James Clear: Atomic Habits | TJHS Ep. 108 (Full Interview)

if you're looking to make or break habits this is the episode for you today we have James queer author of atomic habits this is one of the best-selling books on habits in a decade and we've got a great in-depth interview with him right here right now on the Jordan Harbinger show enjoy James I'm curious about how this all started for you I know you had a massive concussion and it sounds like the most painful way to get a concussion - it was just nasty yeah it was brutal I so I was hit in the face of the baseball bat and that was between my sophomore and junior year of high school and it ended up being incredibly serious I mean my first 10 minutes or so I was like conscious enough to be walking around and answer some questions but I answered all the questions wrong what yours it was like 2002 I was like 19 98 you're like who's the president and Bill Clinton was George Bush so there's all that stuff was your buddy who did it was an accident yeah yeah it was total accident and then pretty quickly I went very rapidly downhill I'd you know couldn't really breathe on my own I had trouble swallowing I have all these seizures I think I had three seizures and the next like eight hours I had to be here cared to the hospital I was put into a coma overnight and eventually the next day I had been stabilized to the point where they kind of released me from the coma and let me try to breathe again and I realized I couldn't smell and so they gave me this apple juice box to blow my nose and like try to sniff the the box to see if I could smell something and that worked I was able to smell it but when I blew my nose all this air went through that cracks my eye socket and forced my eye out so how's that how's that so it was a it was a brutal injury and it took me eight or nine months to recover eventually my I did go back into place took about a month but that process was I don't know if I would say was a blessing in any way but it did teach me some lessons you know it kind of forced me to start small because I didn't really have a choice right I was so injured that I couldn't just have this like radical transformation and be back up and running the next day and so I had to just focus on building small habits and making little improvements that was kind of the first place that I practiced that in my own life was there any lasting aside from your eyeball popping out well you can see how I look now I used to be beautiful yeah I I don't know if there was any lasting impact memory wise but it's also like an impossible experiment to run right like who knows maybe I would be slightly smarter and I just never knew the difference have you had a brain scan since then I'm curious there was a lot of stuff in the first year - after that checkups and different things but I haven't done anything recently and because I haven't had any symptoms present themselves that have been like you know serious or impact my life in a measurable way I don't really think about it that much yeah it's been over 10 years now so that's that yeah that's a long time I did a brain scan with a friend of mine who's a neuroscientist and he gave me a brain scan to play this game that helps you whatever get onto theta waves it's a long story yeah that we don't have to get into here but he goes you have a concussion or you had one and I said no and he's like yeah you hear it is like here's the back of your head and here's all this I don't know if it's amyloid plaque or whatever but a partition scar tissue in the brain he's like we can work on you can work on this for like a couple of years and maybe fix it but you definitely have a concussion did you ever fall and I'm like well who hasn't fallen right and he's like yeah it looks pretty serious like maybe you fell as a kid and I asked my mom and she's like I don't know I mean you probably yeah you know somewhere but nothing where we took you to the hospital yeah that's interesting I I mean I do visually I have something like my nose is a little it's still hooked a little bit on one side I have a scar on one of my eyebrows from it and stuff but it's I would say it's all fairly much yeah yeah you can't even tell I mean I can't even tell and you're telling me about it so that's that's always a good sign it must have been pretty scary losing your sense of smell is the least of your concerns when your brain is that swollen you had to be put in into a coma so you decided to work on how did that lead to you being like I need to build a habit system well I you know I never would have said it that way right I didn't have like language for it just knew that I I just tried to get a little bit better each day whether that was recovering or try I just wanted to you know in a sense when you have a really serious injury like that you feel like you lost control of your life a little bit feels like it's out of your hands you know like oh this thing happened to me and so building little habits gave me this sense of control over my life I mean didn't make me feel it didn't radically transform my life overnight but at least made me feel like oh I'm in control again so I just did little things I mean when I when I went to college II or two later you know I focused on having my room be clean and like make sure I was prepared for class and stay and like all this stuff is small stuff but it started to build a sense of confidence a little bit and this is a little bit the story of my life kind of in a nutshell is the sense that I often start kind of slow but I just don't stop and so gradually that stuff accumulated and you know I ended up having a really good career once it was all said and done yeah I feel similar about my own habits I people go wow you know you're just really you dive right into something and it's like yeah but then if you look online for example Mandarin Chinese people go wow you learned three thousand words in Chinese and you've been studying for six years and you go if you look online there are people that have learned this number of words in like nine months mmm it's just they live in China they're way more intense but I also wonder did they leave China and can they still speak it and the answer to a lot of those if you look down and those threads online is like I forgot all my Chinese how are you guys keeping up with it and they're like we're not so it really it's a freight train it's a one of those that goes so slow that they can't have it cross roads because it blocks everything for like an hour it's just that it doesn't stop right like you said it's just it's not at the level of intensity it's it's the duration in a lot of ways I think I mean that's kind of a hallmark of habits and one of the things I say in the book is that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement the same way that compound interest builds up really slowly this kind of freight train metaphor it's very small in the beginning and those little 1% changes don't seem like much but then you get going and it just compounds to a remarkable degree over time and habits are like that you know like it's very easy to dismiss the a single choice I mean given day positive or negative right it's easy to be like you know I had a burger and fries for lunch versus a salad that it doesn't really matter on a given day your body looks the same in the mirror the scale is the same you don't really see how those 1% changes make a difference for you or against you but you compound that over 2 or 5 or 10 years and the consequences of those repeated decisions become like very apparent right it's the next 1,100 salads that make it right yeah both internal emotions and external stimuli affect our habits this is an interesting statement that it came early in the book in that the way that you feel and things that are happening around you affect your habits what is what does that look like in practice because I can be damn sure that things around me affect my habits in that I think most people think that's the only thing that affects their habits oh well look I don't have any good food in the house or and we'll get to that environmental stuff later on too but the internal emotions are the one where all these always kind of quick to say well this has nothing to do with me it's just that I'm at a burger place right now so I have to have I met in and out I can't not get rid of the fries so I think that I think it's probably true that all human behavior works this way but I also feel like that might be a little irresponsible or extreme for me to say so I'm not gonna say every time have the facts right but I but I think that it holds up in almost all cases and that is that we experience some bit of information which we could call a cue or trigger prompt or something but there's some bit of information usually often it's visual doesn't have to be you could any of the senses could work but you pick up on something that's an external cue from the environment so that's the external influence then you interpret that information in some way and there this is where the internal piece comes in and so you can imagine to people for example who see a pack of cigarettes on the table one person who is a smoker sees those and they interpret it as you know I need to smoke right now so there's this positive signal in their brain the other person who's never smoked it just looks like a pack of cigarettes them same way you have like two people walk into a casino the jingles and chimes the casino to one person or just background noise to a gambler it's like this signal that sets them off and they need to they feel as compulsive desire to you know play the slots or whatever that's kind scary it's it's scary not just for gamblers and smokers it's scary for anybody who's trying to quit anything that's around you all the time yes well I mean this is a crucial thing for breaking bad habits is that one of the first steps to take is to reduce exposure because if the craving or if that internal prediction arises naturally then you want to cut that off at the source there are other ways to break that habits too but that's a really good first step yeah we can dive into that in detail you know in a bit as well I just I think that that's fascinating because I think for most of us we think habits are a matter of willpower and some people are lazy and don't have it and that's why they're overweight or keep smoking or they just can't get their crap together so they're gambling all the time there's all these different kinds of labels we place on people which are all universally negative because we don't want to be that person right right well so let me give you an example that's a little less geared toward good and bad habits it just shows how this process works in general which is you can have say the news plays a story and you could have a Democrat watch this story and you could have a Republican watch the story same exact news segment but they interpret it in totally different ways and so my point there is that the external trigger is the same but the internal interpretation of that is different and the filter that we run our experiences through in life changes how we respond to it and so that's what I in my little habit model I call it the the second step which is like the craving or a prediction that comes before behavior and the prediction you make or the interpretation you make alters the way that you respond your book atomic habits which will link to in the show notes as we always do addresses both avenues to habit change so the emotional the internal emotional would you say route or path to habit change and the external router I don't know if they're two separate routes though well they're not I don't think they are but they often in the past have been talked about that way so there's been you know this whole body of research about external stimuli and a lot of the behavioral psychology research focus on that and then there's been this whole avenue of cognitive psychology which is very focused on your moods and emotions and thoughts and how those influence behavior and one of my goals in writing this book was to develop a model or a framework that I felt like integrated the two because it's very obvious that both influence habits and so we need to have a good way of understanding how that happens other ways that people fail or they try to radically change a bunch of habits I remember a friend of mine being like yeah man I gotta stop smoking and so to do that I think I got to stop drinking and to do that I think I got to stop going out I think I have to stop sleeping in so late and and I'm like you are so basically you want to wake up tomorrow and just not be you right right yeah now that there's anything wrong with that you have a lot of crap you should probably work on that but you can't do that in the example in atomic habits is this British Cycling Team example and I'm not a huge fan of cycling per se but I think we've all maybe heard the hints to this where they were they just smashed they completely transformed the entire team in ways that are surprising like painting the truck white mm-hmm you know and tell us about how this how this worked for them so this coach came in names Dave Brailsford and he had this this theory this approach is coaching style they called the aggregation of marginal gains and the way he described it was the one percent improvement in nearly everything they do so they they just looked for a bunch of 1% improvements related to cycling so they would do things like get slightly lighter tires for the bike or more ergonomic seats or they had their riders wear these electrically heated over shorts that kept their muscles warm while they were training to help them get a little bit more out of that that training ride and they did this in every area they could think of and a lot of the ones like the ones I just mentioned you know other professional cycling teams were doing that too but then there were other things that nobody else was doing so like they they hired a surgeon to teach their riders how to wash their hands so that they would reduce the risk of catching a cold or getting sick they figured out the type of pillow that led to the best night's sleep and had writers bring that on the road with them to hotels for you know different events and whatnot and his theory was if we could actually do this right if we could make all these little 1% changes then I think we could you know win a Tour de France in five years that was the like challenge he laid out to the team and he ended up being wrong they wanted toward France in three years and they repeated again the next year with a different writer and they've won the last two or three again so they've won like five the last six or something like that and then at the the Olympics in London in 2012 they won 60% of the gold medals available and that that core idea there that I think is one of the the main philosophies that I take in to how can we change habits and improve performance in any area it's this idea that it's not I say this in the conclusion of atomic habits it's not a single one percent change that's going to transform your life it's a thousand of them and so you need to like make all these small sustainable changes that are easy to do by themselves but then layer them on top of each other and this is actually one of the reasons I chose the phrase atomic habits for the book which is that atomic has multiple meanings on the one hand it means very small and I do think habits should be small and easy to do but on the other hand it means the fundamental unit of a larger system and that's kind of what we're talking about here how can we make a bunch of 1% changes these little atomic choices that layer into a larger system and then the third and final meaning of atomic is that it's the source of incredible power yes I think I know what I thought initially I was like wow nuclear habits not right yeah well that's kind of like the the overall arc of the book is that if you make changes that are small and easy the first meaning of atomic and you layer them together into an overall system the second meaning then you can get the third meaning which is this incredible power remarkable result in the long run the compound interest of personal development is what you called it happen to the compound interests of self-improvement yeah I like that sounds better than what I said which I can't remember already there's negative compounding and positive compounding though right like you can you can compound in the wrong direction sure I mean think about stress you know so like the daily stress of parenting or of sitting in traffic for a long commute every day or of slightly high blood pressure like those are little 1% things that are negative or you know where on you a little bit but over 10 or 20 or 30 years all of a sudden you've got plaque buildup and you have a heart attack or stroke or whatever and it's really from stress compounding it's not just one like major event that led to that right and this I think is one of the reasons why understanding habits is so important is that small changes can transform your results but only if you understand how they work and how to design them to your liking because habits are sort of like a double-edged sword you know they can either cut you down or they can give you a weapon to build you up and like blaze the path that you want and you need to understand how they work so you can avoid the danger half the blade and before we got on the mic we also talked about this threshold of and he gave a bamboo analogy which i think is react and interesting because I had no idea bamboo grows ridiculously fast that's all I knew I didn't realize it was kind of a build-up to it right well so this pattern of making small 1% change is not really seeing much of an outcome and then it compounding and like exploding later it's a hallmark of any compounding process is that the the biggest returns are the greatest results are delayed so with bamboo it grows these extensive root systems underground for like five years and then suddenly it explodes like 60 feet into the air and six weeks or whatever cancer is the same thing cancer perpetuates and grows in the body undetectable for a long time and then all of a sudden you know take over the body in months or your habits if we're gonna like translate that analogy to this is it's kind of the same thing you know you show up you what's the reward for going to the gym for three weeks or something it's not really a whole lot you know you show arnis yeah you're sore you worked hard your body doesn't really look that different the scale isn't that that different you really need to stick with it for a long the outcomes are delayed can you stick with it for a long time and that's kind of there's this the challenge of that with any building any habit is that there's this gap we put effort in early on and we think that our results should increase linearly it's like hey I'm working hard why am I not seeing something and you really need to kind of overcome this little valley of death or this valley of expectations where you're working hard but you aren't seeing anything so that you can get to the delayed outcomes where the real results are the languages and habits have a lot in common in fact of course you need habits to learn languages but I remember the first the first entire like eight weeks of our Chinese class back when I took classes with a group was learning the sounds of each letter in pinyin which is the Roman sort of anglicized version of these symbols that you see in Chinese because you can't read those they don't sound like anything so if you're Western so you have to sound out basically the whole alphabet and it's hard and we've learned that we did that for at least six out of eight weeks and everyone just quit it was like class number 122 people class number two to the second eight weeks yeah it was like four or five of us and then class number three before you can really speak you're just learning all these little basics there were there weren't enough people to keep the class go and we needed I think four people and we just couldn't get it so I started taking one-on-ones on skype and then now years later and this is just a couple of hours a week at most now I can have conversations in Chinese so if I have to learn if you said learn 25 Chinese words the first month of Chinese it would be impossible I wouldn't have any clue they all look the same it's just a bunch of squiggles on paper or whatever now I can probably I could learn that in like two days maybe or maybe even one day if I just had an hour to study and so you see that your vocab goes up really really high and even in the exams that you take for Chinese the first sort of certification level is like 120 words in the last one which is six is like 2500 words so if you look at level six in the beginning you're like there's no way I'm gonna learn this mmm but by the time you get to the point where you're just memorizing vocab to increase your conversational ability you could do it all in a few months yeah I don't know what the mechanism is there for that and why that happens but it definitely seems to be true and I think all of us have felt that in some way this we work very hard in the beginning we don't really see a whole lot for it and then suddenly you like I don't know cross this threshold and oh it's easier now well I would imagine it's like any sport if you if someone just says hey go play basketball but you've never run you've never thrown a ball you've never shot a basket before good luck all right but if you've already already in good shape you can run you can shoot you can pass then learning how to shoot a three-pointer is just a matter of combining different skills well habits are sort of like the foundation for mastery in that sense you know like imagine you're playing chess you need to know where all the pieces move automatically shared without thinking about it before you can think okay I'm gonna make this move and they're gonna make this move and then I'm going to do this and respond like that that level strategy and thinking can only come after the fundamentals are habitual eyes and automated and I think that's true for most areas you need to like master one unit of performance and then use that as like the stepping stone to the next one and the more habits that you integrate and the more fundamentals you can do without thinking the more you free up space to focus on like the higher levels of play and this is called what the plateau of latent potential that idea that we that the the most useful outcomes are delayed and that we work hard for a while without seeing results is what I call the plateau of lane potential you're not you're not your work is not wasted it's just being stored you know like there's a I mentioned this quote in the in the book but there's this great quote that sits in the San Antonio Spurs locker room and it's about this stone cutter and they say whenever you know I don't feel like working or remember I feel like giving up I think about the stone cutter who pounds a stone a hundred times without a crack showing and then on the hundred and first blow it splits in two and I know that it wasn't the hundred and first that did it it was all the hundred that came before and I think that that encapsulates what it feels like to build small habits a lot of the time one one single instance does not transform things but if you're willing to let it compound then you get something really useful is that why some people that I'm sure there's multiple reasons for this but it seems like that would be a big reason why some people are successful with habit change and others not first of all being aware of that idea and then second of all having the patience to get to that there is something about just knowing the idea that makes it a little easier to go through it right now I mean if that's your expectation going in rather than oh well I'll just work for three weeks and then it'll be done well yeah that gives you it's much easier to stick with it if you know that that's the game you're playing yeah but from a even more meta level yeah that is the game I mean habits if you don't do it if you don't stick with it it's no longer a habit so the the main thing is it's really kind of like an exercise and showing up and starting every day if you could just figure out how to get started and you did that for 300 days then you have a habit yeah yeah that's uh that pretty much encompasses my entire running career there and we'll get to that in a bit because there's a lot of there's a lot of things in this book and atomic habits where I went yeah that's how I started running I don't run anymore because of joint stuff it's not like oh I should get back to I'm consciously not doing it but I went from couch potato to running 10k like all the time and it was from some of the systems and habits that you talk about in atomic habits first though I want to discuss systems versus goals because I think a lot of folks especially people who run businesses or have big ideas they confuse these two things they've got goals or a dream list or even a dream board somewhere in their house we started on that stuff but they don't actually have any systems in place or they want to there's people that come up to me all the time virtually or in real life that say I really want to learn Chinese I'm working for this company for Apple or something and I got a I got to figure out how to learn this and I'm thinking so you have a goal to be functionally literate or whatever in Chinese and I just kind of go hey Gen send them the referral email to the teacher that they're never gonna use because I already know that unless somebody's comes in and says you have an hour a week I want to spend on a language and I thought about Mandarin is it possible I'm like that person's gonna learn Chinese right it's gonna take a decade but they're gonna be they're gonna be fluent in Mandarin at some point so this is coming from someone who I set goals for many areas of my life in for a long time I would set goals for the grades I want to get in school or for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym or how much revenue one of my business turn and at some point I realized okay I've achieved some of these but I failed on a lot of them so clearly setting the goal was not the thing that determined whether or not I would achieve that right like and you can see this in pretty much any domain there a lot of the time the winners and the losers have the same goals like every candidate who applies for a job they all want the job they have a goal of getting it every Olympian has the goal of winning the gold medal okay so if the goal is the same between winners and losers then it can't be the thing that distinguishes between the two so then I was like well what what does make the difference and I would say that it's the systems or process or your habits however you want to define that and one way to think about this is that a goal achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment whereas a building a system actually changes things for the long run so you know if you say you have a messy room and you want your room to be clean you could set a goal and get motivated and clean your room up now and you'll have a clean room you'll have achieve the goal but if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place then three weeks from now you'll turn around have a messy room again and so I think a lot of the time people think that what needs to change are the results or the outcome but what really needs to change is the process behind the results it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause and habits and systems are the cause so it's like solving for the input that goes in instead of just trying to figure out how to Corral everything into one output yeah if you fix the input see the outputs will fix themselves yeah I think that's really important and and that took me years and years and years to learn because of course I too had goals and then no real process maybe to get there or a process to get there but then everything else that's going into that is still garbage well and I don't think I just wanna say I don't think goals are useless you know like oh it can be useful to set a sense of direction or to know like what area is important to you they're useful for figuring out where to focus but once you've done that it's probably better to put the goal on the shelf and just focus on the systems and building the habits because that's what actually determines the progress and you talk about in atomic habits you talk about goals first mentality versus systems first mentality and I liked this because I think there's a lot of people who say well I'll be happy when and that's that goals first mindset where it's I'll be happy when I get a girlfriend finally and then all these other things are gonna solve themselves and that's actually backwards well you sort of box yourself into this either-or situation it's like either I achieve my goal and then I'm happy or anything else happens and I'm not because I didn't achieve the goal whereas the system is more like you're more focused on like building a certain identity you know so let's take weight loss is really common one so either I lose 20 pounds and I'm happy or I don't and you know I failed but with the system it's like well you know maybe your focus is on becoming the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or becoming the type of person who who sticks to a particular diet or eats you know three servings of vegetables a day or something like that and any time that you that you are running that system you're succeeding you don't have to wait for the the out of the ultimate outcome to be happy and I this is again this is something that I suffered with for a long time which is that I was always setting these goals and I was feeling like well then I can be happy when I reach that milestone rather than you know along the way I think that's human nature in a lot of ways is it actually when you look at the social media era that we're in we're like oh I need to have that and this is not me I don't care about this but I see this a lot in my inbox oh I need to have this cool Ferrari because look at this guy on the internet has one and that's like every seventeen year old two twenty-something entrepreneur entrepreneur on Instagram has that same thing well because of social media which i think is exacerbated this and just because of how the news cycle works newsworthy stories are only about outcomes and so when we see outcomes all day long on social and on the news we tend to overvalue them and overlook the process like you're never gonna see a news story that is like man eats salad for lunch today like this just not right it's only a story six months later when man loses a hundred pounds that's what you hear and I think that that causes us to overvalue the goal or the outcome and undervalue the process and the habits and the system behind it that's a good point we're kind of wired for that almost and I'm again I'm no neuroscientist but it seems like nobody's really interested I saw a friend of mine actually in this building in the restroom the other day and I go hey haven't seen you for a while did she lose weight or did you screw a beard he goes yeah I lost a hundred and ten pounds and I was like oh I'm really observant apparently you know like not like yeah I lost 15 pounds or ten pounds a hundred and ten pounds and I'm like I need looked a little different I mean he lost an entire like person yeah and but it's not cool to say like hey uh what's what's your what's your secret and he's like yeah working out all the time eating regularly not having 17 pancakes for breakfast I'm sure that's the that's the system but everybody just I'm sure people who want to know how he did it he it's like what workout are you doing or what diet are you on and the answer is probably really not that interesting it's almost always that way I mean the fundamentals are unsexy yeah and people know that we implicitly we kind of know this but this is one of the reasons I wrote atomic habits is to try to unearth what that how can we design this process a little bit more you know how can we take control of that and maybe make building the system the fun thing and the interesting thing rather than getting wrapped up in a particular outcome right because we got to commit to the process not the goal that's the key here otherwise it it's less likely to happen I don't want to say unlikely because a lot of people achieve goals all the time I would bet that if we found a hundred people who have achieved a goal and we were able to ask them a hundred questions we we'd find that they all have systems or at least the majority have systems well you can stumble into it but my question is can you design it you know like can you can you take control the process and I think you can and that was you know part of what I was daring to do and writing this I love the I don't know if you did this intentionally but you adapted this Special Forces motto that says we don't rise to the level of our goals we fall to the level of our systems did you consciously do that I don't know the special forces motto but there's a famous quote which I have us in the footnotes the book by our coloca it's a it's a I think believe it's a Greek philosopher but anyway he says something to the effect of we do not rise to the level of our expectations before the level of our trip oh that's okay so they adapted that so I thought I was thinking about that and I was like well this hat this definitely applies to habits right and I think that that's true that we do not rise to the level of our goals we follow the level of our systems yeah the original quote I think is something like we do not rise to the level of our expectations but we fall to or default to the level of our training right it probably isn't default if it's ancient Greek but whatever you get the idea it's in the book if you want to know the official one you get look at the footnotes there's this onion three levels of change this sort of onion that you created more that you outline in atomic habits one is outcomes or goals on the outside the second one is that process on the inside that we've kind of been discussing but the and you hinted at this earlier the the golden child of the that little tender middle of that onion is identity and I think that's important because that really when I examine my own goals achievement whatever it does come down to identity and to just to continue beating the dead horse of my language learning when I was in high school I was an exchange student in Germany and that's where I learned German but before that I was a miserable terrible French student and I didn't care and I got C's in French it was my worst grade in high school by far and so I air quotes here wasn't a language learner and my parents and I were very concerned that I'm gonna go to Germany and as a non language learner or nun not someone who's not good at languages have to then go and learn this even harder language an informal setting well it turns out humans are actually really good at learning languages especially when they go into it thinking that they can do it mmm so I resisted for three to four months in Germany going well I'm not a language learner so it's okay that I don't understand everything and then one day I went this sucks I don't have any friends I've got to figure this out and then once I decided that I could probably learn some German my path to fluency was rapid yeah extremely rapid so I think true behavior changes identity change and it's this shifting of your self-image your beliefs or the way you look at yourself because it's one thing to say that I want this and something very different to say I am this so you can you can see how this influences Yummie your example there is a good one people walk around with beliefs like that all the time I'm not a language learner I'm not good at math I'm terrible with directions and not gonna remembering someone's name yeah and once you have those type of once you adopt that identity it becomes very easy to just reinforce that over and over again and so these three levels that you mentioned outcomes process and identity all three matter but I think the key is that you want the direction of change to be in the right way through the right arrow so if you start with the outcomes you can start with the result then you're like oh I really want this thing and here's my plan for getting it and most people just never think about the identity that comes underneath that like they think I want to lose weight or I want to be skinny and if I follow this diet then I'll be skinny and then they they don't really give any thought to the the beliefs behind their behavior but if you start the other way around if you start at the identity and you say all right who's the type of person that could lose weight well maybe it's the type of person who doesn't miss workouts then you foster you start with that identity say okay I want to become the type person who doesn't miss workouts here are the habits I need to build and then whatever results come just come naturally so most people focus on the results and build a plan and let the identity come naturally but that rarely works because their beliefs like conflict with your actions but if you start with the identity and you build the habits to reinforce that then the results just could come on their own so if our beliefs are incongruent with what we want to happen we can't we're shooting ourselves in the foot consistently it's really hard I mean imagine two people who are trying to quit smoking the first person you show them a cigarette and they say oh no thanks I'm trying to quit and the second person you show them a cigarette and they say oh no thanks I'm not a smoker they're both turning it down but the first person still identifies as someone who smokes even if it's like non consciously they're like on trying to do something that I'm not trying to quit the second person no longer identifies as a smoker it's not part of their identity it's like oh no thanks I'm not a smoker and it is very it's much easier to take an action that is in alignment or congruent with your identity than to do something that conflicts you might be able to do it once or twice or have the willpower to muster up and you know push through it but you need willpower every time in the long run it's really hard it's really hard to stick with the behavior that conflicts with your beliefs and I would say actually you probably can't do it I would agree with that because for me to resist a cigarette quota I'm not even resisting it I'm not a smoker exact gusting I wasn't it doesn't bother you there's absolutely no if people are smoking around me I want to leave I don't go oh man I wish I could do that right now that's the the exact opposite it works the same way for good habits you know like they're for many people going to the gym feels like a sacrifice it's like oh it takes hard work and effort but there are plenty of people out there who going to the gym every week is just normal for them it's not it doesn't feel like a sacrifice just like this is just who I am yeah and so once you've adopted an behavior as part of your identity you're really not even pursuing behavior change anymore because you're just acting in alignment with the type of person you already believe that you are that makes sense and that I had to do that of reading I mean people go wow you read so many books and I'm like talk to me three years ago and I probably read maybe two or three books in a year now I've probably read that many a week this is so that example right there is a good example of how this process works which is so that if you believe that this is true what we're saying the natural next question is okay well how do I upgrade and expand my identity right like how do I shift it so that I believe something new about myself and this is where we come back to small habits because it's kind of like every action you take is a vote for the type of person that you believe that you are and so each time you do this thing each time you habits are how you like embody and identity you know so each time you read a book you are embodying the identity of being a reader right every time you go to the gym you're embodying the identity of being a fit person every time you make your bed you're embodying the identity of someone who's neat and organized and if you embodied that identity enough if you cast enough votes for being that type of person it's like evidence builds up and as that evidence accumulates now you have a reason to believe it and this I think is like a key distinction between the importance of habits and what some people say about like fake it till you make it or something like that fake it till you make it is asking you to believe something about yourself without evidence right it's saying like oh just fake it and believe that but that does not work really well for the brain because beliefs that don't have evidence are called delusional so if you try to hold on to them for a long time it doesn't work the brain doesn't want to latch on to that but if you can build small habits and accumulate evidence now you have a reason to believe it a reason for that identity to be rooted in something and this I think is like ultimately one of the real reasons habits matter so much it's true they can get you you know you can be more productive or you can make more money you can lose weight habits can give you all these things and that's great but the external results are just one factor the real reason habits matter is because they provide evidence for the type of beliefs that you have about yourself and ultimately you can reshape your sense of self your self-image the person that you believe that you are if you embody the identity enough so the goal is and and I think this is from atomic habits the goal isn't to run a marathon it's to become a runner right the goal isn't to read the book it's to become a reader or to read 100 books yeah it's not about one single instance it's about developing the identity of being that person I think a lot of people find challenging in this that they say well look I wasn't brought up to save money or invest or become savvy with real estate or to read books or to be good at in school or and I heard this even yesterday with Freeway Ricky Graz he was like look I lost I bought a ton of properties before I went to jail and then they weren't being managed well when I was inside and all and I thought how did you not figure out how to take care of hundreds of millions of dollars somehow did you how do you not just hire like one attorney to maybe manage all this and he goes well you know my family and friends we just we were not brought up to and I can't remember exactly what he said but he basically just went well these are all the people and it's very forgivable mistake those are all the people he trusted as a career criminal at that point in his life to hold on to his millions of dollars of property he didn't want to go hey random white dude who I've never met here's the keys to my kingdom he trusted all these people that were around him and they weren't brought up in this way but I thought wow you know we all kind of do that it's some level well my whole family's really overweight so here I am you hear that all the time that's it yeah that's an interesting insight I talked about this in the book when I write about social norms but whatever try we are all part of different tribes so some of the tribes are really big like being an American or being Australian or being French or something like that some of the tribes that were part of a really big like being an American or being French or something like that and some of the tribes are really small like being a member of your local neighborhood or being a member of your CrossFit gym or volunteer organization or whatever it is but all of those tribes have a set of shared expectations and a set of like shared social norms and habits that and behaviors in general that align with those expectations are very attractive and we want to do them and habits that conflict with those are very unattractive and so like in that case it's possible that reaching out to somebody else outside of the tribe would have been a violation of trust in a certain way and so that's not an attractive thing to do and that we all experience that in to varying degrees and so it's hard to to figure out the best solution to that but you need to constantly be assessing your current tribe and think about whether it aligns with the habits that you want to build what about this habit loop that you've got here we talked at we hinted about it I think in the very beginning cues this really is like the I don't know what you'd call this is a road map to habit creation or the road map to how habits work I think that's right and that's I mean I was trying to build when I put it together so a lot of people were familiar with do hIG's habit loop from power of habit or a cue routine reward and that actually kind of had its origins in the 1930s BF Skinner had the stimulus-response reward model he's this famous psychologist but anyway that is a good example of the external influences on behavior which we talked about earlier but we need to account for the internal influences as well and so my model has four stages so first there's a cue there's some bit of information that you come across second there's what I call it craving which is really the prediction that you make about the queue and I'll give you an example in a second third there's the response so the actual habit itself or the behavior that follows I think this model works for not only habits but most human behaviors and then fourth there's some kind of result which I would call the reward there's a benefit that comes from doing the behavior how it serves you and these four stages form a feedback loop and if you repeat them enough then a habit becomes ingrained or behavior you can do more or less automatically and it's really what we're describing so the process of learning it's how you learn a new behavior how you learn a habit so let me give you an example if you walk into a kitchen and you see a plate of cookies see the plate of cookies that's a visual cue next your brain makes an interpretation a prediction and we call that the craving so it's like oh the cookies they're gonna taste good so I should go eat them then you have the response you eat the cookie and then the reward is it's tasty it's sugary whatever and so that closes the feedback loop and teaches you hey next time you see a cookie you should eat it again because it's tasty right but you can just as easily imagine a scenario where let's say you were eating in the other room and you just finished dinner you just had three cookies you're full you walk in you see another plate of them in the kitchen and now your interpretation is different you see the same cue but you're like oh I'm stuffed I don't want to eat anything so different interpretation or different prediction and so now you avoid the cookies you don't eat anymore response is different outcome is different and so that's where we account for kind of this internal state your your internal state determines how you interpret the cue which then leads to the response and so that's how we kind of both get the external and the internal influence in this model and everyone does this if you don't if you can't leave an example if the cookies aren't clear enough for you light switches phones yeah let's say you walk into a room it's dark that's the cue mmm you've reached that you want to be able to see craving there's some kind of prediction you reach for the light switch from and flip it on response you can see reward so I mean that and that happens in half a second and you do it all the time a time you walk into a dark room right as loop is like endlessly running and you're you're doing this without even thinking about it right you're building habits all the time depending on the study you look at habits account for 40 to 50 percent of our behaviors on any given day and this is a stuff like and does that mean like anything that we do basically yeah pretty much I mean you know tying your shoes or flipping on the light switch or unplugging the toaster after each use like stuff that you don't even think about all the time you're always using it you unplug the toaster after each use my wife does I do too remember why I started doing that which is like such a random and perfect example because I thought other people unplug the toaster huh I thought we were the only weird as that unplug the toaster I tried to I did a lot of research for the book and I tried to find a lot of examples that were things like that people feel like wait I thought I was the only one that does that and I remember like maybe I saw it in the instruction manual for the toaster it's like hey there's no off button you just have to unplug it but then you have to admit to being the type of person who reads the instruction that's true Jen do you have any idea why we unplug the toaster after each use yeah we don't know no clue yeah yeah anyway but it is endlessly running and so you're always and again in a way what I'm describing is the process of learning and so the brain is always learning based on what experience you're going through next and then it updates its predictions and approaches the next time around based on your past experiences in your current situation and when the situation's repeat themselves when you kind of come across the same context again and again then you end up form a habit because you come up with the same solutions over and over I mean in a sense habits are like a as you go through life you face problems and some of those problems are big and some are small like your shoe is untied and you need to tie your shoe and the more that you face the same problem the more your brain starts to automate the solution you know so at first you have to think carefully about tying your shoes but after you do it 100 times or 500 times now you can do it without thinking and you can have a conversation while you're doing it and it frees up mental capacity to focus on other things and that's the role of habits there are these automatic solutions to repeated problems that you face I always I was the last kid in kindergarten to learn how to tie his shoes though so I never understood there was it there like here's the hard way and here's the easy way you know hard ways to loops and the easy way is one loop and then you do the yeah and I thought if there's two ways to do the exact same thing one is harder why would anyone learn why are we all teaching it right yeah why would anyone not just do the easy way and so there's kind of maybe a protest on my phone I'm curious what other habits the toaster unplugging you said you research you wanted to find things that were other people thought this is I'm the only way this what else did you find cuz I bet that's interesting so a lot of people cover their mouths whenever they laugh a lot of people apologize before they ask a question and it's like these are just two bitch'll things they don't even think about like I'm sorry but and then you know so there yeah there I used to cover my mouth when I left but I think it was like a insecurity thing as a kid I stopped doing it sure I mean there are a variety of reasons for it but yeah yeah that makes sense yeah I think there's and of course the I'm sorry but is like I'm sorry for interrupting its again it's probably a social status thing you know if you're if you were the youngest kid or maybe you weren't you grew up in a place where you weren't supposed to talk in class that was a lot of things we don't need your questions just follow what the teacher says there's a lot of that and it might be generational - that's so interesting so we can edit the elements of the loop to change our behavior of course whether we want to build a habit or break the habit so this I mean this is kind of the the backbone of the book which is what I call the four laws of behavior change and so I came up with a law of behavior change for each stage so for cue it's make it obvious for craving make it attractive for response make it easy and fair reward make it satisfying and you can think of those four laws as sort of like levers and when the levers are in the right positions building good habits are easy and breaking bad habits is an easier task and when they're in the wrong positions it's really hard and so they're sort of like I prefer things that are like a toolbox rather than a formula I don't I don't think there's one way to change behavior sure but there are a set of principles and tools that can work depending on the situation and there are certain things that kind of do need to be there each time even if you can do it in your own way like I remember I played baseball for a long time and they would say when you're swinging a bat you can do you can have your own swing but at the end of the day the bat needs to be in the zone to hit the ball like there are certain things that you can't overlook and habits are in a similar regard like there there's a variety of tools you can use and there are a couple fundamentals kind of everybody needs that dialed in so the four laws of behavior change let's start with Q and go through these because I I think some of us who are good changing our habits or at least better than terrible which is where most of us are yeah we do some of this stuff but when you when you really do apply these four laws you can pretty much do anything or you can create any habit or break any habit I would imagine I would say that people probably do a few of these like you'll be familiar with them but it's really figuring out how they work together and this honestly this was where my knowledge was when I started work on the book I had a variety of ideas that were related to habits but I didn't have one overarching system for understanding how they all worked and we talked earlier about the importance of having a system for making progress and so one of my you know the PERT one of the purposes of writing this book was to develop a system for building good habits and breaking bad ones so the first law of making things obvious it's seen this itself almost seems obvious like well sure yeah if you keep the spinach in the refrigerator I'm gonna have more salads but it's not just that and it in you're right it has to be in concert with other things where it's not gonna happen so here's how the thing about it for any behavior when you want to build or break you can map it out and think about all the little things that need to happen for that behavior to occur and then you try to figure out what portions of that you need to make obvious so I'll give you an example of good habit and a bad one so for many years I would brush my teeth twice a day but I wouldn't floss consistently and if you map that behavior out there were a couple things that needed to happen first I needed to suit the floss was like in a drawer in the bathroom and so I just wouldn't remember that it was in there sometimes I'll just forget about it and look at the second thing that sounds kind of silly but I didn't like the feeling of wrapping floss around my fingers like yeah it was just like uncomfortable so I bought some of the pre-made flossers and I got a little Bowl and I put them in it and set it right next to my toothbrush so now it's I know so now it's right next to the toothbrush and so just that little change of making it obvious that was pretty much all I needed to do to build that habit that was the only lever I needed to pull and and now you know I do it twice a day without thinking about it so that's a good that's an example making it good oh yeah so so that's an example of making it obvious then an example for for a bad habit I don't know like think about a lot of people watch too much TV or don't want to play as many video games that do or whatever and if you walk into pretty much any living room where do all the couches and chairs face they all face the TV so it's like what is this room design to get you to do it's the TV room now and so you can their varying degrees that you could do this to like you could take a chair and turn it away from the television or you could take the remote control and put it inside a drawer so you're less likely to see it you could put the TV inside like a wall unit or a cabinet so that adds doors and you know it's behind it so you don't see that as much you could also increase the friction associated with the task so you could like take batteries out of the remote so that it takes an extra five or ten seconds to start it up each time and maybe that's enough time for you to be like do I really want to watch something or am I just like doing this - yeah or you could unplug the television after each use and then only plug it in when you can say the name of the show that you want to watch so again like you just can't turn netflix on and find something and then you know the most extreme version is you could take the TV off the wall and put it in the closet and only take it out when you really want to watch something you know but the point here is and this is true for any kind of environment design which is relevant to this idea of making obvious is that you want to increase the steps between you and the bad behaviors and reduce the steps between you and the good behaviors and if you live in an environment where you're kind of being nudged in like a hundred different ways then it becomes easier to fall into good habits and I do want to say as well that make it obvious for all of these these laws for all for lost behavior change you want to build a good habit you've got make it obvious if you want to break a bad habit you just invert it so make it invisible and a lot of the time if you can reduce exposure to the cue the bad habit will fall away without you having to do much more you know like if you if you don't want to eat as much that stop following food blogs on Instagram if you don't want to spend as much money on on technology don't follow all the tech review blogs like you're constantly being triggered by that stuff and you have to resist those prompts all the time so just make it easier on your life and design a place where you're getting triggered or prompted to do the things you want to do rather than things you're trying to resist I love the concept of friction I feel like that's something that I've had to work with a lot even now I look at things that I do that I don't like to do and we'll go to like See's Candies which is like this old school itself is delicious right and occasionally if it's the holidays or something there's stuff around it's like let's go or we're at the mall it's like let's go there and get some samples and then but the problem is when you go and you get the samples in you're like whoa now we have to buy something so you bought something and then it's sitting on your living room table facing the TV of course and then at night you're like oh we have a whole box of chocolates here right I'm not gonna go watch Netflix and go hey you know what we're out of chocolates let's go to the mall and go buy them yeah yeah if they weren't there you wouldn't even bother with I would never bother with it you know it's crazy one that I've noticed for myself if I buy beer and I keep it in the front of the fridge where I can see it as soon as I open the door then I'll just drink one each night because it's there sure but if I buy a six-pack and I put it in the back of the fridge like under the Shelf where I don't like ant really see it and it's like low on the lowest shelf it'll sit there for like a month and I don't even remember that it's there so the question I have is do I really want to drink a beer each night or do I just do it cuz it's there and I think so many of our behaviors we just do it because it's obvious not because we actually want it I like unwinding to play I'll play some mindless video game or something to unwind and I usually will it's pretty rare actually but some days I'm like I really want to just decompress I don't think it engages enough of my brain where if I'm stressed out about something I can't think about it so I'm playing some other Halo or whatever yeah but I find that I'll end up laying down on a weekend decompressing and I'm like next to the Xbox playing something on my iPhone and the reason is friction all I have to do is tap that icon on my phone on there otherwise I got to turn on the TV plug in the Xbox put the thing in turn it on you know get the controller out make sure it's charged probably repair it or whatever mm-hm and I'm just never doing that the same principle applies for digital spaces as it does you know I've the examples I just gave were for the actual physical world but you can do it with your phone - you know like I all my social media icons I have them on a separate screen like my home screen is just blank so I need to swipe over twice then open up a folder and you know to get and it's not a lot right it's just an extra like three seconds but the point is I don't want to mindlessly tap Instagram just because it's right there in front of me right I wanted to be a more intentional decision and that's just a way to design your digital environment the same way you can do the physical one that's a good idea I did put for a while I had my email app on another screen and then I don't know somewhere long I went it's too many it's too many clicks there are too many swipes why isn't this in my top four or whatever it is and then I went oh right because like freaking took it out of there so that I don't check my email habitually right every five minutes and then pull-to-refresh I've now you know turning off notifications is a very common example of reducing exposure to stuff but I've now permanently keep my phone and do not disturb mode so I just don't get I don't give a tax or get a call I don't hear it yeah but like most adults now I'm checking my phone you know I think the average person now checks it it goes up every year because we keep getting more and more dicier our phones but I think the average person checks their phone over 150 times a day now that's obscene so and I say have a lovely doing that yeah I have it on do not disturb mode and if I miss a call or miss a text well I'm probably gonna be looking at my phone in four minutes so it doesn't you know it doesn't even matter I just call him back I resisted getting this Apple watch for years because of that exact same thing I went I do not need something that's gonna make it easier for my phone to remind me of something I actually found that this counter-intuitively makes me check my phone less mmm because I'll go oh a text then I'll go I don't need to look at that right now yeah or instead of going oh I have an alarm that's going I need to check how much time is left well no you don't have to pick up your phone and do that you can just look at your watch now I mean here's another example of making it invisible or reducing exposure to bad habits but I try and this doesn't work for every job but as best I can each morning I leave my phone in another room it's not in my office with me until lunch so I get like a block of you know four hours or so where I don't have to worry about you know being triggered by that or because it's just completely out of sight out of mind this is just that it's the same principle what is the habit scorecard this was kind of a good practical drill or exercise for people to do I think one way to consider the process of behavior change is that to do it in any reasonable way or to do it in a to have any control over the process it always starts with awareness you're not aware of your habits you can't really design them in any meaningful way so the habit scorecard is a way to improve awareness about your habits and the the method is really simple you wake up in the morning and then you just start to write out all the behaviors that you do as you walk through your day so it's like I wake up I turn off my armed I check my phone I go to the bathroom I take a shower I get dressed I brush my teeth where all that stuff whatever the order is and you can do it with as much detail as you want I think the first time it really helps to be pretty granular about it and then once you have that list you just go through a new market you know do I think this is a net positive habit or a negative habit or a neutral one and that helps you kind of understand like what areas should I be focusing on to change and what things are already going well and it just makes you more aware of your behavior so it gives you like a good foundational starting point for making some changes and the goal is not to like judge yourself you know son to feel guilty about it it's just to literally like observe yourself and actually see what you do there's a lot of our habits are mindless so we go through and we create this inventory of habits right and then we decide which are good and which are bad this this goes hand-in-hand with making things a little bit more obvious right because we bring that we bubble those habits up to the level of awareness or what we're calling it out right if it's not obvious to you you don't have much chance to change it right it's just that inventory helps make it more you helps make you more aware of your behavior and what's this Diderot effect that kind of leads into another practical that I liked but I'd never heard of this before yeah so there's this French philosopher named Denis Diderot and he was relatively poor for most of his life but he was kind of well-known because he wrote this encyclopedia that was it was one of the more popular ones of his days in the 1700s I think and anyway so his name was known but then his daughter was getting married and he didn't have enough money for the wedding and Catherine the Great who was the Empress of Russia at the time she heard about him and like kind of you know felt bad for him was like oh you know I really like his encyclopedia she was just huge book lover and so effectively what she did was she said I'll buy your library but it was more like a gift she basically paid him like 100 what would be the equivalent of like a hundred grand today or a hundred twenty grand and said I'll buy your library here's the sum of money and so dinner all of a sudden didn't have money but now he had more than he and they needed so he was able to pay for the wedding and then he also was like all by myself this nice robe to go along with it so he got this robe and then he realized this robe was nicer than the chair that I'm sitting in yeah I need a new chair and there's like well now the chair is nicer than the rug so I needed a rug and now my furniture is out of date so I need a new kitchen table he bought art from do askus and he got like all these new things like a lottery winner yes I was two Ferraris it actually happens all kinds of people it happened to me I got a new car and I started buying all this stuff I didn't have before I bought like a shovel to put in the back in case I got trapped in snow I bought an extravagant purchase I bought it I bought a seat belt cutter the oh yeah in case I got trapped in the water or something you know I bought a flashlight to put in their umbrellas I've got a little bag that had like extra clothes in it and no point I've been driving for like a decade right I didn't need any of the stuff before but now suddenly I need to get it and this is what's called the Diderot effect this idea that a single purchase spirals into more consumption and behaviors in general often work this way which is why I bring the story up in the book it's that behaviors often come in like a chain you know you go to the bathroom and then you need to wash your hands so when you wash your hands you think oh the towels are dirty and do the laundry and anything oh we're out of laundry detergent so I need to go to the store and so like it all it there's kind of this endless chain of behavior that happens and because behaviors happen in bunches like that they're related to one another that actually is a really useful way to build better habits you can sort of use it to your advantage you can start to tie the habit you want to something that came before and use that you kind of use this momentum to your to your advantage how do we actually do that in practice you know this before we get into that reminds me of my brother-in-law he got a great deal on a curved LCD monitor or something like that for his computer so he got one and he's like oh this is gonna be great and then it turned out his video card didn't support the monitor so he had to go get a new video card for his computer and then he got that and he went oh man my processor doesn't support this video card so he went and replaced the entire computer because he got a great deal how he ended up with a new computer new video card new monitor and he's like that was not that was that was not the point yeah it's not the plan yeah some deal I just got there so we can use this to our advantage this idea that you know one bit behavior kind of leads into the other and I refer to the habit stacking I first learned it from BJ Fogg he's this professor at Stanford and I think he calls it the tiny habits recipe but the idea is the same which is that before or after certain behavior I will do the next behavior after this habit I will do that so for example you know say you want to start meditating you could say well after I make my morning cup of coffee I will meditate for 60 seconds so you just come up with like this rule basically and you tie your new behavior to your old one and the great thing is you can start to like and once you get good at this you can insert habits into the appropriate place in your life so we just talked about that habit scorecard that inventory that we create well you can look at that list that you have of your habits and you can figure out where is the best place to insert this new habit so let's say that say that part of your your morning routine is that you wake up you make your bed you take a shower so you've got those three in a row and you want to build a habit of reading more each day well you could say I wake up I make my bed and then you insert the new habit you say I'm gonna place a book on the pillow then I take a shower and so that's your new habits really simple it's really easy and when you get into bed at night you've got a book waiting there reminding you obvious and for you to read and now you can read a page or whatever and so you can use that same kind of strategy pretty much anywhere you just have the set of rules that you use this reminds me of the environmental habit change or the idea that creating an environment around what we want is is the way to go and we talked about this a little bit with Benjamin Hardy who's been on the show before I read that book I haven't because I know Ben you I think you'll you might you might dig it or you might know everything that's in it already but it's it's really good as well and the environment matters more than say your motivation in the moment you really do structure everything around you to make sure that you've you're almost funneling yourself into the right course of action mmm how can we set up our environment you gave some clues already as to how this might happen but how can how do you set up your environment to make sure that you are set up for success on a daily basis yeah well most of it is what we mentioned previously about kind of making the good habits obviously bad habits invisible the second aspect is friction which we talked about so BJ Fogg that same professor I just mentioned he I think he had this example where he wanted to eat he liked eating popcorn but he didn't want to eat as much of it and so he took popcorn out of his pantry walked down the hallway and went into the garage and climbed up the ladder and put it on the highest shelf in the garage so if he still wanted to eat it he could just go out and get it it's only gonna take a minute but if he's designing for his default behavior for like his lazy action not going to go out there and get it and that's kind of one of the ways of the principles you can think of for environment design is how do I design an environment where the default option is the better option the good choice and the unproductive or unhealthy action is more difficult and harder to get to and if you can do that then often good habits will just kind of result naturally I love this idea I actually uh again not consciously used this a lot in my own life for example I wanted to work out Lauren I love kettlebells because I feel like they're versatile and you really every time I use them just ridiculously sore which is always kind of a good sign yeah but the problem is you get these ugly kettlebells and then they sit around you end up piling clothes on top of them so I went and I got these on it ones that are like zombies and superheroes yeah yeah yeah so I was like these look cool I can leave him out there a conversation piece so I'll leave him out so walk past him all the time I'm like all right well I got to use these yeah so same principle you know I had a friend who he wanted to get better at playing violin so he left the violin in the middle of his living room so they saw at the time you know most people their musical instruments are tucked in a closet or in the corner or something you don't see it you don't use a drain your laundry on the ab machine right yeah so the idea that we create our own world instead of just living in a world that's designed by other people that we consume I think is powerful well you're always your entire life you are existing inside some environment and most of the time you're existing inside environments that you don't think about right you're like and in that sense you're kind of like the victim of your environment but you don't have to be the victim of it you can be the architect of it and that's kind of the core idea here is that you want to be designing the spaces that you live and work in so they serve your purpose rather than fighting against whatever space you happen to be in right like moving all the chocolates aside and the pizza aside so that you can make room for your salad never gonna happen right oh yeah if you're surrounded by it I mean it's we talked about earlier if See's Candies available you're gonna be either yeah you know and and you will love every second of it but then you look in the mirror and you go damn you sees why why me of a victim what about the the locations themselves you you talk about kind of mapping a location to a habit I think that's kind of genius you know my garage has a car in it yes but it also has weights and matze I don't have to go and set all that crap up it's it's happening so one way to think about environment is that it's not a physical place or a thing it's a relationship and so the really you really should think about like what is the relationship I have with these items or these places in my life you know for one person their couch might be the place where they read each night and for another person their couch might be the place where they eat a bowl of ice cream and watching Netflix for an hour each night and it's not necessarily the thing it's the relationship you have with the thing and that can be sometimes that can be hard if you already have a relationship with a particular space in your life whether it's your living room or your work space or whatever you basically already have a set of habits that are tied to that context and so if you try to build a new habit in that same context without changing the environment at all it's kind of like you're trying to overpower the relationships that you already have it's like you're fighting against your default mode so you either need to change the environment or it's often easier to build a new habit in a new environment because you don't you don't have any like previous stimuli but you're trying to overpower so if you want to build like a journaling habit it might be easier to stop it say a new coffee shop or something where you don't have any context and then this becomes the place where you journal then doing it at a place where you know this is usually where I play video games that make sense and that solves the objection that a lot I think a lot of people might have which is look I live in a shoebox in Manhattan I don't have 20 different locations for new habits like this is where I you can so that does solve that situation you go somewhere else but also you can employ this is sort of like a kindergarten model so kindergarten classrooms have different activity zones and so it's like this is where playing happens and this is where reading happens and this is the you know this is the reading corner this is whatever and you can do the same thing in your apartment you know even if you just have a studio you could say this is the chair where I read or this is the table where I write or whatever and by having them very well defined zones it becomes easier it doesn't make it flawless but it going becomes easier to fall into the write habit because it's like all right it's time to read I need to go sit in the chair and you become conditioned that like this area is where that happens what if you have a ton of bad habits you just move like this is my smoking balcony this is my cocaine table but I got crap I got to change my apartment it's funny that you mention that but they're actually even studies done on this which find that it's easier for people to build new habits when they're on vacation because they leave all those relationship and those relationships the environment behind now sometimes that gets brought up because people say oh yeah always start a new habit on vacation but I think that's a little bit of a ridiculous suggestion because two weeks later so but the idea the the core principle is true which is if you have a bunch of if your behaviors are tied to all the context of your round right now you either need to change the context or find a new one so that you can make that process easier on yourself that that completely makes sense I love I love the idea that I love the idea that things are tied to locations and I do find honestly that moving around I've moved a lot has helped build habits not necessarily always good ones right but definitely helps you build habits cuz you're in a new routine you don't even all those cues are gone you know you're resetting everything you're building new cues you're building new routines your environments completely different like it really does have this nice recipe if you do it consciously if it's unconscious welcome to hell you're reconstructing your entire life well this is one of the challenges for people who travel a lot for their job is that they're always changing context and habits are tied to a particular context so it can be hard to build a new habit if you're always moving so in that situation what I would recommend is trying to find a part of the process that repeats itself even if the context is different and try to tie it to that so you could say say you're always on the road you're a consultant or something you could say after I check in at the hotel then I will look up where the grocery store is so I can buy a healthy meal or after I set my bags on the bed I will do 20 push-ups or something like that and so the type of the action that repeats itself even though the context is different becomes the prompter cue for the new habit that's great yeah I like that and I like the idea of what you call temptation bundling tell us about what that is that's this is novel I haven't seen this before so the temptation bundling comes from a researcher named Katie milkman who's at the in school she's at University of Pennsylvania but the this addresses the what I call the second law of behavior change so it's make it attractive and remember after you see a cue or interpretive cue pick up on a cue you interpret it you have a prediction something it follows and if that prediction is positive then you have this craving or this motivation to perform the habit and temptation bundling is a way of making it more likely that you'll feel motivated to do the habit that you want to do so what the way it works is like this you have something you you pair something that you need to do with something that you want to do so one of my favorite examples this student this engineering student in Dublin and he was always watching Netflix but he was like dude I need to get in shape like I know I need to be exercising more so he rigged up this little engineering thing he tied his exercise bike a stationary bike to his computer so that Netflix would only run if he was riding the bike and so he essentially genius took something he needed to do riding the stationary bike and linked it to something he wanted to do which was watch Netflix and there are many ways you can do that right like you could say all right I really need to see my relative you know my aunt that always annoys me but like I need to go see her and hang out with her so but I really want to go to my favorite restaurant so I will only see her or I will only eat in my favorite restaurant if I am there with my aunt so like layer some it's like all right now I have a reason to go way to run your favorite restaurant yeah really great but the point there is that you take something you want to do in pair it with something you need to do and increase the attractiveness that happened in that way how have you done this or was that a real example no that was not a real example I love my aunt but uh but yeah they're I don't know let's see there have been a variety of ways so exercise is a really common one so for me I like working out anyway but it helped if I could see like some friends or if I could see somebody that I wanted to hang out with so you know whether that's scheduling a run with a friend well now I have a good reason to go and may not feel like doing the run but now I want now I get to see my friend so there are all kinds of little ways you can use it like that how long does it take to form habits because we've heard oh it's 60 days actually it's 28 days and I'm like yeah you just picked that because it's round number but neither of those things are true yeah so there there's a this is probably the most common question I get is how long has it taken bill to have it and in 21 days 30 days 66 days is very common out because there was one research study that was done that said on average of 66 days but even within that study the range was quite wide so you know the an easy habit like drinking a glass of water at lunch was like three weeks and a hard habit like going for a run after work every day was like seven or eight months now from a general approach I feel like okay 66 days or the idea like this is gonna be months okay this isn't gonna be something quick that's probably good to internalize but the real answer to this the honest answer to how long has it take to build a habit is forever because if you stop doing it it's no longer happy and people the I think that this question kind of hit him there's an implicit assumption there which is that how long do I have to work before I cross this finish line right how long do I have to work before it's easier it's done and instead people need to stop looking at habits as like a finish line to cross and start looking at them as a lifestyle to live and so if you adopt this idea that habits are permanent changes their lifestyle changes well then you focus our focus on making small shifts that you can actually sustain over time the other thing that's important to consider with this is that the time that is elapsed for a habit it doesn't really have anything to do with whether the habit is built it's actually about frequency it's about reps you know you could do something 200 times in a month or you could do it once in a month and whether 30 days is passed or not has very little to do with how well you've internalized that habit so habits are much more about repetitions than time elapsed that makes sense they probably just went oh we're gonna do this thing twice a day oh it takes 66 days or 21 days for 28 days it's like well if you do something constantly at your new job every 10 minutes you're gonna have to have it in like three days I mean how long did it take you to get in the habit of checking your phone yeah I don't remember what it was but it's we all seem to pick it up pretty quickly quick yeah you're like this thing is so cool and you just do that and then you're checking it 150 times a day yeah you know the your your brain not Amit's that process pretty quickly yeah so it's more about the reps than the time and I think a lot of us we don't actually want to build the habit we just want the result from the habit unfortunately like I don't really want to I I guess I do like working out now but really though if I think about it I just want to look good and be fit I don't really want to go to the gym everyday and work out per se there's this weird thing the status thing I mean habits are so I mentioned this earlier but we're all part of tribes and habits that are praised by the tribe or approved by the tribe are very attractive and habits that are run against the grain excuse me have us the run against the grain of the tribe are very unattractive and so in many cases people perform habits not because they actually want the result but because the result of the habit but because they want the result of being praised or approved or respected so change our tribe sometimes is that I mean that can be depends on what you want right but I think the way to think about this is do you want your desired join a tribe where the desired behavior is the normal behavior so you know there are people who like I said earlier going work working out as normal for them it's not hard if you you know if you want to learn an instrument and you hang out with a bunch of jazz musicians then suddenly playing jazz four days a week seems totally normal that's what everybody else is doing right so the key though and this is the caveat I don't see a lot of people mention is that the thing that makes that stick is whether or not you want to be friends with these people you have a sense of belonging you know like you if you are worried about losing your friends who are jazz musicians then you start to have a good reason to play jazz and to pick up an instrument because you want to belong with the group if you don't really care about losing them as friends or don't care about belonging to that tribe then it doesn't make that big of a difference so the key I think is to join a group where the desired behavior is the normal behavior and you already have something else in common because then you can become friends over that other commonality and once you're friends then you have a reason to pick up the behavior that you wanted in the first place that's great so environment you know what you can almost lump that into environment right to include people in your environment I like to define I like to separate them as physical environment social environment but it's for sure true that both of change wildly and you mentioned earlier sometimes it's really hard like most people are gonna act the same way if they're in the same physical environment the exception to that is if you're part of a tribe that doesn't want you to do that thing if you're part of a group and like you know if you practice a certain religion and that religion doesn't eat pork and you walk into a butcher shop or something then you're there with the rest of your friends like well none of us are eating this because we have a very strong reason to not eat it a different person that doesn't belong that tribe walks in there and they don't have the same set of social norms and so they're like yeah sure I'll take the pork sandwich and so they're a product to their physical environment because they don't have the social environment conflicting with that gateway habits in the two-minute rule are something that I this is what I was talking about earlier where I used it to become a runner I essentially told myself I was in Michigan it was freaking freezing it was wintertime and I was like look I don't want to get up while it's still dark go outside and run three miles this is gonna be a living hell I hate every second of this and I did build up to that obviously I did couch to 5k which is like this little conditioning program you can link to it in the show notes but what I told myself and I don't remember where I got this was all I have to do is get out of bed put on my workout stuff and stand outside in the cold and if I want to go back to bed I can and I did that a couple of times honestly faithful sometimes I was like okay it's way too cold the wind is going through all of the layers I'm not doing this but most of the time I was just outside know what screw it I'm gonna go for a run at least I'll be warm it's a great example so people have heard you know I've talked about small habits a couple times during this conversation and people have heard that type of thing before you know like oh you should stick to small steps like to you know take it slow whatever but even when you know you should start small it's still easy to start way too big and so my recommendation is to practice what I call the 2-minute rule which essentially says take whatever habit you're looking to build and downscale it into the first two minutes and you just focus on that so your example is a good one just put on your running shoes and your clothes and step out the door if you take another step then that's just a bonus but you're the real habit you're looking to build is putting on your running shoes and getting outside sometimes people think oh that sounds kind of like a trick or a mental trick or don't like why would I do that I know the real goal isn't but my running shoes on and there's real goals to go for run if you feel that way my recommendation would be to force yourself to only do the first two minutes for the first few weeks like you're not allowed to keep running so I had a I had a friend or sorry a reader who did this he ended up losing over hundred pounds and one of the things that he did was he went to the gym but he wasn't allowed to stay for more than five minutes so he showed him again show up get out do an exercise or stand there or something and then five minutes of fascinating walk out the door and go home and eventually after like six weeks he was like I'm coming here all the time like kind of feel like doing more yeah yeah but the key there is that it's and the reason it works is that he's mastering the art of showing up and so often we get motivated to make a change and then we do something really big and impressive you know join a CrossFit gym or we take on insanity or p90x or some kind of crazy program and we think I got to get fit right now and then you push really hard and then you burn out in three weeks and then you sit there for a couple months until the process repeats itself again but a habit must be established before it can be improved if you don't have the if you don't master the art of showing up there's nothing to optimize there's nothing to improve so you really need to master the first two minutes before you have the chance to do anything else so I like to say standardized before you optimize so make it the standard in your life that you put on your running shoes and get out the door and then you can worry about optimizing how far you run and what your program looks like and all this other stuff because you have the chance to improve it other people take the opposite approach and they think all about the the finish line you know we're always optimizing for the finish line how much money do I want to earn how much weight do I want to lose how often how many books do I want to finish but if you optimize for the starting line then you figure out like all these logistical details associated with a habit like when am I gonna do it and what do I need to wear and who's gonna be with me and do I need to prep anything beforehand and once you have all that stuff handled the rest of it becomes much easier alright a lot of people are probably really well equipped at this point by the way this is not the whole book this is there's so much more in the book habit tracking to the emotional component so don't think you heard this and then you got everything that you needed there's so much more but I know one question that people are gonna ask is yeah yeah this is all great how do I get my freakin kids husband to do this stuff I you're gonna work on themselves but they're not gonna say hey now listen to this podcast and implement everything or buy this by atomic habits and implement everything what are some ways in which I can get other people to apply okay yeah it's so that's a good question it's a hard question too so same way that I said earlier that there is no one way to build a behavior I think there's also no one way to change behavior like you you have a bunch of different lovers you can pull and stuff I actually have an appendix that's associated with the book that talks specifically about how did these apply these ideas to business and also how to apply them to parenting because those are two like really common categories I get asked about but I think that long term for a behavior to stick you really need to come back to what we just talked about a few minutes ago the social norms the tribe that people are part of so if you can start to foster a way for people to get new friends then the behaviors start to shift themselves and they also stick so if you're a parent the probably the biggest influence that you have is what other types of kids you put your kid around actually scare the crap out of you by the way so like what do you you know what extra extracurricular activities or they put in so what kind of kids are that you know are they going to swimming lessons are they going to play violin or music or they I don't know do whatever doing like a thousand other things so it's so what what type of children you put your child around has a huge impact on what their behaviors are this is actually hairy there's actually a really good book called the nurture assumption it's written by Judith rich Harris and it talks about how the biggest thing that parents pass down to their kids are their genes and so if your kid is like you if they're you know if you're fairly calm and your kid is calm or if you get really anxious and your kid is anxious it's probably likely that your genes were passed down that was the reason for that a lot of parents think oh it must be because of my parenting style but it's probably more likely the biological piece but the biggest social environment or teaching factor the biggest nurture factor rather than nature is actually from peers rather than from parents and so you can think about this it kind of makes sense if you think about your own life like I you know I I have a technology business I'm into all that stuff my parents weren't into it but all my friends were in school and so that was where I picked that up from and that applies in in a lot of different contexts but it also is true that my parents put me into athletics early on so all my friends were athletes too and a certain set of habits and behaviors that athletes tend to learn and it differs depending on the sport but they did have an influence in that way so I think that's probably the first place to start and then the second place is with environment design which we talked a lot about earlier so if you're trying to get your kids to do that change the peer group if you're trying to get your significant other to do that might be harder to change their peer group but if you live together you can be like oh well there's yeah you're right there's no coca-cola oh yeah the beer it's buried under all the spinach and behind the apples in the drawer that you have to move all of the healthy stuff out of the way to get to it ultimately it comes back to the identity stuff that we talked about early on you know if your spouse identifies as a particular type of person and you're trying to make these changes that conflict with that it's really hard so having an honest conversation is of course gonna be a good way to approach that because then you can get on the same wavelength about what the desired identity is and what's important to them and then making environmental changes that kind of nudge in that direction and cast votes for that type of new identity that's kind of how to get it to last James clear atomic habits is there anything else that I haven't asked the reader like wait a minute I didn't include this well you brought up habit tracking I think that's really important there's a section in the book on genes and behavior and how your genes influence your habits and what you can actually do about that how personality and habits are influenced there's a section on the long-term consequences of habits and so like how to get a habit to stick and we talked a lot today about how to get it happy to start which is sure it's the first hurdle across but then you need consistency to make it last so there's a lot there to go into and we you know unfortunately just don't have time to cover it all yeah exactly do you want to give us one quick thing on making things stick sure so there's something in the book that I talked about which I call the Goldilocks rule a Goldilocks rule has this idea that humans experience peak levels of motivation and sustain peak levels of motivation when they work on tasks of just manageable difficulty so not too hard not too easy just right and a good example this is say you're playing tennis so if you play against a professional it gets pretty boring pretty quick for both of you yeah like you're gonna lose every point right if you play against a five-year-old again it gets pretty boring pretty quick because you win every point but if you play against someone who's your peer they want to you you and a few you have a chance to win the match but only if you really try that's incredibly motivating and habits need to be kind of in a similar way for you to stay interested in them in the long term you know after a while once you start to automate a habit it gets boring the result is expected now there's a certain category of habits I like to lump them kind of into two groups the first group are just basic things you don't need to think about again like flossing your teeth or tying your shoes or whatever I don't need a process of continuous improvement for tying my shoes yeah but for a few areas of life like some of the things you really do want to get better at you want to be a great podcast or you want to be a great writer you want to be really fit or whatever those areas you need to find little ways to advance so that you stay in that Goldilocks zone where you're winning enough and succeeding enough that you have a reason to keep showing up but you're challenged enough that you have a reason to keep coming back and saying interested and engaged and ultimately we also didn't talk about the fourth law behavior change or to make it satisfying and that is really the key one for getting things to stick but what you want is for the ending to be satisfying and if you're the ending is satisfying you have a reason to repeat it again the next time perfect yeah like I said we were only maybe 30% through the notes so if this stuff interests you go grab atomic habits we'll link to it in the show notes it's a quick read it's not like oh man a 20-hour book this is I can't remember how long it was an audio probably around 8 hours and it's at 2 X which is what normal people this that's like what we're talking at right now if you don't have your podcast player tuned because 1 X is kind of painfully slow for most books you're looking at 4 hours I mean that's a that's a flight yeah or a round-trip flight that's even a short one so you can you can do this and everything is very practical there's not a lot of there's no fluff in there so I think it's a worthy read if you're trying to break or make any particular habit James thanks so much for coming on the show man yeah thank you so much for having me and if you want to get the book atomic a viscom is probably the best place to go and the at that page I also have there's a secret chapter that's not included in the actual manuscript there's some exercises like have a scorecard and some of the things tell people implement that and then I also have chapter by chapter audio commentary from me I'm like why I wrote particular chapters and what I was thinking behind and anyway all that said atomic what's the secret chapter about it's about the biology of that behavior so why we fall what would it why we're biologically primed to fall into certain bad habits and what we can do about it I can't I want to read that now to hope you all enjoyed that if you want the full interview and all of our interviews subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger show in Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts also subscribe to our Channel and then click over here for BJ Fogg the other og habit guru

Channel: THE JORDAN HARBINGER SHOW

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Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, james clear podcast, james clear interview, atomic habits, james clear atomic habits, atomic habits by james clear, jordan harbinger james clear, atomic habits book, atomic habits james clear, stop bad habits, how to build habits

Id: mqogCtd_jqc

Length: 86min 20sec (5180 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020