The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 248: James Clear LIVE! - How Can We Live Better?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Having the goal had nothing to do with whether or not I achieved that goal. What mattered was the fact that I just decided to not stop lifting for like 10 years. It was the system. I had forgotten about the goal until I saw the piece of paper after it was already done. And I think that that was the lesson I learned was that setting a goal is easy. Anybody can set a goal. And in fact, this is an interesting thing, that winners and losers have the same goals.

Starting point is 00:00:24 Every team that rides in the Tour de France wants to win the Tour de France. It wasn't the goal that change for the British cycling team. It was the system that they had. This special live edition of The Learning Leaders Show is brought to by Bricksey and Meyer. Bricksey and Meyer is an unconventional team of business experts who love to help companies grow. Bricksey and Meyer has the experience you need, whether it's tax consulting, accounting, business strategy, or leadership advisory. Bricksey and Meyer is grounded in the industries that matter to you.

Starting point is 00:00:57 No matter the size of your company, Bricksey and Meyer scaled to give your business the strategic attention it deserves. And Bricksey and Meyer also has something that other firms don't. A unique way of working with you that won't leave you flat. You'll be inspired, invigorated, and engaged in what's next. To learn more, go to brixie and Meyer.com. Welcome to this special edition of The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2. in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world text learners to 4422. Now on tonight's feature leaders with my friend James Clear. James and I recorded this in front of a live audience in Columbus, Ohio. It was so much fun, a really engaged, energetic audience.

Starting point is 00:01:59 A ton of great leaders taking detailed notes throughout this talk. I loved it. I can't wait for the next one already. For those of you who don't know James, he is a master when it comes to human behavior and habit formation. He writes at jamesclear.com. He's got more than 400,000 people subscribe to his email newsletter. He's got a book coming out later this year.

Starting point is 00:02:22 He's all over the place when it comes to media. The New York Times CBS this morning. I just watched some Time magazine Forbes everywhere. James is so thoughtful yet humble. humble and just a quality guy. I got to meet his family and his wife at this event. I just loved it. It was so much fun.

Starting point is 00:02:40 A few of the topics we got into. The aggregation of marginal gains, what it means to get 1% better every day and everything that you do. And then the difference between systems and goals. A great part we got to at the beginning of the talk. Then first principles thinking how Elon Musk uses this to get us to Mars and to create electric cars. cars and how each of us can implement this into our lives and their love of travel and what it means to create moments of voluntary hardship how this helps us get better ladies and gentlemen there's so much here so much more i can't wait for you to listen to this one with my friend

Starting point is 00:03:21 james clear this is what i love to do more than anything else is to speak with really thought-provoking and thoughtful people learn how they've sustained excellence tease that out, ask, I hope, good questions, good follow-up questions. And then my audience hopefully learns along with me. So that's the purpose of us being here tonight. Now, when Tony came to me with this idea, and he said, let's do it in Columbus because we're trying to grow our Columbus market. My first thought was, I really hope James Clear will do it.

Starting point is 00:03:56 I really hope James would be the guy. James and I met about a couple years ago in Ohio, California. We're at a conference called Mastermind Talks. It's a conference for entrepreneurs. I was fortunate enough to get invited. James was as well. And the interesting thing about Mastermind Talks is an invite-only event. A few thousand people apply, and the leader of the event, Jason Gaynard, takes about 150.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Okay. And so we're both fortunate enough to be there. And instead of having somebody up on stage give a speech, it's a lot of peer-to-peer style learning, a lot of roundtables, really. And so they broadcast these roundtables and they say they're not going to be taught by flowing in experts. They're going to be taught by actual members of the conference. People who are here, people like all of you who've come here today. And they give you this brief, like 60 seconds teaser. Each person, Jason, allows them to speak to say, hey, here's why you should come to my roundtable.

Starting point is 00:04:54 And as you can imagine, there's only about five to seven during a session, but they're all happening at the same time. Each person, there's a little bit of ego in a room like that. Each person wants their roundtable to be successful. But it's interesting, James is one of the people leading one of them amongst some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, and all these guys, they get the mic, and they are selling like crazy. Come to my roundtable, come to my roundtable. They want to really broaden their brand.

Starting point is 00:05:20 Well, James gets up, and is very matter of fact, the most modest guy in the place, super humble, and just says, you know, we're going to talk about human behavior, habit formation, and, you know, I'd love to have you come to the roundtable. That was it. I was in because I've been a James Clear fan for a long time. So anyway, I go to his roundtable, and it's like almost as many people here. It was jam-packed, and I talked to Jason Gate already. He said James Clear always has the highest attended roundtable.

Starting point is 00:05:46 And this is with the 150 hand-picked entrepreneurs from all over the world. So I share that story with you to say, when James talks, when James gives a talk, people listen. And that's why I'm so grateful that he is here today with us to share some of his knowledge. He is a master when it comes to human behavior to habit formation. He writes at James Clear.com. He's got 400 plus thousand email subscribers, which is unheard of in this world. He's got a book coming out later this year. Former athlete.

Starting point is 00:06:19 So many great things about James, but I couldn't be more excited. Let's bring up. Please, big round of applause for James Clear. Thank you. So let's get started. So it was about, God, it might be five years ago. I was a regional sales manager at a place called Lexus Nexus. We have some Lexus people in the audience, friends of mine, close friends.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And we're starting a year, and I'm looking for some way to bring motivation, inspiration. And I'm a big fan of the compound effect, which I know you know a lot about. If your behavior can compound day after day, you can build your house kind of brick by brick. And I'm searching online and I found this or a picture that looks a lot like this, right, which we talk about the aggregation of marginal gains. So I love to, I'm not going to steal the story, but I love for you to share the story about you writing about Brailsford and the aggregation of marginal gains to kind of kick us off for everybody here. Sure.

Starting point is 00:07:19 So first, hello everybody. Thanks for having me, man. This is a very nice introduction. Probably too generous. So the story about Dave Brailsford is one that, it's a lesson that many of you will know from your own life, but you may not know how different places are applying it, which I think is what's interesting about it.

Starting point is 00:07:39 So Dave Brailsford is a performance director for Team Sky, which is the British cycling team. So professional cycling team that competes in the Tour de France and so on. And one interesting fact about British cycling is that they were terrible for a very long time. For about 100 years, they won one gold medal in 1908. They never won a Tour to France in the first, like, 105 times that it was held. And so they wanted to change this, and they brought Brailsford

Starting point is 00:08:05 in, and he believed in this concept of the aggregation of marginal gains. And the way that he described it was the 1% improvement in nearly everything that you do. So they started by breaking down cycling into everything that they could think of, like the type of tires that are on the bike, the type of seat the cyclist rode on. They used different racing suits and put them in wind tunnels to see which ones were more aerodynamic. But then they also looked at a bunch things that you wouldn't expect a cycling team to look at. So they hired a surgeon to teach each rider how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infection. They split-tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the best form of muscle recovery. They even figured out the

Starting point is 00:08:44 type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night's sleep for each rider, and then they brought that on the road with them to hotels for major events. And Brailsford said, if we can actually execute on this, right, if we can make all these little 1% changes related to cycling, that I think we can win a tour to France, and I think we can do it within five years. He ended up being wrong that won Tour de France in two years, and then they repeated again in the fourth year, and then after one year off, they've won two more,

Starting point is 00:09:09 so they've won four of the last five now. But it was really at the Olympics in London in 2012, where it kind of fully came circle, because the Tour de France is just one rider, right? So you have one great person, you can win the Tour de France. Obviously, they have a team around them, but you really need one elite player. But at the Olympics, they won 70% of the gold medals available,

Starting point is 00:09:28 And then again, the next round of the Olympics in 2016, they won 60% of the gold mills available. And this idea that tiny 1% changes, they're not just like a little bit, a nice thing to have, a cherry on top of your performance, but actually can make the difference between being mediocre and being the best in the world, I think is a really powerful concept

Starting point is 00:09:50 to understand how compound interest affects us in all areas of life and not just in finance. I think the, I love the story, and I, I love the story, the story and I have used it. And I think what most people think is that's a cool story. Now, how do I apply that to my life in my business? If I'm leading my business or I'm leading just myself, I think a lot about Greg Marath and I have been writing a lot about personal excellence as a leader because you can't necessarily lead anyone else until you can lead yourself. And so I think how do we implement and execute on this aggregation of marginal gains when it comes to

Starting point is 00:10:26 ourselves. Yeah, it's a good question. And there have been a variety of different organizations that have started to do this as well. So the Atlanta Falcons are really big on 1% gains. But 20 years before Brailsford did this, other people were figuring out as well. So there's an interesting story about Los Angeles Lakers and Pat Riley. In 1986, the Lakers started the season 29 and 5. People were talking about how they were the best team of all time in the NBA. They were, until the Golden State Warriors went 26 and 2 or whatever it was a couple years ago, it was the best start an NBA team had ever had to the season. And yet, that team never made the finals. They flamed out in the last half of the year. And this is an interesting thing about talent and high

Starting point is 00:11:05 performance, which is that everybody settles into routines. And if you don't stay vigilant, then those 1% games stop accruing and you start to flatline at a certain level of performance. And that's kind of what happened to this team that was filled with some of the greatest players of all time, Magic Johnson's on that team. So the next year, Riley did something interesting. He came up with what he called this career best effort model, and so he tracked every stat for everybody on the team, and then he came up with a score. So, you know, number points, rebounds, whatever, divided by how many minutes you played.

Starting point is 00:11:38 And let's say that your score for a game was like 8.50. Well, over the course of the year, he asked each player to raise their average by 1%. And if they could do that, then it would be a career best effort year. And, of course, 1987, they win the NBA title, 1988. they become the first team to repeat the NBA championship in over 20 years. So they're back-to-back champs by employing this same kind of 1% philosophy. And the lesson here, and what I think Riley did in the answer to your question, is the way to implement it in your own life is to build a system

Starting point is 00:12:10 so that you're continually reviewing what's going on and staying vigilant about whether or not you're making an improvement each day or not. So you wrote an article recently, or I don't know if it was recently, but I reread it about systems versus goals. Now, when you Google goal setting, I believe your name pops up number two or three normally. And when you Google motivation, I think you pop up one or two. It depends, but yeah. Right, right.

Starting point is 00:12:36 So obviously, Google's kind of a big deal. You figure a way to optimize it. The only reason that's happening is because a lot of people are reading what you produce. So tease this out when it comes to system versus goals and why you say, how do we put a system? into our life as an individual, as a business owner, as a leader, as a team. How do we do this? I think, okay, so everyone here is familiar with goal setting. For most of my life, I thought that's how I needed to achieve some level of higher performance or accomplishment. I would set goals for the grades that I wanted in class, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym,

Starting point is 00:13:11 for how many games we wanted to win on the sports field. Everything was related to some kind of goal. And it was only after doing that for, you know, five or ten years that I looked back, and I actually came across this list of goals that I had written when I was a sophomore in college. And one of them was to bench press 300 pounds, which they just probably like, you've got to be kidding me. But anyway, so that was the goal that I had. And I didn't achieve it, right, at the time. I wanted to do it by the time I was a senior. And I just did it like two years ago.

Starting point is 00:13:47 11 years later, I achieved it. having the goal had nothing to do with whether or not I achieved that goal. What mattered was the fact that I just decided to not stop lifting for like 10 years. It was the system. I had forgotten about the goal until I solved a piece of paper after it was already done. And I think that that was the lesson I learned was that setting a goal is easy. Anybody can set a goal. And in fact, this is an interesting thing, that winners and losers have the same goals.

Starting point is 00:14:13 Every team that rides in the Tour de France wants to win the Tour de France. It wasn't the goal that change for the British cycling team. and it was the system that they had. And so if winners and losers have the same goals, then the goal cannot be the thing that makes the difference in performance. So what is the difference between goals and systems then? Well, the goal is the outcome that you want. The system is the process you follow.

Starting point is 00:14:36 So if you're a basketball coach, your goal might be to win a championship, but your system is what you do to practice each day or how you recruit new players or the things that you do with your assistant coaches to prep for the game. If you're an author, your goal might be to write a best-selling. book, but your system is how you write each week or the way that you research new topics, that type of stuff. And so once you embrace this philosophy of systems over goals, it shifts the focus a little bit. It shifts the focus from what outcome can we get to what identity

Starting point is 00:15:06 can we build. How can I be the type of person who doesn't miss workouts rather than the type of person who loses 20 pounds in the next six months? When it's only about the goal, all you focus on is the outcome. When it's about the system, you can start to focus on becoming that type of person or becoming that type of organization or becoming that type of team. So it's the process, it's the actual behavior that you're thinking about. And we talked a time before, and we're talking about where the friction happens, though, right? The friction typically, and I'll let you kind of dive a little bit deeper, but friction happens at the beginning of trying to change something, right? So, for example, I think an example you used was

Starting point is 00:15:41 putting on your shoes is usually actually to get ready to go for the the run is actually harder than after you've started the run because you've already created momentum. So what about the friction when it comes to this? Well, I mean, this is an actual concept in physics that the coefficient of friction to start pushing like a box across the table is higher than once it gets going. Right. But we're kind of stretching it a little bit to apply it to human behavior here. But I think that it's generally true that it's actually harder to get started on something

Starting point is 00:16:07 than to be in the middle of the work. So it's harder to start running three miles. Once you're a mile out, you're like, well, I'm already out here. I might as well keep going. And so procrastination is interesting because it's actually, procrastination is probably more painful than being in the middle of the work, but you have to wait until the pain gets to a certain point and then you tip over and it's easier after that.

Starting point is 00:16:31 It's more painful than being in the middle, but it's not as painful as getting started. So the key here then is to make starting as easy as possible to reduce friction so that it's easy to get into the behavior. And that's where some of the things, that we've talked about before, like the two-minute rule or things like that. What are those some of the things?

Starting point is 00:16:50 Like actionable things somebody could leave here and say, yeah, James said this, I'm going to do this. Sure. I'm actually going to do this. So I'll make a divergence in the conversation here. So far we've been talking about systems and how they can improve your performance overall. Any system is made up of a number of components of subsystems.

Starting point is 00:17:10 And so each of these things we talk about now is like a component that you can use and implement in the system if you want, to build that. Not every system needs every component. You can just kind of pick and choose like tools in a toolbox. But yeah, so the two-minute rule is one. So if one of the keys is getting started, then you need to make starting as easy as possible. And scaling a behavior down until it can fit within just two minutes is one way to do that. So, you know, do the laundry becomes fold one pair of socks. Or do 30 minutes of yoga becomes take out your yoga mat. Or, you know, there's a moment

Starting point is 00:17:44 each night for my wife, Christy and I, she'll get home from work at like 5.15, and I like to call that like a decisive moment where either we change into our workout clothes and go to the gym, or we like to sit on the couch and order Indian food and watch the office. And both of those are good nights, right? But that moment, those two minutes determine what the next two hours are going to look like. And so I think that the key about the two minute rule is that it allows you to master some of those pivotal moments throughout the day. And this is also one of the powers of building better habits is that your habits act like an entry ramp for your conscious behaviors. So research shows that your habits habitual things you do, tying your shoes, brushing your teeth,

Starting point is 00:18:29 making your morning cup of tea, things that you can do basically without thinking, account for about 40 to 50% of your behaviors each day. That's already a lot, but the actual influence is much greater than that, because your habits act as this entry ramp for the conscious choices. So, like, take the habit of, like, pulling your phone out of your pocket. This is so automatic and non-conscious that we all do it, even if you're in line for three seconds, you can't even handle the boredom and you pull your phone out. But that one automatic choice creates, like, a menu of options. So the next 20 minutes, you're deciding, do I answer email, or do I play a video game,

Starting point is 00:19:04 or do I browse social media or whatever? And it was all set by that one pivotal moment. And so you think you're in control. You think that you're deciding how you're going to spend those 20 minutes, but really you're only deciding within the container of what your habits started. And that's one of the lessons about optimizing, I think, a good day, is there's actually not that much to do. You only need to master maybe five to ten decisive moments throughout the day.

Starting point is 00:19:27 If you master that one moment at 515 and get to the gym, you don't even have to worry about watching too much TV. You can't watch it. You're at the gym, you're working out. You're not even thinking about it. And so the next two hours are easy for you, just because those two minutes were mastered. How do you do this?

Starting point is 00:19:41 How do you put this into play in your life? Well, so I think knowing the idea is just a good start. Yeah. But you can just map out the things that you want to achieve and then try to figure out what are the decisive moments throughout your day. So I can go through mine. There are just a few. Like each morning around like 9 a.m. or so,

Starting point is 00:19:58 there's going to be a moment where I either decide. Do I open up a web browser and check 11 Warriors and look at Ohio State football stuff and read ESPN? or do I start writing the next, do I start writing the next article I'm going to work on? And if I can just master that moment, then the next hour or two is very different. So you'll see those little decision points throughout your day once you start to map out what you do and what you want to work on. And almost always, you can just back through the causal chain of behavior and look at where it starts. So take a common one, like a lot of people want to wake up earlier.

Starting point is 00:20:32 So if you want to be an early riser, well, all right, why do you go to bed late? So you go to bed, or why do you wake up late? You wake up late because you go to bed late. Why do you go to bed late? Well, maybe it's because you have trouble like stopping working because there's always something more to do, so you're always working late. So then you realize, well, the real pivotal two minutes

Starting point is 00:20:47 that I need to master is the end of the workday. If I can just master that and shut off and close my computer, then I can get to bed earlier and then I can wake up earlier. So you just, like, kind of walk back from what you want to get to. Are you, you're talking as a guy who seems incredibly disciplined. Are you taking that for granted here? I mean, I think some people might be listening to saying, this dude just overly disciplined.

Starting point is 00:21:11 I don't know if I'm there yet. Maybe. I think there is a dramatic overestimation and how much I have my own habits dialed in. I think because I write about it and talk about it, people think, wow, his life must just be. But like... Christy's like laughing.

Starting point is 00:21:26 I mean, every week I deal with the same things everybody else deals with, right? Did I get something productive done this week? Was it affected? Did I get to the gym enough? like all of, you know, they're all those same things. I think one thing that I try to do that probably makes it easier. Actually, so I'll say two things.

Starting point is 00:21:44 The first is your question is about discipline and self-control. Do you have the discipline, the motivation, the grit, the willpower? And this is a very common narrative in our society, that what you need to succeed is grit and willpower and motivation. And those things can be important. It's like, it's so deeply embedded into our society that it's even in the story, of Adam and Eve. It's like if you could just have resisted temptation, then you

Starting point is 00:22:09 would have been perfect, right? Then you would have been successful. And I think it permeates all over the place. And those are good qualities, but what research shows is that the people have the greatest self-control are actually not that different biologically than anybody else. The difference

Starting point is 00:22:25 is they aren't exposed to as many temptations. So... The environment. Yeah, it's basically impossible for anybody to stick to positive habits in a negative environment. If you're, you can do it for a while. You can, you know, like, you can resist checking Twitter at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Starting point is 00:22:40 But once it gets to 3 p.m., it's like you've already done it 25 times. So it's really hard to keep that going. And that's one thing that I do think I have going for me and that I try to optimize is I try to reduce the exposure to negative cues in the environment. And so there are multiple examples of this. I don't have my phone on me right now, but I, you know, I don't have any icons on my home screen.

Starting point is 00:23:04 So that makes it as easy as possible for me to not just mindlessly tap Instagram or whatever because I'm not triggered. It's just blank. Right. If you saw James on CBS this morning, you did the same thing. All the hosts said, oh, my God, wow, James. This was like just a couple weeks ago. But yeah, you can do the same thing in your physical environment too, right? You walk into any living room in America.

Starting point is 00:23:24 Where do all the couches and chairs face? They all look at the television. So it's like, well, what does that room designed to get you to do? If you want to watch less TV, you're constantly trying to fight against these non-conscious stimuli. that you should watch television because that's what you're looking at. Yeah. So there are a bunch of things you can do, right? You can unplug your TV so that each time you want to watch it, you have to plug it back in.

Starting point is 00:23:44 So just increase friction a little bit. You could put your TNV in a wall unit and close it behind doors so that you don't see it as often. Maybe you don't get triggers much. If you're really extreme, you could take it off the wall and put it in a closet and only get it out and plug it in when you really want to watch something. It's like if you want to eliminate mindless television, that will do it. But the point is reduce the nature. number of steps between you and the good behaviors and increase the number of steps between you

Starting point is 00:24:08 and the bad behaviors. Making it easier for the good behaviors to happen. The metaphor that I like here is like a garden hose. So if you have a garden hose that's bent, then there are two ways to get more water through it, to be more productive, so to speak. You can either crank up the valve and force more water through the hose, or you can just reduce the bend and let the water flow through naturally. And crank up the valve is the let's get motivated, let's have more willpower, let's be gritty and persevere, and it can work, but it adds tension to your life, and it increases the amount of friction that you're dealing with. Removing the bends in the hose reduces tension in your life and reduces the amount of friction the you have to overcome. How do you get started with this stuff,

Starting point is 00:24:45 man? I mean, like, you built, your parents and Christy were telling me you built your own major in college. You wanted to say, like, I'm not going to follow. Your dad was telling me that you knew you'd be successful, but you also were not going to necessarily follow the path of anybody else. How have you made a life yourself? You've got a huge book deal. I know I probably won't say the amount, but it's a massive amount of money. I know for the book that you just sold that's going to come out hopefully later this year. You built this incredible life.

Starting point is 00:25:15 How did this get started? Bits and pieces, like everybody's story, I think. Steve Jobs has that quote where you can connect the dots looking backwards but not looking forwards. I think I always had little pieces of entrepreneurial ability, but I just didn't know it because I wasn't surrounded by entrepreneurs. So, you know, I don't really have any entrepreneurs of my family. I didn't have any, many close friends that were entrepreneurs. I had one guy who I was friends with in high school as a DJ. But like, you know, like everybody has that, I think. But yeah, so I didn't really know what that looked like. I maybe didn't even have, like,

Starting point is 00:25:50 language for it. But I knew when I got to school that I didn't, I looked at the options for the majors and I wanted something else. So I just decided I found that you could design your own. So I started piecing it together. And I don't know, there were other things along the way, too. Like, I was always hanging out with people who were nerdier and smarter than I was, but they were always starting things, and I always thought that was cool. Like, in fifth grade, we started this robotics club where we would make, it sounds fancy, but it was just Legos, and then, like, a conveyor belt and, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:19 two lines of code on a screen or something. And I didn't know how to do any of that, but I learned it through these guys. And so I think I've always kind of been around some of that stuff, and it just kept pulling the end, and so then I ended up there. I know we haven't talked about this before, but it just made me think of it. One of the themes that I found among the 250 plus people I've interviewed for the show is the fact that they are

Starting point is 00:26:42 constantly putting themselves in environments where you, what you just said, and you kind of just glossed over it, but it's interesting, where they are surrounded by people who are far smarter than them, who stretch them, who I remember, like when we were younger, our parents had us play sports a grade up, right, to force us against better, The same thing.

Starting point is 00:27:00 So when you think about leveling up, and that seems to be a common theme amongst people who are able to sustain excellence, is they're constantly searching out people, places, things to do with others who are going to lift them up, because you are going to be the average of that core people you spend time around. What have you learned from a habits and behavior perspective when it comes of leveling up? Well, I think this is true of many great truths in life, which is that is true, but only in a nuanced way. So if you put yourself in a situation where you're surrounded by people who are way better than you,

Starting point is 00:27:33 and you just fail all the time in comparison to them, that's actually very demotivating. And so I call this the Goldilocks rule, which is not too hard, not too easy, just right. And so one of the most motivating things for the human mind is the challenge of just manageable difficulty. So imagine you're playing tennis and you play against Roger Federer or Serena Williams. It might be cool for a second, but if you're trying to win, it's actually not very fun. after about three points because you're just getting smoked the whole time. Similarly, if you play against a four-year-old, it might be cute for a second, but if you're actually trying to win, it's boring because you're just, you're winning every point.

Starting point is 00:28:09 So what you need is to play against someone who's about it your ability, maybe even just a little bit better, because you have a chance to win, but only if you try really hard. And that, like, gets you into a state of flow. It makes you, you're right on the cusp of the edge of, you're kind of on that razor's edge of your ability. It forces you to be fully engaged, but you all, also aren't trying so hard that you're pushing or stressing or like you're brittle and break. So I think the lesson there is, yes, expose yourself to people who are smarter than you.

Starting point is 00:28:39 But basically always try to be playing the game like maybe just one level up from where you're at. You don't need to jump like, yeah, you don't need to jump five levels at once. And you probably shouldn't because usually there's a lot of wisdom in the level that you're at. Like if you're a chess player, the only way to master chess is first you have to, literally learn the movements of the pieces so well that you can do it automatically. You don't need to be thinking about like what a rook or a castle does because now you're thinking about the game. But you have to habitualize that first. And so I think mastery in any area is the process of mastering one small aspect, one fundamental piece of the puzzle, and then moving on, using that

Starting point is 00:29:20 as a foundation to move on to the next problem, which you then master and internalize, and then repeating that over and over again. And so you're constantly moving on to, to the next challenge of just manageable difficulty, which keeps you motivated, but you're having enough success that you don't get dejected by it. So you were in the audience, I believe, at a Richard Branson speech, is that right? Yeah. I read an article about this, and he had talked about what the key to his success was, and I believe this quote was something on the lines of that he's always started before he was ready.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And so we have a mixture of people here, business owners, leaders, entrepreneurs, a real wide variety of successful people that we've chosen to be here. I'm curious your thoughts on this. What do you mean by, I mean, a lot of us know Richard Branson and everything that he started, and it's obviously worked out. But I think there's a lot of stories of people who want to be like him, and we don't hear about them because it doesn't work out. And there's thousands of them out there.

Starting point is 00:30:17 So what can the average person, right, take from Richard Branson's message of Start Before You're Ready? All right. Well, first I got to tell us Branson's story. I don't know if you want me to do this, but it's hilarious. All right. So it was totally random that I was there. It was this conference in Russia.

Starting point is 00:30:34 I won't tell you the story about how I got there. But anyway, I'm there, and it's a small group listening to him talk, and he tells us the story about how he starts Virgin Airlines. So apparently he was, like, pretty young at the time. He was in his late 20s, so he hadn't been an entrepreneur for that long. But he's on this flight going to some island in the Bahamas, and his flight gets, he's like on a connection and his flight gets canceled. It's the last flight out that night. And I guess he was like going to go meet a woman and he like really wanted to get there. And so he's annoyed by the fact that

Starting point is 00:31:05 his flight gets canceled. So he goes and charters a plane that he doesn't have money to pay for. So I don't know how much this is, but let's say it's like 10 grand or something to charter this flight to the next island. Then he takes a chalkboard because it's like the 1970s and writes Virgin Airlines $29 on it and walks over to all the people who had their flight canceled with him and then sells out the rest of the seats on the chartered flight and then uses their money to pay for the difference between what he could afford and what was left. That's all got started. And on that flight, someone was like, you should start an airline. He was like, yeah, maybe I will. But what I love about that is he literally did start before he feels ready, right? He wasn't an engineer. He knew nothing about

Starting point is 00:31:46 airplanes. He had no reason to start an airline company. But he just did it and figured it out. And I would say, if I could only summarize entrepreneurship in one sentence, it would be that, the trust that you have the ability to figure it out. Because everybody's flying blind. Everyone is just trying to figure it out as they go. And unless you believe that, then you're going to really have a hard time like making it work over the long time. I view you as more of a calculated guy, a more of a measured risk guy. Maybe I'm just speaking about you. And also, I think about how this podcast is built. So a little bit of backstory. I did research in 22 recordings before I launched. I looked at the algorithm in iTunes to understand exactly how I could rate number one,

Starting point is 00:32:26 if I, the exact number to release per day, per week to say, okay, how can, obviously the show's got to be good. But I got to optimize, that took me four and a half, five months. I did not start before I was ready. I was really ready to go. I feel like you're more of a, I could be wrong, more of a measured risk guy. Is Branson just the one-off that we should say, great job? But that's not really realistic for my business or for what I'm trying to do. Well, so first of all, he definitely is some kind of outlier or exception, right?

Starting point is 00:32:55 Maybe it's just luck, who knows. Also, you have to understand everything that he says publicly, which I thought he seemed very genuine, but it is marketing, right? So, like, you've got to, like, couch it in that as well. Sure. But so while you're doing that research process for your podcast, you are figuring it out beforehand, right? Right. Your point about, I did not start before I feel ready, the reason I think that saying is useful is because that is the default for everybody, is that we don't want to step into the unknown. It's weird to feel uncertain. It's not comfortable to try

Starting point is 00:33:27 something new. It's not fun to be the person playing Roger Federer, right? It's not fun to feel like you're losing the game. And so I think it just helps pull you back to center a little bit. Now, if you take that to the extreme and just start doing a bunch of stuff that you're not prepared for, then, yeah, that can definitely be a bad idea. But most people have the opposite problem, I think, which is they want to start a podcast and they're sitting on their couch, or they keep saying they're going to get started on this side business, but then they never do. And so maybe it just nudges them a little bit more toward what would be useful. So one of the common themes amongst leaders, obviously, and business owners is the fact that we have to make,

Starting point is 00:34:03 the most important decisions we'll make, one of the most, is the fact of who we decide to bring into our business, who we decide to hire. There's something probably almost everybody in here is going through or we'll go through at some point. How do you take what you've learned, what you've gathered about human behavior, about habit formation, and put that into this thing we call the interview process to say, I know you just added somebody to your team, so you've kind of done this, and you said it's really helped your business.

Starting point is 00:34:27 But how does the regular business owner, entrepreneur, leader, who's trying to do this take some of what you've learned, the research you've done, and say, okay, I'm going to do a good job here when it comes to adding members to my team? Yeah, good question. I don't know that I'm qualified to be a good answer on this because I intentionally have a small team and only have one full-time employee.

Starting point is 00:34:48 And I can tell you, as I've spent the last year writing this book, I think one of my weaknesses has been being a good manager. Really? Now, she happens to be exceptional, so that makes it very easy on me, and she can figure it out without me being there all the time. So maybe that's the first lesson is, like, hiring great people makes your life a good manager.

Starting point is 00:35:07 How do you do it? I mean, what are some of the questions you asked her when you're going through the process? So I wanted to bring this up earlier, and I think that what's more important than the specific questions that I have, asked is the overall process. So we've talked a lot about habits and systems so far. Habits are one part of the two-piece process that I feel like make are what lead to

Starting point is 00:35:29 successful outcomes. So the other part is decision-making. And decision-making is become increasingly important in modern life because we live in a more leverage society than ever before. And so what I mean by that is you have a lot of options for financial leverage. So you can invest in the stock market or whatever and have compound interest working for you while you're sitting around. You have options for people leverage, which we can call hiring, so you can have people work for you. It's easier than ever to start a business now. Still not easy, but it's easier than it has been. But you also have technology leverage, which is, you know, you can write a bit of code that can run a software program over and over again. You can write a book or create a product

Starting point is 00:36:09 that you don't have to be there to sell over and over again. And because this is how the world is, is becoming more leveraged, making a good initial decision is more crucial than it's ever been before. If you make a good initial decision, it could be very beneficial for your life. If you make a great initial decision, it could be life-changing. If you choose to write the correct book

Starting point is 00:36:28 or build the right piece of software or hire the right person, it can make a really big difference. So decision-making is how you create leverage. Habits are how you capitalize on it. And because the things that you decide to focus on are the ones that you're going to need to build habits around in mangan. to be in and day out.

Starting point is 00:36:47 And so I think the answer to your question about how do I make a good decision, how do I hire the right person, is you cast a really wide net, but you have a very tight filter. And so this is the research process of trying to, like, I, you know, have the benefit of having my email list, but I had over 900 people apply for this role. So very wide net. And then I had a very tight filter. I made them go through, really, truly, it was an insane interview process. Like, I made them do like 40 hours of work.

Starting point is 00:37:13 Like what do they do? They had to do everything from like, tell me how you would optimize the search engine optimization for the site. Look at our Facebook page. Tell me five things that are wrong with the brand and how you would fix them. Take a look at my archives. Pick three articles and tell me which ones are weak and why and how you would fix them. All stuff like that. So it was, yeah, it was a lot of work.

Starting point is 00:37:41 But the benefit of that, so, you know, 900 apps. 500 you can immediately cut out because people like don't even answer the questions or whatever they'll be like see resume it's not going to work so and then the next half you are able to cut down so I went from like 400 to 100 by looking at who had like reasonable skills and then from 100 to 4 based on how many people would do that work and who did it well and then I interviewed the final four in person okay so I want to bounce around a minute because we had lunch and talked about this and I'm not trying to re-orchestrate anything, but you got really animated and emotional about this. So, and I liked it. That's what we try to do here. And I brought up the phrase called,

Starting point is 00:38:25 I'm trying to be unemotional in public. Why? Just reasonable, middle of the road. You're going to, like, go, like, bounce around. Okay, okay. So anyway, you are a big, you're a world traveler, right? You're a big photographer. I know you said you're, the reasons that you travel to other countries are to take pictures and to eat their food, right? And you go all over the world, right? And, but we I wasn't for a long time, though. I never, I hadn't left the country until I was 22. So you had to kind of matured us to, to appreciate this. I guess that's not true. I hadn't left North America. Yeah. Canada. Yeah. But in, in combined with that, we talk about this, this phrase called voluntary hardship. And what I mean by voluntary hardship is, is intentionally putting yourself

Starting point is 00:39:09 in tough situations because you don't fully understand. understand what you're capable of until you've been forced to exercise that muscle. And you've done this, right? And David Goggins is the name. We brought up a guy who's famous about this, who everyone might know, but Navy SEAL who talks a lot about situations that he's put himself in. He's insane. He's intense.

Starting point is 00:39:29 He's intense, right? And you've done some of this, too. So I think I'm curious from your perspective what you've gained from putting yourself in some tough moments, specifically when you're not within the country. Well, I mean, first of all, I think I can be way better about this. But I think a line that I've been thinking about recently is your level of mental toughness can only be as great as the level of challenge in your life. By definition, you only know how mentally tough you are as what you have to face at the time.

Starting point is 00:39:57 So, you know, this is why people say things like, you don't know how brave you are until you have to go through it or, you know, when life throws you a challenge, you realize how strong or courageous you can be. It's because that has to be true. You literally aren't, until you're tested, you don't know if you have that capability. And so the purpose of voluntary hardship, to use your phrase, is to test that every now and then so that you develop the ability to be mentally tough and so that you know that you're capable of it. Because I kind of view mental toughness.

Starting point is 00:40:26 It's like a muscle. It atrophies without use, right? If you just live a life of ease, then you fashion a mind that can only handle ease. So traveling is one way to do that. Now, you can obviously travel in very luxurious ways if you want. But like, I went to Vietnam a little over a year and a half ago. And that was great. Like, there were all kinds of things that were uncomfortable.

Starting point is 00:40:47 I didn't speak the language. There are very few English travelers there. Very few people who I, like, knew to go to. So now I'm going up to strangers to ask for directions. And, like, you know, it's just a constant dose of uncertainty. And I think I've become, maybe this is entrepreneurship. Maybe it's travel. Maybe it's just getting older and, like, a little more seasoned.

Starting point is 00:41:07 But I've started to become more comfortable with uncertainty. me. And because you realize that that's where you grow. It's like your whole, you start your life as a baby and there's very little that is known. Your like circle of what is known is basically a dot. And then as you go through life, you step into the unknown and that circle gradually widens. And so with each experience, you take something that you didn't know about before and then you integrate it into your knowledge. And once you get used to living on that perimeter, it kind of becomes fun to widen that circle, even though it's maybe a little uncomfortable in the moment.

Starting point is 00:41:44 You've written about first principles thinking. So Elon Musk is certainly out in the news, right? He's trying to build a multi-planetary system, live on Mars, electric cars, all this. And Elon's talked a lot about this. You've written a lot about this. So when it comes to the way we think, right? I think that's something, another commonality I found,

Starting point is 00:42:08 is that the people who are sustaining excellence are the most thoughtful people in the world. And that seems like a, I don't know, a basic thing, but actually it's rare. It's more rare than you know this. Probably better anyway, it's more rare. And Elon really takes it to another level when you have as well.

Starting point is 00:42:22 Can you describe first principles thinking and how we could implement that into our lives to make us better? Yeah, so again, this is something I could get much better at. I think it's something I've been studying a lot recently and I find really interesting. But what you find is that this is especially true in business, but it's true in many areas of life. Businesses often imitate and iterate on what

Starting point is 00:42:44 it's, you know, we use different phrases for it. We call it disseminating best practices or best of breed or reverse engineering. But really what it is is you're looking around at who has success right now and then you imitate what they do. And you can find a modest level of success that way, but it's really hard to have breakthrough success like that. To have breakthrough success, you almost always need to break the situation down into its fundamental parts. So that's what first principles are. And then rebuild it by adding in something new or reconstructing it in a new way. So rather than imitating the old form, you think about what the function is,

Starting point is 00:43:23 and then you find a new way to produce that function. So let me give you some examples. For thousands of years, there have been ways to carry things around. So like Roman chariots had, you know, they would carry boxes and rob. and all kinds of stuff, food, whatever, right? The wheel had been around, and so had this idea of a wagon or whatever else. The Romans also had satchels. They had, like, leather bags that messengers would carry on horses.

Starting point is 00:43:49 And at no point from, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, up until 1970-something, did anybody think, let's combine the bag and the wheel? Because that was when the first rolling suitcase was made. And a guy was walking through the airport, and he saw this dude pushing a dog with a bunch of stuff on it, and he's like schlepping his bag through JFK or something. And he was like, this is ridiculous. Why am I doing this? And he finally, so that was where he got the idea. But the point is, take the function that you want to achieve. I need to move my goods as I travel, and then break it down into its fundamental parts. What are different ways to move

Starting point is 00:44:27 goods? We can do it with a bag. We can do it with a box. We could do it whatever. You need some type of container. And then you look at other ways that you can move goods. You can do it on wheels. do it on skids in a boat, whatever. And then, once you have all those pieces laid out before you, you think about, can any of these go together in a new and interesting way? Another classic example, this guy named John Boyd, a very famous fighter pilot.

Starting point is 00:44:49 He called it the snowmobile example, or snowmobiling. So you take a bicycle, a tank, and then a pair of water skis in a boat. And you break them all down into their fundamental parts. You've got the skis. You've got the hull of the boat. You've got the treads on the tank and the turret. and you've got the bicycle wheel and the seat and the handlebars.

Starting point is 00:45:09 And then you take the handlebars and the seat from the bike, the skis from the water ski, and the tread from the tank, and the motor from the boat, and you put them all together and you have a snowmobile. And it's like a tank, a bicycle, and water skis have nothing to do with each other, but by getting to the fundamental parts and asking what the function is that you're trying to achieve, then you can use this first principles thinking. How does it apply to our daily lives? I try to always bring it back to that, right?

Starting point is 00:45:35 How does that apply? Because I love the story and the examples, and then I think immediately, okay, very cool story, like the snowmobile. How can I do that for whatever I'm trying to accomplish? Well, so those were physical examples, but I think you can use it in the way that you work, too, right? So, like, let's take the average work day. You have a team that you're running or a business you're working on, and everybody assumes that meetings are, like, essential.

Starting point is 00:46:00 Well, what if we broke down the constituent parts of what you do and what the function is, and then ask, like, is there a way that we could do all this without having to meet every Wednesday morning or whatever? You save yourself an hour. Same way with all of that stuff, right? You just break it down and then see what's absolutely essential. This is what you brought up Elon Musk, but this is literally how Elon has built Tesla and SpaceX.

Starting point is 00:46:23 People told him that it wasn't possible to build an electric car that looked the way that he wanted for an affordable amount of money, and the bottleneck was always the battery. And so he said, well, what is a battery it made of? It's made of lithium ion. and you know some these different chemicals and it has a container that you put it in and so then he went to the London stock exchange and looked at the price of all those materials and it was costing like you know $200 per kilowatt to make it or whatever and he was like well if you add up all the component parts it's only like 50 bucks to a kilowatt hour so there's a huge gap here of inefficiency he was like clearly all you have to do is buy the fundamental parts and figure out a cheaper way to put them together and he did the same thing with SpaceX as rocket right it was like $60 million and he found way to put it together for I think between like five and seven and then reuse them it's crazy so just really want to want to thank you I know we're coming up against it here

Starting point is 00:47:12 this it flew by for me because I can listen and learn from you all the time and we had lunch and I was uh I called Miranda after my wife and said this is just I got to spend more time around James I learned so much and I've grown from reading your work and from getting to hang out with you and talk to you so I really appreciate it everybody please give a huge ovation for James Thank you. Thanks so much to James Clear for being my guest for our first experience of recording in front of a live audience. I loved it.

Starting point is 00:47:54 The energy in the room was phenomenal, the engagement of the people, these great leaders taking notes, being so engaged. It was incredible. I can't wait for the next one. If you enjoy this one, please write a review, rate the show, and subscribe in iTunes Apple Podcast. write a review, subscribe, and rate the show, hopefully five stars. Thank you so much for being a part of this community. I love doing this and I especially love doing it live. I cannot wait for the next one.

Starting point is 00:48:22 See you guys next week.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 248: James Clear LIVE! - How Can We Live Better?

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