#163: James Clear on an Easier Way to Build Good Habits as a Freelancer

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a quick reminder before we get started that you can find details show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 163 and those notes include a summary of our discussion here today, as well as links to resources we mentioned during the show. Your habit will directly determine your level of success as a freelance professional. And I've never been so convinced of this as I am today because I've come to realize over the years that everything is habits. Absolutely not everything. Then you couple that idea with the fact that when you're the boss, when you work for yourself, it's really all up to you. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one in the office trying to sabotage your efforts, no office politics, no one checking when you clocked in and out that day. So if we want to succeed, it's more important than ever to develop and maintain the right habits in every facet of our business. Until the past few years, this idea was mostly academic. The practical advice in the area of habit development was mostly anecdotal. It was mostly untested. You know, we've always heard got to develop good habits, but you know, it's something at least I took as more of a feel good thing. Sure, I understand that. Over the past decade, however, huge research and discoveries in the field of of behavioral science have changed this idea. And one of the experts in this field is my guest for this week's episode, James Clear. James is the author of the newly released book Atomic An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. He's an author and speaker focused on habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. His work has appeared in the New York Times Entrepreneur Magazine, Time Magazine, and and on CBS this Morning. His website receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter@james clear.com He's a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball. This is a fascinating interview with a guy who thinks about this topic day and night and has spent years applying the science of habit development to everyday situations you and I face every day in our freelance businesses. It's an important topic, one that I urge you to check out. This, in a way kind of doesn't make sense because this is a really broad topic. And sometimes these broad topics don't, you know, don't always succeed because it's, in a way it's too broad. And we're told, hey, you gotta niche down. But why do you think the whole habit development thing has taken off?

Well, I think there are a couple reasons. One is that it's, it is, it is a broad topic, but it's good in the sense that we all have habits. I mean, literally all of us are dealing with this. It doesn't matter what your work is, what your personal goals are, good and bad habits, they shape our lives. I mean, the, some of the research studies will tell you it's like 40 to 50% of your behaviors in a day are automatic and habitual. But I think that the impact is actually far greater than that because in many ways habits are kind of like an entrance ramp on a highway. You know, you like start doing something and then they send you hurtling in this direction. And it shapes the conscious choices that you take for minutes or hours afterward. You know, take just like the little habit of pulling your phone out of your pocket. You stand in line and pull your phone out. Now that is more or less automatic or mindless. But then what you do for the next 20 minutes, whether it's playing a video game or answering emails or browsing social media, there are many conscious choices in that 20 minute time frame. It's not all habitual, but it was all shaped by that one little habitual action of pulling your phone out. And there are all sorts of things like that throughout our day where there's kind of these, I call them decisive moments where they, they are like a fork in the road. And if you can master that little moment, it really shapes the hours to come. So I think the first reason is because habits, we all feel that at some level that habits are incredibly powerful force, maybe one of the most powerful forces in our lives. But then the second point, about your topic, sometimes broad topic, about your question, sometimes broad topics don't go over that well or don't catch people's attention because they're a little too watered down, I guess, they're too generic. And I think that that comes down to how I try to write about the topic and how I frame it. So the two things that I think really resonate with people, and this is one of these, is. Well, both of them actually are very core concepts in the book. So the first One is that 1% changes can compound into something really significant. The power of getting 1% better every day is not intimidating on a daily basis, but can be very surprising in the results that it delivers over time. So people gravitate toward that concept. They like this idea that changes can be small and powerful, which is one reason why I chose the word atomic, because it means both tiny and the source of incredible power. But then the second thing is that we do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. And so often the conversation about habits and behavior change or achievement of any kind is like, set a goal, be more ambitious, have purpose and drive and so on. And it's not that I think those things aren't useful, they're fine. But it's just that at the end of the day, whether or not you set a goal for something does not determine very much about the progress you make. What determines whether or not you make progress is the system that you have and atomic habits. This book that I just finished is intended to be an instruction manual or a guide for building a better system where good habits naturally emerge and bad habits fade away. And so I think the combination of those two things, the fact that habits are incredibly potent, and we all feel that at some level, and talking about improvement as 1% changes organized towards building a better system, I think that way of framing the concept, for whatever reason, those combinations of things have led to.

Some massive growth, makes perfect sense. Ben. And I tell you, I was playing devil's advocate obviously here a little bit. The way you write about it is so engaging and so fascinating. You've been a big reason why I have shifted the way I think about habits. I think before I started reading your stuff, I thought of habits as kind of a small part of my day. You know, they were either bad habits or good habits. And I did some things that weren't great sometimes during a day and some things that were good. But that was like, maybe 10% of my day. I guess that's the way I was thinking about it. And now I realize that everything is habits. I mean, like, every microsecond is driven by a habit because that's the way our brains work to conserve energy. And it's just I wasn't paying attention to those things. So now I'm being really, really mindful of, you know, what. What are my habits doing and where are they taking me? That's been a huge shift for me.

You know, one way to think about a habit Is that. And I kind of lay out this. This way of thinking in chapter three, which is that habits are like automatic solutions to the problems that you face. So you go through life and you're facing problems, little problems all day long. And sometimes we wouldn't even phrase it that way. Like, you know, you take something simple like tying your shoes, for example. Well, getting your shoe tied is a problem that your brain needs to solve. And the first time that you face a problem, you're just kind of experimenting with different ways or testing different ways of solving it. You don't really know what to do yet, and so your parents are teaching you how to tie your shoe or so on. But then you do it 40 or 50 or 100 times, and eventually it starts to click. And your brain automates that solution. And pretty soon you can tie your shoes while you're having a conversation and so on. But that's true not just for little stuff. It's true everywhere. Like you said, habits are. Everything is habits. So, you know, you get done with a long day and you feel exhausted, and that's a problem that your brain starts looking for a solution for. And so you can learn different ways of solving that problem. You could, you know, play video games for an hour, and maybe that'll relieve your anxiety. Or you could get a bowl of ice cream or watch an hour of Netflix, bite your nails, like all of these are possible solutions. Or you could meditate for 10 minutes or go for a run. And over time, you start to learn what the solution is that solves that problem. Your brain begins to automate it, just like tying your shoes. And I think the key point here is that the original way that you learned to solve a problem, the original habit that you learned, is not necessarily the optimal way. And as soon as you realize that, you can start looking at all these habits that you have that fill up your life and realize that what I'm doing right now to solve the problems I'm facing now, I can start to look at those and see, like, which ones do I need to restructure? Which ones do I need to adjust? And as soon as you realize that and you start to understand how habits work, then the power kind of shifts back to you. You feel less like a. Less like the victim of your habits and more like the architect of them. And then you can start looking for ways to change them and improve them.

I love that. I guess I never really thought of it that way. When you were speaking, I was thinking it's kind of like a bit of Code. Computer code. Right. It's like, hey, it's. You can choose all these different code packets, and we've made those choices, but they're. That's not necessarily the best solution. Not. Not all of those are the best solution. So how are we automating a lot of these things? We can consciously change those may not be easy at first, but they're all automated, which is fantastic. So let me give you a little bit of context, because where I see my audience struggling, there's a few areas. We all struggle with a few different things. But I find that when you're finally out there on your own as a freelance writer or copywriter, we now have to do two things. First, we got to wear all the hats. So there's a lot of different things that we have to get at least good at or competent doing. Whereas before, maybe we've had a job where we only have to be good at one or two things and there's nobody there telling us what to do. So it's always up to us. Everything is up to us. That is a liberating thing. It's also a very scary thing. And what I find is when you have those things together, we're not consistently doing the things that will keep our business healthy. So I'm curious in the context of specifically two things. One would be marketing your business, which is an area where a lot of us don't have very good healthy habits, and in. And then doing the client work, which is the production side. So there's the marketing side, and then the production side. I'd like to talk with you a little bit about systems. I love what you said earlier. You don't rise up to the level of your goals, which is what we all tend to do. You fall to the level of your systems. I'd like to start talking a little bit about systems and how we can start putting systems in place so that these things actually get done and get done right instead of like, ah, I don't feel like doing it, or I'll do it tomorrow, then that kind of thing.

So in the book, I divide habits into kind of four. It's like every habit is like a loop, like a feedback loop. And so you can imagine this, a habit by definition, as a behavior that you're repeating again and again. So you're kind of running that loop over and over. And I like to divide that loop into four different stages. And by doing that, it kind of ends up giving you four levers that you can pull. And when the levers are in the right positions, building good habits is much easier. And when they're in the wrong positions, building them is much harder. And so together, those four levers kind of give us a framework, so to speak, for building a better system or for building a more effective habit. So let me walk through those four right now. We won't go into all of them in detail, but I'll give you an overview, and then we can pick one or two that we'll dive in. So the four stages of a habit. The first stage is the cue. And this is what prompts you to do the habit. It's kind of. It's what catches your attention, so to speak. So, you know, let's take just a very common example. You, like, walk into the kitchen, and you see a plate of cookies. So that's the. It's like a visual cue. The next stage is the craving, what I call the craving. And the craving is some kind of prediction or interpretation about the cue. So, for example, if you walk in, you see the plate of cookies, and then your mind predicts, oh, those are going to be really tasty. I should have a bite. Then you have a reason to move forward. But you could imagine another person who, for example, just got done finishing a big meal, and maybe they ate five cookies at the end of it. And then they walk from the dining room into the kitchen, and they see a plate of cookies, and they think, oh, you know, I'm stuffed. Like, I don't want to eat anything right now. So the interpretation that you have after you see the cue makes a big difference and determines what your response is going to be like. So let's say you see the cookies, that's cue. You think, oh, those are gonna be tasty. So that's craving. The third stage is the response. So this is the actual habit itself, the behavior you perform. And then the fourth stage is the reward. And the reward serves two purposes. The first purpose is it satisfies the craving. So you think, this cookie's gonna be tasty, and then you eat it, and then you feel like, oh, that tastes good. So it satisfies the expectation, the prediction that you made. And then the second thing is it teaches you for the next time. So if a response, if a habit is enjoyable, productive, satisfying, then it teaches you, hey, next time you see that cue, let's do this again. Whereas if it's unsatisfying, so let's say, for example, that you hate oatmeal, oatmeal raisin cookies, and you happen to eat one of those, and you think, oh, it tastes really bad. Well, the next time you have a reason to avoid that when you see that particular cue. So those four stages cue craving, routine reward, cue craving, response, reward. Those are the four ways I like to break up that habit loop. Now, associated with each of those things is this, like, lever, or what I call the four laws of behavior change that you can use to make it easier to build a better system or to build a better habit. So the four laws are make it obvious. So you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, make it attractive. You want that second stage, the craving. You want to make it as attractive as possible so you have a reason for approaching it or a reason for doing the behavior. The third one is make it easy. So you want the actual habit itself to be as easy as possible to do. And then the fourth one is make it satisfying. If you can find a way to make it immediately satisfying, then you have a reason to repeat it in the future. And so those four areas are kind of the four places we can intervene to build a more effective system or to make it easier to build habits.

I love that. I love. So that this makes perfect sense now, let's take that and put it in a very specific situation. I just had a coaching client last week. She's really been struggling with prospecting. She knows she's got to get this done. I mean, it's not an issue of ignorance, but it's been weeks, and she can't seem to get it done. And so, you know, she's obviously putting it off, other priorities. It wasn't an issue of actually putting it off. She said, you know, all this is happening. And then this came up, and then that came up. But look, we can all say that. So how can we then take this system in some of these factors and kind of increase the probability that this can start turning into a habit for her?

Okay, so I'll give you. I'll give you two. And we're going to focus. In this case, we'll focus on the. The first law. So make it obvious. And we'll focus on the third law, make it easy. So the first thing. And this is a place I like to start a lot when we're dealing with building a system or improving your habits is with what I call environment design. And the basic idea here is that it's more effective to create an environment where willpower is not required than to rely on your willpower to overpower the environment.

Why is that, by the way?

Well, because, first of all, there's just a good body of research on self control and willpower that shows that the people who have the highest amount of self control or who exhibit the greatest willpower, grit, self control, perseverance, whatever you want to call, is often not the case that they have like some internal ability that is beyond what the normal person does. It is simply that they exhibit greater willpower because they face fewer temptations. So in other words, if you're not being tempted all the time, it's easier to draw upon that reserve and resist every now and then. And the way that I would phrase it is that I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment. If you're constantly surrounded by stuff, it's just hard to resist the pull of what engulfs us. You know, like you, you may not want to eat fast food, but if every day on the way to work you drive past 15 fast food restaurants, it's kind of hard to never go because you're seeing it all the time. So anyway, the point here is that by shifting the environment, you want to do two things. The first thing is you want to reduce exposure to the things that pull you off course. So this client of yours who's saying like, oh, this is coming up and that's coming up, I don't know exactly what the distractions are that she's facing, but we can imagine what some of them are based on what we all face. So for example, getting notifications on your phone, this is the type of thing that can derail you all the time. So I have a rule where I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day so that at least gives me like a four hour block in the morning where I can do work without getting text messages, phone calls, social media updates, all that stuff. And the idea here is actually for your good habits, the first law is to make it obvious. For a bad habit, you want to invert that law and you want to make it invisible. So the things that distract you, the things that pull you off course, you want to make those, the exposure to those cues as invisible as possible. Again, I'm just coming up with hypothetical examples here, but if she, like many freelancers, works out of her house, then one struggle that I had early on in my freelance career, because I did a fair bit of it for the first year or two that I was getting started, was that I didn't really have an office space. I was working from my couch or my kitchen table. And from the kitchen table I could see the television. And so like, if you want to watch Netflix or play video games or turn on the news, that's just a continual exposure to that queue. Now, there are a variety of steps you could take there. One thing, for example, is you could put the television inside, like, a wall unit that has, like, a cabinet so you don't see it as often. Or you could unplug the television after each use and then only plug it in when you can say the name of the show that you want to watch so you don't just, like, mindlessly turn it on. If you want to be really extreme, you could take the TV off the wall and put it in the closet and only take it out and set it back up when you really want to watch something. But the point there is to try to reduce exposure to that thing that pulls you off course. And sometimes, again, this depends on living situation. It's not always possible to have a separate room. That was a big win for me when I could move from the kitchen table to a. I moved to a different apartment that had a room that was actually my office. And so then suddenly work was something that happened in there, and personal life was something that happened out here. And I was able to divide the two much more easily and not get distracted as much. So that type of environment design, it's not always possible. If you live in, say, a studio apartment where you don't have that kind of space, then you can do what kindergarten rooms do, which is they divide the room into activity zones. And so you could have, like, specifically a corner for writing or a chair for writing. I know one writer who. He's uninstalled the web browser on his desktop. His desktop is just for writing. His laptop is for research, so it has the web browser on it. And then his tablet is for reading and like, Kindle and stuff like that. So he tries to divide his digital devices into activity zones. But the point here is to have clear distinctions in the environment so that it's easier for you to fall into the habit of doing things the same way. You know, one of the challenges of many of our modern devices, like a smartphone, for example. Smartphones are great, but you can do like 800 different things on them. So it becomes very difficult to associate it with one task or in this case, with just a productive task, because it not only is the place where you call prospective clients, but it's also the place where you check Twitter and Instagram and browser email and do a bunch of other stuff. So the more that you can divide things up either digitally or physically, the better it is or the more likely it is that you'll develop a habit associated with that particular task or situation or location. So I'll stop there for now. That's like a good example of the first law of making it obvious or of making bad habits invisible. And then we can also talk about the third one.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And as you're speaking, I'm thinking of several examples that have kept me, you know, I've lost 30 pounds, so over the past almost year and.

Nice. Congratulations, doctor.

Thanks, man. Thank. You know, honestly, it's just been. It's been habits and mostly eating habits and there's exercise habits there as well. Five days at the gym. I, you know, I hate to miss one because it's like my week feels incomplete. It's kind of like that check the boxes, Jerry Seinfeld story. Right. But one of the things that has really helped me during the week is I find when I do eat, if I overeat, it's going to be on the weekend. And it's because I'm not in my office during the week. I'm really focused. I got a big day and I'm in my home office. And something about having to walk downstairs to get some. I just don't even want to do it because there's some friction there. Right. And then the other thing is when my family's home like this summer, you know, the kids, they did go to camps, but they're here and it's noisy. And I find when I leave my office just to get a drink of water, I get asked a million questions. Where is this? When are you going to do that? You know, can you do this for me? And I don't want to deal with that. So I stay in my office and I don't snack in. Most days I'm not even eating lunch. And I'm fine with that. But it's kind of like a. I didn't realize that. It's kind of like an accidental, making it obvious kind of thing. Right. It's. So I guess it's worked out. So I love the obvious one. So let's talk a little bit about the easy, because I think that's where maybe a lot of people are having a lot of trouble. They feel or they tell themselves that it's hard, it's going to be painful. So how can we change that?

So making it easy is where it's probably the first place I would say to intervene if you're going to work on building a better habit. This is probably the picking the right habit will make everything else easier. Picking the wrong habit will make everything else harder. So you can employ as many strategies as you want. But if you're trying to build a habit of, say, doing 100 push ups a day, it's just hard to do that every single day. It's going to require a lot of effort, it's going to require a lot of planning. You're going to have to start changing your life around to get it fit in there. It's just. Yeah, for a lot of people it's a big change. So if you can make the change much smaller, then you'll be much more likely to stick to it. Now, just because it's smaller doesn't mean it's not going to be effective. So applying this to this client situation and kind of building on the current example of your own situation, you just gave. One of the things that I like to think about when we talk about making habits easy is friction. So the friction associated with a task has a large influence on whether or not we do it. And one way that I like to talk about this is by using a metaphor of a garden hose. So imagine that you have a garden hose and it has some water trickling out of it, but there's like a bend in the middle of the hose. Now, if you want to get more water pushing through the hose, then you have two options. You can either crank up the valve and like force more water through the bend, or you can just untwist the hose and remove the bend and let the water flow through freely. And so often when we try to build better habits or achieve some kind of goal in our life, we do the equivalent of cranking up the valve. We just try to overpower all the things in our life. We just say, all right, you need to work harder, you need to want it more, you need to have more ambition, you need to have grit and perseverance and so on. Now that can get results. But just like cranking up the valve on the hose, it increases the amount of tension in the system. So you can get the outcome, but it's gonna lead to additional stress and wear you down a little bit. Meanwhile, releasing the twist in the hose will relieve tension and in many cases get a very similar outcome. And so the point here is to start looking around. And you can do this by mapping out the processes that you do each day and then trying to find or identify different points, different bottlenecks in that chain where you can streamline things or reduce the amount of tension associated with the task. So there have been many successful businesses that have been built this way. If you take, take Uber, for example, they could have mapped out the chain of processes of behaviors that a person would perform if they were going to get a ride across town, for example. And it starts with things like getting to call the taxi company and they have to wait on the curb and they got to get into the taxi, and then they drive across town and they get out and they have to pay and they have to, you know, and so on. And so they map out each little thing that's happening. And you could do the same thing for whatever the process is, whether it's prospecting or getting the writing done on a given day. Just go ahead and write down each little stage then. And this is true for most businesses. What you're trying to do is trying to find a more frictionless way to solve the problem that your customers are facing or that you as an individual are facing. So Uber could have looked at one of those stages, let's say the payment process at the end, and said, all right, when people get out of the cab, it usually takes like two or three minutes. They got the get some change out of their, their wallet or their purse, then they have to pay the cab driver, then they get changed back, and then, you know, or they take their credit card out, they swipe it, you got to wait for the credit card to process, and then you get out. And so they're like, how can we make that more frictionless? Well, we could have them upload their credit card information to the app beforehand. And then as soon as they arrive at their destination, they just get out and they're charged automatically. There's no exchange. They don't have to wait for anything. And that's one way, one little way to make that process more frictionless. And then by doing that across, you know, four or five or 10 different areas of the behavioral chain, you end up with an experience that feels much more frictionless to the end user. And the same thing can be true for your daily habits or for your prospecting or writing style. Look at the chain of these processes and you try to find as many as you can that you can either eliminate, Automate, or Streamline. And some of my favorite automation tools, I'm putting that in air quotes right now, are actually not automations in the software sense, but they're one time choices that pay off again and again. So, for example, buying a computer with a faster processor, one time choice, one time expense, but it can lead to faster work on everything that you do on your computer if you want to be more effective each day. Getting better sleep is a great way to show up and be more productive each day. So there are a variety of one time choices you can make there that can make getting better sleep an easier habit to fall into. So you could buy a better mattress that you sleep on there at night. You could purchase blackout curtains so that your room is dark. You could buy a sleep mask so that you can sleep when you're traveling or on the road in hotels. You could purchase earplugs if you're in a noisy environment. All of those are examples of one time actions that pay off again and again in the future. And they're simple ways of trying to automate different portions of a productive process. So the first thing to think about when it comes to making it easy is reducing friction. The second thing to think about is using what I call the two minute rule. But I'll go ahead and pause for a second and see if you have any to add or questions on that.

Yeah, yeah, so let me add a little bit of context or maybe use an example and you tell me if I'm on the right track. So let's just say let's take the problem prospecting, because that's a very common one I'm not doing. I'm not sending warm prospecting emails out. It keeps getting pushed from one day to the next. For me, I think I would ask myself, what is it that I am? What part of that process am I the most scared of? Or the one that I'm avoiding the most? And let's just say it's like actually sending out the email, like writing it out and sending it. That just feels scary to me. What I would probably do is if we're talking about automating and streamlined, maybe what I can do is, okay, tomorrow I'm going to do this. I'm actually going to do it first thing in the morning because then there's no excuse that, well, I got behind. So that would be one way I think I might do it. The other might be I'm going to write three names down, three prospects I'm going to reach out to. That way when I get there in the morning to my desk, I don't have to wonder, okay, what am I doing again? Who am I contacting? And then I might even have their contact information ready. So when I get to my desk, it's going to be first thing in the morning. I have no excuse. I've automated that in a way I think, at least that's how I think about it. I've streamlined it, and now I know exactly what I need to do and what I need to send. And now I'm kind of at a place where I got to get it done. Maybe a third one might be the fact that I've narrowed it down to three instead of like 20, because that seems overwhelming. Right. So that's too much friction. Is that maybe a good method to. Or a good way?

So I think you're employing both the second law of behavior change, which make it attractive, and third, which is make it easy. So the actions, like having a list of three names and having their contact information ahead of time, that's what I would call your, like, priming the environment. You're making it as easy as possible to do that habit, which I think is great, super productive way to do it. By limiting it to three names rather than 25, you're making it more attractive. It's not as overwhelming, it's not as uncertain now. And secondly, by doing it first thing in the morning, which I think is a huge thing, you also are making it more attractive. Because one of the big things that determines whether a habit is attractive to us or not is the timing, the time of day that we choose to ask ourselves to do it. A lot of times people will say things like, everybody's got the same 24 hours in a day, and, you know, like, you have to make the most of the time and so on. But in fact, the time. It is true that that is a constraint, but in many ways, time is secondary to energy. If you don't have the energy to fully utilize a given hour, then it doesn't really matter whether you have the hour free or not. And in many cases, what happens as the day goes on is, as you mentioned, we get interrupted more. You start putting out fires. Other people's agenda starts to become. Starts to override your own agenda. And so the longer that you wait, it's often the case that the harder it is to stick to the habit. One of my friends told me, if I start the day with a good habit, it almost always continues to be a good day or it almost always continues well. If the day doesn't start well, then with like a Herculean amount of effort, I can turn it around. But it's really hard for me to get it to end as well if I don't get off on a good.

Start throwing this ball. Right.

Yeah. Well, I think to your point about starting strong and making sure that you get the most important task done or the thing that you're avoiding, it can end up paying big dividends for the rest of the day. It's not just about the three prospecting emails that you're sending. It also can start you off on a really good foot and give you some momentum for the next task.

Okay, cool. So I think we're on track here. So what would be the second factor here?

So this is what I like to call the two minute rule. And the idea here is that a habit should take two minutes or less to do. And this is particularly important in the beginning when you're building a habit. Once you have a habit build and something that you do every day, like once, once you're going to the gym four days a week. Okay, sure. If you want to expand the routine and try to find ways to optimize or improve it, that's fine. But at first, before it's a habit, when you're just trying to get started, the most crucial thing is to focus on always doing the first two minutes of the behavior. And so often this is not how we approach change. You know, for example, we might say, all right, I want to start prospecting. So I need to do a ton of research to find the best prospecting email templates I can find. And you can spend weeks looking around and trying to figure out the ideal way to send the perfect email. Same thing is true for trying to come up with an idea for a side business, or finding the perfect program to lose weight, or the perfect template to work out. And we're so focused on optimizing that we don't get around to mastering the art of showing up. And the, you know, the great irony of this, of course, is that if a habit is not established, it can never be improved. So you have to master the art of showing up before you can optimize anything. And the way that I like to phrase it, or a little mantra I keep in mind is standardize before you optimize. So before you worry about sending the perfect prospecting email or find the perfect.

Prospects or yeah, anything, anything like that.

Before you worry about optimizing that process, make it the standard that you send three each day. And when you're sending three each day, even if they're super short, I mean it literally in the beginning, it actually doesn't really matter that much about the results. It's more about building the habit of showing up. So you really could say, I mean, it could just be like a two sentence email just saying like, hey, you know, I was Just wondering if you had five minutes to chat or something like that. That might not actually be an effective email, but it's effective at getting you to build the habit. And once you've done that for, say every day for, you know, a month in a row or two months in a row, a row, then you can start to worry about, all right, am I finding the right prospects here? Let me make sure that I'm getting in touch with the right people. And then how should I frame this? Can I be outlining these emails better? Is there a better way to frame this? Ask and so on. But it's only once you've become that type of person that you have the chance to optimize the results and improve. If you're just focused on theorizing and coming up with the best plan, but they never get around to executing on, then it doesn't really do a whole lot of good.

I that you. Right, you hit the nail on the head right there. I find that writers tend to be perfectionists and we don't want to do anything half assed. You know, we want to make sure we, you know, if we're going to do it, it's going to be done right. And this is tendency to try to optimize everything. I see it every day and I totally get it. But you, you can't, you can't improve what you don't already have. Right. So I absolutely love that. I'm curious to hear how you feel that accountability, what role accountability plays in all of this and is it really a factor? How important is it?

So I see it as influencing the second and the fourth laws of behavior change. What I mean by that is being accountable. If we're going to phrase it this way, it means that you belong as part of a group or you belong as part in that group. Could just be two people, right? It could be you and your accountability partner. But you, you belong to some tribe and that tribe has expectations. In the case of a formal accountability partner, their expectation might be that they, that you run together at 6am each morning or that you are two accountability partners on, you know, writing and you send each other your, your finished drafts at the end of each week or something like that. But all the social groups, all of the subcultures that we are part of, have expectations associated with them. And one way to phrase this is by talking about social norms. So for example, when you walk onto an elevator, everybody turns around and faces the front of the elevator. Now there's no reason you have to do that. You could walk onto an elevator and face the back, but it would violate the social norm. It would just feel a little weird. Weird to all the other people on the elevator. And so we don't do it because we want to fit in with the expectations of the crowd. And this becomes a very powerful form of behavior change and of habit formation. If you can find a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. And I've seen this in my own career as an entrepreneur and as a writer, you know, like, I'm in these groups now, whether it's a mastermind group for entrepreneurship or a writing group on Facebook or stuff like that, where that was not my norm. You know, even just five years ago or 10 years ago when I was getting started, before I had a business, I didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn't have any professional writers that I knew. There was no one for me to hang out with or for that to be like the normal behavior. But now I belong to those subcultures, and I have friends in those groups. And so in order to maintain my friendships with them and feel like I, you know, belong, belong in the group, There are a variety of habits that go along with that. One of them is publishing consistently, for example, writing books is another one. Or talking about revenue and expenses and, you know, ways to improve the business. Like, all of these things are these little kind of like, invisible habits that are associated with being part of that culture. And so I would not call that a formal accountability group. But I think implicitly, any of the subcultures that we are part of exert some kind of pressure on us. Peer pressure. And peer pressure doesn't have to be bad. It can be very productive if you're in the right group. Peer pressure is amazing because it compels you to act in accordance with those norms, and you start to adopt the habits of the people around you. And I think that that phrase that I mentioned earlier, you want to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. It sort of encapsulates the. The central idea here, which is that, you know, for many people going to the gym and working out four days a week, that feels like a real big sacrifice. Feels like a lot of work. But there are also people who. That is just normal for. It's not. It's just how they live their normal life. And if you can become part of a group like that, then develop friendships there and so on, then it starts to become easier for you to see that as normal behavior. And the same is true For I. Entrepreneurship and building a business. You know, if you're around people who all run successful businesses, then that starts to seem like a pretty real option to you. So that's how I would describe the. The implicit accountability that we all face each day. And then of course, there's a formal accountability partner, an accountability group that you could create that actually judges your action or tries to keep you on pace or in some cases punishes you or makes. Makes you feel guilty if you don't publish consistently or if you don't stick to the things that you say. And that, I think, is more about the fourth law of behavior change, more about making it satisfying, because you're able to hold up to your word or follow through on what you said you would do, or unsatisfying if you slip and you don't want to be the one who doesn't show up for the running group or doesn't have their draft into the writing group and so on.

I hadn't really given much thought to the implicit kind, but as you started describing that, I thought of a few examples. And at the gym, you know, I go at the same time every weekday. And it's so funny. It's the same people there, of course, the same people. After about February 15, it's the same people there. And it's so like, I don't know the names of most of the people I've only. Because I'm not really that social there. I just. I go get my job done and get out. But a lot of people are very social there. And it's funny, like, suddenly you stop seeing someone, you're like, I wonder what happened to that guy. I don't even know his name, but I wonder what happened to that. I haven't seen him. And I think everyone kind of feels that way is maybe that's not the reason they do it, but that is a component of it is I show up at the same time. Those are like my people. It would be weird if I stopped showing up even if I came at a different time, because, well, I do.

Think that that's the. The strongest component of CrossFit, you know, and for all the criticism CrossFit receives for different reasons, the community aspect is very powerful. And they. It's much more social than a normal gym would be. And people do expect you to be there. They, you know, they all talk and they grill out or go to dinner afterward or whatever. Like it's. It's a community. And that in many ways, honestly, the same way people get a sense of community from going to a church, for example, they, for some people, they feel like that's church for them. They like, you know, that's where they find some kind of tribe or hang out with them. They see those people five or six days a week. So yeah, it can be whatever the social group is or the subculture that you're a part of, it can be a very powerful driver of behavior.

Fantastic. Well, James, I don't want to leave without asking you about your book. I know it just came out, I believe, last Tuesday, the October 16th. Tell us about it where we can learn more about it.

Yeah, so it's called Atomic Habits. An easy and proven way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad ones. And as I mentioned, one of the core philosophies of the book is that we do not rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. And the book is laid out in what I hope is very practical, easy to understand format for building a better system for explaining how habits work and how to create more effective and productive habits on a daily basis, whether that's in work or in daily life. And you can check out the book and see get some bonuses and a bunch of other stuff@atomichabits.com awesome.

Well, listen, I love your work. Seriously, you have changed the way I think about this stuff. And I know that as a result, I mean my life and specifically my health has improved over the last year. I really love the way you lay it out, that you explain it. I love the way you bring science into this without being boring. You really make it interesting. So I recommend everyone check out this book. Guys, as I said at the beginning, when you are in business for yourself, one of the curses, if you will, is the freedom. And with that freedom comes, to use a cliche, a lot of responsibility. You have to develop habits that maybe you didn't have have to develop before. You have to get good at that. And I think James is really, really good at breaking this down, making this practical. I've read some great books about habits, but they were more interesting than they were practical. And I love the way you do that. So definitely go check it out. So James, thanks for coming in, man. Really, really enjoyed a conversation and yeah, I hope we can continue this at another time.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really had a good time. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B to B business launcher. Learn more at b2b launcher.com.