Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: John Assaraf interviews James Clear

The most effective form of self control is not necessarily resisting temptation, but just avoiding it entirely. The question then becomes, how can you find just these little points of leverage, these tiny things that you can do that send you our entrance ramp to the right highway, not the wrong. If you can master those little points of decision throughout your day, you can often end up spending your time doing much more productive ones.

Hey everyone, John Assaraf here. Hope you're having an amazing day. And many of you know that I study the brain, brain patterns. What causes us to do what we do and not do what we know we should be doing. One of my newest friends is James Clear. And James is just a really unique, awesome individual that studies human behavior and performance and he studies some of the most successful people in the world. He's a prolific writer with probably about what, half a million people who follow his newsletter and blog every week. He's got just a great following because he does some great work. And so we'll give you some information on how to get onto his newsletter in just a moment. But today we want to talk about a topic that I've read through James that I really, really love. And that's habits. And what are habits? Why do they control us so much? Is it easy or hard to create or let go of empowering or disempowering habits? And so we're going to get a little bit deep into the science of habits and really introduce you to some of his work, which I absolutely love. So, hey my friend, great to have you on and thanks for doing this.

Hey John, happy to do it, man. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Yeah. So you and I discussed habits and a whole bunch of other things I don't know, a couple weeks ago. And so let's maybe get into how did you get into really being so prolific in your understanding of habits and how they control just about everything we do?

Yeah, well, they really do have very far, far reaching impacts. My first kind of foray into habits was without me really knowing it. I learned a lot about habits as being an athlete in college. So I played, I played baseball throughout college. And looking back at that time now, I realize how many habits and routines and rituals were essential. Performing well in the baseball field or doing well in school or, you know, other areas of my life at the time. But I didn't know it then. But I was a science guy. I was in, I majored in chemistry and physics. Biomechanics was my specific major. And so I was always interested in it. And when I started my own business, I realized I had no idea why people bought something. Why would someone sign up for an email list or buy a product? And so that kind of led me to consumer psychology. And as I learned more about the brain, I got into behavioral psychology and these other areas. And that was when I started connecting the dots between my past as an athlete or someone in the gym or someone trying to stick to better diet or writing habits. And I saw these little areas in my life where I was doing these things or picking up on certain things. Sometimes stuff would work, sometimes it wouldn't. And then I would read another behavioral psychology study and be like, oh, that's why. And eventually it all kind of came together and I started writing about it.

So from the research that you've done and when you and I talked, we never talk. I love chemistry and biology. Those are the only two topics that I loved. I wasn't really good at math except for, you know, I got good at math when I started making some money, But I wasn't good at math in school. But biology and chemistry were fascinating for me. How things interacted and the mechanics of stuff I love. So let's fast forward a little bit to what are a few of the key discoveries that has turned on your light bulb to go. Here's why habits matter.

Well, the first thing is just a basic understanding of how your actions compound over time. So, you know, compound growth of any sort is kind of hard for the human brain to conceptualize. We understand that, you know, if we do something right now, how it might impact our life. But we often fail to see how repeating small actions, whether they're positive or negative, can accumulate in a very significant way over the long run. Just as a very basic example, I actually, I went ahead and calculated this at one point. But if you are in a plane leaving Los Angeles for New York City and your pilot decides to shift the heading of the plane by three and a half degrees south, rather than landing in New York, you'll actually land in Washington, DC. Now, that's an imperceptible change when you're on the Runway, right? The nose of the plane only shifts a few inches, but you end up hundreds of miles apart because you magnify it across the entire United States. And so if we take that analogy of distance magnifying an effect and translate it to time in our lives, the distance that we travel, you can end up in a very different destination just by making a choice that's slightly better or slightly worse and repeating that over the long run, each day or each week, month, and year. And so that's kind of the first once I fully understood that and appreciated how much those small actions compound. That was when I first started realizing, oh, habits actually can have a very big impact on what we do in daily life.

Love it. So let's dive in a little bit into the neuroscience of habits. And, you know, I look at, you know, a behavior one time, you know, creates a weak connection in the brain, and then a behavior repeated, you know, over multiple times spaced repetition creates a stronger pattern in the brain. So what? Right? So if somebody says, so what, what, what is happening biomechanically that induces behavior?

Well, if we want to bring some biology into it or evolutionary theory into it, and think about it, the core purpose of an organism is to collect rewards. So rewards might be food, sex, water. Those are like very basic physical rewards. In modern life, we have kind of secondary rewards like power, fame, praise, status, approval. And those are things that kind of eventually translate often into our ability to collect those physical rewards like food, water, and sex. But we need to capture these things for our survival. Not just humans, but any organism needs to capture these things because they provide energy, and that allows us to live. And so the task then for any living organism is to figure out, how do I get these rewards and how do I get them effectively? And that's where habits come into play, because if you had to exert the maximum amount of energy every single time, then you wouldn't be as well equipped to get rewards and conserve energy as an organism who could automate certain things or remember certain things. So in a way, habits are kind of like a memory of a past reward. Like you can imagine if we were a hunter gatherers walking around the savannah, and you stumble across a berry patch, you would be very well served if you could remember where that patch was the next time around. And so all of these things that we do in our lives, all these habits, remembering how to walk, how to tie our shoes, how to stop at a stop sign and go at a green light, these are all memories that we have from the past that we gradually learn about. Oh, this is how I survive in the world. This is how I get the rewards of food, water, safety, and so on that I need to survive. So habits are essential. They kind of automate the process of getting these things that are. That are core to our survival.

Love it. I love the way you took it to evolutionary biology and that, you know, we. We seek rewards. And also the other part of it Obviously, is the. You know, we want to avoid pain or discomfort.

Right? Yeah. So safety is also a reward. Right. So we kind of have these two. They're kind of two parts of the same axis. So you have defending safety, defending what is known, and then you have discovering the unknown. And so everything that is known comes out of the unknown. At some point, you didn't know where the berry patch was, but then you decide to explore the unknown, and then eventually it becomes part of the world that you have. And so we try to defend the rewards that we. That we already have attained, and we try to find new ones so that we can improve our ability to survive in the future.

I love it. It's amazing, you know, this brain that we have, what a gift it is.

Oh, yeah.

And how powerful it is. It's just pretty awesome.

So to link that to the, you know, your. Your point earlier about the fact that as we repeat things, as we repeat an action, those neural pathways in the brain get tightened, the circuitry strengthened, and so it's easier for us to perform that action again the next time. Right. This is the basic, like, any learning curve that you see, any ability to, you know, to develop a skill. You know, the first time you type on a keyboard, it's clumsy, and you don't know what you're doing. And then eventually, now all of us, our fingers are just fluttering without thinking about it, practicing thousands and thousands of times. And so your question of, like, well, so what? Like, what's the usefulness of that? The usefulness is that our ability to learn through repetition makes it easier for us to recognize the cues that signal rewards, the triggers that are indications of where a reward might be in our environment. And it makes it easier for us to respond to those triggers when they arise in an automatic fashion without having to think about it as much, without having to deliberate. Do I go right or left to the berry patch? You just know, oh, I see that tree and I turn right, and you do it automatically. And so that's kind of where all of this integrates with our habits. We have these triggers or signals in our environment that show us, oh, a reward probably lies behind this action or behind this opportunity. And our brain, through repetition, automates a response to that trigger whenever we see it.

So I know that you've studied, and I have as well, BJ Fogg's work around tiny habits and.

And.

The habit loop. Talk about that just a little, because I know you were moving in that direction just now as well with the cue. And so maybe you can Just share with me from your research and what you've observed and applied in your own life, what is it that we could learn from the neuroscience of habits? Sure.

So as far as the stages that habits follow, all habits do follow a particular pattern or a specific kind of loop, a neurological loop. And I like to think of it in four stages. So the first stage is noticing. Noticing happens when you see a trigger, when you see a cue. So it's, you know, your phone buzzes, for example, that's a trigger. The second stage is wanting. And this is like the stage when scientists will track this. And what will happen is you can see a dopamine spike in the brain before the action occurs. So you see a trigger, then the dopamine spike occurs, and this compels you to act. It creates an urge, a desire to take some type of action. So we could call that wanting, or we could call that motivation or desire. So you notice a trigger, you get the desire to act, then you do the action. So the third step is doing. So noticing, wanting, doing. The doing stage is contingent on your ability. So you could want to dunk a basketball, but if you can't actually dunk a basketball, then you can't perform that action. And you can imagine that applying to any habit, big or small. If you have the ability to do it, then you can act on it. So noticing, wanting, doing. And then the fourth stage is liking. And liking happens because there was a reward. So we've already talked about rewards, but what do you gain from this? What do you get out of the behavior? And so as you go around those four things, noticing a trigger, having a motivation, doing the action, and receiving a reward, eventually the brain starts to learn, was that reward good or was it bad? And those little votes of positive or negative pleasure or disappointment end up strengthening the loop. And eventually the habit is formed.

I love it. When you were talking about the trigger and the dopamine spike, I was reminded of something I read probably a year or two ago around when they studied the brains of addicts, the gamblers, specifically Las Vegas gamblers, they saw the highest dopamine spike in the anticipation, for example, of pulling down the lever versus watching the bars spinning to see if they won or not. So they saw that initial spike was the highest in the anticipation of the outcome.

Yeah, this is an important point, and it actually makes sense if you just think about it logically. A lot of the time people will say, we act because of a reward, and technically speaking, that is only partially true. We act because of the expectation of our reward. The reward cannot be the thing that gets you to act because it comes after the action. There has to be something that comes beforehand, and that's the anticipation, the expectation, the desire that dopamine spike that we're talking about. And so if you can figure out a way to. One of my favorite examples. And so as we've laid these four stages out, important to understand that, like it's good for us to divide these up into stages so we can understand it. But this process often happens completely non consciously. So, you know, one of my favorite examples you mentioned gambling. Drug addicts are follow a similar pattern. Researchers flashed a picture of cocaine in front of cocaine addicts for 33 milliseconds. It's too short for the conscious mind to even notice, so they didn't know it was there. But, but still dopamine spiked. And so what's fascinating is that there are all sorts of non conscious triggers in our environment. The context around us, what is in our room that we just overlook most days. And all of these non conscious triggers, all these aspects of what we see and what we're influenced by, can drive our urge to act even though we don't consciously know it. And that's of course the, the great thing about habits is that they can automate good behaviors without us having to work too hard and also the danger of them. And that we can fall into these patterns without even realizing that we're doing it.

Yeah, and I guess that's where we kick into one of the other systems in the brain is conservation of energy. And so once we've taken the energy to build the habit, then our brain makes it automatic to conserve energy. So safety first, energy second. And those are critical aspects of human behavior in your life. You and I share a lot of very similar paths of breaking things down to usable content and behaviors. How have you used habits to enhance some of what you do to enhance your life? You've got a lot of people following your work. You've got a couple million people come to your website a month. You're living a really great lifestyle. You're, you know, when you and I talked, I realized, you know, I asked you how old you are and said you're in your early 30s. I'm like, what? That's amazing what you've accomplished, you know, in your early 30s. And you know, you're living a life most people would dream of. And I would imagine you've got some really good habits. And so how have you used it in your life to really develop some Empowering habits.

Yeah, well, thank you, I appreciate that. I'm just trying to, you know, do the best that I can and provide some useful content for people. But I, I think that there are, I think a good way to answer this question is to talk about the fact that habits, there habits are not all created equal. So there are certain habits that provide a higher rate of return in life, so to speak. And so I try to focus not on having perfect habits across the board. Like first of all, it's not possible. And secondly, I'm not talented enough to do that. But if I can focus on just, yeah, if I can focus on just, just automating or mastering a few of these core habits that have a very high rate of return, then I can let that kind of the effects of that ripple into the other areas of my life. So I'll pick three of them to talk about. So the first one is my writing habits. So this has been the engine for my business and career growth. And what I did was for the first three years, I wrote a new article, published a new article every Monday and Thursday. And so by sticking to that habit for three years, a lot of great things happened. Right. I knew that if I did that eight or nine articles a month would be published. And I don't know which of those articles will be good, but I know that if I try hard, two or three of them are going to be decent. And then of course, once you have good content, every marketing strategy is easier. It's easier to do interviews and get book deals and all that type of stuff. So writing was an essential one. And setting that schedule, I think is a practical thing that you can apply to almost any habit. So this is called an implementation intention. But I stated my intention to implement the behavior every Monday and every Thursday. So it didn't matter how long or how short the article was, it didn't matter how good or how bad it was. The only goal was to get something out. Then the second habit that has a really high rate of return in my life is exercise. I have said before that aside from the health benefits and longevity and so on, I think for me it's just essential for my sanity. I don't know that I would be an entrepreneur if I wasn't exercising because consistently I think the roller coaster ride that would have wrecked me mentally years ago. And then the third one, which is kind of one of my cardinal rules is I don't cheat myself on sleep. So I usually get eight, often nine hours a night. And I think that that takes hours away from my waking day, But I'm often much more productive because of it. And those habits, in my opinion, have a very high rate of return on the work that I do and the life that I live.

So what I'm hearing is you're focusing on the critical few that have a ripple effect on all the other ones. And it's interesting. I've had a daily ritual for many, many years around meditation, around exercise and nutrition, after about eight hours of sleep as well. And I find that those are the core things that allow everything else to happen. But I also do something else called cognitive priming every day, and that is I take the goals that I have in health, wealth, relationships, career, business, finances, charity, etc. And I just review them and focus on the emotional benefits of achieving them. And so I do that for about seven minutes a day as a way to just prime my brain as a habit of, here's what is important to me, here's what I want you to.

Focus on so that you know that cognitive priming, that form of, like, visualization of imagining the tangible and concrete benefits of that, you know, the emotional outcomes of that, it's a great way to drive yourself to act. We talked earlier about this dopamine spike. How can I increase that? For example, like, let's just take a very small example and say you have a cluttered desk that you want to clean. If you just sit and don't take any action, just look at the desk and then start to see in your mind's eye, what would it look like if I put these papers in one stack? What if I put this book away on the shelf and, like, start to imagine what the desk would look like clean. And the more concrete and tangible you can make that image in your mind, the more you can cognitively prime that desired state, the more likely it is that you're going to feel compelled to take action. And so I love a little ritual like that, the one that you just shared, which is that you're, you know, you have these goals in business and charity and life and so on. And by priming them each day, or by having a clearer and more concrete vision of them, you probably are increasing your motivation to act upon them when the opportunity rises.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's exactly why I do it. I'm activating the neurochemistry required for behavior. I love that. One of the things that I wanted to dive into for just a moment is some of the misconceptions of, you know, releasing or letting go of. Maybe I Don't like to use negative. But maybe a disempowering habit that somebody might have one that's not like their very, very best. What is. What are some of the misconceptions around. What can anybody do to let go of something that's just not serving them? I look at habits as they're there to serve you or not, and you get to choose.

Yeah, well, okay, so let's think about it first, from a high level. So we talked about noticing, wanting, doing, and liking. So that gives you four different points where you could cut the cord, so to speak, and eliminate a bad habit. So first noticing. So this is all about the trigger. So if you don't expose yourself to triggers, then you know the bad habit is not going to initiate. I think that's one of the best strategies. I'll return to that in a moment. Second is wanting. So if you don't feel motivated enough to perform the habit, then you're not going to want to do it. This is often a very difficult thing to do with bad abs, especially addictions, because the thing that marks them is the fact that we are so compelled to act that we have such a great desire to move, even though it has a negative consequence for our lives. The third stage is doing. And so that means the ability to act right. Earlier I said, well, if you can't dunk a basketball, you couldn't actually do that. Same thing goes here. If you can make the friction so great that you can't perform the bad habit, even if you think about it and even if you want to do it, you can somehow prevent yourself there. Again, I think this is another good place to focus on. So I'll come back to that in a second. And then the fourth one is liking. This is the reward. If you could extinguish the reward of a bad habit, not necessarily an addiction, but just a habit that you don't like, then you could probably learn to not do it. So, for example, imagine if Every. The next 10,000 times you ate a donut, you received like a painful electric shock. You would probably come to hate donuts because they would make you feel pain. You would have no desire. They would make you sick. You wouldn't want to do it. Right.

Or you'd like electric shocks.

Yes. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But of course, the problem with that is that it's very hard to actually change the world to extinguish behavior like that. You know, you could in theory design a slot machine that when you pull the lever, punches you in the face. But every slot machine in the world is not going to be designed that way. And so I, technically speaking, it is possible to extinguish a bad habit, to break it like that, and like completely redesign the neural pathways in the mind. But practically speaking, it's basically impossible because it's going to be very hard to change the rewards like that. So if it's hard to change the rewards and it's really hard to change the compulsion, the Wanting Stage 2, that leaves us with the first and third stages as good options for breaking bad habits. So the first one is to reduce exposure, you know, self control. There are some really interesting studies on self control and willpower. And what a lot of them came across was that people who had better self control than others, they actually aren't that different. They just don't get exposed to tempting triggers often. And so if you can redesign your environment to, you know, make it less likely that you see the things that tempt you. For example, you want to stop watching tv, so unplug the TV and put it in the closet, or take the remote and put it inside a drawer in your coffee table, rather than having it out available, put the TV inside of a cabinet and close the doors, all of these things to reduce the likelihood of you noticing, of you being exposed to the trigger, then it's less likely that you're going to actually fall into the bad habit. So in a lot of ways, self control is the most effective form of self control, is not necessarily resisting temptation, but just avoiding it entirely. Now, of course, that's not always possible. So what do you do when you can't avoid temptation? I think the second option is to focus on that doing stage. How can we increase the friction of performing a particular action? So, for example, social media, it's hard for me to avoid it. It's going to be everywhere in our society. I have my smartphone on me. It's, you know, like, it's not likely that I'm going to be able to reduce exposure to that, or at least not in a meaningful way. So every Monday, what I do is I have my assistant log me out of all social media services. She logs me out of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, so on, and then resets the password for them. And then I work during the week, and then on Friday, she emails me the new passwords and I get to log in over the weekend and use them as I want. And then on Monday, we do it all again. And so the friction, the cost of like having to figure that out or reset that I don't know the password. I write, I restrict my ability to perform the action and that makes it easier for me to break the habit.

I love that. So it is very clear that you put systems in place that'll empower you, and then you put systems in place to take away the things that disempower you, obviously as well, based on whatever your criteria is.

That's right. I actually think. I'm glad you used the word systems because I actually think that that's the key to building habits that last is that a lot of the time we think about a habit we want to perform and we make one change or maybe two, and then we get upset because our life doesn't stick, it doesn't last. But what is happening there is that life is a very. It's a complex system and there are many different forces that are at play for any given habit that you have. And so the balance of those forces is what determines your average behavior, your normal behavior on a given day. So maybe you can overcome the forces in your life by getting motivated for a day or a week, but over the long run, the system is going to determine the behavior. And so what you need to do is to make a variety of changes, layer them on top of each other, create these redundancies that allow you to kind of shift the weight of the system so that your normal behavior ends up being improved. And you, you're creating more, you're stacking more redundancies that benefit the good habits and creating less opportunity to perform the bad habits. So it's actually by redesigning the system, that behavior improves in the long run. Whereas most of the time we talk about just getting motivated or having willpower or something. And those are short term strategies at best.

Yeah, which, which we know, you know, doesn't work. It's like gunpowder. It's good to get started with that, but it's not good for the momentum to keep it going. So if I was to want to create a system for a new habit, whether it's, let's say, inner sizing, using, you know, my brain training audios or, or something else, how would you guide me to putting a system together for that?

Yeah. So once you understand the basic structure of a habit, so noticing, wanting, doing and liking, that's like understanding the mechanics of how it works. Right. It's like understanding the pieces of a motorcycle and how it runs, then you need to understand what is the system that this machine runs within and what are the levers I can pull to change it. So for Example, if you wanted to get a motorcycle to run better or to run faster, you could get a better driver. You could make sure that you drive in better conditions. So don't drive when it's like, wet and rainy. You could drive when it's sunny and nice and so on. Right. There are many different things you can do. And for a habit, I think there are five forces that impact the system of your behavior, and you can pull any of these levers to build a better system. So the five forces are mindset, biology, or your genetics, social culture, physical environment, and technology. And so these five things, you have five different choices for how you can adjust your system. It's very unlikely that all five forces are going to be perfectly aligned in your life. And you may not be able to get them all to be oriented in the way that you want. But if you can stack two or three or four of them in alignment with the habit that you want to build, then you kind of shift the weight of the system and you make it easier for yourself to stick to things. So as an example, just. I'll just list off a few for each one. So, like, let's take mindset. You know, the way that you perceive triggers in your life changes the way that you respond to them. So, you know, two people can see the same thing, like they could watch the same news story. And one person, that's a trigger that stresses them out and causes anxiety and worry. And for another person, it doesn't bother them at all. And that's just a change in how you choose to interpret the triggers in your life. So by adjusting your mindset, you can change your. You can shift the system a little bit. The second one, biology. Often we think that our genetics are the most fixed aspect of habits and behavior. And in some ways, perhaps they are. But what's interesting is that genes are only useful within an environmental context. So, for example, being 7ft tall is incredibly useful if you are an NBA basketball player. It is incredibly hindering if you're trying to be a gymnast. And so the key here is to try to align the areas of your genetic potential with the areas that you are focused on, right? So try to find things where you are naturally served, served well. So that's a way to shift the system. Play games where the odds are in your favor. The third one, social culture. So, you know, if you. Social culture impacts our habits in many ways. Like if you move into a new neighborhood and you see that all of your neighbors bring out their recycling on Tuesday night, then you start to Think, oh, we need to sign up for recycling, because that's what people like us do who live in this neighborhood. So we often have this sense of belonging, the sense of approval, the sense of wanting to be part of the tribe. And so the key here is to join a tribe, join a culture, become part of a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. And if you become friends with those people and develop some sense of belonging there, then all of a sudden you start to take on their habits as well. The fourth one, physical environment. A lot of this has to do. There are many things physical environment can influence with habits, but one example is triggers and cues. They can make things very obvious. So, for example, I used to buy apples. We would go buy apples at the grocery store and I would put them in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge, and I would forget about them. And then two weeks later, they would all be bad and we would have to throw them out. And I would get frustrated. And so what I did was I went and bought a large display bowl and put that on the center of the counter. And now we store the apples there. And I eat them every day because they're obvious and available rather than than hidden and out of sight. And so the way that you shift your environment and change those environmental cues can also alter the system of your habits. And then finally, we have technology. And being blocked out of social media is one example of that I gave previously. But often technology also accelerates our behavior. It reduces the time between stimulus and response. A good example of this is one of the first email systems that was ever implemented was at IBM, I think it was in the 60s or early 70s. And before they implemented this system, they had internal memos that had to be written. So if you wanted to send something to somebody in another department, you needed to type it up and then put it in the mailbox and pass it around. And what they found was that the week after they implemented the email system, the number of messages sent internally went up by 5x and the servers melted. And it's not like the business changed that much in one week. People did not have five times the amount of things that they needed to talk about. But because the technology existed and reduced the friction, reduced the space between a thought and acting, they didn't have to sit down and type out a whole letter anymore. All of a sudden people were sending all kinds of messages. And we see this a lot in our everyday lives. You know, smartphones have reduced the space between the desire to act and the ability to act. And it's accelerated to such a degree now that we're just inundated with messages and pings and notifications and buzzes and so on. So you can occasionally use that to your advantage to redesign the system, but you also can change the system or alter it so that you reduce some of that stimulus that you're getting and make space for maybe the deeper, more meaningful things in life. So those are five examples of how to kind of shift the system that surrounds you and your habits.

I love it. And for anybody who's watching, you're probably going to need to watch this dialogue with James and I two or three times and take some notes, because he's given you a plethora of different tools and tactics and things that you can use to develop empowering habits. And sometimes to develop empowering habits. I love one thing you said is you've got to shut some stuff off in your environment, which is really critical. Think of taking away some stuff as well to deactivate some of that motivation that's right in front of you, which is really great. James, before we end. And by the way, if you want to find out more about habits, write this down or type this somewhere. Jamesclear.com jamesclear.com habits he's got a free gift for you there on Habits, and it's excellent. I read it a while ago and love it, love it, love it. So sign up for that and then get his newsletter as well and just go to jamesclear.com but to get the habits one jamesclear.com habits James, what did I not ask you that I should have that will give people just maybe one more aha. Or one more distinction if we need it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, certainly there are plenty of things here that we talked about. And I will say, generally speaking, you know what happens a lot of the time is someone will listen to a podcast or an interview or watch a video or something and they think, oh, that's interesting, and then they don't do anything about it. So my encouragement would be I'm under no delusions that every idea we've talked about is a perfect fit for everyone. But if you have one that piqued your interest, just take that and actually use it. If you implement it, then the time spent watching this will have been worth it. So I would say that that is a good start. But the one thing that people don't often ask or think about that much with habits is how they influence the other behaviors in our life that are not habitual. So for example, you often hear terms like, you know. Researchers have found that somewhere between 40 to 50% of our behaviors on a given day are habitual and automatic. Tying your shoes, you know, picking up water bottle, all this type of stuff. Well, that's great. That means that, you know, almost half of your behaviors each day are habits. But actually, the influence is much greater than that. And it's for a very simple reason, which is that habits are the entrance ramp to the routines and deliberate practice and effortful actions that we often take throughout a given day. So the kind of. You can think of it as habits sort of set the menu of options that you have available to you on a given day. So, for example, a lot of us, when we feel bored for five or 10 seconds, we will pull our phone out of our pocket. And as soon as you do that and open up the screen, that little habit has set a menu for you of what your options are to choose from. You have, you know, you could check your email, you could look at social media and so on. But the problem is that probably isn't the best menu for you to be looking at if you want to be doing, you know, productive and useful and meaningful work. And so if that's the case, what it means is that the little habits that we have, the things that only take five seconds to do, like pulling your phone out of your pocket, end up sending us down very different directions and trajectory for our daily lives. You effortfully think about the email that you're sending on your phone after you pulled it out, but it doesn't really matter, because every action that you're taking after that small habit, you've already locked in a less productive behavior than the best thing that you've done or the best thing you could do. And so the question then becomes, how can you find just these little points of leverage, these tiny things that you can do that send you. Or an entrance ramp to. To the right highway, not the wrong one, that send you down the right direction. And if you can do that, then you have a much better menu in front of you. And that, I think is one of the true powers of habit, is that they act as very tiny things. They seem almost insignificant, but they set the trajectory for our days and for our lives. And so if you can master those little points of decision throughout your day, you can often end up spending your time doing much more productive things.

Hey, this is John. And if you like that video, watch the next video because it is packed with things that you can do right now to achieve success. Way faster than ever before.