The Rich Roll Podcast - James Clear On Why Habits Are The Compound Interest of Self-Improvement

Episode Date: October 28, 2018

What stands in the way of becoming the person you aspire to be? Maybe it's circumstances. Access or opportunity. For many its bad habits, exacerbated by the unsuccessful war waged to replace them with good habits — a rinse and repeat process that generally leads to failure and discouragement. Why is it so hard to overcome negative patterns? Today's guest contends the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Evolving from stuck and unsatisfied into the person you wish to become is equal parts art and science. Science helps explain the root causes of our behaviors and how to modify them. But the application of said principles into practice is very much an art. Today we explore the often misunderstood terrain of behavior change with author James Clear, a man who has spent the better part of his career attempting to understand and master the art and science of human habit formation and decision-making, A regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies, James’ work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. He has been featured in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Time, and on CBS This Morning. His website jamesclear.com receives millions of visitors each month. Hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular e-mail newsletter. And over 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers have built better habits in life and work via his Habits Academy online program. James recently penned Atomic Habits, a New York Times bestselling deep dive into evidence-based self-improvement. A comprehensive primer on what actually works when it comes to behavior change, it zeroes in on the transformative power of making small changes. Packed with implementable takeaways (including many strategies I have myself employed with great success), it's a must read for anyone looking to take their life to the next level. This is a highly practical conversation that explores the psychology and neuroscience behind behavior change. Specific topics include the problem with goals. We discuss the relationship between overly ambitious goals and failure — why most people make the mistake of optimizing for the finish line when we should instead focus on getting to the starting line. James explains why establishing systems are critical; and why focus should be placed on practice over performance. We also cover why it's important to move beyond temporal, emotional drivers like motivation into practical action. Why you're more likely to act yourself into feeling rather than feel yourself into action. Or, as I like to say, mood follows action. My biggest takeaway from this exchange is James’ compelling dissertation on why we are best served by concentrating on identity. In other words, long-term results are best derived not from achieving the goals we set for ourselves, but instead by slowly adopting and inhabiting the daily practices and characteristics of the person we aspire to become. Powerful and potentially game-changing, this conversation will reframe how you contemplate and act upon your ambitions. So break out the pen and paper and please enjoy Peace + Plants, Rich

Your habits are the way that you embody a particular identity. So every morning that you make your bed, you embody the identity of an organized person, someone who's clean. Every time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Every time you sit down to write, you embody the identity of someone who's a writer. And so in that sense, every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person that you believe that you are. And as you take these actions, you build up evidence of a particular identity. And pretty soon, your beliefs have something to root themselves in. And that, I think, is the true reason why habits are so important.

That's James Clear, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. I think it's fair to say that we all want to live better. This is something everybody aspires to do. So how do we do that? Well, doing so requires overcoming bad habits. But here's the thing, the kicker. Most of us struggle mightily with replacing those bad habits with good habits. And I think a lot of people, despite the very best intentions, end up setting the wrong goals for themselves. And we then go about

employing the wrong strategies to achieve those goals. And it becomes this rinse and repeat process that typically leads to failure, at least long-term, and ultimately leaves us mystified and very much discouraged. But this week's guest would say, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. This process that we undertake of moving from where you are, stuck, unsatisfied, whatever, to where you aspire to be, that person you wish to be and know you can be, it is, in my mind, both very much an art and a science. Science helps explain the root causes of our behaviors and how to modify them, but applying these principles and putting them into practice, well, that is very much an art.

My name is Rich Roll. Yes, that's my God-given name. People always seem to find that curious for some reason. Anyway, I am your host, and today we explore the tricky, fraught terrain of behavior change. And we're going to do that with James Clear. James is an author, a speaker, and an expert on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. James' work is used by teams in the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball.

He has been featured in the New York Times, Entrepreneur Time, and on CBS This Morning. His website, jamesglare.com, receives millions of visitors every month. And from what I understand, hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter, which you can also find at jamesglare.com. In addition, he is the author of a great new book.

It's called Atomic Habits. It's a New York Times bestseller. And it's essentially this extensive deep dive into evidence-based self-improvement strategies that focus on the transformative power of making small changes, small changes, and how to make them, which is something I can say from a lot of experience is super legit. His book is killing it right now. I think it was something like number 13 on Amazon the other day. And it's well-deserved because basically when it comes to habit formation, this guy is the dude. Got a bunch more to say about our conversation particulars before we excavate this fascinating and important terrain.

But first, we're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment.

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I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created

an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health Thank you. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, James Clear. This is a great one. This conversation explores a tremendous amount of terrain. We talk about the psychology and neuroscience behind behavior change. It's about why most people optimize for the finish line when they should be focused on getting to the starting line, which is a really cool discussion. We talk about the problem with goals, why most people set themselves up for failure by creating overly ambitious goals, why establishing systems are critical, and the need to focus on practice over performance. It's about moving beyond motivation

because you're far more likely to act yourself into feeling than to feel yourself into action. Or as I always say, mood follows action. But I think the real gem here is James's dissertation on why we should zero in on identity over everything rather than goals. over everything rather than goals. Because it's a much better long-term practice to inhabit the practices and characteristics of the person we aspire to be. This one is powerful. It's also super practical. And I think it's going to really help you reframe how you think about and act upon your ambitions to become the person you want to be. So break out the pen and paper and please enjoy my conversation with James Clear. The EPS guy literally just showed up like 10 minutes ago.

He's petting the dog and he delivered another copy. So he sent me two. Interesting. All right, well, maybe I had you on the list, and Casey maybe sent you a backup because she knew that this was happening. It's all good. But now you can donate one. Congrats on the book.

Yeah, thanks. You've been through it, so you know. But, yeah, it was, I mean, it took me three years from start to finish, and then it also just, for your first one, there's so much learning that goes into it. Like pretty much every part of the process, I'm flying blind and just I'm learning as I go. So there's that, what's that called?

Hofstetter's law, where it's like, everything takes twice as long as you expect, even if you take this into account. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, certainly with publishing, you're like, oh my God, the timelines on this thing are insane. So it's quite something. It's a huge accomplishment.

The book is great and excited to break it down with you, man. Yeah, cool, thanks. Thanks for coming out here today. I think the best way to launch into it is to define our terms. I mean, let's talk about, before we even get into the nuances of all of this, like, let's just define what a habit is. Sure. So, there are a couple ways to think about it,

but I would say, just quick definition, a habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to be performed more or less automatically. So, you can do it pretty much on autopilot. But another way to think about it, and I think this is a useful way to define a habit, is that as you go through life, you face different problems. And some of those problems are big and some of them are small, like you need to tie your shoes. And whenever you face a problem, your brain starts looking for solutions to that. And as you come across solutions to the recurring problems in life, you start to automate those. And so every morning you wake up and you put your shoes on and you've got this little problem that you need to solve. And pretty soon after you tie your shoes a hundred times or 500 times or a thousand

times, you can do it pretty much without thinking. And so that's another way of thinking about habits is that they're kind of these like automatic solutions we fall into for whatever the recurring problems are we face. Right. Behavior that becomes habituated. Yeah. And the interesting thing about this is you don't necessarily have to have the same habit to solve a recurring problem. If you come home from work each day and you feel stressed and exhausted, one person might play video games for an hour, and that's a way to resolve that problem. So they get in the habit of doing it, and they just walk over to the controller. They don't even think about it.

Another person might go for a run for 20 minutes or meditate for 10 minutes. A third person might smoke a cigarette. And all of those are just solutions to that problem that you're facing. And that, I think, is another powerful lesson is that your original habit is not necessarily the optimal one. And once you realize that, then it kind of becomes your responsibility to become a little more aware of what those habits are and then think about it. Can you shape them or design them? Right. And so a habit is the physical manifestation. It's a behavior, uh, the physical manifestation of, um, your psychological makeup,

your emotional body, and your conscious or unconscious mind, right? Like habits flow from what is already built inside of us on some level, right? So to kind of deconstruct what a habit is, how to change it, what's a good habit, what's a bad habit, how to flow from bad to good, it demands, I would imagine, and you're the expert here, a real analysis of how our brains function. You have to look at psychology, you have to look at neurology, you have to look at

the science and understand the human mechanism in its holistic form. I think that's true. And you bring up a really interesting point and one that I wanted to answer or think about in the book. So in the book, I lay out this four stage model for how habits work. And the reason the second stage is there, it's all about craving and prediction. In other words, you come across a cue or some kind of context and then you interpret it in a certain way. And that's where we're getting to this point that you're just making, which is that the habit only comes after. The habit is the behavior that follows your prediction or your interpretation of how you should act in a given context. And for one person, they might see their couch as the place where they read for an hour

each night. And so their interpretation of that context is I should open up a book for another person. They might see the couches, the place where they turn on Netflix for an hour and eat a bowl of ice cream. And so that's a different interpretation of the same physical cue. And so in that way, habits kind of follow. They're this lagging measure of how you predict you should respond to the different contexts in your life. Yeah. And I like how you couch it in the context of habits being a solution to a problem. They're not the problem themselves necessarily. They're a reflection of what's going on inside of us. They're a solution to whatever emotional state it is. I mean, a habit is a way of adapting to an environment or solving a problem. Yes, I think that's right.

In certain ways, right? Yeah, it's a way of solving a recurring problem. You come over it again and again, and then pretty soon you're falling into that pattern. Right. So a lot has been written about habit change. You know, you go to any bookstore. Sure. Certainly in the airports, there's no shortage of self-help primers on how

to change our behaviors, how to develop healthy, effective habits. And now you're kind of coming into this sphere with a little bit of a different perspective. So maybe it would make sense to kind of canvas conventional wisdom on habit change and perhaps your different take on how we approach this. Sure. So, I mean, I think there are a variety of little insights in the book that are maybe different or just a slightly different angle on the common takes, but I'll just go over some of the big ones real quick. So, there are many different fields I draw it on for the book. And I think that I like to call myself idea agnostic. And what I mean is I don't really care where a good idea comes from, as long as it's a good idea or practical or useful. So neuroscience, biology, psychology,

and so on. But the most common area that people talk about habits in is psychology. And there are kind of two big movements or bodies of research that have happened over the last hundred years. The first was behavioral psychology. And so this started with classical conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs and things like that. And then B.F. Skinner's work with kind of a cue, like a light would go on inside the little case, right? And then the rat would press a lever and then they get a pellet. And so this kind of linking the pellet to the light. And so you have a cue and then a response and then a reward.

And Skinner defined this as stimulus response reward. So once you start to link the cue to the reward, they realized they could shape pretty much any kind of action. And Duhigg's book, Power of Habit, kind of popularized this and brought it back into the modern spotlight, this idea of a cue, routine, and a reward. So that's the first kind of major area.

The second is cognitive psychology. And this kind of took off in like the 50s and 60s and has continued into the modern day. But psychologists started playing with what Skinner put together and realized that, well, it wasn't just the cue and the reward that shaped people's behavior. Also, our thoughts and moods and emotions, our beliefs, kind of our internal states shape behavior too.

And this was a question that I kind of had rolling around in my mind when I started working on Atomic Habits was, well, how come the same person will respond to the same cue in a different way at different times? You know, like if I, um, if I walk into the kitchen and I see a plate of cookies, that's like a visual cue. Uh, and in one case I might be like, Oh, those look good. I should go eat them. But you can just as easily imagine a situation where I just finished eating dinner in the other room and I walk in and I see a plate of cookies and I'm like, oh, I'm stuffed. I don't want to eat anything. So what's going on there? The cue is the same. The reward is the same. Why aren't you taking the same action? And I think it's because of that internal process. You're interpreting the cue differently based on your current state. So the model that I lay out in the book of the four different stages that I have it goes through, it tries to combine these two major fields. It includes the cue and the reward because those are important for shaping our behavior. But it also includes an additional stage about our interpretation of the reward because your internal moods and states and feelings can change. And as they do, your behavior does as well.

And so I kind of wanted a model that i felt like encapsulated all of that um and that's one of the major differences right so you added two steps to this now it's cue craving response reward right right and so that allows you to kind of more deeply probe into that um that aspect of contextualizing these cues. It actually brings up two, I think, important things. So the first is the contextualizing the cue, uh, which you just mentioned. It allows us to understand like, why do you, why do cues get you to do anything? It's because of how you interpret them. If you believe the cue is attractive, then you take an action. The second thing that it does is it helps clarify what the reward is. Like, why is

something rewarding? Why do you find it rewarding? And one of the reasons is because it satisfies the craving that preceded the action. So one way to put this is that perceived value motivates you to act. Actual value motivates you to repeat. So when you buy something on Amazon, you don't actually buy the product. You don't buy the book because you don't actually have it yet. What you buy is the image the product creates in your mind. You buy your expectation or the perceived value of the sales page. It's only after you get the book and you read it and you're like, oh, this is really good. That's when the actual value, it satisfies that craving you had before and it reinforces, oh,

hey, this was enjoyable. I should do it again next time. So you kind of have both of those on each side of the behavior. Cravings that generally derive from very primal, instinctual reptilian brain instincts that we have. I mean, typically, and these function on an unconscious level in almost everybody. I mean, when you're surfing Amazon and you hit buy on something, like you said,

it's not necessarily driven by this interest in this product advancing you along your trajectory, it's probably more likely because you feel uncomfortable in that moment and the dopamine rush of buying that thing will make you feel, will change your emotional state and give you some sense of comfort

driven by your hormonal state, right? And this goes back, you talk about this in the book and in the writing that you do, like we want people to love us, we wanna be perceived well by others, or we think these material things are gonna fulfill that spiritual hole that we have, our emotional need. And all of these drivers function on a level where we're not really aware

of how they're impacting our behaviors and habits throughout the day. So how do you kind of think about those things? Well, in a sense, you could say that every behavior is driven by the desire for a change in state. And so when you smoke a cigarette or eat a bag of Doritos or pick up your phone, what you really want is not the nicotine or the calories from the Doritos or the likes on social media. What you want is to feel less anxious or to feel approved or to not be bored anymore. So it's really the desire to change that state that you're in that motivates you to act and the behavior. And in many cases, a lot of our modern technology is an example of this. You didn't, we didn't evolve.

You didn't come out of the womb with like a desire to check Instagram, right? Like there's nothing evolutionarily wired there. It's just a modern manifestation of an ancient desire to gain respect and approval or to not be abandoned by the tribe or to feel approved in, you know, in some capacity. And so we kind of have those like deeper primal drives and then the secondary layer on top of it is just the modern manifestation of that behavior and how we're resolving it in the moment. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's interesting.

The more, this is like a subject matter that's so important because the habits that comprise how we behave and navigate our day are determinative of our entire experience as a human being. Not only do they determine whether we're gonna be, quote unquote, successful or failures, they literally dictate every aspect of our experience as humans. So on some level, like there is no subject more important

than really understanding how behaviors work. So I applaud you for taking on such a monumental subject. Like this is not easy to understand. And I, but I think also it's something that we can easily kind of fall prey to intellectualizing and feeling like, okay, I understand this, but yet still find ourselves incapable of actually implementing the knowledge

into the behavior change that you're trying to, you know, sort of speak about and instigate in people. Yeah, well, so first of all, I totally agree. It was an incredibly difficult topic to choose, especially for my first book. I ended up, uh, my solution was to just try to like work harder at it. I, there was a, uh, there was a quote from Elaine de Botton that kind of became my, um, my mantra as I worked through it, where he says of many books,

a reader thinks this could have been truly great if only the author was willing to suffer a little more. And I was like, all right, so I guess I just need to suffer a little more. Yeah I was like, all right, I guess I just need to suffer a little more. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I ended up, uh, writing, I think like 720, 750 pages and then cut it down to the final two 50. Um, because it just, it ended up the scope of the behavior change, um, and human behavior is just so wide that, you know, anyway, I need, I felt like I needed to cover all the bases and then figure out what are the actionable steps. And your point that it's easy to just theorize or get kind of like caught up in your head about this rather than translating it into something actionable. I think that's a crucial thing.

And it's one thing that I pride myself on my writing is that I try to be scientifically based but also highly actionable. thing that I pride myself on my writing is that I try to be scientifically based, but also highly actionable. And that was the idea behind the four laws of behavior change that are in the book, because I wanted to kind of give people like a set of levers or a toolbox that, okay, here are like the four levers you can pull to try to make habits easier or to make bad habits harder. Yeah. And I want to get into those four laws. But before we do that, I'm interested in what got you interested in this subject matter to begin with. I find that most people who walk that path of becoming obsessed with a certain subject matter or idea tend to be people who are trying to solve that equation for themselves. So is that part of

the influence? In a sense, every article I've written and this book is just a reminder to myself. My publisher told me there's something to the effect of like, we write the books we need ourselves. And that's, it's funny because, you know, when I write about habits, a lot of people assume that I have my habits so dialed in because I'm the guy writing about it. But I'm writing about it to learn about it. You know, I'm writing about it to try to improve. I consider my readers and myself to be peers, right? We're all just kind of experimenting and operating and working on stuff. And the only difference is I just share the lessons when I learn them.

So, yeah, I definitely had an internal desire for that. And then there have been a variety of areas in my life where I've had to implement that. Athletics, photography, writing and building a business, of course. And all of those have been kind of like test labs for me to put the ideas into practice. Right. But why zero in on this? On habits? Yeah. Well, I think that a little bit of it comes back to what you just mentioned a few minutes ago about how important habits are. I didn't know this at first. So I was a baseball player for many years. And as any athlete can tell you, there are all kinds of habits that you have at practice,

rituals, things like that. And I was benefiting from that. You know, my strength coach would tell me to do something or my coaches would hold me accountable to certain habits and that would help pull the rest of my life in line. You know, I always did better in school when I had sports as well. It would like give me something to anchor my day around. And so I knew that it was working, but I didn't have a language for it. And so it was only until maybe five years after my career ended and I finished graduate school and I started looking into this stuff a little bit more that I started to come across the science of habit formation

and behavior change and developed a language for it and started to write about it. So I kind of implicitly knew it was important, but didn't discover the actual way to write about it until later. Now, the second thing here, though, but didn't discover the actual way to write about it until later. Now, the second thing here, though, is that as I dug into the topic more, I started to unearth these layers and realized, wow, this is actually even more important than I thought.

And this comes back to the point that you made a few minutes ago, which is that habits are, one of the phrases I like to use is that pretty much any of the results in your life are a lagging measure of your habits, right? So your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. The outcomes are just the manifestation of the behaviors that preceded them. So you kind of get what you repeat in that way. Well, that makes sense. People understand that that's important. So you kind of get what you repeat in that way. Well, that makes sense.

People understand that that's important. So that's one reason why habits are crucial. But there's another thing that habits do that is even more central, even more important. And that is that your habits are the way that you embody a particular identity. So every morning that you make your bed, you embody the habits of, you embody the

identity of an organized person, someone who's clean. Every time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Every time you sit down to write a sentence or a page, you embody the identity of someone who's a writer. And so in that sense, habits are like, every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person that you believe that you are. And as you take these actions, you build up evidence of a particular identity. And pretty soon, your beliefs have something to root themselves in. It's like, man, I showed up at the gym for four days a week for the last three months. I guess I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts.

And that, I think, is the true reason why habits are so important. Once I realized how beliefs and behaviors are connected, that it's like this two-way street, then I started to think, all right, maybe this is really something. Not only does it deliver those external results, the clean room or the bigger bank account, but also the internal results of shaping your sense of self-image and what you believe. Right. So let's drill into these four laws. You've got, we'll just break them down. Okay. So I've hinted at this process so far, but the four stages that any habit goes through, cue, craving, response, reward. So there's some type of cue or raw data that gets your attention.

Then you predict or interpret that data in some way, which motivates you to act, take a response. And then somehow that behavior either benefits you or does not benefit you. And that's what gets you to close the feedback loop and update your prediction for the next time and decide if you want to continue that. Although a caveat to that, I would imagine, is that you're saying it either benefits you or it

doesn't, but isn't there an argument that it's benefiting you somehow, maybe not in a good way, but you're getting something out of that? Like if you have a habit that's unhealthy, some bad behavior, and everybody tells you, you gotta stop doing that. You're getting some positive result from that, even if it's twisted or unhealthy, there's something inside of you that compels you to act that way because you're getting something out of it.

Right, so that's a crucial point. Yeah, like whether it's masking some pain or whatever it is, there's a reason behind that. All behaviors, those that are repeated, serve us in some way. I guess we'd say all habits serve you in some way. And one way to think about this is that every behavior produces multiple outcomes across time. So if you take a bad habit or an unhealthy habit, like eating a donut or something the immediate outcome is favorable it's sugary it's tasty it's enjoyable in the moment that's how it serves you that's the reason why you repeat it the ultimate outcome if you repeat that every day for the next

three months or year or whatever is you end up gaining weight or you're less healthy or so on for good habits it's often the reverse right like? Like sometimes, you know, the benefit of going to the gym in many people's eyes is the immediate outcome is unfavorable. Sweat, I have to work, it's effortful, it's hard and sacrifice. I don't get to watch TV. I got to go there instead. So the immediate outcome is unfavorable. The ultimate outcome, if you repeat that habit for two months or a year or whatever, is you're fit and healthy. And this is one of the key challenges of building good habits and breaking bad ones is figuring out ways to take the long-term consequences of your good habits or of your bad habits and pull them into the present moment. So you feel a little bit of the pain right now. So it serves you less and to take the long-term rewards

of your good habits and pull those into the present moment so it feels good. And this is one reason why, you know, it's great to choose like, what's the best form of exercise? Well, maybe it's the one that you enjoy because if it feels good in the moment, now it serves you and you have a reason to repeat it. Yeah. Humans are not wired to prioritize long-term rewards over immediate gratification. Right. And that's why, you's why habit change in the interest of setting you on a long-term positive trajectory is much more difficult than defaulting to the immediate gratification that's leading you astray.

And intellectualization of it doesn't really help. It's not like everybody who's smoking knows it's bad for them. Yes, right. But they can't stop, even though the long-term benefits of stopping are evident and indisputable. For some reason, we lack the ability to harness that motivation to implement that behavior change. So I think that's a good way to define what a good habit is and what a bad habit is, is that bad habits, think about it in the long term.

Good habits serve you in the long run. Bad habits do not, even if they serve you in the moment. And so. Sorry to interrupt you. No, go ahead. we would be benefited from removing judgment on habits altogether and kind of avoid classifying them as good or bad and just saying, these are behaviors. They're serving you in a certain way.

Like let's take all the passion and emotion out of this altogether and look at it from just a forensic point of view. Would that be a good way of helping people, I don't know, make the transition from one to the other? Have you looked at that? I think so. And part of the reason is that in order to change behavior,

design it in any meaningful way, you need to be aware of it first. But usually when people become aware of their habits or think about them, like you might smoke or bite your nails or something on autopilot. But then if you start to think about it, well, you feel guilty about it. You know, you start to judge yourself. As soon as you start to judge yourself, then you're not in a great position to change because what ends up happening a lot of the time, this has happened actually with a couple of campaigns that have tried to scare smokers into not smoking by showing them pictures of blackened lungs or scare obese people into not eating as much

by talking about the detriments of being overweight. What happens is people get really anxious and stressed. They feel guilty and worried, and then they resort. They amplify that behavior. They resort to their preferred habit for dealing with that, which means they end up smoking more or eating more or whatever. So yes, I think there is a benefit to looking at it in an unemotional forensic way. Um, and one way to do that is to say there are no good or bad

habits. Uh, there are just behaviors that serve you in a particular way. And the goal is to try to find a behavior that serves you in a better way. Um, and, uh, I still use the term good and bad because I think implicitly most people know what we're talking about when we say that, like, and we use it in everyday conversation, but from a practical standpoint, it's just, uh, the, the effort and energy used judging yourself, uh, and feeling guilty about things is not well spent or productive. And so if that is a way that helps people get over that, then I think that's useful. There's also certainly a hierarchy of habits too. What I see a lot of, and I'm interested in your experience working with so many people on this, a lot of, and I'm interested in your experience working with so many people on this, is people honing in, zeroing in on a behavior or a habit that they want to change, but they're kind of

identifying the wrong one. Like if your goal is to lose 10 pounds or the behavior that you want to change, the habit that you want to change is going from sedentary to being a runner, for example, you're going to run your first 5K, you set this goal, but you have a victim mentality and you think the world is against you and everything bad in your life is somebody else's fault. And you're not addressing and redressing the habits that are fueling that identity. You can run as many 5Ks or marathons as you want, but ultimately you're channeling your energy in the wrong direction. Right. Yeah. The energy is focused on the thing that makes the last 2% of difference and not the thing that makes 95% of difference. You see this

in all kinds of places. I mean, the example you just gave is good, but just take someone who's trying to get in shape. I mean, people will, what kind of protein powder should I get? What knee sleeves do I need? What are the best weightlifting shoes? And all that stuff is like the last 2% of difference. It's mostly like, don't miss workouts and get your reps in. Yeah. But ultimately I think that those people aren't even really interested in the answer. They're just stuck in analysis paralysis. Like they, they sort of want to change their behavior, but they want to have all these questions answered and they want to know exactly what they're doing before they'll even go take a walk, right? So how much do they really

want to change that behavior? They're flirting with the idea of behavior change, but they're ultimately not at the place where they're ready to commit to anything. And so that makes them feel like they're doing something when they're actually to commit to anything. And so that makes them feel like they're doing something when they're actually just reinforcing that paralysis. This is what, in the book, I call the difference between motion and action. Action can actually deliver a result, but motion is related to that, but never will.

You know, like going to the gym and talking to a personal trainer about signing up. That's fine. That's related to getting in shape. But it doesn't matter how many times you talk to a personal trainer, you're never going to get in shape. Whereas like doing 10 squats, that actually can do something. It's like talking to the trainer is motion, doing squats is action. And yeah, I think a lot of times people get trapped in motion.

They get trapped in analysis paralysis because it is a way to feel like you're making progress without running the risk of failure. Right, and it's more complicated and nuanced than that because going and talking to the trainer is an important step if you've never done anything like that before. Yeah, and that's the hard thing is it's not like you shouldn't do it.

It's just that it's not the only thing you should do. If that's the thing, if that doesn't create the momentum to take the additional step and set in motion a consistent flow of repeatable actions over time, then. This is why I think identity is such a crucial issue with habits is that true behavior change is really identity change. Um, because you're, you're not really looking to go from the type of person who doesn't run to the type of person who can run a 5k. That's fine. That's good. It's the outcome. But the goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book. The goal is to become a writer. And once you identify as that type of person, in a sense, you're not even really a writer. And once you identify as that type of person,

in a sense, you're not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person that you already believe that you are. It's like one thing to say, I want this. It's something different to say, I am this. Yeah. You write a lot about this and we can drill down on goals and the importance or lack thereof of goal setting. But ultimately, what really moves the needle is making a decision about the person that you want to be and starting to construct your life in a way that reinforces that identity that you idealize in yourself. So it's less about a finish line and it becomes all about process and the journey. I think that's right. You know, like you're, um, what I said earlier about how habits are a method to embody a particular identity. That's really what we're looking to do here is how do I become the type of person that embodies this each day? Um, how do I become the type of

person who doesn't miss workouts? And that's another reason I like small habits, because if you have a really busy day and things are crazy and all you can do is five pushups, if you're oriented around the result, around the outcome, it's easy to dismiss that. It's like, well, why would I even bother doing five pushups? It's not going to get me in shape. But some days it's not about the result of the training. Some days it's about reinforcing being that type of person. You know, like, yes, life was crazy and things were really busy today.

And the best I could do was getting five pushups in. But I'm still the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, even when it's not ideal. Right. And in the long run, that can count for a lot, which is the kind of twisted thing about small habits, which is that even though they're small, they can still be meaningful. And if they're meaningful, they actually are big. Yeah. And that really gets at the foundation of this whole thing, which is that every great achievement is about small habits ultimately. And, you know, as our, in this culture in which we live, it's all about, you know, shoot for the moon and like set these huge goals and be audacious

and find the shortcut and all of that. But every successful person will tell you it's about the tiny little imperceptible, non-sexy things that they do every single day and have been doing for the last 10 or 20 years that got them from wherever they came from to the place that everyone aspires to be. The crazy thing is habits are like the foundation for mastery in any area. And it's often the people

who are at the peak of a particular area that have the best habits, that have like the most things automated and dialed in. You know, imagine, I always think of the story of Josh Waitzkin, who wrote The Art of Learning. And he gave an example of he's doing, you know, Thai push hands, this martial art. And when I think about doing something like that, I'm like, all right, I'm going to be grappling with this person. Like, you know, I'm fully engaged on the wrestling component. But he had practiced it so many times and knew all the moves so well that he was able to more or less put that part of it on autopilot. And he would just focus on his opponent's eyes. And when they were getting ready to blink, then he would make his throw. And that was like how he found his advantage that to someone like me who hasn't

done that, that sounds insane that you could even like get to that level. But the point is in order to master any area, he has already habitualized everything else. He knows how to do the throws on autopilot. He knows where his feet should throws on autopilot. He knows where his feet should be on autopilot. He knows where his weight should be shifted. And because all of that is habitualized, he actually has the mental capacity available to focus on the thing that makes the last, tiniest

bit of difference at the highest level. And I think that's true for anybody. Think about everything LeBron can do on autopilot. He doesn't have to think about shooting, dribbling, where he's at on the court. Like all of that is just internalized at this point. And he can think about the offensive set or the thing that happened three possessions ago that he did to set them up for what he's going to do now. But most basketball players aren't even at that level because they haven't habitualized. Yeah. Have you seen the

documentary free solo? Yeah. Oh, you saw it? Yeah, yeah. All right, good. So for people that are listening and haven't seen it, you should go out and see it immediately. Alex Honnold. It's Alex Honnold, Free Soloing El Cap. And even if you think you know the story, I assure you that this movie will leave you

with sweaty palms and your mind blown. Dude, those rock climbing documentaries are crazy. But this one is next level. And it speaks, the reason I bring it up is it speaks directly to what you're talking about, which is a level of process and mastery that is rare even at the highest levels. And you think of Alex as a master,

but when you really get to understand the level of focus and intentionality and the amount of years that went into that accomplishment, you understand it on a whole different level. And you talk about automation. I mean, you see when he's climbing that wall, he knows every hold, every maneuver, every footstep. And there's actually only maybe three or four problem areas up the

whole wall that he really had to double down on to make it work. And all the rest of it was so rote for him. And if you were to ask him, he's not intellectualizing this. It's so built into who he is that the execution of climbing that wall is just a reflection of a lifetime of preparation and focus that's followed in the wake of that success with him going back to his van and doing pull-ups. You know, because he is somebody, that's who he is. It's identity. It wasn't about, yes, he had that goal and the goal was audacious and he was successful in that goal, but he was successful in that pursuit because this is who he is fundamentally at his core.

I remember hearing a story about Brett Favre late in his career. And there was a particular crossing pattern and this guy's running across the field and the linebacker was interviewed after the game who was defending against the pass. And he was like 999 times out of 1,000 every time this play is run.

Based on my positioning, the pass is going to be going in front of the linebacker. And so he saw the play and read it and jumped up to intercept the pass. And Favre somehow implicitly noticed all of this and threw it behind him and hit the receiver in stride and they ended up getting the first down in this big play. Right, all happening in a microsecond.

Yes, all of this is, you know, for the average person, you'd stand out there in the middle of the play and it just would look like chaos. Everybody's moving around so fast. And stories like that, and like Alex and these other ones we were telling, the only way that you can get to that level of, the only way he could even notice that

is because every other thing about that play was already on autopilot. He had run it so many times that he could see the one thing that was different and make the adjustment on the fly. And those stories, of course, are incredible and inspiring, but they also make me realize that I don't know many people fully understand

what it takes to be at the top of a field like that. You have to literally live it so that you can internalize all that stuff. I mean, the higher that you get on the curve, it's like the less margin for error that there is. And you need to work. I mean, Olympians will work for four years to shave off two hundredths of a second. And that you have to have that level of commitment because the, when you're going against the world's best, the margin is so small. And yeah, anyway, I think habits play a central role in that. I think that they are, they are crucial because the more that you can habitualize, the more you free up your mind to focus on the

things that could make that last bit of difference. So let's talk about habit change. We were attempting to launch into these four laws and we haven't even gotten there difference. So let's talk about habit change. We were attempting to launch into these four laws and we haven't even gotten there yet. All right, yeah, let's go to it. Let's break these down. Okay, so there are four laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, so that's about the cue. Make it attractive, that's about the craving.

Make it easy, this is the response. And then make it satisfying, which is the reward. And this is all about adopting a quote-unquote good habit. Correct. And then you can invert each of those four for breaking a bad habit. So for bad habits, you want to make it invisible. You want to make the cue invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, and make it unsatisfying. And again, these are like a toolbox for thinking about what can we practically do on a daily basis for building good habits and breaking bad ones. So obvious. So one way to think about this is with a strategy that I call environment design. Um, and the idea is just to restructure your physical environment

to make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits, um, invisible. So let me give you an example of both. These are two personal examples. So I first, I realized that for most of my life, I brushed my teeth twice a day, but I wouldn't floss consistently. And when I looked at the habit, there were two issues. And one of the problems was the floss was just tucked away in the drawer in the bathroom. I wouldn't see it. And so because it wasn't obvious, sometimes I just would forget. The second thing sounds kind of silly, but I didn't like the feeling of wrapping floss around my fingers. It was just like uncomfortable. And so anyway, I took the floss out of the drawer, bought a little bowl and got some of those pre-made flossers and put them in the bowl and set it right next to my

toothbrush. And now I brush my teeth, put the toothbrush down, pick a flosser up, do it right away. It's obvious. And that's pretty much all I needed to do to build that habit. Now I've been doing it for, I don't know, five years and I haven't really had to think about it. This is the most important thing, I think. There's a lot of people, my friend Dan Buechner included, who don't hold a lot of confidence and belief

in a single human being's ability to implement positive behavior changes with sustainable results, long-term results. It's just, that's why there's so many self-help books. People struggle with weight and fitness and you name it, profession, like all of these things, it's so hard. But the best way to fundamentally address these things is to change your environment

so that it's conducive to the healthy choice. So whether it's flossing your teeth or reimagining what an urban landscape is, so that's incentivizing people to ride their bikes and not drive cars and not drink sodas, but drink water, like structural systemic changes in our environment that make the healthy choice, the productive choice, not only the obvious choice, but in some cases,

the only choice or the choice that is at arm's length at all times. And that goes with eradicating the unhealthy choices, removing those from arm's reach so that they become more difficult to access. Yes. It's huge. I mean, imagine the impact of living in an environment where, or working in an environment where there are a hundred little things like that, that are all kind of nudging you in the right direction or nudging you away from the wrong direction. Um, here's another example for breaking a bad habit. So again, here you just invert it rather than make it obvious, make it invisible. I've noticed that if I buy a six pack of beer and I put it in the front of

the fridge, like either in the door or like right in the front of the shelf, I'll open it up and I'll have one each night just cause it's there. Um, but if I take it and I put it in the back of the fridge, like lowest shelf all the way in the back where I can't really see it when I open the door, sometimes it'll sit there for like a month. And so it's interesting, you know, I'm like, well, did I, do I want a beer or not? Because in a way I do, but only if it's really presented to me. Right. You moved it like five inches away. Yes, really. Seriously. It was probably like, yeah, it's probably like 12 inches back. Well, I can tell you as a recovering alcoholic, in my drinking days, that would not have been a barrier for me. I would have had to take more extreme measures. So that actually raises

a good point, which is that many of these strategies that I talk about in the book are very effective for good habits and bad habits, even though we just agreed not to use that term, but not necessarily for true addictions. Yeah, and this is something I wanted to really get into with you, which is the difference, the qualitative difference between a quote unquote bad habit

and something that would qualify as an addiction. I think that line gets blurred and certainly it's a spectrum, but I think there's a very different approach that you need to take when somebody is truly, you know, falling prey to addictive behavior patterns versus something that's just habituated. Yeah. So we'll get back to the four laws of behavior change. Yeah, we're going to, by the end of this, we'll get through them. So the technical definition for an addiction, and by the way, I don't consider myself an expert on addiction, is a behavior that you continue to repeat despite negative consequences.

So you know that it's bad for you. You know it's not serving you, but you still can't stop yourself from doing it. And I do agree. It's probably on a spectrum. So on one side of the spectrum, you have a behavior that you do just one time. And then the more that you repeat it, you kind of shift down and then at some point,

maybe you cross over this threshold and you get to a habit. And then if you go even further, you've got behaviors that you keep doing again and again, but you don't learn from them. And we'll call that an addiction. And so it's kind of like the feedback loop is broken. You go through the cue, you have the craving, you take the response,

but then instead of there being a reward, instead of it serving you in some way, really all it does is just satisfy the craving, but it's not good for the rest of your life. The feedback loop isn't necessarily broken. It's just that it doesn't matter. The craving is too strong. The person who's addicted is typically, I mean, there's, again, denial is a spectrum as well,

but on some level, whether conscious or unconscious, they're aware that they're destroying their lives, but it simply doesn't matter. They're still going to pursue this path of destruction, no matter where it takes them. And I can just tell you from my own personal experience, as somebody who has always prided themselves on having a large capacity to endure work, somebody who has a reservoir of self-will, who had been successful in many ways by virtue of a strong work ethic,

I was confounded and brought to my knees time and time again by my inability to leverage these skills that I thought were my secret weapons to this problem. And the more that I applied self-will, determination, decision-making power, my ability to dedicate myself to a goal, the deeper that I applied self-will, determination, decision-making power, my ability to dedicate myself to a goal, the deeper that hole got.

Like I had to completely upend how I saw the world and come to this place of not just acceptance and breaking that veil of denial, but also surrender. Like understanding that I was powerless over this thing was really the first base of trying to figure out a new trajectory forward. And it's very counterintuitive and weird. And it doesn't make sense to most people

unless you've gone through this process. It's like a letting go as opposed to like, like some sort of driven willingness to like fight it. So it was like you could apply determination and grit to any other area of your life. Any other area of my life, I've had success using those skills. But for some reason with this.

Yeah, it just, it made it worse and worse and worse and worse. Yeah, that's fascinating. And it further and further isolated me from everybody else because I thought I can solve this, I don't need help, I'm gonna do this on my, you know. All these other areas of my life have worked out when I use this strategy. There's no reason why this strategy won't work here.

And it just destroyed me. So, I mean, obviously addiction is very complicated and I don't know that, so I just made the distinction of the strategies in the book, I think are really good for bad habits, not necessarily for addictions. Although I don't think that it would hurt to use those strategies for addiction, but I don't know that it's going to be like, oh, it'll magically solve the problem. Well, it may help with the denial part at a very minimum.

Yeah. So there's a secret chapter to the book that's not included in the final manuscript, but that you can get at atomichabits.com. And it's called The Biology of Bad Behavior. And it discusses what scientists are doing to kind of rewire the brain of addicts. So some of them are pills, like cocaine addicts are using a drug called Baclofen that was originally developed for back spasms that some addicts say when they start to take it, suddenly their cravings and addiction like have vanished more or less overnight. I don't know that it works for all of them. And that's kind of the story with a lot of these drugs for addiction right now is that some

people have really amazing results, but not every patient does. Then there's a second strategy. It has been National Geographic covered it last year. It's starting to be used in Italy, and I think it's making its way around the world where it's this TMS machine, this magnetic stimulation for the brain. And essentially, as I understand it, the prefrontal cortex of the brain is responsible for a variety of decision-making centers

and your ability to resist temptation. And in addicts, they find that this particular area is kind of deactivated to a certain degree. And so when a craving arises, you have trouble resisting. And so you'll go in for this magnetic stimulation and effectively they place the magnet over that portion or that region of the brain, stimulate the neurons there with some electrical impulses

and people walk out and they feel like they don't have cravings anymore, which is kind of crazy. So I don't know where this is gonna go. And I'm very wary to say that like, oh, this is a magic trick and it'll work. I mean, I think all of that is interesting and it's gonna be really cool

to see how this stuff plays out. There's all kinds of amazing studies happening with psychedelics at the moment and treating addicts with that. But I always kind of default to this, you know, fundamental perspective that, you know, addiction is fueled as Gabor Mate would say from some kind of childhood trauma

or some psychological framework where a person feels broken in some regard and is compelled to engage in that destructive addictive behavior as a means of state change, right? Which is what we were talking about earlier. So you can eliminate the craving and eliminate the behavior or the substance, but that predisposition remains and it will continue to find another avenue to satisfy itself with some kind of behavior or whatever to solve whatever that wound is or that sense of incompleteness or inadequacy or whatever it is that is really the driver behind the addictive behavior. Because the substance or the behavior is the solution to the problem. And you can, until it becomes the problem itself and you can remove that, but you're still left with that fundamental disposition that needs to get addressed. Do you feel like running or writing

has been, or something else has been the thing that's helped solve that for you? Yeah, they're helpful and they're curative in some regard, but ultimately they're not the solution for me. I mean, I've been sober for a long time, 12 Steps, The Secret Society, that's how I've got sober and have stayed sober. And I'm still a very, very active member of that program. And that to this day is still my number one priority. And the minute I start to lose sight of that or forget that or take it for granted is when I start to lapse back into that realm. And there's no stasis either.

And this is something you write about and understand well, like there's no like, oh, I conquered that. Now I'm moving on to this. With addiction, it's either regressing or progressing with every thought you entertain or behavior that you engage in. So you have to be very mindful of it and engaged in the behaviors and the activities

that keep it at bay in order to be healthy and functional. So I don't go around thinking about drinking or using drugs very often. It rarely occurs to me, but I have a whole battery of other negative behavior patterns that will manifest all kinds of character defects that I wouldn't qualify as addictions but are habits that I'm constantly trying to master or change. Yeah. Well, this is kind of an interesting intersection with the second law to bring it back to some of those. Because, so the first law we talked about, make it obvious and doing some of these environment design changes. The second law is about making it attractive. And what I mean by that is when you interpret a behavior, excuse me, when you interpret a behavior or a cue as being attractive, as being something that you should move toward, then you have a reason to perform

the action and you're motivated to do it. So in many cases, the behaviors that are motivating to us, that are attractive to us are dependent on the people that we are around. So one way to think about this is that we are all members of tribes. Some of the tribes are big, some of them are small, like big ones might be what it means to be American or what it means to be French or something like that. And small ones could be, you know, what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or a volunteer at your local high school or whatever. But all of these tribes, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for what it means to be part of the group. And when you belong to that tribe, when you have friends there, when you feel like you want to

fit in with that group, habits that align with the shared expectations of the tribe are very attractive and you want to do them. And habits that go against the grain of the shared expectations of the tribe are very attractive and you want to do them. And habits that go against the grain of the shared expectations are very unattractive. And so, one of the ways to make habits more attractive is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. To be with a crew where the habits that you want to build are just normal and everyday for them. Yeah. I mean, that's really an extrapolation of the first law. You're extending your physical, you're creating a productive physical environment

and now you're extending that to your interpersonal environment. So you're surrounding yourself with a physical environment that's conducive to the healthy behavior, the healthy habit, and now you're surrounding yourself with the people that reinforce that and make it more difficult for you to behave otherwise. I mean, society leans heavily on all of us, you know? Like, I mean, there's a bunch of habits that people do each

day you don't even think about. Like, you get onto the elevator and you turn around to face the front or you, you... Who made that role anyway? Yeah, I know, right? Well, you go to a job interview and you wear a suit and a tie or a dress or something nice. There's no reason it has to be like that, right? Like you could face the back of the elevator. You could wear a bathing suit to a job interview. But we don't do that because it violates those shared expectations. It goes against the grain of the group. And so, so many of our choices are like

that. And in many ways, when we're young, a lot of our habits are not chosen. They're inherited. They're passed down to us by whatever group that we're a part of. And then, you know, part of the process of becoming an adult is you grow up and you get into your twenties and thirties and you decide these groups that I inherited, these behaviors that I inherit, are these the ones that serve me or these are the ones that I want? And then you kind of go through the process of changing that. And in many ways, asking people to change their habits is actually asking them to change their tribe. And that can be hard, especially if people have to choose between having the habits they want and being alone or having the habits they don't want and being with people, having friends, belonging, we'd often rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. culturally in this interesting moment that we're having right now, where across all forms of social

media, the things that people are saying in the political sphere are as much signaling to their own group to reaffirm their position within their tribe as they are in attempt to convert somebody from another tribe, which doesn't work generally. But it's interesting to see that social dynamic writ large because it's such a heightened state right now, but it's really no different than the guy who is hanging out with his gym buddies and wants to be part of that crowd

and really wed himself into that subculture and identify with that and be approved of by that group. I wrote an article recently called Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. And humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world, of the facts, to survive.

You know, like if you couldn't accurately see where the car was moving down the road and then you walked out, you would get hit by one and wouldn't pass your jeans along and so on. And so you need to have some reasonable baseline. But within that, there's actually a fair bit of flexibility. And so people don't just hold beliefs because they're true and accurate and factual. They also hold beliefs because they can help them belong because they signal to their social allies that, hey, I belong to this tribe. And in many cases, being abandoned by the tribe is more of a death sentence than having a belief that is slightly inaccurate, especially one that doesn't impact your personal life right now.

And so then we fast forward to modern society and you get this manifesting in all kinds of weird ways. On this idea of making it attractive and surrounding yourself with the people that affirm and approve of and encourage the kind of behavior that you're trying to manifest within yourself. There are two, it seems to me, there are two kind of operating systems here. There is the positive reinforcement that you get, the approval mechanism, but there's also the negative accountability, right?

Like if, cause if you stray, then you're gonna be held accountable for that in the same way you're gonna get a pat on the back for towing the line or being part of the group. Right. Is there one that you've seen that is more powerful than the other? Are they both necessary?

How does that work? Yeah, that's a tough question. Jonathan Haidt, I think he's at NYU, he has some interesting research on this. And I don't know that he's performed it himself, but he was the one that I saw present it about the importance of punishments and consequences in societies in general. And we need to know that there is a punishment for breaking the law or something in order for people to stay on course. And so I'm not sure exactly how that applies to habits. My gut reaction is that you probably need both in the long run, but that extreme punishments and consequences, those like fear-driven consequences rather than rewards, really get people to move in the intermediate, in the

short term, and the belonging and the positive rewards are more likely to sustain in the long run. So I would say that's generally how I would bucket them. I think it was Tim Ferriss who came up with that case study experiment of creating a gym where I think the idea was you pay all the money upfront for the year and they take a picture of you without your shirt on, looking terrible. And if you don't, if you miss a day or whatever,

like then that image goes on social media, so there's sort of like the stick, being more powerful than the carrot, at least in the short term. I've heard about ones where you pay, I don't know what the exact number would be, maybe it's like $150 a month. And then every time you go to the gym, you get five bucks. And so if you go every day for 30 days, you pay nothing. And if you go three days a week, you get to, so that's kind of a similar incentive. And if you go three days a week, you get to.

So that's kind of a similar incentive. In the book, I think I have an example of this guy, Thomas Frank. He's this entrepreneur in Colorado, and he wanted to build the habit of waking up earlier. And so he created a little automated Twitter post that would go out at 6 a.m. every morning or 6.05. I think he wanted to wake up at 6 a.m. or 6.05, I think he wanted to wake up at 6 a.m. And so if he didn't get up at 6, at 6.05, it would post to Twitter and say, I'm not up right now because I'm lazy.

The first five people to respond to this, I'll PayPal you $25. And so then every day he'd wake up at six and the first thing he'd do is push that back to the next day. Yeah, that's ingenious. I mean, you definitely would wake up, you know, if you had some horrible tweet going out that reflected poorly on you. And yeah, the other example that comes to mind is the, I think it's Tim Ferriss as well, which was the, if you fail, like a certain amount of money goes

to an organization that you despise. There are a variety of services that do that now. One's called Beeminder. Another one is called Stick. I think it's S-T-I-C-K-K. But yeah, you put like, you know, all right, my goal is to run this half marathon. And if I don't train three days a week, then I'm putting $500 on the line and you commit it and you can't get the money back unless your friend releases it to you. Right. And if you don't do your training, the money goes to a charity that you hate or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Cool. All right. Um, the next law is, uh, is easy. Okay. So make it easy. Uh, many of our behaviors are just about convenience. Um, you know, like I, uh, so I've started doing this thing recently where I'll leave my phone in another room outside of my office for an, until lunch each day. So I

get a block of three or four hours in the morning where it's not around. Now these numbers keep going up every year. We just get more and more addicted to our phones, but the average adult checks their phone over 150 times a day now. And, uh, if the phone is next to me on the desk, I'm like everybody else. I'd look at it every three minutes or five minutes or whatever. Um, but when I keep it outside of my office, I have this home office. All I have to do is walk up the stairs and go to a different room. It's like 45 seconds away, but I never go do it, which is fascinating to me because it's like, well, I was checking my phone every five minutes if it was next to me. So you would think I wanted to do it, but I never wanted it bad enough to walk 45 seconds upstairs. And modern society has done this weird thing

where so many of the behaviors and technologies are so frictionless now, they're so convenient, that we find ourselves doing them just with an inkling of desire. We don't actually really want them, but they're so easy that we'll just fill space with them. And so this law, the third law, is about trying to get that to work for you when it comes to building good habits. So reducing the number of steps between you and

the good habits and increasing the number of steps between you and the bad ones. So you want to make it difficult for that. And one of the metaphors I like to use is a, like a garden hose. So imagine you have a hose that's like bent in the middle and there's a little bit of water trickling out. If you want to get more water through the hose, then you have two options. The first is you could just crank up the valve and force water through, but that increases friction and increases tension in the system. The other option is just to unfold the bend and let the water flow through naturally. And that also gets more water to flow through, but it reduces tension and reduces friction. And so much of the conversation about building better habits and achieving peak performance is all the mental equivalent of

cranking up the valve. You need to work harder. You need to have grit, persevere, hustle, grind. And it's not that those qualities are bad. It's just that it increases tension in the system. And what you really want is to create a setup where it's easy to do the things that pay off in the long run. And you have the mentality of I'm the type of person who will work hard. So you want to reduce the tension wherever you can. Yeah, a more sustainable, So you want to reduce the tension wherever you can. Yeah, a more sustainable, gentle solution than rise and grind versus remove these things that are in your way every single day

that actually are pretty easy to remove or create distance between to make it easier for you to do the thing that you're trying to do. You're really trying to prime your environment to make the default action easier. And sometimes you can do that with environment design stuff that we talked about earlier. Other times you can do it by taking actions ahead of time that pay off in the future. So like, say you're trying to build a better sleep habit. There are a variety of one-time

actions you could take today that make it easier to get better sleep every night after this. You could test different mattresses and see which one leads to the best night's sleep and buy that one. You could purchase blackout curtains so that your room is dark. You could buy earmuffs or earplugs so that you can sleep more soundly. Get a sleep mask so that you can sleep on the road or in hotels. There are some of those things like the chili pad or some of the other stuff that will cool the temperature of the bed to a more ideal rate. Or you can get a tent and sleep in your backyard like I do. There you go. You could sleep outside. There's this little device called an outlet timer

and it costs like $10 on Amazon. My friend near AOL, he bought one and he plugged it into his, it's like an adapter. You plug it into the outlet and then you plug the device into the timer. And so he plugged his internet router into it and set the timer for 10 PM each night. And it would kill the power to the internet router at 10. So then it's like, well, Netflix doesn't work. I can't browse the web. It's time for everybody to go to bed. Oh, that's interesting. Um, and so imagine if you just did, I mean, I just listed off seven or eight things there,

but imagine if you did five of those. Well, now suddenly you're in an environment where getting better sleep as a habit is much easier. And those are all just one-time choices that paid off for you in the future. And there's a bunch of stuff like that, depending on the habit. You know, I mean, finance habits are a good example. Automated savings or automatic deposit into your 401k or stuff like that. I mean, you want to make this brainless 401k or stuff like that. I mean,

you know, you want to make this brainless so that you can, uh, as much as possible so that you have the energy leftover to do the hard thing when you need to. Yeah. It's weird how we've created this world where now we have to spend so much energy trying to create systems to- Combat the systems we've created. Yeah, to like override our DNA and impulses to engage in these things that we think we've created to make our lives better. And yet at the same time

are creating all these downstream problems. I mean, you know, the obvious candidate, the cell phone, it's like this thing is so scientifically devised and designed to captivate us and trigger all of those impulses that we so deeply seek that you can't blame anyone from, I mean, it's like you're scrolling and you're like, I didn't even know I was scrolling,

become so bred into us. And now we have to go way out of our way and buy all these other devices to protect ourselves. I just saw the other day, I don't know if you saw this, somebody came up with these special sunglasses that you can put on and it makes all screens look blank. No, really? So when you're wearing them, you actually can't read anything on a digital screen. Yeah, I think it just makes everything look white. Oh man. No, really? about. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, this is just a good argument for simplicity and minimalism. You know, I think being a minimalist, which I don't know that I consider myself a

staunch minimalist, but I definitely adhere to some of the principles. It's not about having the least number of things, but having the optimal number of things. And many of the items that we choose or are surrounded by in daily life, they give us way more than the optimal number. Now we're being bombarded by notifications and text messages and all kinds of stimuli that we're just fighting things that we didn't have to fight before. Yeah. It's getting really tricky and it's weird how the things that foment these bad habits, like the cell phone or whatever app that is your favorite app, like the amount of money and science that's gone into or video games, right?

Like it's just all about like keeping you wed to it for as long as possible. Why is it that we can't channel all of that scientific genius and put that into things that are producing good habits instead, right? Like all of that, you go to a Vegas casino, it's completely orchestrated to like keep you there as long as possible, right?

It's an environment that is promoting a bad habit. Why can't we create environments with that amount of intentionality and money and science into promoting good habits. Yeah, I mean, capitalism, I think, is the overriding force here. It's not just casinos. Airports, for example, there are really well-paid airport designers

that will come in to lay out a new terminal that will specifically decide where the walkways should be so that you weave through the maximum amount of stores and pass the right restaurants at the right time and to spend the most money while you're there. And so anyway, my point is just that capitalism is the overriding incentive for the people who do this stuff. And so the person who can figure out how to make a lot of money from good habits will have a strong reason to do it. But until people figure that out, you end up kind of, we work for these companies that do it during the day.

And then as individuals, we want to redesign it for ourselves at night, right? Like all these YouTube execs are like, my kids are not watching YouTube. Right. Which is a fascinating thing. Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have an iPad, that kind of thing.

Right. Yeah, and we need more of the, I just read the other day as well, there was somewhere, I think it might be Russia, maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but someplace where when you go to the train station or the subway, instead of having, if you did like 10 burpees or 10 press-ups

or something like that. It's Russia, you do 30 squats and you get a ticket-ups or something like that. It's Russia. You do 30 squats and you get a ticket. Yeah, you get a free ticket. Yeah. We need more of that, right? Yeah, yeah. That's great.

I know. So anyway. All right. Okay, I have one more thing I want to say about make it easy. So the simplest way to do this is to scale a habit down. And so in the book, I talk about this thing I call the two-minute rule. And the idea is to just take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to the first two minutes. Um, and I had a, uh, I had a reader who did something similar to this. He ended up

losing over a hundred pounds. And one of the ways that he did it was he went to the gym, but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So stay, it sounds kind of crazy, but for the first six weeks he went and he showed up and did like half an exercise and then he would leave and go home. And to most people, they hear that and they're like, well, you know, it's kind of ridiculous. You're wasting your time. You're not actually going to get in shape from that. But the point is he was mastering the art of showing up and a habit has to be established before it can be improved. You know, like until you become the person who shows up every day, there's nothing to optimize.

We're so worried about figuring out the best diet plan or the best business idea or the optimal way to boost my bench press or whatever, that we search for all these perfect plans, but we don't do the thing that is fundamental to all of it, which is just showing up. And the two minute rule is one way to do that. You know, you like, you want to do 30 minutes of yoga. Well, let's translate that into take out

your yoga mat. Or if you want to read 30 books a year, let's translate that into read one page. But whatever the first two minutes are of the behavior, scale it down, master that, master the art of showing up, make it as easy as possible to get started. And then once you become that person and you're going to the gym every day or you're reading one page every day, well, now you have options. Now you have choices and you can upgrade and improve from there. Yeah, yeah. Two observations on that. The first is it goes directly to something you talk about all the time, which is focusing on and optimizing the starting line versus the finish line, right?

Like we all think about the finish line, we set goals that are all about the finish line and we overlook how important the starting line is. And the more we can kind of, we can have in the back of our mind that destination that we're aiming to go towards, but the more we can root ourselves in what's required to be at that starting line, then it becomes digestible

and doable and sustainable. You don't start the race, you can't finish it. People are all worried about the outcome. I mean, everybody wants to, you know, whatever the outcome is, run a marathon, earn six figures, lose 30 pounds. It's all finish line focused, but you have to standardize before you optimize. Like you have to make it the standard in your life before you have the chance to optimize it and turn it into something more. Yeah. And I think it goes to the second point I was going to make. It goes to this idea that I think, I think a lot of people, they really overestimate what they can or should do in a single day. And they completely underestimate what they're capable of in a long-term window.

And I don't mean six months, I mean five years, 10 years. I mean, five years, 10 years. But when you overestimate the daily routine, it ultimately leads to burnout for most people because it's not sustainable, right? And if you can narrow that down and put it into these small chunks, like you're talking about, and create a situation in which you habituate gradually

and you create a lifestyle that's oriented around being able to maintain and build and optimize on that, that's where you're gonna see the results way down the line. I think that's true. And it's hard. I mean, I mentioned this in chapter one of the book. It's hard to feel that on a daily basis, right? Like I use the metaphor of it's kind of like heating up an ice cube, you know,

like you, you're in a room, it's cold. You can see your breath. You've got this ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. It's like 25 degrees and you heat the room up and it's 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Nothing's happened. Ice cubes still sitting there 31 and then 32, one degree shift, just like all the other ones before it. And suddenly you hit this phase transition and the ice cube's still sitting there, 31. And then 32, one degree shift, just like all the other ones before it. And suddenly you hit this phase transition and the ice cube melts. And it's not that life is always like that, but it often feels like that. You know, like people put in a

little bit of work, they scale it down to this little behavior and they think there's nothing happening here. It's like seeing an ice cube go from 25 to 27 degrees. And so then you get, you feel like, oh, I got to do more, right? I need to try harder. I need a bigger goal. I need to be more ambitious because then I'll get a bigger result. But people don't realize that showing up and doing something small for three months or six months and then complaining about not having results, it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube from 25 to 30 degrees and not melting yet. The work wasn't being wasted.

It's just stored. And that is a hallmark of any process that compounds, which is the most powerful outcomes are delayed. But when you're in the thick of it, when you're in the moment, it's really hard to feel that. Yeah, it feels like nothing's happening. It feels like you're wasting the time. It's really hard to feel that.

Yeah, it feels like nothing's happening, feels like you're wasting the time. And that's why it's so important to understand that this is about identity. Because if you're only goal-focused, then you're not gonna be able to stay in it because you'll get dissuaded or disappointed or whatever. But if this is fundamental, if you've made a decision that this is who you are,

I am this person that does this, then you're not so wed to the day in, day out results. You're not tabulating a spreadsheet every day about whether you're moving forward or not. So this is maybe a good time to bring up the fourth law of behavior change, because this is a perfect example of it. So the fourth law is to make it satisfying. And what you really need is to make it immediately satisfying. And the ultimate manifestation of that is the reinforcement of your desired identity. If you are focused on losing 30 pounds and you go run for a month and then you're like, well, my body hasn't changed, scale's the same. Well, you don't have any rewards to see. But if you're focused on becoming the type of person who runs

three times a week, as soon as you step out the door and take two steps, you're reinforcing that identity. So you can feel good in the moment. And even if it's in a small way, that's crucial for getting habits to stick. I mean, this is something that I refer to as the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is that behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel satisfied or feel good. It's kind of like if something feels good right after you finish it, it's like a positive emotional signal to your brain. It's like, hey, this was enjoyable.

You should repeat this again next time. And so in that sense, positive emotions cultivate habits and negative emotions destroy them. And you really wanna find a way to feel good, to feel successful as soon as you finish. Yeah, that's interesting. How important is momentum in all of this? Because I know that as diligent as I am about my training and my working out,

I think most people would agree, as diligent as I am about my training and my working out, I think most people would agree, if you're in the habit of like going to the gym every day and you're seeing results, you're part of that community, and then something happens, you got a business trip or some whatever, like some wrench gets thrown in your plans and you miss a day or two or maybe three days, then it becomes so hard to go back

when it was so easy to go every single day prior to that. And that's where you see people completely fall off the wagon. And then six months goes by, a year goes by and they haven't gone once. Yeah. So psychologically, there's something very strange that's going on with that,

that makes that momentum something so special and mystical that really needs to be respected and cared for because it's so powerful. It's kind of like Newton's laws applied to habits. Objects that are in motion stay in motion, objects at rest stay at rest. So there's a wise lesson there in what you're, you're mentioning, um, which is first of all, all habits streaks end at some point, you know, like everybody slips up at some point. And the mantra that I like to keep in mind for that for myself as much as anybody else is never miss twice. So if I work out at the gym, uh, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I miss on Friday because of a business trip or whatever,

then I need to put all my energy into making sure I get in there on Monday. I don't want to miss twice in a row. It's pretty much never the first mistake that ruins you. It's like the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. So if you can get back on track quickly there, I think I have a line in the book, something like, missing once is a mistake. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

Yeah, because then it creates its own negative momentum. Right, yes, exactly. Yeah, it's like, what's the next right action? And if you are identity-based, you'll say, well, I'm a writer, so I write. This is what I do. I don't take two days off. I mean, diets are like the most common example of this. What we're really talking about here is this kind of all or nothing mentality that people have where it's like,

well, I did the diet for five days, but then my friends wanted to go to happy hour and I binge ate a little bit. And so I guess I'm just not made for this. Yeah, I guess it's just too hard. So I'm just giving up instead of just like, well, you know what? The next time I'm going to sit down to eat, I'm going to make a healthy choice. Exactly. And maybe it's not perfect, but at least it's not Burger King. I wish I hadn't been, Jay, but never miss twice. So I'm going to make sure that next time I get back on track and eat a healthy meal. So I do think momentum plays a role there. There's also a second note about momentum, and this comes back to video games and some of the stuff we talked about earlier, and to that cardinal rule of behavior change that I mentioned, a lot of times the momentum is built on the speed of the feedback

cycle. So we have so far in this conversation been talking about habits kind of from like this larger macro level of like a habit, like going to the gym or writing or something like that. But really, biologically speaking, this process of those four stages, your brain is going through this endlessly and all the time and in the fraction of a second. So take something like turning on the light switch. You walk into the room. Cue. The room is dark. Craving.

I predict that if I turn the light on, it'll be better and reduce uncertainty and I want to be able to see. Response. I flip on the light switch. Reward. The room is now lit and I can see. And all of that happens in, you know, a half a second. Um, and so your brain is going through those cycles all the time. So in a sense, you're kind of always going through these little behaviors and, uh, those

little micro cycles can build momentum as you go through something, if they're tight enough and you have signals of progress, you're getting positive feedback. And this is what video games are incredible at. As you go through any level, there are little counters in the corner. Your score is going up. You're collecting more rubies and coins. Every time you grab a power-up or a weapon or something, there's a little jingle or chime. Even the pitter-patter of steps as you advance through the scene is a signal that you're making positive progress. And what video games can do that it's very hard to do in daily life is they can

keep you right on the edge so that you're challenged just enough, but still making progress. You know, like if you are really killing it on a certain level, they start to take away some of those power ups and give you more difficult challenges to face. If you're struggling, they'll give you more coins and rubies and, you along a little bit. And so they are always

making sure that you're making just enough progress through the level while still being challenged enough to be engaged. And that is like, I mean, this has been shown with research, variable rewards and keeping you kind of on this razor's edge of difficulty is one of the peak ways to maintain motivation and momentum and want to stay engaged with a habit. And technology makes it easier for us to do that, which is one reason those behaviors and games are so addictive. Yeah. I mean, it's ingenious. It's just being channeled for a less than productive outcome for the human animal, right? Like it just makes me go back to that point of like, why can't we take all of that

and create a healthy eating or a fitness app or an app that would work within the structure of a professional organization to enhance productivity? So I think we can, I think it's possible, but I think that it probably won't take the form that people would expect. In many cases, the most effective behavior change apps actually change behavior through like a trap door. And this is just me theorizing right now. I don't have any proof of this.

But like if I think about what is the most effective exercise app that's been created in the last decade? Well, it's probably not actually an exercise app. It's probably something like Pokemon Go, because that got people, that got millions of people to walk five or 10 miles a day, but it wasn't an exercise app at all. And I think that there's something maybe there for people who do have good intentions, who want to change the world in a positive way and are really serious about changing behavior, think about what those trap doors are. What are the things that actually motivate people? Saving money, making more money, winning the praise and approval and respect to their friends, earning a higher score on the leaderboard. And if you can figure out how to have a secondary healthy behavior happening as they do that, that might actually be something that

could really stick and get millions of people to do something different. Yeah. Explain that idea of the secondary healthy habit. So Pokemon Go, the real thing that people are trying to do is collect these Pokemon and get a higher score and whatever. But the secondary habit is to do that, you have to go walk around the world and see where they're hidden throughout the park and all that type of stuff. And so it's not, none of the people playing that think, I'm going to walk five miles today. They just think, I need to go find where this thing is. And it goes back to your original law, which is creating a system that promotes the healthy behavior without people even necessarily being consciously aware of it, right?

That's ultimately how you move the needle. It happens all the time. I mean we've talked about multiple negative or maybe less healthy examples with cell phones and things like that where we aren't really thinking about like, oh, I want to sit on my couch and browse Instagram for three hours. Nobody's waking up thinking that. They're just thinking, oh, I got more likes and what are my friends up to and blah, blah, blah. So that's kind of a secondary action that comes from that. And this is just twisting it or flipping it on its head a little bit and thinking about how we can have secondary actions that are healthier. Yeah. All right. So what's the difference between focusing on creating a good habit versus focusing on eradicating or overcoming a bad habit? Like where should the

focus and intention go? Yeah, that's a great question. I haven't been asked that before, but I think actually there's some important like keys. So I'll, let me start with a bad habit. I think the most effective place to focus on breaking a bad habit is the first and the third stage of my four-step model. So the first stage is making it invisible. So that's like reducing exposure. So, you know, I talked about like hiding the television, for example, or really common example, people here, like make sure you don't have any sweets in the house, like remove the processed food from your pantry. So in many cases, again, not for true addictions, but for just these bad habits that we have, we just do them because they're around us. So it's like, well, if you want to spend less

money on electronics, don't follow all the tech review blogs. You know, you're constantly being prompted to buy something. Or if you want to lose weight, don't follow a bunch of food bloggers on Instagram. You know, you're like continually have to overcome that stimuli. So the more that you can cut out that stimuli and reduce exposure to the negative cues, maybe that bad habit loop just never gets started. And so that's one effective way. I'd skip over the second stage because our interpretation of cues, the prediction that we have, it happens so fast. It happens lightning fast. As soon as you see that food blog on Instagram, you immediately think about your mouth watering and wanting to eat something and being able to like shortcut that and circumvent that it's possible. One of the

things that you would have to do is like kind of reframe your mindset and make that thing that previously meant something mean something else, which you can do, but it's just, it's hard. It's a hard task. Yeah, this is operating on the unconscious mind, right? So you can rewire your neurology over time

with new habits that create those new neural pathways, but that's a steeper mountain to climb. And it takes a long time. If you previously ate pork, but then you join a religion that doesn't allow you to eat pork and you start to belong to that group and you develop friends there and stuff, well then yeah, maybe at some point you'll see pork is very unattractive. So you've like reframed how you interpret that cue, but, um, it's, it might take a while to do that. You need to actually build the friendships and have a strong reason to stick with, you know, with that new, uh, belief system. So anyway, I'm going to skip over the second stage cause it's, I think it's more difficult for bad habit. And then the other area where I think you

can focus is, uh, the third step third step, which is make it difficult in the case of breaking a bad habit. And if you can increase the friction enough, you won't follow through. So one of the examples I like to give, Victor Hugo, famous writer and author, he signed this book deal to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And he just kind of like goofed off for a year. He had friends over and had a bunch of parties. He went and traveled. He went out to restaurants. He didn't really do a whole lot. And the publishers got all annoyed with him and they set this all to made him. And they were like, listen, you need to get this book done in six months. We're going to cancel the deal. So he had his assistant come into his,

his room and took all of his clothes out of his closet and put them in a chest and they locked them up. And the only thing that he was left with was like this large shawl, this like robe. And so he didn't have any clothes that were suitable for having friends over or for hosting parties. He couldn't travel outside of the house. Um, he effectively put himself on house arrest. And so, uh, my point there was he made it difficult to procrastinate. He made it difficult to do the behavior he didn't want to do. And it ended up working. He got the book done like two weeks early. He wrote it in like five and a half months. And then, you know, now we have The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Yeah. I mean, it goes back to being intentional about your environment. I heard a similar story about Jonathan Franzen. I think it was when he was writing Freedom, maybe. But he rented like a crappy, like the most unappealing office, like little, like, like almost like a hotel room in a terrible building, like in Santa Cruz with like no view or any, and all it was, was like, like a horrible table and a really uncomfortable chair. And it was like nothing on the walls, nothing, you know, just to go, no distractions, just write. Maya Angelou does something similar, I think. She,

for many of her books, she rents a hotel room and she leaves her house, drives there and writes. There's nothing else. A lot of screenwriters in Hollywood do that. They go to fancy hotels and order lots of room service. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. So, so back to this idea of, of focusing on building good habits versus. So that's where I think you should focus for bad habits. For good habits, I really think all four are effective. The stuff that we talked about earlier with making it attractive and joining a new tribe, I think that's the most difficult of the four because you're asking someone to, to change their friend group or to find new friends. I think that's the most difficult of the four because you're asking someone to change their friend group or to find new friends at least. I don't think you have to

abandon the people that are currently in your life if you want to change your habits, but it's just easier to adopt a new habit if you have some friends that are also doing that new thing. Is there any research on the difference between an in-person peer group, like joining a running club or whatever, versus like being on a Facebook group where like you're somewhere where that community doesn't exist, but you have this peer group that's available to you through the laptop. Yeah. It's a good question. I have not seen studies on it. It's possible something has been done. I just haven't seen it. But I think that having a group like, you know, you're a member of a community on Reddit

or a Facebook group or something like that, it's probably better than not having it. If nothing else, you're kind of like seeding those ideas in your brain that maybe you wouldn't be getting from your physical environment. But what I'm really interested to see, and who knows when this will happen, maybe it'll be 10 years, maybe it'll be 100, but some kind of augmented reality

or virtual reality solution. I was just talking to someone the other day about this. She has this idea, this company, where it's virtual reality and you effectively use it for self-improvement or behavior change. So you just throw the goggles on and now you're suddenly in a room with 10 other people

who are trying to build the same habit that you are. So it's like a Facebook group, except it feels like you're in person. And everybody knows that being in a Facebook group doesn't feel like what it feels like to go to your local gym. But what if suddenly it did, if it did have more of that feel and it felt almost real, then I don't know, I'd be interested to know, like you could live anywhere. You live in the middle of the woods and suddenly have access to what feels like an in-person group and maybe get the accountability from that. Yeah. Well, I think there's no way that's not happening. Yeah. Agreed. I mean, there'll be a lot of crazy, not so good stuff

that comes with that, you know, technology, but I can see all kinds of benefits with that kind of thing. Yeah. What about this idea of, of the way in which the adoption of good habits begin to crowd out the bad habits? So that was going to be one of the next things I wanted to add to the good habits piece. There are two things. That's one of them. In many cases, building a good habit, it's kind of like how plants can crowd another out. And so as the good habit is formed, it kind of naturally crowds out the bad one. So let's say, for example, that you both want to get in shape and work out more and you wish you watched less TV or something. Well, if you usually watch TV for three hours when you get home from work each day and you just get home from work and

change into your workout clothes and go to the gym instead, and you just focus on the habit of going to the gym, you don't even really need to think about the television one. It just doesn't happen automatically because you're at the gym and you're working out during that time. So there are lots of times when stuff like that will occur where the creation of a good habit will just naturally crowd out a bad one. And another way to think about this is behaviors often come in bundles. Like they're related to each other, right? Like you go to the bathroom and then you wash your hands. And then after you wash your hands, you dry your hands.

And drying your hands reminds you that you need to throw the laundry in. And then you think about, oh, we're out of detergents. And then we need to go to the store. And they're all kind of connected. And in many cases, both bad habits and good habits can kind of come in these bundles. And so if you start to do something else that like pulls on one thread in the bundle, then the whole stack of bad habits like fades away. Yeah, it's not a binary one-to-one equation. If you start going to the gym and you start to see results, then you're going to be more interested in eating healthy.

And then you're going to be more interested in getting a good night's sleep. And then, hey, what's this meditation thing? And before you know it, like, you know, your life is completely different. That's why I think exercise is like one of my keystone habits, one of the crucial ones for me, because I had like this post-workout high where I can focus for like an hour and get some good work done or think clearly. I tend to eat better naturally, just, which is weird, right? You would think, oh, you work out so then you could waste it, but I don't want to waste it. That's like kind of the feeling. I sleep better at night because I'm tired, which means I wake up in the morning and I have better energy. And at no point was I trying to build better sleep habits or energy habits or focus habits or nutrition habits. It

all just kind of came as this natural side effect. And exercise is a common one. I mean, it's mine, but it's also common to many people. What are the other ones? Well, there's, so like visualization is one that you'll hear from a lot of performers, like comedians or something. They'll go through the same visualization routine or athletes before they step onto stage or step out to perform. A daily walk is a really common one amongst creatives. There's a book called Daily Rituals by Mason Curie, where he talks about the rituals of a bunch of scientists and composers and writers. And probably like 75% of it was alcohol and drugs.

And then the ones that are clean, a daily walk is like a really crucial one. Well, the ones that are still producing at a high level 20 years later, you know. Have you heard of what David Sedaris does? No, what does he do? It's insane. He, I mean, he's bananas in the best way, but he has some very weird behavioral quirks. And I think this must be driven by some kind of bizarre OCD,

but he lives like in the English countryside. Yeah. And for some reason, he just became obsessed with the amount of like litter that was everywhere. So he started out like, and this goes back to like creatives taking a walk, like he'd go out and he'd pick up litter. And now he walks every day for like eight hours,

picking up litter all over the place, every single day. Like it's some weird compulsion where he just feels like, and when he travels and he goes out of town, like he does it in whatever town. He'll do it wherever he is. But like, not for like an hour, like eight hours. And I was like, well, there's something very unhealthy about that.

But at the same time, I was left wondering like, how does that inform his creative process? Like, perhaps this is by giving him some kind of steady, low state activity, it allows him to free associate in a certain way that perhaps contributes to the incredible writing that he does. I don't know. I don't know the science behind that, but I have had similar thoughts to the one you just had, which is maybe like going for a walk kind of gives your, yeah, the steady state or like maybe it even gives your non-conscious something to do. And then you somehow like get out of your own way a little bit because you're busy doing that stuff and like making one foot move in front of the other. And that opens up the floodgates for an interesting idea to hit you.

Right. But, okay, so I didn't know that that was where you're going with the Sedaris thing. But I had heard that at some point that he has this. And I heard a great story, which is that he goes around picking up this garbage for like eight or nine hours. And he's done it so much that he got this award from the Queen of England for picking it up. And he thought that he was going to have like a

private audience with the queen for it. And so he goes to Buckingham palace and it turns out there are like 4,000 other people that are being honored for their civic work as well. And anyway, he's just talking about like how, how he thought he was going to get to spend like an hour with the queen. And instead she like shook his hand for half a second and took a picture. And then that was it. his hand for half a second. They took a picture and then that was it. Um, all right. Anyway, uh, where were we? We were talking about, um, okay. So there was another thing I wanted to add about crowding, crowding out and, um, the, uh, oh, well, okay. Let me wrap up the, so visualization, um, going for a walk exercise and then meditation is a common keystone habit that people will talk about, uh, especially, you know, CEOs or whatever. They get their 10 minutes of meditation in or 20 minutes and they

feel like the rest of the day kind of falls in line. And then another weird one that I've heard about from some of my readers is budgeting or specifically paying off debt. When people pay their debt off, it starts to ripple into other areas. They start exercising and stuff. And they're like, this wasn't even part of it, but it seems to bleed over. Well, it's such a heavy, you know, thing to kind of just carry, like a dull, low grade, you know, burden that just weighs on you

without you even really being consciously aware of it. And when you're carrying something like that around or you're under undue financial duress, it's hard to be creative. It's hard to be your best self because it's just this thing that's weighing on you all the time. So those are some of the keystone habits.

The only other point I was gonna make about crowding out bad habits and focusing on good ones is that figuring out ways to feel successful in the moment, that immediate satisfaction, that's a really strong place to focus for building good habits. There are some examples. Products are really good examples.

Businesses are good at this. So like chewing gum. For many years, chewing gum has been around for a long time. But for most of the time, it was like this bland resin. It was chewy, but it wasn't tasty. And then Wrigley came along in the late

1800s and they added juicy fruit and spearmint and double mint. And for the first time, I don't know. I was bored. I don't know. Um, but they, uh, anyway, so they, it was finally tasty right away. And, um, all of a sudden chewing gum takes office. This worldwide habit and Wrigley becomes the, the most popular, um, chewing gum company in the world. And in modern society, there are still tons of examples of stuff like this. Recently, a couple of years ago, BMW added this system to one of their cars where it would pump fake engine growl noise through the speakers. So whenever you stepped on the gas, it would like be more satisfying to rev the engine. I heard about that. We're such dumb animals. It's like unbelievable.

Ford is doing something similar. They have like this little valve system where usually it's blocked and the car is soundproofed. But if you really slam on the gas, the valve will open up and it'll let the engine noise in and you feel this guttural roar. The aliens should just come and take us over now. This is the end.

But the point here and how to apply it to good habits is that if you have some kind of immediate feedback, immediate positive feedback, you feel good in the moment, then you have a reason to repeat it. And we already talked about identity being one aspect of that. Like as soon as you go to the gym, you can feel like you're the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or whatever. And that's one little bit of satisfaction. Habit tracking, I don't think you always need to track or measure your habits, but for certain areas, for the ones that are important to you, that can be an effective way to do this too. You know, like if you, the most simple form is just put like an X on the calendar each time you do a workout or whatever. Well, if you do that every Monday and Wednesday and Friday, as soon

as you finish the workout, it feels good to record that. I mean, I write down like all the sets and reps that I do. It feels good to close the book and have another workout finished. And of course there's a million apps now that do that kind of thing from Strava to the aura ring and everything in between. The point though, the central point is just finding small ways to feel satisfied in the moment gives you a reason to repeat the good habit in the future. I like this idea of batching. You use this example of one way to kind of confront and overcome a bad habit is to combine it with a good habit. So there's the example of the woman who, you know, wanted to watch Hunger Games, but then she's like, she's only allowed to watch it if she's doing it while she's at the gym. So like creating the reward mechanism

for the quote unquote, like, you know, less than stellar behavior has to be built into or part and parcel of doing something that is part of the healthy habit that you're trying to bring into your life. Yeah, so this is called temptation bundling. And the researcher, Katie Milkman, who's at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania,

she's the one who actually ran the study, but she also had that personal example of she liked the Hunger Games, but she knew she needed to work out more. So she was only allowed to read the book at the gym. But it's a larger application of what's called pre-max principle, which is the psychological principle that behaviors that are more likely to be performed will reinforce behaviors that are less likely to be performed if you kind of combine them together. And my favorite example of this, there's this engineering student in Ireland and he rigged up his stationary bike at home to his computer so that Netflix would only turn on when he was pedaling.

Right. And if he stopped pedaling, then Netflix would pause. It goes back to that same thing. We've created all these, you know, now we have so many things that we have to do to overcome the bad. The links that we'll go to, you know. But in that case, Netflix was the more attractive

or more satisfying behavior. And so he used that to incentivize himself to get on the bike and cycle. And it's that delicate balance. Like if what he had to do to watch Netflix was too daunting, then he just wouldn't watch Netflix, right? So he has to be in that like sweet spot where it's uncomfortable, but okay, I'll do it. This is kind of a larger overriding theme of our conversation so far and something that's probably important to keep in mind which is you need to be willing to experiment um you know like everybody's running their race in life separately and so you have to you can use science to inform your strategy and that's a good way it's a good way to have educated guesses and

kind of like nudge you in the right direction. But you have to be willing to perform these N of one experiments to see, you know, like what is a habit that's right on that razor's edge that's just motivating enough that I'll go ahead and do it, but not so hard that I'm like,

oh, just screw it entirely. And only you can know that for yourself. And I think sometimes that's frustrating for people because they just want to be handed like a book and be like, hey, here's the answer. And as best I could, I tried to write that book for habits. But the truth is you need to be willing to experiment and run these kind of personal journeys to figure out what does work for you. Yeah, there's no question about that. All right, let's talk about goals. You have some interesting thoughts on goals.

The traditional conventional wisdom being like, hey, if you want to score, you got to set a goal. If you want to know where you're going, set a goal. No goal is too big. Don't sell yourself short. What's the problem with goals? Okay, so first, before I come off as someone who completely hates goals, I think goals are useful. I think uh, first, before I come off as someone who completely hates goals, um, I, uh, I think goals are useful. Um, I think they're useful for setting a sense of direction. Uh, but once you know what direction you're moving in, then I think it's best to put the goal on the shelf and focus on the system, uh, or focus on the process and the habits. And the, this was first an idea that was kind of like thrown out to me, or I saw this kind of dichotomy between systems and goals by Scott Adams, who wrote the Dilbert comic.

And I think he's a little more adamant about it than I am. I think he says like goals are for losers and stuff like that, which I don't think is entirely true. But there are a couple interesting problems with goals. So one problem is the winners and losers in any particular domain often have the same goals. So one problem is the winners and losers in any particular domain often have the same goals. So every Olympian wants to win the gold medal. Every candidate who applies for a job wants to get the job. So if they all have the same goal, by definition, the goal cannot be the thing that makes the difference between the people who get it and those who don't. But you're not going to win the gold medal if you don't have a goal to win the gold medal.

So I think we could say that goals are necessary, but not sufficient. And that's why I think they're useful. They're useful for setting a sense of direction. You know, like every Nick Saban in Alabama show up, they know from day one, the goal is to win the national title. And this is one of the beautiful things about sports is that it's so black and white like that. It's so clear cut that, okay, we all know what the goal is. And now we can just say, let's not talk about the national title at practice every day. Let's just focus on the process and the system. But there isn't really a national championship of tech startups or of a lot of other things in life.

And so for that, it's like a little, a little messier because people often need those milestones to know that they're still pointed in the right direction. So I think it's good for that. But I think that generally speaking, we have become a very goal and outcome obsessed society. And part of that is because that's what the news shows us every day. You know, like you're never going to see a news story that is like woman eats salad and chicken for lunch today. It's only a news story after she loses 100 pounds. That would be a story in the onion. Yeah, they probably have run that before.

You know, but it's only after the outcome has occurred that it becomes a story. And social media has just like magnified this even more because all we do is just see people's outcomes and results and highlights all day long. even more because all we do is just see people's outcomes and results and highlights all day long. And I think because we are inundated with results and goals, we think having a big goal, having the result, having the outcome is what we should focus on. And so we spend 90% of our time thinking about obsessing over planning these goals and only 10% of our time actually worrying about the process. And it should probably be reversed. Well, I think what goals do well is they create clarity of purpose, right? So, yes, sports is a very black and white template where goals make sense. Startup culture, well, you know, what is the goal? It's more unclear, but I think every successful startup

or startup entrepreneur has some kind of true north. And that may not be financially rooted. It may be in changing the world or whatever it may be, but there needs to be a directional guidepost so that the team or the individual can cohere around a trajectory. So I think it makes sense in that regard because it's a reminder of like where you're going and why.

But I agree with you that once you set the goal, then it becomes about systems. Like you should sort of forget about it and focus all of your attention on like, what is the next thing that you're doing, right? Rather than like talking about this thing that, you know, may not happen for 10 years or 20 years. I mean, you know, I made jest of the Olympic gold,

but you know, the person who wins the gold medal probably set that goal when they were eight years old, right? So it's been this true north that's kind of gently guiding them in a certain direction for a very long time. Yeah. I mean, just to add a couple things to that. So let's say that you are that tech startup and you have some clear goals about what you want the culture to be or the direction of the company to be, where people should focus each day. The interesting thing is that the goals can be useful for that clarity, but really they don't determine much in the long run. Your true culture as a

company is not the goals that you put on paper or the mission statement that you put on the wall. Your true culture is the shared habits of the team. If it's not a habit among the organization, it's not actually part of your culture. It's just something you did one time in like a thought building exercise. And I think that that kind of puts goals in their proper place, which is, yes, it's very useful for us all to know what direction we're trying to row in. But unless we're actually rowing, unless we're actually doing the habits, then it's not really part of this. And so that's one thing. The second thing is that achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. Yeah, it's temporal, right? Whereas

identity has a permanence to it. There's an example I use with this for cleaning your room. You know, like you get really motivated and you got a messy room. And so your goal becomes to have a clean room. So you clean it up, but you have a clean room for the moment. But if you don't change like the sloppy, messy pack rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, you turn around two weeks or a month later and you have a messy room again. And so we think that the thing that needs to change is the result. But actually what we really need to change is the process behind the results. We like treat a symptom without treating the cause. Right. Well, in your example, you're actually treating the symptom rather than

the root cause. It's like taking a blood pressure medication without changing your lifestyle habits. Right. Right. But I think this is really common when people set goals because they think only about the outcome. They think about the clean room. They think about the million dollar bank account. They think about the fit six pack abs. But what they don't think about is what kind of lifestyle do you need to live to get that thing? And unless you actually want the whole lifestyle that's associated with that result, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make it your goal, you know? But it becomes very easy to get wrapped up in that because all we ever see is the outcome rather than the process. You also have this interesting idea about the sort of peril of good habits and how that can kind of create a comfort zone for people.

So I think that, and we mentioned this early on, the habits of the foundation for, I think the habits of the foundation for mastery, so LeBron or whatever, like all those examples of automating as much as you can of the process. Um, but there is a downside to building good habits. And that is that at first you become aware of something that you want to change. Then you like deliberately practice it for a while. You put effort in. And as you do that, you develop fluency and skill and ability.

And what was previously difficult becomes easy and you habitualize it. But once it's a habit, the downside is you stop paying attention as much. When you can do something pretty good on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better. And there's actually an interesting study that's been done on surgeons that shows that early on in their career, they go through residency, they increase fluency and skill, they start practicing surgery maybe for a few years, and then actually their skills get to a peak. And then once they've done it for a while and they're pretty good at it, it's not that they drop off a cliff, but there's a slight decline in performance because they can do so many of

the steps on autopilot that they stop thinking about, did I make a little error there? Did I make a mistake? Did I overlook one step? Yeah, there's a rigidity. You become less teachable. Yeah. And you become less cognizant of where you might be slipping by, you know? And so one of my favorite examples of this, I mean, this is one of the values of having a coach

is that coaches keep you aware of your mistakes when you are no longer. Atul Gawande, who's a fantastic writer in his own right, and as a surgeon, he- He got us everything. Oh, it's insane. I know. His schedule is crazy.

Straight up genius, that guy. Yeah, no, he's fantastic. I also think Complications is his best book and it doesn't get nearly as much press as I think it should. But anyway, he hired another surgeon who had recently retired to review the tape of his surgery and tell him like where he was going wrong and what he was, you know, what he could improve on. And I love that because surgeons never get coaches, right?

That's not a thing in that industry. But you don't have to be an athlete to have a coach. Like find a mentor or someone who recently retired or someone who's 10 years ahead of where you're at and have them critique what you're up to. where you're at and have them critique what you're up to. Um, and that is a really instructive and powerful way to kind of overcome, or at least become aware of some of your habits that the downside of some of your habits that maybe you're overlooking. Yeah. Or, or perhaps develop habits around, um, making sure that you're always, uh, tiptoeing outside your comfort zone or habits that encourage you to always have people around you that will give you that critical feedback.

Push you, nudge you just a little bit from that comfortable place. I mean, so that maybe is what I'm talking about here. As habits are formed, they become a comfortable place. And usually growth is on the perimeter of that rather than in the middle. And so you need some reason or some way to stay on the perimeter of your abilities and keep stretching rather than staying comfortable. Where do most people go wrong with all of this?

I think probably the biggest thing is making a habit too big. So we talked a little bit about the two-minute rule and the idea of scaling a habit down to just the first two minutes of optimizing for the starting line rather than finish line. That's a huge one. The second one would be the all or nothing mentality. We talked about like never miss twice. Let me make sure that I, you know, like get back on track as quickly as possible rather than acting like, well, if I can't run three days a week, then why bother at all? You know, like doing it once is fine. Um, so that's another huge issue. And then in the long run, the two things that I think are most crucial are identity, uh, adopting that type of identity and casting votes for the person you want to become, even if it's in a really small way. So you start to see yourself and build up evidence of being that person.

And then the second one is social environment. Um, you know, like in the long run, it's really hard to stick to a habit if it goes against the grain of the people that are around you. Whereas if you get praised and respected for it, people stick to things, even if they don't have a factual basis for them, even if they don't have a good reason, because the social component and the belonging is so strong. Yeah. The identity one is huge. You know, I think really a huge problem is that people are not adequately in touch enough with themselves and their impulses, who they are and where they want to be. Like they're not connected to their interior landscape to the extent that their choice of identity or goal is necessarily reliable because most people are not engaged in that internal process of trying to really understand what makes them tick and who they want to be. And what I see is a lot of people chasing the wrong thing.

And they may be very good at executing on that goal or that habit that takes them there, only to later discover that that whole pursuit was, you know, really not what they should have been doing in the first place. That's that Jim Carrey quote, right? Where he's like, I hope everybody gets everything they ever wanted and realizes that wasn't what they actually needed in the first place. That's that Jim Carrey quote, right? Where he's like, I hope everybody gets everything they ever wanted and realizes that wasn't what they actually needed in the first place. Yeah, or I can't remember who it was that said this.

Like, you spend your whole life climbing this ladder only to realize it's leaning against the wrong wall, right? Which becomes a much broader discussion about psychology, I suppose, in general. But all right, we gotta start to close this thing down. But why don't we, if you could leave us with a couple things that people can take away to perhaps kind of tweak how they look at

and think about the habits that they're trying to change in their own lives and some simple steps to get them started in making better decisions? Sure. So I'll give you one mindset shift and one practical application. So the mindset shift, and this kind of lies beneath the entire conversation we had today, is to just try to find a way to get 1% better each day. It doesn't need to be something radical. It doesn't need to be something huge. But habits are easy to overlook,

both good and bad on any given day because they don't seem like very much. The difference between studying Spanish for an hour tonight and not studying at all seems like nothing because it's like, well, I still didn't learn the language. And the difference between eating a salad versus eating a burger and fries seems like nothing because your body looks the same in the mirror and the scale is the same at the end of the night. It's only once your habits have compounded over two or five or 10 years that the full impact of those 1%

choices, 1% better or 1% worse becomes fully apparent. And if you can understand that concept and internalize it, then you can start to see the importance in your daily actions and in your daily habits and why those are so critical. So that's the first thing is just try to find a way to get 1% better. And the second thing, just a practical application, I would encourage you to try to apply the two minute rule. Think about whatever habit it is that you're trying to build and scale it down to just the first two minutes of the behavior. What is the thing that you can do that can initiate it? Don't think about it as like the overall habit.

Think about it like a gateway habit or an entrance ramp to a highway. How can you automate the beginning of the behavior? And this is maybe an important distinction about habits. A lot of the time we talk about habits as we use the phrase habit for things that aren't actually habits. Like we'll say something like, I want to build a habit of writing every day. Technically, we define this at the very beginning of this episode, a habit is a behavior that can be performed more or less automatically. That's on autopilot. Writing is about the most effortful, concentrated thing that you can do, right? Like you're, you're going to be thinking carefully. You're not going to be on autopilot. So the habit part of that would be, I sit in a chair at a desk with a pad of paper in

front of me or a laptop. The habit is the first two minutes, right? How can you automate the ritual of getting started and then let the consequence and the, uh, the effortful concentrating work follow naturally. Um, same way with, you know, the example I gave about my reader, the habit was showing up at the gym, you know, or for running a lot of people, a lot of people have heard stuff like this before, like, Hey, take small steps. But even when you know, you should start small, it's still really easy to start too big. People are like, all right, I want to build the habit of running. So I guess I know I should start small. People are like, all right, I want to build the habit of running. So I guess I know I should start small,

so I'll only run for 15 minutes. But even that's like way bigger than what I'm talking about. Scale it down just the first two minutes, automate the ritual of getting started, putting on your running shoes, stepping out the door and locking the door. And if you can automate that and make that a habit and you do it day in and day out

and you're the type of person who always gets their running shoes on and steps out the door, there are going to be a lot of days where you go for a run. Yeah, that's great advice. That's great advice. All right. James Clear. I think we did it. This is awesome, man. Thanks, Rich. I really appreciate it. Feel good? Yeah, I feel great. Anything else you want to say? Do we say it all? We could keep going. We could. There's a lot in the book that we didn't get to cover, which might seem incredible

given how much we covered here. But the book is very thorough. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed it. There's some sections that I find really interesting. Like I have a section on genes and habits and like choosing what happens for your personality. Oh yeah, I had written down to talk about like genetic factors. Yeah, I mean, we can talk about it.

Let's do it. All right. There's like a running joke out on the internet that I always say like, all right, we're wrapping this up. And then I go, I'm going. Two hours later. All right. So here's my thought on genes.

In many cases, the genes that are, well, we often don't like to talk about genes in biology because it seems like a fixed characteristic, right? By saying that like, oh, your genetics, it seemed nobody likes to think like, oh, it's out of my control. Why bother? Like, oh, your genetics, it seemed nobody likes to think like, oh, it's out of my control. Why bother? But the truth is the usefulness or the applicability of your genes is highly dependent on context. So being seven feet tall is an incredible advantage if you're trying to play basketball. And it's an incredible disadvantage if you're trying to be a gymnast.

And just as that is very obvious with physical traits, it's becoming increasingly true as we develop more understanding of the link between genes and psychological traits, or what we would call your personality. And so for certain personalities, certain habits or certain environments might be predisposed to being really successful, enjoyable, or not. I think there's a lot to improve in this area. I think there's like a lot for us still to learn. So in many ways, we might just be in the infancy of understanding this. But one of the best measures or most robust measures of personality is the big five in this kind of like mapping personality traits onto five different spectrums. The most common one that people know is introversion and extroversion. But there are other ones as well, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and so on.

And each of these five traits has been linked to some kind of genetic underpinning, some type of DNA. And so one of my favorite studies on this, researchers took babies that were in the nursery and they played a harsh noise on one side of the nursery. And some of the babies turned toward the noise and some of them turned away. And as they track those children as they grew up throughout life, they found the ones that turned toward the noise were more likely to grow up to be extroverts. And the ones that turned away were more likely to grow up to be introverts. Yeah, the extroverts are in the mosh pit and the introverts are at home watching Netflix. So again, I think there's still a lot to learn,

but there's definitely something going on here. People, for example, who have higher levels of agreeableness tend to have higher natural levels of oxytocin as well. And so you can imagine how someone who is high in agreeableness might be more likely or it might be easier for them to build a habit of writing thank you notes or of organizing social events where people can be warm and hang out and kind and considerate and so on. They're that kind of personality. And so they're maybe predisposed to that kind of habit.

Where it gets interesting is if you can understand yourself at a more, I guess I'll even call it genetic level, then maybe you can start to design habits that fit you better or design an environment that fits you better. So one of the examples I gave in the book, and again, I'm just kind of, I'm still like toying with some of these ideas, is for people who are low in conscientiousness, which is one of those five traits, that means that they're less likely to be orderly or less likely to be organized. So if someone is like that, if they're predisposed to be that kind of person, it might really help them to be in an environment, to have an environment designed

where things are already orderly or primed or set up because they're going to be less likely to be the type of person that would just remember to do it or to make a to-do list to do it and so on. And so maybe if you knew, oh, I'm low in conscientiousness, you should shift more of your energy and attention to environment design. Yeah, yeah. That's super interesting. I mean, in the book, you talk about, you know, Michael Phelps, who has a physique that's perfectly suited to him swimming very fast. And then you have this long distance runner who they have the same inseam, but the proportionality of their bodies

are completely different and he's well suited in long distance running, they could not swap places. And the point being that from afar, the casual observer will say, well, of course he's good at swimming, like look at his body, I can't do that. But the greater point that you're trying to make is if we can develop self-awareness around what suits us best in our predispositions and gravitate towards those environments and those opportunities, then we're putting ourselves in a position where the expression of our genetic makeup can advance us and fuel us and put us in the position that is best for us.

I don't know if this is going to end up being possible. It's possible that there are maybe a few key traits. Measuring intelligence is a hot topic and difficult to do because there are many different types of intelligence. But if, for example, winning the genetic lottery in intelligence happens to be like a cheat code and it helps you succeed in any area of life, then maybe this is what I'm about to say isn't as accessible. But what I think could be possible and is a really inspiring notion to me is if we could appropriately map your personality and genes, then maybe we could better suit people to environments where they could be excellent. And that would be a wonderful thing for everyone to be able to feel

and experience what it's like to be excellent at something, what it's like to be world-class or to succeed. And in many ways, it's just a matching problem. You know, like what if Michael Phelps grew up in a family that was all runners and it never swam and he never got exposed to that? Well, there probably is a guy, you know, walking around right now who has a physique that's even better suited for the 200 butterfly and has never been in a swimming pool. It's like, we don't know

because we're ping pong balls bouncing around and we kind of, you know, find our own water level eventually, some of us do, but it leaves you wondering, well, how many people aren't finding that perfect outlet where the world, you talk about luck, you've written about like luck and you use Bill Gates as an example,

like there's a lot of luck involved. He was born in America and he was in this, the timing was right. Everything was perfect for him to be the person that he ultimately becomes. But how many people out there have that potential where the world doesn't converge in a way that allows them to express

whatever gift is innate within them? And my hope is that there are enough niches throughout the world that there are enough ways for people to fit in and find their thing where they can be excellent, where they're like perfectly suited for that. And it's just this matching problem that we don't, right now it really is like ping pong balls. It's just luck. I mean, it's luck that Michael Phelps grew up in the right environment, the right family,

the right situation for that. And that doesn't discount any of the hard work that he did. You know, I mean, he worked his butt off, but he was in the, he happened to also have been matched with the right thing at the beginning. Including like the perfect amount of psychological trauma to fuel the competitive nature within him. Like it's all of it, right? And I think we're headed towards a future where AI and genetic testing are going to be able to answer some of these questions for people.

And that's fraught with all kinds of other perils, but there is something interesting about that as well. In the meantime, you kind of leave people with this question, which is, what are you well-suited to suffer for, right? Something like that, paraphrasing. I think- Which is a way of kind of prompting that self-inquiry.

A lot of people try to figure out like, yes, so in that chapter after a set of questions that you can go of people try to figure out like, yes, so in that chapter, after a set of questions that you can go through to try to figure it out for yourself, what are you most appropriately matched for? What environment would suit you? And one of the key questions I think is where's an area where you can handle the pain of the work better than the people around you? The area where you are more well-equipped to suffer is the work that you were made to do, which is an interesting way to think about it, right? Like most people think about, oh, well, where is it just easy? Where do I succeed?

But every area requires hard work and effort to achieve some level of success. So the question is not, where is it easy? The question is, where can I handle the pain? Yeah, it's a different lens through which to look at it. But I think that that, I think that's, I think that's right. You know, for some people, for some, for whatever reason,

uh, people who grow up and, you know, become great writers, they writing a suffering, but they can handle it for some reason. Um, Navy seals,

like it's not easy to be one, but the guys who can make it somehow they can handle the suffering of it. Yeah. They're, they're well suitedsuited and prepared and willing to undergo that for some reason. And I think I used that line, something similar to that at the end of that chapter,

which is at the peak of any field, what you're going to find are people who are both well-suited and well-trained. It's not just one or the other. They have the environment matching and they have the hard work and the effort and the perseverance. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

I love it. That's one of my favorite lines in the book. I think it encapsulates the core idea. If you're willing to build those small behaviors and layer 1% improvements on top of each other, they will compound and multiply. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them over

time. And that can be true for you or against you. And that's why it's crucial to understand how habits work so that you can, you know, make sure that they're, uh, they're multiplying in your favor rather than to your detriment. You heard it here, people right from the source. Uh, I love it, man. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your wisdom. The book is fantastic. I think it's gonna help a lot of people. So I'm excited for you.

Are you going out on a big book tour? Are you gonna be around where people can come and hear you talk and stuff like that? Yeah, thank you. I'm so grateful and pleased to hear that you enjoyed it. So thanks for that. And we probably will do a book tour at some point. I'll definitely be in New York for the launch on October 16th. But in the meantime, people can find the book and learn more about it at atomichabits.com. Right. And

jamesclare.com, at James Clare, pretty much everywhere on the internet. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Just jamesclare.com is the place to go to check out some of my articles. So I've got it organized by category. So if you want to just bounce around and see what interests you and then, uh, there are links to social media and all that other stuff. Yeah. And you got this newsletter with like eight zillion people who subscribe and read your stuff, right? Yeah. That's, uh, jamesclear.com slash newsletter. But, uh, but yeah, you can just jamesclear.com and atomic habits.com. That'll, that'll have it all for you. Cool. Good talking to you, man. Great.

Thanks, Rich. Peace. That was awesome. Really enjoyed talking to James to learn more about what he does and who he is. Go to jamesclear.com. Hit him up on Twitter or Instagram at James underscore clear and let him know what you thought of today's conversation and pick up his new book, Atomic Habits. I want to thank Health IQ for sponsoring today's episode. Health IQ is the life insurance company that understands and puts into action what is, I think, obvious and

elementary, that you should be rewarded for living a health conscious lifestyle, which of course has its own inherent rewards, but should also be reflected through financial rewards because historically, the health conscious have overpaid and subsidized those who are not as health conscious. It's just the way the healthcare insurance system works, but Health IQ realized, hey, it doesn't have to be this way. We can reinvent this. Let's celebrate those who take great care of themselves. And while we're at it, why not inspire health literacy across the world? What's really different about Health IQ is that they use science and data to get lower rates on life insurance for the health conscious,

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Thanks for the love, you guys. I'll see you back here next week with Bruce Friedrich from the Good Food Institute. It's all about clean meat. It's a fascinating conversation. That guy has a lot to say, and there's very much to look forward to in that conversation. Until then, peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.