James Clear || How to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Clear's website, Jamesclear dot com receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribed to his email newsletter. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, and Entrepreneur, and on CBS This Morning, and has taught in colleges around the world. Clear is the creator of the Habits Academy, the premier training platform for organizations and individuals that are interested in building better habits in life

and work. His latest book is called Atomic Habits, An Easy and proven Way to build good habits and break bad ones. James, such a delight to chat with you today. Hey, thanks so much for having man. It's good to talk to you. Good talk to you too. I mean, this book that you did is right now at this point in your life, you're magnum opus. Yeah, that's true. I mean it's the most complete and comprehensive guide that I've put together on how habits work and really how to

change them or how to shape them. And you know, it's funny. I mean, as a scientist, you'll appreciate this philosophy too. But I think a lot of authors, they write a book and then because you put so much effort and energy and research into a book, you know, for me, this was a three year process to finish the book itself, and then probably six years of writing

before that. I think a lot of time. Once the book is published, you kind of double down on all the ideas because it took so much effort to put it in there. But in a sense, I'm trying to just view this as like the world's most polished first draft on habits, you know, And so I put it out there and I'm hoping that I'll get a lot of feedback on you know, what people enjoy and find useful and what questions they have where there are gaps

in my thinking. And then you know, hopefully I can send out a revised and updated version five years from hour or ten years from how or whatever and really fix any of the flaws they are there. So I'm I like, I'm very excited to share with people. I'm really proud of what it is, but I'm also excited to continue to improve it. Well, you clearly walked it, dok, because that's one of the main themes of your book is to continually improve even you know, one percent, you know,

every day. I'd be happy if I improved one percent every month, you know, I add up by a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm always impressed with those who can do that every day, you know. Yeah. So I really like that attitude. And you said the first draft for the world like the world's first draft, but personally you obviously went I assume you went through more than one draft. What was your first draft like a this book? Your person man, do

not even want to talk about it? Well, this is maybe a little bit of an insight into my process, but I totally over wrote for the book, so I ended up having to ask my publisher for an extra year to research and write it. Once I got about a year in, I really still this isn't going to be enough time, and they very graciously gave it to me.

But my first full draft of the book was two hundred and fourteen thousand words, which is over seven hundred pages, and the finished version is about two hundred and fifty pages of texts, so it's about one third of what it was when I first put it all together, and I'm glad that that happened. I mean, it needed to be refined and honed down, but my hope is that I was able to like still capture the essence of all of those seven hundred pages, but in a more digestible,

easy to understand, simple and actionable format. Yeah. I mean, it's such a common thing for that first draft to be bloated, as they say, because you rarely know exactly until hindsight, you know exactly what are the most relevant things until you see the big picture. At least that is the case for me, you know, Oh, that was definitely the case. I didn't really know what the book

was until I had written that's interesting proposal. Well, it was always going to be a book about habits, right, it was always going to be that I have been writing about habits at James claar dot com for what six years now, And so I had a lot of ideas about habits, a lot of individual strategies for changing them or specific tactics that you could use in a given situation. And there were maybe say thirty or forty of those ideas that were all kind of under the

umbrella of building better habits. But I didn't understand how they all fit together. I didn't understand like what the framework was, that how they integrated. And I needed to pretty much write the whole book to get my thoughts in order and figure out, like how do these work together? You know, on a blog, articles can be kind of like a spider web. You can have like one article

that connects to three or four other ideas. But in a book, it needs to be more of like a number line chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, like it needs to build. And so I had to write the whole thing to figure out where do all

the pieces fit. I love that. I love that because you know, in Wire to Create, I talk about how creativity is is an emergent property, and like you know, Picasso said he hardly ever knew where he was going until he got there, you know, and it sounds like your process is similar, But it doesn't mean that you have to operate blind. That's a false economy at all. Right. It doesn't mean just because it's emerging that you're just

like stabbing in the dark at trial and error. You're still building these habits that are going to ultimately increase the likelihood that something good's going to emerge. You know, I would be interested to get your thoughts on this, but I think for me, similar to that Picasso quote you just shared, writing is like thinking. A lot of the time, I don't really know what I think about something until I have written about it, because I get to kind of iterate on the thought multiple times as

I go through it. And I find that if I'm asked about something that I haven't written about, what I'm really doing in the moment is I'm just talking my emotions. I'm talking my feelings. Like you asked me a question, I haven't written about it before, so my response is just kind of based on like whatever my gut intuition is or feeling is in the moment, and I'm talking those feelings out loud in my response. But when I write, I get to do that. I get to talk through

my feelings and I read what I write out loudly. Yeah, but I get to revise it again and again, and so I eventually where I get to after I've revised an article twenty five times is very different than what that first draft would be when it comes out of my mouth in conversation. I don't know, it's kind of an interesting thing. It's like you ask me about something and I tell you what I think, but it might not actually be what I think. It's just kind of

my first initial response. Yeah. I've also I've often thought of the running the process as a beautiful thing for me personally, because it allows you to kind of call and reject all the things that, if they were put in public, would hurt your reputation as a writer. And I wish, like the dating process, the marriage process, the job, the selection process. I wish so much of life was

like that. You know. It's like because I think like if some people read like some of those early drafts, they would not think I'm as good of a writer as they think right now. But who's the real me? I mean, is the real me? You know, the finished, polished you know, Wow, he's such a good writer. You know or is the real me? Am I faking everyone? You know? Like the real me was like that first draft.

I like this idea that, like the mind is a suggestion engine, and so in my mind is suggesting a lot of alternatives for the answer to any given question, and writing allows me to kind of like put all of those alternatives on one page and then gradually call the ones that don't make sense and cut those out

and refine the ones that do make more sense. And Yeah, when you only get one chance at the first date or one chance at the job interview, you kind of give whatever your first response is, but it may not be your the best suggestion that your mind could come up with. That's right. So you were on this podcast before. You're one of our rare return offenders. Oh, thank you so much. I'm very honored to have earned the right

to come back. Your work is excellent, and I'm wondering how you personally have felt like you've learned or grown since I chatted with you February fourteen, two that I had to look it up. Februar fourteen, twenty sixteen, we chatted Where were you at that place? And you know, how do you think you personally have grown well. So you caught me right after I had signed the deal

at that point. So I signed it in late twenty fifteen, so it had been a few months, so I was in the process of writing the book, but I really had no idea what I was biting off and what was to come. But as far as how I've changed, I think my thoughts on habits have become much more refined, and we can talk about that as we go through the conversation. But in a more broad sense, recently I've come to realize or have started to appreciate more the

I guess I'll say, like the balance between things. So this idea that two opposing answers can often both be correct, but it just depends on the circumstances. Or two opposing strategies can often both be effective, but it depends on when you need them. So take just as like a very simple example, you could live your life in like a low level state of movement, walking to and from work, sleeping, whatever.

Or you could do like a more extreme strategy where you're living on both ends of the spectrum, Like you sprint for thirty minutes a day and you do like this intense sprint, workout, and then you like really rest and recover for like ten hours and you sleep, you

know a lot that night. And often that like oscillating strategy can actually lead to better outcomes or better results, Like it could lead to more muscle growth and strength in this sprinting and sleeping case than just performing at like a mid range level of movement throughout the whole day. And I wonder if that's also true of a lot

of ideas. If that's true from like a mindset standpoint, that many seemingly opposing extremes or opposing theories, there's truth in all of them, and it just the answer is not to always sprint or to always sleep. The answer is to like, what strategy or what extreme do you need at this particular time. And so I'm coming to

appreciate that a little bit more. One of the areas where I've thought about this related to habits and related to ideas is, you know, there's this never ending nature versus nurture debate, and like you have on one end the deliberate practice believers who say, like we can fashion ourselves into almost anything, and then on the other end you have geneticis and scientists who say, like, you know, the genetic code is, we're definitely not a blank slate.

We're you know, very limited. And I think both of those are simultaneously true, which sounds like crazy when you first think about it. But it is both true that we can fashion ourselves and mold ourselves into much more than people would expect, that maybe you're ceiling in any given area is higher than you would believe. And it's also true that our genes nudge us in ways and shape us in ways, set a boundary for us in

certain areas that we often underappreciate. And so I don't know, I've kind of been wrestling with these ideas of like opposing answers or simultaneously true opposites. I really love that you said a lot of really interesting things there. You know. Our last are very elitist podcast episode is with Robert Poeman. I inter mentioned of the book. Actually, I know I was going to say, you mentioned him in your book in one of your last chapters, So that was cool

to see that. Yeah, And we try to kind of wrestle with some of those issues of that tight interplay between na surnature and he's a strong believer that genes make us create our environments like we create, They nudge us to create our environments, you know. And it seems like a big theme of your book is choosing the environment that'll help you excel, Like why make things hard for yourself? Like Pullman talks about not going against the

green of your nature. Yeah, I mean, so this is something I talk about a little later in the book, and I haven't really seen. I'm sure Robert has a variety of ideas on this, but I haven't really seen many people talk about the influence of genes on habits or personality on habits, And I think that there are like some interesting threads to follow there. But it's also it feels like we're kind of still in the infancy

from a scientific standpoint on what the answers are. But the example that I give in the book is that you have Michael Phelps, who is, you know, one of the most famous swimmers of all time six foot four. And you have another Olympian that I mentioned who competed at the same Olympic Games as Phelps in Athens, hikim Ol Grooge, who is a very famous runner and Grouge held at one point the world record I think in the one thousand meters, the five thousand meter and the

mile races. And so he's a fantastic athlete in his own right. And what's interesting is that they're seven inches different in height. Phelps is six ' four, El Grooge's five to nine I believe, and they have the same length enseam on their pants. So the runner is like all legs and no torso, and Phelps has this very long back which is great for pulling through the water. And so the question I had was, well, what if

they switched sports. They're both like literally world class athletes, and you know, if Michael Phelps was a runner instead of a swimmer, could he make the Olympics? And the answer is almost certainly no. At peak fitness, Phelps was one hundred and ninety four pounds and El Garuge and the other Olympic runners competed around one hundred and thirty one hundred and thirty five pounds, so it Phelps would have been sixty pounds overweight by the time he got

to the starting line. And in distance running, every pound is like a curse. And so the point here is that this is kind of a larger way of looking at genes in general, which is that your genes are The usefulness or the utility of your genes is often

determined by the environment that you are in. So if you're seven feet tall, that's an incredibly useful set of genes on a basketball court, but it's very limiting if you're trying to be a gymnast or do a routine on the balance mean, and this is true not just for physical characteristics, which are very clear and obvious to talk about, but also for psychological ones. I don't know that we have the same depth of knowledge about psychological traits and their links to the genetic code, yet I

think we're moving in that direction. But it is interesting to think about can you set up an environment for yourself or put yourself in situations where you're like a seven foot or on a basketball court, where you're in an environment that favors you, and make it easier for

yourself to build better habits in that way. And you probably know the personality psychology literature better than I do, but I am interested in, like how certain personality traits, like the Big five, how onto the genetic code, and then like what that might tell us about how to

strategize for your habits. You know, like if you're low income, scentciousness, and you're not likely to be someone who's orderly and organized, and maybe like not the type of person who would remember to do something, Maybe your strategy could benefit from a more optimized environment, like a physical environment that has more cues in it to prompt you and remind you to perform a habit rather than just leaving it up

to being orderly. I don't know, I'm not sure how that would shape things, but I think that there's probably like a thread to pull on there where personality can be informative for strategy. And that's the ultimate punchline of that chapter, is that genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They show you what to work hard on. They do not eliminate the need for strategy. You don't just say, oh, there's biological determinism, no need to worry

about this, like it's all fixed anyway. They tell you, based on your characteristics, where should your strategy be focused. I like that. I think there's an interesting catch twenty two with the personality one, in the sense that personality might influence what strategy is. You're motivated to pursue in the first place. Like, one facet of consciousness is achievement drive. Some people would call it grit, some people call it industriousness.

And industriousness is a separate facet than orderliness. So you might actually score really low in achievement oriented drive and low in orderliness, and the well ordliness just won't bother you, Like if you're very low orderliness and you're high these things come apart as well, like you're very high achievement. Like, so it seems like the discrepancy between like who you want to be and who you are is really the important factor here versus you know, because some people it

just won't bother them at all. They're not setting habits that make them more orderly. Like some people are actually totally fine with not always having publicly recognized successes or even you know, reaching long term goals. They're just happy to like just have good friends and family, you know.

So it's just so you think about, well, I think what's interesting there too is and this is true for any type of advice, which is advice is pretty useless if you don't have a willingness to self experiment, you know, Like there are a lot of great ideas out there, but if people expect those ideas to map perfectly onto their own life, then things kind of fall apart a little bit. You need to be willing to like massage the ideas or toy with them enough to figure out

how do I fit this into my own circumstances. And so in that sense, a deeper understanding of your personality or of your genetic traits, your inclinations and predispositions might allow you to more accurately determine what advice is useful for you. You You know, someone who doesn't need to worry

about things being orderly. It's like, well, you know, maybe that area of this advice is just not relevant to me, and I can move on to the next section because something else is going to be more useful for my personality and situation. So I think that understanding ourselves more deeply, and there are all kinds of interesting things that I think are going to come in the coming decades about DNA and genetics and how that links to our psychology

and mindset. Understanding those things better will probably allow us to have better strategies for building habits as well. Yeah, I love that linkage that you're making there, and it's going to start talking about that in the public conversation. I want to circle back because like almost every sentence you make leaves me in like ten directions to follow up on. So it's like you're particularly a difficult guest

in a good way. But you said a bunch of things that were very rich earlier, and I want to circle back to this idea of opposing things that seem to be at odds with each other, like you're either this person or that person, and it's like, no, I'm a person that has both that encounters both sort of things. I think about this a lot. Let's zoom in on that point you made because Abraham as one of my favorite psychologists, refers to us one of the key elements

of self actualization as dichotomy transcendence. So I linked that to what you were saying, Like he talks about how like really highly developed individuals who are very wise have this ability to not see things that seem paradoxical as paradoxical, like seeing them is only like a parent paradoxes. Like you know a lot of dichotomists we have in sy like male female, or work and plan or all these

other things. So he actually viewed that as a very high level of actualization in life if you can do that. I like that phrase dichotomy transcendence. You know, it's like you're stepping outside of this black and white conversation and seeing the partial truths that are available in all the options. Yeah, so I'm really exciting made that point. That was excellent. Yeah. Actually you don't talk about that too much in your book though. Is this a new theory maybe your next

book or something. Well, I came to realize some of it as I was writing the book, you know, so I just mentioned this, like the difference between Okay, so you know, there's this classic debate and a lot of psychology research about like social psychologists saying the environment shapes your behavior and personality psychologist saying your personality shapes your behavior and so on, and of course there are elements

of both. But what's interesting to me is like how far either option can take you, you know, like how far altering the physical environment, like what you see when you walk into your room. So let's say, you know, just take a classic example of like watching television as a habit. Well, if you walk into pretty much any living room where do. All the couches and chairs face they all face the TV. So it's like, what is

that room designed to get you to do? And we don't think about it that way, right, But there are a variety of things you could do there. You could like take a chair and turn it away from the TV. You could put the television inside a wall unit so it's behind like a set of doors or a cabinet so that you're less likely to see it. You could take the remote and put it in a drawer. You could also increase the friction associated with the task, so you could like take batteries out of the remote control.

And then that adds like an extra five or ten seconds and you're like, well, do I really want to watch TV? Or is this just something mindless I'm going to do? Could check it out at the window, Yeah, right. You could take the You could take the TV and unplug it and then only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch, so you aren't just allowed to like

mindlessly turn on Netflix and find something. If you really want to be extreme, you could take the TV off the wall and put it in the closet and only set it up when you want to watch something bad enough to set it up again. But the point here is that many of our habits are a response to what is obvious or frictionless in our environment. I mean, there's no better example than cell phones. You know, our smartphones are on us all the time, and I find the last year or so, I've started to keep my

phone in another room until lunch each day. I keep it out of my office. So it just gives me like three or four hours where I can stay focused and not be distracted. But what's funny about that to me is that if my phone is next to me, it's on the desk and I have in the room, I'm like everybody else, I'll check it like every three minutes or five minutes or whatever. But if it's I have a home office, so if it's out of there, it's just up the stairs, it's like forty five seconds away.

But even though it's only forty five seconds away, I never go get it. And so my question is like do I really want it or not? Like I'm checking it every three minutes if it's next to me, but if it's not in the room, I never want to work forty five seconds to go get it. And I think that there are a lot of Technology has created a lot of habits like that, where they're so frictionless and convenient that we find ourselves falling into them whenever we have a down moment or whenever we are bored

for a fraction of a second. But we don't want them in some deeper sense. We don't even want them enough to climb up the stairs for forty five seconds and go to a different room. And so when you remove those things and you make them less convenient or less obvious, you'll often find that you slide back into the work that maybe is deeper and more meaningful to you. It's not that I didn't want to write an article today.

It's just that because my phone was three feet away from me, I was always checking it, and so once I took it out, it's like kind of removing the mental candy from your environment, and it becomes easy to like eat the healthy stuff when you're not surrounded by that. So I think that environment design can play a crucial role in shaping habits. Yeah, I really like that, And you triggered in me the idea of inverting your fourth law. I wanted to actually go through. Maybe we should first

go through the four laws, how about that? And then we'll like after that, so we'll get everyone excited. They'll want to listen. Now they're dying to know what the inversion is of the fourth law. So let's go each one. So the first law of behavior change, and these are your laws. By that, I mean you propose these laws, right, So, yeah, ladies out in the Yeah, I break a habit into four stages and then come up with what I call the four laws of behavior change. And there's one for

each stage. And so you can think about them as like a set of tools for making it easier to build good habits. So the first law is to make it obvious, so you want to make the cues of your good habits obvious. The second law is to make it attractive. The more attractive and a habit appears to us, so the more we perceive it to be valuable, the more likely you are to follow through on it and perform it. The second or the third law is to make it easy, so you want to make your habits

as convenient or frictionless as possible. And then the fourth law is to make it satisfying. If a habit is satisfying. If it feels rewarding or enjoyable, you have a reason to repeat it in the future. And as you just mentioned, you can actually invert each of these four laws. If you want to break a bad habit, so make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy. Make it satisfying is for building a good habit. If you want to break a bad habit, then you make it invisible, make it unattractive,

make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. And so those four laws of behavior change kind of give us a set of tools for adjusting and improving our habits. Yeah, I mean that synthesizes an awful lot of research. Yeah, there are four laws, but it like we're talking hundreds and hundreds of research studies on self control that back that up from all those self contrilly literature scene definitely talks about like ways of making it hard for you to

get to the thing. Well, actually, I mean there are probably there are thousands of studies behind those four laws, you know, they're really what I wanted to come up with was a framework that describes how human behavior works. And I'm not really I think it would be a little reckless to claim that those four stages and those four laws describe all of human behavior, but from a

broad standpoint, they're pretty close. You know, pretty much every behavior you take in some kind of raw data, there's some type of queue or some preceding event, and then you interpret that data in some way. And that's what the craving stage is about. It's about how you interpret the cues that you come across. So that's the second stage.

And then there's a response the behavior you perform, and then there's some kind of outcome or result, which we could call the reward if it's beneficial, or the consequence if it's negative. And what I'm really describing there is the process of learning. You know, you see something, you make a prediction about how to respond, you take an action, and then you update your prediction for the next time based on what the outcome was. And there's a lot

of finer details of each of these things. I'm going to point some stuff out that I think it was pretty cool. So you have three layers of behavioral change, outcome processes, and identity. Could you explain those three and then let's zoom in on identity. It's many favorite phrase zooming in let's zoom in on identity. All right, Yeah, So the way that I think about this is there are kind of multiple levels of behavior change, or multiple

levels of achieving something. And typically when we go about trying to change our behavior, we start with what I would call an outcome based approach. So we think about the result that we want. So I want to double my income, or I want to lose sixty pounds in the next six months, or I want to meditate for twenty minutes a day or something like that, and so we think about the outcome that we want. Then we

back into a plan for doing that. So it's like, all right, if I want to lose sixty pounds, then my plan is I'm going to fall this diet and I'm going to the gym three days a week. And that's your process. So you have outcomes and then process, and these are kind of like we're peeling back the layers of an onion. So outcomes on the outside, process the next layer in. But then I think there's a deeper layer of behavior change, which I would call identity change.

And so this is like the set of beliefs or how you identify your self image. That's kind of underlying the process, the actions you're taking, and the outcomes that you're trying to achieve. Now, typically when people go about changing, I don't know that most people really think about identity. Most of the time, it's like, all right, outcome, I want to be skinny, and process, if I follow this diet, I'll be skinny, and that's kind of like the end of the thought, and the identity is sort of like

implicitly just follows. You think that if I get skinny, then I'll be the person I want to be or something. But I think it's actually better to invert this process. So it's not that any of them fascinating. I'm the person I want to be. What's that? Oh? I thought the inversion was if I'm fat, then I'll become the person I want to be. Exactly. It's not that any of the stages are bad. It's just that if you start with the outcome, I think you're focusing in the

wrong direction. But if instead we start with the identity. One way to do this is to like kind of reverse engineer the process. So you can ask yourself, well,

who is the type of person that could lose weight? Well, maybe it's the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, and so then you focus on building the identity of being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, and then that changes or shifts a little bit the process that you're going to follow, because now it's more about, Okay, I need to go to the gym, and it's less about like I need to do this particular type of workout or this particular type of results or outcome. It's

more about, like, how do I reinforce that identity. And this is one reason why I think small habits can be so useful is that even if they don't get the outcome that you want, they can still reinforce the identity, which ends up leading to good outcome in the long run. So something like doing five push ups, a lot of people would be like, well, well, you know, what's the difference of doing five push ups? Like, it's not going

to get me in shape anyway. But the key is if you're really busy, if your kids are sick, you're traveling, and it's like I've been on the airplane the last six hours and I was exhausted, and I got to the hotel and all I can do is five push ups before I collapse on the bed, but I still am the type of person who doesn't mis workouts, and so even though it's a small habit, it can still

cast a vote for that identity. And this, I think is a good way to think about how identities are formed and how they can change, is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person that you want to become. So it's kind of like, as you perform a habit, you're building up evidence of being a type of person. In a sense, your habits are how you embody a particular identity. You know, It's like every day that you make your bed, you embody

the identity of someone who's clean and organized. Every time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Every time you sit down and write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer. And so these small actions like reading one page or writing one sentence, or doing five push ups, they seem little because they are insignificant because we don't they can get the result that we want, but they can reinforce the identity of who you want to become.

And I think that that actually identity change is true behavior change, because once you identify as that kind of person, you're really no longer even looking to achieve some kind of behavior change. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person that you already think that you are. You know, It's like it's one thing to say I want this, it's something very different to say I am this. And I think that ultimately that's where we're trying to get to, is to adopt that identity and then let

the results of all naturally. I really really like that. I mean, for the longest time, my identity was like, you know, I'm an introvert and I don't want to be as introverted sometimes, you know, like I would like to break out of my shell sometimes. And so you know, I've bet a lot of listeners listeners would like to break out of their shell in their own respective things.

Maybe we all have something we would like to share it at Rochelle, and you're saying, a really good first step is to, yeah, reconceptualize ourselves as you know, well, if I were this raging extrovert, I would be the type of person who would not say no to that request or now I'm not going to as my goal is to be a raging extrovert. But you know, just go outside my comfort zone socially more well. And I think actually that you know you don't want to be

a raging extrovert as the example. I think that's a good way to think about this. You're not looking to like rip your identity in half or become a totally new person. I want to be authentic STI right right, You're looking to upgrade and expand your identity a little bit. It's kind of I compared to like retouching a painting. You know, you're just looking to like make some adjustments. And one way to make the adjustments is to implement

some of these small one percent changes. And I think it's also important to note that this is a little different than what you know. See oftentimes you'll hear people say things like fake it till you make it, But what I'm talking about is a little bit different here because by sticking to a small habit, by doing five push ups or writing one sentence or whatever, you again, you're casting those votes for that kind of identity you

have evidence of that being that type of person. Faked till you make it is asking you to believe something without evidence, And there's a word for beliefs without evidence called delusion. You know, at some point, if you try to keep believing something and you don't have any reason to believe it, then the brain doesn't like that. It falls flat. But with small habits, you have evidence of being that type of person, proof to root the identity in.

And I think that's what's so powerful about them is that they seem like these small actions, but they end up being evidence of the type of person that you're becoming. And this is maybe the deeper or real reason that habits matter that I wrote this whole book on it, that I think it's so important. I mean, yes, habits

can get you external results. They can help you lose weight or earn more money, or be more productive or reduce stress or whatever, but they also are the path through which we forge our self image, through which we kind of reinforce this who what type of person we are and develop self confidence. And so for that reason, I think they serve an even deeper and more important role in our lives. I love that. Yeah, And I also really like their focus on systems. Could you talk

about why we should stop setting goals and focus on systems? Instead, because that's not a language that many people talk about. Everyone talks about importance of goal setting for instance, Right, right, sure, So I mean, first of all, this comes from someone I was very goal oriented for a long time. Right. I would set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for how much weight I wanted to lift in the gym, for you know what, I wanted my business to grow, and you know, like all that

type of stuff. So I did this for a long time, and at some point I realized that some of these goals I set I achieved, but many of them I did not. And so clearly, like the action of setting a goal was not the thing that was determining whether or not I was achieving these things. And I came across this language from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert. At first he's got like this system versus goals thinking as well, and he's a little more anti goals than

I am. But I think goals are useful, but it's important to be clear about what they are useful for. They're useful for clarity and setting a sense of for like knowing where you want to focus your attention. But almost immediately after you've done that, after you've gained some clarity, it's best to put the goal on the shelf and focus on systems. And this is not the typical way that we think about this. I think that this is because part of it is because we live in a

very results oriented society. So the news something is only newsworthy. It's only a story when we're talking about the outcome, the result, the goal. You know, you're never going to see a news story that's like man eats chicken and salad for lunch today. It's only a news story like six months or a year later, when it's like man loses one hundred pounds. It's only after the outcome that

it becomes something that people talk about. And social media has just exacerbated this or magnified it even more because now all day long we're inundated with people's results, with people's outcomes, and I think because we see the outcome so much, we overvalue the results and think the goal, the ambitious outcome, is what matters, when really it should be about the process of the system that precedes the outcome.

And so this hints that at some of the things I write about in the book about why goals are less useful maybe or deserve less of our tension than we give them, which is that one problem is achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment, right, Like, we think that what we need is this result. But you know, if you get really motivated and you want to have a clean room, you've got all this clutter in your garage or in your bedroom or something, and

so you spend a couple hours cleaning your room. You'll have a clean room for now, you know, after you spend a couple hours doing it. But if you don't change the sloppy or messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place, you turn around three weeks from nowur a month from now, and you've got a dirty room again. And so we think the results need to change, But the results are not the thing

that needs to shift. We need to change the habits behind the results, or the system that led to the results. And if you change the system, the outcomes are just a natural product. It's like we spend all our time treating symptoms without treating the actual cause. And so I think that a focus on systems helps resolve some of that. Yeah, yeah, and I thought That was an excellent point. I'm going to quote you on something relating to this that I

want to discuss. When you finally break through the plateau of latent potential, that's capitalized plateau of latent potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it's the work you did long ago when it seemed that you weren't making any progress that makes the jump possible today possible. You also talk about the different positive and negative compounding. Have you thought

about it in the reverse way? You know, we make judgments about people you know as well they're great because they did that, but we also make a lot of we're very judgmental about each other as well. So in the book, I talk about how habits can compound for you or against you. Yeah, And I think that this is one key reason to understand habits. They're kind of like this double edged sword. You know, they can either

cut you down or they can build you up. And if you understand the details about them, then you can design them to your liking rather than to your hindrance and maybe avoid the dangerous half of the blade of that double edged sword. And I think that that's crucial for understanding how they work, because on any given day, I mean, I like to so that chapter you just quoted from earlier in there, I say, habits are the

compound interest of self improvement. And the reason I like that phrase is that, the same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them over time. But that can be true both positively or negatively. Right, So, on any given day, it's really easy to overlook the difference between a choice that's like slightly better or slightly worse. You know, I mean, what is really the difference between eating a burger and

fries for lunch or eating a salad. Your body looks basically the same in the mirror that night. The scale hasn't really changed. What's the difference between studying Chinese for an hour tonight or not studying at all. You still haven't learned the language either way. And so it's very easy for us to dismiss those daily choices, those small habits.

But it's only two or five or ten years later that those choices have compounded and we end up in a very different spot, and when we realize how much value there is in a choice that's one percent better, and how much of a cost there is and a choice that's one percent worse. So that's why I like

to use compounding as an example for habits. It's not that it maps perfectly onto that hockey stick curve, but it more accurately describes what it's like to build a habit and what it feels like on a daily basis, which is, it doesn't really feel like much. It kind of feels like the beginning of that compounding curve. You just kind of flat, there's nothing to show for it.

And it's only later when you get down toward the hockey stick portion of the curve that you're like, WHOA, I'm in a really different place a decade later than it feels like on a daily basis. Yeah, I love that, and I loved the idea of contrasting positive versus negative compounding. That's really cool. Maybe we should step back a moment and actually explain what your four step model of habits is. Sure, yeah, so I'll give you an example as I walk through

it so real quickly. The four stage is ore a Q, what I call craving as the second stage response and reward. Okay, As an example, say you walk into a room and it's dark. So in this case, the queue is visual, it's a dark room. The craving is how you interpret the queue or the prediction that your brain makes about what to do next. So often we talk about craving as like, you know, I crave a donut or I

crave a cigarette or something like that. But I kind of mean this more in a broader sense, like what do you desire to do based on the situation. So Q, the room is dark, craving, I want to be able to see, or I wanted to reduce the uncertainty of being in a dark room. Response is the third stage where you flip on the light switch. So this is the routine or the action, the behavior that you take, and then reward the room is lit, I'm able to see now. And those four stages in that example, you

know that happens in what thirty milliseconds. I mean it's happening so fast that you don't even think about it. And this is a good way to think about how this process works in the brain. I mean, your brain is going through this endlessly. You're endlessly taking in information, raw data from the environment, the temperature, the pixels in your visual field, what you're hearing, all of this data, and those are the cue use that you're of the

external environment that you're absorbing. And then you're making predictions about which of those cues are important and how you should respond and what your next action should be based on your current state and past experience and what you've learned. Then you take an action, and then finally you analyze what the outcome is and then try to update your prediction for the next time. And your brain's going through these cycles endlessly, even right now as you're listening to this.

Oh yeah, and if you do it enough, then pretty soon you can proceed through all four stages without even thinking about it. It's more or less non conscious, like flipping on a light switch in a dark room. You don't actually think the room is dark. I'd like to be able to see like you're just flipping the switch as soon as you enter the door. And that is kind of the process of forming a habit. You've repeated it enough that you can do it more or less

without thinking. A second way that I like to break down these four stages though, and I think it's instructive for understanding what the role of a habit is in daily life. Is that habits are the solutions that your brain automates to repeated problems that you face throughout life. So the more that you face the same problem, the more your brain starts to develop fluency and speed and

accuracy with coming up with a solution for it. So like, in the morning, you put your shoes on, and in a sense, having an untied shoe is a problem that your brain has to solve. So Q you see this, your shoes untied, craving, I want to have a tied shoe. Response, I tie the shoelace and then reward the shoe is now secure on my foot. And in that sense, habits are just these solutions, and they don't have to be And this is one of the key things to realize.

Your brain is just looking for an effective solution in the moment. It doesn't mean that the original solution that you came up with, the original habit that you build, is necessarily the optimal habit, right, So like if you come home from work and you feel stressed and exhausted, so que you walk in the door, craving, you're feeling exhausted, you want to feel refreshed, or you know, improve in some way improve your current state. Response, Well, there are

variety of ways to deal with that. You know. One person might play video games for an hour and they learned that that's one way to reduce exhaustion and stress. Another person might smoke a cigarette for ten minutes. A third person might go for a run for twenty minutes, and all of those are solutions to the recurring problem of coming home from a long day of work. But some of them are healthier and more productive than others.

And once you realize this that your habits are just trying to it's just your brain's best attempt to come up with a quick and easy solution to the problems you face, then you can start to figure out, like, all right, what are better habits that might serve me more in the long run but also resolve those challenges or problems that I face on a repeated daily basis. If I could make that happen in the real world, like, I would definitely be able to make some strides in

my habits. Because this stuff is, as you talk about, a lot of these habits are, and as a lot of research at the subconscious level, they're programmed as if then statements, right, Like, so we need like these implementation intentions in order to but we can reprogram this stuff, right, I mean there's hope, Yes, there is hope, and it's habits are Yeah, if then statement is a good way

to think about it. Because habits are all about associations, right, They're all about like the solution that you associate with a certain context or with a certain problem. And this is often one reason why it's easier to build a new habit in a new environment because you're not trying to overpower your old associations. So like, let's say, for example,

that you wanted to build the habit of reading more. Well, if you are like, all right, I'm going to read more tonight, and so you go into your living room

and you sit down in your couch. But the context of being in your living room, being on your couch might already be associated with watching Netflix for an hour each night, And so when you go in there, you're unconsciously, subconsciously fighting against your like behavioral biases in that environment or the stimuli of being there and like wanting to reach for the remote and turn on Netflix. So it

might be easier actually to build a reading habit. Say, there's so there's like a coffee shop near your office where you never go in there, so it's a new shop, and now this place becomes the context, the area where you finish work. You walk to the coffee shop, you turn your phone off when you get in the door, and you pull out a book and you read for thirty minutes. And so now there's this is it becomes the reading coffee shop. Right, It's like that's the thing

that that context gets tied to. And even if you can't do it with like an entirely new environment, you can often do it with a space in your current environment. So maybe you get like a new chair and you put it in the corner of your apartment, and that's the reading chair, and the only thing you ever do

in that chair is you read. And the point here is you're trying to associate the context with a new habit, and it's better when you can do it in a place that you don't already have associations with, you don't already have other things you have to fight through to build a new one. I love that. So in the little time we have remaining here, why don't we do some advanced tactics. Yeah, for sure. It sounds like an

operative advanced like mercenary tactics. Okay, I love it. How can we go from being merely good to being truly great? I mean, obviously that book From Good to Great is a bestseller. You know, a lot of people are very interested in that, Like, how can we go that extra mile? Yeah, our fie off frontier. We already talked about genes in town, and we already talked about the importance of finding that environment that get the best out of your genes. Can

you talk a little about the Goldilocks rule? Yeah? So the Goldilocks rule is essentially a way of thinking about how to stick with a habit in the long run, or how to maintain your motivation to perform a habit in the long run. And the idea, and there's some interesting research that has shown this is that humans experience peak levels of motivation when they work on a challenge of just manageable difficulty, so not too hard, not too easy,

just right. That's like the Goldilocks rule or this Goldilocks zone. Did you coin that phrase? Goldilocks rule. Yeah, I did. I'm kind of like happy about that. I didn't coin the phrase just manageable difficulty. That was from the research. But Goldilocks rule is like my way of thinking about how to keep yourself on that edge of challenge. So the idea here is that you want to stay on the perimeter of your abilities. And so you know, imagine

that you're playing a tennis match. If you play against someone who's a professional, like Roger Feeder or Serena Williams, is going to get boring pretty quickly because you're going to lose every point. But if you play against someone who is like if you play against a little child playing against five year old, that's going to be boring because you're going to win every point. But if you're playing against someone what's that that might be a little fun.

Oh yeah, well it'd be really cute for a minute, right, But if you're trying to play a serious match, if you play against someone who is your equal, you know who's like, they're pretty good, you're pretty good. They win a few points, You win a few points. You have a chance to win, but only if you really try. That's incredibly motivating. It like forces you to lock in. And perhaps the best example of this in modern life is video games. Video games are designed to keep you

right on that razor's edge of your ability. So if you're struggling with a level, they'll give you more power ups or more coins, or maybe drop a few more weapons your way. If you're really advancing and knocking it out of the park, then all of a sudden they'll throw more challenges for you. But the idea idea is that they want to keep you on that edge while you always feel like you're making progress, but you're also always challenged enough to stay fully engaged, and so that's

kind of where you want to stay now. This is similar to being in a state of flow, similar to being like fully engaged in the moment. And some research has shown that states of flow are often achieved when you're about four to five percent beyond your current ability. So you're being stretched just a little now in daily life. How do you know what that is? Right? Like, what is writing four percent beyond your current ability? Or what is you know, meditating five percent harder than you usually do.

It's kind of hard to quantify that, but I think that as a rule of thumb, or as a heuristic to keep in mind this idea that I'm looking to stretch, but only just a little bit, Like you really do still need to be winning a lot, making progress, otherwise you don't have a reason to continue. Yeah, And would you say Steve Martin was a good example of that. Yeah. So I tell the story in the book of Steve Martin, who he had been comedian for many years before he

broke out. I think he said, how did he describe it? I think he said eighteen years total, and it was like ten years struggling, four years refining, and then four years in wild success. And early on in his career his comedy segments were incredibly short. I mean when he was like a teenager and he was doing this in high school, it would be, you know, three minutes or

five minutes on stage. And then gradually, each year he would expand it just a little bit, so he'd do like a seven minute routine, and then I think by the time he was eighteen, he was doing like a ten minute routine or fifteen minute routine, and each time he would just keep adding a little bit so he'd keep the pieces that worked right. He knew that he had some segments that could get laughs, but then it was like, Oh, all of a sudden, I have to come up with two new minutes of new material that

I don't have before. So he's also really being challenged. So a great example of what the Goldilocks rule looks like in daily life. There's just enough winning for him

to be like that wasn't a total bomb. I still need to show up next week, but just enough challenge for him to really be pushing hard and be like, man, I got to come up with some good jokes, and result was he kept getting better a year in and year out, and he turned around when he was, you know, in his twenties and thirties and just had this incredible career. And of course there are a variety of other things aligned with that. We talked already about jeens and so on.

To maximize your ability in any field, you need to be able to stay motivated and stick with it, and the Goldilocks rule is one way to do that. All right, So I'm going to end here with two of my favorite quotes from your book. So one each habit unlocks the next level of performance. It's an endless cycle. Love That kind of makes me think of the love life as a video game right where you get to unlock the next level, you know, just by doing something a

little bit better. And the other one I like is the secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It's remarkable what you can build if you just don't stop. James Clear, congratulations on this tremendous accomplishment of this book and I wish it all the success. Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for the chat. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.

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