Bonus Holiday Re-Issue: James Clear

only been listening for a year. I picked the episodes because either a I think it's a really great episode or B I think it talks about behavior change, which we're heading into the new year, and that's on a lot of people's mind. Speaking of which, we are going to try something this new year. We're going to try the first one You Feed Group Transformation program. It will be a hundred dollars for a month. We're gonna limit

it to ten people. We will meet online four times that month, will discuss tips and tricks and different ways to ensure that you stay on track behavior wise. You'll be able to ask questions of me, and we'll do some things where you're paired up as a group so that you can get some support outside of the calls as well to make sure you get the new year off to a great start. So if you're interested, just send an email to me Eric at one you feed

dot net. I hope you enjoy these episodes. I listened back to a couple of them, and um, let's just leave it at we are getting better at what we do. In the very first one, I sound very nervous and I was so. Anyway, it's still a great interview. Enjoy these, have a happy new year. Thank you for listening, and we will talk to you soon. Bye. We often think that, oh, if I start with something so small that it isn't

gonna make a difference, it's not gonna matter. But the truth is, because that momentum builds after you get going, you can often start with something very tiny and then it will blossom into something much bigger afterward. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen

or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,

how they feed their good wolf. Hi, everybody. We have received so many questions about habits lately that we thought we should re release one of our episodes from two thousand fourteen, which was our interview with James Clear. This was one of our most popular episodes at the time, and with good reason, because it contains classic pieces of advice like never missed twice and one of the wisest pieces of information I've ever heard, which is reduced the

scope stick to the schedule. With that in mind, this episode is worth hearing again or for the first time. If you're newer to the show, here's the original run of the episode. We hope you'll enjoy it. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is James Clear, entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer. His work can be found at James Clear dot com, where he writes about scientific research and real world experiences that help you rethink your health and

improve your life. His blog gets millions of visitors per year. Here's the interview. Hi James, welcome to the show. Hey Eric, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, it's uh, it's great to get you on. I think the listeners are really going to enjoy this one. I have. Your writing on the web is very compelling, and I think we actually talk about a lot of the same things. I think you might be a bit more eloquent about it, but you're there's just a real common sense approach to

everything you do, which is something that always resonates with me. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of Two Wolves, where there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are engaged in an epic battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and

hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, it's a good thing to think about.

It's it's an interesting concept because I think often uh, society pushes us to feed um, maybe the evil wolf in some ways, or we at least reward that inside and society in many ways, you know, if you think about it, money and UH and wealth is the only addiction that we applaud, you know, um, millionaires around the on the covers of magazines. But people who are addicted to drugs rather than money, or alcohol rather than money or um, you know, have needing disorder or whatever else,

they aren't you know, they aren't applauded for that. So I don't know. It's interesting how the a similar mindset and obsessive mindset can be positive or at least seen positively in one way and and very negatively in another. Um. Anyway, that was just a thought that popped in my mind. But as far as my own work I I have, I guess I'm in a fortunate position now. So I've

been an entrepreneur for four years. During the first two years, I started a bunch of different things that you know, failed or flopped in one way or another, and then eventually found my way to building a business that succeeded and did well. UM. One of the best piece of of advice that I got early on was to try things until something comes easily. So in that first year I tried probably I don't know five or six different

business ideas just to see what would stick. And then eventually, like I said, I sort of made my way toward towards building a business around UM teaching people how to travel for free with freedom Flyer miles and UM, you know, different works. I've done travel photography, working over twenty countries now, so it was something that was like top of mind

for me as well. And uh, after I built that up over the first two years, I was able to transition a little bit so that the businesses run mostly by employees now and I check in every week or so. But the last two years I focused pretty much exclusively on writing at James Clear dot com, which is how

we got in touch. And so I guess what I'm getting to is I don't have to worry about money now, which is very different than where I was when I was starting, um, you know, four years ago, and so I don't have to worry about feeding that wolf as much. And so all the work that I do at James scare dot com is focused. The phrase that I use

a lot is mission first, business second. So you know, I'm working on my first book right now, and I have a habits workshop that I'll sell and um, I'll be paid to go speak at different conferences and whatnot. But the business model is secondary. The primary thing that I care about is spreading the message and trying to build a platform where I can help as many people as possible. UM. Last year, my articles are read by over two million people. This year that doubled over five

million UM. And so that's like, that's probably the most important metric for me at this point is growth and reach and impact in some way, UM, And I feel lucky that I am able to feed that wolf of integrity and value and meaningfulness and UM and impact and sort of do work that focuses on that rather than work that focuses on the bottom line. Right. Well, what I think is really interesting about that However, and we'll get into this a lot as we talk through the show,

is what we're doing here is is very similar. I think our business model is certainly secondary. This isn't a show where the goal is to is to make a lot of money, so that so that means there are other things that that I still do for for money. But one of the things I think is interesting is a lot of people tend to have this, well, I can't really do the thing that matters to me until I can do it all the time or completely, versus

the ability to sort of start where you are. And I know that a lot of what you talk about from creating habits perspective and being successful talks a lot about that all or nothing mentality. Yeah, I think this is one of the biggest pitfalls we've we uh, we find ourselves then when it comes to building new habits, are really just making a behavior change of any type?

Is that we think? You know, it's so easy to overestimate the idea of one defining moment or you know, overnight success or this massive transformation or change like flipping a switch and becoming a new person um And so we see things in very black and white terms, but it's not that way at all. Um too to share a story about this. One of the stories I like telling us about this guy named Dave Brailsford. And Brailsford

was hired by Great Britain's professional cycling team. They're called Team Sky and when they hired him, they had never wanted tour to France and they said, Mr Brailsford will bring you because you want to win tour to France. What's your plan for doing this? And he believes in this concept called the aggregation of marginal gains, and the way that he describes it is it's the one percent

improvement and nearly everything that you do. And so they started by looking for improvements that you would expect of a professional cycling team. They got bite tires that were slightly lighter, They had their outdoor riders where indoor racing suits because they were lighter weight. They had their writers were biofeedback sensors to see how they were responding to the training. You know, they did all these things that are associated with cycling performance. But they also made a

bunch of changes that you wouldn't expect. So they figured out the type of pillow that led to the best night's sleep and had their writers bring it with them on the road to hotels. I wish I knew. They taught their writers how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infection and UH and try to promote health in the best way possible and help them recover. They figured out the massage gel that led to the best recovery over time, and so they use that every

day after practice. So they made all these little changes, and Brailsford said, I think if we if we can execute on this strategy, we can actually make this happen. I think we can win a tour to France in five years. He ended up being wrong. They won the tour to France in three years, and then they won

again in the fourth year with a different writer. And when the professional cycling team from Britain went to the Olympics in London in two thousand twelve, Team Grade Britain won seventy percent of the gold medal available to them. So the moral of the story here is that one percent gains actually can add up to something very significant over the long run. It doesn't have to be a major switch or some like, you know, incredible change that leads to significant results and I think that this is

important because we often when we talk. You know, your original question was about this idea of the all or nothing mindset, or you know, if I if I just do a little bit and make a mistake every now and then, does that actually add up to anything? And the answer is yes, it does add up to something

significant if you can just maintain it consistently. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect by any means, but if you can aggregate these little one percent choices and tiny improvements day after day, even if it's only three days or four days or five days a week, it doesn't have to be seven, then it can actually lead to a very significant result in the long run. Yeah, You've got a lot of different things that that touch

on it. There's something that I say a lot on the show, which is, uh, a little of something is better than a lot of nothing, which I think reflects a phrase that you have which is reduced the scope, stick to the schedule. So I've been an athlete pretty much all my life. I played baseball through college, and I compete in Olympic weightlifting now and um when I first started training in the gym, I don't know, I I just thought like, if I couldn't get the perfect

workout in, then it wasn't like I wasn't doing enough. Basically, it was it was very much all or nothing mentality.

So as an example, you could say something like, if your goal is to run three miles after work today, you look up at the clock and you know it turns out that you were going to run for this next hour, but time's gotten away from you a little bit, and you only have twenty five minutes left, and you're like, well, twenty five minutes is enough time for me to get changed and run three miles and you know, get back.

So what I would have said in a situation like that in the past is, well, let me not waste this time, right, Like, maybe I don't have enough time to to get my workout in, so I'll answer, you know, some emails that are important, I'll make that phone call had been putting off, or I'll do something else like productive right at rational lies using the time in a

better way. But what I think is actually more useful now is to reduce the scope of what you're planning to do, but always stick to the schedule of doing it. So maybe running through miles isn't possible in twenty five minutes, but you could run one mile, for example, or you could get your shoes on and run tense sprints, whatever

is actually feasible within that that amount of time. And I got this idea from a software company called thirty seven Signals, which has been very successful that they are of a hundred million dollar company at this point, and one of their main principles is that they always ship software updates on time. It doesn't matter if it's as big as what they were hoping like. It may not be the full feature that they were hoping to launch,

but it's going to get out at the deadline. And I've seen this to be very useful in a variety of different areas. It's useful in the health example as I just gave, but it also is very helpful for work related habits. So when it comes to my writing, I published new articles every Monday and Thursday. It doesn't matter how long or how short they are, how good or how bad they are, it doesn't matter how I

feel about the work. The main thing is that I ship something every Monday and Thursday, and of course I'm going to try my best each time. But what I've realized is that occasionally there'll be a dud of an article. But that's a cost that I'm willing to pay because I know that if I stick to the schedule every Monday and Thursday, if I show up consistently, then there

are going to be some gems in there. That's on average, eight or nine articles a month for me, and I know that if I try my best on those eight or nine, there's gonna be two or three decent ones. Now I can't predict what they're going to be, just as I can't predict when my best lifts are going to be in the gym. Right like, I train every Monday, one day and Friday. If I only went to the gym when I felt motivated, when I felt inspired to go, then you know, I would never be able to show

up consistently enough to put up a decent number. But I know that if I show up three days a week, every week, then sometimes there's you know, there's gonna be a good number on the board. There's so much good stuff in what you just said there, and I think

that idea. I like that phrase reduced the scope. Stick to this schedule, or as I said, a little if something is better than a lot of them nothing, because at least, you know, my life is very and I think a lot of our listeners and a lot of people in the modern world to their lives are very chaotic, and routines are harder to come by than they used

to be. You know, you've got a kid who's got this on this night and this on that night, and then the next week it's here, and and I've just found that ability to say, Okay, I'm gonna have to be flexible on what it is that I do. Um, it's gonna be five minutes versus ten minutes or whatever it is, but that that you stick with that schedule.

I think that's really important. The next thing that you led into in there is something we've talked about a lot on the show, and it's the idea of doing what you've committed to doing regardless of what your mood or not letting your mood be your decision making tool. Yeah. I the way I phrase it a lot is don't let your emotion drive your behavior. So I when I started writing, I actually wrote in private for over a year before I published anything, and I was coming up

with all sorts of excuses for why that was. You know, my ideas aren't fully formulated yet, my marketing skills aren't good enough. I you know, I don't I'm not a great writer, I haven't figured out my voice whatever, all

these different things. And eventually I talked to a friend of mine named Todd Henry, and Todd's a published author and much better writer than I am, and so I was talking to him and I said, Todd, I I feel like I only right when I get this burst of motivation or this you know, the spark of inspiration, this creative music. That's when I get my best ideas. So all right then, and he was like, well, that makes sense silently, right when I feel motivated to it

just happens to be every day at eight am. And like when he said that, I was like, oh, this is the difference between professionals and amateurs, right. Amateurs do things when they feel motivated or when it's easy for them, when they feel inspired, and professionals do things on a schedule. Um. And so that was when I decided to set my

Monday Thursday publishing schedule. And I've been able. November twelve, two twelve, was the first day, the first Monday that I published, and I've been able to stick to that schedule ever since. The caveat here is that you have to choose a schedule a pace that you can sustain. Um. One of the stories I like held about this is

about Southwest Airlines. So in the mid nineties, Southwest had been growing very rapidly for almost twenty years at this point, and this was a period of time when most airline companies were either losing money or going bankrupt, at least in the United States and in I believe it was. Southwest had offers to expand to over a hundred different cities, and if you're a business, this is a great problem to have right there, like, Okay, we have tons of

options for growth. But what Southwest did was they turned down almost all of them. They only expanded to four new locations in and Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, I think he's the one who originally found the story, and one of the reasons that he says Southwest was so successful is that they they set like an upper bound for their growth, like an upper limit

for what they were gonna do. Right, they had a hundred options, but they said, we're only going to grow to four new places, and sometimes I like to keep that in mind when it comes to behavior change and building new habits as well. You know, so often we think about the lower limit for what we want to do. I want to work out for at least forty five minutes, or I want to write at least a thousand words today, or you know, I want to lose at least fifteen

pounds in the next four months. But I think in many ways it would be much more useful to set an upper limit for our behavior, especially in the beginning, because the only thing that matters is the consistency of the habit. It's not the result that matters in the beginning, because if you don't do the action consistently, then you're never going to get the result anyway. So if you can check your ego a little bit and set an upper limit for yourself, you could say something like like,

I had a reader the name as Mitch. He lost over a hundred pounds over the course of two years, and when he was adding exercise into his routine, he told himself, I'm not allowed to stay at the gym for more than five minutes. So he would go to the gym he dies for over four weeks. First four weeks he went to the gym for five minutes a day, five days a week, and then when he got to six minutes, he left and he was like, after four or five weeks, I kind of, you know, felt like

I'm coming here all the time. I sort of want to stay longer. Right, And the important thing there is he wasn't worried at all about the result or the outcome in the beginning, right, He was only focused on the behavior. How do I make it a habit? How do I become the type of person that shows up at the gym every day? How to become the type of person that doesn't miss workouts? And once I know that I'm gonna be here consistently, then I'll worry about

improving the performance. But so often we flip it. So often we're so obsessed with the idea of the outcome or the result that we want that we never think about how can we actually build this into a behavior that's habitual and repeated. Yeah, we had todd On is one of our first guests, and and he's amazing. And one of the things one of the earlier guests we also had was a guy named Dan Millman who wrote um a book, The Way the Peaceful Warrior. But he

talked in our interview about this idea. It's very similar. He called it, you know, start small and connect the dots. But you know, exercise for two minutes a day, but do it for you know, do it every day for a week or two weeks, and then if you if you exercise for four you've just you've doubled it. But I think it's it's back to that idea of all or nothing. It's really it's easy to get into that.

All right, I'm gonna go forty five minutes a day every day, and then when I when I fall off, it's it's hard to maybe stick to that, which I think is what you're saying is to keep keep the scope at what we can do. The podcast, for example, we do once a week. I occasionally put out a mini episode on the weekends. And the data is clear that if you want to grow a podcast, you put one out, you know, as frequently as you can. But the reality is it's not a pace we could keep.

And so it's more about the slow and steady. Every week on Tuesday, an episode goes out well and the data is also clear that podcasts that put something out every week succeed more than one's to do five in a row and then don't do anything exactly. You know. That's so I would say, yeah, that's a great story. So that idea of breaking things into smaller, smaller chunks is um one that that I'm a big fan of. And you have something you call the two minute rule.

I think I call it the five minute rule. I think they're very much a very similar thing. Can you tell us about the two minute rule? Sure? So the original and two minute rule comes from David Allen's about getting things done, and it's just a productivity strategy that he uses to try to do things that you keep

putting off. So for example, um, making the phone call that you've been wanting to make for the last week, or responding to that email that's been sitting in your inbox, or washing the dishes that are in the sink, throwing a load of laundry, whatever, if it takes less than two minutes, do it right away. That's his two minute rule. But I think we can adjust that rule for building new habits and behaviors. And the basic idea is nearly any habit that we want to do, for the most part,

is going to require some conscious effort. They're they're actually bigger in scope than what academic researchers would define as a habit. Academic researchers would say a habit is something you do automatically, like scratching your head or biting your

nails or flossing your teeth. But a lot of times when we talk about building new habits, we're talking about things that are you know, I want to make a habit of eating healthy, or I want to make a habit of going to the gym, or I want to make a habit of making five sales calls a day, whatever it happens to be, And these are things that are going to require conscious effort. But the thing that often happens is that when we think about the whole habit that we're trying to build in scope, it seems

like too much. You know, It's kind of like what I mentioned earlier. If you want to run three miles, maybe you get home from work at the end of the day and you feel exhausted, and the thought of running three whole miles sounds like too much for you. Right, It's it's more than the motivation or whelpower that you have available at that time. So rather than focus on the entire event, on the whole scope of the project,

focus just on the first two minutes of it. So not most habits cannot be completed in under two minutes, but nearly any habit can be started in less than two minutes. And so the idea behind this is put all of your motivation and willpower into starting the behavior, and trust that in many ways, motivation comes after starting, not the for you know, we have this this sort of myth in our head that we the reason that we don't get started on things is because we don't

have enough willpower. We weren't born with enough willpower. It's not this innate, I don't know trait that we with something we lack for one reason or another, and that if we only had more willpower then that would be the solution to you know, to to accomplishing these tasks. But what often happens is that the willpower shows up not before we begin, but after. And pretty much anyone has experienced this in one way or another. When you started behavior and all of a sudden, it's much easier

to finish it. You know a lot of times, like if you're it may be hard for you to get your workout going. But if you can simply get to the gym and start your first exercise, you're going to follow through with it at the end um to the end. So the idea behind the two minute rule is focus all your intensity and motivation on the first two minutes. So for example, if we take the running thing, then it's just get your shoes on, get out the door,

close the door, knob right, something like that. And then after that, if you don't run at all, find no big deal. Only need to judge yourself. But often you'll find that you feel motivated enough to finish the task. Yeah, that's exactly what I do it for five minutes, and I'm very deliberate about setting a timer, but it's usually I can trick myself into starting for five minutes. And

then momentum is a is a particularly powerful force. You know, nine times out of ten, you're right, it's sufficient to to get the thing done. And I think the corollarity of that too, and I've seen you reference it is a lot of the things that I tend to put off feel overwhelming to me and breaking them down to two minutes doesn't feel overwhelming, or if it's an overwhelming thing, breaking that thing into so many small tasks that I

can find one that's easy to start on. This is the classic phrase that Leo be about to use is all the time, right, like, starts with something so easy you can't say no to it. And if you you know, a lot of the time this is some of this comes back, weaves back in with the one percent gains story that I mentioned in the beginning. We often think that, oh, if I start with something so small that it isn't

going to make a difference, it's not gonna matter. Um. But the truth is, because that momentum builds after you get going, you can often start with something very tiny and then it will blossom into something much bigger afterward. You talk about not needing to be fantastic at the start, you just need to be there at the start. Yeah, I mean this idea that we're we have to be an expert to some degree I think is is uh is incorrect. So the phrase that I've been taught by

a friend of mine named Beck Tench. She she worked at a science museum, but she wasn't a scientist, and she said, one of the interesting things I learned when I was there was about how scientists treat failure. You know, when a scientist runs an experiment, there are many pieces of data. Some of them agree with the hypothesis they have, some of them may not. But they don't necessarily see the pieces of data that don't agree with the hypothesis as a failure. Um, it's just a piece of data.

It's just another data point. So there may be a positive result, there may be a negative result, but it's just a data point to them. And I think that's a much more powerful a to look at failure in our own life. You know, you don't need to show up and have positive, positive string of data points from the very beginning when you start a habit. You could try to start a habit fail and then say, huh,

that's interesting, what a useful data point. Let me take that and turn that into something right, use that as fuel for the next adjustment that I need to make, rather than as an indication of who I am. So often we make the mistake of sealing seeing failure as an indication of our identity, of our self worth, of the type of person that we are the talent that we have or what we're capable of. But that's not

true at all. Um. You know, if you went to if you went to a restaurant and ordered, uh, you know, an entree and it came out and you ate it and it was bad, you wouldn't accuse yourself of being like a terrible food order. Right. It's not like it's not a reference to the quality of you as an individual just because the result is negative. Um. Instead, you would just see it as a data point of Oh, I don't like this food, or this is something I'm

not going to order again in the future. And I think would be much more useful if we took that same approach to creative tasks that we have in our work, to health and personal tasks and other growth tasks that we have in our life. Yeah, you say that. A lot of people see failures like you just said, it's an indication of who they are. But mentally tough people define themselves more by their perseverance. There's a you know,

I don't know, it's interesting there. I mental toughness is a topic that I've been thinking about more recently, and I'll probably write write a lot more about it at

some point. But one of the articles that I've written recently that I enjoyed is about this finished concept called see sue and there's a there's no direct translation for the word in in English, but see sue and finishes sort of this quality that that the fins are proud of having, this idea that they persevere even after their out of options, even after there's you know, no necessarily um forward or way to succeed in a particular task. Yet still they find a way to to move forward.

And I find that that a lot of people who are really successful, whether it's entrepreneurs and CEOs or at lead athletes at some level, um really successful comedians or entertainers, whoever happens to be. In the very beginning, they keep getting riddle with these failures, but they have this this like quality of c sue in the beginning, this ability to persevere and continue to move forward even when they're

not getting positive results. You know, sometimes it's so hard to continue moving forward if you don't have an indication that you're making progress. But there's this, I don't know, there's this magical quality of learning that requires failure in the beginning, and the people who embrace that are the ones who end up, you know, developing a significant skill set in the long run. I know it's something you've been writing more about, and it's a the idea of

grit or mental toughness. Do you have any thoughts on how people go about acquiring more of that? Yeah, that's a good question. That's the main thing that I've been thinking about UM as I'm as I've been working on this recently. I think the the idea of starting small makes sense in this particular case as well, because one of the I think in many cases one of the most dangerous things you can have is actually to grow

very fast or really quickly. Like most of the trouble that I've gotten myself into or troubles maybe the wrong word. Most of the the setbacks that I've had um have happened when I've tried to do too much too fast, and or or when I've gotten to a level that maybe I'm not prepared for too quickly. And so in other words, it's kind of like training yourself with small failures to develop the ability to overcome those. And once you develop the ability to overcome something small, you can

step up to the next level. And take a slightly greater risk and then fail there, but still be able to handle it because now you have a new skill set. And then take a slightly greater risk and again be able to handle that because now you're a little bit

better than you were before. And um, I think that idea of progression works really well here, um as well, because if you can prove yourself, prove to yourself that you're mentally tough in a small way, then maybe you can take that and leverage it into proving it again to yourself in a slightly bigger way. Yeah, it's a really inter esting It is about how do we define

failure and how do we define success? And one of the things that you you talk about and I am I've learned, you know, I've learned so many of these things through what can only be described as bitter experience. But is the idea of don't make the second mistake? Well, I guess I'll back this one up with a little

bit of research. So there was a study done at University College London in uh in England, and they they were looking at the length of time that it took to actually build a new habit and there's all these miss out there it takes twenty one days when you habit our thirty days or whatever. What they found was

that on average it took about sixty six days. But that's even that number is is largely unhelpful, I guess, because it's of huge range, you know, and as you would expect, it depends on the habit, right, Little things like drinking a glass of water at lunch may only take three weeks, whereas big things, um, like going for a run three days a week, or you know, some other habit that's much larger and requires more effort and um and willpower may require eight months before it becomes routine.

And so the range that they saw was anywhere from like eighteen days to two fifty something days UM. But the message that the exact numbers aren't important. The messages it's going to take months probably to build a new habit.

But the the second finding of the study, which I thought was very interesting, is that they looked at the people who stuck with habits over the long run and the consistency that they had, and what they found was that different people failed at different points along the curve, but at no point did missing one day, whether it was the first day, the tenth day, the hundredth day, the thousandth day. Missing one day had no measurable impact whatsoever on your ability to stick to a habit over

the long run. And so this goes back one to the the all or nothing mentality, right, But it also triggered this idea in my mind, which is that top performers in many different industries make mistakes just like everybody else. I mean, you know, they're not perfect. They're just like you and I. They make errors, they slip up, they have a bad day. There's urgency these and emergencies of life they have to deal with that prevent them from

doing their habits consistently every now and then. But the key is when they get off track, they find a way to get back on track as quickly as possible. So the phrase that I like to keep in mind is never missed twice, or don't make the second mistake, as you said. And so if I can figure out a way that once I get off track, I can get myself back on track as quickly as possible, I know that that's not going to hurt me in the

long run. I don't need to be perfect, and there's no measurable impact that missing yesterday will have if I can get back on track today. And so for that reason, I think one of the most useful exercises you can go through when it comes to building new habits is uh. Then this is an idea from a book called The

Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonagall. She's a professor from Stanford and her idea or her strategy is the main thing that takes your willpower off course or that depletes your willpower is not understanding how and when you lose willpower, how and when you get off track. So, in other words, if you get a piece of paper and list out all the things that could take you off track with

your habits. You know, my kid gets sick, or I you know I'm ill, or I um, you know, I forget I didn't set a reminder on my phone, or you know a thousand other things that could take you off course. I my friends asked me to go out to eat when I'm trying to stick to my diet, whatever it happens to be. For the habit that you're working on, list out all the possible scenarios you can think of that could take you off course. If you can prevent those things, great, go ahead and prevent them.

But if you can't, then come up with an if then scenario for what you're going to do to get back on track as quickly as possible, because then it becomes less a story of oh, I'm a victim. That happened to me. Um, now I don't know what to do. It takes me two weeks to get back on track or two months before I feel motivated again to do this. It's less about that victims story of this happened to me and this is why I got of course, and more about Okay, this happened. Here's my plan to get

back on track. And if you can develop the strategy to never missed twice, then you'll probably have much more success of a long run, and the little airs that occur every now and then you're going to happen to all of us won't have a measurable impact on your results. Yeah, that's such a big one. And the bitter experience I was talking about is that seems to be the thing in the past that would always derail me, is I would fall off the wagon, whatever that wagon might be, um,

and then just give up. And I think A lot of it gets back to the stories we tell ourselves about what that stuff means. And you just you touched on in a minute ago that that the idea of failure is a is not an indication of who we are. But I think it's so easy for us to start telling ourselves stories when we miss a day or we fail to get into oh well, this means I'm just not cut out to do this, or I always do this thing, or what's the point and those are all

just they're nothing but stories. Yeah. A great book to read on this particular topic is called Mindset by Carol Dweck. She also has a researcher at Stanford and the strategy that she lays out of the um the discovery that she lays out from her research and that book is that there are two types of mindsets. The first type of mindset is a fixed mindset, and the fixed mindset believes that talent matters, and that you know, we're very

focused on the outcome, the result that we get. We tend to avoid challenges that are faced to us because we think our skill set is fixed to some degree. I was born this way. These are the this is the talent that I have. This is the type of person that I am, um, and it looks at outcomes as an indication of who we are. So what you're mentioning there, Oh, I slipped on on this habit. I

always do this. I'm a failure. I'm the type of person who you know isn't good at working out, or I'm the type of person who isn't natural at sales or whatever. It happens to be the growth mindset. So this first mindset is the fixed mindset. The second mindsets the growth mindset. Growth mindset is very focused on effort rather than outcome. I worked really hard on this. This

is why I did a good job. Your process focused how can I commit to the system and continually get better rather than worrying about a particular outcome, And you embrace challenges that come your way because you see them as ways to develop your skill set. So the growth mindset says, my abilities are not fixed. It's not a talent question. I can improve in some way even if I'm not good at it now. And the key to realize here is that you don't have a fixed mindset

or a growth mindset. We have that we but we all have both in certain areas. So if you take my writing for example, I'm very growth mindset oriented. I'm always looking for ways to improve. I think, okay, I can look at my progress of the last year or two, I've definitely become a better writer. Let me, you know, look at other writers who are great at the aircraft and see what I can learn from them and try to develop my skill set. Always focused on moving forward.

But with sales and selling, I would always tell myself the story of I'm not a natural salesman. I prefer to be really high integrity. This isn't something that you know I'm good at for that reason all these other things. And so I was hamstring myself saying, oh, this isn't who I am. Right, I was just saying, oh, this is a fixed thing. It's just not me. And so we can do this to ourselves in many different areas where we say we're fixed in a certain area, but

we may be growth in another area. And when you notice yourself having that fixed mindset of you know, using failure as an indication of who you are, or using an outcome them as an indication of what you're good at or how talented you are, you need to remind yourself that the growth mindset is what is true, right. This is the approach that we need to take. That skills can be developed and cultivated, that you have the ability to improve in some way, even if you failed

in the past. It's not an indication of the outcome that you're destined to have. It's just something that has happened in the past. I've got two last areas i'd like to cover with you, which tend to be too of themes that I always like to explore, and luckily you've written about them a little bit. One of them

is the idea of comparison. So you've got an article where you talk about a show choreographer who puts out a bunch of work that she doesn't feel as great, and then or that she does feel as great, and then something she puts out that she doesn't think as good becomes very successful. But you talked through that that article about the idea of comparison, and comparison is one of those things that I think can be potentially very painful to us, and I'm interested to hear more about

it from you. Yeah. So the story is about this choreographer named Agnes Demil who she choreographed a bunch of different shows that she thought you were great, as you mentioned, and then she did the choreography for Oklahoma, which is a blockbuster hit on Broadway, performed over two thousand times and had all the success, and she thought her work

was average. And so she was talking to Martha Graham, who is one of the most famous dance choreographers of the twentieth century, and she was like, Martha, I, you know, I feel like maybe I'm not cut out for this work, because my whole concept of what is good work and what is bad work seems off. I you know, the work that I thought was great, nobody cared about. The work that I thought was very average. People loved. Maybe

I'm not cut out for this. And Martha Graham just looked at her and said, you have something inside of you, a unique set of skills, set of circumstances and experiences and ideas that if you don't put it out there, if you don't deliver it to the world, it will never it will never be, it will never exist in any other way no one else can produce that. Your job is not to determine whether or not that is valuable.

Your job is not to compare it to someone else or try to measure how good or how bad it is. Your job is simply to create the work, is simply to put it out in the world, and then you can let the world decide whether it's good or not. And I think that that's a great way to think about comparison, for for all of our our our own work and the you know, the comparison trap that we often fall into when comparing our lives and um and

our our choices to other people. You know, like your job is not to determine whether your life is more valuable than someone else's, or your work is more creative or more compelling than someone else's. Your job is simply to live out the path that you have because if you don't live it out, nobody else will be able to. There's no one else that can put out this unique set of creative output, this unique set of circumstances and ideas and experiences, this unique set of conversations and stories

and pieces of advice. Whatever it happens to be that you want to deliver to the world, it's your job simply to deliver it, not to try to measure it, and then you can let the world decide whether they love it or not. Yeah. I think that's such a great, a great piece of advice on this because it's so easy to get into comparing and one of the other things that listeners might be tired of hearing me talk

about it. But the the other thing I've noticed about comparing is that you know, there's always somebody who you could think is better than you in certain things, somebody who could think is worse than you in certain things. But the thing I've noticed in both those cases is I'm not connecting to the two people at all. I'm kind of often my own isolated world. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you're kind of in the theater of your mind rather than in the you know, the real world

producing something. And one of the phrases that I keep in mind on this sometimes is it's it's very easy to judge from the crowd. It's much harder to be in the arena and actually do the work. And as much as possible, I think we should try to keep ourselves in the arena rather than up in the crowd judging what's going on in the field. Yeah. I was just on somebody else's show earlier today, doing an interview, and he's somebody who's also in the UM bodybuilding world,

which I thought it was interesting to have me on UM. Nonetheless, we talked a little bit about that, and I'd just be curious about your perspective because in the bodybuilding weightlifting world, there certainly is a great degree of comparison in physique, for example, or things like that. And it's easy to see how that quote from Martha Graham makes sense in a creative expression. How would you handle comparison in a more um physical sense like that. Yeah, that's a good question.

As as someone who was an athlete, I feel like comparison and competitiveness often get confused, you know, And so for a long time, for most of my athletic career, I was very comparison focused, right like, how am I outperforming the person next to me? Or how am I performing against the team that I'm playing against. But competitiveness

does not necessarily require you to compare. You can compete against yourself, you can compete at the highest level possible, you can try to improve and be as ambitious as possible. But the judgment of whether or not it's good or whether or not you're better actually if you think about it does not help you perform. It's not the performance. The performance itself is what matters, not the judgment of it.

Um from your from your side, and if you're If we take the body building example, comparing yourself is not what makes you a better bodybuilder, right. It's like doing more reps, or focusing on a new type of exercise that maybe you've neglected in the past, or optimizing your nutrition to a certain degree. You know, it's like spending time in the arena of doing the work that makes the difference. It's being more focused and missing fewer workouts.

These are the things that actually drive better results, not how much time you spend comparing yourself to someone else. Um. The comparison is not the work, but we often confuse it with being associated with the work or motivating the work, and so we we spend too much time focused on it. If you were able to relieve yourself of all comparison but do more work than you had before, you would

probably get better results. So I think I think oftentimes we use comparison as a crutch by saying, oh, this is what motivates me, or this is what you know. I'm always thirsting to get to the next level or whatever. But being focused on comparison and judgment is not the same as being competitive. And being competitive is great, but it doesn't require you to compare yourself to others. I think that can be similar to worrying, right. A lot of people think that worrying about something is the same

as doing something about it. And one of the rules I tried to put in place for myself and I do with varying degrees of success, though, is that if I start to worry about something, I asked myself, is there any positive action I can take that would improve this outcome whatever that thing is? And if so, I try and do it, and almost instantly upon that, the worry or the comparison or all that stuff vanishes once

I'm engaged in some sort of positive action. Yeah, that's actually one of the main reasons why I tend to not watch any news or television really unless it's an Ohio State football game. Um. But uh, I I found that after a while, I was like, watching the news didn't give me any particular action to take to become a better person. It didn't allow me to do anything positive or to to make the world a better place

in any way. And this is different. The criticism that I'll get sometimes when I talk about this is people are like, oh, well, you're an uninformed citizen. Well this is different than saying that I don't want to learn or that I'm uninformed. Right. If it's something that's important to me or that I want to get better at, or an action that I actually want to take to to make the world a better place, then of course I'm going to seek out information to become better on it.

But what I'm saying is I I found that watching the news is relatively useless for me because getting that information pushed on me doesn't prompt me to make any better action. All it does is just prompt me to worry or think about things that that don't allow me to become a better person anyway. Yeah, I agree. I think that's I've been doing in a course for some of the listeners on the seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and that falls right into that um circle of concern

versus circle of influence kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So. The last thing that I'd like to talk about is and I love the way you phrased it because it's but It's something I'm always talking about and always wrestling within. It's and you say, ambition and contentment are not opposites, but we often make the mistake of thinking that they are incompatible. Can you talk a little bit more about that, because that's a fascinating topic for me, is how do

you be ambitious and content at the same time. Yeah, it's you know, and this is something I certainly haven't mastered to I need degree. It's it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently, and that you know, you look at on one hand, competitiveness and drive is something that is central for me. I mean, it's the the athlete in me is like, yes, I love this um And then on the other hand, you see people who

are you know I we're talking about. I was talking with some friends the other day about a particular entrepreneur that we know, and he said, he's literally the only person I know who does not want more. And when you think about that, it's like, wow, that is a really powerful thing. Right to not want more. That has to be the ultimate definition of success, right to be

completely satisfied with with where you're at. And so on one hand, you're like, oh, if I'm satisfied with where I'm at, then why would I feel driven or ambitious to move to the next level. But then on the other hand, you're like, well, I want to get to the next level, like growth is something that's very important to me. So how do I how do I emerge these two How do I make these two things connect?

And the best metaphor that I had heard of it came from this book I was reading, called The Inner Game of Tennis by tim Timothy Galway, and he talks about a rose seed and basically says, when rose seed is planted, we don't criticize it for not having roots or not having stems or whatever. And then it grows and sprouts into you know, a bud and a stem, and you know, at that point we don't criticize it for not being a full grown tree or you know,

not having branches or more leaves um. And then it continues to grow and it you know, develops more leaves and strong and so on. And at no point during this this uh sequence do we criticize the roads for being immature or underdeveloped or not you know, fulfilling its full potential or not being ready yet. Right. But but it also never stops growing, So it's perfectly. It's perfect the way that it is at any given time. It's what it's supposed to be. It's content, it's happy, but

it's also ambitious. It never stops growing. And so I think that that's the type of metaphor and approach that I would love to take with my own life. It's like, I am perfectly happy with who I am now, satisfied with the type person. I am, satisfied with what I've achieved. I feel self confident. I don't feel like I have to prove myself to others or justify myself in some way. I don't feel a need to compare myself. I simply feel present and at peace. But I'm also never going

to stop growing simply because that's what I do. Not because it requires me to be unhappy with my life or the current state that I have, not because it requires me to constantly question whether I'm doing enough or whether I am enough, but simply because growing is what I do. Just as a rose seed grows, so do I. And I think that that that idea of being both content and ambitious is a really powerful thing that that I would love to be able to you know, to master or at least um do on a on a

consistent basis. Yeah, that is such a great analogy. And I almost intended to end the interview with what you just said because it was so powerful. But I think it is that so many of us have this idea that it's dissatisfaction or unhappiness that provides the impetus for for growth or change, and that certainly is true. You can't deny that that is one of them. But I

like what you said. I think I actually go further, and I think it's not just what you do or what a rose does, but I think it's kind of what the universe does. Right. It's there is a clear bias towards growth and change and move forward that seems embedded in everything. And that's why I always get sort of because you've got sort of the contemplative practices like Buddhism that say, well, you know, desire or craving is

the is the problem. And on one hand, I go, well, yeah, I kind of see that, and then on the other hand, I see that that idea of growth is seems inherent, and I love the way you put that. Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's it's a very interesting balance to strike, and it's also I think a very difficult balance to maintain over the long run, you know, like in any given moment maybe we feel that way, but it's it's a challenge to maintain that day after day. Well, James,

thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been a wonderful conversation. And I'll have links to your website and I will you know, I do and will continue to encourage anybody to go read them because I think you're very, like I said, very common sense, very practical, and and things are presented in a in a in a way that it's easy to take something powerful away. So thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. I um, I

hate to leave people without anything. So if they you know, obviously they're welcome to stop by the website if they like, but if they want more information about some of the habit stuff that we talked about, specifically, like I have a couple of exercises. There's this tea chart exercise. It's relatively useful for building new habits um and a couple other ideas. I put them all on a little guide

and slowly free. They can download it at James clear dot com slash habits, so if you feel like checking out more, yeah, feel free to pop over there and give it a look. Excellent and I'll link to that also in our show notes. Well, thanks, James, have a great afternoon, sure thing, all right? Take care bye? All right, you bet bye. You can learn more about James Clear and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Clear