It was a few years ago, and suddenly a bunch of people I knew, entrepreneurs, creative types, coaches, and players were all quoting from the same book, Atomic Habits, about tiny changes producing remarkable results. Ideas like that really connect with me because consistent, continuous improvement and growth. That's a huge daily focus for me. So my guest today is the author of Atomic Habits, number one New York Times bestseller, close to ten million copies sold in fifty languages. James Clear is a brilliant guy, great communicator, and an ex college athlete. This conversation with James was a year in the making, but worth the way. James has the best advice I've ever heard. Specific ways to gradually build good habits that can age beliefs about ourselves who we are or want to become, and how to recognize and reverse bad habits, specific ways to reshape behaviors. We also talk about altering social media habits, something a lot of us wrestle with. How curating your social feeds helps direct your future thoughts in positive ways. And James is an expert on productivity hacks, on doing more in less time and not feeling overwhelmed. There's so many ideas and tools in his book and on James clear dot com. So, with the year wrapping up and a new one approaching, all the evaluation and pledges to improve yourself that go with that, there's no better way to wrap up season five of Fouler Who You Got than a fun, far ranging, fast moving conversation with James Clear. Well, James, I'm so grateful for your time. The next five minutes that can to be very useful and important for people, But more importantly, they're also going to get people to go to your weekly email newsletter and your Instagram feed and of course read or reread atomic habits. There's so much to cover that we'll try to hit the highlights. But but let's start with the new year that's approaching means that people are going to be focusing on self improvement. But new year's resolutions, I speak to myself too notoriously ineffective. They don't last long. So give us some some concrete tools and tips for how to make new habits stick in the new year. Sure, so, um well, first pleasure to talk to you, Thanks the opportunity. I uh so, I kind of have two things that come to mind immediately So the first is that a lot of the time when we start with making behavior change or trying to make some kind of improvement, we think about and I think it's a fairly natural way to do it. We think about the results we want to achieve. So I want to lose forty pounds, or I want to make more money or be more productive or whatever finishing a half marathon, and then we come up with a plan for doing that, so you've got results, and then you have a plan, a strategy, and we kind of implicitly assume, you know, if I'm able to achieve this thing, or if I can follow through on this, then I'll be the kind of person that I want to be, or I'll you know, I'll be more of the person I hope I could be. And my encouragement is often to flip that on its head and to start and say, let's start by asking ourselves who is the type of person that I wish to become or what is the type of identity that I hope to reinforce? And you start there and then you build habits that reinforce that desired identity. So, no, doing one push up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for on the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and no writing one sentences not finished the novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. And I think this is the real reason that habits matter. Like the truer, deeper reason is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. And so small habits seem fairly insignificant on any given day or any particular instant, but they actually reinforce being that kind of person, and they give you evidence that this is part of your story. They give you something to take pride in, and once you take pride in that aspect of your identity, it becomes easier to fall through on it. You know, like, if you're the kind of person who takes pride in the size of your biceps, you like never skip ourm day at the gym, you know, if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have like this really complicated hair routine that you follow every day. And so what you're really hoping to do is to try to encourage that process a little bit, and maybe this year, rather than worrying so much about the results, we can focus a little bit more on the identity that we want to reinforce in the habits that can help us get there. Yeah, what the world needs as much as anything right now is kindness, compassion, empathy. So if I want to shape my identity to improve the habit of I want to be a person that listens better, is more tuned in, is more kind, is more compassionate. Doing the things that people have those quality do is what you write about being very important. It's sort of what would a kind, compassionate person do, Let's do more of that. I actually think questions like that are useful to carry around in a lot of ways. I find questions more powerful than advice. You know, advice is kind of brittle because it's very context dependent. It's even somebody who's been there and done exactly what you want to do, their situation was different or the timing was different, and so you know, it's easy for that advice to fall flat or to not work quite as well as you had hoped. But if you have the right question, then you can walk around and you can ask yourself, like you said, you know, what does a kind person does a compassionate person do? Well? The answer will arise naturally as you go through the situation, or what would a healthy person do? That's an interesting question to kind of carry around with you if you're trying to build a better fitness habit and so on, um on that same theme of questions, I think, and this is kind of where you're getting at or the direction you're moving in. Any way, we start by asking ourselves, who's the type of person I want to be? What is the kind of identity I want to reinforce? And then the natural next question is like, Okay, I kind of have a better idea of that, or I know what I'd like to achieve, but how do I actually do that? And this is one of my kind of like gripes or complaints about a lot of self help books or a lot of how two books, is that they say they're how to, but they're actually what to. They tell you what to think, like don't doubt yourself, believe in your greatness, you know, fall through, show up, work out four times a week, but they don't actually to tell you how to do those things. And um, I wanted a time of habits to be both a how to and a what to book. And I think if we're asking that question, how do I actually do this? How do I actually fall through? They're roughly like four things that you want working for you if you're trying to build a good habit or break a bad one. So you want the habit to be obvious, like you want the cues that sparked to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. You want the habit to be attractive. Some more attractive or appealing appealing a habit is the more motivating or enticing it is, more you feel compel to do it. You wanted to be easy, The easier, more convenient, frictionless, simple habit is, the more likely it is to be performed. And then the fourth and final thing is you wanted to be satisfying, more satisfying or enjoyable habit is. The more pleasurable or rewarding it is, the more likely are to fall through on it. And I call those the four laws of behavior. Change, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, to make it satisfying. And if you're sitting there and you're thinking, man, you know, I how this habit? I've just been procrastinating on it, or I got this thing I keep trying to do it, but I, you know, only do it every now and then I'm not falling through very consistently. You can just go through those four steps and ask yourself, you know, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make this more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And the answers to those questions again a good question to carry around with you will reveal the answer as you're kind of going through life. So, um, I think start with identity, and then how do we actually do that? We kind of have these four different stages or four phases that we can implement and apply. I cringe. Whant to hear someone say with my luck filling the blank and they catastrophize and sort of expect the worst to happen. And that kind of a mindset can lead to bad habits. And what you write about in Atomic Habits It's so important is that positive habits are great, but avoiding negative habits might be even more important, in the way that avoiding terrible decisions might be even more important than making a bunch of good ones because they're so life altering, and that bad habits can can increase by one percent and send you way off course in a hurry. So what's the best way to check that, be aware of it and prevent it. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, some of the things you mentioned there are really difficult, because there I would kind of have two buckets. There's like habits of thought and habits of action. Habits of action you know, doing to push up or meditating for one minute or whatever the stuff like that. Um, you can plan for it a little bit more. Habits of thought, Man, they're so rapid. They arise so quickly. You're having to come station with somebody and they make an off and comment and suddenly you're you know, judgmental or self loathing or you know, just like these feelings arise like pretty quickly. And I don't have a great way to like stop a thought from happening. But I do think that there are ways that you can optimize your environment to try to prime things to be in a better position, to try to like stack the deck, so to speak, in your favor. And one thing you can do is just walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, your office, you're living room, in your kitchen, and look around and ask yourself, what behaviors are obvious here, what behaviors are easy here? What is this space design to encourage? And you'll start to notice a few things that you could tweak and design and improve, you know, like when I um one bad habit, for example, that a lot of people feel like they have is checking their phone too much, or maybe browsing Instagram or Twitter all the time or whatever. And I fall into that just like everybody else. And so when I wanted to start reading a little bit more where I did two things. The first thing I did was I downloaded Audible for audio books, and I moved it to the home screen on my phone. I put it kind of in the home bar, and I took all the other apps and moved into the second screen. Now that's a really minor thing. It's not going to radically transform your behavior, but it's a subtle reminder each time I opened up my phone, Hey, the one thing I want to be doing is spending more time reading. And I sprinkled books around like the physical environment, you know. I had a bunch of my desk and some by the bed, and some of the living room and so on. But then the second thing that I did was I started to leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. And that doesn't work for everybody's job. And I can't do it all the time, you know, I can't do I probably do it maybe eight percent of days, but man, whenever I do it, I almost always have a better morning. And the thing that's funny is that if it's next to me, I'll check my phone every three minutes, just like everybody else. But if I have a home office, and so if I leave it in another room, it's only like thirty seconds away, but I never go get it, And I'm like, did I want it or not? You know, Like, in one sense, I wanted it bad enough to check it every three seconds when it was next to me, But in another sense, I never wanted it so bad that I would walk thirty seconds down the hallway and go get it. And there are a lot of behaviors in life that are like that. They'll kind of curtail themselves to the desired degree if you just increase a little bit of friction between you and the action, increase the number of the number of steps. And so I think that's one thing that you can do when you're thinking about some of your bad habits are just maybe some of the time that you're spending in a way that you'd prefer to spend it in a different way. How do you increase a little bit of friction, how do you introduce a little bit of distance between you and the behavior. That's a great point. Um, Yeah, I try to furiously protect I don't know the succeed the first minutes of the day. I can't go till lunch without checking the phone. But when I get up in the morning, whether it's breathing, drinking water, stretching, and certainly not bombarding my senses with with devices and input, I don't turn on the TV things like that. And now many people listening or going to find that's the most radical confrontational suggestion you could possibly. I can't do it out my phone, but you you've actually practiced that. You you will uninstalled the Instagram app. I've heard you say, just to avoid scrolling and falling prey to the evil algorithms that dictator patterns of right now. Actually, I uninstalled Instagram about six months ago and I haven't put it back on, and it's been really good. I uh, I used the desktop app so I can log on like when I'm on you know, my computer or something, but I'm not sitting at my desk all the time, whereas my phone is with me constantly, and so I don't know it. Just for some reason, that little shift, it feels like, Okay, now I'm using the service the amount that I would like to use it, rather than just checking it all the time. You're an athlete. We'll get to your college baseball career and how that puts you on this path. Athletes connect with atomic habits and coaches maybe coaches first and then athletes. But when the book came out around ninety and I kept running into teams and coaches who were referring to your book and encouraging their players to read it. I mean week after week on the college football circuit every end of this and the players would talk about it because I had read it, and we would have part of our little production meeting would be about your book and what they were getting out of it. So that has to be very gratifying to you that in a world of sports where or habits are are so much and it's a result oriented thing, but really the smart people focus on the process and not the results that you're connected with so many coaches and athletes. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's fun. You know, I don't get to hear all the stories a lot of the time, they like don't make their way back to me or whatever. And uh, it's cool. It's really kind of wild and surprising, and it really nice to be able to create something people find useful. Um, you know, like that's that's kind of my ultimate objective is is this contributing is my little contribution to the you know, pile of knowledge for humanity? Is that doing something? You know? Is it like carving out a little niche in the universe and making a positive difference. And it's fun to see the book doing that. And as a former athlete, um that it feels cool to be able to contribute to that particular sphere. What kinds of work have you done with athletes or teams? And what's what's the most powerful thing you've heard back from from someone about how it's it's helped them in a really tough, challenging competitive world. Well, I spoke with the now the Cleveland Guardians. They were the Indians back when I went talked to them, and they've had one of the best records in the American League for the last couple of years now, and I don't think we can attribute very much of that to my book universe, so I know, right, yeah, but it's fun. You know, it's fun to contribute to a winning program and to see kind of where they've been in the path they're on. And yeah, I've you know, most of the most of the teams have received copies of the book at this point. A lot of those sports performance or mental performance coaches that work with some of the professional teams, they love the book, and I talked to them like fairly frequently. Um, you're right, it it's kind of it's funny. It's like the coaches like it, and then the players like kind of asked to read it, or like parents like it and their kids are kind of asked to read it. Whether they enjoy it or not, I don't know, but it's uh, I don't know, it's fun. You mentioned something a minute ago about how it's a very results oriented business, and sports is perhaps more that than almost anything else because it's so easy to measure did you win or did you lose? And I am a very results oriented person and pretty much everything that's in the book is written as a reminder to me to stop for focusing so much or worrying so much about the results. Think of a little bit more about the system, Stop worrying so much about the goals, think a little bit more about the type of person you're trying to become. And um, it helps to kind of pull myself back to center. And I do think it's true that if you genuinely care about the goal, if you really care about the results, you'll focus on the system. You know, this is one of the core ideas of the book, is that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And so often in life, man, it's so easy to focus on the outcome. It's so easy to focus on the result. And results do matter, but they aren't the thing that you'd be getting most of your focus. I mean, that's like Bill Walsh's famous line, you know he wants multiple Super Bowls. In his line is always the score takes care of itself. And that's true. If you're committed to the system, if you're focused on building a better process day in and day out, you end up with much better outputs. It's one of these like interesting or almost ironic things about life. Our outcomes in life are offering a lagging measure of the habits that precede them. So your knowledge is like a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits, or your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits, or even like stupid stuff like you know the amount of clutter in your garage the lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And we also badly want our results to change, but the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Um. And if you if you think about like your goals are what you're optimizing for. That's like the target, the thing you're shooting for. And then your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. If there's ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Like almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. So whatever system you're running, whatever collection of habits you're following, they're kind of carrying you almost inevitably to the outcomes that you have. And it's not that habits are the only thing that influence outcomes in life. You know, you got luck and randomness. Sometimes the bul just takes a bad bounce, but they are the element of the situation that's under your control, and by definition, luck and randomness are not in your control. And the only reasonable rational approach in life is to focus on the element to the situation that you can control. So for all of those reasons, I think the collection of habits that you have is the system you're running, and that's the thing that deserves most of your attention day in and day out. I want to repeat that because it's one of the core principles, and for a lot of people who read Atomic Habits, it is kind of an aha moment. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And I'm surprised to hear that you're you're that goal oriented and that that not that system orient and that the book helps remind yourself that I kind of preach against goals, James. I think I just don't value concrete goals as much as I do the path the process. I think that that if you think about paths and that destinations or not even paths, but just directions instead of destinations, because the path is sometimes hard to define or even find. But if you had any direction, to me, that's always been more powerful than than the end result. And uh I get that. You come from from that sports world where it's all about the score. You are what the score is. You know, you're not defined by anything else than that. But how cool that you've you've come to this and it's a reminder for yourself what's important. Pretty much everything I write is a reminder to me. Um I, uh I like the term. I like how you phrase their path or direction. I think a lot about trajectory. Now, that's like kind of the thing that I try to come back to. It's not we have all these measurements, all these analytics, all these numbers for determining our current position. You know, there's so much discussion about position in life. What's the number on the scale, what's the current record of the team, what's the stock price or of the quarterly earnings. We have like all these ways of analyzing and measuring our current position. And then if the number doesn't come out right. If it's not what you're hoping for, it's not where you're hoping to be. There's often a lot of judgment that comes as a result of that. You know, like all this coach is washed up and like their past their prime. Or you know, I feel like a failure because I didn't achieve what I said I wanted to achieve. Or we've been working on this aught up for six months and it's still a mess and we haven't shipped it yet. Like there are all these feelings and judgments that come as a result of analyzing your current position, and my like current suggestion or current focus is saying, hey, let's stop worrying so much about our current position and focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. Are we getting one percent better or one percent worse? Are we improving or have we flatlined? Because if you're on a good trajectory, all you need is time. You know, like time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes your ally and every day that goes by kind of getting a little bit better position. And if you have bad habits, if you're not a bad trajectory, then time becomes your enemy, and every day that clicks by, I dig the whole a little bit deeper. And so I've started to come to this feeling that it's much more about the trajectory and returning to that focus, to that path or that direction as you called it, and much less about the result on any particular day. Yeah, that's powerful. I love the traject because there's a three dimensional quality to it, right, I mean path and directions kind of you think of a flat space. Trajectory can can can imply and signify even more. Um So let's go back to the way you start atomic habits and I'll just quickly a paraphrase and not make you relive the details. But sophomore year high school, you're hitting the face with a baseball bat. It's a freak accident, but it's frightening, terrifying. I think you had multiple skull fractures. Both I sockets were broken, ended up almost losing your life being in a coma, and it's an excruciatingly long, challenging rehab and it basically ruins your high school baseball career. Who what gave you the belief James that after playing as you as you talked about eleven innings of varsity baseball that you still had some baseball in you and you could go to college and become an outstanding player at Dennis, And which you did. Where did that come from? Um? Probably family, I guess I was gonna point to to one particular area. Um, you know, some of it is just like luck, and some of it's maybe my personality or makeup, but a lot of it was family. I think mostly my dad and my grandpa, my mom. Um, those are people that played like a really crucial role in my recovery. And um, they're very positive people, you know. My my grandpa in particular, was very positive. And I think, uh, for whatever reason, even though it was like, hey, this terrible thing happened to me, Like one of the first things I said when I woke up out of the coma was I never asked for this. Um. I kind of was able to move on from that, like fairly quickly. Even while I was still recovering. I couldn't drive a car, you know, my first physical therapy sessions, I was practicing basic motor patterns like walking a straight line. But I remember being in like a fairly good mood despite that, and so I don't know. I I think somehow keeping my mental state in a positive place was like a really important part of the early process. And then there also was just a lot baked into it. You know, my dad was a very good baseball player. He played professionally, he played the minor leagues for the St. Lois Cardinals, and so, you know, my whole life, I grew up looking at that and thinking about that and thinking about how cool WO be to play professionally too, And you know, I was never as good as him and didn't end up having that kind of career, But I do feel like I fulfilled my potential. And I'd say, like maybe that part was like kind of my personality. And how much of that's genetic and how much of that's learned, I don't know, but that's definitely something that I feel like has expressed itself, not just in my sports career, but also in the other things that I try. If I attempt something and like I'm serious about it, who knows where I'll end up. Like I'm not saying I'm gonna be the best in the world at it, but I want to feel like I squeezed everything I could out of it. You know, I want to feel like I maximized my potential, and as long as I feel like I gave it my best shot, then I'm pretty satisfied before we're out at the end of the day. And it's almost always been the case that my early results are never that great. Like, you know, I was never the fastest promote, that most death let person on any team that I played on. But I stuck with it for a long time. And if you keep getting better each day, and you keep trying to squeeze out all of your potential, you can end up in a pretty good place if you're persistent. I remember my dad telling me that that we at the end of each baseball season early on and throughout high school and so on, we would sit on our back deck and talk about how the season went, and he would always say something along the lines of like, you know, like more guys are gonna drop off at the end of this year, Like this is gonna be the last year they play. You know, they won't show up again next year. And it's interesting how like much that probably played a role in my career that like I just kept being like, yeah, I'm gonna play again next year, and if you keep showing up, you know, after a fifteen or seventeen years or something, you're like, yeah, you ended up having a decent career. And I was kind of one of those guys that started sort of slow, but just continue to get better and better, and um, I ended up feeling like, yeah, I had a really good career. At the end of it. Baseball was a really important part of my life. I'm really glad that I had it, and I'm glad I didn't lose it after the injury because it ended up playing any and more crucial role after that. Yeah. Just showing up, right, just showing up and and improving that. That's that's a lot of what the book is about. So, Dennis, and you're the Male Athlete of the Year, and I'm proud to see that ESPN recognize you is an Academic All American. That's a pretty big deal. So you know, my company that same Academic All America team. So I was listening on that team under the D three players and whatnot. And then Buster Posey was selected as the Player of the Year that year. Four years later, he was playing for the Giants and I was starting a blog, So we had like very different trajectories after that, but for that one year we were together, I know, I had a lot of fun with it. You know, I feel like the person who has the most fun ends up winning at the end of the day. And um, it was Baseball was just a huge part of my life at that time. And I was really lucky to have great teammates. Teammates are kind of like family. You don't get to pick them, but I just like, I got really lucky with the set that I had. And Uh, it was definitely very formative experience, and I think a lot of the lessons I learned both building habits at practice each day and in the gym and so on, and just like relationship wise and competitiveness wise, a lot of that stuff has been like copied and pasted over into my entrepreneurial career and has continued to serve me well. We share a passion for fitness. UM, the therapeutic value of it, the mental health benefits as well as a physical UM. I've heard you say that workout can can change the course of your day. And if you can change the course of a day, you can you can change the course of a longer period of time. UM. I get called Jim obsessed, and I said, well, you know, let's let's just refame it as wellness obsessed. You know, fitness to me as wellness and longevity. So for people that have a hard time building a gym habit, and don't roll your eyes out there. I know I talk a lot about the gym, but it is important to me and um and to you too. So what what can people do aside from just showing up to make the habit stick and make it not seem like drudge because you right, fun, let's not downplay that. If if you can be active in some way, if you can not think about lifting weights but just being active, can't we all find something that's active that we enjoy. Oh. I think that's a huge element of any habit that you're trying to build. You know, the truth is a lot of the time people pick up habits because they kind of feel like it's what they are supposed to do, It's what society is encouraging them to do, or their parents or their friends are encouraging them to do. It's not actually what they want. But you know, there's not a thousand ways to do anything in life, but there's almost always more than one way. And so I think, for whatever habit you're trying to build, ask yourself, what's the version of this habit that brings me the most joy or makes me the most excited. Because if you're excited about it, if you're interested, if you're curious, if you're engaged, that is like almost always the first huge hurdle to clear, because if you're excited, then there are endless ways to improve. But if you're not excited, if it does feel like drudgery or like a chore, then even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a hassle because you don't really feel like doing it. You want to be there. So I I like training with weights, but not everybody wants to train like a bodybuilder like some people want to be you know, kayaking or rock climbing or going for a run or cycling with a friend or whatever whatever that version of fitness looks like to you. I think, try to find the one that makes you most excited or interested. As a real kind of extreme example of this, I think probably one of the greatest fitness apps that was ever built was Pokemon Go because it was like a back door to getting people would go walk like ten miles a day just to try to find a Pokemon. It wasn't a fitness app on the surface, but man, I got people moving. And that's a good example of like, hey, you know, like I just found this really fun and so it got me digging around the park for three hours. So, um, find the version of the habit that's exciting to you. I think that's the first step. Second thing, though, and I do think this is particularly it's not necessarily unique to fit us habits, but it is very common with fitness habits, which is man, you know, especially for ambitious people, sit around and you think what you want to achieve and becomes really easy to bite off more than you can chew. And I don't know why we're this way, but we are so focused on finding the perfect diet plan or the best workout program, the ideal sales strategy. We're so focused on optimizing that we don't give ourselves permission to show up in a small way. And this is one of the strategies I talked about in the book, which I call the two minute rule and says, take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something. It takes two minutes or less to do so read thirty books a year becomes read one page, or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. Now, sometimes people resist this a little bit, so like, okay, buddy, you know, I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So this is some kind of mental trick. And I know it's a trick. Why would I fall for it? Basically, but I have this guy. This guy's name is Itch, I mentioned in Atomic Habits, and he ended up losing over a hundred pounds and he's kept off for more than a decade. And when he first started going to the gym, he had this strange little rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous, you know, it sounds silly. You're like, this is obviously not gonna work. But if you take a step back, you realize that he was mastering the art of showing up up. And so I think This is like this deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize it into something more. So I think probably a couple of things we've mentioned already all tie into this. Pick a habit that excites you, that you're interested in, that feels like it's a good fit of fun fit for you. Um use the two men a rule or something similar to scale it down and make it as easy as possible to master the art of showing up, to become the type of person that goes consistently, and then tie that into the identity piece that we talked about earlier. You know, who is the type of person that doesn't miss workouts? What happens do they have? Who's the type of person you're hoping to become. What would a healthy person do here? Those questions, those like um uh, forms of identity, Those are interesting to think about it. And ultimately I think the the ultimate version of this is kind of where you're at now, Chris, which is you take pride in it, you know, like you take pride in being that kind of person who focuses on wellness or who is fit or who prioritizes that in their life. And because it's an important part of your story, because it's an aspect of your identity, it's kind of easier to show up each week. It doesn't mean the workouts are easy, it doesn't mean it always feels like you want to do it. But you don't have to motivate yourself to go to the gym in the same way that somebody's just getting started does. Because it's part of your story, You're like, no, this is just like who I am. This is something that I do each week, and it's important to me. And hope believe those little steps can get you started and set you on that path to becoming that kind of person I read about Mitch. She puzzled me because I don't get it. Every day I get to work out, I don't have to work out. I view I view it as something that is great process or and I don't have fitness goals. I don't do it for anything other than I Actually I'm completely present in the gym, and that is a great hour, hour and a half, and that's that's its own reward for me. Beyond weight or aesthetics or anything else you achieve. But on the other hand, um, I do think of myself as a disciplined person. I'm shitty at having the discipline to get better in Spanish. There's just something like that where you know, I speak it by living in Miami. I want to be fluent in it, and for some reason, I know what it takes to do that. I know it takes consistency. I know it takes practice and study and talking, and I just I am having a block with that. And I'm sure everybody out there has something they'd like to do, they know sort of the roadmap to it that damn it. If it's just hard to execute day after day, I still have a lot. That's that's for I'm going to get better at it by finding ways too to show up every day, so you know, it's fascinating. My My best personal example for this is nutrition. So like if we say you got fitness and working out, you have sleep, and you have nutrition. That's kind of being the three like big pillars of of wellness or health. I was always pretty good. I was always great at prioritizing sleep, um, and I was always pretty good at at working out. But nutrition just eluded me for a long time, and I kind of got away with it when I was in my twenties. But then you start to get older and you're like, yeah, I can't quite like slide in the same way that I could before until you hit sixty, James, I want to tell you, so, I, Um, I tried a bunch of things, you know, I tried all the different types of diets or whatever. I tried, um uh, downloading apps like my Fitness Pal. I actually used my fitness but I didn't even use it for a single a whole day. I used it for a single meal, and I was like, this is an enormous paint in the ask. There's no way I'm gonna be blocking my food to all this. So um. This was over a span of five, seven, you know, nine years, Like I was trying all kinds of different stuff, and I just never I don't know, I just always kind of reverted back to my normal way of eating. And over the last two years I finally have made like meaningful progress on it. And the thing that changed it was I hired a coach and he doesn't actually do even that much. He just there's a spreadsheet, so it's just a Google sheet where I log my meals. And the thing that helped a lot was, like many people, I eat a lot of the same things each week, Like there's probably twenty meals or thirty meals that are what I eat, like eight percent at the time. And once I logged those twenty or thirty in there, I could just copy and paste them in each day, and that made it was so much easier to track. And then um and then he sends me an email once a week to check in and see how things are going. And I don't know why, but that version spreadsheet, plus an email from a coach, that was the thing that got me to stick to tracking my calories and staying on track. And I'm not perfect with it, you know, I'm not even worried about being perfect with it, but I bet of the weeks throughout the year, I'm on target. And that is so different than how it was before. And the point that I'm trying to get across here has actually nothing to do with new nutrition and tracking. Whatever. The point is, I wrote a book about the stuff. I know all the strategies. It's not like I didn't know what to do right. So like if you're feeling like, man, I keep being told what to do, but I'm not falling through. Yeah. Same, you know, like there's so so don't feel like that that's like the core issue or that you're unique or in your struggle there. Um, it's just that I had to keep trying different lines of attack before I figured out one that fit and worked for my life. And I think this is generally how I think about habits and behavior change, which is there is no single best strategy for doing it. There is no one way to build habits. There's no one way to break a habit. There are many ways. And what I tried to do with atomic habits is lay all the tools out on the table and say, hey, here's here's a wrench, and here's a screwdriver, and here's a hammer, and your job. The thing you have to bring to it is a willingness to try things, a willingness to say, you know what, I'm gonna pick up a hammer today and see how that works. And then the next week maybe it's like, you know what, I'll try the screwdriver. And eventually you find the right tool for the job, You find the right thing for your situation. But it can take a while, and you know, like that has been true for me, just as it's true for everybody else. So I think that's just kind of if you're serious about change or serious about improvement, you also need to be serious about having this mindset of self experimentation, this philosophy of trying things out and of experimenting until you find the right solution for you. So that's just It doesn't make it easier, but that, like, that is just part of the process, and those things are hard. If you're saddled with the fear of failure, if you're if you're a perfectionist, you're afraid to fail, then you don't want to experiment you because you feel like, well, what if it doesn't work. Well, that's not the point. You You talk a lot about things that really stem from self awareness. You write the self awareness or lack of it is poison, and that reflection and review is sort of the antidote for that. Awareness to me is such a missing component and such an elemental thing for a lot of people. I don't think you can be a good leader if you're not aware. If you're not aware of what's going on around you, your people. With the problems. But but how do people sort of spark that kind of self awareness if they if they don't have it. If you're not self aware, you don't even aware that you're not aware. Yeah, it's a great question. It is crucial. And I again, this is all this stuff as reminders myself, right, so like I've made all these mistakes too, and self poorness is tricky. A lot of times you think you have it and you don't, and so like that, boy, that's really hard. You feel like, yeah, I know what's going on that you're actually missing the bigger picture. I think there are a couple of things that are involved. So the first is are you engaged at all? Like are you interested and curious? If you kind of checked out, then you're just sort of blind to all the things that are going on. So it's really hard to be self aware if you're not engaged um. And that can mean on like a personal level, that can just mean that you care about the thing, you care about the workout, or you care about the novel you're working on, you care about the project or whatever. But are you engaged um. And then ultimately, self awareness is the process of recognizing feedback. So sometimes the feedback comes and you don't recognize it. Sometimes you miss it, you don't see it. Other times the feedback is not there. You're not getting the information at all. And so I think this is where the process of reflection review comes in and can be useful, which is it is a process for sourcing, for collecting, and for analyzing and noticing feedback. UM. I have a couple of different processes of reflection review. You can sort of think about this almost like a meta habit. It's like one level up or one level above all the other habits you're building, because if you have a process for reflection review, you can kind of look down on the rest of your habits from above and maybe notice them or look at them a little bit more. Maybe it even gives you a little distance where you can get out of the emotion and the feelings of of it and you can just kind of see it for what it what it is. UM. So my two processes for a reflection review are one. I do a weekly review, so every Friday that's mostly business related for me. I'm mostly looking at how many email subscribers do we get this week, how much revenue expenses, um, you know, do we published like just kind of getting a view of the business, where's the money coming in, where's it going out, etcetera. And um, most of the time I don't do a whole lot with that because the feedback cycle is pretty quick from Friday to Friday, and not a whole lot has changed, but it does. It's interesting a couple of times a year something a little flag will go up and it's like, hey, that's a little abnormal, you know, like that doesn't look the way it should. We need to course correct and so, um, that's a useful kind of weekly review. Then at the end of the year, I have an annual review that I do each December, and I used to publish them publicly. I haven't published it the last year or two. But this looks at all kinds of stuff. I look at the number of workouts that I did throughout the year. I look at the average number that I did each month. Um, I look at my best lifts for the year. Um. I'm training in a different way now, so I don't care as much about hitting max as I as I used to. But that was like a big thing that I used to look at, like, hey, did I hit a higher weight this year? At some point that I did the year before, Um, I look at how many places I traveled to, number of cities that I went to, how much time I spent away from home, how many nights did I sleep outside of my own bed? Um, And then like is that too high or too low? A lot of the time when I was trying to like travel more and see more of the world, I felt like, Oh, I should do a little more of this. And then the year after the book came out, I was traveling like crazy, and that year it was interesting. It was like the opposite. I was like, oh, there's way too many nights away from home, and so I kind of dipped it down. The next year. Um, I look at the number of articles I published, how many words I wrote that year, um, the amount of traffic that each article published, etcetera. So you get the idea it's gonna be unique for each person, and you have to ask yourself, what are the kind of the core things that I want to track or pay attention to. But it's a chance to check in, and I think mostly it's a chance to say, hey, I have these things that I say are important to me, Like I say that I'm this kind of person or that I say I'm working towards this sort of outcome. What did I actually spend my time on this year? And are the is there are those two things lined up, like the way that I spent my time and what I actually did? Is that lined up with what I say my priorities and values are. And every year I find areas where they're not. Where I said one thing was important, but actually I didn't spend enough time on it, or that wasn't where my attention was directed. And so the process of reflection review gives you a chance or course correct. You'll never be perfect, but now you have a chance to adjust. And the more that you have that, I think, the more you're starting to get a little bit of that feedback and you can be aware of what's going on rather than just kind of continuing blindly down some path for two or three years, ten years. Reflection and review that's a powerful a new meaning for R and R. Rest and relaxation are really nice. I mean that nothing against that, but I think I think that the other R and R is a great tool, um you know, for awareness, and I think that reflection review probably is easier if you can clear out the static, internal static. We talked about finding ways to get centeredness and peace solitude if possible, but also the external stuff, leaving your phone in the other room, that that's that's so crucial. I think people are yearning for that kind of inner harmony, that sort of centeredness and the ways to get there and what all the things that you describe that that can lead to the that it can improve in medicines and a lot of ways. Focus is the art of knowing what to ignore and instead of thinking about what should I be focused on? What should I be sending my time on? Which should I you give more attention to? It can be useful to start by saying what do I need to ignore, what I need to get rid of, what do I need to like call and delete from my life and create the capacity to spend more attention on the things that matter. You know, I mean a lot of time we feel like we can't do we want to do because we're tapped out, we're exhausted, you know, we don't have capacity. So that removing the static, as you say, can be a really helpful thing to do. Yeah, not to get to philosophical or too eastern, but I think unlearning things can be even more powerful than learning them sometimes because we all get very program and we all have to stop and check ourselves and and unlearned self control. So it's part about that. I agree with you. I think it's a really important point. I just want to double click on that for a second. Is um, un learning is really tough because a lot of the things that you learned did serve you for quite a while, it did benefit you, and so um, I think about life is like a series of seasons. So my personal example for this is like when I was writing Atomic Habits, I was in this season where it's really career heavy. I was working tons of hours, focused a lot on the book and finishing it and doing a great job and launching it and marketing it and so on. Then a couple of years later, I had kids, and now I'm in this season where everything shifted. I've got young kids, and so it's not his career heavy. The family burners kind of turned up now the work burners turned down lower. And I was really slow on the uptake there, Like it took me probably a year and a half to figure out, oh, some of these things that we're serving me in my previous season aren't serving me anymore, and I keep trying to force fit them into my new life, and so it can be tough to I think my assumption early on was unlearning means everybody learned some of these bad patterns throughout life or some unhelpful things, and you need to unlearn those. And that's kind of true. I think we all have things that are suboptimal that we can unlearn. But it also can mean there were a lot of good things that you learned, are good habits that you had, but they just don't fit your current life or your current season that you're in, and you need to unlearn those two And that has proven to be tougher for me to unlearn, but I think can be just as useful. So I think that question of what season in my inn right now and what habits do I need to let go of that previously certainly but no longer do And what habits do I need to soak up that are a better fit for the season that I'm in. Those are some interesting things to come back to from time to time. That's that's a great way to think about it. I hadn't before, but I'm gonna I'm gonna ponder that the way of looking at it in terms of life seasons, um, a couple more things. Self control governs a lot of the things we talked about. What you write is that people with most self control are often the ones that are best at removing themselves from temptation or moving the temptations from their proximity. So help people sort of grasp that, how can they achieve some success with what we're talking about by just strengthening their self control with some of the tricks of the trade. I thought that was one of the more surprising things that I came across as I was researching the book and talking to different academics and so on, is that, I mean, h ones are all somewhat similar in the sense that, yeah, most people think donuts taste great. You know, are like most people are excited to watch a really good TV show, or you know, like it's just easy to do some of the things that people spend a lot of their time doing. And um, we look at some people are like, man, they have such incredible self control. How do they do it? You know, they never eat donuts, they never watch TV or whatever. And the answer is, they're actually not that different. They just aren't tempted nearly as much like they the person who the person who eats the fewest number of donuts as a person like never really sees them or doesn't pass a donut shop. Um. And that's kind of interesting because if you take that idea seriously, then you start thinking about, how can I structure my life so that I'm tempted less? How can I structure my day so that I'm coming across the things that I want to be tempted by and maybe not the things that I feel like are wasting my time or pulling away my energy and so on. So the first thing you can do is just reduce exposure. You know, unsubscribed for emails, don't keep junk food in the house. If you're trying to follow a new diet, like don't follow food bloggers on Instagram. You know, you're constantly being triggered by the thing that you're trying to avoid, reducing exposure to the queue that prompts it. That's probably one of the most straightforward ways. The second thing that you can do is increase friction, sometimes increasing it so much that you can't even do the behavior anymore. One of the more interesting examples I came across when I was writing the book is some people who were biting their nails and doing it for years, and they wanted to get rid of this habit. One of the ways that they kicked it was by getting invisible line. And the invisible line the liners that you wear on your teeth. Once you have them on, you can't bite your nails while those are in, and so it was this weird thing that you like, you wouldn't think it was for that, but they were like, hey, I need to straighten my teeth. And then all of a sudden their nail biting habit faded to the side because there was too much friction between them and the behavior. And I think that's kind of an interesting thing to think about too, Like how can you introduce steps between you and the thing that you want to do. Sometimes it can be a subtle, a really subtle thing, like I gave the example of keeping my phone in another room. Another example for me, if I buy let's say I buy a six pack of beer and I put in the fridge. If it's like on the door or at the top shelf where I can like right in front of my face, and I can see it when I'm sitting in there. I'll drink one every night with dinner just because it's there. But if I put it down like on the lowest shelf of the fridge, like all the way in the back, I have to like bend down to see it, I can't even really spot it when I opened up the door. Sometimes it'll sit there for like two weeks. I won't even like think about it. Now, this is not going to work for someone who like has no how CAHOL problem or is struggling with you know, it's like a real addiction or something like that. But there are a lot of habits that are like that if they're just like not visible, if they're just like the friction is increased a little bit, they kind of fade away. So I think that's actually the first place to focus with self control is optimize your environment. We've talked a lot about physical environment. The last one that I want to mention with this just because I think it's so important is social environment. And if you really want to get habits to stick, like if you want him to stick, get him to stick for two years or five years or I don't know, even decades. The social environments one of the most powerful elements to capture. You know, if I if I walk outside my house, I look across the street, let's say my neighbor's cut in their grass. I might think, oh, man, you know what, I need to mow the lawn too, And you'll stick to that habit of mowing your grass for five or ten or twenty years, like however long you live in the house. And why do we do it? Partially we do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly it feels good to have a clean law because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And so it's actually this social norm and the social expectation of the group of your neighbors that gets you to be motivated to do the habit consistently. And that kind of thing happens with all sorts of habits. And so I think the punchline if you want to increase self control, if you want to increase consistency with habits, is join a group, join a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that group, man it's going to be really motivating for you to stick to it. You know, like people will join across Fit Jim thinking that they're gonna build a workout habit, and then you find them six months later and they all are eating paleo and they have the same brandon nee sleeves, and they're like wearing the same workout shoes. And they were never trying to like pick up all those habits. They just they are soaking them up because that's what the tribe is doing. And so if you start to build relationships, build friendships with people where your desired behaviors the normal behavior, it becomes much easier to maintain that sense of what we would call self control and stick to the habit of the long run. So physical environment, social environment, both of those are powerful ways to kind of hack self control and get it to stick for a longer period of time. Yeah, social environment includes strangers on social media platforms, and a good way to avoid toxicity in your life is to remove yourself from that um the platform that begins with Tea among others. But I don't want to get side. Were short on time, but you you write very convincingly about the need to sort of shape and curate your social media feeds so that between to reinforce things that you want to make part of your identity and remove things that you don't want part. I mean the people you follow on Twitter or Instagram or whatever. In a sense, you're choosing your future thoughts when you choose those people people, you're choosing your future thoughts by who you are clicking on. That That is a that is a great way to incentivize people to take stock. You have to think carefully about it in a way. You're when you choose who to follow on all these sides, you're kind of creating your own little city. And pretty much every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. It's almost never the case that a thought just arises spontaneously. It's almost always somebody said something in conversation and then I had a response, or I read something, or I viewed something and I had a response as a thought. And so yeah, like when you choose who to foll all on the Twitter, you're choosing your future thoughts. So think carefully about what you want to be focused on a week from now, or a month from now, or a year from now, and pour more of that into your feet and into your life, and less of what you feel like makes you feel down or angry or depressed or whatever. You're generous with your time. Last thing, now that you've helped people change their mindsets, which changes lives, which is contagious, which changes the world, what is the next frontier for you? And where do you see UM an area that that excites you beyond um the work in Atomic Habits. So I kind of have two things first, as you mentioned at the beginning of the show. But three to one is the weekly newsletter that I put out. So it's three three short ideas for me, two quotes from other people, and then one question to think about for the week. And uh, I really enjoyed the practice of putting that together. And I think it's nice because it's a reminder for myself again each week, like what I want to focus on, what I want to think about, what's an interesting question to kind of sit with. And the audience seems to be enjoying as well. So that comes out every Thursday. And then I am working on a second book. UM I wrote my Habits book. I'm like, I don't have anything else to share about it. I don't. I don't have any other ideas. Everything's in that one, um, But I do feel like there are some questions you could have at the end of the book, Like, for example, one question might be, Okay, I know how to build better habits now, but which habits should I be focused on? Or where should I direct my attention and energy for it to be the highest and best use. And we could call that different things, you know, we could call it focus or choices, or like how you're you know, channeling your energy and attention. But I'm kind of circling a lot of ideas around that right now and trying to figure out um. You know, people work hard in many different areas of life, many different professions, many different careers, many different countries, and yet the results are very different depending on what you choose to direct your effort toward. And this is true even within an individual life. We all can think about stuff where, hey, when I put my effort here, I get a lot out of it, and when i've my effort here, I don't seem to get many results. So what's going on there and what is the difference between things that kind of multiply your effort and things that sort of divided, and so I'm thinking a lot about those choices and maybe how to best direct your attention and energy. Can't wait to see what's next. I'm sure it'll be wise. Hey, it's nice to meet you two dimensionally on this screen, James. I really appreciate what you've done, as I said, and grateful for your time today. Yeah. Thanks, Christ appreciate the opportunity, and I hope we get to hang out in person sometimes, so thank you again. That'd be fun. I really hope you've got a lot from that. We only had time to scratch the surface. James offers so many proven methods and tools for self improvement. I recommend checking out James clear dot com. As always, a huge thank you to the team at Octagon by co executive producer and wife Jennifer Dempster and I are so grateful you've made valor who you've got part of your listening habits and be saying you best wishes for the new year. We'll talk to you then in season six mm hm