IMPROVE Your LIFE and Get 1% Better Every Day w/ James Clear

people who exhibit high willpower who appear on the surface to have great a great deal of willpower the primary thing that is different between them and people who appear to have low levels of willpower is that they are in environments where they are tempted less so their environment is primed for them to be high willpower and i think that alone should inform a lot of your strategy again how do we stack the deck in your favor how do you design an environment where you don't need to be a superhero just to get something done you know like if you're constantly putting yourself in a tough position where you're fighting against the friction of the environment you're in it's almost like a form of gravity you know it sort of pulls you toward it [Music] welcome back to the show everybody excited to talk to this gentleman today because his works fascinated me for a long time the reason his work has fascinated me for so long i went through this string for a while where so many what i call high performing successful friends of mine would say have you read atomic habits you're at atomic havocs i'm talking about athletes business people entertainers and i'm like the heck is atomic habits and i finally find out there's this guy james clear turns out he's written this book like five million people have bought it and i'm like well why if five million people read this book on habits because you know you're supposed to have them and then i read it i'm like ah it's not one of these like have a habit book it's like how your brain works how to create habits how to eliminate bad ones and physically why in your brain you can do these things and why it's so necessary so i've wanted james on for a long time we finally put it together i'm so grateful to share him with all of you today so james clear welcome to the show brother hey thanks for having me on great to talk to you yeah and i don't want to just talk habits today i'm going to talk about some of your productivity hacks as well sure your work bros is uh i think i'd call it groundbreaking because i don't think anybody's really approached habits the way that you have but let's let's back up a little bit just for a second because i i think it's important for people to understand this concept you teach that you know everyone's always trying to take a massive action you take massive action towards what you want you're like yeah you should do that but your concept of getting one percent better is much more believable for most people and so just address that for a second why why one percent better every day and how does a habit do that sure so first of all i think there's no reason that you can't be really ambitious right like i consider myself to be very ambitious person i think it's just that you're oscillating or switching between these two modes you know like when you're in planning mode when you're in strategy mode sure you can be very ambitious um and be very aggressive and you know stretching yourself and reaching but when it comes time to take action and execute uh you have to scale it down to something you can achieve that day you know like the in in one sense the biggest unit of time you could ever do something is about a single day because then you've got to go to sleep you know and then you have to wake up again and do it the next day so unless you're playing you know at some point there's a limit you can only stay up for 48 hours or 72 hours like you know and then you break so that's the largest possible unit that you could ever do a single thing in and i think more realistically most of the time the truth is you know you got about an hour or maybe you got two hours to work on this and then you got to go move on to something else so we don't have big chunks of chunks of time available to us we need to scale things down into pieces that we can actually work on and execute so the way that i think about it is when making plans think big when making progress think small and getting one percent better each day is a way to encourage that the story that i like to tell and this is something that i kind of kick atomic habits off with the story of the british cycling team and you know for many years british cycling was very mediocre they had never won a tour de france which is the premier race in cycling they had won a single gold medal over like a 100 year span and they brought this new performance coach in named dave brailsford and he had this concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains the aggregation of marginal gains and the way that he described it was the one percent improvement in nearly everything that we do related to cycling so they started looking at a bunch of things you would expect a cycling team to focus on like they put slightly lighter tires on the bike or they designed like an ergonomic seat for the riders they had the riders wear a little feedback sensor little chip to see how each individual responded to training then they would adjust the practice schedule but then they started doing like these little one percent changes these small improvements that nobody else was really thinking about like they hired a surgeon to come in and teach the riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of catching a cold or getting the flu they have this big trailer like a semi-trailer that carries a lot of bikes in it to major events and they painted the inside of that truck trailer white so they could spot little bits of dirt and dust that might get in the gears and degrade the performance of the bikes they have two different types of fabrics they've got like indoor racing suits and outdoor racing suits and they tested those fabrics in a wind tunnel and they found out that the indoor fabric was lighter and more aerodynamic so they asked all of their riders to wear that fabric they even had all their different riders tests you know like a bunch of like maybe a dozen different types of pillows and then they see which one led to the best night's sleep for each person and then once they figured that out they brought that on the road with them to hotels for the tour de france and so on and uh you know brailsford said something like if we can actually do this right if we actually make all these one percent improvements related to cycling then i think we can win a tour de france within five years he ended up being wrong they won the tour de france in three years and then they repeated again in the fourth year with a different rider and then after one year break they won three more in a row so after having never won for like 110 years you know they win five of the next six and i like to use that story as an introduction to this idea of getting a little bit better making these one percent improvements for a couple reasons the first is it shows you that excellence a lot of the time maybe we can even say most of the time is not actually about radical change it's about a commitment to accruing small improvements day in and day out secondly and i think this is also crucial it encourages you to focus on trajectory rather than position right there's a lot of discussion about position in life how much money is in the bank account what is the number on the scale what is the current stock price what are the quarterly earnings is all this measurement around our current position but what getting one percent better each day encourages is to focus on your trajectory instead am i getting better is the arrow pointed up into the right or have we flatlined am i getting one percent better one percent worse because if you're on a good trajectory all you need is time right if you have good habits time becomes your ally you just need to let time work for you but if you have bad habits time becomes your enemy and every day that clicks by you kind of dig the whole little bit deeper and so it's very much at the core it's about encouraging you to focus on trajectory rather than position how did you get the 37.78 times better like where'd that ratio number come from yeah yeah it's just it's just math right so if you get one percent better each day for a year so 1.01 to 365th power then he gets 37 times better by the end of the year if you get one percent worse 0.99 to the 365th power then you drive yourself almost all the way down to zero now you know look real life is not exactly like a mathematical equation right your habits are not exactly like this this formula but i do think that it highlights an important concept which is the difference between making a choice that's one percent better or one percent worse on any given day is relatively insignificant but it's very easy to dismiss and this is i think one of the things that makes it under appreciated or underestimated you know like what is the difference between eating a burger and fries for lunch today or eating a salad or you know going to the gym for 30 minutes or not well on any given day not a whole lot you know your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night scale hasn't really changed it's only two or five or ten years later that you turn around you're like oh you know those daily choices really do add up and i think you see this pattern again and again throughout life like take knowledge for example the person who always reads for an extra 10 minutes each day well look reading for 10 minutes a day does not make you a genius right it's very easy to dismiss but the person who always does that over 5 or 10 or 20 years yeah really meaningful difference in wisdom and insight productivity is the same way you know like the person who gets one extra task done each day doing one extra thing does not make you an all-star but again over 10 or 20 or 30 year career that can be a really meaningful difference in output so this pattern shows up again and again what starts out small relatively easy to dismiss compounds or turns into something much more significant over time the biggest word bro i don't think most people take into account you and i are both college baseball players good ones but neither one of us were you know surefire first round draft pick major league players and i think most people don't take into account in their life the compound effect i don't think they understand it money i don't think they understand it in their bodies both positive and negative and i don't think they understand their identity or in just and inhabits the compound effect in life of allowing small things to stack up over time has a multiplier effect and one of the things that i feel like in your work and by the way your work is i'm all work we're a few minutes in here and i'm like this is so good and the reason is is one i believe most people believe they can get one percent better every day i don't think most people believe that they can completely transform everything in one big leap i think there's a multiplier though do you agree that between doing the right things one percent or just better habitually every single day not only you actually making deposits of doing things correctly or better but there's a part of your identity that starts to change over time about how you view yourself that i am that guy who doesn't eat the hamburger and fries when he can choose to eat the other one you stack those choices and behaviors up over time and you start sort of believing maybe you deserve something that you didn't deserve prior doesn't there a factor of that don't you think as well this is a huge part of kind of my philosophy and book this idea of what i call identity based habits but essentially the concept is and this i think this is the real reason that habits matter the the surface level reason the habits matter is they help you be more productive they help you make more money they help you lose weight and get fit and look habits can do all those things and that's great but i think the deeper reason that they matter is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become and so when you perform these small habits when you take these little actions you're casting votes for a certain aspect of your story or a certain element of your identity in a sense every time you perform a habit that's how you like embody that aspect of your identity so you know when you make your bed in the morning you embody the identity of someone who's clean and organized or if you write one sentence you embody the identity of someone who is a writer and this is why it can be valuable you know even to like do one push-up it's like no that does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and eventually as you build up evidence of that story as you start to cast more votes for that identity you have like actual proof to believe this right this is i think it's a little bit different than you'll often hear something like fake it till you make it and i don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it so you make it it's asking you to believe something positive about yourself but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it and we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence we call that delusion right like at some point your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you're actually doing and so my argument is to let the behavior lead the way to start by meditating for one minute or doing one push-up or writing one sentence and letting that be undeniable proof that in that moment you were a meditator or an athlete or a writer or whatever it is and ultimately i think this is the real value that habits provide which is they reinforce your desired identity well it's just so good brother so good i don't know why i'm just meeting you now because our our overall belief system about change is is so very very similar and you know i want to we're talking about how to actually begin to establish habits but before we do that i want to talk about the concept of establishing one because you said something about the one push-up reading or listening to something you're talking about about the guy who would go to the gym for just five minutes and work out and you said something about this casting the vote for who you want to be or who you're going to be that was powerful right but you're saying before a habit can be and i don't want to quote you incorrectly but i want you to elaborate on it because this is profound to me i mean it's obvious but if you if you don't step back and get away from it and look at it you just really don't realize the truth of it before a habit can be improved it has to actually be established and i think what happens is you tell me what you think beginning of the year i'm going to lose 50 pounds i'm going to do this i'm going to eat five then it's it's i'm going to i'm going to starve myself to 500 calories so it's not a one percent improvement or i want to get up earlier i'm going to get two hours earlier starting tomorrow instead of get up 15 minutes earlier right get up a minute earlier so talk about it from just the the concept for everyone to just they can take control of their life right now by just the establishment of a habit right or or right yeah definitely right i um so one of the concepts i talk about in the book is this uh one of the strategies is this idea of what i call the two-minute rule where i encourage people to build a habit that takes two minutes or less to do so you take whatever you're trying to do read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat and sometimes when i mention that idea people resist a little bit because they're like okay buddy you know i know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out i know i'm actually trying to do the workout so if this is some kind of mental trick then like why would i fall for it basically well i tell the story of of this guy mitch that you mentioned this guy who i met i talked about him in atomic habits he went to the gym he's lost over 100 pounds kept it off for more than a decade and when he first started going to the gym he wouldn't stay for five longer than five minutes he had this little rule he had to leave after five minutes so you get in the car drive to the gym get out do half an exercise get back in the car drive home and it sounds ridiculous right it sounds silly like obviously he's not going to get the guy the results that he wants but if you take a step back you realize that he was mastering the art of showing up right he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for five minutes and this gets us to that deeper truth about habits that you just mentioned this idea that a habit must be established before it can be improved it has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize it and scale it up into something more and you know i don't know why we do this like we get very all or nothing about our habits we're like we're so focused on finding the perfect business idea or the best workout program or the ideal diet plan that we spend all our time theorizing and researching and looking for a better way and instead if we could just master the art of showing up even if in the beginning it was less than what you had hoped to do you're establishing a foothold you're building some small progress that you can advance off of and it reminds me of ed lattimore has that great quote where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door and man there are a lot of things in life that are like that you know like the the hardest part is getting started the hardest part is establishing the routine even if it's a lower level baseline than what you ultimately hope to achieve but the reality is if you can't become the type of person who masters the art of showing up even if it's just for five minutes then it doesn't matter how good the plan is it doesn't matter how great your theory is and so i think the two-minute rule pushes back on that perfectionist tendency a little bit and just encourages you to master the art of showing up so good i'm right just finished writing a book called one more and i get asked that sometimes too and one of the things that i i wasn't thinking about it from this perspective when i wrote it but you can become the kind of person says look i'm going to do it's my bench press i'm going to do 10. you do one more you do 11. i even say you're right in the running the treadmill for 45 minutes you can build that habit of okay i'm going one more minute i do 46. what's the difference in that minute well you stack up that minute over a year there's a difference but also your identity begins to changes and i'm not telling you go from 45 minutes to three hours on a treadmill so the pr actually i was doing this i wasn't thinking of it from this perspective but now that i'm thinking about it actually our work is sort of converging you know almost in the exact same space now establishing habits i think very few things in books are actually life-changing because this is a life-changing thing tim grover is a good friend of mine he's like not every show you do is life-changing you know what i'm like it is to me man every one of them i wouldn't put it out if it wasn't life-changing and i go well which ones are he goes mine yeah what do you have me on he's been on a couple of times but the truth is i actually think this is life-changing work you did when you talk about habit loops and so i've discussed in life in fact i learned it in baseball i learned in baseball about triggers you know we put your batting gloves on triggering a state i teach it with my athletes i've talked about it on the show before you know i know sometimes even walking into a room or a song can trigger something if there's a memory that happened in a space but i never thought about it at all was it related to habits and you call it you so i want you to use your terminology but let's talk about how do we create habits and what is a habit loop because i feel like to some extent that's the foundation of of for me in the book when i went oh my gosh this is unbelievable this is actually how you do this no one's ever explained this before so explain so uh i like to divide habits into four different stages four steps and i think if you understand those four steps then you not only get like what a habit is from a scientific standpoint you understand like how the process works you also have four different places where you can intervene so it's like a practical application you have four different ways that you can adjust a habit and make it more likely to build a good one or break a bad one so the four stages just from a real high level are cue craving response and reward cue craving response and reward so the cue is like you said some kind of trigger that tells your brain to initiate the habit it's like a prompt or something that gets you started so like the ambulance driving down the road when you hear the siren that's an auditory cue that starts the habit of pulling to the side of the road or if you see a plate of cookies on the counter in the kitchen that's a visual cue starts the habit of eating a cookie now the next stage is the craving and the scientific way to describe this is it's a prediction that your brain makes about what that cue means so you see the plated cookies on the counter without even really having to think about it your brain sort of makes this automatic prediction oh those cookies will be sweet sugary tasty enjoyable and it's that favorable meaning that you assign to the queue that motivates you to take the third step which is you walk over you pick the cookie up and take a bite and then finally there's the fourth stage the reward oh it is in fact sweet sugary tasty enjoyable and so that's rewarding now not every behavior in life is rewarding right sometimes things have a cost or consequence sometimes they're just kind of neutral and don't really mean a whole lot but if a behavior is not rewarding it's unlikely to become a habit because your your brain needs some kind of positive emotional signal some reason to repeat that experience in the future you need some way to market and say hey that felt good that was worth it you should do this again when you're in a similar situation next time so cue craving response reward and that's kind of how we go around the loop and explain like what that habit loop is and pretty much all behaviors go through those stages in some way and the more that you go around them the tighter the feedback loop becomes it's like it reinforces the behavior and eventually you're tying your shoes or grabbing a cookie or unplugging the toaster after each use and you're just doing all those things kind of automatically you're not even really thinking about it can you give me a practical application of that if we just walk through i any habit doesn't matter i want to establish can you give me a practical application of that strategic application of how i would do it sure so once we have those four stages i like to try to operationalize it how do we make this actionable how do we apply it to a habit like you're asking and to do that i've come up with what i call the four laws of behavior change and so there's one law for each stage and if you follow these they give you kind of like a high level framework for building a good habit or breaking a bad one so from a real quick again from a high level the four laws are the first law is to make it obvious you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious available visible easy to see easier it is for it to get your attention the more likely you are to act on it second law is to make it attractive so again this one connects to the craving right the more attractive or appealing or exciting or enticing a habit is the more likely you are to perform it the third law is to make it easy the easier more convenient frictionless simple a habit is the more likely you are to do it we've already talked a little bit about that the two minute rule is an example of making it easy and then the fourth law is to make it satisfying the more satisfying or enjoyable or rewarding or pleasurable habit is the more likely you are to repeat it so those four laws make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying they give you a high level framework for building a habit if you're ever not sure what to do if you say how can i make this more habitual or how can i you know do a better job of doing this consistently you can just go through those four and ask yourself how can i make it 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 find opportunities to do those things and of course the whole book is organized around sharing different strategies for doing that let me just give you a couple personal examples so you can see how this might be applied when the pandemic started i knew that i was going to want to start i was just i wasn't going to have to be driving or traveling as much so i wanted to spend that time so that time i was spending traveling previously that i wanted to use it productively and read more so i opened up my phone and i downloaded audible for audiobooks and i moved the app to the first screen on my phone i moved all the other apps to the second screen so the only thing i saw when i opened my phone up was audible now that's a very small thing does not radically transform your behavior but it was a way of making reading more obvious right so that's the first law making it obvious let me get it in front of me i also sprinkle books kind of around the house or on my desk like i've got i have three on my desk right now i have a couple you know by the bed i've got a couple in the living room and the point for me was i never wanted to be far from a good idea you know like i always wanted to be kind of surrounded by something that was interesting or useful to read and odds are it's more likely that i pick it up and take a look at it on the flip side this also applies this first law of making it obvious it also applies to many of the bad habits that we have so yeah for example a lot of people feel like they watch too much television but walk into any living room where do all the couches and chairs face you know it's like what is this room designed to get you to do and so i think the question that you can ask yourself for this first law on making your habits obvious is what does this space encourage right what behavior is encouraged in this area and you want to design your life design the spaces that you live and work in to encourage the good habits and discourage the bad ones to make the the path of least resistance or the obvious choice the good habits so the healthy food is on the counter not the junk food books are around you not the tv remote and so on and so forth and no individual choice like that is going to radically transform things but you can see how making a dozen or two dozen or 50 little tweaks like that now all of a sudden you're living in a space that always is kind of like nudging you toward the more productive behavior bro you're brilliant this is so good i often feel that change is you know changes change is mental change oftentimes is much more environmental than it is mental and anybody that's ever had a baby around their house you know you know not to leave certain things on the floor yeah you know with the gate up to block the staircase there's things you do in their environment to protect them there just becomes a particular age where we think no longer our environment dictates any of our choices or our behaviors the other thing your environment can do is it can dull your senses as to what is a healthy environment or what are healthy choices so it might not be obvious cookies on something but it could be an environment the people around you their behavior choices the noise level auditoriums that you talked about earlier and and sometimes they can just dull what we think is normal compared to an extraordinary environment and so it's you know if you walk into any really fit person's home for the most part their environment looks a little bit different than an unfit person's home your point earlier about making your bed most successful people that i know make their vet every day most of them do and most of the people that i know that aren't successful don't make their bed every single day they seem like ridiculous things environmentally but there's a messiness there's a clutter to not making a bed that starts a day there's a structure and i guess it's a clean tight organized thing about just habitually doing that daily so i think these things are huge and i just think the way that you describe it by the way you can tell it's a book you need to get if you've not gotten it five million people plus already have but james also has a newsletter that i want to make sure i promote because it's just there's just only so much good ideas out there in the world and james is full of them and so where do they go get it james how do they get their newsletter yeah it's called three two one and uh each week i share three short ideas from me two quotes from other people and then one question to think about and uh you can just go to jamesclear.com and click on newsletter get it guys i thought you brought up a really good point with the uh structuring the environment for like a baby or young child you know it's very obvious for us to do that because we're we're trying to set them up for success right like you don't want to put the baby in an environment where yeah they're surrounded by sharp objects or things that could fall on them or ledges they could trip over or whatever and that seems so straightforward when you think about it with a child but like why would you not want to do that with yourself as well you know set your the environment up for success stack the odds in your favor by putting yourself in an environment where the good outcome is the more likely one i think people don't do it james because they look at someone like yourself that's a high performer or myself they think we are and i think they think we're just altered discipline and discipline comes in a lot of different forms and so discipline is for me i always tell people show me your habits and show me your calendar i can pretty much show you what your life's going to look like right your calendar looks like crap you're not loaded with enough stuff that you should be doing that serves whatever your goals and outcomes are obviously you don't do the right things you're going to end up long term with a particular result but i think the notion i used to think this person's just so much more disciplined than me the truth is i'm not i love cheetos i love television i love netflix i love not thinking i like not working so because i lack natural discipline as an athlete i was disciplined but they were more disciplined guys i like to work out but if you said ed you could be jacked sexy ripped lift to 150 years old and not lift all this heavy stuff and eat clean i'd probably eat the pizza and the cheetos right so it's my lack of discipline that's caused me to create habits and an environment around me that supports them that allows me to get some of these things done it's the lack of discipline actually in my case that causes me to know i need these structures around me so we're not different than you there uh there's a chapter in the book called the secret self-control and i talk about some of the some of the studies and research around willpower and and so on and one of the key findings is that people who exhibit high will power who appear on the surface to have great a great deal of willpower the primary thing that is different between them and people who appear to have low levels of willpower is that they are in environments where they are tempted less so their environment is primed for them to be high willpower and i think that alone should inform a lot of your strategy again how do we stack the deck in your favor how do you design an environment where you don't need to be a superhero just to get something done you know like if you're constantly putting yourself in a tough position where you're fighting against the friction of the environment you're in it's almost like a form of gravity you know it sort of pulls you toward it the other thing that i wanted to mention that you kind of brought up talking about like putting yourself in an exceptional environment and actually so we've talked about the first law making it obvious this actually connects directly to the second law making it attractive so far we've mostly talked about physical environment but the social environment is also crucial and i think this is if i could pick one topic that i think is even more important than i realized when i wrote the book i would probably say it's this um you know we are all part of multiple tribes some of those tribes are large like what it means to be american or what it means to be french and some of those tribes are smaller like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local crossfit gym or a volunteer at the elementary school or whatever but all of those tribes all those groups that you belong to they have a set of shared expectations a set of social norms for how you act in that group and the type of habits that you perform and like if we take the neighbor on your street example and say you walk outside on like tuesday night and you see that your neighbors mowing their grass or cutting their lawn and you're like oh i need to mow the grass too well you might stick to that habit for 20 or 30 or 40 years like however long you live in that house you wish you had that level of consistency with some of your other habits and why do you do it partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one and so it's actually the social expectation of that group of that tribe of neighbors on your street that's kind of underlying that habit and the consistency that you have and so the expectations of the group often influence in a very strong way which habits we find attractive and which ones we find unattractive and which ones we stick to consistently and which ones we don't and i think the the practical takeaway here the line is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior because if you're surrounded by people who are doing that thing on a normal basis it's a part of that that tribe's culture or expectation it suddenly becomes much easier for you to stick to that too you know you hear stories about this from entrepreneurs all the time i have one as well which is when i started out as an entrepreneur i had nobody around me that was doing that i don't have any entrepreneurs in my family i didn't have like this you know network of people who had started businesses to tap into and so for the first six months i just sent tons of emails to different people who were doing what i already wanted to do i probably sent about 300 emails or so most people didn't get back to me but maybe 30 or so did and i set up calls with them and chatted on skype and then about a month later i met five or six of them in a conference and so now i had a group of people that were already doing the thing i wanted to do that i actually knew that i could go to with questions that i could look at and they were doing these things it wasn't weird for me to do it anymore you know it wasn't weird for me to try to do this business stuff because now i had people around me i had a tribe where the desired behavior was the normal behavior and that made a huge difference so social environment also is a crucial factor in habit formation so good brother i uh i take two things from that i want to add and then i want to ask you something that i'm just fascinated to ask you about but i'm enjoying this very much by the way very much i can do this all day with you when i was 25 i paid a bunch of money to go to a seminar that i didn't have it was like a week long and i came back you know and my dad said to me so what was the big takeaway from this railroad thing you went to you know it was like a week-long deal and i said dad just the fact that you use these words bro just blows my mind the actual word i said dad i figured out that my life's going to be a direct reflection of the expectations of my peer group he just sort of stared back at me real quiet and he goes that's actually really good and i said i actually believe that dad i think my life will end up being a direct reflection of what my peer group expects of me and i need to find the right peer groups and pretty much the rest of my life whatever i've i've wanted to go try to achieve or become or feel or experience i've sought peer groups that expect that out of themselves and their own lives and i think is one of the most powerful things what you just said anyone has ever said on my show and i haven't said in a very long time the second thing i was thinking when you're talking about these environments to support our habits and our choices is that if i were a leader of any organization listening to this if i were an entrepreneur ceo the leader of a division somewhere the leader of a family a coach i'd be thinking about that real heavy again evaluating that what's the environment that i'm raising my organization in am i supporting if i was leading a church i was leading a any type of a business i think you should look at all elements of that or is that environment in every single way supporting your outcomes and your goals because the way you describe that change doesn't just apply to any individual it applies to an organism or an organization as well so i just want to make sure that i second that for those of you listening to this there's two ways to hear this stuff i'm hearing it from me that i'm hearing it for the people that i try to lead and i try to support you mentioned earlier the phone thing and i wanted to ask you this since i read the book and by the way i read the book a while ago right and then i prepped for the interview getting to know more and it reminded me of things i actually think i read the book and then i read it again like six weeks later on a vacation because i thought it was that good and i don't reread books i bet i've re-read from my religious texts four books in my life think and grow rich and your book and probably two more but i can't recall right now that's how much i think there's value in the book just for at least it from me and my stage your phone or people's phones it's become a great pattern interrupt it's become something that we can get into even myself where i wake up and i've lost an hour of my life is there anything you do or would recommend in your phone what you said earlier about audible was the only app on there that led you there but that in and of itself the smartphone thing gives us access to here's what i my theory on it is i want to say it really quickly obviously technology the internet phones access smartphones have allowed all of us to become far more productive i don't even think that's arguable but then you have to ask yourself now you're being measured against the mean so as cultures become more accessible information can get things done faster there's still a mean there's a median of which people are productive and so some people use their phone in a way that puts them below the average or near the average other people are able to navigate all those distractions and become hyper productive so is there something you recommend with a phone or you do in your phone what apps do you have do you not have anything like that you would share yeah that's a good question i mean smartphones are a huge part of our daily routine now and you're right they have strong positives but they also can have strong negatives um a couple little patterns i have around my phone usage so the first one is whenever possible i try to leave my phone in another room until lunch each day and that just gives me a block of time so that i can just respond to my own agenda right and do like a deep creative block or focus on my stuff before everybody else starts squeezing things uh onto my plate and you know that doesn't work for every job and it also doesn't work for me every day but i do it most days and the days when i do i almost always have a better morning one some little interesting insight with that by the way just as an aside i have a home office so if i leave my phone in another room it's like 45 seconds away but i never go get it and yet if it's right next to me i'm like everybody else i check it every three seconds so i'm like well did i want it or not you know like in one sense i wanted it bad enough to check it every three seconds when it was next to me and in another sense i never wanted it so bad that i would go work 45 seconds to get it and i think that there's a lesson in this about habit formation which is sometimes you just need a little bit of friction to curtail the behavior to the desired degree it's not that i never want to use my phone again it's just that i don't want to use it all the time and let it interrupt like some of these deeper working sessions that i have and so that 45 seconds is just enough friction to keep it in place something similar happens with like beer if i get like a six pack of beer and i put it in the front of the fridge where i can see it like as soon as i open the door up i'll have one every night at dinner just because it's there but if i put it down on the lowest shelf and like tuck in the back of the fridge or i can't really see it i got to kind of bend down to spot it sometimes it'll be there for weeks i won't even remember that we bought it and so same thing like did i want it or not and so finding ways to introduce a little bit of friction to your habits i think can be very helpful wow that's good on that same note you know i'll go through different periods of friction with social media so i think there's a big discussion we could have here about social media i don't think that most people are using it to its full power it can be incredibly powerful twitter in particular is like a great source of ideas for me at this point but it's only because i've spent a lot of time curating who i follow and so my feed is very productive i'm like in the flow of good ideas all the time people don't really think about it this way but when you choose who to follow on twitter or instagram or wherever you're choosing your future thoughts right like you're choosing the flow of information that you're gonna put yourself in front of and pretty much every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume and so it's really if you want to have better thoughts if you want to be a sharper thinker it's really about making sure you're consuming better pieces of information and so curating your feed in a careful way is a good way to do that now even so there are still periods when i spend too much time on social media i'm you know like i'm working on a new book and i need to have a block of time where i'm just like not being bothered by that so i usually fall into one of two strategies either i will delete the app from my phone after each time i use it so when i get done using twitter i'll just delete it and that means the next time i need to download the app again and that's going to take a minute and often that's enough friction for me to be like i'm just doing this my i'm just doing this because i got 10 seconds freaking a board it's not because i actually want to check it and so i'll get it i won't i won't download it again occasionally i do want to download it and actually see what's going on but a lot of the time it's just enough friction to avoid it and then if i really get extreme and i did this with atomic habits when i was working on the book the last nine months i just like really had to be focused and need to make sure i wasn't getting distracted so every monday my assistant would log me out of facebook instagram and twitter reset all the passwords i would work all week and then on friday she would send me the passwords and i could log in over the weekend and then get them and i did that for like nine months straight so i don't know it worked i got the book done but that's a that's a very extreme version no brother it's a ver it's an extreme example though of the fact that you're not relying on some sort of mystical discipline to get things done in your life and i really believe most people think high achievers are just these super crazy disciplined people that is an extreme move and it's probably something i should have done when i was writing my book and you would already be reading it by now that we just it's making me really think i've done a much better job of managing that stuff but i have to tell you i think it's one of the great distractions of all time i hadn't thought about it as in depth as you describe it in terms of future thoughts though and again i go back to children we want to monitor what our children consume and what they look at somehow we think we can pick an age and we're immune to the things that we're watching that impact our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions and our energy and i gotta tell you man you're 100 right i watch people get transformed by what they're consuming on there and become so so distracted so i'm reading an article you wrote that resonated with me and i don't know that this gets worse as maybe you achieve more but you're like the ultimate productivity hack is saying no so this isn't part of the book this is something a little bit different right and i have i think most people have a hard time saying no and i know i do there's so many days now i'm 50 years old and i'm just being transparent with friends of mine that listen to this because this most you know i look at this is like my family our audience a lot of days man where i look at my counter and i'm like why did i agree to this why did i agree to this like why couldn't i just say politely no i mean i mean i should have got to a point in my life by now where like i'm allowed to say i don't want to do that and yet i've done that all my life and it's been a hindrance to achievement so talk about that a little bit like you want to be more productive this article by the way guys google it it's so good it actually teaches you how to say no as well in the article but are you good at this or did you write it for your own benefit well pretty much everything i write is a reminder to myself of what i should be doing so uh no it's not that i'm great at it it's that i'm trying to learn to be better at it i felt this very acutely after atomic habits came out and over the course of the next the first like three months that it was out i was doing okay and then the book really started to take off and i was constantly feeling like i'm a very slow learner and that i should have been upgrading the level of which i was saying no to things and i was always like two or three months behind i was always on the hook for more stuff than i should have been and it was because i was saying yes too many things and there's this weird dynamic where success starts to eat itself so the the thing that was getting me all of these opportunities is because i was focused and i wrote a good book and because of that people were very interested in talking to me or sharing these new ideas and like there's all there's all these interesting new opportunities that come your way you know do you want to speak at this thing or what about these tv rights or how about this interesting opportunity or would you like to come to this you know cool conference or retreat or whatever and individually each of them sounds really fun and interesting but collectively if you start to say yes to all those things you don't have any more time to do the thing that got you those opportunities in the first place which is thinking clearly and writing a good book and so uh success like eats itself all these new opportunities come in and they squeeze out the thing that you were good at in the first place so it's a i don't know the other thing that's difficult about it and i still you know i'm close enough to the beginning of my career that i can still appreciate this and feel this for the first decade of my career i was trying to say yes to everything i was trying to capitalize on every opportunity so that i would have the chance now to say no to basically everything because you got a bunch of stuff coming your way so at first it's like outbound and you're trying to like capitalize on every opportunity you can and then there's this like rapid switch where now all of a sudden everything's inbound and you have to put up a tight filter and uh that can be a difficult lesson to learn it's almost a book bro the success can eat itself i've watched it happen over and over and over to people that the very thing that got them successful in your case the discipline and focus to write an incredible book they somehow lose over time with saying yes to all of these other things that were ancillary to it at one point you know that quote there's a quote from brian eno the he's a musician he says the way to get rich is to have one good idea and to never have another one and you just keep capitalizing on that thing and you don't distract yourself you know you don't keep saying yes to all this other stuff that's on the fringe but it's easy to say it's hard to do long-term success man is not always easy because of things like success can't eat itself a couple of things i want to ask you we're going to run out of time but i just like i'm fascinated by your work brother what do you do when you're slipping you feel yourself slipping on some of your habits is there something that you do immediately or that you notice are you i guess even is there a part of your awareness is like i'm more vigilant to see if i'm slipping than i used to be what are your thoughts on that yeah i do think i i do think my sense of it has improved over time i do think i've become a little more vigilant maybe early on like my early 20s maybe i didn't realize it when it was happening i'd be a little late it would take a week or two before i'd see it now i think i actually usually can tell within that day or the next day like pretty quickly if it's like oh you're starting to get off course like you missed a workout or you missed a you know like you missed a deadline with the writing this time or whatever and what i found it almost um it works so well for me that it's almost a crutch which is the number one thing that will always get me back on track is to have a good workout that will it will alway it will save every bad day that i have if i feel terrible if i'm in a bad mood if i'm not productive i'm not getting things done if i go to the gym and i get one good hour in then the whole day is kind of like rescued and it also resets my mind and i'm like after a hard workout and a good night's sleep your problems adjust to their appropriate size you know it's like it doesn't mean that it's not a problem still it just means that you see it clearly and you understand like the the scope of it and where it fits but i say that it's almost a crutch because sometimes i know that now and so if i'm having a bad day i'm like well i just need to work out and then i'll go do that but that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem i still haven't fixed the root cause yet so i can't rely on that too much but that's definitely the thing that does it best for me me too is there something that two questions left by the way thank you for this enjoying it man we'll do something together you're outstanding is there something that your top achievers do that you work with that you talk with that you interact with that the people that that aren't achieving at their level do i know that's a broad question but does something come to your mind where you go yep this is what they do yep yeah no i'll give you two things so first thing is they we could put this different ways but they reclaim their habits faster than most people or they they get back on track quickly so top performers make mistakes like everybody else but and i think most of us know this or have felt this from going through life which is it's almost never the first mistake that ruins you it's the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows it's like it's letting slipping up become a new habit that is the real problem and if you make one mistake you miss a workout or you miss a deadline or you flop on a speech or a presentation if you get back on track quickly if the next time the next iteration you don't miss and you're right back where you were before then your progress is generally maintained and you can just continue to advance from there but if you miss a workout and then one missed workout becomes two weeks and that becomes two months well now all of a sudden you have backslided a fair amount and you got to regain all that ground and so i would say you know another way to think about this is like a lot of people are focused on what can i achieve on my best day and that's kind of how they select their habits like what's the best thing i could do when i'm at my best but instead you could ask yourself what can i stick to even on my worst day and i think that that could be your baseline and if you try to raise that baseline a little bit so that your bad days are a little bit better than they were before then you never eat in to the compounding as much you don't lose that progress as much so i think that's pretty good they they respond from mistakes quickly and then the second thing is more of a a mantra or mindset a way to think about things than a specific action but this is a phrase that comes from frank slootman he's the ceo of snowflake the software company and basically it's something to the effect of narrow the focus up the quality increase the speed so narrow the focus do less stop trying to do so much it's very hard to be almost we could maybe even say it's impossible to be a top performer in a dozen different things like you have to choose what is what matters most so do less narrow the focus up the quality once you have selected those few things that truly matter do them at an exceptional degree right do them in a very high level way and then finally up increase the speed only once you've selected a few things to focus on and you do them at a high level then you can worry about shipping more consistently or increasing the volume or scaling the project or whatever and those are simple ideas but i think that top performers take those simple ideas very seriously and you'd be surprised how far they can take you if you do take them seriously so freaking good bro so good all right last question i run into you in a starbucks somewhere i'm a budding new entrepreneur with some dreams i could be 50 years old i could be 25 years old i said james just tell me where i should just give me one thing to start with one thing that you haven't said to ed milette so far in this interview that you know i want to create some change can you give me some place to start one thing to do one thought to have one action to take whatever it might be what would you say to them well uh so again i'll say two things uh the first is a piece of advice that was given to me when i was in that situation so when i was starting out one of the best things that somebody said to me early on was try things until something comes easily and i think if you break that phrase down there are two important pieces the first is trying things which means you need to have a philosophy of experimentation this is actually quite different than what a lot of people do when they start out a lot of people feel like what they need to do is read more and research more and try to i don't know discover everything that's out there and it's not that you shouldn't plan it's not that preparation isn't useful it is useful but at some point planning becomes its own form of procrastination and when that happens it's not useful anymore and so you have to have some willingness to experiment to try things to test stuff out and see what works specifically for you what matters most is not if it's like the best strategy that's ever been designed what matters is will it work for you and for your situation and you can only figure that out by experimenting so that's the first part and then the second piece is until something comes easily now the key distinction here is that does not mean that it is easy right it doesn't mean that it's going simply or smoothly it just means that the results are coming more easily than the other stuff that you had tried you may still have to work very hard to get that outcome but this i also think helps reveal like your strengths in the situation so a lot of people think like your strengths are just something that like must come effortlessly to you or something but actually in many cases your strength is the thing that's challenging or the suffering or the pain that you can handle better than most people so it's not that it's not challenging for you it's just that you seem to be able to handle that form of pain a little bit better than most people and i think if you look at a lot of top performers they're like that you know it's not it's not that athletes aren't working hard it's nothing not sweating it's not that it's not tough to be in the gym and like doing the next rep it's just that they can kind of handle that pain you know like that that form of suffering isn't that bad for them relative to the average person and so you're looking for those two qualities a philosophy of experimentation and the ability to get results in a way that allows you to handle that struggle a little bit better than others bro what an incredible conversation today i'm telling you incredible conversation like i can't wait to listen to this back it was so good i think you're incredible i really think you're incredible i think you're outstanding i want you guys following them okay so you're mainly a twitter guy right mainly twitter twitter and instagram yep twitter and instagram so you guys make sure that you're following james you're gonna want to get whatever he's working on right now when it comes back out i just wanna say everything to my audience too first i wanna thank james clear for being here today that was an extraordinary conversation and i appreciate you bro so thank you and then to my audience share this i don't know if you're all aware of this stuff there's all kinds of incentive and rewards now to share the show some of you are going to earn the right to come watch me do one live in the studio you're gonna come spend a day with me to you know be with one of me and one of my guests very soon there's all kinds of rewards out there to share the show and i know you're compelled to do it anyways the fastest growing show in the world that's why we're in this new agreement a new deal that we're doing and i'm grateful to our max out family for doing that so god bless all of you i hope you enjoyed today's program take care hey guys thanks for sticking around if you'd like more click the videos right here they're exactly what you need to see next and if you're new here hit subscribe and become a part of the max out community and tell me what you think about the videos in the comments below i read all of them every week and i select winners that get all kinds of prizes gear coaching calls with me make a comment

Channel: Ed Mylett

Views: 317,192

Keywords: james clear, james clear interview, james clear habits, atomic habits by james clear, james clear advice, atomic habits, atomic habits book, how to build good habits, how to change your life, how to improve your life, habits to improve your life, habits that will change your life, healthy habits that will change your life, change your life in 2022, habits to change your life, daily habits to change your life, here is how you change your life in 2022, tips to improve your life

Id: Kz0pNyS0plk

Length: 52min 58sec (3178 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021