In this episode, we discuss the foundations of evidence based thinking, the important balance between Habits and Decisions and how each of them shapes who you ultimately become and dig into the idea that your decisions set the trajectory of your life, but your habits determine how far you walk on that journey, from there we explore how to build high impact habits, what you need to do to determine the best habits to focus on first, how you can harness the the power of the “aggregation of marginal gains,” and much more with our guest James Clear.
James Clear is an american author, entrepreneur, and photographer. His personal blog, jamesclear.com has over 400,000 email subscribers and his first book Atomic Habits is set to release in October this year. His work focuses primarily on habits and human potential looking to answer the question “How can we live better?” by focusing on science-backed methods. James’s work has been featured in The New York Times, CBS, Forbes, and more.There’s no real playbook, everyone is operating on their best guess and trying to do their best with limited informationScience and scientific research are the best tools we have for determining what the “Best guess” would be for improvementScience is still a guess, but its the best method we have to guide our actions and is much better than anecdote or opinion You are not the average - you have to adopt this philosophy of self experimentation to determine what works for youIt’s very hard to step outside of your own experience - but that experiment may not always be the best predictor or provider of informationYou could live a billion lives - its up to you to decide and determine which single version of YOU actually gets lived Your decisions set your trajectory and your habits determine how far you walkDecision making creates leverage, habits capture itIt’s always the process that leads to the outcomes. Focus on the process. And build a system so that process happens every dayTrue behavior change is identity change. Once you change your identity it doesn’t feel like work anymore. It’s NEVER the first mistake that ruins you - its the spiral of mistakes that follows it. Get back on track. A “craving” is a desire to change your state” to some small degreeMotivation is something that rises and falls arbitrarily - don’t rely on motivation to force yourself to adopt new habitsIt can be dangerous to “start too big” with new habits The true impact of habits is far greater than we realize - little habits are like an entrance ramp to a highway - the determine what we end up doing for minutes or even hours afterwardsFocus on mastering a few decisive moments that end up shaping how you spend your time - and make those moments as easy as possible.Find people who’ve achieved what you want to achieve - but also have SOME commonality with you nowHomework: downscale your habits until they can fit within 2 minutes (make sure your habits are small enough)Read one page in a bookMake the decisive moment as easy as possible Homework: reduce friction so that doing that behavior is as easy as possible. Start with environment designIncrease friction for bad behaviorsReduce friction for good behaviors
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These Habits Will Help You Crush Procrastination & Overwhelm with James Clear | The Science of Success podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
