James Clear: How To Build Awesome Habits

it's almost never the first mistake that ruins you but if you can never miss twice the mistakes are just kind of a blip on the radar James Clear is the author of The New York Times bestseller Atomic habits his work has been used by the teams in the NFL NBA and Fortune 500 companies within three months of riding there it was pretty obvious that this was the best idea that I had had so far when I started writing even to this day I still have never shared an article that I wrote on my personal Facebook page with like all the people who knew me from high school or college or things like that I was worried about what they would think censor belonging was powerful I mean we all want to belong that's one of the deepest needs that we all have a lot of the time people choose to belong to fit in rather than choosing to like do the thing that they say they like to achieve there are a lot of things in life that your family and your friends often want you to be safe and you want to grow it doesn't mean they don't love you or they don't want good things for you it just is a difference in priorities they want safety you want growth in a way I almost feel like the bad days are more important than the good days if you want to be in that one percent you can't do the same thing that 99 of other people are doing every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become no doing one push-up does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts take a little bit of time to think about that who's the type of person I want to cast votes for listen I want to say a massive thank you to all of our new subscribers but you know most people that watch this content on YouTube don't subscribe I want to change that the more subscribers The more amazing we can make high performance and I've had a lovely message actually from Rob who says I only recently discovered the high performance Channel and I watched the full Eddie Howe and Tyson Fury interviews both some of the best content I've seen in the last five years on YouTube listen if you agree and you want to keep this amazing stuff coming for free then hit subscribe right now thank you so much James thank you again for joining us on high performance yeah I'm uh excited to talk to you in your mind what is high performance there are kind of two things come to mind to either um fulfilling your potential so you know we're capable of so much but it is so rare to have a moment where you are fully utilized so fulfilling your potential things seems like it qualifies related to that not being your own bottleneck um we are again capable of so much but talk ourselves out of so many opportunities of so many achievements attempts um you know in many ways the hardest thing is not to keep winning but to keep reaching because you often talk yourself out of trying something else so if you're not your own bottleneck you're in a position to be uh to fulfill your potential so those are the two things that struck me first okay so human beings first appeared on Earth around 2 million years ago so why are we still talking ourselves out of things why are we still our own bottleneck why are we why have we still not managed to get to this point where we've fit our potentially because it feels to me like every generation learns all the things the previous generation learned yeah that's probably true um trade-offs I guess um a lack of self-awareness competing priorities I think all these things play a factor not being clear about what you're optimizing for um you know it's not that people no one's out there trying to make a poor decision you know nobody is trying to waste their time or be ineffective I think it's just that we often life is dynamic and what we were previously optimizing for may not be what we should be optimizing for in the moment or maybe we've entered a new season of life and we're slow on the uptake we kind of are still inheriting the inertia or the old habits that we've been following and we haven't upgraded or improved our strategies yet maybe what we really want is a little bit different than what is socially accepted or what we would be praised for or what the people around us want and so we're forced into this tension between choosing what we feel like we want internally and what we feel like will be praised and supported for and in many cases the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve and so this desire they all have to bond and connect to be a part of community to fit in with our friends and family sometimes that conflicts with fulfilling your potential or with achieving the greatest thing and so it's really being forced into these trade-offs over and over again that makes it a continuous battle to try to return and refocus on what matters most to you or clarify what is important in this season so that you can recommit to those habits and maybe shape your environment or your social groups in a way that supports it rather than hinders it so if you're talking about removing ambiguity from our world gems I think not some really appropriate place to almost jump in with you because your writing is brilliantly unambiguous you know like it's real it's a great compliment that I was saying to Finn our producer before that when you're reading your book like what often occurs to me is that if like the biggest compliment I can pay is the ideas are very familiar but the way you express them is really clear and unambiguous so how it's a long-winded question of asking how do you remove ambiguity from your world to keep that Clarity of intention and purpose behind what you do yeah thanks for saying that it does that does mean a lot I think that is a really nice compliments because um complexity often is just like kind of a mask or a disguise and uh you know what we really want is actually pretty simple most of the time and but getting to the root of that sifting away through all of the noise and finding the signal takes a lot of effort and a lot of work um you know I don't know that I have this figured out any better than anyone else you know I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with and that's why I write about the topics to begin with you know my my publisher said to me when I was working on Atomic habits we write the Books we need and you know I definitely felt that way I mean I you know do I procrastinate sure all the time you know like have I focused too much on the goal and not enough on the system yeah absolutely and so it's really a lot of these messages are reminders to myself to refocus on the process or try to commit to building better habits to get back on track quickly and not let one mistake become a dozen mistakes so um I don't know that I have a good answer to how to live a life with Clarity but some of the things that I try to do include not doing too many things so if you're optimizing for too many things at once is very hard to remain clear you just have too many you got too many um you know irons in the fire there's too much going on um and so that is easy to do when you're choosing between a good use of time and a bad use of time it becomes harder to do and I think this it becomes increasingly true as you get deeper and deeper into your career it becomes harder to do when you're choosing between good uses of time and great uses of time in a sense the most dangerous things on your to-do list the things that are most likely to remove Clarity and cause confusion and introduce a sense of overwhelm are items like three through five on your priority list because you have a good story for why you're doing those things that's why they're on the list to begin with and smart people are so good at coming up with like valid excuses or developing stories that sound really reasonable so you'll look at that list and you'll be like oh well I need to do this like this is number three you know like I have it on the list for a reason this is a good way to spend time I'll be productive but the truth is items three through five are actually the greatest distraction to doing items one and two because you can convince yourself that you're being productive while still avoiding the highest leverage work so not taking on too many projects I think is a really crucial part of it obviously there's sort of a Connecting Point there like a pre-step which is you need to know what you're optimizing for you need to know what what is the most important thing and that requires a little bit of self-reflection um and then not just dive into a little point on that James so um when we created high performance it was basically meant to be a podcast it wasn't meant to be a podcast and a book and a live tour and corporate speaking and appearing on TV and radio shows and all of the other things that it's become right so it's almost procrastination is so easy now for us because there are so many things demanding our attention so I totally get what you're saying and I am I mean we've we've been recently writing our theater show and it's number one on the list but it's number three in terms of the things I've been working on because there are easier things just to move higher up the list so I'm totally with you my problem is the things I'm doing rather than what I should be doing I can't I feel I can't get rid of because they're coming our way without us asking for them and I'm sure lots of our listeners will feel the same what would you say to them yeah it's a it's a really good point I think success has this quality where it tends to eat itself you know you do something well and because of that new opportunities come your way and if you just think about like each day has a certain amount of surface area where you live those 24 hours and things happen you know somebody comes up to the door and they knock on it or people send messages to your inbox or you receive something in the mail you know it's very unlikely if you keep living days that you're not going to have distractions creep in that's just kind of part of how the cycle of Life Works and so you need to develop a system as that inbound increases for hand handling and filtering all of it sometimes it requires like a really extreme move like in my case once the book took off for the first couple years of my life or first couple years of my business I would answer every email that came in sometimes I was even sending emails like I was you know somebody signed up to the email list for the first like 10 000 subscribers which was usually just you know 50 a day or something like that I would send emails out and say hey thanks so much for signing up like really excited to have you here and then you get over 10 000 you can't do that anymore so then you just respond to the inbound that comes in and then you get over a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand or whatever it is and then you can't respond to the inbound anymore so now the whole inbox is just shut off it's just on an autoresponder and I don't love that solution but I needed an extreme filter like that because otherwise there was no time left to write the next book or to do the thing that got people to come in the first place so you kind of have to be continually upgrading your filter for what you say no to and that's a really hard thing to learn because sometimes things that like previously you know two years ago this opportunity would have been the most exciting thing to come across your desk all week and now you have to say no to it um and so it's difficult to kind of learn that the second thing is so is it about placing a sorry is it about placing a value then on the things that come in because as an optimist I I go everything at 100 and think everything could be the next amazing opportunity so is this about what's the value of that you know like UE I suppose my mind thinks well hey sending an email to everyone could be the the golden ticket that separates you from every other author and brand Builder on the planet you know yeah um so sometimes you can set a value to it uh you know sometimes I think you can use price or money as a filter so for example with speaking requests you know I get five ten speaking requests a day obviously I can't do that many uh so that is actually like a very weird part of my business because we actually want 99 of requests to say no um just because I have time constraints um and so you just keep raising the price to use that as a filter that's like one way to do it um but I don't think that money should always be the filter um it just kind of depends on what the area is so another way I like to think about it is what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done so um you know I heard this phrase one time about email it was this executive from Microsoft and he said emails where keystrokes go to die and if you think about it you know throughout the course of your life you have a certain number of keystrokes we all do we don't know exactly what the number is but there's some limited finite amounts of times that you're going to touch the keys and the more that you spend those keystrokes on answering emails the more you're spending those keystrokes on one individual person or you know maybe two or three but for the most part it's just individual communication but if you spend those same keystrokes on writing an article that gets posted to the blog well now a million people could potentially read it and so that is a way of leveraging those keystrokes in a much more High leverage way and that is also placing a value on the activity it's not necessarily a monetary value it's more thinking about leverage or scale or reach but that's another way to do it and then also that question that I just mentioned what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done something like this is a good example you know we record this interview and after we're done a year from now somebody could listen to it and this work this time that I'm putting in right now is still going to work for me even after this hour is complete compare that to say doing like a radio interview which I used to do a couple of those when the book came out but I tend to not do them anymore because as soon as that work is done it vanishes it's off the air and so I'm trying to find ways to kind of like multiply my effort rather than to spend it once and then it's gone and those are all different ways of filtering the requests or filtering time and placing different sorts of value on that time but those are ways that maybe make it easier to say no to some of the things that you were previously saying yes to but one of the obvious points that stems from your answer there James is that they all direct back to an original Source now some people refer to this as a as a sense of purpose that you that you have a sense of mission what would you say is the sense of mission that you're on that gives you that Clarity to then make those decisions um it's it's probably still a little squishy and not like super clearly defined but I generally I would say is trying to be useful uh I try to maximize for reach rather than Revenue so I'm always trying to like impact the most number of people and not worry as much about the money side if you do that well then the money side usually tends to take care of itself you know the person with the largest audience usually has a lot of opportunities for driving Revenue so it tends to work out fine um but that's kind of my general sense of mission is can I create something useful can I try to be as useful to the the broadest number of people possible now you know there's a little bit of a personality thing associated with that which is you could like for a long time I thought about going to medical school um not that the medical schools would have accepted me but I thought about it um but uh you know a doctor makes a really meaningful difference in a smaller number of people's lives so it's like a really high uh touch but lower volume sort of thing whereas you know like 10 million people have read Atomic habits I don't think anybody is under the impression that the book is making as big of a difference as like your doctor might make so it's not as high touch so it's a it's a lower touch impact but it's a much broader surface area and I don't know that there's a right or wrong way I'm not really trying to compare them I mean the world needs you know many different types of people and many different types of services but uh my point is the second style kind of my personality gravitates towards that more and is interested in that so it's kind of figuring out what um what you're particularly interested in um there is another thing I want to mention kind of connected to these last two questions and how you filter your time and thinking about sense of purpose and all that which is um a lot of the things that you're saying yes to you may be saying yes to it because your ego is involved or because status is involved or because you're going to be praised for it in a certain way and when you say oh it's hard for me to give that up it maybe it's just hard for you to give it up because you're like you know what I've already invested like 10 years of my career and if I give this up then like that means all that time was kind of wasted or like I lose a little bit of the status that I had in the industry um and sometimes that's required to continue to to grow you know the tighter that you cling to your current identity the harder it becomes to grow Beyond it and some of the people that I admire the most some of the entrepreneurs I've seen grow the most of my friends they have this willingness to kind of walk back down the mountain a little bit and then maybe climb an adjacent Peak but that requires a lot of courage to walk back down for a little bit to look foolish to start something new to maybe give up or release a little bit of the status that you had before so that you can try again and become a beginner over again that requires a lot of courage and people are a little scared of that perhaps perhaps rightly so but I think generally um it's not as scary as you think it might be and the ability to say no to some of those things that you feel like I have to do this a lot of the time the reason you feel like you have to do it is because of the story in your mind about the status that you have or about the other role that you occupy or the position you want to cling onto and if you're willing to let release that a little bit it becomes easier to focus on the new thing James I think that's so powerful and I I know there'll be lots of people listening to this as we speak thinking there's loads I do because of what other people think of it or what society makes of it or what my ego believes you're the king of process and if people are understanding what you're saying but then are scared to make that decision because as you said it's a big one what would be the processes that they should consider um well I think make this leap of faith the process of behavior change almost always starts with self-awareness so you know it's really it's a conversation you have to have with yourself and I also don't think that it's something that happens once it's something that probably is a continual check-in so having a process or a habit of reflection review whether that's once a week or whether it's once a year or whatever Cadence makes sense for you um that can be really helpful basically what we're just saying is hey you need some time to step back and think um and I've done this a couple different ways one interesting thing I did about a year or two ago I woke up each day and for two weeks I opened a blank page of my notebook and the first thing I did was I wrote at the top of the page what am I really trying to achieve here and um it's surprising how much my answer changed over the course of two weeks you would think after like two or three days you'd be like just feeling kind of like a dummy and you're like it's always the same thing over and over again but actually your answer changes a lot you know there were a lot of things that I wrote down early on that turns out that was just a middle step and it could have been cut out entirely or there were things that I wrote down that I thought I wanted but actually if I gave it a little extra thought it was like well actually that's something my parents want me to do and that's something well for example James what's that I was going to say can you give us can you just color in the example and give us some of the what you were writing sure well I can't remember exactly what I wrote down because like I said it was a year or two ago but the the general idea is that I was writing mostly about what do I want to achieve in my personal life so what you know we were building were like I have young kids now so we're in the middle of kind of building a family so it was stuff focused around that and then the second thing was okay I wrote this book it's this bestseller now what am I going to do next and um you know I kind of had to wrestle with that for a little bit because there's on the one hand you could just like Chase whatever the book brings in so you could say okay I'll do more speaking or I'll turn into a consulting company and we'll have an atomic habit certification and all that kind of stuff and there are a lot of other authors that do that kind of thing and I'm not criticizing them at all like that may be the right choice for them to me that sounds like a nightmare because then I gotta have a managing 50 Consultants I have like this huge team I don't I don't want to be a manager I don't want to have a big team and so if I was just writing down the obvious answer where I was like oh let me just grow Revenue then I end up living a lifestyle that I don't actually want and man you'd be surprised how often people are already making enough money to support their life but then they choose to make more money but live a worse daily life and to me that seems like a terrible trade you know now of course there's some threshold you know like you got to take care of your needs but if you're already at that threshold to choose to make more money and live worse days seems like an awful trade and so often we talk ourselves into doing that so um that's such a powerful Pine I think that was something that helped me a little bit was that that process of doing that for two weeks and I realized you know what what I should start with and this is a line from my buddy John who's one of my entrepreneur entrepreneurial friends he um he says the thing we start with is how do I want to live my days and then inside that box I can ask how can I make the most money or how can I reach the most people or how could we do the most interesting thing but only inside that box not outside of it and if you start with that you end up with a very different set of answers than if you just start by asking how can we make the most money or how can we reach those people or how can we do the most interesting thing and ideally the objective here is to try to design a business to design a lifestyle that you feel like serves you rather than feeling like you know you're chained to this thing that you created so um I like questions like that questions that prompt self-reflection and get you to maybe think about it with let's call them helpful constraints and if you have those helpful constraints you often come up with a very uh different answer and I think often better answers that reminds me I remember reading years ago where an interview with Jack White from The White Stripes where when he used to go in the studio he they'd sort of pull up different demands in a in a heart it might be like you can only play certain chords or certain instruments and then you'd pull it out and that would be the rule for the day where those constraints force them to be creative rather than just get into the usual habits and routines that stifle creativity oh that's so good I haven't heard that story but you know the other nice thing about that is um it gives you a place to start and it's often better to have some kind of constraint to work around than to have a completely blank canvas because then that can be sort of paralyzing when I was working on three two one which is my newsletter now and it has you know it's got 2 million subscribers it's just you know this thing that's become kind of a big part of my business but I started it in 2019 and I had already I had already had a newsletter for for years and what I had been previously doing was writing two articles a week and they were you know 2 000 words and I would spend 20 hours on each one and it was you know it was kind of a big lift but then when I'm working on Atomic habits and writing the book I couldn't do that anymore I just I was tapped out I didn't have capacity to write the book and write the newsletter in that way and so I was looking for a different way to have a newsletter and I started with the constraint of okay let's imagine that I only have like two hours a week to do this instead of 20. what would I do and um then I I threw an extra layer on it which is is there a way if you could just imagine all the universe of possibilities for how you could create a newsletter is there some version out there that I could do in two hours a week that is not just as good as what I'm doing now but is actually better than what I'm doing now that actually people get more value out of than what I'm currently sending them and I mean I'm kind of optimistic about stuff like that but I like doing uh thought experiments like that and I have to think you know you're not going to be able to think of everything in the world but there's got to be something out there that's better than what I'm doing right now and fits that constraint and as soon as you accept that as soon as you say you know what there probably is then it's just this little quest to try to find what that thing is and um you know I I don't know if I hit the mark or not that's kind of for the subscribers to decide but um but I do think 321 has worked so well that it is evidence that um I didn't totally miss you know like there's there is something about it that's working really well in that format and it's such a better fit for the time constraints that I have how many subscribers do you have for three two one uh I think it's like 2.1 million right now yeah you did okay yeah I think you might I think you might have got it quite good um we can't have you on high performance without talking about one percent uh it's been mentioned by some of our guests um the focus on the one percent making anything you do everything you do and we just want to talk about how people can could know if they're hitting those one percent I mean I love the conversation about if you want to be in that one percent you can't do the same thing that 99 of other people are doing and expect to be there which is exactly what you just spoke about with your newsletter so for our listeners what questions should we be asking ourselves if we have the desire to be in that one percent and we need to make sure that our actions are living up to our Ambitions yeah um there's kind of a series of questions that I think you could use as a guidepost so the first question we mentioned previously in the conversation what am I optimizing for so yeah that's up to you to decide but you got to be clear about it you know it's very unlikely that you're going to just stumble your way into Peak Performance um You probably have to be at least somewhat clear about where you're going to spend your time and why so what am I optimizing for the second question is probably something along the lines of can my current habits carry me to my desired future so and how do we know that though well um signals of progress is probably the short answer if some form of feedback so let me give you a couple different examples um when I started out my entrepreneurial career I started a bunch of different websites over the first two years just tried a couple different things see if they work I started I tried an iPhone app I didn't create it I paid a developer like a thousand bucks to make it um and all of those projects let's say or there are four or five different things over that two-year span they were okay but they didn't really do a whole lot they were fine but I could tell like this wasn't the thing and then but I did hone my skills and I did learn how to build a website I did you know I was picking up some things but nothing was really taking off and then I started writing at jamesclere.com this is about yeah about two years in to starting uh my entrepreneurial Quest and uh I had just one been doing freelance gigs on the side to make money and make ends meet and um within three months of riding there it was pretty obvious that this was the best idea that I had had so far um email subscribers were coming faster people were more engaged it just was clicking better and um most things that go well they tend to have at least early signals of progress It's it's very unlikely that it just completely Falls flat and it's like well if you just stuck with it it's gonna turn out to be something you know it's it may not be what you want right away but you've got some signals that things are going moving forward so I think that's what you need to look for are signals of progress and that depends you know differs depending on the um depending on the thing that you're doing if I take another example from my personal life so I've been training in the gym for I don't know probably 15 years now um and then before that I was an athlete and so I was Loosely in the gym with the team and stuff like that so I've been around the gym and waits for a long time and you know I think just the way that I got into it my dad was kind of interested in Olympic lifting and some of my friends were kind of interested in power lifting so I did more of those movements when I got done with my athletic career and it wasn't until like three years ago that I started doing more bodybuilding style stuff and it took me a long time it took me a decade before I stumbled into that but my body just seems to respond better to that kind of training and again there were signals of progress it was kind of obvious to me if I step back after like six months of doing that my body still felt really good whereas when I was training powerlifting style and Olympic lifting style I would almost always get dinged up a little bit like every six months I need to take a couple weeks off because my joints would hurt or something but I don't know I just I would always have some little Interruption to my training whereas I you know I've had a nice kind of two or three year streak now where I still feel pretty good so um I guess the two things to kind of wrestle with there to think about first need to know what you're optimizing for but then secondly you need to be willing to experiment a little bit and try new things and as you're willing to do that you're looking for these signals of progress and eventually you're like okay this is a path that's a little more fruitful um but so I think what am I optimizing for can my current habits carry me to my desired future related to that there's probably a little bit of like a you're almost being ruthless with yourself about where you're actually spending your time so one little thought experiment I like is let's say aliens came down and they can't talk to you but they can just watch you throughout the day if somebody could see you but they could only watch your actions and not hear your words what would they say your priorities are so you can't convince them you can't tell them any stories they can't be sold on your reasoning they can only watch your behavior and if you ask yourself questions like that you start to realize like oh maybe I'm not I say that I'm optimizing for one thing but actually my behavior doesn't match up with that as well and um it's good to have a plan for how to change that but just being aware of that just noticing the gap between what you say you want and what you're doing that alone just noticing it will often change your behavior a little bit so um yeah those are just a couple questions to ask there's obviously kind of an endless uh cycle we could follow here I mean once you're a little bit more clear about what you're doing what path you're on then you can start asking questions like the ones that we raised earlier about does this work keep working for me when it's done am I multiplying my efforts in a way that is productive rather than spending the keystrokes or spending the hour and at one time and it's not serving me anymore so you're kind of like first you're kind of like narrowing your focus and figuring out am I on the right path and then once you're on the path you're trying to figure out how can I move down it more quickly how can I multiply the effort in the minutes and the hours that I'm putting in and so on so they're all great tips on getting started but what stops US what are the common mistakes that people make there are probably a couple different ones you know and I'm sure there's more that I'm not even thinking of right now but um social constraints or social environment plays a huge role so you might be able to do whatever habits you want to do for a day or a week or I don't know a month or two but if they go against the grain of the groups that you're around if they create friction with the people that you're surrounded by or the people you work with it's really hard to overpower that friction for a long time maybe you can do it for a little bit but at some point if people have to choose between you know what I have habits that I don't really love but I fit in I'm belong I belong I'm part of something or I have the habits that I want to have but I'm cast out monster sized and criticized I mean a lot of the time people choose to belong to fit in rather than choosing to like do the thing that they say they like to achieve so what you really want is to get those two things aligned you want an alignment between your desired outcome your your daily habits that you're trying to follow and the social norms of the groups that you're in so if you can find groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior then you can rise together so I think that's probably one of the biggest long-term things is can you surround yourself with people who also want what you want and I'm not saying you have to do it for 24 hours a day but at least for the amount of time that you're investing in your craft can you be around them for for that portion of time um so that you're not trying to go against it when you're spending effort on it so that's the first thing and then the second book the questions James oh sorry what questions what questions do you ask yourself for the people that get to have a seat on your bus um I don't really filter it like that uh I like I don't filter I don't ask questions about the people around me I'm like oh can they have a seat or not you know can they stay around or not um it's more like I think about the project that I want to achieve or the thing that I'm trying to create and then I ask myself who are people that are already in that world who are people that are already doing that kind of thing and can I hang out with them so it's less about like who's allowed to be around me and more about like who would I like to expose myself to who would I like to be or surrounded by or influenced by um as an example when I started out as an entrepreneur I I knew I wanted to have a business I didn't even really know that I wanted to be an author but gradually I started to figure out oh hey I kind of like writing I'd like to do that a little bit more I didn't have any authors in my family I didn't have any friends who were authors I didn't have anybody around me who was doing that thing or building a business like that so I sent a bunch of cold emails reaching out to people went to conferences tried to meet some people it took like probably two years or so but gradually I got to know maybe let's say 20 to 30 people who were kind of doing that thing and the best thing that I did was I started putting together these author Retreats and I would host like six or eight people and we would just split you know the house or an Airbnb for three nights and then we would all get together and just talk about how to launch a book or how to build an audience or you know what we're writing on and just all the things that all the problems that we were dealing with in our businesses and I tried to find people who were like a year or two ahead of where I was at so I could still provide value because I was still doing the same thing but I man I learned so much from them and I would always lead those sessions and I would have like six months worth of stuff that I needed to execute on um and so that's kind of what I'm thinking of when I say you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior you know I would leave that session and then I'd be like you know what now I know like six people who they're making a living doing it you know are like talk to a normal person and ask them hey do you think you could sell 100 000 books that like that sounds kind of outlandish but now I could be like well actually like I know three people who did it you know so like maybe it's not that crazy I mean at least I could look at their playbook and try to figure out how that could work for me so it doesn't guarantee success but I think it does make success more uh believable or more palatable it gives you a pathway and once you start to see what it looks like then you can start to piece it together for yourself and try to figure out a version that works for your life so can I ask you about um a guess that we've had on the podcast before was a guy called Russell Kane he's a really successful comedian here in the UK James and he he spoke about a similar idea but he introduced us to a concept called River jumping so he was saying sometimes if you're in an environment where maybe comedians don't want to help other ones out for example how can you sort of go into different Industries and look at the parallels of say it might be a a fighter and how does a fighter prepare so how we could then apply it to being a stand-up comic was the example he used so what occurred to me in your case was that you're in pretty rare territory in terms of a copy of atomic habit cells somewhere in the world every 15 seconds so how do you surround yourself with people that are in that similar rare territory then um yeah like again I don't really think about it that way I mean I'm not like really worried about measuring you know my success compared to somebody else's or something like that it's more just like what cool thing do I want to create and who are people that I can be around there doing that kind of thing but I do like the idea of river jumping I like the idea of diving into these kind of disparate Fields seeing what Peak Performance looks like they are seeing what other people are interested in and what can I learn from that um I think both strategies can be useful so Mickey Stevenson was this uh musician and talent um kind of coordinator Talent recruiter for Motown um and he was the one that got Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross and The Supremes and like a bunch of these really famous artists to come to Motown and create their music in the 60s and um he told me this story that he I can't remember who it was but he was watching somebody perform and at the concert he was like man this is a really great show and he gets about halfway through and he's looking around and he starts deconstructing what's going on how many lights they have on stage how many musicians are up there now how long between the sequences like how long does each dance routine last and then when do they switch to the next one he starts just looking at like how are they assembling this really killer show and that's something that I think is probably best done in your industry rather than River jumping that's something that you look at the people who are really succeeding and then you try to deconstruct the things that you see that are cool whenever you see something that really lights you up you should start to like pull that apart a little bit and see what the pieces are that it's made of and you'll start to notice different things that you can do I mean there's this other story uh Mr Beast the YouTuber who's got you know like over 100 million subscribers and one of the most popular YouTubers in the world he's got this little clip where he talks about or in the early days like you know 10 years before he was this massive success he and his friends would just get on YouTube they would get on like a call a Skype call or Zoom call for um you know like six hours a day and just look at YouTube videos and talk about what does the thumbnail look like how how long and in between transitions how long is the video in total like what's the lighting they're deconstructing everything about it how do you write a great title and that deconstruction process is a really important part of succeeding because once you know what the ingredients are then you can start to make your own recipes you know like it doesn't mean you have to use everything that everybody else is using but you start to see what the commonalities are and you can start to put it together for yourself in a way that fits your style or your personality so I think that is best done in your own industry but once you've done that once you've built this skill set where you've deconstructed what it looks like in your space then River jumping is super powerful because you go and you say okay I'm just trying to become the world's greatest YouTuber and look at how do we produce these awesome YouTube videos and you have all this Insight on how they're deconstructed and what the elements are and then you're like hey I'm going to go to this Formula One race and I'm going to look at their pit Crews and see how they operate and you pick something out about how that works where you're like you know what if we implemented that idea we could probably upload two videos a day instead of one and so now you have an area of expertise where you can apply the diverse um wide-ranging general knowledge that you get when you start River jumping so I guess my point is just you need both and River jumping tends to be most useful when you have an area of expertise to apply these kind of Novel insights or interesting ideas um and put them into use and I'm so pleased that we've gone here because I think it plays into two things that we believe on this podcast a hugely important in taking your life where you want it to go but it also under celebrated and under spoken about patience and consistency I mean neither are particularly sexy but how important do you think they both are yeah they're crucial I mean there are a couple different ways to gain advantages in life you know you could have like more money you could move faster or you could just be more patient and um being patient is definitely a competitive Advantage you know a lot of people will choose the projects they take on or the style of work that they do or the um the way that they approach particular problem based on time constraints and if you're willing to be more patient about something you can take on projects that most people would like avoid entirely you know something's going to take 10 years most people don't choose projects that are going to take that long but if you do that then suddenly you can do stuff that people are like man that kind of seems impossible to be able to do it but it's only impossible if you're looking at it through the lens of I have to get this done in the next 12 months so patients can really be valuable in order to execute on that in order to capitalize on your patients you need to have consistency and so they kind of go hand in hand um consistency you know there is some Nuance to it um Seth Godin has a line where he says what really matters is being better and to be better you often need to be different but the thing about consistency is that being consistent is different and so um a lot of the time the way to be better is just by doing the thing everybody else knows they should be doing but doing it more consistently that is different that is better and so uh in that way the fundamentals do provide an edge if they're applied over a longer time span than usual and so greatness can often just be being good but over a longer time span doing the reasonable thing but over a longer time span and if you can do that if you can maintain that level of consistency then you end up with a very different result so one of my favorite lines in your book James is um the never miss twice philosophy we did an interview with a it is a British brought in great uh called Jamie Peacock is a Titanic rugby league player and he quoted your book directly about how that had been at the heart of his whole success was if you made a mistake you don't make you don't miss twice you double down and you make sure your next move works well and I'd like to explore that with you because I think that one of the things we often talk about on the podcast is we all like we Embrace failure failure is where the learning happens but it's about getting smart quickly as well would you tell us a little bit more about that philosophy and why it's so important sure well first a little just a little point on your uh thought about embracing failure um I I feel like this is something you hear from a lot of people who talk about you know especially like Silicon Valley startup culture you know failure is almost praised like you know things like that and there is an element of truth to it uh I don't think that you should be scared of failing because then that prevents you from reaching that prevents you from trying but I also think there's kind of an opposite uh or another side of the coin that's important to emphasize which is you're never trying to fail like that's not the objective you know just because it's not like we're okay with it in the sense that oh it's fine like I didn't get the result I wanted that let's just stick with that you know like I'm I am in fact trying to do my best every time I am in fact trying to figure out a solution that works I am in fact trying to get an exceptional result failure is never the objective um but I'm not scared of it you know like it's not going to prevent me from trying and in fact I would say that actually many people their fear of failure or their feel or fear of how they'll be judged or what other people might think or whether it will appear impressive enough for you know what they're hoping to to instill on the people around them that General fear that worry whatever form it takes it ends up becoming like a break and it pro it like stops the car it prevents you from moving forward and my encouragement is to say listen let fear be the gas pedal not the break and so in I have all those same fears you know I'm worried about what the people who know me well will think of the next project I'm going to create I when I started writing um I I still this is even to this day I still have never shared an article that I wrote on my personal Facebook page with like all the people who knew me from high school or college or things like that um and why is that well now at this point it's because who cares and I don't use Facebook anymore but um in the beginning it was because I was worried about what they would think I was worried that they would look at it and be like oh you know look at this dumb little blog this guy has um and instead of that sense of belonging was powerful there then oh for sure it's powerful yeah it's powerful for all of us you know I mean we all want to belong that's one of the deepest needs that we all have this is why those trade-offs are hard to manage because we all do want to fit in we all want to connect and also sometimes people will say things like well don't don't care what other people think of you it can be useful in a context but there's a very good reason why we care about what other people think of us which is it tends to serve you very well when people think well of you it's very beneficial to have friends to have support not only does it feel good it also provides you opportunities it provides you love and affection it provides you support in your life that you need so to care what other people think about you is like perhaps the most natural thing in the world to do the question is not whether to care it's just when to care so anyway all of that to say um rather than letting my worries about what other people think of me prevent me from writing or prevent me from creating instead I just used it as fuel to say okay listen you just need to get to work now you know like you you need to put even more effort into this so that you can make it truly great so you can create something that you're proud of and if you use it as the gas pedal and not the brake then it becomes a driver of creative output rather than a hindrance for it um so anyway that was just kind of a point on that can you remind me of the the initial question though yeah I was asking you around that never missing twice philosophy yeah just asking you to reinforce that so um the more that I kind of study or come across read about people who are like Peak performers in their particular industry the more that you realize like everybody makes mistakes you know none of these people are perfect and one kind of commonality across them is that they tend to be good about getting back on track quickly it's not that they're good about never making mistake they slip up too but most of us I think have felt this from going through life which is it's almost never the first mistake that ruins you you know it's like the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows it's letting one mistake become a new habit or a new pattern and then you turn around three months later and you're like I lost the last three months but if you can never miss twice if you can correct the mistake quickly then you know you get to the end of the year and it doesn't really matter that much the the mistakes are just kind of a blip on the radar so never miss twice is just a philosophy it's an encouragement it's a reminder to get back on track quickly to reclaim the habit and if the reclaiming of a habit is fast then the breaking of it doesn't matter that much can you tell me your opinion of of struggle please James because we think a lot of people come to this podcast because they think that learning from great people will free them from struggle and it will give them that sense of achievement which we all know lasts for a very short amount of time before you chase after something else and you know it was Seneca who said he was one of victory over the meanness of his own nature and has not gently LED himself but has wrestled his way to wisdom Seneca there talking about the fact that it's the struggle that we should embrace that you know the man who's walked through the shadow of the valley of death is the one who deserves admiration what's your relationship with struggle uh I I probably lean more towards seneca's style and approach I think that being comfortable with challenge being comfortable with struggle seeking It Out In Pockets um is is a really good strategy um you know as you kind of go through life we all get beat up by life a little bit you know we all face challenges and um you know like when my parents were my age they had three young kids my sister had cancer at the age of three um and so they probably weren't trying to seek out struggle in that moment you know like life was giving them plenty to handle on their own and um that's fine you know like I don't think uh I don't think we need to um try to act like we need to do more than that you know sometimes life just hands you a bad deck of cards and or deals you a bad hand and you need to deal with it as it arises but when life doesn't challenge you I think it's great to challenge yourself because you kind of hone that ability you hone that strength to manage some of those more difficult times um also this idea that and I know that you don't believe this but just based on how you ask the question oh let me succeed and then I'll free myself from struggle um you know I think there's this Alan Watts quote where he says something like you know the brightness of the stars is only visible because of the darkness of the space behind them and so you actually need the contrast you can't without the contrast you don't notice how bright the stars are and the same thing is true for the good feelings that you want to have in your life the reason it feels really good to win a Super Bowl or to launch a best-selling book or to get through some period of difficult trial in your life is because you had to struggle so much or put so much effort in ahead of time to get there it's because it's so hard to do that by doing it you can feel proud of yourself and it's the contrast between all those dark periods that came before and the Triumph that you're feeling right now that gives you the feeling of elation if there wasn't any dark period before it then there would be no contrast there and you probably would just feel like kind of neutral the way you do on most days so um in that way you almost can't have success without struggle because they're just they they require each other to provide the necessary contrast um now again with all of these things that we're talking about there there's so much about life where opposites are both true you know it's not should you train or should you rest it's well you actually need both and the question is do I need to train right now or do I need to rest right now the question is not should you read or should you write it's well actually reading and writing are both important and do I need to be reading right now or should I write a little bit right now and so it's really a question in most areas of life not about what to do but about what to emphasize in this moment and I think that also is true when it comes to struggle and challenge sometimes struggle gets glamorized so much work we almost think like if you're the type of person who works really hard and you're very ambitious you almost feel like it has to be a struggle otherwise it's not worth it there's like some kind of um you know there's a badge of honor to be worn if you're always like uh struggling so much look at how hard I'm working look at how much I'm suffering and so that must mean that I have value I don't think it has to be like that either you know there are going to be moments like that for everybody and when you need to step up and have that kind of mindset you better be ready for it and not scared of it but that doesn't mean that you need to live your life in a state of Perpetual struggle in a state of Perpetual suffering there's nothing wrong with having peace and contentment there's nothing wrong with stepping back and relaxing for a little bit and in fact Act is probably the balance between the two and emphasizing them at different times that allows you to perform at an even higher level so it's not a question of either or it's both and but it's just when so is it okay to throw zero some days I think so I mean nobody's going to be perfect it's um it's not the objective though you know so I like that's the I think um again it's very easy to get into this style where you're like giving yourself excuses um and you're like oh well it's okay to you know not show up um what I've come to find so I had a day like this last week actually there was a day I think it was Wednesday or Thursday last week I really didn't feel like working out I've been on a really good streak where I haven't missed in quite a while and I just I went to the gym and I was like I just really don't feel like doing anything today and it would have been very easy for me to give myself a story about putting up a zero that day but instead what I said was okay you know what like you can reduce the scope but stick to the schedule you don't have to do the whole thing if you don't want to let's just do the first set and see how you feel um and so I really like took the pressure off myself like just just do this set and see where it goes so I did that um and you know I felt a little bit better so I was like I'll do the next one and then I just kind of got through the whole workout that way um and uh I got to the end of it and it wasn't like anything to write home about I mean I didn't have an amazing lift or anything like that but I didn't miss and I told my wife when I came uh came back afterward I was like you know in a way I almost feel like the bad days are more important than the good days because if you show up on the bad days then you maintain the habit and if you maintain the Habit then all you need is time but if you only show up on the good days you're not really getting any separation between you and the average person like everybody shows up on the good days you know if you got energy if you got time you got space like that that's pretty easy so it's really in a way greatness only reveals itself on the bad days that's the only time that you get any separation between the average performance and the exceptional one so you need little mental tricks to help you get through it and it's not the objective to have a zero it's fine everybody's going to have them occasionally and I don't think you should berate yourself when it happens but um it's better if you can find a small way to show up than to do nothing at all I love that James there's a there's an example that really resonates with me as you say in it about um I used to work in um boxing and uh there was a young guy who was supremely talented who was uh he was exceptional that sort of get it so he would never set his alarm clock to run but he would run when he woke up or he'd always be five minutes late into the gym and he'd be building a distraction so that he'd never really call into task on it and his talent got him all the way up to fight him for um a title and after halfway through the fight he was winning the fight easily but then it then came down to grit and resolve and being able to find a way through and he'd never practice those small habits of showing up on a bad day or getting through it and he ended up losing the fight on it and I remember his his training the same precisely that to me he's not lost a fight tonight he's lost it over the last 10 years of constantly see like not showing up on her on a bad day that's an interesting um point it's a good little phrase you know he didn't lose it tonight he lost it over the last 10 years there are a lot of things in life that are like that you know where it's actually all the sum of all these little moments before the sum of your preparation that determine the outcome in a lot of ways like the outcome of atomic habits was baked in months and years before it happened you know it was all the articles that built the audience it was all the revisions of the manuscript it was all the prep for the marketing and the launch that happened months before a single copy was sold it was it was actually all of that that was just potential energy energy getting released when the book came out um and there are many different things like that in life I also think it's worth um saying like I don't know anything about this particular story other than what you just told me but um you know most people never even make it to the title fight you know so this guy was there and that that also should count for something you know um there people just have different personalities and different makeups too and that's okay you know like people have different things that they want to emphasize and in a lot of ways I think when you see truly fantastic outcomes when you see really exceptional outcomes it's this perfect matching this perfect blending of personality and talent and situation um and so it's really I heard a phrase one time grit is fit and their point is like when you are well suited to an environment when you are perfectly fit for the task that you're working on um then yeah you're really gritty because it's the kind of thing that you're genuinely interested in that plays to your strengths that addresses your natural Curiosities and so in a lot of ways that's kind of the first big hurdle the maybe the most enormous thing to try to figure out is what is something that is naturally aligned with what I really want to do or the way that I'm encoded the way that I'm um you know put together and if you can find yourself a situation like that then you're in a place where you're gonna find like endless ways to improve because you're just naturally interested in it you'll always be unearthing in discovering new little things that you could uh tweak if you're in a situation where you're not that well suited to it or you're doing it just because other people are telling you you should or you kind of are being like nudged into it even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a hassle so that's another question that I really like asking which is what's the version of this habit that would be the most fun for me what's the version of this habit that feels like it's the best fit for my style and my personality there's not like infinite ways to do things in life but there's almost always more than one way and so you should choose the version of that habit that feels best suited to you and your style and your personality and if you do that you're in a much better place to improve so give us an example of that in your world then sure so um I'll give you two the first is very common like just weight lifting or exercise a lot of people especially in January when you know the years getting started they they choose an exercise habit because they feel like oh I'm supposed to go to the gym or I want to get in shape this year you know this is something I should do but you know I like lifting weights but not everybody wants to train like a bodybuilder and that's fine you know like you could kayak or rock climb or ride a bike or do yoga or you know there's like an endless number of ways to live an active lifestyle and you should choose the version of that habit that is most exciting to you or another one I did an interview with Tim Ferriss one time and he was telling me that when he did his um meditation habit for a long time when he first started his actual his meditation was he would listen to a song from Prince and he would sit and meditate while the song was playing now that's a really different version of meditation than what a lot of people have in mind when they're like oh I should go and meditate you know they think they need to be a Zen monk or they need to listen to some you know structured meditation session and he was like no I'm just going to sit and listen to this song from Prince and that's a really enjoyable version of that habit for me writing is another example you know I have gradually found that I like writing in shorter chunks when uh when I first signed the book deal to write Atomic habits the editors were encouraging me to write chapters that were like six to eight thousand words but that's not really my style like I I like writing things that are two or three thousand words and So eventually I was like you know what the structure of this book is just going to be different and so what would this look like if it was going to be fun for me to write well it's still going to be a lot of work but it's going to be a lot more fun if I get to write in my style so the chapters are short so that's just you know there are a lot of different ways that that can express itself but that basic idea of asking yourself what would this look like if it was enjoyable what would it be like to be someone who has fun doing this habit and then trying to find or structure the version of that I think it just puts you in a much better place and what habit have you stumbled upon that you'd share with us that has the biggest impact on the rest of your day you know on a personal perspective the early morning allows me to bounce from thing to thing to thing and I actually think that getting up early is one habit that maybe impact seven or eight further down the line well that's actually the key I think what you just mentioned which is to ask yourself which habit is Upstream from other good things happening for me and I you know it's easy when you sit down and think about the habits you want to change especially for ambitious people it's easy to start to get really aggressive about it be like you know what what would Peak Performance look like here's the seven things I'm going to start doing and you know you come up with this big plan and instead I would say how about we back out a little bit and ask ourselves what could I stick to even on my bad days let's start there with the floor and then we try to figure out what is the one or two things just one or two little moves that if I do this each day I tend to live a good day so your example is waking up early which is a good one for me my workout habit is the one that kind of anchors the rest of my day if I work out then yeah I get the benefits of exercise and that's great but I also I have a post-workout high for like an hour or two where I get like really good concentration I tend to sleep better at night because I'm tired from the workout which means I wake up the next day and I have better energy I tend to eat better when I'm working out it's when I'm not working out that I kind of like oh who cares you know like I'll eat whatever I want yeah um I might as well eat badly yeah yeah um now at no point was I trying to build better nutrition habits or sleep habits or Focus habits but all those things kind of came as a natural byproduct of just making sure that I got the workout in some other common ones you'll hear people say um a lot of performers comedians or basketball players or something like that they'll have a visualization habit if they do that before they step out on stage or step out onto the court they're more likely to have a good day um creatives we'll often talk about having a daily walk that's kind of their anchor habit they do that and the rest of the day kind of Falls in line the creative juices get flowing so I think it's as simple as asking yourself when I am really on when I'm living a good day what are some of the key parts of that day and you'll probably come up with two or three things that work well for you and I would say start there you know like man if you can knock down that one key habit that is Upstream from a lot of other good things you're living a lot of good days there if you can just get that done and then once you've established a foothold and kind of mastered the art of showing up consistently with that habit well now you have a lot of things that you could improve or you know advance from there James this has been a master class so thank you for being so generous and sharing it we Norm we then have a quick fire questions that we'd like to uh fill out here so the first one is what are the three non-negotiable behaviors that you and everyone around you must buy into um hmm the part about everyone around me is throwing me a little bit I don't really I don't think about it like that like I'm really not trying to force people to do stuff you know like I'm just trying to I'm just trying to keep my eyes on my own paper and focus on what I'm doing so um sleep is my big non-negotiable I try to try to get enough sleep it's hard when you got little kids you know like I got two young ones running around but um but uh so sleep is a key one working out which I already mentioned and then I for a long time I would have said writing but I actually think I'm gonna put reading in that category because what I found is that if I'm reading consistently the writing comes naturally if I'm if I'm exposing myself to interesting ideas then uh the juices just start flowing and you know things pop out and I'm like ready to write uh automatically so those are those are three things that are really crucial for me to live a good day um I would love a tip from you for our high performance book club we've got thousands of members they love um talking and discussing and sharing reads it can't be your own book unfortunately but everyone knows about it anyway um and there's two parts to this question for you because of the knowledge that you've got the first one is what would that book be the second one for people who want to be an Avid Reader like you but find that things get in the way what what do you do to keep that reading period of your life sacred uh okay so in terms of books I'll give you two because they're both really short so the first one is called manual for living by Epictetus a lot of people talk about the other stoic books that talk about Marcus Aurelius and meditations or Seneca or you know things like that but I really like manual for living biopic Titus you can read it in under an hour it is uh nothing in there or is anything that you've never heard before but it's all stuff that is helpful to hear again um so I really like manual for living second one is um lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant again very short um probably could read it in two hours or less um will and Ariel Durant were a husband wife combo who were historians for their whole career and over the course of their academic career they wrote this massive volume was like 12 volumes and like 600 000 words about everything that happened in history and then when they finish that project they wrote this little 100-page book called the lessons of history that is about the recurring themes or patterns the pieces of human behavior that show up again and again and so it's about the stuff that seems to never change the the elements of human behavior that are pretty consistent and Timeless and so I find it very interesting for that reason so manual for living lessons of History uh and then in terms of how do I keep my reading habits sacred um I think the first thing is try to keeping uh try to keep reading easy so I have no obligation to finish books like I don't I don't feel any pressure if I start something and you know it doesn't work out then it's not a big deal also if I start something and suddenly my life gets busy and I lose time it's not a big deal it's not this like burden that's hanging over me to finish a book another phrase that helped me with this is um most great books aren't actually great books they have great chapters and so what you're looking for is to read a great chapter not to read a great book and when you start to think about it that way we can all think of many books that are like this that actually should have been two chapters but it actually are 20. um and in fact what you're really looking for is where is the insightful chapter not where is the insightful book so that gives it that makes it a little bit easier it scales it down um be willing to quit books that helps a lot and then make it easy keep them around you so I have a bunch of books I got some sitting on my desk right now I have some sprinkled by you know around on the coffee table in the living room or next to the nightstand by said so I'm never far from a good idea that's kind of one of my little mottos is I always want to be close to a good idea um and then when I wanted to read more books I downloaded audible from my uh for audiobooks and I moved it to the home screen of my phone and I moved all the other apps to the second screen now that is a small thing and it's not going to radically transform your behavior but having books around you having audible on the home screen these are all just ways of trying to make good ideas accessible and easy and visible and putting them around you and I think the more that you do that the better position you're in to pick one up and dive in the last thing that I'll say though and probably the thing that makes the biggest difference is choose to read things that are exciting to you I mean a lot of people pick these books that are best sellers or that you know people tell them well you should read this because you know they feel like they're hearing about it a lot what topic are you genuinely thrilled about you know what topic is naturally pulling you in if you read books that are relevant to the things that you want to achieve you're going to want to pick it up and read it just because it's like oh this will help Propel my life forward so just pick things that are exciting to you and don't give too much regard to what other people are talking about reading do you read books in the specific way James uh no like like look at the index first and then the table of contents and then the chat no I don't really do anything like that I've seen people talk about doing that and I have friends who really love that kind of outlining approach for researching their own books you know they'll go through this research phase and they'll go through 10 books like that or whatever um I I don't really worry about it like that um I just basically pick it up and I read the part that looks interesting to me apparently so that's why quick fire what's one piece of advice that you'd give to a teenage James just starting out um well for my specific situation I probably would have said trust yourself and uh start earlier you know like there there are a lot of things in life that your family and your friends often want you to be safe and you want to grow and those two things are not always aligned and so realizing that you know that if you do something a little bit different than what they want it doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad it also doesn't mean that if they don't support you in the way that you were hoping it doesn't mean they don't love you or they don't want good things for you it just is a difference in priorities they want safety you want growth and those are two different things so that's more for me personally though if we're talking about like what do I think is good general advice for a teenager or what is something you would tell you know an 18 year old um I think it mostly comes down to focusing on getting started and being consistent so I always encourage people to start with what in the book I talk about the two-minute rule take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do so read 30 books a year it becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat and the real key there is that you're encouraging yourself to start small because you want to master the art of showing up you know you want to become the type of person that does it consistently there's that quote from Ed Latimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door and you know there are a lot of things in life that are like that and encouraging yourself to find ways to make it easy to show up to make it easy to open the front door to make it easy to get started that's where the battle always begins and you can really get in your head about trying to theorize or come up with the best plan I mean we all do this we want to come up with the best sales strategy you're the perfect diet plan the ideal business strategy but we often do that because we tell ourselves like oh I need to learn more before I can take action but the truth is the best way to learn is often by taking action the best way to learn is by getting in the arena a little bit get started gain a little bit of a foothold try a few things out see what works for you and then improve and update and iterate from there and so the two minute rule kind of pushes back on that perfectionist tendency gets you to master the art of showing up and start to get some of the results and the final question from us this is your your one last message to the people that have listened to this fascinating conversation thank you for being so generous with your time what would you like to leave ringing in their ears your one Golden Rule to a high performance life well we talked a lot during this conversation about what are you optimizing for what are you trying to achieve and I think a different way to frame that is around what kind of identity are you trying to build what's who is the type of person you wish to become you know for high performing people they often focus on results and that's fine like I get it too you know like I'm really interested in results and we all want to achieve great outcomes but I think it's often better to start not with what do I want to achieve but who do I wish to become and then the connection back to the everything we've talked about back to this discussion of consistency back to this discussion of small habits and showing up each day every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become and I think this is the real reason the true reason that habits matter it's not because habits will help you make more money or reduce stress or you know get get in shape they can help you do those things and that's great but the real reason that habits matter is that they reinforce your identity it's like each one each action is like a little vote you know building up some evidence for being that kind of person so no doing one push-up does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and no writing one sentence does not finish the novel but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer and so take a little bit of time to think about that who's the type of person I want to cast votes for what is the type of identity I wish to reinforce and how are my habits shaping the story that I have about myself and if you can get those two things aligned then the results can kind of come as a natural byproduct James I can't thank you enough thank you so much really appreciate the opportunity it's been a privilege thank you just a quick one to say thank you so much for watching this content on the high performance Channel we would love it if you would subscribe you know most people that watch what we do don't subscribe if you can subscribe we can make this bigger better Bolder than we've ever done before so hit subscribe right now and help the high performance podcast make a real difference to the world see you soon [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: High Performance

Views: 49,799

Keywords: Podcast, The High Performance Podcast, Jake Humphrey, Damian Hughes, james clear, atomic habits, how to make good habits, james clear habits, james clear podcast, habits podcast

Id: pqksVIv_NoE

Length: 74min 39sec (4479 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023