"EVERY BILLIONAIRE Uses These SUCCESS HABITS To Achieve Their GOALS" | James Clear & Lewis Howes

because what you need to do is master the art of shell count like I had a had a reader who ended up losing over a hundred pounds and one of the things that he did is he went to the gym but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so he was show up be there do like half an exercise five minutes ago he'd leave he did this for like six weeks Wow now it sounds ridiculous it sounds silly because they work out for a half hour yeah yeah but what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up and a habit must be established before it can be improved if you don't establish the habit there's nothing to optimize welcome everyone back to the school greatest podcast we've got James clear in the house good to see a man what's up man good to talk to you good to reconnect we met I think like eight to nine years ago yeah originally I was just a story it was in Ohio we're both calm both Ohio boys and it was I had I had a website for like two weeks yeah yeah it was just it was a good way for me to learn stuff but but yeah anyway that was the very first website and you told me a story about the first webinar that you and Sean did and afterward you wouldn't jump on a trampoline because you're so happy about exactly yes back in the day man yeah you've grown a ton since then that was when you're just starting out now you have almost a half a million subscribers to your your newsletter you've got a book that's coming out right now called atomic habits an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones and you've done so much over the years with what you were just saying is science-based research what else was it against science-based resins evidence-based and highly actionable it's got to be both of those right like I want Owen science-based ideas but I also want them to be practical and easy to implement I mean either one is useful but if you haven't vote together it's really bad and you kind of got started in what personal finance and personal development and yeah I wasn't a personal finance was never really a big part of my story although I find it interesting for myself I wrote about small business marketing and stuff early on so and then I transitioned after I learned how to build an email list my transition to James clear calm which is what I've been doing for the last five or six years now and that's been mostly focused on performance strength training productivity and really like just habits in general and how we can use them to live better lives what would you say is your core audience is it entrepreneurs is it just everyday individuals looking to improve their life it started and there were like pockets of people that are really interested like I had a pocket of venture capitalists and investors they're really interested because you're doing business and marketing maybe well I one of the phrases I use I have this in the book is that habits are the compound interests of self-improvement so it's like the same way that it's far compound interest you know cruise through finance you're the effects of your habits multiplied over time and so often these choices that you make they're these little 1% improvements for you or against you each day and they're very easy to overlook on a daily basis right like what what really is the difference between eating a burger and fries or a salad chicken for lunch you only face a lot or that's actually a moment that's actually a crucial point that I cover in the book which is that habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely to be repeated and so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time right like if you eat a doughnut right now it's tasty good but in the long run you gain weight and so the the immediate outcome is favorable the long-term outcome is unfavorable with good habits just off on the reverse I'd like you go to the gym right now and it takes effort you sweat you have to work hard it's the second time for Netflix and chill to go train the immediate outcomes unfavorable but the ultimate outcome you're in shape and you you know you month or whatever is favorable and so the challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits in the immediate moment so you feel a little bit the pain right now and want to avoid it and the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment so you have a reason to repeat it again in the future so is it kind of like okay I'm gonna go to the gym and he doughnuts at the gym so I feel good but also realize this is gonna help me long term so in the book I talked about this concept I call identity based habits and essentially what you're the ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity so you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or you show up - right and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm someone who writes everyday and so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction from being that person and being aligned with your identity your values your principles but you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day and so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement like eating a doughnut at the gym where you're casting votes for two different identities right it's like I showed up at the gym I'm casting you the vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts type person is healthy but then I eat a doughnut so now I'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person so they don't miss out yeah right so you want you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values we essentially have to form your identity first is that what I'm hearing so who you want to be I think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity right so like each time you make your bed you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized each time you go to the gym you embody the identity of someone who's fit each time you sit down to write you embody the identity of a writer so you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become and if you cast enough votes for that type of identity you start to believe that about yourself right like if you go to church for 20 years you believe that you're religious you study Spanish every Tuesday for 30 minutes you believe that you were studious so in that way your habits provide evidence of your desired identity and I think that that is probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important it's true like how this can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight and all that stuff is great but in addition to the external results that habits provide they also shape your sense of self they like are the at the engine or the Avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself like sometimes people will say stuff like fake it till you make it but fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it and you can do that for a little while you could do it for day or week but eventually I mean there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind those delusion right and if you're deluding yourself then eventually you give up on that but the power of doing a better habit each day or casting one little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in so now I've done last months Yeah right like yeah I mean now you have a lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer you know like you do this over and over again each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself and you don't just your delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer it's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times right and so I think that that's true for any habit large or small that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the the type of person that you are hmm what are the five non-negotiable habits for you on a daily basis oh that's a good question so obviously this is gonna depend on your goals for me specifically I think there are a few core habits that are gonna serve everybody and certainly serve me well so exercise is a huge one I don't do it daily but I exercise I train four times a week yeah and I feel like if I didn't exercise I don't know that I would be an entrepreneur like I don't know if I could handle the psychological rollercoaster without the physical yeah the release you probably feel that as like an athlete too you know like I for being an athlete for so many years I feel like I need to push myself physically in addition to mentally a visit just mental it doesn't do it for me I don't have a physical outlet so exercise exercise is one the other the ultimate meta habit is reading because if you build a habit of reading you can solve pretty much any other problem you know you won't learn how to be a better podcaster you can read about that you want to write how to meditate you can read about that you want to learn how to you can read about that and so what you need is to develop a habit of reading and then whatever problem you're facing at the time you can you have a method for solving that okay writing for me is huge I don't actually know what I think about something until I write it that huh I find that if there are ideas that you get it out if you ask me something right now but I haven't written about before what is really happening is I'm just talking my emotions so what I mean is that you'll ask me something and I'll get an implicit feeling about what what that topic is I'll have some intuition a gut feeling about it and I'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say but I don't actually know if that's what I really think what I deeply think until I have the time to sit down the really logically go through it because a lot of the time you know if you would ask me the same question next week I might have a different feeling at that time so I'm talking different emotions so I think I actually need to have time to sit with it a little bit and write write it through delonix writings third accident exercise reading writing I don't know I would say that those were probably my main three if I was gonna pick five and the other two that I would add going for a daily walk would be a huge one that's one that like I kind of aspire to because I don't do that every day but at any time I do it really benefits me in what ways well you see this with a lot of anybody who does creative work in particular that something about getting outside and walking I think there's this is just me spitballing I don't actually have science but when your body is moving it's very hard for you one to not be active mentally like if you think about someone who shut down mentally what does their body language look like they're usually closed off their arms like they're sitting there not moving very much try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically it's very hard to do if your body is moving there like that it's really hard for your mind to be shut down mm-hm so that's one thing it kind of gets like the juices flowing the second thing and this is where I'm spitballing I don't know if this is actually true but I wonder about your non conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes and so if you're if you're moving if you're walking it gives your non conscious mind some to do so you're like it gets out of the way and now you can actually like have this stuff arise or think in a different way than if you're sitting so I don't know I think that those are yeah that's cool okay so that'd be the fourth thing sleep is the fifth and this is one that I actually am pretty good about so my cardinal rules I don't cheat myself on sleep so if I stay up late work till midnight I'm gonna sleep till later let's leave it in yeah yeah like I'm not I'm not gonna get up early because I don't wanna cheat myself on that but um yeah I think that those are kind of the core things it's funny sometimes people asked like oh how can I double my productivity or something like that and you'll see articles like that all the time like fold this one five-minute trick to double your productivity but the real answer to most of that stuff is like get eight hours of sleep a night exercise don't eat like crap and then instantly you have this boost of energy the fundamentals are covered 90% of it yeah exactly you said this you said you do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems what are the systems you created to be successful beyond those kind of core habits right there yeah so this is a really good question I think first I just want to talk a little bit about that at that point that you do not rise to the level of your girls you fall the level of your systems what do I mean by that so often when we set about to change something or to achieve something the first step is almost always setting a goal and this is coming from someone like I was very goal-oriented for a long time right asset yeah I would say goals for the things I wanted to do in sports the goals the grades I wanted in class the goals for how much money I want to make in my business and sometimes I would achieve those but then sometimes I wouldn't and so I had this question like well clearly I'm setting goals for both so like that can't be the thing that determines it and you see this a lot that the the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals like every Olympian wants to win a gold medal sure every job candidate wants to get the job so if the winners and the losers have same the same goal then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two and the thing that distinguishes them is the process the system behind the goal and this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment it's like you know say you're you just take like a simple example so you have a messy room you know and you set you get motivate and you set the goal to clean your room well you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room but if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place then you just end up with a dirty room again yeah so it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause and habits are a better solution in that case because if you fix the inputs the outputs fix themselves automatically right you don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits and I think that's true in a larger sense as well right people want outcomes they want to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress but the outcome is not the thing that needs to change it's the system that precedes it mmm so give me the let's let's bust the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit because there's 14 days 28 days 60 days yeah here right if you do something every single day and maybe it changes for each person but what's the science or the the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit I guess so 21 days is the thing you hear all the time 30 days hundred days whatever right now 66 days is making the rounds does the latest thought in another book what was that book well there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average for how long it takes and as a rule of thumb I don't think it's terrible like you should remind yourself yeah this is gonna be months of work it's not just gonna have something quick but even within that study the range was quite wide so if you did something simple like drink a glass of water at lunch each day it would take like three weeks if you did something more difficult like go for a run after work every day that would be like seven or eight months but I think actually that question to begin with is sort of a there's like a broken mentality the wrong question yeah it is because if you ask that question the implicit assumption is when do I have to stop working or when is this done and is it automatic after a certain period of time well the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever because of you to stop then it's no longer a habit it's a constant choice and a decision right I think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived and if you look at it as a lifestyle change then you're saying okay okay what's something small and sustainable I can stick to right what's something that can actually last over time so it is true that you can actually map this through research that a habit will become more automatic with practice but this reveals another important point which is that there's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built you could practice something once in 30 days or you could practice it a thousand times what actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition so the phrase that I like to use is not 21 days or 30 days but put in your reps I mean that's the real thing is you need to you need to practice and if you put in your reps then your brain starts automate how that process works yeah what makes you an expert on habits oh man I ston lots of other people that are talking about habits why are you talking about it differently and what have you discovered that's different than everyone else okay so two questions there so the first one is expertise and I think that and I've said this many times before I'm just going through this with everybody else I consider my readers my peers in the sense that we're all just trying things out the only difference is I write about what I learned and shared each week and but we're all just learning along the way early on I had a feeling like that it was like Who am I to you know I'm just got this and I had a friend tell me the way you develop expertise is by writing about it every week so I wrote a new article about habits every Monday and Thursday for three years and that was how I developed the expertise on the topic by writing about it did research you said here's what I found here's what I tried here's what worked what didn't work it's a combination of me reading the scientific literature and reading the research and then trying to distill the practical insights from that and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter a Travel Photographer a writer and entrepreneur and seeing what that looks like and then the two together and I think you need both like I don't want to be some new-age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower just like theorizing about ideas is different what it looks like to put ideas into practice right like imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to coach like an NBA team these guys like dude you need to step on the court if you know what and write to see what it's actually like so you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that so you were researching and you were applying it into your life and what was the second part a second question which I think is probably the more interesting one which is what makes my angle different and what makes this different than every other book out there about habits so you can broadly put books about habits into two categories the first book the first category is what I'll call motivation models so motivation models are about what sparks a behavior how do you get started how do you get motivated the second category is what I'll call reinforcement models so how does it have its stick how does it last why do certain behaviors get reinforced and sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the other a lot of the time they'll just kind of live in separate worlds that's what I would say is it happening in like the self-improvement space then you have the academic space so psychology or neuroscience or whatever and a lot of those books are focused on the Y but not the how they'll tell you they'll tell you why something happens why a particularly neuron fires why a particular biological process works the way it does but they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life and so what I wanted to do was try to combine the two why yes why a book that is both why and how why do habits form the way they do why are they important and then how do they actually work and my hope is that atomic habits was able to do that largely because of the framework that I put together so in the book I lay out these four stages that all habits go through and I felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model but not both okay and you need to understand what those sparks a habit and what makes a habit contains it yes if you want to be able to understand how they work and not make them last and what are those four frameworks so the first stage of every habit is a cue the second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes I'll give you an example of these in a second the third stage is the response and then the fourth stage is the reward so you walk into a the question I had that that no model I could find could solve in any good way or explain in any good way was why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way so let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at five o'clock every day but then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at five o'clock current models don't explain that very well because it's like well the cue is five you should be going to the gym right now it says you'd the routine Falls automatically after the cue or why why does someone walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies and then they automatically want to eat it but you could just as imagine it just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room and you're stuffed and you're full and you walk in you see a plate of cooking just like I'm stuffed I don't want to eat anything so what's going on there and I think these four stages explain it which is you see the cue or you experience a cue and then you're craving or prediction differs based on your current state so the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in the way of feeling right and also other things like your beliefs or your identity the social group that you're part of right it's like if you're in a different group then maybe you interpret things in a different way you know you could imagine one group they practice a particular religion they walk into a butcher shop and see pork and they don't they're like oh we can't eat that right another person walks in and they're like oh yeah I'll have a pork sandwich because it's obvious and easy and right there so what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life hmm well I would change what we interpret yes good question all right so this is a key point in the book which is that social norms society leans heavily on us all so if you they're just broad examples of this so rasher religious pressure media pressure all kinds of snow pressure yes let's say so just some broad examples you walk into an elevator and you turn around to face the front you have a job interview and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice there's no reason it has to be that way right like you could face the back of the elevator you could wear a swimsuit to a job interview but you don't do that because it violates the shared norms of the group right it violates the shared expectations of what that society has but that's not that's true not only in a broad sense that were part of these tribes like big tribes you know what it means to be a Christian or to be American or to be Australian or whatever but it's also true in the small tribes that we belong to what it means to be a neighbor on this street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or to volunteer for a local organization all of those tribes all those groups that you belong to have a set of shared expectations a set of shared norms and the key if you want to build habits that last if you want to change the way that you interpret cues is to join a group where you're the desired behavior is the normal behavior right like there are there are plenty of people who they want to work out but going to the gym feels like a lot to them it feels hard feels like sacrifice but there are also people who go to the gym every week and it's just normal it doesn't feel like an obligation that's the desire behaviors the normal behavior their lifestyle right same thing for musicians you know like if you want to learn an instrument hang out with people who play all the time you know like if you hang out with a bunch of musicians it's like well yeah we do all yeah we play four days a week be play seven days a week because it just happens that's that's what the tribe does the caveat to this and the thing that I don't see people mention a lot is that the reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe but want to be friends with those people and so we don't want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norm yeah you're not gonna hang out with a bunch of vegans and have pork right and just like be the only one eating that you won't hang out with them for very long cuz there's not gonna be friends with them anymore they'll kick you out so you want to rise to the standard of that group of that community so the key I think is to join a group where your desired behavior is a normal behavior and you already have something else in common with that group so Steve cama is a good example of this so like Steve runs nerd Fitness right and all these people want to get in shape who are coming into his community but they also love Star Wars or Batman or spider-man or you know all these other things that nerds are into and if you show up it can be intimidating to get in shape or you know work out the first time but if you can connect with the group over your mutual love of Star Wars then you're like oh I'm friends with these people and now I also want to pick up those other habits with them because I want to belong with the group because we're already friends and so I think you can apply that methodology to most new tribes that you join don't just join a new tribe because they have the desired behavior also try to find a way that you can overlap with them find some shared contacts or stuff too that you can bond over and then it's easier to enjoy habits musicians that like to be healthy yeah right you want to do both right it's sure finding that even subgroup it's like hey we love you know we love playing music and then also you're gonna start eating better because we all want to eat healthy exactly yeah interesting okay so that's the second part the cue and then the desired habits yeah right the craving cue craving response reward okay what's the response so this is mostly about making it easy so this is the habit itself and the easier habit is the less friction there's associated with abot the more likely you're gonna be to do it so the way that I like to describe is imagine you have like a hose right and there's a bend in the middle there's a little bit of water trickling out if you want to increase the amount of water going through the hose you have two options you can either crank up the valve and force more water through or you could just remove the bend and let it flow through naturally and a lot of the time advice is centered on cranking up the valve it's like you need to try harder any grit and perseverance see any motivation you need to overcome the obstacles in your life and all those things are fine but I think they're all short-term solutions you might be able to do that for a day or a week but I've never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment it's really hard to fight that day in a day out so the solution I think is to reduce friction there are ton of ways you can do this one way is just a scale to have it down make it as easy as possible so people have heard things like this before start small small steps whatever but even when you know you should start small it's still really easy to start too big so you know say you want to get in shape and you're like alright I want to run a couple days a week but I know it should start small so I'll only run for 15 minutes but even that is like way bigger than what I'm talking about I mean it should be so small that you in the book I called the 2 minute but you should downscale any habit to fit within two minutes and so it's like all right I want to go for a run three days a week my habit is I put on my running shoes and I step out the door anything else that happens after that is just bonus isn't success now sometimes people resist that because they're like well this sounds kind of like a mental trick right like I know the real goal isn't just to put my shoes on into the real goal is to go for a run so if you feel that way my suggestion would be only do the first two minutes for the first few weeks because what you need to do is master the art of showing up like I had a I had a reader who ended up losing over a hundred pounds and one of the things that he did was he went to the gym but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so he would show up be there do like half an exercise five minutes ago he'd leave he did this for like six weeks Wow now it sounds ridiculous it sounds silly because it's the opposite workout for a half hour yeah yeah yeah but what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up and a habit must be established before it can be improved right if you don't establish the habit there's nothing to optimize if you're not showing up at the gym every day you don't even know who cares about what workout you're doing you're not even there don't start running an hour a day if you've never run in a long time be the person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day before you worry about how far you're running what kind of workout you're doing and all that type of stuff a lot of that was is that the art of showing up first before going all-in on the desired goal you want I think that's right I mean you can find examples of people who flip a switch and transform their lives or have an epiphany and do it overnight but I think that it's rare I think that the more sustainable strategy the more reliable strategy is to scale it down to the first two minutes focus on that establish it master the art of showing up and then go from there so really you should like usually when people think about building better habits they optimize for the finish line right it's like how much weight do I need to lose how much money do I need to make you know how when can I finish this book it's all focused on the result but I think instead if you optimized for the starting line make it as easy as possible to start scale it down organize your environment so all that stuff is set up this is another strategy for making it easy which is that you can prime your environment to make the future action easier right like if you chop up a bunch of vegetables and fruit on Sunday it's now easier to have a healthy snack during the week if you set your workout clothes that out the night before it's now easier to get into the workout the next day but doing all that stuff to make it easy to show up that is probably the more important piece early on there's also like all these they're always logistical details for building a habit that nobody thinks about in the beginning like what well like take the example of my reader who went to the gym there it's like okay what Jamie are you gonna go to how are you gonna get there are you going by yourself you're gonna go with friend do you need to what time you're gonna go yeah what time you are you gonna have your own water bottle or is there water fountain at the gym and that stuff sounds like silly and small but when some parties right yeah the fact that like oh the gym doesn't have a water fountain and I always forget to bring my own that's enough friction for someone to quit so by focusing on just the first two minutes you figure all that stuff out and then once you've got that piece mastered now you can worry about how long the workout is and what programs right and all that stuff so figuring out the logistics first is an important step I think that something that just comes naturally with scaling a habit down if you figure out what's required to show up because they're not worried about the results or the outcome or how long you worked out or judging yourself form you know for running 30 minutes when you should have run 45 or without it okay so this is a response too right okay and what's the fourth the fourth one and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick is the reward or the outcome so every behavior is followed by some kind of outcomes just basic cause-and-effect and if the immediate outcome is favorable is enjoyable you have a reason to repeat it in the future it's kind of like Donuts yeah exactly right piece like that example if you if you um if you feel good if you feel satisfied right after you do something then it's like this positive emotional signal and it's like yeah I should do this again yeah so you can see this actually business is a really interesting example with this there are a lot of products and some of the most successful products have some type of immediate satisfaction that is layered into them so toothpaste is a very common example there's no reason a toothpaste needs to taste like mint but it does because the minty flavor and the refresh this of it and make sure it gives your mouth this clean feel it's more satisfying so you have a reason to do it again in the future I heard an interesting one recently about car manufacturers that some of them are adding a fake guttural roar to the the car the truck when you press the accelerator because it just adds to the actual natural sound of the engine so it makes it more satisfying to step on the gas and to drive the car so there are a variety of examples like this but if you can add and in the key is it needs to be immediate right it's like this is um in the book I refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided and it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel successful if it feels good do you have a reason to do it again is that why video games do so well video games are masters at this they're masters at it so their masters actually at a variety of aspects related to habit formation so one is they're really good at this immediate satisfaction there are all kinds of things you're actually constantly getting feedback in a video game guys even if you're just running you hear the pitter-patter of the steps it's that's why buying it's the jingles of like picking up another powerup or you know seeing a kill or something like that whatever the game is you're always getting constant feedback sound things that are on screen they're really good at dripping now watching the the score increase in the top corner that is immediate feedback so there they have all these different ways of making you feel satisfied and when you see that progress you have a reason to continue in the future this is one of the one of the most effective forms of immediate satisfaction is progress mmm as soon as you feel progress you have a reason to continue feels really good to see that you're making headway now why do some people make all this progress let's say they lose the weight they lose 100 pounds but then they gain it back two years later yeah they've got this progress they achieve the desired goal but then how come it didn't stick it's a good question I mean it's a complicated thing the hard thing but I'll give a couple potential reasons so one is it comes back to the social norms that I mentioned before there's a story that I tell in the book about Vietnamese soldiers well American soldiers and during the Vietnam War so there were over in Vietnam and these two congressmen went over and found out that the heroin usage among the troops was incredibly high it was like think that first thought it was like ten or fifteen percent but then they found out it was actually over twenty so you know one in five troops is addicted to heroin or trying heroin using it while they're over there and they're like this is a huge problem we need to figure this out so they created this whole committee to investigate things whatever and eventually the war ends and the soldiers come back and they were shocked by is that ninety percent of the soldiers that were addicted to heroin in Vietnam were not addicted when they returned and the main reason it makes so much sense but it upended our understanding of addiction at the time they completely changed the context right in in Vietnam they're in a war zone they're highly stressed they're surrounded by other users heroin is present and easy to get they come home they're in totally new environment it's not a war zone anymore they're not surrounded by other users they don't really know where to get heroin so they have to figure that out too you layer all this stuff together and suddenly it becomes much easier to not do that whereas previously they thought it was an addiction they were doing it for other reasons this same thing is true but usually in the reverse right typically you have an addict who gets hooked on a drug goes into rehab this is the equivalent of leaving your environment behind not having any of those triggers but then you send them home to the same place they got addicted in the first place right so now we're surrounded by all their old friends all the same cues and becomes very hard to resist that and I wonder if when people rebound from habits after they've achieved some level of success what's losing weight or getting clean or whatever if it's the return of the environment that causes a lot of that I think that's what it is well I don't know if it's always that I don't think I could say it is universally but part of think that it's definitely it definitely plays a role I mean because we were influenced by people's pressure either way thank you yes peer pressure can either be positive or negative yeah the communities we surround ourselves with we rise to the community right you know if you're around vegans all day and there's only a vegan food available you're gonna eat probably mostly vegan right if that's what you want or if you're trying to eat healthier if you go back home and everyone's eating doughnuts all day that temptation is gonna be hard to say no to after months you can do it for a little while but it's just really hard to do so environment is a huge factor it's what I'm hearing I think both socially and physical we haven't talked that much about physical environment but that's another key component you know so like I'll give you an example of a good habit and a bad habit so for good habits you want the physical environment to make it obvious and easy for you to do the behavior you know so like I am like have a pull-up bar in your room exactly trying to do 100 pull-ups a day right like have it hanging him or your door as opposed to even if you had one but it was in the closet because I'm just half the time you would or take it out or it's at the gym upstairs or down the street no you know I have a friend who he wanted to practice guitar more and so he left his guitar in the middle of his living room and that just so he'd walked past enough hundred times a day good up becomes much easier right bad habits in the same way so but in Reverse instead of making it obvious you want to make it invisible you know take like which is just talking about video games a lot of people feel like they're watched too much spend too much time watching TV or playing video games or watching a screen but if you walk into pretty much any living room where do all the couches and chairs face they all face the television so it's like what does that room designed to get you to do right on yeah so you can restructure that environment to make it less likely that you fall into that habit and there are variety things you could do you could take the remote control and put it inside like a drawer so you don't see it you can put the television behind a wall unit or a cabinet so that it's less visible but you could also increase the friction with the pass so you could like unplug your TV after each use and only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch so you can't like mindlessly pull up Netflix and just find something or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it's an extra like five to ten seconds to turn on maybe that's enough time to be like do I really want to watch something right now just doing this mindlessly yeah if you really want to be extreme don't have a TV yes you could that's what I get rid of the TV entirely or take it off the wall and put in the closet and only take it out when you really want to watch something for four years when I lived in Columbus I I remove the TV for four years so they went TV in my place because I was like I want to earn money right I want to build my business and I nothing so I need to work I need to focus on this to build you know the habit that I wanted for my business and it was the best thing for me because I would spend hours just mindlessly watching and now it's like okay if I don't watch something I'm gonna go to the sports bar and watch the game I'm gonna go to a friend's house and watch this specific thing or I'm gonna go to the movies and take a break right as opposed to three hours a day of TV what's brilliant about that and it's a really good example is that we I think about that a lot with phones as well so every day I try to leave my phone in another room outside of my office at least until lunch because then I got like a four-hour block of time in the room where I can just work without any distraction yeah and it's funny how quickly you don't like if my phone is on me in the morning I would check it like you know every five minutes or whatever but when it's out of the room I don't even find myself wanting to I never walk up the stairs to go check it even though it's only thirty seconds away so it's it's interesting how little we actually want to do these things but we just do them all the time because they're obvious and easy and I think the key is to invert that take the things that are the bad habits the distractions the procrastinations the unproductive uses of time and make them more invisible reduce exposure and less less easy to do and take the things that are good habits and make it the equivalent of having your phone on you all the time and make it right in front of you make it obvious make it easy make it you know frictionless yeah if you're looking to write have your do you write with your journal your computer I write on the computer I never know it's gonna be faster yeah transfer later and all these things yeah okay if you were coaching someone who said I have no clue what I'm supposed to do with my life I'm lost I have all these bad habits I smoke I drink I eat donuts every day I have no job my room is sloppy and I'm just depressed what would you say to them to get started with changing their life around in the form of better habits well you just need to pick one thing first of all I think that I just mentioned a few minutes ago one of the most powerful forms of motivate is progress so seeing some progress I mean it can be as simple as make your bet each day right like but just doing that embodying the identity of someone who is getting better who's making progress just pick one thing and use that as this is true I mean Louis this is something you've probably seen with a lot of people you talk to oh yeah habits are the foundation for mastery so if you you know say take take a sport like basketball you need to be able to dribble with both hands without thinking before you can worry about what strategy running on offense or what kind of you know strategic play you're gonna run or what your defensive scheme is or all this other stuff right like you need to automate the fundamentals of the craft before you can worry about the next level of performance same thing is true for chess you know like you need to know how the chess pieces move automatically without thinking about it before you can get into alright what are you gonna do and I'm gonna do this and they're gonna do that and so I think this is true not just at the peak levels of performance that you integrate these habits and used habits as the foundation for the next level of performance but also true when you're getting started just build one small thing carve out a 1% change of 1% improvement and use that as a stepping stone to the next what about self-control because what if we have this desire for something what's the other word for self-control well power will or something yes or about willpower how much willpower do we have so you hear this a lot I mean it's very common in especially in self-help motivation self-government you need to be motivated you have to have willpower grit and perseverance are huge and important and it's not that those qualities are not important it's just that the way to develop them is different than what most people think so most people think I need willpower so I should just try harder there's an interesting body of research I mentioned it in the book Hanson chapter 7 on self-control and willpower which is that the people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least so they face temptations less frequently and therefore have the reserves and the resources to resist it when it occasionally comes up and I think that this is actually like the lever to pull or the pressure point to push on is that the way to get better power is to design an environment that temps you less not to say let me just try harder right yeah set yourself up to win and you have a a chapter that talks about the power of accountability partners and I talk about accountability and coaches all the time I hire coaches for everything because I use sports as my life ya algae for my life and I know that I couldn't have gotten to where I wanted to be as an athlete without great coaches and accountability yeah so how important is accountability towards habits as well yeah it's huge so I recently hired a powerlifting coach Grady's words like 12 world champions and half lumbus has he's not based in Columbus actually but Columbus is great for strength yeah it's you know I'm so there's the Arnold but then West Side barbell and a bunch of other stuff yeah it was awesome but your point about coaches is a crucial one which is that having a coach forces you to be aware of things that you would otherwise overlook right like as you this is what I call the downside of building good habits which is you build habits and in the beginning you develop fluency and skill and ability and things become easier but after a little while once a habit has been established the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot which means that you start to overlook your mistakes and not think about how to get better and so what you need is a coach to keep you on that razor's edge so that you you keep building habits but it also forces you to stay aware of what the next level of performance is and that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement it's like a cycle you know it starts with awareness if you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is you don't have a chance to change it then from that awareness you go to deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better and eventually the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes automatic but once it becomes automatic that's not the end you have to return to awareness and see where you're at now yeah how do you start the cycle again huh and what about what if you can't afford a coach how do you find the right accountability partner that's where I think we come back to the social component that we talked about earlier join the group join the community that's probably the best way to do it and the great thing about the you know the internet and the web is that you can find those people before where you couldn't find them previously you know it used to be that you had to hope that the people in your local community or on your sports team or at your you know organization we're also interested in the same things and now you can find those people and find it online sergej and what's the downside of the good habits so this is what I was mentioning with this fact that like you start to overlook your mistakes there's a there's an interesting study that was done on Surgeons where they found that early on in residency they were getting better and then they continued to improve as they became a surgeon in practice for a few years and then they hit some kind of peak and then their performance actually declined slightly because they stopped overlooking their mistakes or stopped looking for ways to get better and so you need to be on that on that edge of paying attention my favorite example of this is actually a surgeon himself Atul Gawande and he hired a coach a previous surgeon who was retiring to review the video of his surgeries at a time where you could improve and what he could do better and I think that's a brilliant example of how to have a coach even if you're not in sports or not you know not a competitor or something we can all benefit from the feedback and the tighter the feedback cycle the faster you learn that's powerful I love a man this is powerful stuff I'm gonna ask you a couple final questions yes sir this one's called the three truths if you could only share three lessons with humanity in the world and then no one they didn't have access to your writing or your blog or your books but you only have three lessons you can share what were those three lessons or three truths B yeah that's really tough so the first one I would say is about reading I mentioned earlier that reading is sort of like this met a habit that helps you solve all your other problems so I guess my lesson for reading would be start more books no would be yeah start more books quit most of them read the great ones twice so if you start more books you'll be exposed to more ideas if you quit most of them if you quit the ones that aren't relevant to you or aren't that good or just aren't a high quality bar then you'll have the chance to start even more and when you find the great ones read them twice because the advice is incredible and it's potentially life okay alright so the first one I would say is reading the second one is some kind of something to do with physical movement and strength training you cannot every human has a body and every human has like a physical presence so learn to use your body in some way to be more alive and experience what that's like to be human if you just spend all day in your head or all day staring in the screen you only kind of get half of what it means to be alive so I would say physical strength is another one and the third one has to be something along the lines of community connection serving others I don't know what exactly that would be personally I have felt most engaged when I've been working on a shared mission with a group of people face to face which is interesting coming from someone who you know my business is built online right I spend most of my time sending emails to you know half a million Bieber ever but I think actually I find more satisfaction and more non purpose in connecting with people face to face so maybe that would be it talk to someone face to face every day well that's cool yeah well I get acknowledged you man for all the work that you're doing to make an impact on people I think your writing has really helped transform lives whether you know how impactful it is or not but half a million people's a lot of people and I know people are doing the action steps that you provide for them so you constantly doing the work cost of doing the research and showing up for people is making a big impact so iconology for that where can we get the book and where can we follow you and everything else yeah thanks man so the book is called atomic habits an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones and it's at atomic habits calm if you go to that page there is a secret chapter that's not included in the actual book now there are some exercises and templates that help people kind of implement some of the ideas that we talked about more and I also have chapter by chapter audio commentary from me I'm like why I wrote this chapter and what some of the research is behind it and a variety of other resources that's actually just a few of the things but anyway all of that stuff is available at atomic habits stuck I like it man yeah you've got a lot of actual things in here which is really cool so and even more out of time on how the stock counts they get on Amazon Barnes & Noble everywhere else as well right you got it everywhere books are sold and your website James clear calm that's right you can subscribe there are you on social media at all yeah so if you go to James core calm you'll see Instagram Twitter and Facebook on there and you can also just poke around the articles like I have most of my writing organized by topic or category so people can just check out what's interesting that I've done do you hang out on social media I use Twitter mostly that's the one that I found most useful social media is kind of interesting because the people you follow it's like creating your own little city and so you get to choose what the citizens are and you should be very careful about who you put in your city sure because it changes what you're exposed to all the time yeah so I've spent more time cultivating Twitter and who I'm following and that really has changed like I find it very useful now I come across good ideas all the time that's correct Instagram and Facebook I use less but both can still be useful if you follow that same strategy yeah that's cool huh all right I like it man when's the book out with the date they can pre-order right now that's right it's available now launches on October 16th and yeah I'm excited to share it with the world it's gonna be great man final question for you actually two font of questions what's the one bad habit you wish you could break for yourself so I'm working on new habits all the time there's always something currently the one that it keeps eluding me is it's not sleep it's not the problem I'll sleep long enough the problem is powering down early so I like I have trouble shutting off you know like I don't know if you feel this way but I've I'm always interested in what I'm working on and so then I get to you know there's usually a I work really well in the morning and then I work really well late at night I think it's just because that's why I'm not interrupted and you know like I kind of have the space to think but it'll get to be 10 and oh my god well maybe I should just dig into that for a second and then of course you know return yeah exactly that I'm like I should have gone to bed two hours ago so that's one that I keep powering down or finding downtime you know right cool last question what's your definition of greatness mmm I think greatness is contributing your little bit to the world that's it you know like the thing that has advanced humanity over the broad span of time is the collective knowledge that we've all accumulated what we've added together it's like we've had a real started out as very small snowball and just keeps you rolling on this endless hill as humanity continues and a cumulative knowledge gets bigger and bigger there have been think that numbers are there been a hundred and seven billion people who've lived throughout history really and there are seven billion alive right now so the dead outnumber the living fifteen to one when you were born you inherit all the lessons from those hundred and seven billion people right like I had a little niece she's two years old she's gonna be taught things in school that I was not taught there's a little some stuff that I was taught we found out was wrong and now we got rid of it and some stuff we learned that was new and right and now we're adding it and that's true all the way down the line right like we the next generation always gets to advance based on this like ever-growing bundle that we have knowledge that we come up with and so if you at some point throughout your life can add just a little bit to that bundle the rest of humanity is better for it mmm James - thanks Bill it's great you

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 221,572

Rating: 4.8909626 out of 5

Keywords: lewis howes, james clear, the school of greatness, 701, atomic habits, Success Habits: The Proven Way to Achieve Your Dreams, entrepreneur, how to become successful, success advice, entrepreneur ideas, entrepreneur mindset, how to become successful at a young age, power of habits, entrepreneur motivation, habits of successful people, lewis howes interview, 2018, entrepreneur advice

Id: xRse5I_p7tA

Length: 51min 14sec (3074 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018