Learn more @ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------ Follow Shane Parrish:X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/shaneparrish⁠ Insta: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the two minute rule? Take whatever habit you're trying to focus on and scale it down to something it takes two minutes or less to do. You know, I have this reader. He started going to the gym and he lost over 100 pounds, kept off for more than a decade now. But when he first started to go, he had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes, right?

It sounds like kind of ridiculous. Like, oh, clearly this is not going to get the guy the results he wants. What you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved. You need to standardize before you optimize. And then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate, what is the mechanism by which we can do that? Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit.

And I think one of the best things you can do early on, this is if I could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't in it, it would probably be this. What is the role that identity plays in terms of habit formation? Ultimately, I feel like identity may be the most important thing with habits. Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. So when you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. If you study biology for 20 minutes on Tuesday night, you embody the identity of someone who is studious.

The act of doing it is proof that you are that type of person. And eventually, you start to build up this body of evidence for being that way. You have every reason in the world to believe it. So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So when you show up at the gym today, you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. When you sit down and make one sales call, you are casting a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you are casting a vote. vote for being a writer. And no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does

cast a vote for that identity. It does provide evidence for being that type of person. And eventually, as you build up that body of evidence, you start to take pride in being that way. And I think that's where you get to this really resilient place in terms of building your habits. When you start to take pride and being that type of person, you will fight to maintain the habit. You know, it becomes the opposite situation. Now instead of trying to force yourself, to do it, you're trying to maintain it because it's a part of your identity that you believe in and that you want to keep. You know, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you never skip arm day at the gym. Now, if you take pride and how your hair looks, you have this long hair care

routine, you do it every day. We wouldn't know. It's like, um, and so, um, really the goal is not to read a book. The goal is to become a reader. You know, the goal is not to run a marathon. It's to become a runner. The goal is not to do some silent meditation retreats to become a meditator is to install and adopt this identity that this is the type of person that I am. And I think ultimately that's why small habits matter so much. You know, behavior and belief is like a two-way street. You know, what you believe will influence the actions that you take. But the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. And, you know, every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person.

And so my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way, to start with some small action and then prove to yourself and you're in that moment that you were that kind of person. And as you start to foster and build that identity, sticking with the habit becomes easier. I like the idea of the small, you had 1% better in your book to these small changes leading to big results. I think where people go astray is the lack of patience sort of changes the outcome. So I know I want to be healthier, but I know it's a lot of work and a lot of time. If I eat healthier, I go to the gym more. I just live a healthier lifestyle. And that's where we get in trouble, but we do it with everything.

It's not just. Lack of patience changes the outcome. That's a good phrase. It's definitely true. I think there are two ways people can go astray. So there's what you just mentioned, which is not being patient enough and sticking with it. We'll talk about that in a minute. The other one is small changes can really matter, but only if they're oriented.

in the right way. You know, we, we know, we all know people who spend time on minutia and trivial things. You know, you kind of waste time on small stuff that doesn't really matter. And I think one of the distinctions is, are your small actions accumulating or are they evaporating? You know, are you doing small things each day that are oriented toward a larger outcome? Or are you doing small things each day that are just kind of like one-offs and don't really add up? In a lot of ways, I feel like the two timeframes that matter most in life are 10 years and one hour. You know, so like 10 years is just shorthand for the big meaningful things that you want to do in life. Where do you want to be in a decade? You know, I sometimes I like to

encourage people to don't let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade. And one hour is how can I do something today right now that is oriented toward where I want to be in 10 years. And if you can kind of live in that simultaneously in those two modes of thought, if you can both be thinking long term but acting short term, then you use. start looking for little changes, little adjustments that do add up, that do accumulate, that are not trivial and, you know, um, meaningless. So, um, I think that's one way people go astray is there, their small actions are not oriented toward the larger outcome. They're not accumulating. The second way that they go astray is what you just mentioned, which is, um,

lack of patience changes the outcome. I, one of the examples I give an atomic habits is thinking about an ice cube, you know, so you walk into a room. It's cold. You can see your breath. And ice cube's sitting on the table. We start heating the room up one degree, another degree, another degree, ice cube still there. And eventually you get to this tipping point, this phase transition, the ice cube starts to melt. And so it's like one degree shift, no different than the shifts that had come before, but you hit this transition and things change. And habits are like that a lot of the time. You know, you'll hear people say things like, you know, I've been running for a month.

I can't see a change in my body. Or we've been meeting every Friday for six months and we still haven't shipped this feature yet. And it's like, yeah, that work is not being wasted. It's just being stored. You know, it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube up a little bit and they're not melting yet. It's like, well, you just haven't hit the phase transition. So that's where people give up.

Yes. Yes. The San Antonio Spurs have a quote hanging in their locker room where it says, you know, they've won five NBA championships. And it says when I think about giving up, I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock a hundred times without it splitting in two. and at the hundred and first blow, it cracks. And I know that it wasn't the hundred and first that did it, but all the hundred

that came before. And so many in things of life are like that. You know, it's not the last workout that got you fit. It's all the hundred that came before. It's not the last sentence that finishes the novel. It's all the hundred that came before. It's not the last conversation that closes the sale. It's all the hundred that came before.

It's this willingness to keep showing up and hammering on the rock and knowing that at some point you are going to hit that phase transition. You are going to hit that, you know, that new level. but you need enough persistence to keep doing it. Are there tips or tricks you have? Because like when I'm working out, I'm getting better, but I'm getting better internally. I just don't, I can't visual, it's not visible.

But it is in, like I can't see it, but it's happening. Yes. Are there tips or tricks you have that we can use either psychologically or practically speaking? This is one of the big lessons for habits, which is just because improvements aren't noticeable doesn't mean improvement isn't happening. You know, you're not going to see a change on the scale. every time you work out, you're not going to see a change in the number of subscribers every time

you publish an episode or whatever. Like it's, you know, it takes a while. But the tricky part is if something's not working, it also takes a while. You know, you just keep banging your head against the wall. So how do you know when you need to be patient and how do you know when you need to try something different? And sometimes you'll hear people say like try, try, try again. I actually think it should be rephrased to try, try, try different. differently. You need to keep trying, but you need to keep trying different lines of attack. This is, I think Naval has something where he says, you know, it's not 10,000 attempts. It's 10,000 iterations. You know, an iteration is a different way of doing it. So you need, you need some

adjustment to the approach. And I don't think you need to do it 10,000 times. Usually just doing it five different ways or 10 different ways is enough to see, oh, one of these is working better than the other. Yeah. So this is the second kind of insight, which is when something goes well usually it goes pretty well from the beginning it's not now that does not what that does not mean is that you'll always have the results you want right away or that you will immediately get the outcome that you're you're hoping for but what it does mean is that you should this was one of the best pieces of advice given to me early in my entrepreneurial career somebody told me you should try things until something comes easily now that doesn't mean that it will be easy

but it does mean that results will come easier than the other things that you have been trying. And so in a lot of ways, I think what you kind of, one of the big quests for life is to experiment enough to find what comes easy for you and then work really hard on what comes easy. Because if you work hard on the thing that you have some skill set for, some strength for, some natural aptitude for, then you're very hard to compete with. So it's just your classic explorer exploit tradeoff. you know early in the process you need to explore more and experiment more and then eventually you start to discover okay the 10 things I've tried these are the

two that work best now you need to double down on what's working and start exploiting some of the things that that are actually getting your results Peter Thiel gave a talk a while ago and one of the things he said that really stood out to me was we underestimate when something's working we underestimate how long it can go for and how powerful it can be so often we change habits that are working for us too where we tinker with things that are working man there's so many places in life where this is true like i so um two examples one in the gym i have a friend who was very strong really good lifter um squatted over 500 pounds and we were trained together and he was doing

the squat program and it went great he made a lot of progress over like this three months span and then i had to travel or something i didn't see him for a little while whatever i came back. Maybe I saw him like six months later. And I said, oh, hey, are you still doing that squat program? He's like, no. I was like, oh, did it like, did you stall out or something? He was like, no, I just got bored. And you're like, man, like all the time. You know, it happens everywhere. People just, the quest, the desire for novelty overpowers the, you know, the desire to get results. It's like we just can't keep sticking with it. So doubling down on what's working. In a lot of ways, I feel like the process is actually quite simple.

Try a number of things, right? So experiment with a number of things, run a number of small experiments. Once you find something that works, double down on it. And then keep doing it until it stops working, which is the step that a lot of people skip. Um, and then once it stops working, go back to the start and try a lot of small experiments again. And it's really, it's really not more, it doesn't need to be more complicated than that, but people shortcut each step. They either don't try enough experiments. They try one or two things.

And they say, well, this didn't work for me. You're like, well, it's not enough to try two. Like, maybe you need to try 20, you know. And then once they find something that's working, they, maybe they don't double down on it enough. That seems once you've tried a lot of things, you're kind of diversified, doubling down feels kind of risky, you know, to just go all in on something. But you need to be able to flip that switch and fully commit. And then once you're fully committed, people get bored. And so they don't stick with it until it stops working.

Keep doing it if it doesn't work. This is part of the reason why I have not published another book. yet. Atomic habits is working really well. And so I'm trying to take my own advice and don't stop until it stops working. Dude, that might be forever. Yeah. Eventually, eventually you realize that it's not just about results, right? It's also about how do you want to live your life? What do you want to spend your time on? But yeah, so I think those three steps probably should be taken more seriously than they are. How do we create an environment that makes behavior change inevitable? I think that's one of the best questions, how can I create the conditions for success? You know, how can I,

how can I design an environment where my desire change is easy? In a lot of ways, that's one of the driving questions of atomic habits is to say there's this, I came across this body of research when I was working on the book about willpower and self-control. And a lot of the surface level conversations about habits that people have are about discipline and willpower. You know, people will look at a professional athlete and they'll say, man, if I was just as disciplined as them. But I, you know, I talked to one guy who played for the Philadelphia Eagles. And, um, he said, you know, during my career, everything was designed for us. You know, we went, we would go to the stadium and we have professional trainers and nutritionists. The food is prepared for us. The,

you know, all the workouts are designed. Coaches are on us every day to do the right drills and the right order and to, you know, like everything is, there's this environment where the conditions for success have been fully created. And he's like, after I retired, that's, That was the hardest time for me to stick to it. Like people would look at me as a professional athlete and think, wow, how disciplined are you? But in fact, you know, what I was is I was benefiting from my environment. And all of us are like that. And so I think you can look around your own environment and say, how can I do a better job of creating the conditions for success?

Let's forget about me being a more disciplined person or being, you know, someone with superhuman willpower. And let's try to make it as easy as possible for me to do the things I want to do each day. So a couple questions I think are helpful. One is walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, your office, your living room, your kitchen, bedroom, and just look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? You know, what behaviors are obvious here? What behaviors are easy here?

And you'll start to notice that it's designed for certain things. You know, a lot of people feel like they watch too much TV, but walk into any living room, you know, like where do all the couches and chairs face? What is this room designed to get you to do? And I'm not saying you need to rearrange your entire house, but, you know, you can notice that if you put the healthy food out on the counter and it's visible, you're much more likely to eat it. Like I, one of the examples in the book is that I used to buy apples and I would put them in the crisper in the bottom of the fridge. And I would kind of like forget that they were there. They were just tucked away in the drawer.

And then I'd find them in like a week and like two of them have gone bad. And I'm like, I'm wasting food and I'm wasting money. So instead I just bought this little display bowl and I put them in the counter on the counter, just visible. and now you grab one whenever you walk in. They're like gone in two days. And so it's just a change in the environment. What is obvious? You know, are you creating conditions where the change that you want or the behavior that

you want is obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. And the more that you can do that, the more likely it is that you'll follow through. You want to, you want to be able to walk into the rooms that you're in each day. And the good habit is the path of least resistance. It's the easiest thing to do. And a lot of the time, you walk into rooms and it's, the distractions that are easier to do and you feel like you're swimming upstream and trying to fight your environment to make a change happen. So that was one question. What's the other one you

had around environment? I like, am I creating the conditions required for success? What is this room designed to encourage? And then how can I make this behavior more obvious? And there are, there are a number of ways that you can do that. Like some of it is just, you know, if you want to go for a run, take your running shoes and your clothes, set him out the night before. I have one guy who he sleeps in his running shorts. So he just gets up. All he has to do is put his shoes in a shirt on and then he's out the door. You know, he's just trying to make it as frictionless as possible.

I found that to give you like another example, if I buy a six pack of beer and I put it on the, you know, shelf where I can just see it as soon as I open up the door, I'll grab one each night and have one in dinner just because it's there. But if I tuck it down on the lowest shelf and like put it in the back, I got to like bend down to see it. Sometimes I'll forget that it's there. It'll be there for like two weeks. You know,

and it's just about what is obvious. What is in front of you? Just like the apples. Yes. Right. And yeah, it's just the inverse of that. And so I'm not saying that that's enough to change like an addicted behavior or

anything like that, but so many of your behaviors will curtail themselves, possibly to the desired degree, if it is less obvious, if it's not as accessible. Another little rule that I follow. is I'd take my phone and I try to leave it in another room until lunch each day. So that just gives me from like nine to noon-ish where I can work on my own agenda and not

respond to everybody else's agenda, no, not interrupted. And if I have my phone next to me, I'm like everybody else. I'll check it every three minutes just because it's there, right? But I have a home office. And so I put it in a different room. It's just down the hall. It's only like 30 seconds away. But I never go get it.

And so many behaviors are like that. it's like, well, did you want it or not? You know, like in the one sense, you wanted it so bad that you would check it every three minutes when it was next to you. But in another sense, you never wanted it bad enough that you would work for 30 seconds and walk down the hall to get it. And so a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior. What would you say to somebody who doesn't have the confidence to start?

Anytime you do something new, by definition, you are doing something you're unqualified for. It can't be, if you've already done it, if you already have some kind of qualification or skill set or experience, then you're qualified for it. It can't be new. It's just something you're repeating that you've done before. So you have to realize that there is some level of uncertainty that comes with anything that is new. So I think just accepting that is a good starting place. The second thing is that you don't need to figure it all out today. Like one of the frameworks that I like, I think I heard this originally from Sean Puri. He said A, B, Z. Okay. So A is an honest assessment of your current situation. Try to look at your current reality with

clear eyes. Z is where you ultimately want to end up. And B is your next step. And all you need to know is A, B, and Z. You don't need to know step C through Y. But so often people will convince themselves, well, I don't know what steps C through Y are. Or even if they realize they're not going to plan it all out. They're like, yeah, but I kind of want to know what C, D, and E are. You know, they want to be able to see a little bit further into the future. But you have to become comfortable with some level of uncertainty. There's that quote, I just shared in my newsletter recently. I think it's from Ian Wilson.

He was a GE executive where he said no amount of information is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future. It's just a fundamental reality of life. Knowledge is purely about the past and what has been learned and decisions are purely about the future and what cannot be predicted. And so you have to become okay with that reality. In a lot of ways, I actually think the most powerful form of mental toughness, the most powerful or resilient form of preparation is a mindset that can handle uncertainty.

You know, it's the, we all, we all try to resist this. You know, we try to control reality. We try to predict scenarios and outcomes. We try to figure out what's going to happen ahead of time. But really, all you need is not to predict the future. What you need is the confidence that you can handle uncertain. me that whatever happens, I will be able to figure it out. I think if I was going to encapsulate entrepreneurship in a nutshell, I would say it is the trust and the willingness that you can

figure it out. It's the, it's, there's always going to be some point on the curve with your business where you're like, well, we're not quite sure what the future is going to bring. You know, I have a podcast and who knows how AI is going to change that. But if you're, if you trust that you can figure it out, great, you can be an entrepreneur. You'll make, you know, you'll figure it out one the way. How do we develop that mindset practically? I think that it's practiced in small ways and then it accumulates over time. So I don't think sports is the only way to do this, but it's the way that I did it. So I'll use it as an example. There are many ways you could do it. One thing that's great about sports is that you have to fail publicly. You know, so you, I played baseball all the

way through college, played it for 17 years of my life. And, um, you know, the early years, you're in T-ball or little league or whatever and you're playing and then you make an air. That does not feel good, right? Like you let the whole team down. But you realize that life goes on. You failed publicly and you move forward. Um, later when I was in college, you know, we're not only playing games together. We're also training together in the gym. You show up in the gym. You look at the guy next to you. You realize he's a little bit stronger than you. That doesn't feel great. You see that. then you're like, well, let me try to set a new PR. I'll throw five more pounds on the bar.

You fail in front of everybody. You miss that lift. That doesn't feel good. But you move on 30 seconds later. You get back to it and you go do the next thing. And it happens again and again in small ways, but failing publicly trains your mind. It teaches you that what matters most is not that you always win, but that you always keep reaching, that you always keep striving.

In a lot of ways, the real important question to ask is not what can I succeed on or what can I achieve, but what is worth reaching for, you know, and that's really what you want is to keep reaching, to keep striving. And as you train that muscle and develop it in all those little small ways, eventually you get to a point where you can handle it in big ways. You know, I remember my senior year, my final season, I said, like, I don't want us to lose, but if we're going to lose, I want to be the one who's playing, you know, like put me out there. I can handle, I can take the loss. You know, I don't want to lose, but I can handle it. And I feel that way now, too, about stuff that I do, you know, in business.

I put everything that I had into the Atomic Habits launch, you know, like I, we started planning that launch 15 months ahead of time. And I, in a lot of places in life, good enough is good enough. But every now and then, you find an area where good enough is not good enough. And you want to do it the best you can do it. And I decided that for me, that was one of those things that I was going to try to do as good as I could possibly do it. And that comes with risk.

That comes with vulnerability. You know, you're going to spend your next year and a half promoting and pushing and talking about this thing that you poured three to five years of your life into. What if people hate it? What if the reviews aren't any good? You know, what if you secure big interviews and you go on morning shows and then the book flops and it doesn't sell? What if the publisher is mad at me because they paid me in advance or they were expecting it to do well. and then it doesn't perform. And like, you sit with all those questions.

And my thought, I think partially because I had trained that muscle over time was I can handle it. You know, like if we lose, I'll, I'll deal with it, you know, and you'll be fine. But you have, I think once you have that confidence, then you have the confidence to go for it fully. You know, the problem is if you don't have that confidence, you start talking yourself out of it. You water it down. You know, you don't promote it all the way. You don't do all the things you can. do because you're kind of scared of what the result could be. What if it doesn't go well?

So then I don't go all the way in. And then it's kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it for sure isn't going to work that well if you don't give it everything you have. As you're saying that, the thing that comes to mind is like the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose and the hesitation that comes with playing not to lose versus like just going for it. Yeah. There's in the World Cup final women's World Cup a couple years ago, the US beat Japan and Carly Lloyd scored like three goals in that game. And I think the third of her goal, she kicked from midfield. It was like just super long.

But she, the cool thing about that play is that she saw the opportunity to go for it. And she went for it right away. She never talked herself out of it. It was a shot that you would never take in most circumstances. It's not a good shot. It's on a high percentage shot. But she saw an opening and she went for it. There was no hesitation.

Similarly, totally different domain. One time my wife and I, my wife's, I'm not very musical at all, but my wife is. And we were listening to Zach Brown band play a song. And she was like, one thing I love about listening to him sing is that there's no hesitation in his voice. When he, when it comes time to sing the lyric, he's like fully in it. He's not like second guessing himself or doubting himself. It's just like singing with confidence. And so in all these different domains, sports, music, business, you can't have that hesitation.

You know, you don't want to be the one talking yourself out of it. I think for me, I try to not be my own bottleneck. You know, I don't want to have, I don't want to be the first person to tell myself no. I want the world to tell me no first. And then I'll and then I'll adjust based on the feedback that I get. But I don't want to talk myself out of it. One of my little sayings internally is like I try to work backwards from magic. So what would the magical outcome be?

And then let me try to figure out a couple different paths that could potentially get me there and I'll start to take steps forward and then I'll get feedback from the world. You know, I don't tell myself no. Maybe the world will tell me no and I need to adjust the course. But I start with the magical outcome and then go from there. And what you find, I mean, I see it with family. I see it with friends. Like so many people that I'm around, almost always you talk yourself out of it before the world actually prevents you from doing it. There is very rare that you truly run up against a hard stop in the world where they say, sorry, this is impossible. What you're trying to do is it can't happen. There's almost always

somebody else you could have talked to, another approach you could have taken, another attempt you could have gone for, and you're the one who talks yourself out of doing it, not the world. And so I try to not be that person. I try to, you know, give myself permission to go for it and then adjust along the way. I love these little sayings you have. You move like thunder, you know, work backwards from magic. What other internal sayings do you have that really resonate? with you in this moment? One of the biggest things I learned from my grandfather was, his little saying, was PMA, positive mental attitude.

So in any scenario, you try to have a positive outlook regardless of the current circumstances. And that sounds a little kind of woo-woo-y sometimes or, you know, always think positive or whatever. But I have tried to become better at practicing it and teaching my kids how to practice it. So one way that you can do it is when you run up against something that feels kind of difficult or feels like you don't feel confident about it, you try to rehearse it visually and you emphasize the good portions of what could happen. And this can, this can happen

either in retrospect or it can happen pre visualization before the thing happens. So I'll give you two examples. In retrospect, when I played baseball and I was like 10 or 12 or 14, after each season, we would go sit on the back deck in my parents' house and my dad and I would talk about the the year and we would talk about the good plays from the year. My best plays, my best games, the games that we won. We would try to highlight, I didn't know this at the time, but what he was doing was he was helping me highlight the wins from, you know, small and big from that last season. And I can remember some of the conversations that we had. Like one, I got into high school and I was never the best player on any team that I was on. But he was like, look, if you just keep

sticking with it, what you're going to find is that guys will drop off each year. You know, and so by just by, there's this power of longevity of staying in the game that will benefit you. And he was right. I became a better player every year that I played. So that's like a retrospective one. Are you emphasizing your wins? And then the looking forward, if you do like a pre-visualization version of it. So I have a couple kids.

One of them is three and starting preschool. And he went to preschool on the first day. He had a hard drop off. He didn't like it. don't, you know, don't leave me. I don't know what this place is. It feels, you know, scary or whatever. So he had a tough day getting dropped off the first time.

Second day comes. Same thing. Kind of cries a little bit. Has a tough day when he gets dropped off. So the third day, I get them up in the morning and I get, get them ready and get them breakfast and stuff. So I'm in the kitchen. And I said, all.

And I was like, eh. And I was like, hold on, hold on. You like your teachers, right? Ms. Jalen, Ms. Caitlin. Don't you like them? He's like, yeah. And I was like, okay, what did you guys do yesterday? You got to play with the crayons and the glue sticks.

like that was fun wasn't it he was like yeah um i said you have snack time and lunch like that those are good things he's like yeah and then i said after school you go play on the playground so you get to go down the slides and everything he was like yeah yeah and that was all i said you know but what i'm trying to do is to get him to emphasize the positive portions of what's about to come to imagine what it would be like for the day to be good and um he went i don't know maybe we just got lucky but he went and he had a great drop off that day you know and he's he's loved it every day since. He's been fine. And so you can see how that skill can be applied throughout life. You know, they're in fourth grade and they're getting ready to give their first

presentation and they feel nervous about talking in front of the class. Great, let's walk through this and emphasize what the good parts are going to be. Or, you know, they're getting, they're in eighth grade and they're going to go to their first school dance and they feel weird and awkward about it. Like, let's talk about what a good night would look like. And so so many of your problems in life come from your brain over emphasizing, minor details, the wrong minor details. And what I'm trying to do with both myself and my kids and the people around me is to encourage them to emphasize good minor details.

Yeah. You know, to what, what portion of the day are you latching on to and what story are you telling yourself? And so the more that you can do that, it's kind of like a muscle. The more that you do it, the better you get at it. And that's ultimately that goes back to that PMA, positive mental attitude that, you know, my grandpa taught me. Um, and so that's another one of my little.

I love that. I want to talk about reputation. I want to hear maybe I'll just say the word and like you can riff on it for a few minutes. Reputation like my reputation or how I think about it. How you think about reputation? I don't really think about it that much. Um, I'm not, I'm not that worried about it. Um, I guess the main way that I think about it is I want to be known as someone who is useful.

You know, like useful is a word that I come back to a lot. If you, if you, Josh Kaufman has a good framework. It's like three things. I think it's true, useful, and clear. You know, it's like you want to write things that are true and accurate. You want to write things that are useful and actionable. And you want to be clear and understandable and how you do it. I think that that does describe a lot of my approach and how I'm trying to focus on, you know,

putting work into the world. All right. So I guess I don't think about my reputation that much, but this is how I generally think about reputation, status, brand, whatever. Ultimately, your reputation. will be the work, the quality of the work that you do. So it is, I think Brent B. Shore said at one point, it's like the range of outcomes that you can expect from a brand. And so the more that you do things that are high quality and useful and valuable and actionable, the more that you will

become known for that. Now, there is a little bit of priming that can go on. So like at the top of three to one, my newsletter, it says the most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web. I'm trying to set that expectation there. Right. Like it's when somebody's signs up and subscribes and they read that now you see that and you're like okay i'm about to read something that has a lot of wisdom and is like dense and informative there's a lot of signal and very little noise that's the the tone i'm trying to set now the flip side of that is you have to deliver yeah and so if you if you set that expectation and you don't actually deliver well this not going to go very well and so i'm also putting the responsibility on me a little bit you know there's like

nothing to hide behind. I do this with my Instagram account. It's like a very weird Instagram account. You know, there's no photos of me. It's just text. But it's kind of like a peacock's tail, you know, in the sense that it's a very useful hindrance. Like it's very visual, and it shows which peacocks are strong enough to have this kind of superfluous tail to still survive and escape predators. Those are the ones that have great genes. Well, when you can't hide behind anything else on your Instagram account, and it's just words, the ideas have to be good enough. You know, it's a, it's a useful hindrance. It's a useful blockage to getting people's attention. And so I'm like, well, if it's just going to be words, they better be pretty good.

So I think about setting those, priming those expectations and setting those standards and then also trying to reach them. But ultimately, it's just about the quality of the work that you do. And so the more that you show up with value and useful ideas, the more you become nosy, for that. I think I also, this is kind of connected to reputation, but I don't think about shaping it for me that much. But the lens should be mostly focused on the reader, not on yourself. I think if you think a lot about reputation and you're trying to like cultivate this image,

that's the energy is focused in the wrong direction. If you're focused on the reader, then you start asking different questions. How can I create something that's incredibly useful for somebody? How can I make it more actionable? How can I make it easier to understand and simpler? How can I make it easy enough that I can teach it? All those questions are focused on the reader's view or from their position. And then there's also just questions like, what do people need right now?

You know, like what, what is somebody, what would, yeah, what are people asking for? I'm trying to pay attention to that. So for the most part, I think reputation takes care of itself if you try to take care of other people. And if your, if your lens is focused on them, then it ends up, you know, working just fine for you. I love that. Thanks. What about positioning? Positioning is critical. Positioning is something that I think a lot about.

I don't think I haven't figured out yet, but I have seen how powerful it can be. So let me give you a couple examples. I'll start with positioning for books and then I'll start talking about positioning for life. So any product, the way that it is positioned and packaged is probably 50% of its success. A couple examples from books. Atomic Habits has a chapter later in it where I talk about deliberate practice. It could have been a book about deliberate practice where I talk about habits. But instead, it's a book about habits where I talk about deliberate practice.

And I think the way those two books would sell, the difference is enormous. If you don't know what deliberate practice is, it takes 30 seconds to unpack it and describe it. How is it different than regular practice and so on? You don't get 30 seconds when somebody's thinking about buying a book. You're not there at the store to explain to them. So the packaging, the positioning of the book, which I would describe as pretty much anything that you see on the cover, has to sell itself in seven seconds, you know? And just by virtue of growing up in society and being part of the world, you know that having good habits is favorable and

having bad habits is unfavorable. And I don't need to sell anybody on that. All I need to sell you on is, hey, if you only read one book about habits, atomic habits should be the one. And that's a much different pitch. And so the positioning and packaging makes a big difference. Another example, one that, so author's equity is this book publisher that I helped co-found. We have a book coming out called The Overthinkers Guide to Making Decisions. And that is basically a book about choices. It's a book about choosing and making decisions. It could have been called something else. You know, it could have been called the decision guide or the power of choice or

something, you know, it could have been called that. But the overthinker's guide to making decisions is a great package. It's a great frame. I have told multiple people about it. And they, the reply to me has been, oh, I need that. And that's usually a sign that you got the packaging right is that, you know, people are interested in that way. So those are two examples of positioning for products.

And I think any, any, any process. product, the positioning and packaging is a critical part of the success. Before I go on to positioning about life, I just want to mention a few things that make for good positioning. So a lot of this is our principles from direct response copywriting. It's a good domain to study or a good place to look for examples. But one of the core principles of direct response copywriting is that you should try to solve or address a timeless and enduring desire that people have. And so many books and other products, but I think a lot about books.

So many books are kind of adjacent to a desire people have. They're not the actual desire. And then you're kind of in this uphill battle where you're trying to convince somebody to pay attention to something that they don't actually care about. But you want to address a timeless and enduring desire. So a lot of what makes for a really good book title. is part of what makes for good packaging. So good book titles usually have three or four qualities.

The first quality is it addresses a timeless or enduring desire. The second quality is it tells you what the book is actually about, which sounds kind of obvious, but a lot of the time people kind of like keyword stuff titles. You know, they say like, how to make millions be happy and live the dream. And you're like, that's not even what this book is about, but whatever. The second thing that, or the third thing that they do is that they are

an unmistakable or an ownable phrase, So what that usually means is that it's a little bit weird when you first hear it. A lot of the really iconic book titles, they are phrases that you do not hear elsewhere in life. So man search for meaning. Basically, you only hear that in the book title. Nobody uses that phrase in daily life. How to win friends and influence people. Even to even now, describing it as winning friends sounds kind of odd.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's odd enough that there's no mistaking what you're talking about. They can own the real estate in the reader's mind. Atomic habits. Before the book came out, you would not describe a habit as atomic. You might have said it was little or small or tiny or something like that, but you wouldn't say atomic. It's a weird way to describe a small habit.

But that's good because you can own that phrase. So unmistakable addresses a timeless or enduring desire tells you what the book is actually about. And the final piece is that usually there's an element of contrast, some element of surprise. So rich dad, poor dad, or the life-changing magic of tidying up. I thought tidying up was a small thing. Now you're telling me it's life-changing. Atomic habits. Tiny changes, remarkable results.

You know, you want some kind of contrast between sometimes it's small to big. Sometimes it's the easy thing, the easy thing you can do to accomplish the hard thing. But there needs to be some form of contrast. A good example that's not like a self-help book or a business book is astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I thought astrophysics was something that was going to take seven years in a PhD. Yeah. No, actually just read this book in an hour and a half.

And so the contrast is, um, is something that's compelling. So if you have those four elements that usually leads to good positioning and packaging. All right. So that's just on the product side. Separately, there's a whole other discussion about positioning, which is like life positioning. Yeah. How can you put yourself in good positions for things to happen? And there are so many ways that you could do this.

I'm sure that you can think of many too. Sometimes it's just about putting yourself in positions for good things to happen. So we talked earlier about sharing your work publicly. Every episode that you publish, every blog post that you put out, every social media post you put up is a little bit of surface area that somebody could discover and you could, you know, have some interesting interaction. For Atomic Habits on launch day, I had an interview on CBS this morning. And yeah, it was a big, um,

It was a big moment for me because it changed the launch of the book from, hey, some guy is releasing a book to this is a thing. You know, here's a piece of national media. It's people are paying attention, basically. It made it feel credible and real. And the way that it happened is I wrote an article, a blog post on my site, four years earlier called the physics of productivity. And it was just me trying to be clever, taking Newton's three laws and applying them to

productivity. And it sat there for four years. And it was fine. It was an average article. It didn't go viral or anything, but it did fine. And then a year before Atomic Habits came out, a reporter at the New York Times stumbled across my website and liked it and they linked to it in an article. Well, some producer at CBS read that article and was like, hey, can we have you come on

and talk about those productivity principles? So I went on and I did a segment for CBS about a year before the book came out. It was maybe like 10 months or something. And I did that segment for like three minutes, just a little interview. And as soon as it got done, I went to Gail King and I said, I have a book coming out in 10 months and I want to come back on the show and talk about it when it's ready. And she said, sure, we'll have you back on. You just need to be, make sure that we're your first interview. Like we want to have the first, you know, release.

And I said, deal. What's your email address? And so I got our email and I sent it to my publisher and we got it all linked up. So when I wrote that article four years earlier, I had no idea that that was going to work out like that, you know, but it was a little bit of surface area. area, I was putting myself in a position for good things to happen by trying to create something of value in an enduring format. You know, again, we talked about what has a long half life. That blog post had a half life of at least four years. And I put myself in a good position for things to break my way.

You don't know how it's going to happen, but you know if you try your best each time and you keep creating some surface area, you're going to catch a break at some point. So that's like a business example. There are tons of examples with margin of safety. especially with finances, you know, if you give yourself a large margin of safety, in other words, your expenses for your life are much less than what you're taking in. You can handle a lot of things coming your way. And so that is positioning yourself well for the unexpected elements of life. You know, we have a family situation with some medical stuff and there were,

you know, there was some customized medical equipment that somebody needed because of what they were dealing with. And it's $200,000. And it's like, it's a huge expense. But if you give yourself a huge margin of safety and you've been saving for years, you don't know what that's going to be, right? It could be that. It could be. So one of my little things that I'll say sometimes is like life is going to come for you.

You just don't know when, you don't know when it will be your turn. But it will come for you. There will be something. So that, that expense was not our turn. But a couple years later, my wife fell and broke her knee into four pieces. And I had to take six months off of work. I'm like super thankful to previous James, right? Like James from 10 years earlier that built this business where I could actually take six months off of work to take care of her and the kids because what was I going to do if I didn't have that margin of safety?

But I put myself in a position where I was able to make that happen. And so each year I look at my position, both in terms of like flexibility and in terms of finances. And I just, I don't really even care about our net worth that much. What I care about is, am I in a stronger position this year? You know, like, as long as each year it's getting a little bit stronger, the margin of safety gets a little bit larger. The ability to handle stress or uncertainty gets a little bit better than, you know, you're positioning yourself better each year. And so there are lots of ways to apply that positioning concept. Just a slight off track here.

How are you investing that money these days? Yeah, I don't know that I don't know that I want to talk about my personal investments, but I will talk about my personal philosophy. fee. I guess I'll say that. I eventually I realized that you can beat the market, but you will lose your life. And so what I mean is that it is possible to get outsized returns, but you have to spend all your time doing it. And I don't want to be a VC or an investment advisor or, you know, like somebody who's trying to be the next Buffett or Munger or whatever. It's not how I want to spend my time. You know, you only get one precious life and I want to spend it on other things. mostly I want to spend it creating, you know, trying to make things that didn't exist before

and spending time with family. And so I'm kind of optimizing for that. So if you can be okay with that, then you realize, well, maybe there's very different ways or simpler ways to invest your money. Like I'm a huge advocate of J.L. Collins and the Simple Path to Wealth, that book. His approach, I think is great, which is mostly just like dump it in Vanguard and let it ride. But it's incredibly simple and I get all my time back. And if I'm making 12% a year rather than 15% a year, who cares? You know, like I'd rather trade the 3% a year and get to spend my hours the way that I want. So a lot of my, a lot of my approach is based around that, around simplifying and trying to make sure that I protect my time more than trying to squeeze out additional percentage points beyond what the market makes.

You know, there I heard this other phrase once, which is. remember that the goal is not to beat the market. The goal is to end up wealthy. You know, like so many people are focused on beating the market that they lose all their time and end up, I don't know, in many cases, not even beating the market. But, yeah. So it just gives you a little bit of a different approach. And I think also, I, investing in Vanguard is incredibly diversified because you got a slice of every company. I have realized that I do not have the ability to predict what is going to go well.

Yeah. And I feel even more that way now than I did a year or two ago. Things are moving so fast, the rise of AI, whatever. Like I really, I cannot tell you what companies are going to be at the top of the Fortune 500 in three years or 10 years. Like I have no confidence. They may not even exist. Yeah. I have no confidence in it.

So, um, I, I, I would wrap. I would rather not try to pick the winners and instead just play the general trend. I wanted to ask you about your reading habit and how you take what you're reading and incorporate it into what you're doing or thinking about or make a top of mind. It's so easy to read something and sort of put it down and then forget about it. I wrote two articles a week for three years when I started out every Monday and Thursday. And about a year in, I hit 100,000 subscribers. and I had this conversation with myself.

I don't know why, but I got kind of in my head about that number. And I thought, well, now a lot of people are paying attention. So it needs to be really good. What I should have just said was things are going very well. Just keep doing what you're doing. Right. But I thought, well, if I really want to make it good,

then I should spend more time writing it. Right. And what happened is things got worse, not better. And eventually what I realized is that if I want to be a better writer, or what I needed was not to write more, but to read more. And it's kind of like filling a car up with gas. You know, reading is like filling the car up. Writing is like driving and going on a journey.

And you need both. You know, like the point is not just to sit at the gas station all day and keep filling the car up. Like the tank is already full. Yeah. You should go out and see something. But if you just keep driving, you end up stranded on the side of the road. And so for me, reading is the primary way that I generate inspiration and ideas.

almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. It's so rare. There's even a debate among neuroscientists, whether it's even possible to have a spontaneous thought, truly spontaneous thought. You know, you say something to me or ask me a question and that sparks a thought. Or somebody cuts you off in traffic and that makes you feel a certain way or whatever.

But it's just an endless string of you responding to the situations and inputs that come to you throughout the day. So we don't usually. give it this amount of weight. But when you choose who you follow on social media, when you choose what podcasts to listen to, when you choose what books to read, you are choosing your future thoughts. Yeah. And if you want better, more productive, more creative thoughts, you need better, more productive, more creative inputs.

And so choosing what to read or choosing what to listen to or who to subscribe to is actually a very weighty decision. It's a very important decision. I find that my reading habit now, there's some quote about Emerson, I think, where he says he reads like a hawk flying over a field scanning for prey. And I kind of feel like that's how I read a lot of the time. I'm almost reading for like ideas or for chapters, not for books. You know, I'm looking for the piece that is relevant to what I'm writing about at the time or what I'm trying to learn at the time. I'm not just sitting down and saying, well, let me read and unpack this argument for fun.

I maybe when I do if I am at a stage in my life at some point where I'm doing less writing, maybe I will read for that way more, you know, just for enjoyment or for knowledge for knowledge of sake. But right now I'm kind of reading more for knowledge for an outcome, which is for me to distill it and apply it in some actionable way and then share it with the world. So what does that look like? Like you're reading a book. Are you highlighting?

Are you taking that highlight and putting it into like a word document? Like if I read a book that's really good and relevant to what I'm working on at the time, it's very hard for me to make progress on it. I will, it might take me like, seriously, I might spend, I mean, at this point, I'm not working as much because we have all these kids. But, but I like, it might take me four hours to get through three pages. Like, because there's, I'm reading, I'm at a point in the book where it's just really hitting on what I've been like kind of stewing on and thinking about. And it's sparking idea. So I'll read a sentence or a paragraph and I'm like, I got to write about it. this for a second. And then I, you know, I may end up writing two pages. And then I go back and I read some

more and then I, you know, write some more. When it's not as intense as that, then it'll be more. What I do is I prefer to read physical books. I also, audio can also be helpful for me, especially if I'm in the car a lot or something. It's just, you know, obviously it's a better way to do that. But it can be helpful for me, especially if a book is kind of dense, I find audio is better because it doesn't, if the book is really dense, I will slow myself down too much as I'm reading it in print, but audio just keeps rolling

and I still get the idea, but I don't slow myself down through the writing. So I find some authors to be better for me in audio. But my preference is to read the physical book. As I roll through, I find passages that interest me and I put a parentheses, open parentheses at the beginning of the passage,

close it at the end, and then I put a star in the margin so that if I just leaf through the book, I find the stars and I can easily identify these passages. And then once I finish the book, I will go back through and take photos of each of those and highlight the photo on my iPhone and just copy and paste it into like an Evernote file

or Google Doc or wherever I'm storing that stuff at. So that's my typical approach. So that's how I end up with like usually, if I read a book that I highlight a lot on, maybe it'll have 50 or something passages. and all those get dumped in at the end. I just have to ask one follow up to that, which is, and then what? So it goes into Evernote.

Now, a lot of people do this. They capture these notes, but then they never revisit them. They never do anything with them. I don't like having, I tried this for a while. I've tried. I mean, also, I've been, ever note. I've been, well, I've been doing it for a long time. It's just, it's just 12 years old, you know.

Notion wasn't even around when I was getting started. But so I just have a lot of stuff in there now. But I tried for a little while doing it based on the book. So I would, I would finish a book and then I would put all the highlights into the book dock. And so I just have all the notes from that book in one place. But what happened was what you just described, which is then it would just sit there and I would never really look at it. Occasionally, I would work on an article and I would like search for terms and ever note and then find a passage from a book and maybe pull it in or something. But it was pretty rare that that would happen.

Instead, what I find more useful now is to have a project that I'm working on and a dock for the project. So like the next book I'm writing, for example, and then I'm reading books that are relevant to that project. And I take the passages and I drop them into the appropriate place in that dock. So usually the way that I start writing a book, I try to have the concept, the big picture concept nailed at the start. Like I knew Atomic Habits was going to be a Habits book from the beginning. It was going to be a book about building good habits and breaking bad ones. That can go at the top of the dock. Then I start at first, at the very, very beginning, I just collect notes and ideas.

And maybe it gets to be 20 or 30 pages and it's just a bunch of random stuff. But eventually, once you get enough material in there, I start grouping it by section. And eventually those sections become chapter, chapters. And that's usually for most of the process, that's usually what the dock looks like is it's just sort of a loosely structured chapter. This is a chapter about leverage. This is a chapter about tailwinds. This is, you know, whatever. And when I read and I have something that's relevant to a chapter,

it gets copied and paste into there. So it starts to, the chapters end up, the part of my process that's, that part is just a lot of fun. What I just described to you, that, that's just fun to me. I get to read. I'm excited about it. I dump it all in. It gets organized.

That part can be great. I have two manuscripts right now. One is 500 pages, one is 600 pages. That is just that. is just a bunch of stuff that I've read that is organized around the book concept. The very unfun part is taking it from 600 pages of roughly organized notes and turning it into chapters that can be readable. And it gets compressed along the way from 600 pages down to 200.

And so that takes a lot more work. But that work is what makes it so easy for the reader to read. Yeah. Yeah. That's what makes it good. And that's also what's hard. I mean, sometimes people will complain and say, oh, you know, writing is hard. And like, yeah, writing is hard, but also that's kind of the point.

You know, like it's also like lifting. It'd be like complaining about lifting weights and the weights being heavy. You're like, yes, the weights are heavy and that's what's getting you stronger. You know, like writing is hard because it's making you a better thinker. It is forcing you. The act of writing is forcing you to clarify your thoughts. The act of lifting the weight is forcing your muscles to get stronger. And so it only works because it is hard.

If it was easy, it would not require much thought, which means it also doesn't require much reorganization in your mind and you're not learning very much or clarifying very much. After the success of Atonic Habits, the inbound must be crazy. How do you maintain the focus on the things that you want with all these opportunities available to you? I'm kind of a slow learner, honestly. It took me a while to figure it out, and I don't know that I have it fully figured out now. It seems like the bar keeps changing or moving, you know? Partially, I think it's a good thing.

If you're really successful and things are going well, then every year your opportunity cost should increase. But what that also means is every year, you should be saying no to things that you were saying yes to the previous year. And so I feel like I'm always three to six months behind on what I should be saying no to. When the book came out, it did well from the start, but it really didn't take off till about a year in. So it hit the bestseller list the first week.

nothing until New Year's week and then nothing for like six more months. And it wasn't really to like the summer of the second year that it started appearing every week. So 2019 was the year. 2018 it came out. 2019 was the year that like everything changed. And there was a stretch in like 2019 and early 2020 where I just felt like I'm on the hook for all these things that I should have said no to. Eventually I had to do like harder things like put the email inbox on an auto responder and they're like, oh, like they runs like kind of counter to what I wanted to do, you know, like I for the first 10,000 people who signed up to my email list, I emailed each of them individually and said like, hey, thanks so much for joining.

You know, I love to have you in the community. I'll be writing about this, you know, whatever. And then, you know, you get to 100,000 or a million or you know, and you just can't do that stuff anymore. So, um, yeah, it's like best possible outcome, right? Like you don't want to complain about it. What could be better? But, um, also it just takes a lot of learning and reminding yourself that you have to continue to increase that filter. Are there any lessons that you took away that you wish you would have known sooner about filtering or selecting opportunities? There are lots of things that I think about now strategically for what I want to focus on

that I didn't really have a language for at the time. You kind of like follow your gut or your intuition. But so I'll give you a couple. Not everything that you do can match all the qualities that check all the boxes that I'm about to cover. but I think about each of these boxes and how do they weave together? So like one thing is leverage. How can I get more output out of each unit of effort?

And so some things are much higher leverage than others. You know, like writing, let's just take writing as an example. Writing in a journal or a diary is fine. It's very useful for you. It might help you think more clearly. Like writing has lots of benefits. But if you choose to take what you write and share it publicly, well now all of a sudden you have a lot more leverage with that.

Other people can find it. It becomes this kind of like honey, that attracts like-minded people. You know, I like to say that sharing your work publicly is like a magnet and it just draws other people to you who are interested in the same thing. It's probably one of the most useful things you can do for networking. It's not actually networking. It's just sharing your knowledge and trying to be useful in public.

So leverage is one thing to think about. How can I get more output out of the hours that I'm putting in? One question that I really like is, what is the work that keeps working for me? once it's done. So like doing this podcast interview is a good example. When Atomic Habits came out, I did like 200 interviews in like six months. And some are podcasts and some are radio. And I don't really do radio interviews anymore. And it's not really because I have something personal against radio. It's just that once we get done with that five minute segment or 10 minute

segment, we're off the air. And that work is not working for me anymore. You know, the time I just put in evaporated. But this will get recorded. You know, and somebody will watch it today. and then somebody watch it in a month. And, you know, it's, it's almost like there's two versions of James out there. You know, there's like the version that's out there living his daily life. And then there's the one that got recorded right now that can keep working each hour after it's done. So that's one filter. Another thing that I think about is sequencing.

So doing things in the right order or doing things in an order where it accumulates for you. I debated about whether to self-published atomic habits or traditionally published for, like a year, year and a half. I was like really close to trying to self publish. Um, and ultimately at the time, it's a little bit easier now, but still quite hard to hit a best seller list as if you're self published. And I decided, well, if I'm really going to go for it and try to hit the New York Times list, I might as well do it with my first book because then I can be a New York Times bestselling author for the rest of my career. Um, there's no guarantee I was going to do it. But it's like, if you're going to try, you might as well try early. And then you can get the benefit of that

status marker for the next 50 years, rather than self-publishing your first like five books and then doing it, you know, in 20 years. So that's just kind of a, you know, a sequencing thing. The other thing that I think about a lot is how do I like it when the work that I'm doing, every project that I'm touching feeds each other in some way. They kind of like cross-pollinate. So a few examples I, you know, I'm writing. There's, there's, it's almost fractal the way that you can think about this. So like the small version is, I write an idea. That idea could go on Twitter and be used as a tweet. It could be in a newsletter that I publish each week. It could get repurposed onto Instagram as like a quote card or

something. Maybe if it's good, it could become the seed of something that's a chapter in a book or whatever. But it gets repurposed in lots of ways. So that one hour, again, kind of like leverage, it's working for you in more ways. How does it accumulate? How does it cross pollinate? You can also do it with platforms. So like all of the platforms that I have from my business point to each other. You know, like when I post on Instagram at the bottom of each post says, you know, want to learn more ideas like this? Sign up for the newsletter at jamesclair.com slash 321 or go to James clear.com for more. The book points to things. You know, you read Atomic Habits. And then at the end of each section, it says, you know, if you want to get a PDF guide that

summarizes these key ideas, go to Atomichabits.com and, you know, you can download it or whatever. So the book's pointing to the website. The website's pointing to the book. The newsletter is pointing to social media. Social media is pointing to the newsletter. It's all like this web where everything is kind of cross-pollinating. I think some people, people get that and they do it like once or twice or seven times, but like you need to do it every time. You know, like you're building this very tight web.

It's and you're building this network of things that all accumulate together. And then you can do it an even larger level. So like we have the writing idea, the tweet idea. You have the platform idea. That's still within one business. But you can even do it across businesses. Like I have my business as a writer. You know, I'm an author and I have my platforms.

But I also co-founded a publishing company, author's equity. And so now the brand that I have as an author helps me meet other authors and talk to them. And if it's a good fit, they can come and publish with us. And so those two things feed each other. I publish my books through author's equity. Like it's, you know, it's a way for those two businesses to help each other. And then I have a, I even have like, a side project, which is this cabin in the woods that I built, you know,

I'm building this cabin. And they can be a retreat center for authors. You know, like we can bring authors out there and we can meet for two or three days and talk about how to write books and launch books and build your platform. And some of those people can publish with authors equity. And you can like see how everything kind of feeds each other. So it doesn't all work perfectly together like that every time. But I like when things can kind of check multiple boxes. And then one of the one of the other ones that I'll mention and then I'll take a break for a second as um tail wins so like i always think about email lists i don't we you know you and i both have lots of friends who have email lists and people are growing at different rates

but basically everybody i knows list is getting bigger i don't i don't know that i know anybody whose list is shrinking um unless it's like they're intentionally you know trimming subscribers or something but uh more and more people come online each day more there still are like you know a billion people in the world that need internet access and are coming on. So there's just this huge tailwind of readers that and the internet continues to grow and people continue to subscribe to things. And so it's just a good like place to play because there are lots of forces working for you. So if you put all of those things together, you're like, all right, there's a big tailwind on the internet and building an audience. If you share your work publicly, you gain leverage and you can

attract more people to your work and you can, you know, become more known or your work can get out there. If your platforms cross-pollinate, they can kind of grow each other. That same dynamic of a tailwind for, you know, email list is also true for social media and, you know, other platforms online. And if you do this early in your life and you build an audience early, then you have tons of flexibility and how you can use that and where you can direct the attention or what, you know, what businesses you want to build or what projects you want to work on. So all of that collectively just makes it feel like, all right, if you're doing things that are in that zone, then it's probably a really high leverage way to spend your time.

And I'm not saying that's the only way you should spend your time. Probably the single biggest thing that we haven't talked about is, are you excited about it? You know, are you interested? Are you passionate about it? But those are some of the ways that I think about focus and prioritization and selecting. And when things blew up, you know, we put all this together and atomic habits did really well. And then when things blew up and my time got tight, you're like, okay, you have all these. it felt like for 10 years, it was me trying to knock on every door and window and be like,

hey, will you please pay attention? Maybe, like, can you read this? And then all of a sudden overnight, it was like, whoa, way too many people are paying attention. And so now I have to be more strict about which things check those boxes and where I direct my time and attention. I love a couple of the themes we talked about. I just want to circle back to longevity of content. We published an interview this summer, republished an interview that was recorded six years ago. And nobody had any idea. So when you think of like content and the long tail of it, it's really fascinating. We don't talk politics.

We don't talk anything topical. One of the reasons we do that is we have great longevity of content. I think that that's really important. So that's one that I didn't mention, but I do think about a lot. I think this is a little bit more of my style and what I'm interested in personally. But it does, you know, there are ways that you could apply it probably whatever you're focused on, which is what's the half life of this idea? You know, you want, I like to work on things that have a very long half life. They just persist. And I even like to work in formats that have a long half life. Like social media has a very short half life. And that's fine. It can serve a role in the business. But I'm never going to make it my central thing. Because something like a blog post has a little bit longer half life, but a book really has a lot. long half-life. And so I like formats that are durable and persist in that way. And so you can, yeah, you start to put all those different elements together. And I think you can end up with

something that's pretty evergreen. One thing you mentioned that I thought was really interesting was the word sequencing. And I'm wondering how you think about that in terms of accomplishing your goals, but also in terms of like different eras of your life. Are your 20s different than your 30s, your 30s and your 40s and your 40s and your 50s? Yeah, that's a great question. I, I, I I don't know why, but I've been thinking a lot about this recently. I guess you could call it like life strategy or something. But think about most of the big, really meaningful things in your life. You know, like raising a family that you're proud of, building a great marriage,

creating a successful company, getting in the best shape of your life, you know, starting some new initiative or, you know, giving back in some big way. Like whatever it is, it's probably a multi-year thing. You know, all those really big meaningful movements in life are three, five, 10, sometimes longer, you know, it's like it's a lot of years. And if you just look broadly at your adult life, you're like, well, if I'm lucky enough to get to live to say 80, I've got maybe five or six of those, you know, 10 year movements in there. So what are you going to spend those five or six on? You know, it's a limited number, whatever it is. Some things, five or six alone is

limited, but it's even more limited than I think you realize at the beginning because certain things don't make sense in certain decades. You know, like, if you want to travel around the world for a while and party in a visa, like, you probably aren't going to do that in your 70s. You know, like, it's probably better for your 20s or 30s. And so the sequencing of things starts to matter to. Building a company, I think, is another one. You can do it whenever you want, you know, like there's no, there are no rules. But man, it sure is nice to like do it early. And then you get some of the advantages of that as you go on. It seems that responsibilities and obligations tend to increase throughout life. Each day that goes by is an opportunity for a responsibility to come into play

or an obligation or an obstacle that you didn't foresee to come up. And so if you're waiting until your 40s or 50s to start a company, again, there are no rules. You can do it then. It's just that you're playing the game on hard mode a little bit or a harder mode. I always say like I started my first business when I was 24 and I had no kids and I wasn't married. It was as easy as it could be and it was still really hard. Yeah. Um, you know, so anyway, that's, I think about sequencing in that way. Um, and some of the questions that I like to ask to, there are two that really feel relevant to this. The first is, what season am I in right now? You know, life has different seasons. And, um, sometimes you want to focus on earning money.

Sometimes you want to focus on time with family. Sometimes you want to focus on creativity or, you know, creative freedom, the ability to choose what projects you work on. Sometimes you just want it to be a personal season, you know, and it's less about work. But whatever the answer is, it's probably really specific to you. And it helps to figure out what season you're in right now. Because when your seasons change, your habits often need to change.

You know, what you focus on often needs to change. And so the question that I think is closely tied to this, which is a good one from Derek Sivers, is what am I optimizing for right now? And so I, you know, if I don't know what to optimize for, I feel like it's good to optimize for enthusiasm, what lights me up. But whatever that answer is right now, what are you optimizing for? It helps you determine what season you're in. And I found that a lot of the time when I'm struggling or I'm facing some sort of,

I feel like I'm facing a lot of friction, it's because I'm trying to force fit old habits into a new season. You know, I keep trying to do things the way I was doing it. And then eventually I realized, oh, okay, stop being a dummy about this like you're in a new season now. So I think sequencing starts with self-awareness. It starts with knowing what season you're in and what you're optimizing for. What's important to you at this stage of your life? And then once you realize that, you can start to figure out, you know, which pieces should I focus on next?

Let's explore habits a little. What exactly is a habit? The one that I like is that a habit is a recurrent. solution to a recurring problem in your environment. So something comes up again and again, and your brain is trying to solve it. Another way to describe it is that it's like an automatic or a mindless behavior. If we were talking to a researcher or an academic, they would probably say a habit is like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes or biting your nails, you know, something you do really fast and mindlessly and you don't even really think about it. But if I were

to ask you, hey, Shane, what are some habits you're trying to build? Like, you're probably going to say, you know, I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week or I want to write every day or I'm trying to meditate for 10 minutes or something like that. And I know what you mean when you say that, you know, you mean you want it to be this regular practice, this ritual. Now, technically, in some kind of academic sense, maybe that's not, you know, a habitual automatic behavior. But in a cultural sense, that's exactly what we mean when we talk about habits is we want them to be reliable, repeated routines. And then the third way you could define it. And this one I think is quite useful is that it's a behavior that is tied to a context in your environment, behavior that's

tied to a particular context. So like your habit of watching Netflix at 7 p.m. is tied to the context of your house and your couch at that time of day. And so what we start to see is that behaviors have a very strong link between environment and context. And that's a good way to adjust behaviors. But I think all of those are our potential ways to define what a habit is. Ultimately, it's really just your brain trying to automate the problems and solutions of life and do things with more efficiency. You mentioned seasons and tying that to habits. I'm wondering, how do we know if a habit is working for us or if it's working against us? There's some debate among researchers about is there even such a thing as a good habit or a bad habit like all habits serve you in some way. You know,

you smoke a cigarette because it serves or resolves some, you know, need that you have. And I understand what they're saying, but I think that we all know what we mean when we say good habit or a bad habit. And the way that I like to define it is that the cost of your good habits is in the present, the cost of your bad habits is in the future. And so what you find is that a lot of things that typically get categorized as a bad habit, eating too many donuts or smoking a cigarette or something like that feels good in the moment. But it creates some kind of cost or consequence in the future. Whereas a lot of good habits going to the gym. him right now, you require sweat and effort and it's hard, it has a payoff in the future.

I think one way to determine whether a habit is serving you or not is, is it giving me more of what I want in the future or less of what I want? It's almost like it's first order negative, second order positive. If it's a good habit and then the inverse is true. I think as a general rule that probably can be true, the real trick is to figure out how to make it first order positive and second order positive. And, you know, a lot of atomic habits is about this, which is trying to make habits as easy as possible to do so that you don't feel as much friction in the moment,

while also aligning them with your identity and the type of person that you want to be. And so working out as like a classic example. But everybody wants to work out so that they look better in the mirror and so that they get fit. They want the results of it, which is fine. The second order outcome is going to be great. But it's hard in the moment and you don't always feel like going and sometimes it's, you know, difficult or whatever.

the real trick and where I have eventually gotten to myself after 10 or 15 years of training is I like how I feel when I'm working out. And so it's not even, yeah, I want the same results everybody else does. But it's also about being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And I know that if I'm in the middle of the set, I can feel good about being that person and being who I am. So now all I have to do is do the thing. And I don't have to wait for the outcome. The outcomes are also good further down the line. But it's more about showing up and being that. type of person. Is there like a specific framework that you use to evaluate if this habit is serving you or getting in your way and then you should replace it with a different habit? I said earlier that habits

are the repeated solutions to recurring problems in your environment. So let's say that you go to work and it's a long day. You get home, it's like 530 or 6 and you're exhausted. That happens again and again and you feel tired after a long day of work. So that is a recurring problem that's resurfacing. And people have different solutions to that problem. You know, one person might play video games for 30 minutes. Somebody else might go for a run. A third person might smoke a cigarette. But you can see some of these, they're all solving the same recurring problem, but some

solutions are better than others. And what you find is that like early in your life, a lot of the solutions that you come up with are just things that you either inherited from your parents or saw modeled and started to repeat. And you get to be about 22 or 25 or something like that. And what are the odds that your current solution is the best solution? Just mathematically, it's very unlikely that the way that you're solving the repeated problems in your life right now is the optimal way to do it. So as soon as you have that realization, it becomes your responsibility to try to figure out a better way.

And I think one of the best things you can do early on, this is if I could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't in it, it would probably be this, which is to ask, what would this look like if it was fun? you know like for any habit that you're trying to build just sit down and ask what would it look like if it was fun and try to brainstorm 10 or 20 or 50 different solutions to it um there's not always a thousand ways to do everything but there is almost always more than one way and so a lot of people the most common new year's resolution is to go to the gym and work out and i kind of feel like a lot of people are in the gym in january just because they feel like they should be in the gym or society wants them to be in the gym or something like that But we can come up with a long list of what it looks like to live an active lifestyle. You can rock climb or kayak or, you know, do all kinds of stuff. And I think it's worth it to spend 20 minutes and try to come up with that list and then look at it and say, which one of these sounds like the most fun to me. And so that helps, I think that helps you get closer to what the optimal answer is for you. Because if it's not fun, if it's not engaging or interesting, if it doesn't feel good,

you're not going to stick with it when it gets tough. I mean, this is probably one of the great lessons for life, which is if you're If you're having fun, then you're dangerous, right? Then you're hard to compete with. You don't want to, you don't want to go up against the person who's having a good time doing it. Because if it feels like a hassle or a chore, that's the person who gives up when it gets difficult. But the person who's having a great time at the start, they're much more likely to stick with it when it gets hard. Do you think of fun as binary or is it how do I make I want to work out?

So like, how do I make working out more fun versus like fun? Yeah. So, well, everything in your life is not going to feel like going to a concert or something. Right? Like it's never going to be, it may not be the most fun thing in your day or something like that. But anything can be more engaging or more fun than maybe the default would be. And so I think about it more like that. How can I try to make this more enjoyable, not necessarily saying it's going to be the most fun part of my day? And then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate, what is the mechanism by which we can do that?

Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit. And this is true if you want to, you know, replace an old one and install a new one. So roughly speaking, what you want is your habit to be obvious. So you want it to be easy to see, easy to notice, easy to, you know, get your attention. You want it to be attractive. So something that's appealing or fun to you, as we were just saying. You want it to be easy, simple, frictionless, you know, easy to apply and install. And you want it to be satisfying.

The more enjoyable or satisfying a habit is, the more likely to stick with in the future. So I call these the four laws of behavior change, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. And you don't need all four every single moment of the day or every habit that you build, but the more that you have those four forces working for you, the more likely you are to stick with it. And in fact, we can actually learn something very compelling about our habits by looking at behaviors that we often call bad or like that we waste time on. And you see what do those things have in common? they often are very obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Those are the things that get them to stick. You know, like if you just take scrolling social media, for example,

it's obvious because your phone is on you all the time. It's often the first app that your thumb gravitates to and you tap open. It's attractive because the algorithm has curated content for your very interests. It's so easy that like a couple of years ago, Instagram, when you would scroll and somebody put up an album, they, and if you came back to Instagram like five minutes later, if you had already seen that post, they would auto swipe to the second slide.

So you don't even need to use your thumb anymore, right? They would just keep showing you new content for you. They were trying to make it that easy to consume. And then it's satisfying because it kind of satisfies the interest that you have and so on. Get that dopamine hit and whatever. So I'm not trying to like criticize Instagram too much or anything, but I'm just saying if you wonder, why is it so easy for me to do that?

that, you know, nobody's sitting around saying, how can I just find the willpower and the motivation to check Instagram more? You know, but a lot of people are saying, oh, I wish I just had the willpower and the discipline to go to the gym or something like that. Well, you know, one of these is obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. And one of them is not. And so you need to try to find ways to make your habits more obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. And then the opposite being make the ones that you don't want harder. You just, and you just invert each of those for. So rather than making it obvious, make it invisible. So unsubscribe from emails. Don't keep junk food in the house for the social media example. So I've done this for the last year. I just

deleted all social media apps off my phone. And what I told myself was, if you really want to use them, you can just download them and log in. And I don't even know that I've really done that much, but maybe I've done it once or twice. Um, I log in, I use it. And then I delete it after I get done. So I log out and delete it again. And then the next time I want to use it, I got to download it again, but it's just, it's not obvious anymore, you know, um, rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. That one is the most difficult of the four and probably the place that I would recommend focusing on the least because it's hard to change your desires. It's hard to change your expectations about what things are attractive and what or not.

It is possible. We can talk about it if you want, but it's, it's hard. The third, um, is to make it difficult instead of making it easy. So increasing friction, adding steps between you and the behavior. Again, deleting the app off. phone is a good example of that and then the fourth is rather making it satisfying make it unsatisfying you need to layer on some kind of consequence or cost to the behavior and um if you do those four things you're much more likely to avoid before we keep going with habits i do want to take a little sidetrack here into social media and sure so you're not reading anything online you're sort of like ignoring all the it's been awesome it's been so great um i it's one of those things that

I find that there are some changes that sound easy, but actually are very hard in practice. And then there's other things that sound like they would be difficult, but actually they're not hard at all. The hard part is convincing yourself to do it. Deleting social media off my phone was one. I did that for like a year. About six months in, I was like, what if I did it for email? And so I deleted email off my phone.

That sounded like it was going to be really hard to me. But it has been so, so much easier than I thought. Again, I just have the same rule, which is if I really need it, I'll download the app. and log into Gmail and do what I need to do. And I, you know, I've only downloaded it twice in the last, like, year. Once I was at the airport and I had to send an email before my flight. And the other time, I was getting ready to go to a show and I needed to download the tickets while we were in line.

But after I get done, I just delete the app again. And I'm like, well, I'll just download it if I need it. And it has been so nice because if you had looked at my behavior on the phone before that, I think my average time on Instagram before I deleted it was like 42 minutes a day or 48 minutes a day, something like that. So you look at that and you're like, well, there's only 24 hours in the day. This is getting like 120th or 1.30th of his time. You would look at that and think, this must be pretty important to him.

You know, this must be a pretty important part of his life. And in fact, it just evaporated as soon as I deleted it. It wasn't actually that difficult. And you didn't miss it. No. Now, I think the one interesting question to play with is what do you do when there's nothing to do? So a lot of people when they are standing in line at the grocery store or they're waiting for the gas to fill up in the car or something like that. What do they do? Well, they

pull their phone out, you know? Last night, I went to a restaurant. Every single person who was waiting in line for a table, you go in and you check in, you, okay, we'll see you in five minutes. Every single person pulled their phone out. And so what do you do when you have nothing to do? And for most of us, a lot of the time, it's check your phone, check your, you know, check social media. So you do need something to fill that space. So maybe, you know, what I did was I moved all, to the home screen of my phone. And I just said, well, I'll just listen to an audio book when, you know, when I'm usually doing that.

You try to need something frictionless to fill that gap. And I don't know what it should be for each person, but I think it's, it's good to have a question, an answer to that question because otherwise you're going to have to just sit with, you know, there's nothing to do. And what are your strategies on a desktop instead of a phone? Desktop. I'm okay with having social media. I actually stay logged in on most of the social media accounts, except for,

Twitter X. I just, I can't. I'll spend too much time on it. So I force myself to be logged out. I also have tried to install some additional barriers, which is I can't log in to any of my social accounts on my own. I have to text my assistant to send me the login because it's tied to a separate phone. It's I can't even get past the two factor because it doesn't go to my phone anymore. So there's just, yeah, it's just me trying to like moderate. my own behavior. I love it. What upstream habits are most important for people to think about or create? That so I didn't mention this earlier, but I think this is also related to sequencing, which is just asking, you know, what things are upstream from the outcomes that I want or from the

habits that I want. It's a good, it's a good way to, a good frame for thinking about what you should focus on. You should generally try to do the things that are upstream first. Probably the single most important habit that is upstream of all the other ones is some kind of habit of reflection review, the habit of thinking. It is so unlikely that whatever you are working on now is the best use of your time. It's almost impossible. And so I think Sam Altman has some line where he says you should have a very high bar for working on anything other than thinking about what to work on. because that's that's going to be the biggest point of leverage is choosing a better thing to focus your attention on.

And so many people are, you know, I was like this too. If you have, if you're the type of person who has a very good work ethic and hard work has benefited you a lot in your life, you get to a point where you start to use it as a crutch because you're like, well, I'll just work my way out of it. You know, I'll just, I'll just work harder. And that's a way to solve this problem. But you cannot outwork the person who's working on a better thing. And so it is possible if you really grind, maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder than you are now.

But if you work on the right thing, you get 100 X of the results or 1,000 X of the results. And so what you need, I almost feel like we should change the definition of what it means to work hard. It should not only mean putting in the hours. It should also mean outthinking the other person. If you're not outthinking them, you're not outworking them. And so a habit of refurb. reflection review is probably the single most important habit. You need to create some time in your week to sit down and think, am I spending my precious time energy, my one precious life on the

things that I want to be spending it on? And I don't know any other way to do that than to make some space to think. You know, if you just keep your head down and work hard, it's just really unlikely that you're going to be spending it in the right way. So I have a couple different ways I do it. I do a weekly review every Friday where I sit down. That's mostly related to business stuff. So, you know, it's looking at metrics and how things are going and, you know, subscribers and revenue and expenses and all that stuff. It's just a quick check in.

Most weeks, nothing happens. I just look at stuff and it's fine. But occasionally you'll get a week where you see a trend and it's like, oh, that's been going down for three weeks straight, like what's going on there or something like that. So it's just a way to kind of notice red flags when they come up. The more important one is I do an annual review. and the annual review is more about values. It's more about what do I say is important to me?

Who am I the type of person or, you know, who am I trying to be as a person? And then looking at how I spent my last year and saying, well, did that match up or not? My calendar plays a really critical role there. I go through my calendar in detail. I look at how many workouts did I do last year? How many did I do each month?

What was my average per month? I look at how many places did I travel to? How many nights? I spend away from home. Is that enough or not enough? Like how did that feel? I look at how many articles I published or newsletters I published, you know, things like that. And so it's kind of a chance for me to check in on my production and time for the last year. And then you look at your values and you say, well, you said this was important to you. Is that actually where you spent your time? And so it's a way to course correct. The last two years, it's been kind of interesting

because I usually do that annual review in December. And I have continued to keep the document open all year long. And I keep coming back to it and trying to write like new principles at the top of it or whatever to help me course correct. Oh, interesting. Like one of my, I don't even know if it really makes sense, but one of my principles for the last year was like move like thunder. And so it's like you don't really see it,

but then all of a sudden there's this big crash. And that's the, that's kind of like I'm trying to do fewer things, but with a bigger impact. And so I just have little lines like that that are at the top to try keep me on track with, you know, what I'm hoping to do that year. Do you have a check-in with your wife? Yeah, we, we don't have like a formal check-in. I don't treat it like a one-on-one that you would do like in a company or something like that.

But what we have- You don't have like a board meeting? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It just feels like too structured and weird, you know. But the biggest thing that we've done in the last couple of years is a monthly date night and just making sure that that actually happens every month, which we have for like probably, I don't know, probably 24 to 30 straight months now, um, has been huge. It's the one time. What we say is, it's the one time that we actually talk, which sounds silly because we're talking

all the time, right? But everything is logistics. It's all tasks and figuring out what to do with the kids. And, you know, it's like there's all these things that need to be done. It's all jobs to be done. And then, um, you go out for a couple hours and you're like, oh, now we, it's actually, we can actually talk, you know. So I think that has been, uh, that's been really valuable. I think that's so important. What popular habits do you think are garbage? Hmm. The only one that's coming to me right now is consuming the news.

And browsing social media. Those are the two that I just feel like. I wonder, you know, we have a one of our grandparents is in her 90s. And we talked to her and it's kind of like, oh, yeah, we smoked when we were younger. But like nobody knew, you know, like they're like, we didn't realize. Like everybody did it. It wasn't, you know, it was just. just like how it was. And I wonder like when I'm 94, like what am I going to be saying where it's

like we were all on social media. Nobody do. You know, like we didn't realize. And I don't mean to criticize social media too much because like obviously there are benefits from it. But I do, I do wonder what we're going to look back on and be like, yeah, we didn't quite realize the full effect of all of it. And it was kind of like, you know, messing with our minds. So increasingly. I mean, we're moving to a world. I don't think people quite realize that. Yeah. where you and I open the same article in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, it's going to be two different versions of that article that's based on our browsing history, our political preferences.

I'm not saying they're doing that today, but you can see the technology is sort of formulated. I kind of feel like the only way to win is to not play the game. You know, so that's why I've sort of checked out in a lot of ways. We have two friends who are our age who have never had social media accounts, and I'm like, man, I kind of wonder what it's like sometimes. Like, that's kind of, I, I don't necessarily like envy them, but I do look at that and I'm like, that's kind of a refreshing way to live, you know? And it is interesting how essential it feels in the moment.

It feels like, oh, I can't really give this up because this is a really big important part of my life. But if you can get yourself to give it up for a month or something, you realize, actually, life goes on just fine. There's, you can still live a very rich and full and fulfilling life and it plays no, no role in it. So, yeah, giving, I think giving that up has been, has been good. What's the two minute rule? Two minute rule is very simple.

It just says take whatever habit you're trying to focus on and scale it down to something takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page. Or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. You know, sometimes I mention those examples to people and they kind of resist it a little bit. You know, one guy who's like, okay, buddy, you know, like I know, like I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. You know, I'm actually trying to do the workout. So I understand where people are coming from, but the two minute rule does something important.

You know, I have this reader. His name was Mitch. I mentioned him in atomic habits. And he started going to the gym. And he lost over 100 pounds. It's kept off for more than a decade now. But when he first started to go, he had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes. So you get in the car, drive the gym, get out, do half an exercise. Get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds silly, right? It sounds like kind of ridiculous. So like, oh, clearly this is not going to get the guy, the results he wants. But what you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up.

You know, he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. And I think this is a very deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize it turning into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize. Yeah. And the two-minute rule helps you do that. It helps push back on that perfectionist

tendency, that feeling that you need to have it all figured out or to do it perfectly, to do it at all. I don't know why we do that with our habits. We get very all or nothing about them. You know, we're so focused on finding the best sales strategy, the perfect business idea, the ideal diet plan. We're so focused on optimizing that if we can't find the perfect one, we're like, well, I need to keep researching. But you need to master the art of showing up. You know, like, if you can't go to the gym for five minutes, four days a week, who cares how good the 45 minute workout plan is? You know, it's just a theory at that point.

Ed Latimore has that phrase or that quote where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. Yeah. Like, there are a lot of things in life that are like that. You know, the hardest step is the first one. The most difficult action is the first movement. So you need to master the first step, master stage one, and then advance. I just like this principle.

You should try to use your current advantages to gain new advantages. So, you know, early on, like if I look at my entrepreneurial career, early on, I had very few advantages, you know, I had no money, no resources, no connections. But what did I have? I had time. And so for the first three years, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday. And I would spend, on average, I would spend between like 15 and 20 hours on each article. The short, the fastest I ever did one was eight hours. The longest was like 40 something, but that was rare. But, you know, if you, if you spend 20 hours on, two articles a week, it's 40 hour a week right there. And most people are not spending that much time

on a 2,000 word article. And so my mission was just to try to make it the most useful, valuable, actionable article it could be. And if you do that, a hundred times, you end up with a lot of really good content on there. And that helped the audience grow. So then I then I used my current advantage, which was time to create something of value. That helped grow the audience. Now I have 100,000 email subscribers. Now I have a new advantage. which is I have an audience. And so then that kept growing. I think once I got to around 200 is when I got the book deal for Atomic Habits.

So you use your new advantage to gain another one. Now I have a book deal and spend the next three years writing the book. Then you have a bestselling book. That's another advantage. And you can just, you know, you see how you try to like lever up one after the other. And you start to accumulate these new advantages. And it puts you in a much different position. Now, there's obviously some patience.

that needs to come with that, right? Like, I just described something in 30 seconds that took like seven years, you know. So it takes a while. But sometimes people will say, oh, how did Atomic Habits become this bestseller or whatever? And really, what you're seeing when the book comes out is the release of potential energy that was built over like five years prior. You know, it's not like it happened overnight. It was the five years of building an audience of hundreds of thousands of people, meeting other authors, going on podcast and doing interviews. know, all that stuff was released around the same time, but it was, it took a while for it to get

built up. So anyway, that's just another one of my little principles, which is use your current advantages to gain new advantages. One of the things that prevents people from doing things is that just don't feel like it. How do we become stronger than our feelings? I think it's okay if you don't feel like it. I think sometimes it's a signal, you know, like you should procrastination is not always a bad thing. If you're procrastinating on something, sometimes it's a signal that you don't actually want that thing, uh, which is fine. I for a long time, I, so I, I was good in school. I got good grades. It was like a game for me that I tried to win. You know, I didn't really care about whether I was learning. I cared about was I getting A's, you know, am I succeeding? Um, which may not be the way that

you want to go through school, but that's, you know, that's how I treated it at the time. And, um, so for a long time, If you asked me when I was in college, what are you going to do? I said I was going to go to medical school. It was something that I liked. I do think I would like a lot about being a doctor or a surgeon. I think there's a lot about that profession that would align with who I am. But there's also probably 30% or 40% that would not have been a good fit for me. And I kept saying that because it's the type of thing that you can say and never be criticized for.

You know, like you go home at Thanksgiving or Christmas and people are like, what are you going to do? And you're like, I'm going to go to medical school and everybody says, that's great, you know. Um, and, you know, some people should be doctors, but what I kept procrastinating on was studying for the MCAP, the entrance exam. And that was kind of a sign. You know, it was a sign that I didn't really want to do this because I wasn't fully in. Um, and I ignored that for a long time, um, and took it and didn't do that well. And, you know, but it's like, yeah, like this wasn't, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was a sign that I realize at some intuitive level that this isn't actually what I wanted. And it was just a story

that I kept saying. Whereas other stuff like writing about habits, for example, I was interning at an orthopedic medical practice over the summer. And I got to do a lot of cool stuff. I went in on like 35 surgeries and got to like shadow that and watch it. That was really neat. I did some back-end billing stuff for the practice. But each afternoon, I usually ended up with about two hours where I was supposed to be working until five and I didn't have anything to do. And so I sat down and I started writing about habits. I just had this word doc. It was just kind of like James's thoughts on habits. And it got to be about 60 pages long. And I was like, you should publish something of this. You know, this is kind of ridiculous. Keep writing about all this. Like, what are you going to do it for?

Kind of back to my earlier point about you should share your work publicly. And nobody asked me to do that, you know. But I, so it's kind of like, what are you, what are you doing on nights and weekends. What are you doing with your free time? Maybe that's what you should be doing during the week. And it was like very much that sort of energy. And so you look at medical school and you're like, well, I was procrastinating on a key part of it. And then you look at the habits and like writing part and you're like, well, you were doing this and nobody was even asking you to. And so those are two very different forms of energy. And I think trying to find the things where you are running toward the next thing, not away from the last thing. Like same, same direction,

totally different energy. What are you now? running toward what is naturally pulling you in and those are the places that you should double down on one of the things that you said that stood out to me there was nobody could argue with the fact that i was i was pursuing this goal and so many people seem to optimize their life in this way right where i'm not standing out i'm not spiky i'm nobody can what will you not be criticized for how do we develop the courage to i mean the book the courage to be disliked but basically the courage to you. Yeah, it's kind of the, I've started to call it internally to myself.

I've started to call it the tyranny of labels. You know, it is the tyranny of being beholden to a label. It's the need to be described in a certain way, to need to be called a bestselling author or a surgeon or a lawyer or whatever the label is. If you need that label, then you are beholden to doing it that way. But if you can release yourself from the label, And instead, ask yourself, what type of lifestyle do I want or what type of impact do I want to make, regardless of what the actual label is?

Now, all of a sudden, a ton of options open up. So as an example, like I have a couple friends and family members who are professors. If you need to be a professor, if you need to have that label, you're very limited in what your job options are. But if instead you ask yourself, well, what kind of lifestyle do I want? Okay, well, professors off in the summer. I like the flexibility of that lifestyle. or what type of impact do I want to make? Well, professors get to teach.

They teach concepts to other people. Well, if you say, if you just say, I want a flexible life where I get to teach people, there are tons of options. You could be a podcaster. You could be a YouTuber. You could write. You can do almost infinite. You can be a coach.

There's so many different ways to teach and to have a flexible life. But if it needs to be about the label, now all of a sudden your subset of options is very limited. And I have seen this again and again with people who I think are very talented. talented and intelligent, but they kind of restrict themselves because they have to have the label. And so I think if you can give that up, if you can release that need to be described in a certain way, to have a certain status marker, but instead ask yourself, what type of impact do I want to make? What type of lifestyle do I want to have? Now all of a sudden you have a lot more options

from making it happen. A lot of people consume the gist of something. So if you think of James, you know, you read a full book. You might take away one idea. from that book you can press that idea into a thought you post that thought on Twitter yeah somebody reads that thought and they think that they understand at the same level that you do but you've distilled all this experience into that how do you think about when it's okay to have the gist of something versus when you need to deep dive and it's actually important to go into the weeds on things it seems I'll put this in context it seems more and more people are refusing to deep

dive and we're just sort of like skimming on the surface of knowledge. That's absolutely right. A lot of that is kind of a, is it the medium or the message. The medium is the message sort of thing. You get forced into it by the shape of Twitter or the shape of Instagram or whatever. It's not, it's not a place where you can unpack a book length argument or even a 30 minute argument. You know, it's everything is compressed to a headline or a tweet. So it's hard to, it's hard to play that game to be browsing.

on there for 30 minutes or 60 minutes or an hour and a half a day and also be nuanced. You know, you need to play a different game if you want the nuance. But separately, thinking about this for me, you're right. That is a big part of what I do is I try to. So when I was working on atomic habits, I had 12 chapters at the time. There ended up being 20, but at the time there were 12. And I wrote the chapter title on an index card for each of them. I laid all 12 out on the floor.

And then I went to my bookshelf and I grabbed each book that was relevant to that chapter. And usually there were like four or five or six for each chapter. So I had these little stacks of books by each index card. And then I looked at each of those books and I said, how can I take everything that is genuinely useful from this book? Like when you sit down and you read these 200 pages, what are the two or three ideas that you actually remember that made an impact? Or what are the 20 pages that really drove that point home?

Can I take everything that's actually useful about this book and compress it into this? chapter. And so that if you read this one chapter, now you don't have to read those six books. And I actually think that is a good measure for what makes a great nonfiction book, is how many other books can you make irrelevant by writing this? Now that you've read Atomic Habits, you don't need to read these other 30. And I don't know if I actually hit that measure or not, right? Like, that's for the readers to decide. But you're never going to hit it unless you strive for it. And so that was part of the objective was to take everything that was useful and to compress it into this higher signal, you know, piece. The first draft of atomic habits was like

712 pages or something like that. The final one was, you know, 230 or whatever. And so it got compressed a lot. And my goal was for it to be as high signal as it could possibly be. So that is a big part of what I do. And you're right that if you just read the compressed version, you don't necessarily have the same nuance or depth that somebody else has. It's tricky to figure out like when do you need that and when can you just have the short version because like I said earlier, in many areas of life, good enough is good enough. And so giving somebody the compressed and actionable version is enough for them to get what they want.

And then really the way to honor that is to let them have all the rest of their time back. You know, like that's one of my big principles is that don't waste the reader's time. You need to have an extreme respect for the reader's time, almost like an obsession over the reader's time. Every word that you write is actually an obstacle that the reader does not want to have to go through. Your book is an obstacle between them and the result that they want. And so every word needs to earn its place in that way. And if you take that seriously, then it forces you to make sure that the book is even better. But certainly there is a time for nuance and depth.

And I think that's one of the nice things about books is that they provide that space. So my strategy for it is I try to have the compressed version, which is like the soundbite that's sticky and that people can remember. They can walk around with it in their mind. So things from atomic habits like every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Great. That's kind of sticky. You can remember that as you go throughout your day, whether you're working. on a fitness habit or a parenting habit or a writing habit, you know, you can be like,

okay, I'm trying to cast a vote for who I am. It's like a little shorthand that you can take with you. But then the whole chapter is 20 pages. You know, we're unpacking why identity is powerful and how habits and identity intertwined with each other and why that's useful in some of the research and so on. So the book gives you the space to make the argument, but the sound bite gives you something sticky that you can walk around with, you know, or like you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I mean, a lot of people like that phrase or a lot of companies or teams have used to get 1% better every day. So it's good to have the compressed versions because it's nice to have that

shorthand as you go through your day to keep you on track. But the book gives the real estate to unpack the full argument. What do you think that we focus on complexity when simplicity usually carries most of the outcome? We have a very strong to desire to believe that there's a secret. People want to know what the secrets are. Um, like the athletic ran this article a couple years ago about, um, Michael Phelps and his breathing techniques. And it was one of the most popular articles that, you know, they had. And people, people want to believe, oh, there's a secret that he's doing that I'm not doing. And if I knew what

that was, then, you know, it would make the difference. And I'm not saying that they don't make a difference. They probably did help him. But also, you know, he's six foot six and built like a fish. And, You know, like he's perfectly designed for this, you know, for this outcome. And so, uh, yeah, was it the breathing techniques or was the fact that he like didn't miss a swim for like, you know, 16 straight years. He's in the pool. Like, you know, there's there's so many other pieces of it. So we want to believe that there's some secret behind it, but a lot of it is like, sometimes when people will come to me and ask about building an audience or, you know, launching a newsletter or writing a book, getting in shape even a lot, a lot of habits are like this. I'll say like, well, you know, don't miss a workout for two years and then get back to me.

You know, like, write, write two articles a week for two years and then get back to me. You know, like, have you done the simple version yet? You know, like, have you done the very obvious thing first? They're trying to go for 99.8 to 99.9.9.9, but they're actually at 45. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you need to. I guess the one way to think about it is, especially in the beginning, the primary bottleneck. to results are, are you doing the obvious things? You know, do, do the obvious stuff first. There's probably only two or three pieces that you just need to do it. Like, are you showing up

consistently? Are you doing, you know, just do the obvious things. And that will get you 80% of the way there. And then once you're there, now you're in the arena. Now you're showing up each day. You've got plenty to optimize. But by trying to make it too complicated at the start, you have kind of like shortcut yourself or short-circuited it. And you've also put yourself in a, you put yourself in a worse position because now you're focused on the wrong things and you're not doing the things that are going to get you the majority of the result. So master the basics to start and then advance from there. Somewhat related to that and actually related to the investing conversation we're having

is how do you think about the relationship between outcome and ego? So our ego wants us to be the investor that beats the market. But the actual outcome we want is maybe if the outcome is beating the market over a long period of time, and we could do that in a way. But there's no ego in buying Vanguard. Yeah. Sometimes I think we, we think the outcome we want is one thing, but actually the outcome we want is the ego to be stroked. You know, it's like, I wonder if, like, how many people would be VCs if you weren't allowed to tell people what you invested in? Oh, yeah. If you couldn't tell people, I was an early investor in Uber. You know, if you couldn't tell them, I, you know,

I invested in Facebook. Would you still do it? Or, like, how much of it, how much of it is that label that you like. So certainly some of it is the returns, but a lot of it is the social status and the praise. So there's, and that's fine. I'm not necessarily criticizing that. Like, we are social creatures, you know, we are primates that want to climb the social hierarchy. Like, there's nothing, there's nothing odd about it. It's part of human nature. But, um, I think we should at least admit it, you know, admit, admit what's actually going on. Um, we crave the status as much as we crave the outcome. So, but back to your point about trying to balance ego and outcome and figuring out how to like walk that delicate dance between the two and not let your ego lead

you astray. Some of the little phrases I try to remind myself of are like, I've been saying this a lot recently with one of the projects I'm working on. I'll sit down to with a team and I'll tell them, I don't need to be right. I just want us to get it right. Okay. So it doesn't, I'm going to generate a lot of ideas and I'm going to share my thoughts on it, but I don't need us to pick my idea. That is not, the goal is not for us to do what James says. The goal is for us to get it right. So what do we need to do, you know, to get there? And then another follow-up question that I will often ask, I find it helpful for me to keep asking this question. If I only ask it in one meeting, it doesn't do it. But if I ask it again and again, it's what is not being said right now

that needs to be said? You know, like what? There's so many times when people, you know, I look at them, I say, what are you thinking right now that in two years, because I'm a slow, learner and I don't know yet, but I'll figure it out. And then you're going to be like, James isn't going to like that in two years, you know, but you can see it right now. I just, I'm just not smart enough to ask about it yet. So what needs to be said that isn't being said? And I find that that question helps, but doing both of those things saying, I don't need to be right. I just want us to get it right. And then what needs to be said right now that's not being said, it sets the table so that people can, you know, open up and share what

they need to share. Um, so I come back to those two a lot. The other one that I come back to is telling myself is mostly just a reminder for myself that I am not right. I am trying to be less wrong. And if you start with the position that I am already wrong, I don't know everything. I'm getting something that I believe right now is off, but I'm trying to become less wrong. Then you're, you're more in a position where you're trying to learn and less in a position where you're trying to defend. You know, if you believe that you're right, What's that line? It's like the fastest way to stop learning something is to believe you already know it.

Yeah. You know, it's like if you already believe that you're right, now you're not open to receiving. But if you believe that you're wrong and you're just trying to improve, now, now you can come out it from a much more humble place and it doesn't need to be about you. So those are, I don't always get that stuff right, but those are, those are things that I try to center myself with. Jeff Bezos had this saying that stuck with me ever since I heard it, which was basically, and I'm paraphrasing that the people who are right, a lot of.

lot, changed their mind a lot, and they're rarely right at the beginning, but they're right at the end. And there's a huge difference between being right at the start and being right at the end. Well, that's great. Because it's so hard to be right at the start, so unlikely that your first idea is the one that works, you know, or the one that's correct. I mean, you need to be willing to adjust along the way. And so that that level of flexibility is, I think, critical. How do you think about the relationship between consistency and intensity? intensity makes for a good story you know it's like oh i went to a silent meditation retreat for a week you know or i um i ran a marathon um you know we launched this product faster than any other had been

launched or what you know intensity makes for a good story but consistency makes progress you know it's not about like oh i did a silent meditation for treat for a week it's not you know i have a meditation practice i do it for five minutes each morning it's part of how i start my day you know that's when it's kind of part of your identity or, you know, I go for a run three days a week. I really love how it makes me feel. You know, that now it's part of your lifestyle. So I think you can kind of draw this distinction between intensity is often about the story that you get to tell.

Consistency is about the lifestyle that you live. And really what matters is how do you want to spend your days? You know, how do you want to show up as a person? What kind of identity do you want to have? And the great thing is that if you do a good job with the consistency, it develops your capacity to manage the intensity or to handle it. You know, I like this saying, consistency enlarges ability. By being more consistent, you enlarge your ability to handle the intense moments,

to do the peak performances, to do the more impressive things. But it needs to start with a focus on consistency and lifestyle. And by doing it in that way, you flex those muscles sometimes literally and develop that ability. One thing you've written on recently is the relationship between belonging and accuracy. And I'm wondering if you can riff on that for a second. Humans are very social creatures. You know, we care a lot about what other people think about us. We are focused on status and prestige. We want to rise up the social hierarchy and be praised and rewarded. And all of that is very natural and makes a lot of sense. You know, people, a lot of the time people will tell you,

don't care what other people think about you, but we all care what other people think often for a very good reason, which is if people think well of you, it benefits you in life. It, you know, it puts you in a good position. You were rewarded for it. It helps you accomplish things. It makes you safer. It just feels good. And so belonging is a critical part of being human. Um, however, especially in the modern world, the desire to belong can offer often run counter to the desire to understand or be accurate. Um, and so if you have to choose between, well, I could believe this thing and be ostracized or criticized or criticized or outcast from my community or I could believe this other thing, which may not be that accurate, but it will get me praised and rewarded and accepted by my community, a lot of the time the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand. It puts you in a position where you're like, well,

you know, I could believe this fact that may or may not impact my daily life or I could keep a good relationship with my wife and my best friend and my, you know, co-workers and so on. And a lot of people choose the belonging over the accuracy. Do you think that applies outside of social groups to to our identity. Like if I identify as a Republican or Democrat, then this thought has the exact same impact. So earlier in this conversation, we talked about the power that identity can have in building habits, right? Like as you start to practice a habit, you foster an identity. And that puts you into a stronger place. Because once you take pride in being that kind of person, you will fight to maintain the habit. You fight to be the type of person who doesn't

misworkouts of the type of person who meditates each day or the type of person who writes consistently or whatever it is because it's part of who you see yourself to be. But now we see that there's also a flip side to this or a dark side, a shadow side to identity, which is the tighter you cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. And so once you have started to identify as a certain type of person, once you adopt that label, oh, I am a member of this group or I am the type of person who believes this thing. It becomes hard to stretch and grow outside of that. And so eventually what you realize is that you simultaneously need to have two things. You need to be casting votes for the type of person that you wish to become, building up

evidence of that identity that you want. But you also need to realize that your identity does not have to be fixed. You know, identity is an interesting word because there's pieces of it that you can't really get around. Like, I am a male and a father and tall. And those are. are all aspects that I'm not going to change about my identity. But there are other aspects of my identity that can be adjusted and can be, you know, refined. So, you know, I'm a writer. I don't always have to be a writer. That's a part of my identity right now. I could shift to something else. And so I sort of view it as like a painting that's always being retouched and kind of edited. And so you're, you're slightly adjusting the picture. And what you realize is that progress, both

physical progress, but also mental internal progress requires unlearning. It requires the willingness to unlearn some of the identities that we have. And you see that when people are not willing to do that, they often get stuck. You know, it's like the, it's the surgeon who you can imagine a surgeon who's done an operation a certain way for 20 years and then all of a sudden a new form of robotics comes in or something that changes it. And they say, well, look, I have all these patients that I've served well for 20 years who had good outcomes. I'm not going to switch, but five years later, they're behind the curve. Or a teacher who has the same lesson plan. They've been doing for 15 years. And then all of a sudden, they should update and use new tools or bring YouTube in or

whatever. And they don't. And now all of a sudden they're starting to lose the students. And it goes back to that that line where the only bad mindset is the one that you're fixed in. It's the one that you can't get out of. If you're stuck in this one way of thinking or one form of an identity, then you're not growing anymore. And so identity is both a powerful driver of change and a force that can help you establish a habit, but it also can be a pitfall to the next round of change and a reason that you use to prevent yourself from moving forward. What's your exact process for learning new subjects as an adult? I don't know that I have an exact process, although now that you say that, So, okay, this is kind of interesting.

I don't have an exact process in the sense that I haven't written it down. I don't have, I don't have like some template to give you. But I do have a pattern that I go through very consistently when I'm trying to learn something new. I think some of this is my personality and how it gets expressed or maybe like a strength even. And some of it is probably applicable to everybody. So I really like living. by this little principle of broad funnel tight filter. And so I try to cast a really wide net when I'm learning something new.

I want to read and consume an enormous amount of information. It's very common for me to have like 40 taps open. You know, I just, I'll do a search. Like here's an example from when I was working on atomic habits. I found Reddit really helpful when I was working on certain sections of the book. So I would search things like, what's the best habit you've ever built, Reddit? Or what's one habit that you struggled with, Reddit? it. And if you search those terms, it'll pull up, you know, 20 or 30 different threads.

And so I would open all of those. So I'd have like 50 tabs open on there. And then I would go through and I would read all the comments in each thread. And a lot of it wasn't really that relevant. But I would probably find after I do that, I would probably find six or seven or eight phrases that I really liked that I was like, oh, that's a good description of like a real problem somebody had. And then I put all those into a list together. And so what I'm doing, I mean, what I'm learning is I'm learning what people struggle with with habits. I'm learning, you know, where do they succeed and where do they fail.

And so I do that broad funnel and then I have a really tight filter for what gets out. Look at 50 tabs, end up with eight sentences. And I just would run that cycle again and again and again. So maybe I do it on Reddit for some stuff. I do it on, I ran a survey with my audience for another. Look at social media comments. Look at comments on. I used to a long, long time ago.

I used to have comments on my website. So maybe look at that. Go to the newsletter. Go to my inbox. look at the replies that I've gotten from people through the newsletter. Like, that's another one. So you just do these really broad data sets. And then you have a really tight funnel for what, for what gets through.

And you end up with some really high quality stuff that way. The tricky part about learning that way is it requires a lot of persistence. This is where I said, like I think some of it's my personality. One strength for me, something I'm good at is I can concentrate on something for a very long time. So I could do that for eight, 10, 12 hours in a day. and I would just spend it doing that. And I will just go through all those tabs and do the whole thing.

A lot of people don't like that. The flip side of that, a weakness for me is I'm not as good at compartmentalizing. So if I had that same eight hour day, but it was split up on like six different meetings, I don't, I don't like that. I don't, I'm not good at the task switching between each one. It's too much. My mind feels really scattered. But if I can lock in and just do one task for the whole time, that feels great.

So my approach to learning is usually something like that. Let me, let me get a really broad data set and just read super widely. And then I'm just going to try to identify the most meaningful piece in each one and gradually like collect that into one area. I don't know if it was you that told me this or somebody else, but you had went through Amazon reviews for all these books as well. That was another big piece. So I went through, you know, I am not the first person to write about habits, right?

And I won't be the last. And so I looked at some of the books that had come out before me. power of habits, seven habits of highly effective people, you know, books like this that are already been written on habits. And I went to the three star reviews on Amazon. One star review, everybody hates it, often for some stupid reason, like the book showed up and it was dirty on the dust jacket or whatever. Five star review, everybody loves it. But the three star reviews or the four star reviews, those are pretty useful. You know, it's usually a person who liked the book, but they had some complaint about it. And so I would look at all these different reviews, not just for those two books,

but other ones as well. And I was just trying to map the like habits book universe. What have what has already been written? What do people like about what's been written and what feels like it's missing? And the primary thing that came up is these books are really good at explaining habits or they help me understand them, but I still am left wondering, how do I apply it? And so once I saw that enough times, I thought, all right, I can be the practical guy. You know, I can be the one who translates this and makes habits actionable.

And so my little objective was I'm going to try to write the most useful, actionable guide on building good habits and bringing bad ones that's ever been written. And I don't know that I actually achieve that or not, but that was the objective, right? It's back to what we talked about earlier. If you don't strive for that, you're never going to just stumble into that outcome. You know, you're not going to be like, well, I just decided to write a book. And it turns out it was the most actionable whenever. You know, like it's not you need to actually try to reach for that. And so I decided that that was one project where I was going to do that.

And research methods like looking at those reviews is one way to try to accomplish that. You don't get out of bed and become Michael Jordan, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, so it's like the classic, like, I don't want to work out too much because I don't want to look like a bodybuilder. And you're like, you know, I'm like, I've been trying to look like a bodybuilder 15 years. I still am not there yet. You know, it takes a long time.

You need a lot of effort. How do you think about prioritization? A lot of it comes back to what we talked about earlier, about can I find things that have tailwinds, that have leverage, that accumulate, that feed each other. And so if I find something that checks a lot of those boxes, that feels pretty high priority. I have this new thing I've been trying, which is I bought a bunch of wooden clothes pins, you know, the little, like, and they're like kind of flat on one side so you can write on them. And I hung a string from my office ceiling. and on so I got like 50 of these and on each clothespin so I wrote each of my kids names on one and then I wrote working out on another one and then I have all these projects that I want to do

you know I've got I've got stuff that makes sense that you would want to do like you know writing another book or things that you would expect and then I got like totally other stuff like a film idea that I would like or like some idea for a music label or you know things that are like outside of my normal focus but try to write all these ideas down and then I put like a red line across the string and the question is what earns its way above the line obviously my kids are going to go above it obviously working out is going to go above it but i haven't increased what feels like i have every year especially with each additional kid you add it feels like you have fewer and fewer hours right um and so the time is precious and so i look at the rest of these projects

and i say is this good enough to earn its way above the line and um i need that visual reminder One of the, there are a lot of things in life that are like this, but one of the challenging things about the really important stuff in life is that they're endless battles. You know, if you do a good job focusing today and prioritizing today, you pick the right thing to focus on, it earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. Tomorrow you show up and if you spend all that time on YouTube or getting distracted or whatever, like that day is gone. And so other things are like that too.

Like just because you worked out two weeks ago doesn't mean you don't. need to do it today. You know, just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for today. You still need to show up for them. And so I'm trying to get comfortable with that endless nature of those things. A lot of the time we try to resist the endless nature with that stuff. Oh, I wish it wasn't that way. We want it. We try to convince ourselves that it's like a finish line. Oh, if I just do this 21 day cleanse, then I'll be a healthy person and I won't have to think about it anymore. Yeah. You know, oh, if I just, you know, buy her something nice for her anniversary, then I can like stop worrying about it and I don't have to, you know, it's like, no, it's not

like that. It's, you know, it's endless. And as soon as you accept the endless nature, then you start looking at it differently. You say, okay, it's not about getting to a particular finish line. It's about living a daily life that feels sustainable and that I like and that I'm fully engaged in. So it's about liking my days. So I use all of that lens as I look at this string and ask myself, which clothes pins get to go above the line. And that's one way to prioritize it. And I find that having the visual marker

helps remind me the next day when I forgot that I just did that exercise and I feel like getting pulled into, you know, the next shiny thing. I love that because it visualizes what so many of us are dealing with. One of the really key pieces of building a habit then getting it to stick is finding ways to visualize your progress. So if you look at technology, that are really good at building habits. They're great at visualization. You're playing a video game. You have a score in the top corner of the screen.

It's increasing all the time as you go through the level. Every time you pick up a weapon or a ruby or a gem or whatever, there's a little jingle or a chime. There's some kind of power up. Even the pitter, patter of footsteps as you run through the level is a signal that you're progressing. So you have all these signals of progress, visual, audio, like it's very, the feedback is immediate.

And if you compare that experience of just like playing this level for 15 minutes to what it's like to sit down and try to write a blog post or record a podcast interview or do anything in the normal world is very different. The feedback comes much slower in real life. You know, my parents, they like to swim. And, you know, one of the challenges of swimming is your body looks exactly the same when you get out of the waters that did when you jumped in. If they're doing it for the visual results, I mean, it takes two years for your body to change in the mirror. And so they have a little habit tracker where they just put an X down. for each day they do their workout.

And then at the end of the month, they count up how many workouts they did and compare that to the month before. And putting that X down at the end of the workout is like such a small little thing. But it's one little visual signal that we showed up and we did the right thing today, you know, that I did what I was supposed to do. It's a way of visualizing your progress. And so finding ways to visualize your progress as you go through your habits is important because a hallmark of almost any compounding process is that the greatest returns are delayed.

You know, it's not till later that you get to the hockey stick portion. So in the moment right now, you do the right thing and you feel like I have nothing to show for it. So finding ways to visualize that can be helpful for getting habits to stick. We always end with the same question, which is, what is success for you? I think the short version is success is having power over my days. That's, you know, if I have the freedom and the ability to choose how I'm spending my days, that sounds, that sounds great. What more could you want than that? You know, that means I would get to choose to spend time with my kids. If I have kids, before I had kids, it meant I could choose

to travel or to work on projects that I wanted. Um, you know, after my kids are grown, it'll mean that I can choose to dive into new things. Like, you know, what, what more could you want than that than to have control over your time? So I think, uh, to have power over my days is the version for me internally. And then to contribute my little bit to the world around me is the external focus. What does what does success look like on the outside? I think it's adding your little bit to the pile of knowledge for humanity. I mean, one of the one of the great gifts of humankind is that you get to inherit the lessons of the hundred billion people that have come before you. You know, my kids are going to school now and they start 30 years ahead of where I got to start.

You know, all the things we've learned from the last 30 years are going to be taught to them when they go. And that's what helps kick the ball of humanity forward. And so, you know, if I could add just some little bit to that, then I feel like that's definitely a success. I love that. Thank you. This was awesome. This was a great conversation. You bet.

Thanks so much for having me.