The School of Greatness - 701 Success Habits: The Proven Way to Achieve Your Dreams with James Clear

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

HABITS ARE THE FOUNDATION FOR MASTERY. When I lived in Columbus, I knew that I wanted to make a lot of money. So I took my TV out of my apartment. If I wanted to watch a game, I went to a sports bar. If I wanted a break, I would go to the movies. I changed my environment to help me reach my goals. Habits will only work if you create a world that makes them easy. If you have a pinched water hose and you want more water to come out, you can either create more water pressure or straighten the hose. Which one do you think is easier? Habits will make or break you. That’s why I really enjoyed talking with my guest today who is an expert on habits: James Clear. James Clear is an author, photographer, and entrepreneur. He writes about habits by combining scientific research (the why) with practical application (the how). James tells us that our habits are influenced by our tribe and our environment. He says the people who seem like they have the most self-control are the least tempted. Learn how to make lifestyle changes that last on Episode 701.

This is episode number 701 on creating success habits with James Clear. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Aristotle said that quality is not an act, it is a habit. And Vince Lombardi said that winning is a habit, unfortunately, so is losing. Welcome, my friends, to the School of Greatness podcast,

where we bring you the most inspiring ideas, people, and stories to help you unlock that potential within you. And habits has been something that has transformed my life. As a young athlete, learning how to become a better athlete, those habits of waking up early and working out and doing the things that I didn't want to do early on, those were the things that made me into a better athlete, that helped me achieve my goals, that helped me transition from sports into school and school into a professional career and building a business and everything. And habits are a part of my daily life. From the moment I wake up to my afternoons to my evenings, I've got specific habits that I do on a daily basis that are

non-negotiable for me. They really anchor me into achieving the life that I dream of, into creating the things that I want. And without them, I would not be here. So habits are a must if you want to unlock your potential. And James Clear writes at jamesclear.com where he shares about using behavior science to improve your performance and master your habits. He has close to a half a million weekly newsletter readers and provides his audience with fresh ideas on how to live a healthy life, bold, mentally, and physically. And in this interview, we talk about how habits are the key to becoming the person you want to be. James shares his five non-negotiable habits from his years of research.

We also talk about ways you can start small with your habits so they aren't too overwhelming. And he shares ways you can increase your willpower. This is going to be a powerful one because habits are such a hot topic because they work. And if you're not developing good habits in your life, then you have bad habits and bad routines. And as Vince Lombardi said, winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. So if you don't feel like you're improving and growing in your career or your business or your health or your relationship or spirituality, if you don't feel like you're growing in your life, you've got to take a look at your habits because you probably don't have good habits. And that's why you might feel like you're suffering, struggling, anxious, overwhelmed,

or losing at the thing you're doing. And we're going to get into all this and reveal the answers that you can apply to your life like you're suffering, struggling, anxious, overwhelmed, or losing at the thing you're doing. And we're going to get into all this and reveal the answers that you can apply to your life right now. Again, a big thank you to our sponsor. And as always, make sure to take a screenshot of this episode while you're listening and share it with a friend. Text 3FANS right now, the link, which is lewishouse.com slash 701, or just grab the link over on iTunes that you're listening to on the podcast app or Spotify and put that direct link in your text message to a couple of friends or post it on your Instagram story and tag me at Lewis House. And without further ado, let's dive into this episode on the proven way to build life-changing

habits with James Clear. Welcome, everyone, back to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got James Clear in the house. Good to see you, man. Lewis, what's up, man? Good to talk to you. Good to reconnect. We met, I think, like eight or nine years ago, right? Yeah. Originally in Columbus. I was just telling someone this story. It was in Ohio. We're both Ohio boys. I had a website for like two weeks. It was the first time. That was a cute little look around. I liked it though.

It was a good way for me to learn stuff. But yeah, anyway, that was the very first website. And you told me a story about the first webinar that you and Sean did. And afterward, you went and jumped on a trampoline because you were so happy with how it went. Exactly, yeah. It was back in the day, man. You've grown a ton since then. That was when you were just starting out. Now you have almost a half a million subscribers to your newsletter. You've got a book that's coming

out right now called Atomic Habits, an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. And you've done so much over the years with what you were just saying is science-based research. What else was it again? Science-based research? Science, evidence-based, and highly actionable. It's got to be both of those, right? Like I want science-based ideas, but I also want them to be practical and easy to implement. Either one is useful, but if you have them both together, it's a really powerful combination. And you kind of got started in what? Personal finance and personal development and...

Yeah, I wasn't... Personal finance was never really a big part of my story, And you kind of got started in what, personal finance and personal development? Yeah, personal finance was never really a big part of my story, although I find it interesting for myself. I wrote about small business marketing and stuff early on. And then I transitioned after I learned how to build an email list. I transitioned to JamesClear.com, which is what I've been doing for the last five or six years now. And that's been mostly focused on performance, strength training, productivity, and really just habits in general and how we can use them to live better lives. What would you say is your core audience? Is it entrepreneurs? Is it just everyday individuals looking to improve their life? It started and there were pockets of people that were really interested. I had a pocket of venture capitalists and investors that were really interested.

Because you were doing business and marketing maybe? Well, one of the phrases I use, and I have this in the book, is that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. So it's like the same way that compound interest accrues through finance, the effects of your habits multiply over time. And so often, these choices that you make, they're these little 1% improvements for you or against you each day. And they're very easy to overlook on a daily basis, right? Like, what really is the difference between eating a burger and fries or a salad and chicken for lunch? You don't really see a whole lot better. Yeah, right. Yeah. And that's actually a crucial point that I cover in the book, which is that habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely

to be repeated. And so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time, right? Like if you eat a donut right now, it's tasty and sugary. It's so good. But in the long run, you gain weight. And so the immediate outcome is favorable. The long-term outcome is unfavorable. With good habits, it's often the reverse, right? Like you go to the gym right now and it takes effort. You sweat.

You have to work hard. It's to sacrifice your time for Netflix and chill to go train. The immediate outcome is unfavorable. But the ultimate outcome, you're in shape in a year or a month or whatever, is favorable. And so the challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits into the immediate moment. So you feel a little bit of pain right now and want to avoid it. And the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment so that you have a reason to repeat it again in the future. So is it kind of like, okay, I'm going to go to the gym and eat donuts at the gym. So I feel good but also realize this is going to help me long-term.

So in the book, I talk about this concept I call identity-based habits. And essentially, the ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity so you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or you show up to write and you're reinforcing the identity of i'm someone who writes every day and so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction from being that person and being aligned with your identity your values your principles but you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day and so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement, like eating a donut at the gym, where you're casting votes for two different

identities, right? It's like, I showed up at the gym, I'm casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, the type of person who's healthy, but then I eat a donut, so now I'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person. So it kind of like washes out, right? So you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values. So you essentially have to form your identity first. Is that what I'm hearing? Who you want to be. I think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity, right?

So like each time you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Each time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Each time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who's fit. Each time you sit down to write, you embody the identity of a writer. So you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become. And if you cast enough votes for that type of identity, you start to believe that about yourself, right? Like if you go to church for 20 years, you believe that you're religious. You study Spanish every Tuesday for 30 minutes, you believe that you are studious. And so in that way, your habits provide evidence of your desired identity. And I think that that is

probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important. It's true, like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight. And all that stuff is great. But in addition to the external results that habits provide, they also shape your sense of self. They like are the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself. Like sometimes people will say stuff like, fake it till you make it. But fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it. And you can do that for a little while. You could do it for a day or a week. But eventually, I mean, there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind them. It's delusion, right? And if you're deluding yourself, then eventually you give up on

that. But the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in. And so the more you show up, right? I mean, now you have a lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer. You do this over and over again each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself. And you don't just, you aren't delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer.

It's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times. And so I think that that's true for any habit, large or small, that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the type of person that you are. What are the five non-negotiable habits for you on a daily basis? Oh, that's a good question. So obviously this is going to depend on your goals. For me specifically, I think there are a few core habits that are going to serve everybody and certainly serve me well. So exercise is a huge one. I don't do it daily, but I exercise, I train four times a week. And I feel like if I

didn't exercise, I don't know that I would be an entrepreneur. Like, I don't know if I could handle the psychological rollercoaster without the physical outlet. Yeah. The release, the. You probably feel that as like an athlete too. You know, like I, for being an athlete for so many years, I feel like I need to push myself physically in addition to mentally. If it's just mental, it doesn't do it for me. I need to have a physical outlet. to mentally. If it's just mental, it doesn't do it for me. I need to have a physical outlet. So exercise. Exercise is one.

The ultimate meta habit is reading. Because if you build a habit of reading, you can solve pretty much any other problem. You want to learn how to be a better podcaster? You can read about that. You want to learn how to meditate? You can read about that. You want to learn how to make more money? You can read about that.

And so what you need is to develop a habit of reading. And then whatever problem you're facing at the time, you have a method for solving that. Writing for me is huge. I don't actually know what I think about something until I write about it. I find that if I- Get your ideas out. You get it out. If you ask me something right now that I haven't written about before, what is really happening is I'm just talking my emotions. So what I mean is that you'll ask me something, and I'll get an implicit feeling about what that topic is. I'll have some intuition, a gut feeling about it, and I'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say.

But I don't actually know if that's what I really think, what I deeply think, until I have the time to sit down, write it out, logically go through it. Because a lot of the time, if you would ask me the same question next week, I might have a different feeling at that time. So I'm talking different emotions. So I think I actually need to have time to sit with it a little bit and write it through to learn what I actually think. Writing's third. Exercise, reading, writing. I don't know. I would say that those are probably my main three. If I was going to pick five and the other two that I would add, going for a daily walk would be a huge one. That's one that I kind of aspire to because I don't do that every day.

But anytime I do, it really benefits me. In what ways? Well, you see this with a lot of anybody who does creative work in particular. Something about getting outside and walking. I think there's, this is just me spitballing. I don't actually have science behind this idea. But when your body is moving, it's very hard for you, one, to not be active mentally. Like if you think about someone who's shut down mentally, what does their body language look like? They're usually closed off. Their arms, like they're sitting. They're not moving very much. Try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically.

It's very hard to do. If your body is moving like that, it's really hard for your mind to be shut down. So that's one thing. It kind of gets like the juices flowing. The second thing, and this is where I'm spitballing, I don't know if this is actually true, but I wonder about your non-conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes.

And so if you're moving, if you're walking, it gives your non-conscious mind something to do. So you're like, it gets out of the way. And now you can actually like have this stuff arise or think in a different way than if you're sitting. So I don't know. I think that those are two. Yeah, that's cool. Okay. So that'd be the fourth thing. Sleep is the fifth one. And this is one that I actually am pretty good about. So my cardinal rule is that I don't cheat myself on sleep. So if I stay up late and work till midnight, I'm going to sleep till eight or nine. Sleeping in. Yeah. Like I'm not going to get up early because I don't want to cheat myself on that. But yeah, I think that those are kind of

the core things. It's funny. Sometimes people ask like, oh, how can I double my productivity or something like that? And you'll see articles like that all the time, like follow this one five minute trick to double your productivity. But the real answer to most of that stuff is like get eight hours of sleep a night, exercise, don't eat like crap, and then instantly you have this boost of productivity and motivation. You have energy. The fundamentals cover 90% of it. Yeah, exactly. You said this.

You said you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. What are the systems you created to be successful beyond those kind of core habits right there? Yeah, so this is a really good question. I think first I just want to talk a little bit about that point that you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. What do I mean by that?

So often when we set about to change something or to achieve something, the first step is almost always setting a goal. And this is coming from someone like I was very goal oriented for a long time, right? Like I would set, yeah, I would set goals for the things I wanted to do in sports, the goals, the grades I wanted in class, the goals for how much money I wanted to make in my business. And sometimes I would achieve those, but then sometimes I wouldn't. And so I had this question like, well, clearly I'm setting goals for both. So like that can't be the thing that determines it. And you see this a lot that the, the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals. Like every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Sure.

Every job candidate wants to get the job. So if the winners and the losers have the same, the same goal, then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two. And the thing that distinguishes them is the process, the system behind the goal. And this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment. It's like, you know, say you're, just take like a simple example. Say you have a messy room, you know, and you get motivated and you set the goal to clean your room. Well, you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room. But if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place,

then you just end up with a dirty room again. So it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause. And habits are a better solution in that case. Because if you fix the inputs, the outputs fix themselves automatically. You don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits. And I think that that's true in a larger sense as well. People want outcomes. They want to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress.

But the outcome is not the thing that needs to change. It's the system that precedes it. So give me the, let's bust the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit. Because there's 14 days, 28 days, 60 days, a year. If you do something every single day, and maybe it changes for each person, but what's the science or the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit, I guess? So 21 days is the thing you hear all the time, 30 days, 100 days, whatever. Right now, 66 days is making the rounds is the latest thought. I saw it in another book. What was that book?

Well, there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average for how long it takes. And as a rule of thumb, I don't think it's terrible. Like you should remind yourself, yeah, this is going to be months of work. It's not just going to be something quick.

But even within that study, the range was quite wide. So if you did something simple, like drink a glass of water at lunch each day, it would take like three weeks. If you did something more difficult, like go for a run after work every day, that would be like seven or eight months. But I think actually that question to begin with is sort of a – there's like a broken mentality behind it. The wrong question.

Yeah, it is. Because if you ask that question, the implicit assumption is when do I have to stop working or when is this done? And is it automatic after a certain period of time? Well, the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever. Because if you stop, then it's no longer a habit. It's a constant choice and a decision, right? I think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed, but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived. And if you look at it as a lifestyle change, then you're saying, okay, what's something small and sustainable I can stick to? What's something that can actually last over time?

So it is true that you can actually map this through research, that a habit will become more automatic with practice. But this reveals another important point, which is that there's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built. You could practice something once in 30 days or you could practice it 1,000 times. What actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition. So the phrase that I like to use is not 21 days to 30 days, but put in your reps.

I mean, that's the real thing is you need to practice. And if you put in your reps, then your brain starts to automate how that process works. Yeah. What makes you an expert on habits based on lots of other people that are talking about habits? Why are you talking about it differently? And what have you discovered that's different than everyone else? Okay, so two questions there. So the first one is expertise.

And I think that, and I've said this many times before, I'm just going through this with everybody else. I consider my readers my peers in the sense that we're all just trying things out. The only difference is I write about what I learn and share it each week, but we're all just learning along the way. Early on, I had a feeling like that. I was like, I'm just a guy. Who am I to write about this? And I had a friend tell me, the way you develop expertise is by writing about it every week. So I wrote a new article about habits every Monday and Thursday for three years. And that was how I developed the expertise on the topic, was by writing about it. You did research. You said, here's what I found. Here's what I tried. Here's what worked, what didn't work. It's a combination of me reading the scientific

literature and reading the research and then trying to distill practical insights from that and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter, a travel photographer, a writer, an entrepreneur, and seeing what that looks like. And then the two together. And I think you need both. Like, I don't want to be some new age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower, just like theorizing about ideas is different. What it looks like to put ideas into practice, right? Like imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to coach like an NBA team. These guys are like, dude, you need to step on the court if you know it, right, to see what it's actually like. So you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that.

So you were researching and you were applying it into your life. And what was the second part of that? The second question, which I think is probably the more interesting one, which is what makes my angle different or what makes this different? Than every other book out there about habits. So you can broadly put books about habits into two categories. The first category is what I'll call motivation models. So motivation models are about what sparks a behavior. How do you get started? How do you get motivated? The second category is what I'll call reinforcement models. So how does a habit stick? How does it last? Why do certain behaviors get reinforced? And sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the

other. A lot of the time they'll just kind of live in separate worlds. That's what I would say is happening in like the self-improvement space. Then you have the academic space, so psychology or neuroscience or whatever. And a lot of those books are focused on the why, but not the how. They'll tell you why something happens, why a particular neuron fires, why a particular biological process works the way it does, but they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life. And so what I wanted to do was try to combine the two. Why and how. Yes, book that is both why and how. Why do habits form the way they do? Why are they important? And then how do they actually work? And my hope is that Atomic Habits

was able to do that largely because of the framework that I put together. So in the book, I lay out these four stages that all habits go through. And I felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model, but not both. And you need to understand what both sparks a habit and what makes a habit stick. Maintains it, yes. If you want to be able to understand how they work and how to make them last. And what are those four frameworks? So the first stage of every habit is a cue. The second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes. I'll give you an example of these in a second. The third stage is the response. And then the fourth stage is the

reward. So you walk into a, the question I had that no model I could find could solve in any good way or explain in any good way was why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way? So let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at 5 o'clock every day. But then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at 5 o'clock. Current models don't explain that very well because it's like, well, the cue is 5. You should be going to the gym right now. It says the routine falls automatically after the cue. Or why does someone walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies

and then they automatically want to eat it? But you could just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room and you're stuffed and you're full and you walk in and you see a plate of cookies and you're like, I'm stuffed. I don't want to eat anything. So what's going on there? And I think these four stages explain it, which is you see the cue or you experience a cue, and then your craving or your prediction differs based on your current state you see the cue or you experience a cue, and then your craving or prediction differs based on your current state. So the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in. The way you're feeling. Right. And

also other things like your beliefs or your identity, the social group that you're part of, right? So like if you're in a different group, then maybe you interpret things in a different way. You know, you can imagine one group, they practice a particular religion. They walk into a butcher shop and see pork and they're like, oh, we can't eat that. Another person walks in and they're like, oh, yeah, I'll have a pork sandwich because it's obvious and easy and right there. So what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life. How do we change what we interpret? Yes, good question.

All right, so this is a key point in the book, which is that social norms, society leans heavily on us all. So if you, there are just broad examples of this. Family pressure, religious pressure, media pressure. All kinds of stuff. Peer pressure, everything else. Let's say, so just some broad examples. You walk into an elevator and you turn around to face the front. You have a job interview and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice.

There's no reason it has to be that way, right? Like you could face the back of the elevator. You could wear a swimsuit to a job interview. But you don't do that because it violates the shared norms of the group, right? It violates the shared expectations of what that society has. of the group, right? It violates the shared expectations of what that society has. But that's true not only in a broad sense that we're part of these tribes, like big tribes, you know, what it means to be a Christian or to be American or to be Australian or whatever, but it's also true in the small tribes that we belong to. What it means to be a neighbor on this street or a

member of your local CrossFit gym or to volunteer for a local organization. All of those tribes, all those groups that you belong to have a set of shared expectations, a set of shared norms. And the key, if you want to build habits that last, if you want to change the way that you interpret cues, is to join a group where the desired behavior is the normal behavior. There are plenty of people who they want to work out, but going to the gym feels like a lot to them. It feels hard. It feels like a sacrifice.

But there are also people who go to the gym every week, and it's just normal. It doesn't feel like an obligation. That's the desired behavior is the normal behavior. It's their lifestyle. Right. Same thing for musicians. If you want to learn an instrument, hang out with people who play all the time. If you hang out with a bunch of musicians, it's like, well, yeah.

That's what we do all the time. Yeah, we play four days a week. We play seven days a week because it just happens. That's what the tribe does. The caveat to this and the thing that I don't see people mention a lot is that the reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe. We want to be friends with those people. And so we don't want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norms. Yeah, you're not going to hang out with a bunch of vegans

and have pork and just be the only one eating that. You won't hang out with them for very long because you're not going to be friends with them anymore. They'll kick you out. So you want to rise to the standard of that group, of that community. So the key, I think, is to join a group where your desired behavior is a normal behavior

and you already have something else in common with that group. So Steve Kam is a good example of this. So like Steve runs Nerd Fitness. And all these people want to get in shape who are coming into his community. But they also love Star Wars or Batman or Spider-Man or, you know, all these other things that nerds are into. And if you show up, it can be intimidating to want to get in shape or work out the first time. But if you can connect with the group over your mutual love of Star Wars, then you're like, oh, well, I'm friends with these people. And now I also want to pick up those

other habits with them because I want to belong with the group because we're already friends. And so I think you can apply that methodology to most new tribes that you join. Don't just join a new tribe because they have the desired behavior. Also try to find a way that you can overlap with them. Find some shared context that you can bond over and then it's easier to adopt the habits. Musicians that like to be healthy. Yeah. If you want to do both, right? It's like finding that even subgroup. It's like, hey, we love playing music and then also you're going to start eating better because we all want to eat healthy. Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So that's the second part, the cue and then the desire habits, right? The craving. Cue, craving, response, reward. Okay. And what's the response? So this is mostly about making it easy. So this

is the habit itself. And the easier a habit is, the less friction there's associated with the habit, the more likely you're going to be to do it. So the way that I like to describe this, imagine you have like a hose, right? And there's a bend in the middle. There's a little bit of water trickling out. If you want to increase the amount of water going through the hose, you have two options. You could either crank up the valve and force more water through, or you could just remove the bend and let it flow through naturally. And a lot of the time, advice is centered on cranking up the valve. It's like you need to try harder. You need grit. You need perseverance. You need motivation. You need to overcome the obstacles in your life. And all those things are fine, but I think they're all short-term solutions. You might be able to do

that for a day or a week, but I've never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment. It's really hard to fight that day in and day out. So the solution, I think, is to reduce friction. And there are a ton of ways you can do this. One way is just to scale the habit down, make it as easy as possible. So people have heard things like this before, start small, small steps, whatever. But even when you know you should start small, it's still really easy to start too big. So say you want to get in shape and you're like, all right, I want to run a couple days a week, but I know I should start small, so I'll only run for 15 minutes. But even that is like way bigger than what I'm talking about.

I mean, it should be so small that you, in the book I call it the two-minute rule, but you should downscale any habit to fit within two minutes. So it's like, all right, I want to go for a run three days a week. My habit is I put on my running shoes and I step out the door. Anything else that happens after that is just bonus. It's a success. Now, sometimes people resist that because they're like, well, this sounds kind of like a mental trick, right? Like I know the real goal isn't just to put my shoes on. I know the real goal is to go for a run. So if you feel that way, my suggestion would be only do the first two minutes for the first few weeks. Because what

you need to do is master the art of showing up. Like I had a reader who ended up losing over a hundred pounds. And one of the things that he did was he went to the gym, but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he would show up, be there, do like half an exercise. Five minutes ago, he'd leave. He did this for like six weeks. Wow. Now it sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly because it's the opposite. Just work out for a half hour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up and a habit must be established before it can be improved, right? If you don't establish the habit, there's nothing to optimize. If you're not showing up at the gym every day, you don't even,

who cares about what workout you're doing? You're not even there. Don't start running an hour a day if you've never run in a long time. Be the person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day before you worry about how far you're running and what kind of workout you're doing and all that type of stuff. Establish the art of showing up first before going all in on the desired goal you want. I think that's right. I mean, you can find examples of people who flip a switch

and transform their lives or have an epiphany and do it overnight. But I think that it's rare. I think that the more sustainable strategy, the more reliable strategy is to scale it down to the first two minutes, focus on that, establish it, master the art of showing up, and then go from there. So really you should like, usually when people think about building better habits, they optimize for the finish line, right? It's like, how much weight do I need to lose? How much money do I need to make? When can I finish this book? It's all focused on the result. But I think instead, if you optimize for the starting line, make it as easy as possible to start, scale it down, organize your environment so all that stuff is set up. This is another strategy for making it easy, which is that you can prime your environment

to make the future action easier, right? Like if you chop up a bunch of vegetables and fruit on Sunday, it's now easier to have a healthy snack during the week. If you set your workout clothes out the night before, it's now easier to get into the workout the next day. But doing all that stuff to make it easy to show up, that is probably the more important piece early on. There's also like all these, there are all these logistical details for building a habit that nobody thinks about in the beginning. Like what? Well, like take the example of my reader who went to the gym.

It's like, okay, what gym are you going to go to? How are you going to get there? Are you going by yourself or are you going to go with a friend? Do you need to – What time are you going to go? Yeah, what time – are you going to have your own water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym? And that stuff sounds like silly and small. But when someone's starting – It takes up like, oh, the gym doesn't have a water fountain and I

always forget to bring my own, that's enough friction for someone to quit. So by focusing on just the first two minutes, you figure all that stuff out. And then once you've got that piece mastered, now you can worry about how long the workout is and what program to do and all that stuff. So figuring out the logistics first is an important step. I think that's something that just comes naturally with scaling a habit down. You figure out what's required to show up because you're not worried about the results or the outcome or how long you worked out or judging yourself for running 30 minutes when you should have run 45 or whatever. Got it. Okay. So this is the response still? Right. Okay. And what's the fourth? The fourth one,

and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick, is the reward or the outcome. So this is the response still? Right. Okay. And what's the fourth? The fourth one, and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick, is the reward or the outcome. So every behavior is followed by some kind of outcome. This is just basic cause and effect. And if the immediate outcome is favorable, is enjoyable, you have a reason to repeat it in the future. It's kind of like... Donuts.

Yeah, exactly, right? It's like that example. If you feel good, if you feel satisfied right after you do something, then it's like this positive emotional signal. And it's like, yeah, I should do this again. Yeah. So you can see this actually business is a really interesting example with this. There are a lot of products and some of the most successful products have some type of immediate satisfaction that is layered into them. So toothpaste is a very common example. There's no reason a toothpaste needs to taste like mint, but it does because the minty flavor

and the refreshingness of it, it makes sure it gives your mouth this clean feel. It's more satisfying, so you have a reason to do it again in the future. I heard an interesting one recently about car manufacturers that some of them are adding a fake guttural roar to the car or the truck when you press the accelerator because it just adds to the actual natural sound of the engine. So it makes it more satisfying to step on the gas and

to drive the car. So there are a variety of examples like this, but if you can add, and the key is it needs to be immediate. So like this is, in the book, I refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is 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 successful. If it feels good, you have a reason to do it again. Is that why video games do so well? Video games are masters at this. They're masters at it. So they're masters actually at a variety of aspects related to habit formation.

So one is they're really good at this immediate satisfaction. There are all kinds of things. You're actually constantly getting feedback in a video game. Even if you're just running, you hear the pitter-patter of the steps. That's gratifying. The jingles of picking up another power-up or seeing a kill or something like that. Whatever the game is, you're always getting constant feedback. Sound, things that are on screen, they're really good at dripping out. Watching the score increase in the top corner, that is immediate feedback. They have all these

different ways of making you feel satisfied. And when you see that progress, you have a reason to continue in the future. This is one of the most effective forms of immediate satisfaction, is progress. As soon as you feel progress, you have a reason to continue. It feels really good to see that you're making headway. Now, why do some people make all this progress? Let's say they lose the weight. They lose 100 pounds, but then they gain it back two years later. Yeah. They've got this progress. They achieved the desired goal, but then how come it didn't stick? It's a good question. I mean, it's a complicated thing, a hard thing, but I'll give a couple potential reasons. So one is it comes back to the social norms that I mentioned before. There's a story that I tell in the book about Vietnamese soldiers, well, American soldiers

during the Vietnam War. So they were over in Vietnam and these two congressmen went over and found out that the heroin usage among the troops was incredibly high. It was like, I think they first thought it was like 10% or 15%, but then they found out it was actually over 20%. So, you know, one in five troops is addicted to heroin or trying heroin, using it while they're over there. And they were like, this is a huge problem. We need to figure this out. So they created this whole committee to investigate things or whatever. And eventually the war ends and the soldiers come back.

committee to investigate things or whatever. And eventually the war ends and the soldiers come back and they were shocked by is that 90% of the soldiers that were addicted to heroin in Vietnam were not addicted when they returned. And the main reason, it makes so much sense, but it upended our understanding of addiction at the time. They completely changed the context, right? In Vietnam, they're in a war zone. They're highly stressed. They're surrounded by other users. Heroin is present and easy to get. They come home. They're in a totally new environment.

It's not a war zone anymore. They're not surrounded by other users. They don't really know where to get heroin, so they have to figure that out too. You layer all this stuff together, and suddenly it becomes much easier to not do that. Whereas previously, they thought, oh, it was an addiction. They were doing it for other reasons. This same thing is true, but usually in the reverse, right? Typically

you have an addict who gets hooked on a drug, goes into rehab. This is the equivalent of leaving your environment behind, not having any of those triggers, but then you send them home to the same place they got addicted in the first place, right? So now they're surrounded by all their old friends, all the same cues, and it becomes very hard to resist that. And I wonder if when people rebound from habits after they've achieved some level of success, whether it's losing weight or getting clean or whatever, if it's the return of the environment that causes a lot of that. You think that's what it is? Well, I don't know if it's always that. I don't think I can say it is universally. But I think that it definitely plays a role. Because we're influenced by people's pressure either way, like you said.

Yes. Peer pressure can either be positive or negative. Yeah. The communities we surround ourselves with, we rise to that community. Right. If you're around vegans all day and there's only vegan food available, you're going to eat probably mostly vegan if that's what you want. Or if you're trying to eat healthier, if you go back home and everyone's eating donuts all day, that temptation is going to be hard to say no to after months. You can do it for a little while, but it's just really hard to do it. So environment is a huge factor is what I'm hearing.

I think both social and physical. We haven't talked that much about physical environment, but that's another key component. So I'll give you an example of a good habit and a bad habit. So for good habits, you want the physical environment to make it obvious and easy for you to do the behavior. You know, so like I, um, like have a pull-up bar in your room. Exactly. Trying to do a hundred pull-ups a day, right? Like have it hanging over your door as opposed to even if you had one, but it was in the closet because you just half the time you wouldn't remember to take it out or it's at the gym upstairs or down the street. No, you know, I have a friend who he wanted to to practice guitar more. And so he left his guitar in the middle of his living room.

And that, just so he'd walk past it a hundred times a day. Pick it up and play. Becomes much easier, right? Bad habits are the same way. So, but in reverse, instead of making it obvious, you want to make it invisible.

You know, take like, which is just talking about video games. A lot of people feel like they watch too much, spend too much time watching TV or playing video games or watching a screen. But if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the television.

So it's like, what is that room designed to get you to do? Turn it on. Yeah. So you can restructure that environment to make it less likely that you'll fall into that habit. And there are a variety of things you could do. You could take the remote control and put it inside like a drawer so you don't see it. You could put the television behind a wall unit or a cabinet so that it's less visible. But you could also increase the friction with the task. So you could like unplug your TV after each use and only plug it back in if you

can say the name of the show that you want to watch. So you can't like mindlessly pull up Netflix and just find something. Or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it's an extra five to ten seconds to turn on. Maybe that's enough time to be like, do I really want to watch something right now? I'm just doing this mindlessly. If you really wanted to be extreme. Don't have the TV. Yes. You could get rid of the TV entirely or take it off the wall and put it in the closet and only take it out when you really want to watch something.

For four years when I lived in Columbus, I removed the TV for four years. I didn't have a TV in my place. Because I was like, I want to earn money. I want to build my business. And I have nothing, so I need to work. I need to focus on this to build the habit that I wanted for my business. And it was the best thing for me because I would spend hours just mindlessly watching.

And now I was like, okay, if I want to watch something, I'm going to go to the sports bar and watch the game. I'm going to go to a friend's house and watch this specific thing. Or I'm going to go to the movies and take a break. As opposed to three hours a day of TV. What's brilliant about that, and it's a really good example, is that we, I think about that a lot with phones as well. So every day I try to leave my phone in another room outside of my office,

at least until lunch, because then I get like a four hour block of time in the morning where I can just work without any distraction. And it's funny how quickly you don't, like if my phone was on me in the morning, I would check it like, you know, every five minutes or whatever. But when it's out of the room, I don't even find myself wanting to, I never walk up the stairs to go check it, even though it's only 30 seconds away. Wow. So it's interesting how little we actually want to do these things, but we just do them all the time because they're obvious and easy. And I think the key is to invert that. Take the things that are the bad habits, the distractions, the procrastinations, the unproductive uses of time, and make them more invisible, reduce exposure,

and less easy to do. And take the things that are good habits and make it the equivalent of having your phone on you all the time, right? Make it right in front of you. Make it obvious. Make it easy. Make it frictionless. Yeah. If you're looking to write, do you write with your journal or your computer? I write on the computer. I write in Evernote. It's got to be faster. Yeah. You'd have to transfer later and all these things. Yeah. Okay. If you were coaching someone who said, I have no clue what I'm supposed to do with my life. I'm lost. I have all these bad habits. I smoke, I drink, I eat donuts every day. I have no job. My room is sloppy and I'm just depressed. What would you say to them to get started with changing their life around in the form of better habits?

Well, you just need to pick one thing, first of all. I just mentioned a few minutes ago, one of the most powerful forms of motivation is progress. So seeing some progress. I mean, it could be as simple as make your bed each day, right? But just doing that, embodying the identity of someone who's getting better, who's making progress, just pick one thing and use that as... This is true. I mean, Lewis,

this is something you've probably seen with a lot of people that you've talked to, but habits are the foundation for mastery. So if you take a sport like basketball, you need to be able to dribble with both hands without thinking before you can worry about what strategy you're running on offense or what kind of you know strategic play you're going to run or what your defensive scheme is or all this other stuff right like you need to automate the fundamentals of the craft before you can worry about the next level of performance same thing is true for chess you know like you need to know how the chess pieces move automatically without thinking about it before you can get into all right right, what is my opponent going to do? And I'm going to do this and they're going to do that.

And so I think this is true not just at the peak levels of performance that you integrate these habits and use habits as the foundation for the next level of performance, but also true when you're getting started. Just build one small thing. Carve out a 1% change, a 1% improvement, and use that as a stepping stone to the next level. What about self-control? Because what if we have this desire for something? What's the other word for self-control? Willpower. Willpower, yeah. What about willpower? How much willpower do we have? So you hear this a lot. I mean, it's very common, especially in self-help, motivation, self-improvement. You need to be motivated. You have to have willpower. Grit and perseverance are huge and important. And it's not that those qualities are not important. It's just that the

way to develop them is different than what most people think. So most people think, I need willpower, so I should just try harder. There's an interesting body of research, I mentioned it in the book, I think it's in chapter seven, on self-control and willpower, which is that the people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least. So they face temptations less frequently and therefore have the reserves and the resources to resist it when it occasionally comes up. And I think that this is actually like the lever to pull or the pressure point to push on is that the way to get better willpower is to design an environment that tempts you less, not to say, let me just try harder. Right. Yeah. Set yourself up to win.

And you have a chapter that talks about the power of accountability partners. I talk about accountability and coaches all the time. I hire coaches for everything because I use sports as my life, an analogy for my life. And I know that I couldn't have gotten to where I wanted to be as an athlete without great coaches and accountability. So how important is accountability towards habits as well? Yeah, it's huge. So I recently hired a powerlifting coach. He's great. He's worked with like 12 world champions. And having him has, he's not based in Columbus actually, but Columbus is great for strength culture. It's, you know, I mean, obviously there's the Arnold, but then Westside Barbell and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, it was awesome. But your point about coaches is a

crucial one, which is that having a coach forces you to be aware of things that you would otherwise overlook, right? Like as you, this is what I call the downside of building good habits, which is you build habits and in the beginning you develop fluency and skill and ability, and things become easier. But after a little while, once a habit has been established, the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot, which means that you start to overlook your mistakes and not think about how to get better. And so what you need is a coach to keep you on that razor's edge so that you keep building habits, but it also forces you to stay aware of what the next level of performance is. And that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement. It's like a cycle.

It starts with awareness. If you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is, you don't have a chance to change it. Then from that awareness, you go to deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better. And eventually the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes automatic. But once it becomes automatic, that's not the end. You have to return to awareness and see where you're at now and start the cycle again. Huh. And what about, what if you can't afford a coach? How do you find the right accountability

partner? That's where I think we come back to the social component that we talked about earlier. Join the group. Join the community. That's probably the best way to do it. And the great thing about the Internet and the web is that you can find those people before where you couldn't find them previously. It used to be that you had to hope that the people in your local community or on your sports team or at your organization were also interested in the same things. And now you can find those people and find them online. And what's the downside of good habits?

So this is what I was mentioning with this fact that you start to overlook your mistakes. There's an interesting study that was done on surgeons where they found that early on in residency, they were getting better. And then they continued to improve as they became a surgeon and practiced for a few years. And then they hit some kind of peak. And then their performance actually declined slightly because they stopped overlooking their mistakes or stopped looking for ways to get better. And so you need to be on that edge of paying attention. My favorite example of this is actually a surgeon himself at Tulgawandi. My favorite example of this is actually a surgeon himself, Atul Gawande.

And he hired a coach, a previous surgeon who was retiring, to review the video of his surgeries and to tell him where he could improve and what he could do better. I think that's a brilliant example of how to have a coach, even if you're not in sports or not a competitor or something. We can all benefit from feedback. And the tighter the feedback cycle, the faster you learn. That's powerful. I love it, man. This is powerful stuff.

I'm going to ask you a couple of final questions. Yeah, sure. This one's called the three truths. If you could only share three lessons with humanity in the world and they didn't have access to your writing or your blog or your books, but you only had three lessons you could share, what would those three lessons or three truths be? Yeah, that's really tough. So the first one I would say is about reading. I mentioned earlier

that reading is sort of like this meta habit that helps you solve all your other problems. So I guess my lesson for reading would be start more books, quit most of them, read the great ones twice. So if you start more books, you'll be exposed to more ideas. If you quit most of them, if you quit the ones that aren't relevant to you or aren't that good or just are in a high-quality bar, then you'll have the chance to start even more. And when you find the great ones, read them twice because the advice is incredible and it's potentially life-changing.

All right, so the first one I would say is reading. The second one is something to do with physical movement and strength training. Every human has a body, and every human has a physical presence. So learn to use your body in some way to be more alive and to experience what that's like to be human. If you just spend all day in your head or all day staring at a screen, you only kind of get half of what it means to be alive. So I would say physical strength is another one.

And then the third one has to be something along the lines of community, connection, serving others. I don't know what exactly that would be. Personally, I have felt most engaged when I've been working on a shared mission with a group of people face-to-face, which is interesting coming from someone who, you know, my business is built online, right? I spend most of my time sending emails to, you know, half a million people or whatever. But I think actually I find more satisfaction and more purpose in connecting with people face-to-face. So maybe that would be it. Talk to someone face-to-face every day.

That's cool. Well, I've got to acknowledge you, man, for all the work that you're doing to make an impact on people. I think your writing has really helped transform lives, whether you know how impactful it is or not. But half a million people is a lot of people. And I know people are doing the action steps that you provide for them. So you constantly doing the work, constantly doing the research and showing up for people is making a big impact. So I acknowledge you for that. Where can we get the book and where can we follow you and everything else? Yeah. Thanks, man. So the book is called Atomic Habits,

an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. And it's at atomichabits.com. If you go to that page, there is a secret chapter that's not included in the actual book. There are some exercises and templates that help people kind of implement some of the ideas that we talked about more. And I also have chapter by chapter audio commentary from me on like why I wrote this chapter and what some of the research is behind it and a variety of other resources. That's actually just a few of the things. But anyway, all of that stuff is available at atomichabits.com. I like it, man. Yeah, you've got a lot of actionable things in here, which is really cool. So and even more at atomichabits.com. So they can get on Amazon, Barnes & Noble,

everywhere else as well, right? You got it. Everywhere books are sold. And your website, JamesClear.com. That's right. You can subscribe there. Are you on social media at all? Yeah. So if you go to JamesClear.com, you'll see Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook on there. And you can also just poke around in the articles. I have most of my writing organized by topic or category, so people can just check out what's interesting to them.

Do you hang out on social media at all? I use Twitter mostly. That's the one that I found most useful. Social media is kind of interesting because the people you follow, it's like creating your own little city. And so you get to choose who the citizens are. And you should be very careful about who you put in your city because it changes what you're exposed to all the time. So I've spent more time cultivating Twitter and who I'm following. And that really has changed. I find it very useful now. I come across good ideas all the time.

That's great. Instagram and Facebook I use less, but both can still be useful if you follow that same strategy. Yeah, that's cool. I like it, man. When's the book out? What's the date? They can pre-order right now?

That's right. It's available now. Launches on October 16th. Yeah, I'm excited to share it with the world. It's going to be great, man. Final question for you. Actually, two final questions. What's the one bad habit you wish you could break for yourself? So I'm working on new habits all the time. There's always something. Currently, the one that keeps eluding me is sleep is not the problem. I'll sleep long enough. The problem is powering down early. So I have trouble shutting

off. I don't know if you feel this way, but I'm always interested in what I'm working on. And so then I get to, you know, there's usually a, I work really well in the morning and then I work really well late at night. And I think it's just because that's why I'm not interrupted. And you know, like I kind of have the space to think, but it'll get to be 10 and I'm like, oh, well maybe I should just dig into that for a second. And then of course, you know, return, yeah, exactly. Then I'm like, I should have gone to bed two hours ago. So that's one that I keep battling. Powering down or finding downtime. All right, cool. Last question. What's your definition of greatness? I think greatness is contributing your little bit to the world. That's it. Like the thing that has advanced humanity over

the broad span of time is the collective knowledge that we've all accumulated, what we've added together. It's like we've had a real, it started out as a very small snowball and just keeps rolling on this endless hill as humanity continues. And the cumulative knowledge gets bigger and bigger. There have been, I think the numbers are, there have been 107 billion people

who've lived throughout history. Really? And there are 7 billion alive right now. So the dead outnumber the living, 15 to one. When you were born, you inherit all the lessons from those 107 billion people, right? Like I have a little niece, she's two years old. She's going to be taught things in school that I was not taught. There's a little, some stuff that I was taught, we found out was wrong and now we got rid of it. And some stuff

we learned that was new and right, and now we're adding it. And that's true all the way down the line, right? Like we, the next generation always gets to advance based on this like ever-growing bundle of knowledge that we come up with. And so if you, at some point throughout your life, can add just a little bit to that bundle, the rest of humanity is better for it. James, thanks a lot.

Appreciate it. That's great. Appreciate it. There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. It's all about the habits. What are we doing with our time? How are we using it effectively?

Or are we allowing our time to run us by not using these habits? Again, simple little things we can start doing. These little things all add up. Just start with one thing differently. Start with making your bed every morning. Spend three minutes making a great bed. Start with moving your body every day, going on a walk during lunch,

drinking another cup of water. Do something different to help improve your life. That's what this is all about. Building those habits to have a maximum impact on your life. If you enjoyed this, share it with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 701. Tag me on Instagram, guys. I try to get as active as I can over there.

Take a screenshot, post it on your story. Tag me at lewishouse. Get creative. When you guys get creative over there, I reshare your posts. Some of you notice that. So keep getting creative with how you're posting and sharing this out to your friends.

And all the show notes and full video interview is over at lewishouse.com slash 701. Thank you again so much for being a part of this amazing greatness community. We are building a movement of love and impact around the world, and it's because of you. So thank you for being here. I love you so very much. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great Outro Music