Heroic Interview: Atomic Habits with James Clear

You're listening to Atomic Habits, an optimal living interview with Brian Johnson and James Clear.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimized podcast. It's been a while since I've done an interview and I'm kind of excited to come back with James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. It is, as I was telling James in our little prelude to this conversation, one of my absolute favorite books I've read, period. I've read a fair number of books at this stage. And I was telling him, I think this is going to make it in my top 10. This is so good. Quick background on James. He's got a super popular website and blog, james clear.com. check it out. Millions of people visit him a month. He's got hundreds of thousands, some absurd number of newsletter subscribers. And James and I had connected before and I really enjoyed our connection. And after I read the book, I realized why he has the reach and the impact he does. He does a phenomenal job of integrating all the science, what we know scientifically works for habits with a really humble yet really powerful practical set of laws. We'll talk about today. And as I was telling James, and as you know, if you've listened to many of these episodes, I'm a huge fan and student of Habits. I think I've read, if not all the books on the subject, pretty darn close to it. We have habits 101, we have willpower 101, and we have a class called optimizing algorithms 101. I'm passionate about the subject and I've never seen anyone approach it with a more grounded, scientifically informed, yet really practical approach than James. So Atomic Habits Subtitle an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. This was an instant New York Times bestselling book. I rarely say a book is a must read, and I frankly never will because you need to make your decisions. But this comes as close as it possibly can to being a must read. I think you and your family will love it, whatever you do. So again, Atomic Habits. James, thanks for taking the time.

Oh, thank you so much. That is an incredibly kind intro and I am so happy that you enjoyed it.

Dude. Yeah, well done. Congrats on everything. And let's jump in. Let's start at the top. Atomic Habits. Tell us why you decided to name the book Atomic Habits.

Yeah. Okay, so there are three reasons that I chose the phrase atomic habits. And the first meaning of the word atomic is small or tiny, like an atom. Right? And that is kind of one of My core philosophies that habits should be small and easy to do. But the second meaning of the word atomic, and one that's often overlooked when it comes to habit change, is the fundamental unit in a larger system. So atoms build into molecules, molecules build into compounds, and so on. And in a way, our habits are kind of like the atoms of our lives. They're these like little daily routines that we do. And as you layer them on top of each other, you end up with your daily routine or your daily ritual, or, you know, the overall system of your life. And then the third meaning of the word atomic is the source of immense energy or power. And I think that if you combine all three of those meanings, you sort of understand the narrative arc of the book, which is you make these changes that are small and easy to do. You layer them on top of each other like units in a larger system. And if you do that, then you can end up with some really powerful or remarkable results.

Well said. The book is as articulated as James just was. Okay, fantastic. So, atomic habits. We've got our three reasons. Let's talk about tiny changes. Remarkable results, which I think is one of the subtitles for the book. So, tiny changes, Remarkable results. Walk us through the math. So one of the things I joke about in the note is that we've got an optimized plus one series where every day I send out another two to three to four minute plus one, you know, just get a little bit better today. And sometimes I refer to that as 1% better, but it's really just kind of plus one plus one plus one. So when I read your book and the fact that you did the math on what happens when we get just 1% better over the course of a year. Tell us about that. And just kind of. That gestalt.

Yeah, so the actual math on it is if you get 1% better each day, you don't just add up and you're like 3.6 times better. It actually compounds. You end up almost 38 times better over the course of a year. And so it's kind of like the compound interest curve of saving for retirement or something. And this is one of the reasons I like to refer to habits is the compound interest of self improvement. They're these the same way that money multiplies through compound interest. And it doesn't really feel like very much in the early days or you're kind of saving up early and then, you know, it's not 10 or 20, 30 years later that you actually get to that hockey Stick portion of the curve. Habits are not. They're not exactly like that, but it's kind of like that, you know, where on any given day it's very easy to overlook a choice that's 1% better or 1% worse. You know, I mean, what is the difference between eating a salad for lunch or eating a burger and fries? Not a whole lot. On any given day, your body looks basically the same in the mirror at the end of the night. The scale hasn't really changed, but it's only when you compound those choices over two years or five years or 10 years that you turn around and you realize, wow, these daily choices actually really matter. I mean, they are the thing that makes the difference. And that's true not just for weight and health, but for pretty much anywhere. I mean, knowledge compounds. So reading any one book or any one page is not going to make you a genius. But man, a commitment to lifelong learning that can really compound and turn into something transformative over time. If you start to look at habits like that as what I would say is like a hallmark of any compounding process where all the greatest returns are delayed, that hockey stick portion of the curve is out there in the future, you start to appreciate the importance of those 1% improvements or 1% declines, the significance of them. And. And it gives you maybe a different way to think about being patient because you start to realize that time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, then all of a sudden time becomes your ally and you just need to keep showing up. And if you have bad habits, well, now time is your enemy. And every day that keeps passing, you keep putting yourself deeper in a hole. But it doesn't seem like it on any given day because it's just a small 1% choice either way. So it's sort of that general philosophy that I carry into the book and this idea of what, why habits matter so much and how they impact our lives in significant ways over the span of months and years and decades.

Yep, so much there that fires me up that I want to touch on. But first I ran it out. So you made the point very clearly, as you just did in the book, that, look, you really need to look at this not only over that year, but 2, 5, 10 years. And then we start to see some real power from those delayed gains. So I busted out a Google spreadsheet, right? And then I ran it out. Okay, well, what's the second year? If we're 37 times improved after a year? What about the second year if I compound another 1% and it's something like 1400 times better, right? What if you go out to 3, 4, 5 years and at 5 years you're talking tens of millions of times better. And I literally broke the Google spreadsheet before I got to 3650 days in. I literally broke it. And what I got out of My math was five quadrillion times. I mean, you have 15 zeros at the end of your improvement curve after 10. Now, of course those numbers are absur absurd and it's a loose metaphor, but that's the point, is that our potential is unknowable. And it comes from the most atomic, you know, tiniest little things we take for granted. And again, I have goosebumps. I say that because you make the point so clearly that it's about those moment to moment to moment choices that matter, that those things really matter. Let's take them seriously and then let's have fun. Over the longer period of time, it.

Seems like nothing, but actually it's everything. Seems like it's not a big deal on any given day, but man really ends up making a difference in the trajectory that you're on. And that's kind of one of the points that I make in the book, is that you should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current position. A lot of the time we're very focused on results and outcomes and how much do I have, how much am I earning, how much do I weigh? And actually that's not the real battle. The real battle is am I on the right trajectory? Am I getting 1% better each day? Am I on a path that's accumulating and compounding in a positive fashion rather than a negative one? Because if you are, then all you need is time. And I think the most powerful way to take advantage of that, to take control of that, is by building better habits.

Yep, I love it. Which leads me to precisely what I just drawn as you were talking. I had made a note previously about the. In the book, James has got this great little simple, you know, line curve. One goes. Starts at where you are today. One goes slightly up, you know, and the other one goes slightly down. Right. And you make the point so powerfully that where you currently are is secondary, tertiary to your trajectory where you were headed. And then we just need time with those good habits compounding. Just the metaphor that I liked in the book that I'd love for you to share briefly, is the plane with the nose tip pointed slightly differently. We're at lax. We want to go to New York City. Walk us through that math. I loved your little geeked out, you know.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I actually did the math on this. And if you're, if you're in, you know, a 747 or an Airbus A380 and you're flying from LA to New York and the pilot changes the heading of the plane by just three and a half degrees. Now when you're on the Runway, when you're getting ready to leave, that's almost nothing. It's just like seven or eight feet. You'd barely know that the nose of the plane has shifted at all. But if you make that little adjustment of just a few feet, by the time you get across the US you're not going to be in New York. You're going to be in Washington, D.C. hundreds of miles away. And that's kind of the same idea here. Rather than compounding over distance like these little marginal, these small changes like you do in a plane for our lives, we just compound over time. But the principle is the same. You end up in a very different destination just based on a slight change in trajectory. And that, I think, is just another. It's another way of thinking about this idea of getting 1% better. Because in daily life, in real life, you're not going to be able to get exactly 1% better every single day. But that's not the point. The point is to adhere to that as a philosophy, to believe in that approach and try to find these little marginal gains, these small advantages. If you can take advantage of that, if you can capture that and live each day in this little way of how can I find one small, easy way to get better today? Well, then that trajectory sets you on a very different path.

We'll leave the discussion on Brailsford for. For the book. Check out the book kicks off with a great story of the British cycling coach Brailsford, who turns him around using marginal gains. Similar approach. The way you tell it is brilliant. I love the fact that the bike manufacturer wouldn't even sell bikes. They were so bad before he took off. But let's talk about where people get stuck in this process. I loved your phrase the plateau of latent potential. I forget how you phrase it. Is that how you phrase it? Yeah, the plateau of latent potential. So why a lot of us might give up. Right? Describe that for us.

So the metaphor that I like to use for this is imagine you're heating up an ice cube and so you have, you know, you're in a room, it's cold. You can see your breath. It's like say 25 degrees and you've got this ice cube sitting on the table and you heat it up 26, 27, 28, 29. Still this ice cube sitting there, there's nothing has changed. 30, 31. And then you get to 32 degrees and all of a sudden the ice cube starts to melt. You hit this phase transition and it's a 1 degree shift, no different than all the other 1 degree shifts that came before it. But now, suddenly, you've unlocked something. You've hit this transition point. And the process of building better habits and achieving outcomes and getting results is often like that. But that period where you're heating the ice cube from 25 to 31 degrees and nothing's happening, that is that period of latent potential. And you're kind of what it feels like when you're going through that, when you're building a habit. You know, you're like, I've been running for a month. How come my body hasn't changed? Or I've been meditating 14 out of the last 16 days. Why don't I feel this sense of calm? And it's very easy to get frustrated when you're in the middle of that. But what you need to realize is that your work is not being wasted, it's just being stored. And the same way that the heat is being stored, as you heat up that ice cube, you cannot get to the phase transition if you don't have that jump from 25 to 31 degrees. And in a sense, complaining about working on a habit for two months or three months or a year, whatever it is, and not having the result you want is kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube from 25 to 31 degrees and not melting yet. It's like, no, it's just. It's just waiting. And I think that if you can embrace that philosophy, then you can start to. It doesn't make it easy, but it does make it easier to show up each day and realize, okay, I'm still accumulating my potential here. I don't know when it will be released, but I know that if I keep showing up, at some point it will be. I always think about the gym. When I think about this, I feel like weightlifting and exercise is such a great metaphor for life. But if I only went to the gym on days when I felt like I could hit a pr, it would never work because I would only go once a month when my energy was Fresh or whatever. But you can't hit a personal record. You can't lift more weight than you have before because you didn't put in the reps beforehand. On all the other days when you just felt average or below average or whatever. Same way that you can't get an ice cube to melt if you just eat it from 25 to 26 degrees. You need to show up the other days to get there. And this is somewhat counterintuitive to us. And I think it hearkens back to this idea of habits being like a compounding curve and not like a linear one. What we think is, oh, I'm going to put in a little bit of work and then I'll get a little bit of results. So then if I put in more work, I should get more results. We think that it's kind of like a line going up at this 45 degree angle, but actually for any compounding process, just a minute ago we said habits of the compound interest of self improvement. The beginning of that line is basically flat. It's basically a plateau. There's nothing at the beginning. It's only months or years later that you hit that hockey stick curve. So I think that all of this is kind of embracing the same basic philosophy, which is making 1% improvements doesn't feel like much in the moment. It's easy to get dejected or depressed, to feel like you're stuck on this plateau of latent potential. But if you're willing to show up and embrace that philosophy and keep putting your reps in each day, then at some point you're going to hit this phase transition and you'll probably surprise yourself with how much you can achieve if you're willing to remain committed to it.

Yeah. And then we could jump to the end of the book where you have some great stuff on kind of greatness and what to do once you've gone through that and it starts to get a little boring, that the issue isn't failing per se, it's getting bored with doing those reps. Actually riff on that quickly if you will. Then I'll bring us back to the identity idea.

Sure. So my first exposure to this. We've all felt boredom before, but there was a period of time where I was training on an Olympic weightlifting team and we had a coach come to one of our practices and I was just, okay, but some of our lifters were very good. One of them ended up going to the Olympics and so on. So this coach had trained a lot of really elite level lifters and I was talking to him and I said, what's the difference between some of these people that are really top tier and everybody else who's in here training each day? And he said, some of the stuff you would expect, certainly genetics matter and talent, or however we want to categorize that, nutrition and so on. But the thing that really stuck out to me was he said, at some point it just comes down to handling the boredom of doing the same lifts again and again and again. And it's really the people who fall in love with boredom fall in love with the repetition and the practice that are the ones who end up rising to the top. And that stuck with me because there are, you know, there's this great Machiavelli quote where he says, men who are doing well desire novelty to such a noise. Men desire novelty to such a degree that those who are doing well want it as much as those who are doing poorly. And it makes me think about so many people. It makes me think about people I trained with, makes me think about entrepreneurs I know who were doing well, it was working, and then they just got bored, so they stopped doing it. And then all of a sudden the results vanished. In a sense, it's like, are you willing to just show up and keep putting in your reps? Are you willing to fall in love with boredom? And if you are, then you turn around 10 or 20 years later and it's like you're in a totally different place than a lot of people. And I've seen that in small ways in my own work. There was one blogger, I don't need to name who they were, but they had an audience that was five times the size of mine when I started. And then they stopped writing. And over the next three years I kept writing a new article every Monday and Thursday. And when we got three years in, my audience was 10 times the size of where theirs was then. And the only difference was that I was able to fall in love with the boredom of writing. And they had stopped. I think their stuff was just as good as mine, but they just decided to take a break. And there are a variety of factors that could be going on there. Maybe it was the right time for them, maybe they wanted to take a break, whatever. But the point is, you need to be willing to do the thing that eventually feels boring if you wish to get those long term results. And then there's a whole other section in the book about the Goldilocks rule and staying on the edge of your ability and continuing to upgrade and expand when you Feel that boredom. But I'll pause there for now.

Yeah, awesome. Let's go back. We were talking tiny changes, remarkable results. And we talk about latent potential and that plateau and the ice cube, etc. Then we're still only in chapter one. Maybe we've gotten out of chapter one, we're in chapter two. We haven't even gotten to the laws yet, which we will in a moment. But I loved your thoughtfulness around an outcome based habit building approach vis a vis an identity driven habit building approach, which I think really lends itself well to the falling in love with boredom. Because it's about more than just the life hacking and the lifestyle design. It's about actualization. It's about becoming the person you feel called to become. Can you talk to us about that? The identity, the centrality of identity. And please mention the etymological root of the word as you describe this.

I'll get to the etymology in a second. I refer to this as identity based habits. And the way that I think about it, the reason I think it's important to talk about it is that often when people are going about a change, when they're trying to build a new habit or achieve a goal, we start with an outcome based approach. We start by thinking about what do I want to achieve so I want to lose 30 pounds in the next six months, or I want to double my income this year or something like that. And then based on that outcome, we come up with a plan. So we say, all right, this is my goal, I want to lose 30 pounds, so I'm going to follow this diet, I'm going to work out three days a week, and that's my plan for achieving it. So we have an outcome and then we have a process. And then I think there's a deeper layer of behavior change that we often just don't think about at all, which is your identity, the set of beliefs, the self image you have, the, you know, the assumptions that you carry around with yourself. And most of the time we say, I'm going to try to achieve this outcome, I'm going to do it with this plan. And then we don't say it, but implicitly we think, whoever I become along the way to that, that's who I'll be. So we just kind of let the identity follow naturally. However, I think it would be much more effective if we reverse that process. And we said, instead of thinking about the outcome that I want to achieve, let me think about who's the type of person that I want to Become who's the type of person that could achieve that outcome? So, for example, who is the type of person that could lose £30 in six months? Well, maybe it's the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. So what I really should be focused on is building the identity of being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And once I have that identity as the centerpiece, now, my process is, okay, I need to go to the gym four days a week, and I'm going to go. And now imagine how this shifts, right? So if you're. If you're letting the outcome lead the way and you say, I want to lose 30 pounds in six months. Now, you do all kinds of crazy things at the workout to try to hit that outcome. You say, I got to be here 45 minutes every time I have to feel like I'm exhausted. I got to do, you know, P90X or insanity or join a CrossFit gym or do something really intense. But if instead the identity is leading the way and you say, I need to become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, well, now you could just do five push ups and you could cast a vote for that identity. And this sounds. Sometimes I think maybe it sounds too in the beginning, because they're like, well, why would I just do five push ups? That's not going to transform my life. But what you need to realize is that. And this is where we come back to the etymology, the word identity. The word identity comes from two different Latin words that mean beingness and repeated. And so, in a sense, your identity is actually your repeated beingness. It's the way that you show up day in and day out. And I think we could say that your identity emerges out of your habits. In a sense, your habits are like how you embody a particular identity. You know, like each day that you. Each day that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Every time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Whenever you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer. And so it's kind of like every action you take casts a vote for the kind of person that you believe that you are. And in the beginning, a single action is not enough to shift your belief about yourself and think, oh, I'm somebody new magically. But each time you do it, it's like you add a little grain to that grain of sand, to that side of the scale, and eventually the scale tips in that favor. And the reason I think this is so powerful and so useful is that it gives your identity some evidence to root itself in. And this is different than what you often hear people say, which is like, fake it till you make. And I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with fake it till you make it. There's nothing wrong with believing, being confident, or trying to believe something new about yourself. But it's only a short term strategy, it's not a long term one. Because if you try to convince yourself.

That you're someone new, but you don't have evidence for it, well, we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence. We call it delusion. At some point, your brain doesn't like that and it doesn't add up. There's this conflict. It's like I keep saying I'm a fit person, but I haven't been to the gym in three months. So like, fake it till you make it, but I don't have anything to hang on to there. But if instead, if you let the habit lead the way, if you let the behavior lead the way, it's like, oh, you know, I've meditated for 10 out of the last 12 days, and maybe it was only for 60 seconds each time, but I just cast 10 votes for being a meditator. And I think that ultimately, if you're able to do that, that's really true. Behavior change is identity change. Because it's like one thing to say, I want this, but it's something very different to say, I am this. And if you reach that stage where you start to see yourself as, I am a meditator, I am a writer, I am a runner, I am a, you know, a fit person, you're really not even pursuing behavior change anymore. Because to show up at the gym or to sit down and write, or to meditate, it doesn't really require motivation. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person that you believe yourself to be. And so ultimately, I think this is, and this is why I had this whole discussion in chapter two of the book, why it's so early. This, I think, is the real reason, the true reason, the deeper reason, why habits matter so much. It's usually when we talk about habits, we talk about them delivering external results. They make you more productive, they help you lose weight, they help you earn more money, they reduce stress. And all those things are true, and it's great that they can do that. But the real reason, the true reason that habits matter is that they're the path through which you can forge your identity, your sense of self image. They're the path. The best. They're the best option we have for casting votes for being a new type of person and accumulating evidence of this is who I am now. And because of that, your identity actually emerges out of your habits. It's a way that you have to reshape yourself, to believe something new about yourself. And that, I think, is the real reason that habits make such a difference in our lives.

That is absolutely fantastic. That was one of my favorite parts of the book among many. We get a lot of tide for verse all which is a long prelude. The book is really. It sets the stage with the higher level theoretical. This is why we should care. And then you get into the nuts and bolts of. And these are the laws as you describe them. We have kind of a habit loop and the different elements of that. And then they are broken down into the four laws. Can you give us the overview of those?

Sure. So I like to divide a habit into four stages. And I think that by doing that, and I'll leave the precise discussion of that for the book, but by doing that, by dividing a habit in that way, I think we have a more precise understanding of what a habit is and how it works. And then more specifically, and this leads directly into the four laws of behavior change, how to adjust it. So just real quickly, those four stages are cue, some kind of cue that prompts the habit, a craving. So the way that you interpret the cue and how you feel right before you take an action, how you're motivated, the response, the action itself, and then the reward or the outcome that follows the behavior. So cue, craving, response, reward. Now, for each of those stages, we can come up with a law of behavior change that gives us. And this is one thing I really wanted to achieve with the book is how can we make this practical and actionable? How can we make this easy to apply? And so the first law of behavior change is to make it obvious you want to make the cues of your good habits obvious and available and visible. The second law is to make it attractive. So the more attractive a habit is, the more likely you'll feel motivated to do it, the more likely it will occur. We can talk about ways to do that. Make it easy is the third law. So the more convenient and easy a habit is, the more convenient a response is, the more likely you are to do it. And then finally make it satisfying. And making a habit satisfying, having a positive ending and Enjoyable ending. That is really the thing that gets a habit to stick. That's the thing that gets you to come back and return to it again the next time, because it felt good, it was enjoyable, it satisfied you. Now, those four laws make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Those help you build a good habit. And if you want to break a bad habit, then you just invert each of those. So for your bad habits, you want to make it invisible. You want the cues to be invisible or unlikely, unseen. You want to make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. And so with those four simple phrases, we have a toolbox for adjusting your habits and coming up with a way to make it as likely as possible that you'll slide into good habits and be able to avoid the bad ones.

I love it. I'd love to walk through an example, if we could.

Absolutely.

And if we could, if you've used those laws for any particular habit in your life that you could use as kind of the. Not an abstract example, but like an actual. This is actually what I did.

Sure.

Can you. Can you offer that?

Yeah. So I'll just. I'll give you a couple different examples and show you how each one uses a particular law. And. And this is true in general, you know, like, there is no one. I say this in the book. There's no one right way to change a habit. You know, like, it's. It's really what you're dealing with at that time. And so what I wanted to give people was a framework that could be flexible and apply to a variety of situations. So let's take a habit that I was trying to build a few years ago, which is flossing. So for a long time, I would brush my teeth twice a day, but I wouldn't floss consistently. And I realized that one of the issues was the floss was tucked away in a drawer in the bathroom, so I just wouldn't see it. So it wasn't visible, wasn't obvious. So this is the first law. Make it obvious. So I. I bought a little bowl, and I put the floss in the bowl and put it right next to my toothbrush. And so now I brush my teeth, put the toothbrush down, pick the floss up, Boom, I just floss right there. Now I do it, like, twice a day. I do it. I floss before I go to bed, and then I wake up and I brush my teeth, and I floss again on autopilot, even though I haven't eaten Anything. But the point is just doing that, making it obvious was all I really needed to do to make that a habit. So in that case, I use the first law, the second law of behavior change. Make it attractive. It can be influenced in a variety of ways, and I give some examples in the book. But one of the most important ones I think to talk about is many habits are either attractive or unattractive, based on the people that are around you or based on the tribe that you are in. So if you step back and think about it from a high level, all of us are part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be French or Australian or whatever. And some of those tribes are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or volunteer at the local grade school or something like that. And all of those tribes, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for what you do in that particular group. And you can see this showing up all the time. Just think of some common habits that people do on a daily basis. You walk onto an elevator and you turn around to face the front, or you have a job interview, and you wear a suit and a tie or a dress or something nice. Now, there's no reason it has to be like that. You know, like, you could face the back of the elevator, you could wear a bathing suit to a job interview. Like, you could violate those. Those norms. But you don't, because it runs against the grain of the shared expectations of that group. And so one of the key lessons for making habits attractive, for employing the second law of behavior change is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that group, then all of a sudden it's going to be easy for you to do, because sticking to the habit helps you belong. It becomes a signal that, hey, they get it. They're one of us. They belong. They're doing the right thing. But if you try to build a habit that goes against the grain of your tribe, whether that's your family members or your roommates or your church or school or the team that you're on, your co workers, it becomes really hard to do that. And people experience this kind of thing all the time. You want to lose weight, but there's a variety of people in your office that are out of shape. And then you try to stick to this diet, and they guilt you into it and make you feel bad and invite you to happy hour and you feel like they're kind of sabotaging your goals and so on. That's one way to employ the second law of behavior change is join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. This applies well beyond habits. So you wanted an example of how I employed each of these. In this case, when I started out as an entrepreneur, I didn't have anybody in my family or close friends who were entrepreneurs. I just didn't know anyone who was. So I spent the first three months sending emails to about 100 or 200, maybe even 300 people who all were full time entrepreneurs doing what I was interested in doing. And most of them never got back to me, but like, a few of them did. And I had Skype calls with maybe 30 or 40 of them. And so by the time I got to the end of three months, now, suddenly I had a little bit of a tribe, I had a little bit of a group where being an entrepreneur was a normal thing. I had problems that I was dealing with or questions about things. Now I had a couple dozen people I could go to about that. And having that group really shifted my perspective on what habits were normal. So suddenly balancing my books at the end of the month, that was a normal thing to do because all these other entrepreneurs are doing it, Writing a blog post every week. Well, so were 20 of my friends. It started to become something that wasn't weird. And I was the only one at my school or in my community that was doing it. Now, it was something that all kinds of people I knew did, and that helped a lot. So I'll pause there for a second. That's some examples of this first and second law of behavior change. But I've used the third and fourth many times as well.

That is awesome. Give us the quick take on the third and fourth. Easy and satisfying.

So the fastest way to employ the third law of behavior change is to use what I call the two minute rule. And so the basic idea is, you take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to just the first two minutes. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out your yoga mat. And that sounds kind of silly to people sometimes because they're like, well, okay, I'm really trying to get in shape, not just trying to take my yoga mat out. And this is a crucial insight about building better habits People often overlook. A habit must be established before it can be improved. And so if you can't master the art of showing up. If you can't be the type of person who takes out their yoga mat three days a week, then you don't have a chance to be the type of person who does yoga three days a week. And so by scaling it down to just the first two minutes, you give yourself the opportunity to develop that identity which we were talking about, to cast a vote for being that type of person and to master the art of showing up. And once you do that, well, now you got a bunch of options. Now you can improve and expand from there. There's also another kind of element to this, which I have noticed in my own life. So if I'm going to go to the gym, there's really a decisive moment that determines that it's really do I change into my workout clothes or not? And if I change into my workout clothes, the next two hours are done. They're already decided. I'll get in the car, I'll drive there, it'll all happen. And I've seen this in other areas of my life as well. So there's a moment every morning, I don't know, around 9am or so, where I sit down and either I open Evernote and I start working on the next article that I'm going to write, or I go to ESPN and I check the latest sports news. And what happens during the next like 45 minutes to an hour is really determined by what happens in that first minute. And so one of the lessons of the two minute rule and the third law of behavior change is you want to make it as easy as possible to get started on the things that pay off in the long run. And so if you can make it easy to do the thing that pays off, then that's really what it's about. It's not only about doing easy things, it's about making it easy to get started. And then the fourth and final law is make it satisfying. And so the first three laws make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy. Those will help you show up this time. They'll help you get motivated and do the action this one time. But if it's satisfying, if it's enjoyable, that gets you to show up again the next time. And it's kind of like you want the immediate ending of your behavior to be enjoyable, because if it is, it's this positive emotional signal in your brain that says, hey, this felt good, I should do this again. And some of my favorite examples of this come from the world of business. So if you take, for example, cars, some recently a Couple years ago, BMW added this feature to one of their cars where if you pressed on the accelerator and you really stepped down on hard, they would pump additional engine growl through the speakers so that it felt more satisfying to like drive the car and press on the gas. Ford is doing something similar where they have like a valve and if you drive normally, it stays shut and the interior soundproofed. And if you really slam on the gas, it opens up and lets the engine noise in. But that's really about the immediate satisfaction, the experience of driving the car. And when it's more satisfying, you'll do it. Toothpaste is another example. There's no reason that toothpaste needs to be minty, but it could just be like a bland paste. And you could brush your teeth, but because it's minty, because it leads to this clean mouth feel, now it's more satisfying and enjoyable and you have a reason to show up and brush your teeth again. So with habits, it's really about trying to find ways to make it more satisfying. And I'll just give you two quick ways to do that. The first one is choose the form of a habit that is most satisfying to you or most enjoyable to you. So take exercise for example. There are many ways to exercise. I like lifting weights. But not everybody wants to work out like a bodybuilder. You could go hiking or kayaking or do yoga or pilates or all kinds of stuff. And so choose the form that is enjoyable to you, not the form that society says you should build or the one that's most popular. And the second thing that you can do, and I don't think you need to do this for every habit, but for certain habits, for the key ones, like important ones to you, tracking and measurement can be a great way to make it a little more satisfying in the moment. So like I log all of my workouts and it's a minor thing, it's a small thing, but it feels good to write the reps down and close the book on another workout. And so tracking can be one way to feel a little bit more satisfied in the moment. If you're waiting for the long term rewards of getting in shape or so on.

Again, absolutely brilliant. It reminds me of Theresa Amabile. You didn't specifically mention her, but just that progress.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Progress principle, right?

Yeah, he's getting the wins. And you did talk about Seinfeld and not breaking the streak, get her breaking the chain or whatever he calls it. All of which is awesome. Let's wrap up with the final idea here, how do you say it? Is it sorites paradox?

The sororities paradox.

Yes, the sororities paradox. I love the way you described that. Can you do that for us?

So this is an ancient paradox, and it comes in many different forms. But one formulation of it is, if you give a person one coin, do they become rich? Or would you say that they are rich? And almost everybody would say, no, of course they're not rich. And they say, okay, well, what if you give them another coin? They say, no, they only have two coins, of course they're not rich. You say, okay, what about another and another and another? And you realize that at some point you have to say, giving someone one coin made them rich. What if they have a million? What if they have 10 million coins? At some point they cross this threshold? And I think that we could say something similar about building better habits. The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1% improvement. It's like a thousand of them. And it's almost certain that if you commit yourself to this idea of getting 1% better each day, you're not going to say, oh, that one thing changed my life. That one thing transformed everything. But if you're willing to commit to it and layer them on top of each other like little atoms in a larger system that build one on top of another, then at some point you have to say, a single 1% change transformed my life. And I think that that philosophy kind of gets at the core, the heart of the book, this idea that change does not need to be massive for it to be meaningful. What it needs to be is consistent and accumulated. And if you're willing to approach it with that philosophy, then you can end up with some very remarkable results in the long run.

Which is the perfect way to wrap up our chat. Atomic habits. An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. James, thanks for the hard work and demonstrating the very things that you're teaching. So well done. Congrats again. People can find you james clear.com obviously, buy the book on Amazon or whatever you get your books. Atomic Habits. Thank you, sir.

Absolutely. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.