The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 110: James Clear – How To Build Habits Using Warren Buffett's 2 List Strategy

Episode Date: March 27, 2016

Episode 110: James Clear – How To Habits Using Warren Buffett’s 2 List Strategy James Clear is a leader who has researched and learned how the best leaders in the world form fantastic habits.  On this episode, I was inspired to hear how James has made it his life’s work to study leaders who have sustained excellence and then has shared what he’s found with the world.  I particularly enjoyed the part of our conversation where we discussed the specific ways all of us can implement and form great habits in our lives. James Clear studies successful people across a wide range of disciplines — entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and more — to uncover the habits and routines that make these people the best at what they do. Then, he shares what he learns in his popular email newsletter. James teaches others to: Use small habits to multiply your mental and physical performance by 10x.  Beat procrastination and shave wasted hours off your workweek. Overcome their inner fears and actually follow through on what they set out to do. Episode 110: James Clear – How To Build Habits Using Warren Buffett’s 2 List Strategy Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show “Stop Trying To Manage Time… Instead Manage Your Energy” In This Episode, You Will Learn: Having an ability to focus and ruthlessly eliminate all unnecessary things leads to sustained excellence It’s an exercise in getting started… Find a way to get started The 2 minute rule – Initially start with the tasks that take only 2 minutes The science behind habit forming Habits take an average of 66 days to form The science of habit forming needs to be a small, but permanent lifestyle change The Compound Effect and getting 1% better everyday The Warren Buffett 2 list exercise The four burners theory – Family, Friends, Work, Healthy The aggregation of marginal gains Being a learning leader means reading and constantly striving to improve  “The Friction In Most Habits Is At The Beginning.  You Must Get Started.” Continue Learning: Go To: JamesClear.com    See why over 75K people follow James on Twitter: @james_clear Read: Getting Things Done To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector W/ Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 082: Dan Pink – The Science of Motivation, Legendary Writer & Ted Talk Episode 086: Seth Godin – How To Become Indispensable & Build Your Tribe Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing James Clear on the show, please don’t hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell Bio From JamesClear.com James Clear studies successful people across a wide range of disciplines — entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and more — to uncover the habits and routines that make these people the best at what they do. Then, he shares what he learns in his popular email newsletter. James teaches others to: Use small habits to multiply your mental and physical performance by 10x.  Beat procrastination and shave wasted hours off your workweek. Overcome their inner fears and actually follow through on what they set out to do.

The friction around most habits is at the beginning, not at the end, not the whole scope of the habit. It's like getting started on the habit. And if you think about the amount of motivation that it takes to do something, often the motivation it takes is much higher in the beginning as starting the behavior. The hard part is getting your running shoes on and getting out the door. Once you start running, I mean, if you're like, okay, I get home from work and I want to do a three-mile run, well, all the friction associated with that is getting the shoes on and getting out the door and starting the run. Once you're a mile in, how much motivation do you really need?

You've already overcome the hard part. You're like, I'm already a mile out here. I might as well finish this run. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey, guys, remember episode, Number 97 with Alejandro Chayin. He is the CEO of Maat and Bao. We both promise to continue our dialogue as we both progressed on our journeys.

And we certainly have, just as I have, with the great people at Mizan and Maine. And Alejandro and his company have decided to sponsor the Learning Leader Show. This episode is brought to you by Moten Bao. I told the story on that episode of why I absolutely love their ridiculously comfortable, handcrafted premium jeans. Also, no ugly back pocket embroidery or weird stitching, just simple, elegant, great-looking jeans. And Motten Bough has a free try-on program.

You get two sizes to try at home with every purchase. Keep the one that fits and send the other one back for free. These jeans are already priced undermarket because they cut out all the retail markups. But the deal is even better when you go to Mottenbow.com. and use promo code Ryan Hawk for 20% off. That's M-O-T-T-A-N-D-B-O-W.com promo code Ryan Hawk. Hey, and welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk.

So thrilled with tonight's featured leaders with the great James Clear. James studies successful people across the wide range of disciplines, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and more to uncover the habits and routines that make these people the best at what they do. He's got a massive following online where he writes at jamesclear.com. A few of the things we got to during this really interesting conversation. How many days does it take to form a new habit? The science-backed research that James discusses during our conversation was fascinating.

Hint, it is not 21 days. And then as a society, we have this disease of always being busy. However, the really skillful, the people that have accomplished, big things in their lives have figured out how to say no to the non-essential task. I love to hearing James explain how we all can do this. And then the aggregation of marginal gains, how getting 1% better every day over the course of a year, will result in you being 37 times better than you were 365 days prior to beginning. A fascinating look at habit forming and high performance.

Ladies and gentlemen, I love this one with the great James. James Clear. James, man, I'm so pumped to have you here in a learning leader show. To get this one kicked off, I got a quick question around common characteristics of people who have sustained excellence. You've studied and spent time around a lot of those people. You certainly are one of those people. I'm curious, what are some of the common characteristics you found that those people all seem to share? Yeah.

Hey, Ryan. Thanks for having me, man. So the first thing is focus. You know, no one has become an expert in a field that they just spend cursory amounts of interest in or just like occasionally dip their toes into. So you have to be focused and ruthlessly eliminate the things that are a good use of your time. So you can dedicate yourself to things that are great uses of time. And I think that often that, like that phrase makes sense to people. But when it comes time to make that decision on a day-to-day basis, it's very hard to do.

So that's the first thing is choosing one or two things that are going to be like your anchor tasks that the whole rest of the day is going to be organized around. You know, like as an example, I had a really serious injury late in my high school career. I got hit in the face of the baseball bat and had to get air care to the hospital and couldn't breathe on my own and, you know, have this whole like I couldn't drive a car for the next eight months. And it was a very long road to recovery. So I was a baseball player and I couldn't play. for the next year. And then that was my junior year. So there was like, you know, basically no recruiting options for college since that's a big

recruiting year. So moral of the story is I went to the small Division III school for undergrad. And four years later, after slowly working my way back and getting better each year, I ended up being an academic All-American. But during those four or five years, baseball was the thing. It was the anchor task that I organized all the rest of my day around. Now, you know, I still did fine in school. and focused on relationships and stuff like that.

It wasn't like the rest of my life was on pause, but if there came a time where I had to decide between something and baseball, I chose baseball. And that's just one example there from the field of sports. Now, you know, I've been running my own business for six years. And so a lot of the time, if I have to make a decision between working on an article and staying up late and finishing that or watching a basketball game on TV that I want to see, I choose to write the article.

And there are hundreds of decisions like that that we face each day. And people who achieve some level of success in a particular field, it often comes down to having that focus where they have that one anchor task that drives the rest of their decision making. Are there a few people that immediately come to mind when you think of sustained excellence and focus? Yeah, I mean, it depends on what you're into, but there are all sorts of folks that, you know, produce work on a very prolific basis. So, you know, I spend a lot of my time as a writer, so I think about writers a lot. Seth Godin has done an incredible job where he's written an article every day for the last like eight or ten years. Yeah, I think it's 11 years. Yeah, we talked about it.

Yeah. You know, so it's just a very, that level of consistency is very rare. And I would say, you know, so focus is obviously the main thing I'm talking about here. But there's something else that goes into that whole conversation, which is the environment that surrounds you. and a lot of the time, people who are very successful in a particular field have their environment working for them. Sometimes they realize that. Sometimes they don't. You know, like, occasionally you'll hear people talk about professional athletes or Olympians and be like,

oh, they have this amazing work ethic and willpower and motivation. And that's true in a lot of ways. But they also live in an environment where everything around them is designed to improve those characteristics. You know, they have access to great coaches. they have access to great resources and facilities. They're surrounded by other teammates who are also motivated. So taking the average person and putting them into an environment like that, immediately your focus and willpower increases because of all these positive forces and stimuli

that you're surrounded by. Compare that to the average person who goes to work and comes home and sits on their couch and they're like, oh, I just wish I could work out more. I just feel exhausted after I get home from work. Well, if you look at most of the stimuli that they're surrounded by, they go into a room, like the living room in most houses where all the couches and chairs face the television. So, like, what is that room designed to get you to do? And they're surrounded by food that's a relatively negative influence or just isn't that healthy. They constantly have either music on or television running or all sorts of distractions on their phone or iPad or whatever.

So if you're trying to fight all of those stimuli in your environment to get your running shoes on and step out the door to get a workout in, it's much harder to do it there than to do it in a scenario where you're surrounded by all these positive influences and you have coaches urging you on and stuff. So if you're finding yourself struggling to do what I mentioned as the first idea, as finding focus and dedicating yourself to the thing that you say is important to you and ruthlessly eliminating all the distractions, if you find it hard to do that, it can often be an environment. issue that's preventing you from doing that. So if you can structure the environment in a way that makes the good behaviors easier and the bad behaviors harder, you'll find that that focus and motivation and willpower is much more readily available when you find yourself in the right environment. What are practical ways people could do that? I'm thinking of the 37-year-old guy with three kids, a mortgage, two cars, a job where he gets home between 530 and 630 every night. He's very tired, but he has responsibilities. What are some ways he could make his environment more conducive to focus to what maybe Kyle Newport would say is deep work.

You know, like getting rid of the non-essential, how could that person that's particularly probably listening to this right now could practically and tactically do those things? Yeah. So I'll say two things. The first one, and that both of them kind of revolve around this idea that for any behavior, So like let's say you're trying to, you know, you're the 37-year-old dad is coming home and you want to, I don't know, find a way to work out after afterward, but you got all this other stuff going on. Really, habits and any type of consistent long-term behavior is just an exercise in getting started over and over again. You know, if you can get started on it and do it today, all right, great, you can do it once?

A lot of people can do something once? Can you get started and do it again tomorrow or next week or whatever? And if you have the ability to get started, to start the task over and over again to sit down with the computer, and start writing over and over again, for example, then all of a sudden it becomes a habit. It becomes a part of your lifestyle. So the point that I'm trying to make here is that the friction around most habits is at the beginning, not at the end, not the whole scope of the habit. It's like getting started on the habit.

And if you think about the amount of motivation that it takes to do something, often the motivation it takes is much higher in the beginning as starting the behavior. The hard part is getting your running shoes on and getting out the door. once you start running, I mean, if you're like, okay, I get home from work and I want to do a three-mile run, well, all the friction associated with that is getting the shoes on and getting out the door and starting the run. Once you're a mile in, how much motivation do you really need? You've already overcome the hard part. You're like, I'm already a mile out here.

I might as well finish this run. So the motivation is much higher in the beginning. Given that, the practical strategy is what I would call the two-minute rule. David Allen is a productivity guru. He wrote getting things done. Yeah. And so anyway, he's got this little two-minute rule for productivity where he says, if something takes less than two minutes, do it right away.

So, you know, the phone call that you've put off or sending that email or throwing the dishes in the dishwasher or doing the laundry or whatever, if it takes less than two minutes to get it done, just do it right away. Well, I think you can take that same philosophy and apply it to habits and better behaviors. So pretty much any habit or routine that you're trying to build is going to take longer than two minutes. Most of the things that we have is goals for ourselves or goals for our long-term behavior. They take longer than two minutes to do. But all of them can be started in less than two minutes. So if you get home from work and you're exhausted and you're thinking about that three-mile run,

and that seems too big in scope, oh, I don't want to spend 45 minutes and don't have enough energy to do that. You know, there's all these things that cause us to pause. instead, focus only on the first two minutes of the behavior. And as long as you do the first two minutes, you've succeeded. So fill up the water bottle, put your running shorts on, get your shoes on, and step out the door and close the door. That's it. You can do that in two minutes. As long as you've done that, as long as you've closed the door, then you're successful.

And it sounds a little bit ridiculous, but how often are you really going to close that door and then not continue the rest of the task? Once all the friction is at the beginning. So once you start the task, then you often find that much. motivation comes after starting, not before. We often think, oh, motivation is this thing I need to do something, but motivation can be a result of active, of taking action, not necessarily the cause of the action. So as long as you put all your energy toward those first two minutes, you find that it's much easier to continue.

So there are a couple things that you can do. The first thing is following this two-minute rule. The second thing that you can do to reduce this friction is to think about, you know, what the causes of that friction are and if you can restructure the behavior to make it easier on yourself. So let me give you an example. My mom, she wanted to start working out more regularly. And so she started going to the local YMCA. She went to the gym. And I was talking to her about it. And what she was kind of complaining about it. She had gone for, you know, two or three weeks. But what she realized was that she didn't like the, one, she didn't like working out in public. She didn't

like working out in front of everybody else in the gym. Two, she didn't like having to get her, remember to get her stuff ready, like just to get her gym bag ready and get her water bottle in there and, you know, all this other stuff before work so that she would, you know, be able to go there afterward. And she didn't like the additional drive to the gym because it was kind of out of her way on the way back from work. She had to, you know, she didn't get to go straight home and just stop on the way. She had to go somewhere else. So those are the three main things that she didn't like about the process, which is interesting, right? Because none of those are really like the actual exercise. It's not like she didn't like.

exercise. She just didn't like all this other stuff associated with it. So there were a couple things you could do here. In a different situation, let's say you could find a gym on the way to work or on the way home from work. That's one thing that's really important for reducing friction is how can you insert the new habit so that it's in the flow of what you already do? You make it easier for yourself to follow through because you're inserting it into a place that's already present in your life. Here's another example. Say you want to start meditating. So you could develop a list of all the things that you do each day without fail. Like I wake up, I take a shower, I brush my teeth, I put my shoes on, I make my morning

cup of coffee, I drive to work. All these just list out all the things that you do each day without fail, just part of your normal routine. Well, if you wanted to start meditating, you could pick one. So you make that list and then you look at that list and pick one that is a good habit where you could insert the meditation into the flow. So, for example, when I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds. So you found a spot in your day where you can find the flow that's already happening in your daily life and then insert that new habit in where it makes sense. All right, so you could do that with the gym.

But my mom didn't want to do that because that didn't solve the other problems, which were that she didn't like getting her gym bag ready and she didn't like working out in public. So instead, what she did was she just got some home workout like yoga DVDs and stuff. And she started watching those. She would go to work. She would drive straight home from work like normal, so she didn't have to drive out of the way. She didn't have to get a gym bag ready because she was already at home. And she didn't have to work out in front of other people. And what she found was it was way easier for her to stick to that habit because she removed the points of friction associated with starting the behavior.

So the second piece here, if the first piece of the two-minute rule and making it as easy as possible to start, the second piece is to try to increase your self-awareness and actually list out the things that are causing. causing you to pause on the behaviors that you say are important to you. Really interesting. I think of the getting started part when it comes to writing as well. A lot of us have pulled off that blank sheet of paper, so to speak, if it's on your computer or you're sitting in front of it. And once, I know for me, I don't know if it's like this for you, once I get started on whatever it is I'm writing about, it seems to then flow.

But getting started part can be really tough. or you write that first sentence, you're like, ah, and then you erase the whole thing, and you start over. And then you, you know what I mean? And once I get past like that first couple of sentences, like you said, the first two minutes probably of the writing, then it's like I'm in my flow state. Oh, man, I've had, I mean, the biggest thing for me on whether or not I get an article done is if I decided the topic that I would write about before I sit down.

Because if I sit down, I don't know what I'm going to write about and I just have that blank page, then I can spend, I mean, I've spent three hours just trying to decide what I'm going to write about. But yeah, that's the common Hemingway advice is that you should always stop writing in the middle of a sentence so that when you sit back down, you just finish that sentence and you continue writing. You're never staring at a blank page. Yeah, absolutely. James, I want to talk about habits. And I think there's a common myth out there that it takes roughly 21 days to create a new habit. And I've obviously studied your writing. So I've researched it through you and through others about what it takes to create and kind of form habits.

Can you share some of the science behind habit forming? Sure. So there was a research study done at University of College London that looked at this very question, how long does it take to build a new habit? But before I get into the research findings, I want to make a distinction. And that distinction is that when we have conversations like this, like how long does it take to build a new habit? Is it 21 days?

Is it 30 days? Is it something else? You know, those are the two numbers you hear thrown out mostly. I think the tone of the conversation or the angle of the question is off a little bit in that we, when we think about habits that way, we're thinking about them as like a finish line. Like, let me just do this for 21 days and then the habit will be done. Let me do this for 30 days and then I'll have cross the finish line and it'll be built, you know. Let me work out for 30 days and then I'll be a healthy person. And in truth, what we actually need to be thinking about it as is something much different, which is a small but permanent lifestyle change.

Rather than a life-changing result that we're hoping to get, like lose 30 pounds in the next six months or learn a new language or earn six figures this year, rather than thinking about that, think about making the process, like going to the gym or making sales calls each day or studying a new language, making the process that piece that's going to be a permanent part of your lifestyle. rather than the result and the finish line is something you want to cross. And so what the research study found was that habits take on average about 66 days for a new habit to stick. But even that number is not as useful because there's a very wide range. So small habits like drinking a glass of water at lunch, those only took 18, 21 days, 24 days, you know, something small. Whereas more complex habits like going for a run every day after work could take up to 250 days, which is like seven or eight months. So I think the point or the takeaway that we should have is if you're trying to build a new behavior into your life, it's going to take months for it to become automatic or for it to become easier for you to do. This is actually, here's a definition of what a habit is that I really like.

A habit is when it is painful to not do something. so it's more painful to not do it than to do it. That's when you know it's become a habit. So, you know, and you can think about that very easily if you think about bad habits, right? Like trying to resist the urge to smoke a cigarette or something. Well, yeah, that's painful for the person because it's a habit for them. But think about that with regards to good habits as well. Once you develop the habit of writing, it actually creates some kind of pain in your life to not do it,

whether it's the, you know, you get the sense of satisfaction and well-being from publishing an article and you feel that, you know, you feel like your life is missing something when you don't have that. Or I know for me, if I don't go to the gym, then I can, I actually feel like more scattered and feel like I have some, I don't know, like my life isn't quite in line or I'm not quite as optimal as I could be. So anyway, that, but that basic idea that it will take months to adopt these lifestyle changes and for them to stick and become more automatic for you, I think is the right way to approach building a new behavior or the right way to set the expectations for yourself. I know you're feeling on the gym thing.

My personal, it's part of my morning routine every day is one of the things I have to do is move my body in addition to drinking a lot of water, writing, reading, listening to some form of educational podcasts and then moving my body in a workout way is, is, and if I don't do that, that's become such a habit to me. The day just, it's not as good. And so I'm curious to hear from you, I would imagine that routine plays a big role in forming habits because it can be painful, maybe not to do it, as you just mentioned, which I love that definition when it's painful to not do it.

Because I know I'm the same way when it comes to working out. It's like, you could ask my wife about it. It's just, I'm just not the same guy. What is your morning routine? Well, so first of all, on this topic here. that when you work out, your day's team seems to be better. I think it's actually an important distinction to make because a lot of the time when we think about habits, it can be easy to overwhelm yourself and be like, oh, I need to make all these changes

or I have so many things that I want to achieve. How do I know which one to start on or whatever? And my suggestion would be the best place to start is with what researchers would call like a keystone habit or you can think about it like a domino effect. And so these are habits that have a positive cascading effect throughout your life. So for me, and it sounds like for you as well, weightlifting is my my keystone habit. So if I work out, yes, I get the benefit of physical exercise. But I also tend to have that post-workout high, that period of really clear focus afterward. I eat better when I work out,

which is weird because you would think, you know, you'd make excuses and be like, oh, you can have a donut or whatever. But if I don't work out, that's when I eat poorly. It's like that's same way, man. This is weird. So I eat better. I sleep better at night because I'm tired from the workout, which means I wake up the next day with better energy. Now, at no point was I trying to build better sleep habits or better energy habits or better nutrition habits or more focus. They all just came as a natural side effect of doing that one keystone habit of working out. And here, there are a variety of keystone habits. So weightlifting or exercise is a common one.

Walking is a really common one. You'll hear a lot of creatives, artists and writers talk about if they get their daily walk-in. then, you know, their creativity is much higher and they feel much better. Meditation is a really common one you hear CEOs talk about. So if they get their 10 minutes of meditation in each morning, then they can handle the stress of the day and so on. And then visualization is another one that you'll hear performers talk about a fair amount, you know. So I know like Kevin Garnett, the basketball players, has talked about visualization multiple times. Now he visualizes for each game.

Comedians will often talk about how they visualize their performance. before they step out on a stage. So those are some examples. If you're trying to figure out what your keystone habit is for you, my suggestion would just be think about what do you do on days when you're at your best? What do you do at days when you feel fully optimized and like you're kind of capitalizing on your potential? And you can list out all the things and you'll probably notice a few patterns in there, maybe two or three things that show up consistently.

And just try one or two of those. That's probably your keystone habit is somewhere in there. So with that in mind, you asked about my morning routine, I find that I have, the big shift for me came a couple years ago when I stopped trying to manage my time as much as I manage my energy. And so that helped me organize my day a little bit more, a little bit more effectively. So in the morning, I have a large creative block where pretty much all that I do is writing or creative or strategic work. The one exception is Fridays where I'll do some different stuff and like review the business and, you know, maybe I'll do some calls earlier in the day than I usually would. But typically from like 8 a.m. to noon is a creative block. I might stop for lunch.

I might work through lunch just kind of depending on what the day is like. Then in the afternoon, that's when I actually open up my email inbox for the first time. So that doesn't work for everyone. But if you can do that, it's a huge win because for a lot of people, email is. is emails where everyone else tells you what their emergencies are, and then suddenly you have to put out all those fires. So you spend your whole time responding to other people's agenda rather than your own agenda. So I try to put that off as long as possible. So between like 1 and 3 p.m., that's usually when I handle email or do repetitive tasks, social media stuff, administrative stuff for the business, calls.

And then from 3 to 4 p.m. each day is when I schedule a call. and that actually has been a really interesting, there's a reason why I do that, and it's because I can't stop myself. So I really enjoy the work I do. And if I don't have a reason to stop working at three, then I'll just continue working until 4 or 430 or 530. And I want to be in the gym by that time.

And so by scheduling a call from 3 to 4, I force myself to stop work because I have to stop for the call. And then the call gets over at 4. And then I'm like, oh, okay, well, I'm not in the middle of something. things. Let me just go ahead and wrap up the day and get, you know, get my stuff and go to the gym. So then I work out usually 430 to 630, somewhere in that range, depending on when I happen to leave the house. And then the reason that I do that I work out then is that I experimented with a couple different times. And this comes back to this concept of managing energy. I worked out

early in the morning. I tried mid-morning, like 11 or something like that. And then I did, you know, like kind of late afternoon or early evening. And I found that my best workouts were during that time. So that's just kind of when I stack it is between 430 and 630. Then I come back and cook dinner and then read at night or hang out with my wife or whatever. And the structuring my day that way has taken a little bit of the pressure off of me to try to stick to like time blocks because that's not necessarily a skill of mine is compartmentalizing and doing something from 830, 930, 930, 1030 and rotating like that. In order to do, you mentioned Cal Newport and deep work, this idea of deep work. I try to get myself large time blocks to sit and think and read and try to, you know, think intensively about what I'm writing about.

And so that large block in the morning is when I get most of that good work done. I'm glad you mentioned that and just ended with that because a lot of people now, because I ask impressive leaders like yourself, what are some of the common characteristics of people who sustain excellence? And what you just said there, building in large time blocks to sit and think. and read and get better. So vital because everyone, the term busy, I mean, how many times you go around and ask somebody how they're doing like, oh, I'm so busy.

But the most successful people in the world, the ones who have done the most, who have accomplished huge tasks over and over and over, they all seem to do what you just said. They block out big times every single day, literally to think, to read, to write,

them improve to maybe innovate or be more creative might be a better way to phrase that. It's really interesting to me. And the people who seem to be busy all the time with back to back to back to back meetings or whatever it may be, those ones usually aren't as impressive to me as far as what they've accomplished as the ones who block out time to sit and think. Yeah. I mean, I think, so first of all, we kind of have this as a society where we have this like disease of busyness basically where we're, it's like if you're not busy, then we've made these

strange associations where if you're busy, then that's good because that means that you're doing something. And if you're doing something and you're busy, you must by default be important. And thus, if you're busy, then that means that you're important or somehow doing something meaningful when that isn't necessarily the case. So I think that the other thing that you mentioned is that like, okay, these successful people, they make these big blocks of time and they you know they give themselves time to sit and think I would say that the skill there is is not necessarily in the work or the thinking or whatever it's in learning to say no or ruthlessly eliminate those things that are good uses of your time so like sometimes I like to talk about you know like people often view themselves like a tree they think oh the natural order of life is for more things to come across your plate the longer that you live the longer you live the more ideas that you'll have the more people that you'll meet the more

more business opportunities you'll be exposed to. Like, it's just natural for things to get added to the pile. The to-do list is going to grow the longer that you live. And we think, oh, I can be like a tree. I'll grow wider and taller and bigger and stronger, and I'll figure out ways to work more effectively. And so I'll be able to take on more and more things. That's how we act a lot of the time.

But in fact, I think we're actually more like a rose bush than we are like a tree, which is that we have some finite amount of time and energy, similar to how a rosebush has a relatively finite scope and scale and size. And in order to fully blossom, we need to prune away some buds so that we can give our full energy to the ones that remain. And for a rosebush, that means you have to prune away buds that could become a flower. Like, there's nothing wrong with them. They're perfectly good. But in order for the few that remain to fully flourish, you have to prune those other ones away.

And in our lives, in your life and my life, we have to prune away things that are perfectly fine, that are good uses of time that we have justification for, but that are preventing us from spending those final hours, those big blocks of time on the tasks that are most important, on the things that we really want to flourish. I think that, you know, I'm actually working on an article right now about how our highest value hours are always the ones that get sacrificed for. first. And what I mean is that if you think about a writer who creates a big block of time of four hours for themselves in the beginning of the day, if they're busy, if they have meetings that come up, if they have people they need to meet, if they have other tasks they need to work on, if they have, I don't know, some new marketing initiative they want to add in to their books or their work, the place that those hours come from is from the big block of time. And so suddenly you only have one hour to write rather than four hours. And those three hours that you gave up,

they can't, it's not possible for them to be three average hours. It has to be the most valuable hours because now since you only have one hour to write, you have to do the fundamentals. You have to do the basic stuff. You got to get the outline done. You got to get words on the paper. You got to get the chapter finished. But you never had the time to sit and think strategically about what you're writing or think deeply about the concepts that you're recovering or to research more that something else that could make your writing unique. Those were the hours that had to go away when you're busy. And so for myself, I try to remind myself that it's not a one-for-one trade-off. If I'm taking a meeting for an hour, I'm not just trading one hour of average work.

I'm actually trading one hour of my highest value work for that meeting. So the cost is actually bigger than we often realize. And once you realize that, I think it makes it a little bit easier. It's still not easy, but a little bit easier to act more like a rose bush than a tree and prune away ruthlessly some of those things that are good uses of time, but not great uses of time. Really interesting. It makes me think of the piece you wrote on Warren Buffett's two-list strategy, which

talks a lot about focus, saying no, eliminating the things that are good for the things that are great. Can you share more about what you learned when studying Warren Buffett's two-list strategy? strategy. Yeah, so a friend of mine met Warren Buffett's private pilot. This guy's name's Mike Flint, and he flies Warren Buffett, but he's also flown multiple U.S. presidents, flown Air Force One, you know, very, very great career as a pilot. And one day he was looking at this new plane that he thought, oh, this is cool. I'd love to be able to fly this at some point. He mentions that to Warren Buffett. He says, hey, next time we get this, you know, we're upgrading our plane, like we

should, you know, I'd love to fly this. And he was like, you know, we're, like, you know, We're not going to be upgrading this plane for 10 years or whatever. So he's like, if you're still working for me in 10 years and I'll have failed you as a boss. So here's what I'd like you to do, Mike. Like, go sit down and write out the 25 things that you want to achieve in your career. And this exercise, by the way, I think you can use this for any timeline. You know, you could use it 25 goals you have for your career, 25 things you want to get done this week, 25 things you want your business to accomplish this year, whatever it is.

So anyway, he writes out his 25 career goals. and Warren Buffett says, great, I want you to circle the top five. So he sits down for a few minutes, spend some time on it, circles top five. And he comes back to him, he says, all right, I got my list. I got my top five circle. And he said, okay, great, what's your strategy for approaching this? And Mike Flynn thought for a second, and he said, well, obviously I have my top five things. So I'm going to focus on those first.

Warren Buffett said, great. What about the others on there? What about items six through 25 on your list? He said, well, you know, I'll do those on nights and weekends or when, you know, when my main project stall, that's when I'll work on those. And he said, Mike, you got it all wrong. Items number six through 25 on your list are your never due under any circumstance list. And the reason that I love that is because the things that have the greatest likelihood of distracting us are things that we have good reasons for doing. I mean, if something is number seven on your list of goals, yeah, you're going to have a lot of good reasons for doing that.

It's going to be easy to talk yourself into that. And often the things that are kind of midway on your list, number seven, number 12, number 14, they have like less fear associated with them, less friction, they require less focus. But they also have plenty of good reasons for doing them. And so we spend all our time working on these things that are good uses of time and never give ourselves the space to work on items one through five. But if you want to do that, if you want to truly excel with items one through five, you have to eliminate items six through 25.

And those can be really hard decisions. You know, there's this theory called the Four Burners Theory. And it's family, friends, work, and health. And the idea is that each one is like a burner on a stove. But you only get to have two burners running at the same time. So you can choose. So today are you going to focus on work and health at the expense of family and friends? Are you going to focus on family and health, but not get much done at work and not get to talk to your friends?

And, you know, whether or not this is perfectly true, I don't think it matters. But it certainly is true that there are tradeoffs in life. And often, we don't want that. We want to be able to run all four burners at once. But if you convince yourself that you can do that, you're just lying to yourself about the tradeoffs that you have to make. Something has to, some burner has to be turned off. And that means you have to say no to those. items six through 25 so that you can make sure that items one through five are things that

you're fully dedicated to or those two or three burners that you really believe in are turned on full blast and yeah that's I don't know the those tradeoffs can be tough but somehow people who perform really really well find a way to to make those tradeoffs love the four burners theory and the Warren Buffett story I appreciate you tell me tell me that James so I normally I would get to this earlier but we got into such great stuff that I didn't but but thinking about you now, so you study successful people across a wide range of disciplines, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and more to uncover the habits and routines that make these people the best at what they do. How did this become your life's work?

Very organically. It wasn't planned at all. I started, well, I've been an entrepreneur for six years, but Jamesclair.com has only been running since November 12, 2012. wealth. So I tried a couple other ideas for the first few years, launched some apps, launched some websites, a bunch of stuff that just totally flopped. I had no idea what I was doing like most entrepreneurs when they get started. But that was a period where I was able to incubate my skill set, so to speak, where I was able to figure out and taught myself how to program, what WordPress was, how to build an email list, how to launch product, how to get people to, you know, why would someone buy something from you? These are all skills that you don't really learn in school. So I spent that

time learning that skill set. Once I did, I knew that what I wanted to write about was about behavioral psychology and habits and performance improvement. I started by writing about health habits a lot more than I do now. I'll probably pick that up at some point and write a lot more about health and fitness habits than I do now. Right now, my focus is more on like peak performance mentally and physically success in general and habits and behavior change.

But yeah, I basically started writing about health habits and it turned out that people were most interested in habits in general. And so I continued to kind of follow that thread. And eventually I found myself here where we are now. Is your primary source of income from then going out and speaking about it? I know you have a book on the way and you're working on that. I read about that. So what's your primary source of making money? Yeah.

So I've been full time as an entrepreneur for all six years. In the beginning, I did a bunch of stuff just to make ends meet freelance work. And I launched a couple little products like after six months or so on my site and stuff. But it wasn't really until about two years in that I actually turned the corner and kind of like started to figure things out a little bit more. You know, I've launched a variety of products. So I have courses on my sites. I call them seminars. So I have like a procrastination seminar, habits seminar, willpower seminar.

Each one of those covers like the science of procrastination. Why we procrastinate? Why our brains fall into this trap? And then what to do about it? Or the science of habits, how habits work and how to approach that. So I usually do about one of those a quarter. I did one a quarter all last year. So those are online courses.

That's one source of revenue. I also do speaking, although I enjoy speaking, but I don't want it to be a big part of my business. I'm happy to do, say, one a month or one every other month, but I don't want to do like 50 speaking gigs a year. So I'm very opportunistic, I guess, in how I approach that. Like, I don't do it often. I also have the book deal, as you mentioned. So Penguin Random House will be publishing my first book that the manuscript is due to them in a few months.

So I should be coming out soon. And then affiliate revenue occasionally. I decided early on that I definitely did not want to do affiliate like courses or product launches or anything like that. But if I write about a book and mention it in an article, then I'll link to the book on Amazon or something like that. So that's a small portion. But those are probably the main revenue streams. Interesting. Okay.

One of the first things that I read about, or read from your work was there's an article about this coach who improved. every tiny thing by 1% coaching a British cycling team. And I'd love for you to expand on this because I love the graph that went along with it. It shows this straight line. And then what happens if you get 1% better every day versus getting 1% worse every day because it compounds on each other? And you can see this beautiful little arrow pointing either as it's arcing up or arcing down depending on, you know, your habits and what you do and focusing on getting

1% better every day. Can you explain more about that aspect and when you wrote that? Yeah. So the basic idea is that these small choices that we make each day can actually have a very significant impact on where we end up. So, you know, you can imagine, you know, take a plane that's leaving New York and flying, you know, south to Miami. for example. Well, if it follows the path directly there, it'll end up there. But if it starts,

you know, say like one degree off to the left, it'll end up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, starts one degree off to the right, end up in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. And it's, it's a very small shift, but it drastically changes where it ends up. So that was the idea that this guy named Dave Brailsford, who you mentioned, had when he came to the British cycling team. So to kind of set the stage, the British cycling team at the time, this is the mid-2000s. They had a very middle of the road record as far as their performance on the world stage goes. So they had won, I think, like a single gold medal in about the last 100 years. They won like 1908 or something.

They had never won a tour to France. So they were very average as far as their performance goes. And they brought Brailsford in and they said, hey, we want to change this. We want to become really competitive. We want to be excellent on the world stage. your plan for doing so. And so he was hires as the performance director. And he said, well, I believe in this concept called the aggregation of marginal gains. And the way that he described it was the 1% improvement in nearly everything that you do. So you can imagine they started with a

bunch of things that you would expect a cycling team to start with. So like they got slightly lighter tires on the bike. They improved it, the seat and made it more ergonomic. They had their riders wear biofeedback sensors so that they could see how each one responds. And they were, to training and then adjust their practice routines accordingly. But then they also did a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't expect a cycling team to do. Like they split-tested different type of massage gels to see which one led to the best recovery for the riders. They taught their riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infection so that they

would stay healthy throughout the season. They figured out the type of pillow that led to the best night's sleep for each rider. And then they brought that pillow on the road with them to hotels when they were competing. So Brailsford said, all right, if we can actually do this, we can execute on all these little 1% changes, I think we can win a Tour de France in five years. He ended up being wrong. They won the Tour de France in three years. And then they repeated again the fourth year with a different rider. And then they also won last year in 2015 with a writer for the third time in four years.

So they've won three of the last tour for Tour de France. And then when he coached the British cyclists at the Olympics in London in 2012, they won 70% of the gold medals available. And so this idea that 1% gains and small improvements don't just make a little bit of a difference or aren't just like improvements that are nice to have or throw on top, but actually can yield significant results in a relatively short period of time. I think that's something that we're not, we don't usually think about. We don't usually accept that. And when you realize that, when you realize that those small changes, those 1% or one degree shifts that could make the difference between being the middle of the pack or winning a gold medal or landing at your destination in Miami versus ending up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, these choices, they surround us all day, every day. Do I eat a slightly healthier meal or a slightly worse meal? Do I spend slightly more time on this article or do I just rush it and spend slightly less time?

I decide to put in an extra hour of studying and repeating my ideas and relearning the things that we went over in class, or do I just mail it in and kind of wing up for the test? Those small decisions, they surround us all the time. And if you find a way to capture a 1% improvement, then it ends up leading to something very significant over the long run. To give you the math on it, if you improve by just 1% each day for 365 days, then you end up 37 times better. at the end of the year than you would otherwise. Meanwhile, if you get 1% worse each day for 365 days, you woulder yourself from 1 all the way almost down to 0.03 or something. So these small choices, they don't even have to be, like you don't even have to do it every day for it to make a meaningful

difference. You know, I may throw that math out there and you might say, oh, well, okay, sure, maybe if you compound every single day, it'll end up to be something significant. But No one's going to get 1% better every day. So, you know, that's not reasonable. Well, that's fine because you don't need to get better every day in order to get much better. For example, if you were able to just maintain, not get any better at all, just do what you normally do for most of the year. But on 70 different days throughout the year, you were able to capture a 1% improvement. Then you would end up twice as good at the end of the year as you are otherwise.

That's all you need is just 70 little instances of a 1% improvement throughout $365. days. So one out of every five days or so, you find a way to get one percent better and you end up twice as good by the end of the year. And I love that story of Brailsford. And once I heard about it, I started to see it in a bunch of other areas as well, like Pat Riley, when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers, during the 1986 season, they were seen as a very good team. They had one of the fastest starts in NBA history. I think they started the season 29 and 5. A bunch of people were saying, oh, this might be one of the greatest teams of all time. And then they just failed throughout the year.

They ended up not even making the NBA finals. So in between the 86 and 87 season, Pat Riley implemented this program that he called Career Best Effort, where he looked at the historical statistics for every guy on the team, what their averages were. And then he challenged them to improve their average performance by just 1% over the course of the season. And so he figured if every guy, like, you know, if Magic Johnson can have 1% more assists and 1% more points and 1% more rebounds and Kareemaddujabar can do the same thing

and all these guys on the team if everybody can do that that we're going to be way better as a team and they assess their performance every night after each game and it ended up working they won the 1987 NBA championship and the 1988 NBA championship they became the first team to become repeat champions in almost 20 years in the league and yeah so this idea that small 1% changes are more than just nice to have They're actually very significant and meaningful to have. That I think is the central idea of those stories. This is great, James.

I have one more question for you before we get rolling. And that's, I mentioned it before we started recording with the purpose behind me doing the show and the fact that I titled it, The Learning Leader Show on purpose for a reason because I love studying the art and science of leadership and consistently learning more and only in measuring yourself versus your previous self and nothing else. So am I better today than I was yesterday? So when you hear the phrase learning leader, what's the first thing that pops into your mind? Reading is probably the first thing.

I mean, Warren Buffett has that great quote where they said, if you could have any superpower, what would it be? And he said, I'd read faster. That would be my superpower. And yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett's business partner, he has a quote as well, something along the lines of, you know, I'm just paraphrasing here. But I don't know any person in any industry who is an excellent. expert that doesn't read all the time, not a single one. So, yeah, I think, you know, I mean,

obviously the phrase learning leads itself to reading, but then also leadership, you know, thought leadership, you need to be aware of the ideas or creative leadership. You need to have a good idea of what is out there so that you can build upon it and, you know, and iterate in your own unique voice in your own unique way. The reading is, I would say, is essential to any leadership effort. Yep, I completely agree. Thanks again, James, for being here. Where would you send everybody to find more about you online. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. If you're interested in seeing more of my work or reading a couple of the articles,

jamesclear.com is the best place to go. If you enjoy the conversation about habits in particular, and you just want kind of some tailored habit information, you can go to jamesclair.com slash habits. And I have a free PDF guide there. I think it's like 45 pages or so. And it summarizes some of what we talked about, but also a lot of,

additional like exercises and activities and just sort of a, it's a good, a good beginner's guide to building habits and kind of implementing behaviors. If you just want the actionable steps to, to take away and don't want to, you know, click around the site and dive into a bunch of different stuff. Perfect.

Thanks again, James, for being here, man. I certainly meet it when I say I want to continue our dialogue as we both progress. It's great to talk to another Ohio guy. And I again, appreciate you being here on the Learning Leader Show.

Awesome. You bet. Thanks so much, Ryan. All right. Thanks, James. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learningleadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show.