The Tim Ferriss Show - #648: James Clear, Atomic Habits — Simple Strategies for Building (and Breaking) Habits, Questions for Personal Mastery and Growth, Tactics for Writing and Launching a Mega-Bestseller, Finding Leverage, and More

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Starting point is 00:05:06 Now would seem like a good time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is James Clear. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at James Clear. James is a writer and speaker focused on habits and continuous improvement. He is the author of the number one New York Times mega bestseller, I'm adding the mega,

Starting point is 00:05:41 Atomic Habits, which covers easy and proven ways to build good habits and break bad ones. The book has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. On average, Atomic Habits has sold one copy every 15 seconds since it was published. So by the time I finish reading this intro, two or three copies will have been sold. James is also the creator of the 3-2-1 newsletter. That's 3-2-1 newsletter, which is one of the most popular email newsletters in the world and has more than 2 million subscribers. Each issue contains three short ideas from James, two quotes from other people, and one question to consider that week. We're going to talk a lot about questions, in fact,

Starting point is 00:06:21 shortly with James. You can sign up for free at jamesclear.com. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies, and his work is used by players and coaches in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. In college, he was an academic All-American baseball player, and he is an avid weightlifter. For those who cannot see the video, we seem to go to the same stylist who got the same handsome bald look and the same long sleeve dark shirt look and you can find james at jamesclear.com and as mentioned on twitter and instagram at james clear james it is nice to see you hey great to talk to you thank you so much for the opportunity absolutely i'm thrilled to be having this conversation and i thought we would start

Starting point is 00:07:01 with something that's also on my mind, but the topic of annual reviews comes up for some people once a year and we are now winding down on this year about to head into the new year. Could you please describe your annual reviews and perhaps just walk us through the process and also describe or explain why for at least a period of time you published all of these publicly. You can tackle that in any order you like. So, you know, it's nice to have a process for a reflection review. I actually think I'm sure we'll talk a lot about habits in this conversation. And one of the kind of meta habits that's really helpful is some kind of habit of reflection review because it allows you to course correct. Nobody sets out to get off course or to make a mistake or to do something that goes

Starting point is 00:07:50 against their values, but we just kind of have this natural drift in life. And as time goes on, we kind of find ourselves in situations where maybe we're not doing the optimal thing anymore. And an annual review is a chance to check in. I also think it's helpful to have shorter cycles of review. So like on Fridays, I usually do some kind of short little business review where I look at revenue and expenses and new email subscribers and stuff like that. But at the end of each year, I like to ask myself some big questions. I'm glad you started here because I think that questions can be very useful. If you ask better questions, you can get better answers. But also questions are very resilient.

Starting point is 00:08:26 They're very adaptable to the context. And that's something that's different and perhaps a little bit better than advice. You know, advice is actually kind of brittle and context dependent. Somebody can have a really good plan, a really good piece of advice to give you. But if it doesn't fit your context, then it's actually not great advice for your particular situation. Whereas questions are very adaptable. So I think maybe what I should do is just go through some of the questions that I like to ask myself for my annual review and, and throughout the rest of the year.

Starting point is 00:08:54 So I guess we could say this first category is just kind of like questions that help improve self-awareness or help kind of bring me back to center. So like the first thing, I think actually this might be a question from Derek Sivers or some version of it from him, which is what am I optimizing for? You know, sometimes people optimize for money, sometimes optimize for free time, sometimes optimize for creative output

Starting point is 00:09:16 or being able to choose the projects they work on, all kinds of stuff. But that answer probably changes over time. What I'm optimizing for today is different than what I was optimizing for five years ago or 10 years ago. So I think it's a helpful question to keep revisiting and you need to decide what it is for you. Otherwise it's easy to kind of slide into this status signaling or just kind of like doing the things that you feel like you're encouraged to do by society or by your friends or peers or your parents or whatever. So what am I

Starting point is 00:09:46 optimizing for? Another way of phrasing that is maybe like, what's the real objective here? Like, what am I actually trying to achieve? So some version of that question. I also like, does this activity fill me with energy or drain me of energy? You can tell a lot just by whether it like fills up your cup or not. And ideally you'll be spending more time in the next year on things that fill you with energy and less time on things that drain you with energy. Speaking of the things that drain you, maybe like a sub question that I like to keep in mind is does the amount of attention I'm giving this match its true importance? And man, there's so many years when I find that I'm giving something a lot of attention that actually is not that important, and it's nice to check in and kind of course correct that.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Are you asking these questions as you're going through the calendar of your past year? In what set of circumstances or in what context are you asking this question? Or are these just broadly speaking questions that you're applying more or less all the time for self-awareness in different types of cycles? I don't think you need to wait and only do it once a year. But when I am asking these questions for the end review, I usually am writing like maybe a paragraph for each one. And it's almost like a journaling prompt. And I do have things that I check for this process. There's a lot of measurement, so to speak, that happens throughout the year, even if you

Starting point is 00:11:05 aren't thinking about it that way. So for example, my calendar measures how many new cities I went to or how many nights I spend away from home. Those are kind of important things. How do you do that? Oh, I see. It measures it, meaning it logs it. Right. Like I can see like, oh, I was in Dallas from Tuesday to Thursday. And so because I know that I was there, then I'm like, well, that was two Dallas from Tuesday to Thursday. And so because I know that I was there, then I'm like, well, that was two nights or three nights where I wasn't sleeping in my own bed. And so then at the end of the year, I try to figure out how many nights I spend away from home. Is that more than I want to spend? Is it less? You know, like how did that for the year?

Starting point is 00:11:36 Yep, totally. I write down my workouts in an actual journal, like a pen and paper journal. So I've got all the sets logged to have how many workouts I did. And then I can look back on the dates, how many workouts I do for each month. What was the average number of workouts per month? So a lot of that stuff, I'm not thinking about tracking it throughout the year, but it's kind of there for me as I sit down to review the year. Those measurements are there as I'm kind of going through these questions and then trying to figure out where did I direct my attention? What am I optimizing for? Am I spending my energy on things that fill me up or things that drain me? Another question that I think is helpful is if once you answer, what am I optimizing for?

Starting point is 00:12:13 You can ask yourself, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? And that's really about figuring out what kind of trajectory you're on. And if they can, then maybe all you need is patience. But if they can, then maybe all you need is patience. But if they can't, something needs to change, you know, like you need to develop or build some new habits. Another question I love, and this is actually at the core of a lot of what I talk about in Atomic Habits, is how can I create an environment that will naturally bring about my desired change? Rather than trying to like fight this and force my way through, rather than trying to grit my teeth and make it happen, even if the circumstances aren't ideal, how can I look around

Starting point is 00:12:49 and structure my physical environment, my social environment and the tribes I'm a part of and my strategy for what I'm trying to achieve so that it's almost natural that I'm moving in that direction. So I have a bunch of questions. I got like 20 that I go through, but those are just three or four that, you know, kind of come to mind. Well, we may come back to the remainder of the list because I am a question junkie. No big surprise there. But I wanted to maybe reference the, I shouldn't say the, but one of the key points in the first chapter of Atomic Habits, which is you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, which is a modification of one of my favorite quotes, wish I could actually speak the original

Starting point is 00:13:37 language, but I cannot. Alas, from the Greek poet and philosopher Archilochus, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. So to the systems piece, I think about this a lot and have found for myself and certainly for many people in my audience that stacking the deck so that it's harder to fail goes a lot further than trying to rely on willpower, right? And it's almost difficult for me to imagine precise steps you could take to hone something that is labeled as broadly as willpower. So how can you set up accountability? How can you set up incentives, et cetera? What are some of the systems that you have for yourself for various habits? So we can pick a couple different habits. Like

Starting point is 00:14:28 let's take fitness, for example, and then I'll also do it for like writing and business. So for fitness, which I consider to be this, this is kind of one of like my core habits. It's one of the ones I feel like is most important for how I structure my day. But I try to do whatever I can to reduce friction and make it as easy as possible to do it. So the first thing is I give myself permission to reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule. So if my typical workout takes 45 minutes, but I only have 15 that day, it's easy to get into this story where you're like, I don't have time to do it all. Like, why bother? But instead, I try to remind myself to reduce the scope but stick to the schedule

Starting point is 00:15:05 and there have been a lot of days where all i have time for is to go in and do a couple sets of squats but i'm glad that i did that rather than doing nothing and it counts for a lot to like not throw a zero up for another day in a sense in the long run i almost feel like the bad days matter more than the good days because yeah if you show on the bad days, even if it's less than what you had hoped for, you maintain the habit. And if you maintain the habit, then all you need is time. So it counts for a lot. You also proved yourself, you know, you can look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the night and be like, you know what? Circumstances weren't ideal. Situation wasn't perfect, but I still found a way to show up and, you know, like get some reps

Starting point is 00:15:45 in today. So that's the first thing is kind of like mindset and approach. Second thing is, and I've gradually increased what I do for this. So I, at first it's, there's basic stuff like set your workout clothes next year, set a mouth the night before, have, you know, everything like ready to go, have your water bottle filled up, stuff like that. But I've gradually kind of reduced the friction even more. And now I used to work out at of gym for like 10 years. And so I would do all that kind of stuff. Now over the last year or two, I build a home gym. And so all I have to do is get down to the basement and I can just work out there. And I'm gradually accumulating more and more equipment. You know, I'm becoming like this equipment hoarder. Now I have enough stuff that like,

Starting point is 00:16:21 I don't have any excuses. Like all I have to do is just walk downstairs and I can be doing that exercise in 15 seconds. So it's really just about reducing friction. Some of that is strategy too. If you don't have equipment or you don't want to pay for a gym membership, there are great body weight programs, or you could just do 10 sprints up and down the sidewalk. And there are like almost no excuses if you have the right strategy for reducing friction and just figuring out ways to get a decent workout in. I will also just add, if you don't have space for an entire gym, you almost certainly have space for a functional doorstop, a.k.a. kettlebell. You could get one kettlebell or even build a kettlebell from some basic materials.

Starting point is 00:17:17 People can look it up, a T-bar kettlebell for swings. And if you can just do one set of swings, I mean, you're going to hit a lot. And I would love to hear, well, let's see see a few things, if you don't mind me just adding my, my commentary. Sure. So the first is underscoring another thing you said, which is, I don't want to say it doesn't matter, but it matters much less what happens on the days where you feel like doing the things that you have set out as your habits or goals,

Starting point is 00:17:47 behaviors, et cetera. What matters is what happens when you don't want to do those things. And this is where the systems and the lack of excuses and accountability and so on comes into play. How do you apply this? Well, actually, one more thing, which is the exercise piece. I'm glad you brought it up first. And many people might think, well, that's fine. That's just exercise. But exercise for me is sort of the cascading upper level of the waterfall. And if you take care of your body, your body takes care of your brain and mood and so many other things. So in a sense, it's the force multiplier category. I'm glad we spoke about it first. What other types of systems, and I'll sort of put that in air quotes because it could take, I'm sure, a lot of different forms, but what might be examples of systems or scaffolding that you've

Starting point is 00:18:37 set up in other areas? So just a quick point on what you just mentioned first. So I think it's worth asking yourself what habits are upstream from other things that I want to do or other things that set me up for a good day. And what you're kind of describing is that a workout habit, at least for you. And I would say for me is upstream from a lot of other good things that happen. Like I get the benefits of the workout. Sure. But also I tend to have that post-workout high for an hour or two, where I get this good period of concentration. I tend to eat better when I'm training. It's kind of like I don't want to waste it. It's actually when I'm not training that I get lazy and, you know, start eating whatever I want. I tend to sleep better at night because I'm tired from the workout, which means I wake up the next day and I

Starting point is 00:19:15 have better energy. And at no point was I trying to actively build better sleep habits or nutrition habits or whatever, but it just kind of came as a natural byproduct of getting that one habit of a good workout in. And it doesn't have to be fitness. You talk to some people, you know, comedians, for example, we'll talk about how or athletes will talk about how they have this visualization habit before they step out on the stage. And if they get that in, they kind of recite what a good performance is going to look like that helps them perform in the moment. Or CEOs will talk about a meditation habit. And if they like, that helps them perform in the moment. Or CEOs will talk about a meditation habit. And if they get their 15 minutes of meditation in the morning,

Starting point is 00:19:49 that sets them up for the rest of the day being productive. So I think it just comes down to asking yourself, when I'm living a good day, when I'm on, what are some of the key habits that are part of that? And then maybe rather than worrying about everything and trying to hit every little domino along the way, what's the lead domino? What's that first action that's upstream from the other productive things? And can I just pour my energy into making sure I do that today and kind of trust that the momentum will carry me forward? Okay. So your question was, what are some other examples of systems? It can take many different forms. It could be a physical thing that helps you be more productive. So for example, this doesn't work for everybody's job, but it works for mine.

Starting point is 00:20:30 And I don't do it every day, but I probably do it 70 or 80% of the time, which is I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. Now it gives me a chance. It gives me space to just work on my agenda rather than responding to everybody else's agenda. You know, like I can actually show up and have a few hours where I can do some creative work. So that's a system in a sense, it's a physical environment that promotes or benefits the habit that I'm trying to build, which is creative output or writing or whatever. It could be digital things. So for example, each week I write three, two, one, this weekly newsletter, and there are three short ideas for me, two quotes from other people and one question in each newsletter. And I have a spreadsheet that has three tabs. One of them is ideas. One of them

Starting point is 00:21:14 is quotes and one of them is questions. And I've got hundreds of ideas that I've generated or quotes that I've run across and read or questions that I've kind of like spitball. And. Maybe this could be in a newsletter sometime. And because I have this system, which in this case is just this spreadsheet of raw material, it only takes me an hour or two to write the newsletter because I have a lot to start from. I have good starting material. And so the system of when I read a book and come across a quote that I like, I type it down and put it into the spreadsheet. That's a very simple system, but it makes the process of writing the newsletter each week much easier. So there are many different forms that could take. I mean, it could be almost infinite in its variations, but it's any way that you set up the environment, physical, digital, or social to make the habit easier and more frictionless. Let's zoom in on the creative process a little bit.

Starting point is 00:22:07 And we're going to talk about also email lists, building email, because I feel as though what was old is once new again, always. It's like every few years I have to be like, guys, you need a way to communicate with your audience that cannot be taken away from you immediately by platform yeah email never dies but everybody talks about how it's dead yeah it's like the cat came back the very next day we thought it was a gone but it wouldn't stay away i mean email is not going anywhere anytime immediately right so we'll come back to that because it is a vehicle for transmitting some of this creative work as you. I have read a bit about your use or past use of asana for capturing ideas. I think this was for asymmetry at the time, at least in the article I read on every.to. And then I separately read

Starting point is 00:23:03 about a 600-page Google Doc that you had put together and were compressing in various ways. Where have you landed with idea capture, maybe web capture? Let's add that in because it may be a separate category. What is your portfolio of tools? First of all, I don't think the tool matters that much. I think what does matter is crafting great information flows and capturing the good ideas that you come across. And then depending on what you're trying to do, in my case, I'm trying to create books or to write newsletters using that raw material that you collected to create something great. So I would

Starting point is 00:23:40 say the big picture game is always the same, which is first, I'm trying to craft better information flows. Almost every idea that you have is downstream from what you consume. We don't usually think about it that way, but like when you choose who to follow on Twitter, you're choosing your future thoughts. In a sense, you're creating the information flow, what the timeline, what the feed is going to look like. Or when you choose what book to read or which podcast episode to listen to, you're choosing the thoughts that are going to arise. Now, you may not necessarily know what they are, but over time, you can start to learn which sources of information are higher signal than others. And I almost feel like that is

Starting point is 00:24:20 like the main habit to try to build, especially in our current modern society, because information is overflowing and so widely accessible. The person who creates better information flows gets better thoughts. How do you consume? What do you choose? I've spent kind of an unreasonable amount of time curating my Twitter feed. I think that makes me feel better about spending time on it. I'm not necessarily saying it's like the best place but because i have found a really good set of people to follow i do get useful ideas from twitter and it's easy and i'm probably spending more time on it than i should so at least now maybe it's a

Starting point is 00:24:52 little more valuable but the single highest thing for me is when i find a book that is relevant to what i'm writing about if it's relevant to the the topic and you and i mean that in like a more granular fashion like let's say for atomic habits for example i don't mean a book about habits i to what I'm writing about. If it's relevant to the topic, and I mean that in like a more granular fashion, like let's say for Atomic Habits, for example, I don't mean a book about habits. I mean, hey, I'm writing a chapter on self-control and this book has a story that relates to self-control or this book has a piece of research that relates to that particular chapter. And when I find the right thing, it's hard for me to even get through a page because I'm taking so many notes and it's sparking so many ideas to write about like it'll take me an entire morning

Starting point is 00:25:29 just to get through like three pages how do you find the gems that are that dense I mean I have my own thoughts on how I approach this but there are yeah 100,000 plus books published a year in the U.S. in English, probably something along those lines. How do you sort of ferret your way through the maze to find some of those books? First thing is you got to be willing to quit books fast. If you have baggage around finishing books, then if you feel like you have to finish something because you started it, then you're just going to be stuck and you won't move on quickly enough. There's this quote about Emerson, I think, where it says something like he read like a hawk looking for prey, like scanning over the field. And I think about that, like I try to read like that. I'm not reading for the enjoyment or like slowly unpacking a book the

Starting point is 00:26:15 way that I would with a sci-fi novel or something. I'm trying to find an insight. So that's the first thing is start more books, quit most of them. The second thing is suggestions from friends are always helpful. And so if you let people know, hey, I'm writing about this topic, what's a good book that I should read? I have found a couple of great ones that way. So just kind of putting it out into the universe. If you find a book that's good, go to the back of the book and see what the references are and then go through those and just scan those books on Amazon. And a lot of the time you'll find a couple other ones that are useful. If you find a book that had something, but you feel like maybe it didn't quite hit it,

Starting point is 00:26:53 go to Amazon and check all the three-star reviews for that book or the one-star reviews sometimes. And there'll be other books recommended in there. So they say, instead of reading this, you should read this one. Yeah. So the three-star reviews is a key, right? Because the five-star reviews are just overly, not overly, I don't want to slam five-star reviews. I love five-star reviews. But they tend to not, I would say for me, at least one-star reviews are sometimes like, I ordered a toaster and they sent me a book. And you're like, oh, come on. You bought a book. Pay attention to what you're clicking. But the three-star reviews, the most helpful or most critical three-star reviews, you tend to get a lot of really helpful feedback. I'll add two for folks who might just be curious because I read for people who can see behind me. I have bookshelves and many, many more bookshelves.

Starting point is 00:27:41 I will very often go to Wikipedia and Goodreads. I will see if the book is old enough, it will very often, and if it's iconic enough or has stood the test of time, which is not true for all books that I've read or do read, but there will often be a Wikipedia page and there will almost always be quotes from film, blank book,s if you search that on google you'll get a good selection so you can get a feel for for instance you know finite and infinite games by cars is that something you want to read well you could get a very good taste that's like if you don't like the trailer for the movie you're not going to like the movie right so if you don't like the goodreads highlights you're not going to like the book i can almost guarantee you and side note on

Starting point is 00:28:24 that you were mentioning you know what am optimizing for? Which sounds very much like it could be a Derek Sivers question. He has a lot of good questions. A variant on that that I've also found helpful is what game am I playing? We're all playing games. So it's like, aside from shelter, food, a handful of the basics at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We're all playing games. So what games are you playing? What are you trying to win? And becoming cognizant of that is, for me at least, step one. And I think, I don't know if this is a question that you've asked before, but like, is that game worth winning? You know, like, is this something that like, am I climbing the right

Starting point is 00:29:07 mountain or do I need to be climbing a different one? Cause it's very important to make sure that you're in, in the right game. Yeah, totally. So you mentioned the tools not mattering so much choosing the inputs. We talked about books for capture when you're like, that's good. So you're right. I do use Asana mostly. It's a very messy process and Asana is just kind of like a holding ground for it. But I have the app on my phone and I got it pulled up in my browser all the time. And so it's always right there. I don't really care what the tool is. Like in this case, this is what I've been using for the last few years, but it just needs to be something that is always present. And as soon as you have an idea, it always goes into one place. You don't have to think about where you're going to record it. And you don't end up with a random note on

Starting point is 00:29:52 your iPhone and another one in an Evernote doc and a third thing in a Google doc. And you know, like now it's hard to find the ideas if you have them all in one place. Sounds like the story of my life right now. Which is why I'm very interested in your use of Asana, because Asana, I've used Asana a ton. I still use Asana for project management, task management, but idea capture wasn't a use case I'd really considered. So would you mind, just for people listening, explaining? I know this is going to seem very pedestrian, but how do you do it without stuff getting lost? Part of this is, again, I'm trying to simplify things as much as possible. And we may talk about this more as we go through the conversation. But I have a really

Starting point is 00:30:34 small team. It's me and one employee. And I'm not interested in having a large team. And I want to be as effective and as high leverage as possible. And that means that we need to think really carefully about where we spend our time. And if I always have a bunch of different tools or I'm always switching between different apps, that's just time that's kind of wasted if the job could be done in the same place. And so we use Asana to run the book launch

Starting point is 00:30:56 or to run the newsletter calendar or to, you know, like for all the other stuff that we do throughout the day. And so I was like, well, I can write it down here just as well as I can write it down somewhere else. And then once it gets categorized, it goes into the appropriate doc for that project. So as an example, let's say I'm reading a book and I come across an idea that's relevant for the newsletter and it's a quote. So I'll probably label the task or the new thing that I put into Asana. I guess they usually call them tasks, but I label things based on the project it's going to.

Starting point is 00:31:26 So I'll just say quote, and then I'll paste the quote in. And it's labeled, and so I'll go through all those quotes, or Lindsay, my employee, will go through all those quotes, and we'll put them into the spreadsheet so they're in the right tab. Or let's say the next thing I'm reading, I come across an idea that sparks a thought for me, or I'm like, oh, that would fit into the next chapter for the book. And so I'll write the idea out and then I'll label it based on whatever the topic of the book is. So for atomic habits, the label might be habits. And so at the beginning

Starting point is 00:31:54 of any idea I come across that would fit for the book, I'll put habits. And then a lot of the time I'll actually put like a second category for the chapter. So let's say that this particular idea was for the chapter on self-control. It'll be habits, self-control, and then I'll type the idea out. And then, you know, a couple times a week, I'll go through everything that's labeled as habits and then put it in the right place in the doc. And then it's all kind of there. You could imagine one way to do this even faster, which is you could just put it straight into the dock that it needs to live in. Instead of putting it into Asana, I could put it straight into the 321 newsletter sheet, or I could put it straight into the chapter for the book. But I've noticed that the problem is I got a lot of projects going at one time and a lot of notes from places where things could live. So if I'm always having to remember which thing to pull up, then you either end up with like a bazillion tabs open, or it just is hard to remember which things need to go where at the

Starting point is 00:32:49 exact moment when you have the idea. And a lot of the time I'll have an idea when I'm on a walk or in the middle of a workout. And so I'm not in a position to pull up the book manuscript. I just need to be able to get it down and then I can sort it later. For people listening, what I'm trying to do in this conversation, we'll see how successful it is, is to zoom in and zoom out. And we'll zoom out and we'll talk about conceptual framework or a particular focal point, whether it's within the atomic habits paradigm or outside of it, just given what you focus on,ams and then zoom in so we can take a look at how does jams run systems or develop systems in location x in his life right so the one employee small team is where i'd like

Starting point is 00:33:36 to go next sure that's okay with you yep how do you i, try to build systems, ensure maximal leverage with a very small team? This is always of interest to me. I have a small team. It has always been of interest to me, like Small Giants by Bo Burlingham. I think the subtitle is companies that choose to be great instead of big or something like that. I've always been fascinated by positive constraints. So one you could set is, I'm not going to have a big team. I'm not going to hire a lot of people. So then you have to make decisions that fall in line with optimizing, not optimizing for that, but operating within that constraint. What are some of the productivity principles, guiding questions, and so on that you have?

Starting point is 00:34:24 At first, I'll just say, I'm not saying this is how everybody should run their business. It's just how I choose to run mine. And you have to choose what you're trying to accomplish. And in my case, I don't want to have a big team, but I do want to make as big of an impact as possible. And so the first question I ask is, rather than optimizing for money, let's optimize for time. So how do I want to spend my days? And then I try to make as few choices as possible that violate that answer. And you got to keep coming back to that. How do I want to spend my days? What do I want my time to be spent on? And within that, how can we reach the most people possible or make the most money possible, but not without violating that? Because there's like all kinds of things you do.

Starting point is 00:35:06 You know, I could staff up, I could build a bigger business, whatever. But like, I'm not interested in spending my days like that. So that's the first thing is you got to decide what you're trying to do. A question that I love and I keep coming back to for increasing leverage. And I try to encourage both Lindsay and I to think about this over and over again is what is the work that keeps working for us once it's done? So as an example, when Atomic Habits came out, I did a ton of interviews and some of those interviews were on radio. And I don't really do radio interviews anymore because as soon as I get done with that 10 minute segment or whatever it was,

Starting point is 00:35:41 all the work that I put in, it vanishes. Nobody's listening anymore. It's off the air. Whereas a podcast, like, you know, what we're doing right now is being recorded. And so people can continue to listen to it. And, you know, I've done a bunch of podcasts for the book and there's somebody somewhere listening to one of them right now. It's almost like there are multiple versions of James out there and they're all continuing to work right now. And that's an example of like the work that keeps working for you once it's done. If you can do one or two things a day that are going to keep working for you in the long run, man, you end up like two or three or five years later and you just have this tidal wave of previous effort that is working for you. So let me give you a couple

Starting point is 00:36:21 different examples and stories from my personal experience. I wrote this article a couple of years ago. It was called the physics of productivity, and it was just taken like, you know, Newton's three laws and applying them to productivity in kind of this hopefully clever way. And it did fine. It didn't, the article didn't blow up or anything, but it was just kind of a normal piece. And it sat there on the site and people would occasionally read it. And then a couple of years later, this journalist from the New York times read that article and they were writing this piece and they linked to the original article in it. And it wasn't much, it was just like a sentence, but they, they linked to the website. Well, there was this producer for CBS that read the article on the New York times and then clicked through to my site and sent me an email and said,

Starting point is 00:37:02 Hey, do you want to come on CBS this morning and talk about this piece? And so I was like, okay, sure. So they flew me to New York and I did the segment and it was my first time on TV. And so I was all nervous about it, but I tried to do my best and have a good segment. And as soon as it got done, I went over to Gail King and I said, I have this book coming out in 10 months. So this was like 10 months before Atomic Habits. I would love to come back and do a segment about that when the book comes out. And she said, sure thing. We'll have you back. Just make sure that we're your first stop. Don't do any other interviews on TV shows before us. And so as soon as I left, I got her email and I sent a message to her and the publisher and everybody. And I got on the calendar for launch day. And that was how I got on CBS this morning

Starting point is 00:37:43 for the launch of Atomic Habits. And that ended up being, I think, a kind of an important moment for the launch of the book because it made it feel like a thing. You know, it wasn't just a guy launching a book. It was like, oh, this is a bigger event. And I don't know how many books that segment sold. I've tried to calculate it probably more than a thousand, probably less than 10,000, probably somewhere in that range. But as soon as the segment got over, they put that clip on YouTube. And then like two hours later, we took the YouTube clip and emailed it out to my audience. And that was the launch email for the book that day was like, here's my segment on CBS this morning, the book is out. And so what I'm getting at is that work of writing that article about the

Starting point is 00:38:26 physics of productivity, that work continued to work for me in really big ways three or five or six years later, even though the initial article didn't seem like that big of a deal. And the reason it worked out is because that was work that kept working for me once it was done. So anytime you create an asset that can compound a blog post, a podcast episode, even simple stuff like Twitter posts and Instagram posts are less likely because they kind of have a short half-life. But even those can be examples of putting work out there that is still being recorded and still being stumbled across by people online. And you're creating a large surface area for good things to kind of break

Starting point is 00:39:05 your way if you spend time doing that. Now, I think you can even do better than that, which is not only can you create assets that compound and keep working for you, you can do it in a way where they layer on top of each other. So I'll spend 20 minutes on a tweet, and that seems kind of like an excessive amount of time to spend writing two sentences. But the time that I put into that, I'll put it out there and it's its own little asset. And then maybe if it does well, I'm like, Hey, I should, we should use that in the newsletter. And so it goes in the newsletter and then maybe it becomes the seed of an idea for a longer chapter or an article in a book or something, or it gets added to related ideas that can become

Starting point is 00:39:45 something bigger. And so now that 20 minutes is actually doing a lot more work than just gaining a few Twitter followers. And if you can find ways to layer those little assets on top of each other, then you get three or five or six years down the line and you really have a dramatic effect. So those are a couple of different ways to kind of like try to operate in a high leverage way with a really small team. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they

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Starting point is 00:41:56 Twitter is one example, has made a number of changes that have suspended a number of my Twitter accounts. And there's no explanation provided, no particular bad behavior that I or my team can identify, but suspended nonetheless. And then they get reinstated. And then two days later, they get suspended again. Can't figure it out. But what this means is, much like when, say, Facebook started,

Starting point is 00:42:26 I don't want to say requiring, highly encouraging boosting, aka paying for promotion of posts to reach your previously organic audience, people's business models and audience size started to effectively disintegrate. And having email is so, so valuable, which is why I'm also spending some time on this, And it's important to me. That's just a background setting the table so that I can ask you when something is going wrong, aside from reaching out to, say, your email service provider and saying, hey, is there something funny going on? Is something broken? Is there a monkey wrench in the works? How would you go about figuring things out? I like to think about it as there's internal distribution. So those are the things that I own. And you really can only own kind of a few assets. Like you can own your website, you can own your email list,

Starting point is 00:43:10 you can own your podcast. That's kind of roughly about it. And then the other bucket is external. So this is other people's platforms that you can have distribution on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera. And as much as possible, I think the web is, it is very platform centric right now. And people spend a lot of time on those platforms. I don't want to be on all of them because I don't have enough time and energy to be good at all of them, but there are probably a few that are a good fit for my audience. So Twitter and Instagram are the two that we've decided to focus on and talk dances coming. No tick tock routines yet. Um, yeah, I figured out how to tie that into habits. We'll, we'll see what comes. So I post on those two platforms and then I try to build an audience there, but also you'll notice a lot of the posts

Starting point is 00:44:01 that I put up on there. So Instagram, for example, I have a very weird Instagram account because I don't share any pictures of myself. I'm not like, not really interested in like me as an individual being out there, but it's all about the ideas. And so it's just a bunch of text, but on many of them at the bottom of the image or in the caption, it'll say, you know, here's a quote. And then at the bottom, we'll say, you know, get more ideas like this, sign up for three, two, one, and then it'll have a link to the newsletter. And so the idea is to suddenly be encouraging people to go off platform and join one of the assets or one of the pieces of audience that I do own one of the internal ones, like the website or the newsletter or whatever. And so I try to get those things to work together and like cross link between the two.

Starting point is 00:44:44 And then they can start to build each other. And I do it the other way as well. Like when I send out a newsletter, sometimes if the ideas are short enough and they would make a good tweet, I'll include a little link under each idea. They'll just say, click to tweet. And so now the newsletter is driving action on Twitter. And so it all kind of like you create this little spider web, this kind of ecosystem where everything is kind of driving each other and you know, it all kind of like you create this little spider web, this kind of ecosystem where everything is kind of driving each other and, you know, it all kind of grows together. But the ultimate idea is to try to point back the external platforms to the distribution sources that you do own so that you're not beholden to any particular one when they decide to change their strategy or approach. Yeah, which is specifically why a whole bunch of stuff is getting banned or shadow banned right

Starting point is 00:45:29 now on Twitter. And this is the best theory I could come up with, and I can't get this verified or denied, is that because some of these accounts which were created for a new podcast that came out have legitimate contact, but they all link out to Apple Podcasts. That's the only plausible explanation that we can come up with for why they have been locked. And they keep getting unlocked. So I don't want to make anybody seem like the bad guy here. But it highlights the fragility of having something that is entirely dependent on a platform that you don't own. And also, if you were to read your terms of service,

Starting point is 00:46:07 you're probably giving all of that content to the platform as well on some level. And I recall chatting with this guy, this was many years ago, before the organic reach was throttled a lot on Facebook, chatting with a guy who had a multi-million dollar business built on a few Facebook pages and massively successful. And I asked him what it felt like to run those businesses. And he said, I feel like I have the most profitable McDonald's in the world built on top of an active volcano. It could go away at any minute. And I don't want to live with that anxiety also.

Starting point is 00:46:46 And just to add a few things, just to feather them in with your comments. One is, it's very important to adapt. I would add something to that, which is, it's very important to adapt. But I think it's really critical to have a good explanation for how you are adapting, and not to discard for the sake of discarding. And just as an example, to give people a window into my thinking, Reddit and some of these other platforms still can drive a lot of traffic, but they're not sexy, and people have started to neglect them. So there's far less competition on some of these older, let's just

Starting point is 00:47:25 call it platforms that are actually still innovating quite well in the case of Reddit. So I've thought about revisiting some of the vintage powerhouses because there's been such a mass migration to particularly short form video. It just seems like a bloodbath. And I would also say something I think you've done very well is set constraints on what you will or will not do, say on social platforms. Because one of the risks of adapting is that you become a slave to the audience in such a way that you morph into this funhouse mirror caricature of yourself. And I've seen this happen to a lot of people where they put out 10 posts and the most extreme of those gets the most engagement

Starting point is 00:48:12 or feedback or positive likes, et cetera. And so they then put out five more like that. The most extreme gets the best response. And a year later, not only has their social feed become like the craziest infomercial pitchman yelling circus, but this is the greater risk is that they in real life have started to become the mask that they've created for themselves. This is a very real risk. So setting up the constraints on what you will or will not do in advance before you get on that

Starting point is 00:48:51 playing field, I think is really, really, at least for me, very, very important. How do you think about that? Or have you thought about that? Well, this connects to one of the core ideas in atomic habits, which is your habits are how you embody a particular identity. So the aspects, the behaviors that you perform each day are reinforcing or shaping the story that you have about yourself. I think it's important to ask yourself, like, who is the type of person I wish to become? You know, like, what's the type of identity I want to be reinforcing? And your habits are not the only things that influence that in life. Like every experience is part of who you are. But by virtue of the fact that they get repeated again and again, they have an outsized influence on your story.

Starting point is 00:49:34 And so, you know, the phrase I like to keep in mind is every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. And so as you show up each day and make another YouTube video or do another TikTok video, you're casting a vote for being that kind of person. And if you let the algorithm run it, if you let yourself kind of fall into this, as you said, mask that you're wearing for the audience. Pretty soon, you actually are like casting enough votes that the bulk of the evidence starts to support that part of your identity. You start to become that kind of person. And this is why I come back to some of those questions that we were talking about earlier. Like what am I optimizing for?

Starting point is 00:50:12 Or how do I want to spend my days? Because you got to start there and set the positive constraints for yourself. Who's the type of person I wish to become? What am I trying? What kind of lifestyle am I trying to create for myself? And then within that constraint, how can I have the biggest audience or how can I make the most money or how can I make the biggest impact? But I think that's a way of trying to anchor yourself and not like lose yourself and let the algorithm kind of run the show. So I think your habits and

Starting point is 00:50:39 your identity are very connected and the actions that you take shape or support, they provide evidence for the type of person that you are. And so it's worth asking yourself, what are my actions moving me closer to? And you want to make sure that you're on a good path. May I read something from your fantastic website? This is on identity-based habits. I want to highlight this and add it to what you just said, because I think it's critically important. And feel free to revise any of this. And you can't believe everything you read on the internet. So who knows? Even if it comes from my own website. I don't think the CCP has infiltrated your website or anything like that. So let me just give this a read. The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity

Starting point is 00:51:24 first. That's the sentence I'd love to get your take on. Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are, either consciously or subconsciously. To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself. You need to build identity-based habits. Would you like to add anything to that? Creating a new identity first is, I think, the piece that is of greatest interest to me. How would somebody go about doing that? Let's say they're listening to this. They're just moving into the new year. James, please tell me. Well, it's kind of a two-step process.

Starting point is 00:52:09 Decide the type of person you want to be, and then you prove it to yourself with small wins. And the more small wins or the more small habits that you perform, the more votes that you cast for that identity, the more you build up evidence of being that kind of person. And eventually you start to take pride in that aspect of your identity. And man, once we start to take pride in a part of our story, like it's much easier to stick with those habits. If you take pride in the size of your biceps, you'll like never skip arm day at the gym. You know, if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this like long hair care routine,

Starting point is 00:52:38 all these hair care habits and you do them every day. I was going to say, it might be past that point for you and I, my friend. I think you and I have lost that battle. Unless we're talking about chess there. Yeah. James, may I jump in for one second? Sure. What is a good way to phrase that? So if someone wants to have, not a mission statement, but some type of statement for

Starting point is 00:52:58 this is the type of person I want to be. I think it's, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, or I'm the type of person who shows up on time, or I'm the type of person who finishes what they start. Whatever aspect of your identity that you're trying to reinforce, that's kind of the story. You can also phrase it as a question. So for example, rather than saying, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, you could have this question that's related to the identity you want to build and you kind of carry it around with you all day. And like in this example, maybe the question is, what would a healthy person do? And so you're just kind of walking around all day,

Starting point is 00:53:33 asking yourself, you know, what should I get for lunch? Well, what would a healthy person do? Or should I take an Uber or should I walk to the next meeting? Well, what would a healthy person do? And you just kind of like go around your day and try to make decisions that you feel like support that identity. But I think you start with who is the type of person I wish to become. So let's say I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And then the second step is prove it to yourself with small wins. So which small actions, what little habits cast votes for being the kind of person who doesn't miss workouts? Well, maybe one thing is rather than doing a 45 minute workout, when I only have 10 minutes, I reduce the scope and stick to the schedule. And I do a couple of sprints or I do, you know, five sets of pushups or whatever

Starting point is 00:54:17 it is. And so you find ways to reinforce your desired identity, even if it's small, especially in the beginning, because if you's small, especially in the beginning. Because if you can show up consistently, if you kind of master the art of showing up and performing these small habits, you build up this sense of momentum. You kind of start to reinforce and shape that new identity. And the more evidence that you have for it, at some point, you kind of cross this invisible threshold where you're like, oh, I guess I am that kind of person. You know, like if you go out and shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don't think, oh, I'm a basketball player. But if you do it every day for six months or a year or two years, like at some point you cross this invisible line. You're like, you know, I guess playing basketball is kind of part of who I am.

Starting point is 00:54:59 So I think you're trying to accumulate actions that support your desired identity. So let's do a case study. And we're going to take a look at, this is purely selfish, at email. Because you've been very methodical and executed very well with email. I also have the five-bullet Friday Friday Which has been going for God I have not missed it Week in God knows how many years

Starting point is 00:55:28 It's been a long time It's pretty wild It serves as sort of a diary For me too I don't know if this is true for you But looking back At these editions It is actually very fun for me

Starting point is 00:55:36 Because I get to see like Oh Three and a half years ago Oh yeah that week Oh wow Look at how dumb Past Tim was Present Tim

Starting point is 00:55:44 Is so much smarter. I've learned so much. Oh, gosh, yes. One boy can dream. A boy can dream. So let's say one of my resolutions, and this is going to be a bit of a force, but not necessarily so.

Starting point is 00:55:56 I am someone who prioritizes email above all the other platforms and grows it consistently. And you may have some familiarity with my newsletter and how we do things. And I know you and I've had some exchanges before. What might be some small wins or just changes that you would make, things you would add, try, test, anything at all? So I was browsing your website a little bit before this conversation. And I kind of feel like the main difference. Also, first of all, I just need to say, you already have an enormous email list.

Starting point is 00:56:29 So to do some sort of intervention on somebody who's got millions of subscribers is kind of a ridiculous premise to start with. But I'll take the question seriously. No, no. I want to give credit where credit is due. I think you have more. I think that your prioritizing is better reflected in your actions and decisions with respect to email than in my case. It's interesting you say that. That was what I was about to say is I feel like the only difference, the only primary difference is you emphasize the podcast as you're like number one, and I emphasize email as like my number one.

Starting point is 00:57:07 And something has to lead the day. Now that, you know, of course, this does not mean that's a bad decision by you, right? Podcast is enormous, and it probably is the more important thing for your business. But each person needs to decide what that is. In my case, if you go to my website,

Starting point is 00:57:20 it's very clear. Like if something is going to be the primary call to action on the homepage, it's the email list, not the podcast or whatever. So that's just a question that like you need to have is like, are we willing to emphasize this more? And if not, then that's a positive constraint you're setting and you can decide, okay, given that email is going to be number two to the podcast, how can we grow it more? Well, you know, you've raised such a simple idea for me. Like right now, if you look at the homepage, right, it's podcast on the top, on the banner, and then you have the email signup, which is sort of right below that to the right. And it could be as simple as like, all right, well, look, this doesn't have to be a

Starting point is 00:57:58 forever decision. Let's just swap those two for a period of time, make the top, the email, the whole thing is email. Everybody's biased to how their story played out. So I'm biased to say email is the most important, but my stance on it is make the banner on your homepage, the email list, and then you can email all the podcast episodes out to these people. Yeah. Every time I think about it sensibly, email is the most important because you can share the podcast much more easily via email than you can share the newsletter via podcast. Because to share email via podcast requires task switching. Almost, I don't want to say always, but probably 90% of the time, if I had to just pull a number out of my ass, people are listening to a podcast as a secondary activity. Very different beast than someone who sits down, opens an email,

Starting point is 00:58:48 and clicks on links. They're opening an email explicitly in the case of Five Bullet Friday, and perhaps also in the case of your email, to find things to learn and investigate. Well, this is kind of what you're getting at, but email is in a position where both of the assets are very flexible. You can talk about whatever you want on a podcast and you can write about whatever you want in an email. But email has the advantage of having links that you can click on right away. And so it can be immediately acted upon. Whereas, as you mentioned, often people are listening to a podcast while they're on a run or making dinner or in a car, and they're not in a position to click on a link right then. And so even if you

Starting point is 00:59:26 tell them, give them a great URL to go to it, just the conversion rate is not going to be nearly as high because people are busy. And then by the time they get home, they don't remember to do it. And you know, so anyway, I, for all of those reasons, I like email more. And honestly, I kind of feel like there are really only two things that came to mind. The first is, are you going to emphasize it more in the web design? So put it above the banner at the top of the page or above the fold. And then the second thing is how are you cross pollinating between your different assets? So I mentioned Instagram for me, that's like of the top five ways that we drive email subscribers. Instagram is one of them. And the reason is because a lot

Starting point is 01:00:04 of the posts have links at the bottom that encourage people to sign up for three, two, one, or they mentioned the newsletter in the caption or a story that we post will have like an actual link in it that you can click to the sign up on the page. So are you using your other assets like Instagram or Twitter or the podcast to drive email subscribers? Example for the podcast would be, I know for previous episodes, I don't know if you do this for every episode, but sometimes you'll mention five bullet Friday at the end. What if we mentioned it at the beginning of the show, rather than the end of the show, more people are going to be listening in the first minute

Starting point is 01:00:38 than are going to be listening in the 120th minute. So it's really just about using the other assets to cross-pollinate and to do it at strategic points that are high leverage. I would rather make fewer asks, but to do it at the exact right moment than to kind of like sprinkle calls to action everywhere. Those are the two things. Yeah. I want to share one of your questions, if that's okay. This is from your newsletter. Someone compiled your questions over two years and put them in a blog post. And one of your questions if that's okay this is from your newsletter someone compiled your questions over two years and put them in a blog post and one of them i have many highlighted this is one that related to my prioritization of email and as you pointed out focusing on the podcast the placement of the mention of five bullet friday being at the end as opposed to the beginning and it is if someone could only see my actions and not hear my words, what would they say are

Starting point is 01:01:29 my priorities? That's a good one. It's a good one. Like, yeah, don't tell me what's important. Just show me your calendar, pal. Yeah. Okay. There we go. We all have stories that we tell ourselves. It's very easy for us to justify internally. But if you're just looking at how you're acting, what are you actually emphasizing? I think we all have felt that pain at various times, which I should say, these aren't just questions I come up with for like the readers. Like these are all things I need to ask myself. You know, I pretty much everything I write is intended to help me get back to center or to course correct. And also to reinforce something you just said, the more success you have, even if it's a small amount, although I do think it tends to go somewhat exponential at some point, there may be exceptions to this, but among my friends and peer group, whatever that might mean, uniformly, I have seen the more success you have, whether it's a base hit or a double or a home run or 10 home runs, the harder it becomes to focus for a lot

Starting point is 01:02:35 of people because in the beginning stages of your career, or maybe mid stages, you're choosing between unattractive options and maybe one or two attractive options. You're trying to generate attractive options. They're like not even there. You're trying to create them, you know, or find them. You're trying to generate attractive options. Exactly. Once you go from having one attractive option to two attractive options on your menu, things really change dramatically. And then when that goes to 10 things, and then it goes to 10 interesting people with 10 interesting things, it gets harder. And I'm not saying this to ask my audience to cry a river for me. I don't expect that.

Starting point is 01:03:20 You know, woe is me. These are quality problems, but you really want to sharpen the axe of asking these types of questions and building these systems before you have your first one or two base hits. Because if you try to sharpen the axe when you are feeling as though you are just up to your neck in water, kind of floating down the rapids, it's going to be very, very hard, I would just say. Well, success generates not only opportunities, but also distractions. And so in a sense, like success almost kind of eats itself. Sometimes it's the same thing. You know, it's like, do you get good at something?

Starting point is 01:04:00 And so then that brings new opportunities your way. Some of them are novel or interesting or different. And so you that brings new opportunities your way. Some of them are novel or interesting or different. And so you do those and then you turn around six months later and you don't have any time to do the thing that made you successful in the first place. So you got to be careful about what you say yes to. I'd like to ask you about two goals slash habits slash behavioral modifications that are of interest to me personally. And also I would imagine of interest to me personally, and also I would

Starting point is 01:04:25 imagine of interest to other people listening. And I'm curious, because you've had 10 million copies sold, you've interacted with, or certainly observed a lot of your readers, people who've tested different things from the book. Let's start with, well, the two that come to mind, and I'm actually good at the second, but the two are cutting back on caffeine and meditating. So the meditating is an addition, the cutting back on caffeine, a lot of people would think of as a subtraction. I would love to hear any thoughts you might have on cutting back on caffeine. If you want to break a bad habit, there are kind of three potential paths you could take. So the first is you can eliminate it entirely. So elimination.

Starting point is 01:05:06 Second option is you can reduce it so you could like curtail it to the desired degree. I don't want to never drink caffeine. I just want to drink less of it. And the third option is you could substitute it. You could replace it with a different habit. And of those three, oftentimes replacing it is actually the more effective option. So for example, if you get your caffeine from drinking Coke or soda or something like that, then maybe you find out, hey, you know, something I really love from this experience is I actually just like drinking a carbonated beverage. And so it's the carbonation that I like. And maybe if I substitute it with sparkling water or something like that, I still get the carbonation sensation, but I don't have the caffeine associated with it anymore.

Starting point is 01:05:50 And so that's a way of substituting for that behavior, and you still get something that the experience provides. This is actually kind of an important larger picture, big picture thing about habits, which is every habit that you have, we build habits to solve the repeated problems that we face in life. And I'm using problems in a very general sense here. You know, like let's say that you come home from work and you feel tired and exhausted from a long day. Well, in a sense, coming home from work at 6 p.m. and feeling tired is a problem. And especially if you experience it repeatedly, you got to come up with some kind of solution for that. And generally speaking, we just kind of like try things out in life. And so you can imagine one person solves the

Starting point is 01:06:37 problem of feeling exhausted by scrolling Instagram mindlessly for 30 minutes. And another person solves that problem by playing video games for an hour. And a third person solves it by going for a run for 20 minutes. And those are all solutions to the same kind of underlying problem, but some of them are more healthy or more productive or service better than others. And what do you think the odds are that the solutions you've come up with to the repeated problems in your life are the optimal one. Like it's just so unlikely that whatever you happen to have stumbled into throughout life is the perfect way or the best habit that serves you most. So I think what I'm trying to get out there is maybe take a little bit of the pressure off yourself and don't worry

Starting point is 01:07:20 about judging yourself so much. You're just trying to solve the repeated problems that you face. But once you realize that it's unlikely that your current solutions are the optimal solutions, well, now maybe we can step outside and above ourselves and look down and try to come up with a better solution. So rather than drinking a Coke to get the carbonation, we can drink sparkling water. So that's one example for the substitution. If we want to take the other path of reduction, something I've noticed about myself is if I get a six pack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge, like in the door or on a shelf, that's like right to die level. I'll drink one every

Starting point is 01:07:56 night just because it's there. But if I take it and put it on the lowest shelf in the fridge and like, it's kind of all the way back in the corner, I can't really see it unless I'm bending down. It'll sit there for two weeks or three weeks. Like, and so I'm like, did I want it or not? If it was obvious, then I grab one. But if it wasn't, then I avoid it. And I think that's a simple question to ask yourself. Where do I get my caffeine? Is it coffee? Is it soda? And is that really obvious? Is it like the coffee sitting right out on the counter? Is the soda, like the first thing I see at eye level when I open the fridge and how can I make it less obvious? Is it like the coffee sitting right out on the counter? Is the soda like the first thing I see at eye level when I open the fridge? And how can I make it less obvious? In atomic habits, there are kind of what I call the four laws of behavior change. And it's just

Starting point is 01:08:34 this big picture view of how to build a good habit. So if you want to build a good habit, you want to make your habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. And if you want to break a bad habit, you just do the opposite of those four. So you want to make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult and make it unsatisfying. And so I think, how can you make coffee or soda invisible? How can you make it difficult to drink, like keep it outside of the house, et cetera. So there are a variety of strategies you could use here. You know, like let's say you live with a family and other people are going to want to drink it, but you don't want to. There's this little kind of diabolical Tupperware container called the kitchen safe, and it has a lockbox code on the top of it. And so you could give the other

Starting point is 01:09:16 family members the lockbox code, but then they don't give it to you and you just put the soda inside of that. And so it stays in that Tupperware and you can't access it. So finding ways to increase friction or to make it difficult or to make it less obvious, those are all ways to potentially curtail the caffeine habit. The locking Tupperware, what is it called again? It's called the kitchen safe. The kitchen safe. There are a few variations of this.

Starting point is 01:09:40 And I know a number of families who use them for phones. So they will have mealtime or evening time or whenever it is and they'll put the phones in the safe and that's where they sit until the phone free time. I've had readers use it for like late night snacking. The chips go in at 7pm or they're just, they just stay in that Tupperware and it's set, it's set to lock from 7pm to 7am and so they just you know they can't get to them late night i'm just imagining myself so i'll give you a confession so i love brownies and two days ago for the first time made brownies and spice cider it's like a whole christmas celebration thing even though it's

Starting point is 01:10:22 not christmas yet and i ate all the brownies last night. I'm not proud of this. I'm not beating myself up about it because I'm working out. It's fine. It's not a big deal. But I'm just imagining if I put the brownies into this locking container. And do you know what a bear bin is? There are these contraptions that you use for camping. I'm just imagining me swatting this safe around, smashing it on the ground, trying to get the brownies out. Anyway, that's more for my own gratification, folks. So thanks for listening. Let's talk about positive. And you already alluded to the four principles or laws or ingredients, but meditating. I think for a lot of folks, meditating is in the air. They've heard about it on this podcast.

Starting point is 01:11:07 I know I should do it. I just don't. By the time I have my coffee and do this and make the sandwiches for the kids, it's too late. How would you suggest people approach, say, meditating in the morning? A couple things to think about here. So again, let me just run through the four laws real quick, just as a primer for this answer. So if you want to build a good habit, roughly speaking, there are four things that you can do. You want to make it obvious. You want to make it attractive. You want to make it easy and you want to make it satisfying. So

Starting point is 01:11:39 obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. Now, if you're sitting there and you're thinking, how can I get myself to meditate more? You can just turn those into questions and you can say, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And you'll start to notice different things that you could do. So for example, how can I make meditation more obvious? Well, do you have a clear space where you're going to do this? You know, like maybe you need a meditation pillow and it's in the corner of your bedroom or it's in the corner of some other room that is the dedicated meditation space. And this is exactly where it happens. So it's obvious where the behavior is going to occur. Make it attractive. There are many different types

Starting point is 01:12:19 of meditation and there are a lot of ways to get into it. And this is true for any habit, by the way. For some reason, I think we often choose habits that we feel like we should do, but it's not necessarily the one that we want to do individually. And, you know, there may not necessarily be a thousand ways to do everything in life, but there's almost always more than one way. And you should choose the version that you're most genuinely excited about, you know, that is most appealing and interesting to you. Because if you're genuinely interested in it, then there's going to be all kinds of ways to improve. You'll find all sorts of things that you can like refine or make it better. But if you're not actually interested,

Starting point is 01:12:59 if you're like not genuinely engaged in the task, even the obvious stuff is going to feel like a hassle. You know, it's going to feel like a chore, even if it's straightforward. So do you want a guided meditation? Maybe it'd be nice to have somebody kind of walk you through it. Or do you want to find a meditation that has like lovely music associated with it? Do you not want anything? Do you just want silence and you want to be able to like hear yourself think for a minute or listen to your own breath for five minutes? And that's kind of the objective. But what sounds most attractive and appealing to you? Try to find a version of the habit that you're actually interested in. This actually, I think, connects to the timing piece that you were talking about, Tim, which is, yeah, in the morning is a

Starting point is 01:13:37 great time for a lot of people. But if you have young kids and like your four year old is running around and you're trying to figure out how to get pants on them and you need to make breakfast. Like that's probably not a good time to do it. So like find a time and a space where that habit can live, where it's attractive and you're not just going to end up frustrated because you're trying to like swim upstream. Make it easy. So rather than doing 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of meditation, which, hey, that sounds great because your favorite guru does it. But listen, like why not just do 60 seconds? Because if you can master the art of showing up,

Starting point is 01:14:09 if you can just do it for a minute and actually stick to that day in and day out, then you're starting to build the habit. And now you have something you've like gained a foothold and you can advance the next level. One of the things that I recommend in the book is called the two minute rule. And it says, just take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to someone that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or meditate five days a week for 30 minutes becomes meditate for 60 seconds. And you're just trying to master the art of showing up.

Starting point is 01:14:40 A habit must be established before it can be improved. It's got to become like the standard before you worry about optimizing it into some perfect thing. So make it easy to do, make it easy to show up. And then the final thing is make it satisfying. Now, if you've done those first three steps, well, it's obvious it's an attractive version of it. It's pretty easy to do. You're probably going to feel pretty good about yourself because you're at the end of the meditation session now. So like that'll probably be pretty satisfying, but you can layer on some kind of additional benefit. Maybe you get to have your favorite type of coffee or your favorite drink after that,

Starting point is 01:15:12 or maybe you get to have a bubble bath or a walk in the woods or whatever sounds motivating to you. So find some way to add some additional positive emotions to the experience, because if you feel good about it, you're going to want to repeat it. And this is something that in Atomic Habits, I call it the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is behaviors that get rewarded get repeated and behaviors that get punished get avoided. And it's so basic, it's so obvious, but all humans want to feel good. We all want to have positive emotions, to be supported, to be loved, to be rewarded, to have something that feels good. And so how can you

Starting point is 01:15:51 get that feeling and associate it with your habits? That's kind of the core idea. And ultimately, this connects back to what we talked about with identity, which is the perfect version is when you perform a habit and you feel good because it's reinforcing your desired identity. You know, I'm the type of person who wants to meditate each day, or I'm the type of person who doesn't miss meditation sessions. And then even if it's only 60 seconds, you can feel good about doing it because it's reinforcing your desired identity.

Starting point is 01:16:20 So that's kind of a quick case study on how to apply the ideas. Yeah, totally. As you're speaking, I'm thinking about all these other questions and how you could phrase the I'm the type of person who looks forward to meditating, right? Like, how do you make that a true statement? And it actually brought me back to San Francisco many, many, many years ago before I took my first meditation training and so on and so forth, I began, I haven't thought about this in like a decade at least, I began with listening to, I think it was

Starting point is 01:16:51 We're Gonna Party Like It's 1999 by Prince, one song. And in the morning, I would just sit down, lean against the wall, get in good posture and just breathe deeply while listening to Prince for one song. That was it. And it made a difference. It made a difference because, as you said, I've never thought of it in these terms, but I became accustomed to showing up and simply having, however small it might have been, it was small, a tiny slot in my mental calendar, which was, when I wake up,

Starting point is 01:17:20 I'm going to sit down and do this thing. And then, when I did Transcendental Meditation training later and I've experimented with many different forms of meditation since, going from three minutes to 20 minutes was a dilation of the amount of time required, but it wasn't introducing an entirely new species of calendar slot. It was already there. Once you've mastered the art of showing up,

Starting point is 01:17:46 scaling it up, increasing the scope is much easier once you're already the kind of person who's doing it every day, you know, and those are good examples. I think actually it may be, I don't know if it's your question, Tim, or I feel like I've heard you say it before, but this idea of what would this look like if it was easy, you know, or what would it look like to be the kind of person who looks forward to writing or looks forward to meditating or looks forward to working out? It's a question worth taking seriously because you can usually design the habit to feel like, Hey, this isn't a chore. Like this is how I want to be spending my days. And that's really where you want to get to because for a habit to last, it's got to be part of your normal lifestyle. It has to be something

Starting point is 01:18:23 that you want to show up and do this each day. And so you're trying to find the version of it that benefits you the most. What would this look like? Or what might this look like if it were easy as a question? I ask myself all the time. And part of the reason for that is that I've, for most of my life, prided myself on having eye pain tolerance, being able to do the hard things in the service of the long term. And when you're starting out, like you said, kind of clawing your way to any good opportunity or any open window, you're just kind of slipping back on the mud slope of establishing any type of You're opening windows that are closed. People are like, that was locked. You're like, not anymore.

Starting point is 01:19:04 Clawing like a raccoon at the window trying to figure out the lock. And at least for me, I think I began to associate results with grinding or some degree of effort. The association would be, if my effort isn't above a certain threshold, I am not doing the thing that will produce an optimal result. But past a certain point, that can be a false filter, if that makes any sense. So I ask myself that constantly. If I'm recording a podcast, right? I've thought, just to give an example, I haven't done this yet, but I've thought, you know what? The technology is good enough. Why do I do podcasts, at least as it stands right now in a static position? Why not figure out, get the best headset available, figure out connectivity and go for a walk,

Starting point is 01:19:58 figure out a way to record a podcast while I'm walking. And I would, I would check off a number of these laws that you mentioned. Microphone in one hand, Starlink dish in the other. You're just going to be... Yeah, yeah. Tim's going to be right. You'll be like the ultimate version of the guys like sifting for gold on the beach. Like you're going to be...

Starting point is 01:20:17 Oh, yeah. That would be amazing. Yeah, I just put the Starlink on the back of my head. Yeah. Mounted on top of the headset. Let's use atomic habits as the case study. How would you deconstruct atomic habits, both in its writing, but then also its launch, right? Because those are intertwined. In what made it successful? What were the things that

Starting point is 01:20:35 really seemed to be the Archimedes levers for producing? To the extent that you can, right? You're on one side of the tennis net. Yeah. So any examples? This will probably be a long answer because there's a lot to talk about. So let's break it into two categories, writing and marketing. The truth is the honest answer might be like, I don't know. I got lucky, you know, like that, that might, maybe that's, maybe that's the truth, but I suspect that there are a lot of things you can do to influence the outcome. And I'll walk you through what I tried to do. So on the writing side, I think you have to operate with this assumption of like, let me create more value than I'm going to capture.

Starting point is 01:21:15 You try to produce a hit. The ultimate thing that drives book sales is creating something that is actually genuinely valuable to people. And it has to be so good that people will talk about it. Word of mouth, you know, Atomic Habits has sold over 10 million copies at this point. We could argue, I'd be interested to know what you think the estimate is, Tim, but there's some number of copies that you could sell just by having an audience and a good marketing plan and sheer force of will and putting a lot of effort in. Maybe it's 25,000,

Starting point is 01:21:46 maybe it's a hundred thousand. I don't know. At some point, there's some number where you can't get beyond that. Even if you have a large audience just by the marketing energy, it has to be word of mouth. And I think certainly once you're in the millions or tens of millions of copies, like the only way a book grows that much is people recommend it. And I like Seth Godin's measure for this, which is, he says, if you want word of mouth, you have to create something remarkable. And that means that it's worthy of remark, right? That it's like worthy of talking about. So you have to start with that.

Starting point is 01:22:18 The three things that I always focus on are, am I writing something that's timeless? So if it's timeless and evergreen, then you have a longer period where it could become a hit. If it's something that's just really relevant to the current moment, two years from now, you've kind of passed your window for it taking off. It's like the blog post you wrote that got to the producers for television. Yes, right. Exactly. Right. Am I writing something that's pretty universal? So that's another kind of filter for me. Everybody has habits. Everybody's trying to build good habits or break bad ones, even if they're not thinking about it like carefully, it's just kind of part of life.

Starting point is 01:22:53 And so not everybody in the world is going to buy the book, but pretty much anybody can look at the cover and be like, yeah, I get why that would be useful. That's a thing that, you know, most people are going to want. So timeless is a universal. And then I feel like you have to pick something that fascinates you because if you're genuinely interested in it, that comes through in the writing. I think Morgan household has some kind of line where it's like writing for yourself is fun and it shows writing for other people is work and it shows. And you know, people have a good BS meter for that.

Starting point is 01:23:25 Quick side sell for Morgan, The Psychology of Money. The title may seem generic. The book is outstanding. I really, really enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. He's fantastic. Okay. So that's kind of like my write something timeless, write something universal, write something that fascinates you and do all that with the intention of creating something genuinely remarkable or that creates value for people. Those things sound good. I think it's worth asking, like, what does it look like in practice to actually do that? So let me just give you some examples. And I'm just going to keep interrupting because I've had too much caffeine. I'm going to blame it on the caffeine. I would also love to, at some point, so you're going to give some examples, I would love to know how you thought about

Starting point is 01:24:06 modeling other books or constructing the format and layout of your book. Not the visual layout per se. No, I know what you mean. Structuring the book. I've seen many examples of you deconstructing sentences, quotes,

Starting point is 01:24:28 application essays. We probably won't get to that, but when you went to Switzerland, right? Yep. You're very good at modeling. So at some point I'd love for you to speak to that. Yeah. I think you should deconstruct the cool things that you see in life. You know, like when you come across something that you really like or that you think is cool. So in my case, like I was writing a book, so how do I deconstruct bestsellers? What's going on there? And if you find a single example of something, it doesn't really tell you anything. But if you start to find patterns, then that's probably something to pay attention to. So I think actually this is a great segue to kind of some of these examples I was going to give. So let's say when I was writing Atomic Habits early on, I was like, how I know what I'm trying to achieve. I'm trying to write the most comprehensive and most useful book that's ever been written on habits. Now, I have no idea if I achieved that. And it's not really for me to decide if we're being honest, like I don't get to choose that it did that. It's that's up to the readers to decide. Is that a mark that you hit or not? But I think that has to be the target. You got to start there. Otherwise you're, you're never just going to stumble into that outcome, you know? So like you have to like

Starting point is 01:25:28 try to intend to create something great. So how do we do that? I looked at a bunch of books, not just about habits, but also other bestsellers. One of the first things I did was I went to the table of contents for all those books. And then I was like, how are these books arranged? And what you'll find is that a lot of bestselling books, they break things into thirds or it doesn't always have to be thirds, but they have like a clear structure that the book goes through so that you can look at the table of contents. And even though you don't know what's in the chapters, you know exactly where you're headed as a reader.

Starting point is 01:25:59 What people don't want is they don't want to open up a book and feel lost, feel like I have no idea where this guy's going to go with this. And it kind of feels like they're wasting their time. So a couple examples, and I thought about these, but I didn't actually use these for atomic habits. I could have had a table of contents that was like habits of the past habits of the present habits of the future. You know, pretty clearly like where that book's going to go. If you see those categories in the table of contents or power of habit is another example. see those categories in the table of contents. Or power of habit is another example. If you look at the table of contents there, I think he does habits of individuals, habits of businesses, and then habits of societies. So it's like individuals, organizations,

Starting point is 01:26:35 societies. And you can see how he's kind of moving up the hierarchy as you go through the book. Another one that I looked at, I can't remember which one of Cal Newport's books it was, but it was either Deep Work or something like that. He had a section on here are the rules that you need to follow. And then there were four rules or six rules. And so each one of those got their section in the book. And the point is just there needs to be a clear roadmap for the reader. And if you start looking through what other bestsellers are doing, you can start to think about how to transport that onto your own experience. Another thing I did was I tried to look at what is the average chapter length for a lot of these books. When I signed the book deal, the publisher and the editors I was working with,

Starting point is 01:27:14 which I love my publishing team, by the way, but they were kind of encouraging me to write longer chapters, like 6,000 or 8,000 words. And I was coming at this as like a blogger, you know, like most of the things I wrote were like 2,000 words or 1,000 words. And I was coming at this as like a blogger, you know, like most of the things I wrote were like 2000 words or 1500 words. And eventually what I settled on was most of the chapters were between two and 3000 words. Yep. And just for folks to have a reference point, I mean, one printed page, what would you say? It's roughly like 300, uh, most of my chapters were about 10 pages. So just so yeah. So 300 words. Yeah. If it's a 3000 word chapter, maybe it's 10 or 12 pages, something like that. So yeah, figuring out the length. And I started to notice other things that like novels would do or books that weren't necessarily

Starting point is 01:27:56 nonfiction. The chapters are really short and there's kind of this momentum that gets into it. Like it kind of gets you flipping pages and it's easier to keep churning through the chapters. And so I wanted to have that kind of chapter length. I actually think atomic habits is still a little bit longer than I was hoping. I just couldn't figure out how to compress it more. My initial manuscript for the book was 700, it was like 712 pages or something. And the finished version of the book is like two 50. So, you know, I, I compressed it by 66% or whatever. So it's, it's much smaller than it started out as, which I think is good because I feel like a lot of books, especially business books, they could have been like a blog post or a 20 page paper, and they get turned into a 200 page book. So I wanted to do the opposite.

Starting point is 01:28:39 I fucking hate that. It's the worst. It's so bad. But I actually think if you look at books that sell really well, a lot of the time they're like 180 to 220 pages. They're actually a little bit, even a little bit shorter than what I ended up hitting. So these are all examples of deconstructing bestsellers and what's going on. Probably the most important place to do this is with titles. So I have a spreadsheet of hundreds of titles for books. Then I, the way that I did it was I said I'm only going to look at books that have sold a million copies or more that's what I'm trying to achieve so let me just see how many books I can find that have done that quick question

Starting point is 01:29:12 tactical question did you do that through access to Nielsen book scan I didn't have access to book scan because I was just a poor blogger who was you know trying to make a book so I didn't have access to any of that stuff but what I did was I just did tons of Google searches. And usually what happens is that when an author hits a million copies or four million or whatever, they don't let you know. Yeah. They let you know. Um, and so there's all kinds of stuff or you'll find like, if you just search a title and then copy sold, there's New York times articles that profile an author and they say, you know, their books, 6 million copies or whatever. So it was just a bunch of legwork like that. Anyway, I put together that spreadsheet and let's say I got like 150 titles or something.

Starting point is 01:29:53 And then I started to look for patterns. So what format do all these titles follow? And I think I ended up coming up with, there are about six. I won't be able to remember them all off the top of my head, but the most common format is the blank of blank. So the power of habit, the life-changing magic of tidying up, the power of now, the power of positive thinking, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, the blah, blah, blah. So it's always the blank of blank. And that's a very proven, the war of art. It's a very proven format, the psychology of money. Like we can just keep going on and on and on. There's so many examples like that. And usually what people do is they take their topic and that's the second piece. And then they take some type of descriptor and that's the first one. And ideally you're combining things that are not usually combined. So the life-changing

Starting point is 01:30:43 magic of tidying up. So tidying up is the topic of the book, but now you're telling me that it's life-changing. And what you find is a lot of these bestselling books, they have some element of contrast in the title. There's something that's unexpected about it. Subtle art of not giving a fuck, right? You don't usually think subtle art. Yeah. The F word is actually the least subtle thing. So like there's this interesting, there's this interesting contrast between the two. Another common format. This is the one that I use for atomic habits is you take the topic of your book and then you layer on some kind of unexpected descriptor before it. I'll get to atomic habits in a second, but like extreme ownership by Jocko.

Starting point is 01:31:20 So the idea is you take ownership and responsibility for your life, but you do it like in this extreme way. It's not just like a regular idea of taking ownership or Cal Newport deep work. You're doing work, but it's a special kind of work. It's not the normal type of thing that you're thinking about. So these are just examples. There are a couple more patterns that I found. And then ultimately you got to decide like which one makes the most sense for me, you

Starting point is 01:31:41 know, which one feels like it's the best fit for my book. And which one can you live with forever? Yes. Titles are really, titles are really tricky because they need to pass a lot of filters. They need to cover what the book is actually about. So like in my case, it needed to actually talk about habits. I think it's important to have some element of contrast. So like in my case, atomic has multiple meanings. It can be tiny or small. So your habits should be easy to do. It can be the fundamental unit in a larger system. So like atoms built into molecules and, you know, systems versus goals is like a big part

Starting point is 01:32:14 of the book. It can be the source of immense energy or power. So I think if you kind of combine all those three meanings, you get the like big arc of the book, which is you make changes that are small and easy to do. You layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system. And then you end up with these kind of powerful or remarkable results as a, as a by-product. So for all of those reasons, I kind of felt like atomic was a great word to describe it. So it needs to describe what the topic is. It needs to be interesting and compelling or like

Starting point is 01:32:43 a little bit different. Sometimes good habits are like a little bit weird in a sense. Like nobody was really using the phrase atomic habits before the book came out. You know, it wasn't like a way that you would describe a habit. You might describe it as small, but you wouldn't describe it as like atomic. Yeah. Good habits. Also, if it had been good habits just for people out there, you're going to be competing with the entire internet. habits. You know, four hour work week is a good example of this. Nobody really used that phrase before the book. It was like a little bit weird in the sense that it wasn't part of normal conversation and that allowed you to own it. For sure. It also had that element of contrast where you're like, man, I work for 40 hours a week. You're telling me I can work for four, you know? So like, it's this surprising thing. Another example that might be like rich dad, poor dad,

Starting point is 01:33:41 you know? So that book has this element of contrast between the two. Yeah, great title. So it needs to be like something that you actually want. It needs to cover the topic of the book. It needs to have this element of contrast. Like there's a lot of filters for it to pass. And that's why coming up with good titles is hard. Yeah, let me add one thing too, because there may be some, I have a lot of engineers and

Starting point is 01:34:01 computer scientists and so on who listen to this podcast. If you guys are starting to develop hives, because this sounds like, oh my God, this is marketing. I hate marketers. All marketers are liars. I'd like to emphasize that if you want anything, I shouldn't say anything. If you want a book you write to be remarkable, there are some prerequisites. In other words, what are the antecedents to something being or becoming remarkable? One of them is it needs to be remembered. People can't remember the title. It's very hard to remark upon it in any way that is meaningful. And this also translates and applies to the table of contents, right? So in the four-hour work week, I had this D-E-A-L structure.

Starting point is 01:34:42 And I thought very, very, very intently about how to structure the book, but then also had to label the different structures. And I had multiple options that could have worked. If you have the book in your hand, almost all of them could have worked. But if I want someone to be able to remember, apply, and also talk about, which requires recall,

Starting point is 01:35:02 the elements in the book, having something that is an acronym, D-E-A-L, that is easy to remember, was, I think, a critical ingredient. It's, to your point, given how many things are outside of your control, not sufficient to guarantee in any way that something will hit the bestseller list, but necessary. So necessary, but not sufficient, I think. What were some of the critical decisions or I suppose critical decisions is most interesting to me, but it could also be lucky happenings that you set the conditions for, if that makes any sense. First of all, the launch of Atomic Habits, I started planning it about 15 months ahead of time.

Starting point is 01:35:44 So it was like a 15 month process. That doesn't mean it has to be that long. I think you could still do an excellent launch in nine months, maybe. But you're going to need a lot of time. Sometimes I'll hear from authors and they'll be like, hey, my book's coming out in two months. What should I do? I still think there are plenty of things to do. But in a sense, you're already a year behind. So it's a long process. And to take it that seriously, it's not like an accident when you see a lot of these books doing that, like people are spending a lot of time on it. So that's the first thing is you need to take it seriously and give it enough time. So what do you do with that year? Well, we didn't really do much different. There's not many things that I did that you like have never heard of an author

Starting point is 01:36:22 doing before, but we did them at a larger scale than most people would have done. So let's take podcasts. For example, doing a podcast tour for your book is a very popular, typical thing to do when your book comes out. So I went through iTunes and I clicked on every category of shows that we felt like could be relevant to the book. So health and fitness business, you know, et cetera. And went all the way through, we went all through all the, for each of those categories, I think usually iTunes lists like a hundred shows or so in each category. So we went through all the hundred for each of those categories. And then we identified every show that was already an interview show. So I wasn't trying to convince anybody to bring me on that wasn't already talking to people.

Starting point is 01:37:02 Then put all those shows in a spreadsheet. I think we ended up with like maybe 300. And then I wrote individual emails to all 300 hosts. So that takes a long time. You know, now we had like kind of a general template, but I would customize each one. And there was a section in each email where I would say, Hey, you've had on this previous guest, you know, in this episode, or you talked about this topic in this episode, I feel like I could, you know, provide something new or expand on that. It seems like it already went over well with your audience. If you're interested, I'd love to come on. I'm sure the show is going to be successful, whether I come on or not, but if you're interested, you know, let me know. And I feel like we could have a good conversation and you got to send 300 of those

Starting point is 01:37:40 emails for 100 of them to work out. And so I wrote the drafts up and then I think about three to four months before the book came out, it was about four months. We started sending them all out, getting interviews scheduled. I spent like a two month span before the book came out recording as many as I could. And I ended up getting about 75 interviews recorded before launch week. We asked everybody to release during launch week. Now, not everybody did, but pretty much everyone at least would either do that week or like one of the weeks before or after. And this is one of my core principles for the launch, which is you want a concentrated strike. You want to have as much energy as possible in like a tight window.

Starting point is 01:38:21 And the idea, which Tim, you know this better than almost anybody, the idea is to make it seem bigger than it actually is. You know, you want to feel like it's everywhere. So I had 75 interviews hit during launch week. I did an additional 25 during the month that the book came out. So by the time we, the book was out for one month, I had a hundred interviews that had hit within that same month span. So you've got a lot of action going on there. At this point, by the time the book came out, my email list was around 400, 450,000 subscribers, somewhere around there. So I had my own energy that I was trying to provide.

Starting point is 01:38:56 So we sent a sample chapter. We sent the first chapter of the book out. I sent a couple excerpts during launch week. I had that segment that I did on CBS this morning on launch day, and we sent that out. So there were probably four or five emails that were coming out around that time. Similar to what you did with four hour body and so on. I did like a series of bonuses. So if you bought the book during launch week, I think there was like a private webinar with me where you could ask any question. If you bought three copies, you got some extra PDF downloads and a secret chapter.

Starting point is 01:39:29 If you got 10 copies, you got something else. I think I only had three categories, one copy, three copies in 10. And I did have one additional higher tier. It was like, if you buy 500 books or a thousand books or something like that, I would come and give a keynote. And I would not do that one again because I ended up giving a keynote in Malaysia and a keynote in Australia just because. Surprise. Yeah. So there were some smart people out there internationally who were like, this is a great deal for us. So anyway, but it was fun. It was all, you know, it was all part of the launch. And so I did the bonuses. I did the emails to my audience. We did the podcast push and all of that action is happening more or less in the same two week window, but definitely in the same like one month window. So we've got all this kind of energy

Starting point is 01:40:11 happening. We also sent out influencer copies or, you know, whatever you want to call that advanced copies to people. I did not want to send any work in process copies. What are those called? They're not, it's not like the finished thing. Yeah yeah galleys i didn't want to send any galleys to anybody i only wanted to send a finished copy because i wanted their experience to be like the actual finished book i wanted to be as good as possible so we waited to send those out the list of advanced folks yes but my thing again the same way with like the podcast i only wanted to do it with people who opted in. I'm not trying to spam people with the book. So again, this takes a lot of effort. Like we had to come up with a list of people who we thought would be a good fit. And then we sent them all messages and said, Hey, I got this book coming out. Would you be interested? If so, what's the best address to send

Starting point is 01:40:58 it to? How did you find those people? Who's a good fit? So the obvious answer, the one that everybody thinks of is, Oh, it's people with a big audience who are interested in the topic that I'm writing about. But I actually think you can do much better than that, which is we made a list. So again, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to give the book a push and help it generate word of mouth. So I think one thing that you could do is say which communities already have a lot of word of mouth what are the type of things that people are interested in that they just can't shut up about

Starting point is 01:41:30 and so I came up with a list of things crossfitters vegans bullet journalers parenting and mommy blogs like I started to write you know I just I came up with a bunch of categories of people who they love to talk about their thing. And so I think I ended up having like 15 categories or so, right? That's brilliant. So brilliant. James, can I pause for one second? There's a restaurant here in Austin called, I think it's El Arroyo.

Starting point is 01:41:57 And they're famous for their signs that they put outside. And they have these really pithy sayings. And these have become books now, mugs, everything, because they're so clever. And one of them was if someone does CrossFit and is vegan, which do they talk about first? Which I thought was pretty good. So continue. There are things that people get genuinely excited about and love to talk to other people that are in that industry about. And so we're interested in that thing. So let's come up with a list of those. And I think I had like 15 or so. And then I went through those 15 and I started asking, okay, which of these communities is the book a good fit for? Which, where do I feel like there's overlap? So then I came up with a subset, but I don't remember what

Starting point is 01:42:38 it was, but let's say it was like five or something. And CrossFitters were one of them as an example. And so I think one of the first sets that we did was we said, let's try to find all the big CrossFitters on Instagram. And then I think the first kind of batch that we sent out, we did like 30 CrossFitters. We did like 30 venture capitalists and we did like 30 parenting and mommy blogs. Why venture capitalists? That stands out from the others. There was a lot in the book about growth, getting 1% better each day, continuous improvement, process and business habits, building a successful company. I am often asked to speak at companies or to speak to sales teams about those types of things. So all of that focus on systems and continuous improvement,

Starting point is 01:43:18 we felt like it overlapped well with business. And venture capitalists are seeing lots of businesses and they're kind of the kind of modern version of venture capitalists. A lot of them have like public presence on Twitter or like they've got their own podcasts or whatever. So it was the kind of thing where we felt like the topic overlapped and they had an audience that they could talk to. So let me dig a little bit on this because I'm fishing and it may be a fool's errand, but I can kind of illustrate something even if it doesn't apply to you. Were you sending them to the venture capitalists in part because if you had, say, endorsement or broadcast in some fashion to their audiences, maybe it wouldn't result in a lot of copies sold. But if one of your income streams is speaking to businesses and so on, that it could bolster that side.

Starting point is 01:44:10 That might be true. That was definitely not what I was thinking when I was doing the launch. It might be true. It might be a good idea. Maybe I should have been thinking about it. But all I was thinking about the launch was where are my potential readers hanging out and how can I get in front of them or make it known to them that this book exists and they would probably enjoy it. And again, this all kind of goes back to this feeling of this concentrated strike or having to not wanting to have a lot of energy in a small window. So we sent out those influencer copies. What ended up happening is that the CrossFitters were the best fit. And I think part of the reason is venture capitalists, for

Starting point is 01:44:44 example, I don't even know how many, like they all opted in. So I only sent them to people that said they wanted a copy. Like I messaged Sam Hinckley, for example, and he was like, yeah, I would love a copy. So then I sent, you know, send him one or whatever. So it was that kind of thing, but they just didn't talk about it as much, or maybe they was, they had a lot on their plate and they didn't read it right away. Whatever the reason was, the CrossFitters did best. And I think it was kind of interesting to them. I feel like if you're a CrossFitter and you have like a million followers on Instagram, you're probably sent a lot of workout gear, a lot of supplements, stuff like that, but you're very rarely sent a book. And it was like, oh, this is kind of cool. Like this is a topic that will help me in my training

Starting point is 01:45:23 and I don't usually get this. And so they opened it up and a lot of them took a picture and then shared it on Instagram. We didn't ask for any of that, by the way, we just asked people who opted in. And then we tried to get them a book that we felt like was a great fit for what they, they were already interested in. And what ended up happening is I've got all these podcasts sitting, I have the emails going out. I got the CBS segment. And then 20 of the top CrossFitters all posted about it on their story within the same two-week span. Now, if you're into CrossFit and you follow the top CrossFitters on Instagram, that means everyone is seeing this book. And you're like, man, everybody I know is reading this right now. And that's not true at all, but it feels like it in your little universe. Right. And so again, it's like, how can

Starting point is 01:46:09 you make it feel like it's everywhere for that window of time? And so once we figured out that it worked well for CrossFitters, then we started saying, okay, let's branch out in fitness. So then we sent it to a bunch of bodybuilders, a bunch of power lifters, you know, and so on. And it has turned out that it's been a really great fit for people in fitness and they love the book and they recommend it to their clients and they find it useful for their own training and so on. And so we had to try a variety of things for that to work out. I actually do think it's one that a lot of venture capitalists like now and recommend, but it just was a slower burn with them. It didn't, it didn't work during the influencer push as much. Anyway, you get the idea. None of those strategies are radical or new. Everybody's familiar with that. If you're

Starting point is 01:46:50 looking up how should I launch a book? But what's different is we tried to do it all at the same time and we tried to do it all at a larger scale than most people were doing. You also chose a few very specific targets where I think a lot of folks who I observe launching books, they kind of half-ass two dozen things. That sounds too pejorative maybe, but they really try to scatter, sprinkle effort across a ton of different things. And I have never seen that work well. And if we're trying to quantify it, right, let's just say one of your goals is to be on the bestseller list. That could be the Wall Street Journal, which at least last I checked is a truer bestseller list. It's compiled based on

Starting point is 01:47:37 Nielsen Book Scan and other metrics. The New York Times list has sales input, but it's largely an editor's choice. I think the best one is Amazon because the Amazon charts are the only source that compiles print ebook and audio into a single number. Now they don't have every book sale, right? They're only counting what's on Amazon, but that's, I don't know, 80%, 90% of print books. It's 95% of audio books. Audible is like basically the only way that people listen to audio books and it's most eBooks too. Cause Kindle's the way that most people listen to or read eBooks. So I think it's probably the truest number of what books are actually selling best is the most sold list on Amazon. It is the truest. However, just like your morning TV show,

Starting point is 01:48:26 the New York Times, just as a specific list, has a mindshare that these other best-selling lists does not have. Well, what did we put on the cover of Atomic Habits? We put number one New York Times bestseller, not number one on the Amazon charts. Right, exactly. Isn't that interesting?

Starting point is 01:48:41 It's the truest number, but it doesn't have the branding. Yeah, so if you want to hit that list, at least last I checked, depends on the category and so on, isn't that interesting? It's the truest number, but it doesn't have the branding. Yeah. So if you want to hit that list, at least last I checked, depends on the category and so on, but you really want to have, let's just say the possibility of selling again, depending on your week. And I would suggest people do research and choose a soft week if you're competing in this way. That's what I did with four hour work week. Just as a side note, you can study these things. If you have a cookbook, maybe you shouldn't come out right before Thanksgiving and Christmas. You're going to be fighting monsters if you try to do that. So pick your timing. But if you have to sell, let's just call it, or have a chance of selling 20,000 copies for two consecutive weeks. If you could only choose

Starting point is 01:49:25 one way to do that, one medium, podcasts, email, fill in the blank, which would you choose? Okay. And then if you had the ability to add on a second, which would you choose? If you had to shape your entire launch strategy around that, then what would you do? I think it's just a thought exercise that is worth doing so that you do not succumb to the distraction and well-meaning advice of many people who will say, you have to be on this, you have to be on this, you must do this, this, this, this, this. And before you know it, you're going to have a must-do list of 20 different things, many of which are mutually exclusive if you're trying to be excellent in any one of those.

Starting point is 01:50:09 Question for you, what do you think would have happened had you not had your email list or instead of it being 450 000 people at the time and it had been 4 500 people obviously there's no way to know but it made an enormous difference and it in my personal story it's the only reason that the book happened to begin with because I was just a lowly blogger. I have no credentials. I don't work for the New York Times. I don't teach at Harvard. The publishers in New York would probably tell you, oh, we were looking for a book on habits and we really like his writing and stuff. But the truth is they would have never let me in the room if I didn't have an email list of hundreds of thousands of people. That's the thing that got me in the door. So this is one of the things that I love about writing, which is competence matters more than credentials. Anybody can write on any topic. And that is a good thing and a bad thing. Like the

Starting point is 01:50:55 bad thing is that means you need to be careful about what you read because people can just make stuff up and write whatever they want. But the good part is competence is what matters. You don't need permission from anybody. What you need is competence is what matters. You don't need permission from anybody. What you need is to write something exceptional. You need to write something that genuinely makes a difference and is useful in people's lives. And if you genuinely deliver on the problem that you're writing about, then you're in a good position to make a career out of it. That wasn't a direct answer to your question, but I think the email list was an enormous, important part of it. It got the book deal to begin with, and it also really moved the needle on book sales during launch week.

Starting point is 01:51:29 The little hypothetical you threw out a minute ago, if you could only do one thing, if I had to choose one thing, I'd choose email. Now, you know, I have 2 million email subscribers, so that's maybe that's kind of an obvious choice. But even if it was smaller, I would spend time building the audience and building the email list because it does so many things that are helpful. As you're building the list, as you're writing each week, you're refining your ideas. You're learning what resonates with people. You're figuring out what your best concepts are. And all of that can inform writing a better book, which puts you in a better position. And then you're also building the audience along the way. And so now you have people that you can launch to. If I had to pick one thing that,

Starting point is 01:52:08 like, let's say your book's coming out, you know, in five months and you don't have an email list, but you have a book that's written, what would I do? Then I would focus externally and I would probably just try to do as many podcasts as possible and use your current advantages to achieve and gain new advantages. So right now your main advantage is time. You got five months. How are you going to spend it? And then if you can knock it out of the park with one podcast, now you have a really good episode. Maybe you can get that published right away and you can send it to some other shows that are like one level up and prove that you're worthy to come on as a guest. Then you try to knock those out of the park.

Starting point is 01:52:45 And then if you have a really good one, you use that and send it to the next level up and so on. And you just kind of try to keep going like that. So I do email first, but if I didn't have an email list, I think I'd pick podcast. How many Instagram followers would it take? If any,

Starting point is 01:53:00 for you to give up your email list. Oh, so let's say 10 million, 20 million. What would the minimal compelling number be? I don't think I would do it. It would have to be over a hundred million. I don't know that I would do it. Say more. I'm not in control of it. So, you know, like Instagram can be, the algorithm can change. My account could get suspended. They could, whatever. There's like, you know, I don't write about provocative stuff, but you get the idea. Like I'm not in control. If you had a hundred million followers, I mean, you also, I'm assuming

Starting point is 01:53:32 some level of engagement here, right? Like it's not just like phantom followers. Like you're assuming that you've gotten engaged either way. Yeah. I mean, like if Kim Kardashian were like, I want you to co-host. Yeah. She's like like i'll give you all my instagram followers you give me all your email list uh yeah yeah right we'll do like makeup and yeah like booty fitting dresses and then we'll have habits right yeah you get every wednesday i know my next my next book is booty habits it's like yeah um i yeah um i'm just saying telling you, man, that sounds like a bestseller in the making. You have to do more squats, but that's okay. Um, yeah, I don't know. I, there's obviously some number where it'd be stupid not to do it,

Starting point is 01:54:16 but I don't know. Email's just so flexible in how you can use it. And Instagram is like pretty constrained. It's gotta be an image and I'm not a very an image, and I don't post images of myself. I'm in a similar boat. If somebody said, I'll give you 50 million, I wouldn't trade. I'll give just a tip for folks also. This is what I did with the first book and pretty much every book since. If I'm sending out advanced copies, I will send out galleys in some cases, at least with the earlier books I did, because it allowed me to just have a longer lead time. I have very long books, as many people know. They violate every rule of length. They tend to be gigantic. to explore these books. So I will send out galleys. Usually they're pretty much in final form. Maybe there are a few citations, no appendix,

Starting point is 01:55:14 probably no page numbers in the table of contents because that stuff is moving around. But otherwise they're pretty solid. They will not have a final cover, as an example. But what I will do if I'm sending out advanced copies, whether they're galleys or actual final product, and this is very old-fashioned and it takes time, but I feel like if people skip some of these time-consuming steps on the front end, they are sacrificing a lot of long-term potential because they may not ever reach that escape velocity, get some post-it notes and pick specific chapters or sections so that you can say, if you don't have time to read the whole book, and I don't expect you to read the whole book, I tabbed the chapter that I think is going to be most interesting to you, or that might be most interesting to you, which requires you to do some

Starting point is 01:56:03 homework like you did when you were sending pitches to these podcasts. You had so-and-so on, you talked about A, B, and C. It seemed like your audience really responded well to X. Why don't we do A, B, and C? Or would you be open? If you'd be open to A, B, and C. And that due diligence pays incredible dividends. And what you did with podcasts was exactly what I did for bloggers for the four-hour workweek. I micro-serialized so I could offer different blogs, different places like Lifehacker and so on, exclusives on a particular facet of the book. And that required an incredible amount of research on the front end.

Starting point is 01:56:45 It's worth it. I did the same thing for sending out the advanced copies. I can remember sending a message to Naval and saying, Hey, you know, I know you're super busy. I do genuinely think you'll find the book interesting. If you only have time to read three pages, I think these are the three to read. I have no idea if you read it or not, but he was like, thanks. You know, I got it. And so, you know, that was it. And you just, it takes a long time to do it in that way, but actually writing real emails to the podcasters and not just doing a template and actually selecting the pages that you think will be most useful for each advanced copy and not just spray and pray, you know, like that, that stuff is, uh, it, it helps. It actually works.

Starting point is 01:57:28 Also, if you're being very deliberate and very thoughtful about how you are picking these recipients, oftentimes it only takes one or two. And doing that diligence and research on the front end increases the likelihood of you at least having one or two. I actually think the word that you just used, which is thoughtful, that's the word that I come back to again and again. And that I hope, I actually hope that's the primary lesson that people take away from this portion of the conversation, talking about writing atomic habits and talking about deconstructing the marketing of it and the launch of it.

Starting point is 01:58:00 I don't know. Maybe some people will be like, Oh, this sounds like a lot of marketing or whatever, but I don't think about it that way at all. I hope what comes through is that what I'm trying is that at each level of this experience, the research of the product, the creation of the book, the launch and the marketing of the book, I'm trying to be as thoughtful as possible, you know, to create the most compelling or most useful version of the book to share the best examples in the book, to find and identify the people who will be the best fit for the book, and to deliver it to them in a way that is the most thoughtful and makes it as easy as possible for them to consume the book

Starting point is 01:58:36 and share it with others. And if you're thoughtful at each stage of that process, you're just going to end up with such a better outcome. And if you are just trying to like write a book, but get it out there quickly, because you want to have a book, you don't want to write a book. Or if you're just trying to market it and get it to as many people as possible, because you want to have a popular book, you don't really care about who it is that it resonates with. If you cut corners like that, then it's just really hard to have a great outcome. But if you're thoughtful at each stage, then it tends to work out much better. Yeah, 100% agreed. Coming back to the frameworks and principles in atomic habits, are there any sections, chapters, principles, anything that you wish more people paid attention to, right? There's

Starting point is 01:59:25 something that you put in that gets glossed over or maybe doesn't stick for whatever reason as much as other things, but you think it or these things are important. I mean, I certainly have examples from my books where I'm like, shit, I don't know if I made a mistake in the way I presented that, but it's not getting its a mistake in the way I presented that, but it's not getting its fair shake in the sense of it's important. Well, sometimes you might just be like, maybe I thought that idea was better than it actually was. There might be that too. Yeah, I have a couple. So there are two things that came to mind. The first one is,

Starting point is 02:00:00 there's a little example I give in the book about maybe about halfway through or 40% through where I talk about having a pregame routine and kind of doing things in the same sequence each time, the same order each time. And that helps get you in the mindset and kind of initiate the habit. So I played baseball through college and I had the same pregame routine that I did before each game. And that kind of like flips the switch in your mind where it's like, Hey, like it's time to compete now, you know, like it's game mode. Or the example I gave in the book was this guy who he would do his writing at the library and he would go to the library, sit at the same desk each day and put on his headphones and play the same playlist. That little sequence was a pregame routine that got him in the mindset to do his writing habit. And one day he turned around and realized that no music was playing.

Starting point is 02:00:44 He just had his headphones on and it was just, it was just silent, but he was writing and he was like 20 minutes into writing before he realized it. And it's a good example of how like just that sequence of doing it the same way each time and having that same pregame routine, that little ritual got him in the mindset. He didn't even need to press play that day. He was just ready to write. So if you can come up with what that little pregame ritual is for you, that can be a great way to initiate a habit. And I don't usually see people talk about that. I think actually I've heard some examples like this on your podcast previously, Tim. Like I think when you talked to Josh Waitzkin at one point, sometime he gave this example, maybe it was in his books, maybe it was a conversation with you where he was competing in

Starting point is 02:01:22 this national competition, martial arts, and he was told that he was going to compete at one time and they came up to him and he was like sleeping or laying on a, on a bench. And they were like, Hey, sorry, timing was wrong. You're actually up in like six minutes. And he was like, normally I would have been thrown off, but he had this little pregame ritual that he did. And he tried to, as he developed it over time, it started out and maybe it was 10 minutes did and he tried to, as he developed it over time, it started out and maybe it was 10 minutes and then he tried to compress it. So it was seven minutes and then it was three minutes and then eventually got it down to where his little ritual was just something he did for like 30

Starting point is 02:01:54 seconds. So they woke him up on that bench and he's got to compete six minutes later, but all he needed was 30 seconds to kind of like get in the right frame of mind. And he was like, okay, now I'm ready to go. And so those pregame rituals can be really powerful if you make it your own and come up

Starting point is 02:02:08 with something that like you do every time and it helps get you into the mindset to compete or to perform. Yeah, for sure. Josh has given, could be his personal example. He's also talked about Marcelo Garcia, who's nine time world champion champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, arguably, maybe uncontroversially, probably one of the best, if not the best, who's ever competed in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, who has a similar ability to throw a switch minutes before he'll compete in a world championship bout. about and it applies furthermore to most writers who i have had on the podcast will have some type of boot up sequence much like this person who went to the library and people can take solace in the fact there's no consensus there's no good it's very personal i think you need to make it your own yeah you know yeah and there are also people who will say like yeah i just dick around for the first two hours like it literally but that's not wasted time because it takes that long for me to just like scribble or complain about my day on the page so that i'm filling the page with something and then

Starting point is 02:03:21 it turns into an hour later, some paragraph that is the nugget of the beginning of what I need to work on. Eventually the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it. And they take action. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or Neil Gaiman. He's like, yeah, I go to the cabin and I'm, I don't have to write, but i'm not allowed to do anything else right that's great yeah and uh bj novak also has his own approach he's done a ton of television and film work and for me like right now you know working on fiction for the first time over the last let's call it six months finding the routine like how i make the coffee when when I sit down, the exact sequence, how I set up my laptop on the laptop stand. I mean, it's very bunkish, but it does make a big difference.

Starting point is 02:04:14 So that was one, the pregame sequence. Developing a pregame ritual that works for you. And then the other one that I feel like this is something that if I had to pick a topic that I feel like is more important than I realized when I was writing the book, I would probably say this. And that's the power of the social environment. You know, we are all part of multiple tribes. Sometimes those tribes are like large, like what it means to be American. And sometimes they're, they're small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local gym. But all of those tribes that you belong to, the large groups and the small groups, they all have this set of expectations.

Starting point is 02:04:51 They've got a set of social norms for what you do when you're in that group and what the typical way is to act and behave and what kind of habits they follow. And the more that your habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group, the more attractive they feel like to you because it's like, Hey, I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something. And the more that they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, the harder they are to stick to, especially in the long run, maybe you can do it for a day or a week or I don't know, a month or two, but like at some point you kind of keep rubbing against that. You have this like friction where you're conflicting with the group and it becomes hard

Starting point is 02:05:28 to stick to that for the long run. And so the little takeaway that I kind of think of now is you want to join groups to join tribes where your desired behavior is the normal behavior, because if it's normal in that group, then it becomes really motivating to stick to it. And furthermore, the kind of like ancillary habits that are part of that group, the other expectations are things that you're probably going to soak up. People will join a CrossFit gym because they think they want to get in shape. But then you turn around six months later and they're all eating paleo and wearing the same brand of knee sleeves and they buy the same workout gear.

Starting point is 02:06:05 And like, it's all these other habits that they never intended to build, but they just kind of soaked them up because that's what the group was doing. And ultimately, I think this comes back to this kind of deep need that we all have, which is this need to bond and connect. You know, we all want to be a part of something. We want to belong. We want to be a part of something. We want to belong. We want to fit in. And if people have to choose between, I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something, or I have the habits that I want to have, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized. I mean, most of the time, the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve. So as best

Starting point is 02:06:44 as possible, you got to get those two things aligned and surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Yeah, absolutely. The whole, you're the average of the five people you associate with most type of thinking. And also for people who are starting off the new year or about to and thinking about how to best ensure that you cohere with a group that leads to these new behaviors, front load it, make it painful not to do it, pay in advance, right? Make some type of bet with one of your friends and you owe each other money if you miss workouts. Set it up so it is painful not to do it.

Starting point is 02:07:29 I know that might sound like I'm favoring the stick over the carrot. You're also going to use the carrots. You can use the carrots, but make it compelling from an incentives perspective. You can also use the carrots, like the flip side of that is, so yes, like make it painful not to do it and make it easy and frictionless and obvious to do it. Try to design your environment so the things that you say are important to you

Starting point is 02:07:55 are the obvious and available things. I think one interesting thing you can do is just think about one habit you're trying to build and then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, kitchen, office, bedroom, whatever. And just look around and ask yourself, what behaviors are obvious here? You know, what is this space design you encourage? That's right.

Starting point is 02:08:16 And you'll start to notice different things that you can tweak to make it the good habit more obvious and easier and the bad habits or the things you want to avoid less obvious and maybe a little higher friction. And making one or two little adjustments like that is not going to radically transform your life. But if you make a dozen or two dozen or 50, and you're kind of all of these environments, all these rooms where you're spending space each day are primed to support the habits you want to build. Now you've got a tailwind rather than a headwind. And so it's become so much easier to appear as if you have great willpower or that you're really consistent when really you're benefiting from the environment that you already

Starting point is 02:08:55 set up. And I'll also say sometimes one or two changes can make a huge difference. Coming back to my brownie binge yesterday, there's a reason I don't cook brownies all the time, right? There's a reason I don't have chips in my house because I will eat all the fucking chips. I will eat everything. I love chips. And rather than view that as failing, like, yes, I could take the hard path

Starting point is 02:09:19 and like crawl on my knees through broken glass to like develop the willpower to stare at these chips every day and not eat them. Or I can just not have the chips in my pantry. So put yourself in positions to succeed. A lot of it is positioning, you know, like if you have a dog and you're walking it down the street and your dog doesn't get along well with other dogs and you see one coming toward you, go to the other side of the street. Don't like put the dog in a bad situation. That kind of thing is obvious with our pets or with our friends or our family members. We're like, Oh, why would you do that to yourself? And then we do it to ourselves all the time,

Starting point is 02:09:52 you know? So like try to design a space where you are being served by your environment rather than being hindered by it. Yeah, totally. I think it was, I don't want to misquote him, but when I had Jerry Seinfeld on the show show i think he said something like your mind is a stupid little dog that you have to train something along those lines and if you think about it right i think now you got me on dog training i think about dog training a lot and i trained my dog molly took it super seriously and worked with all these different trainers and then tried to modify it and so on surprise surprise there are these basic things where it's like if you talk to somebody and they have a problem because their dog chews shoes as an example and you can ask well where did the dog spend most of

Starting point is 02:10:37 its time for its first two months in the house as a puppy and they'll be like oh i like ran around the house and like where did you have shoes on the floor? Yes. And that's how the dog developed the habit of chewing on shoes. But if you crate train your dog and you simply prevent them from chewing on shoes for the first few months, they're not going to eat shoes. It's just not going to be a thing, generally speaking. And for humans too, it's like, if you don't want to eat chips every day, Tim Ferriss, then don't leave the shoes on the floor. Don't leave the chips in the pantry. This is a solvable problem. I find a lot of reassurance in the fact that it doesn't have to be brute force willpower. And I'm not saying this to you, because in place of something nebulous like

Starting point is 02:11:21 that, you can set up systems. And you can also rank order your habits in such a way that you are looking for the upstream habits that make the downstream habits easier. So whenever I've wanted to get in better shape, or someone has asked me for advice, they're like, what should I eat? And I'm like, let's talk about exercise first. Because if you eat well, it doesn't necessarily lead to exercise. But if you exercise, very often, you're not going to want to spoil the exercise you did by eating a bunch of crap, right? If you exercise, you're like, wow, I put in a lot of effort, I feel great. You're going to have this sunk cost fallacy benefit of having put in that effort and you'll

Starting point is 02:12:03 be less inclined to screw it up. There'll be too much cognitive dissonance. And in making those types of decisions, you can actually make behavioral change a lot easier for yourself. And I'm also looking at my environment. I'm like, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. If I want to reduce my coffee consumption, maybe I should change this room that I spend so much time in. My goodness. Anything else that you would like to say, James? We've been going now for almost three hours. And I think this is probably a good place to begin to wind down.

Starting point is 02:12:35 But is there anything else you'd like to mention? The trajectory of your life bends in the direction of your habits. And a lot of what we've talked about today, whether it's launching a book or writing a book, whether it's, you know, building an exercise habit or a meditation habit, growing an email list or developing a creative habit, it comes back to consistency. It comes back to doing small things well each day, trying to live one good day and then waking up again tomorrow and doing the same thing. And the world is very results oriented and that's fine.

Starting point is 02:13:06 We all want to get better results, but almost all the results that you want are a lagging measure of your habits. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your training habits. Even like silly stuff, like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits, your even like silly stuff, like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits, you know? So if you want your results to change, the habits that precede them are the things that actually need to change. It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. And I don't think that means you have to be radical about it. You know, it doesn't mean that you have to upend your entire life. Really, all you need to do is focus on having like five good minutes. You know, it doesn't mean that you have to upend your entire life. Really, all you need to

Starting point is 02:13:45 do is focus on having like five good minutes. You know, like you can do a lot with five good minutes. Five good minutes of exercise can reset your mood. Five good minutes of conversation can restore a relationship. Five good minutes of writing can make you feel great about the manuscript again. And so it doesn't take much to feel good, to get back on the path, to continue to make progress and small habits, showing up in little ways, mastering the art of showing up, trying to get a little bit better each day. Those are all things that you can keep in mind as you try to just live one good day today and be on a good trajectory. And that really one of the core ideas of atomic habits is getting 1% better today. And it's really about that. It's really not, it's not about measuring it and like,

Starting point is 02:14:28 those are 1% improvement or 1.6% or whatever. It's not about the numbers. It's like a mindset. It's a philosophy. It's an approach that I'm going to focus on the trajectory that I'm on. And I'm going to try to stay on a good path, even if it's just in small ways. And then trust that that will compound and multiply and turn into something much greater over time. path, even if it's just in small ways, and then trust that that will compound and multiply and

Starting point is 02:14:45 turn into something much greater over time. Because the truth is time will magnify whatever you feed it. You know, if you have good habits, time becomes your ally and all you need is patience. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And every day that goes by, you kind of dig the hole a little bit deeper. And so the ideas and atomic habits, the strategies for, you know, making small changes for kind of letting these behaviors improve over time, it's all about getting time to work for you. And I think you can start in really small ways and begin to reinforce your desired identity. And hopefully this time next year, you'll be really happy with, uh, with where you're at and the progress you've made. Hear, hear. I'm not going to spoil that with adding any commentary. It is unnecessary. I think that's a strong way to close. James Clear, you can find him at jamesclear.com on Twitter and

Starting point is 02:15:35 Instagram at James Clear. We'll link to everything, including the 321 newsletter, which everyone should check out in the show notes as per usual, Tim.blogs.com. James, thanks so much for taking the time. This is great. I took a ton of notes. I have homework. I have changes to make. I have perhaps a few bags of coffee to remove from my immediate space. This has rekindled my enthusiasm, amplified my enthusiasm for the new year. So I appreciate you sharing so much and being so game to play the tennis match for this conversation.

Starting point is 02:16:12 Of course. Thanks, Tim. Really appreciate it, man. And to everybody listening, be just a little bit kinder than is necessary today. That includes to yourself. Set up systems. Remember our dear friend, Arca Locus.

Starting point is 02:16:24 We will not rise to the level of our goals or our hopes, but fall to the levels of our training and our systems. So best of luck to you. And thanks for tuning in. you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so

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Starting point is 02:17:38 type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Peloton and their brand new Peloton Row. Peloton Row brings personalized form features and guidance to rowing to help you learn and master your stroke. This was always a weak point for me, meaning before I used Peloton Row and I got to test a unit a few weeks ago here in Austin, which blew me away. My form was just a question mark. And I also tended to flame out after five or 10 minutes on a rower. I just really didn't know what I was doing. And with Peloton ROW, that all changed.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #648: James Clear, Atomic Habits — Simple Strategies for Building (and Breaking) Habits, Questions for Personal Mastery and Growth, Tactics for Writing and Launching a Mega-Bestseller, Finding Leverage, and More

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