These DAILY HABITS Will Prime Your Brain To Get ANYTHING YOU WANT

One of the most powerful forms of motivation is progress. So seeing some progress, I mean it could be as simple as make your bed each day, right? But just doing that, embodying the identity of someone who's getting better, who's making progress, just pick one thing and use.

That as... Now why do some people make all this progress, let's say they lose the weight, they lose 100 pounds, but then they gain it back two years later? They've got this progress, they achieved the desired goal, but then how come it didn't stick?

It's a good question. I mean, it's a complicated thing, a hard thing, but I'll give a couple potential reasons. So one is it comes back to the social norms that we mentioned before. There's a story that I tell in the book about Vietnamese soldiers, American soldiers during the Vietnam War. So they were over in Vietnam and these two congressmen went over and found out that the heroin usage among the troops was incredibly high. It was like, I think they first thought it was like 10 or 15%, but then they found out it was actually over 20. So, you know, one in five troops is addicted to heroin or trying heroin while they're over there. And they were like, this is a huge problem. We need to figure this out. So they created this whole committee to investigate things or whatever. And eventually the war ends and the soldiers come back. And what they were shocked by is that 90% of the soldiers that were addicted to heroin in Vietnam were not addicted when they returned. And the main reason, it makes so much sense, but it upended our understanding of addiction at the time. They completely changed the context, right? In Vietnam, they're in a war zone, they're highly stressed, they're surrounded by other users, heroin is present and easy to get. They come home, they're in a totally new environment. It's not a war zone anymore, they're not surrounded by other users, they don't really know where to get heroin, so they have to figure that out too. You layer all this stuff together and suddenly it becomes much easier to not do that. whereas previously they thought, oh, it was an addiction. They were doing it for other reasons. This same thing is true, but usually in the reverse. Typically you have an addict who gets hooked on a drug, goes into rehab. This is the equivalent of leaving your environment behind, not having any of those triggers, but then you send them home to the same place they got addicted.

In the first place.

So now they're surrounded by all their old friends, all the same cues, and it becomes very hard to resist that. And I wonder if When people rebound from habits after they've achieved some level of success, whether it's losing weight or getting clean or whatever, if it's the return of the environment that causes a lot of that. Do you think that's what it is? Well, I don't know if it's always that. I don't think I could say it is universally. But I think that it definitely plays a role.

Because you were influenced by people's pressure either way. Like you said. Yes.

Peer pressure can either be positive or negative.

Yeah, the communities we surround ourselves with.

We rise to that community.

Right.

You know, if you're around vegans all day and there's only vegan food available, you're going to eat probably mostly vegan.

Right.

If that's what you want. Or if you're trying to eat healthier, if you go back home and everyone's eating donuts all day, that temptation is.

Going to be hard to say no to after months.

You can do it for a little.

While, but it's just really hard to do it. So, environment is a huge factor is what I'm hearing. I think both social and physical. We haven't talked that much about physical environment, but that's another key component, you know? So, like, I'll give you an example of a good habit and a bad habit. So for good habits, you want the physical environment to make it obvious and easy for you to do the behavior.

You know, so like I, like have a pull-up bar in your room.

Exactly. Trying to do 100 pull-ups a day.

Right.

Like have it hanging over your door. As opposed to even if you had.

One, but it was in the closet. Right.

Because you just half the time you wouldn't remember to take it out. Or it's at the gym upstairs or down the street.

No.

You know, I have a friend who he wanted to practice guitar more and so he left his guitar in the middle of his living room. and that would just so we'd walk past it a hundred times a day, it becomes much easier, right? Bad habits are the same way, so, but in reverse. Instead of making it obvious, you wanna make it invisible. You know, take like, which is just talking about video games, a lot of people feel like they watch too much, spend too much time watching TV or playing video games or watching a screen, but if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the television. So it's like, what is that room.

Designed to get you to do? Turn it on.

Yeah.

So you can restructure that environment to make it less likely that you'll fall into that habit. And there are a variety of things you could do. You could take the remote control and put it inside like a drawer so you don't see it. You could put the television behind a wall unit or a cabinet so that it's less visible. But you could also increase the friction with the task. So you could like unplug your TV after each use and only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch. so you can't mindlessly pull up Netflix and just find something. Or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it's an extra like five to ten seconds to turn on. Maybe that's enough time to be like, do I really want to watch something right now or am I just doing this mindlessly? If you really wanted to be extreme. Don't have a TV.

Yes, you could get rid of the.

TV entirely or take it off the.

Wall and put it in the closet.

And only take it out when you.

Really want to watch something. For four years when I lived in Columbus, I removed the TV for four years. I didn't have a TV in my place. Because I was like, I want to earn money. I want to build my business and I have nothing, so I need to work. I need to focus on this to build the habit that I wanted for my business. And it was the best thing for me because I would spend hours just mindlessly watching. And now I was like, okay, if I want to watch something, I'm going to go to the sports bar and watch the game. I'm going to go to a friend's house and watch this specific thing. Or I'm going to go to the movies and take a break. As opposed to 3 hours a day of TV.

What's brilliant about that, and it's a really good example, is that we, I think about that a lot with phones as well. So every day I try to leave my phone in another room outside of my office, at least until lunch, because then I get like a four hour block of time in the morning where I can just work without any distraction. And it's funny how quickly you don't, like, if my phone was on me in the morning, I would check it like, you know, every five minutes or whatever. but when it's out of the room, I don't even find myself wanting to... I never walk up the stairs to go check it, even though it's only 30 seconds away. So, it's interesting how little we actually want to do these things, but we just do them all the time because they're obvious and easy. And I think the key is to invert that. Take the things that are the bad habits, the distractions, the procrastinations, the unproductive uses of time, and make them more invisible, reduce exposure, and less less easy to do and take the things that are good habits and make it the equivalent of having your phone on you all the time, right? Make it right in front of you, make it obvious, make it easy, make.

It, you know, frictionless. Yeah. If you're looking to write, do you.

Write with your journal or your computer? I write on the computer.

I write an Evernote. It's gotta be faster. Yeah. You have to transfer it later and all these things.

Yeah.

Okay. If you were coaching someone, who said, I have no clue what I'm supposed to do with my life. I'm lost, I have all these bad habits. I smoke, I drink, I eat donuts every day. I have no job. My room is sloppy and I'm just depressed. What would you say to them to get started with changing their life around in the form of better habits?

Well, you just need to pick one thing, first of all. I think that I just mentioned a few minutes ago, One of the most powerful forms of motivation is progress. So seeing some progress, I mean it could be as simple as make your bed each day, right? But just doing that, embodying the identity of someone who is getting better, who is making progress, just pick one thing and use that as... This is true, I mean Louis, this is something you've probably seen with a lot of people that you've talked to, but habits are the foundation for mastery. So if you, you know, take a sport like basketball, you need to be able to dribble with both hands without thinking before you can worry about what strategy you're running on offense or what kind of, you know, strategic play you're gonna run or what your defensive scheme is or all this other stuff, right? Like you need to automate the fundamentals of the craft before you can worry about the next level of performance. Same thing is true for chess, you know, like you need to know how the chess pieces move automatically without thinking about it before you can get into, alright, what is my strategy gonna do? And I'm gonna do this and they're gonna do that. So, I think this is true not just at the peak levels of performance that you integrate these habits and use habits as the foundation for the next level of performance, but also true when you're getting started. Just build one small thing, carve out a 1% change, a 1% improvement and use that as a stepping stone to the next level.

What about self-control? Because what if we have this desire for something What's the other word for self-control? Willpower. Willpower. Yes.

What about willpower?

How much willpower do we have? So, you hear this a lot. I mean, it's very common, especially in self-help, motivation, self-improvement. You need to be motivated. You have to have willpower. Grit and perseverance are huge and important. And it's not that those qualities are not important. It's just that the way to develop them is different than what most people think. So, most people think, I need willpower. so I should just try harder. There's an interesting body of research, I mention it in the book, I think it's in chapter seven, on self-control and willpower, which is that the people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least. So they face temptations less frequently and therefore have the reserves and the resources to resist it when it occasionally comes up. And I think that this is actually like the lever to pull or the pressure point to push on. is that the way to get better willpower is to design an environment that tempts you less, not to say, let me just try harder.

Right.

Yeah.

Set yourself up to win. And you have a chapter that talks about the power of accountability partners. I talk about accountability and coaches all the time. I hire coaches for everything because I use sports as my life.

Yeah.

And I know that I couldn't have gotten to where I wanted to be as an athlete without great coaches. and accountability. So how important is accountability towards habits as well? Yeah, it's huge.

So I recently hired a powerlifting coach. Great, he's worked like 12 world champions and Columbus has... He's not based in Columbus actually, but Columbus is great for strength culture. It's, you know, I mean, obviously there's the Arnold, but then West side Barbell and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, it was awesome. But your point about coaches is a crucial one, which is that having a coach forces you to be aware of things that you would otherwise overlook. This is what I call the downside of building good habits, which is you build habits and in the beginning you develop fluency and skill and ability and things become easier. But after a little while, once a habit has been established, the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot, which means that you start to overlook your mistakes and not think about how to get better. and so what you need is a coach to keep you on that razor's edge so that you keep building habits but it also forces you to stay aware of what the next level performance is. And that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement. It's like a cycle. It starts with awareness. If you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is, you don't have a chance to change it. Then from that awareness you go to deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better and eventually the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes automatic. But once it becomes automatic, that's not the end. You have to return to awareness and.

See where you're at now.

Yeah.

How do you start the cycle again?

Huh.

And what about what if you can't afford a coach? How do you find the right accountability partner?

That's where I think we come back to the social component that we talked about earlier. Join the group, join the community. That's probably the best way to do it. And the great thing about the, you know, the internet and the web is that you can find those people before where you couldn't find them previously. It used to be that you had to hope that the people in your local community or on your sports team or at your organization were also interested in the same things and now you can find those people and find things online.

Search it. And what's the downside of good habits?

So this is what I was mentioning with this fact that you start to overlook your mistakes. There's an interesting study that was done on surgeons. where they found that early on in residency, they were getting better. And then they continued to improve as they became a surgeon in practice for a few years. And then they hit some kind of peak. And then their performance actually declined slightly because they stopped overlooking their mistakes or stopped looking for ways to get better. And so you need to be on that edge of paying attention. My favorite example of this is actually a surgeon himself, a Tul Gowande. And he hired a coach, a previous surgeon who was retiring, to review the video of his surgeries, to tell him where he could improve and what he could do better. And I think that's a brilliant example of how to have a coach, even if you're not in sports or not a competitor or something. We can all benefit from feedback. And the tighter the feedback cycle, the faster you learn.

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Yeah, great question. I don't even think it needs to be seven days. I think it'd be five minutes. You can do a lot with five good minutes. Five good minutes of exercise will reset your mood. Five good minutes of writing will make you feel totally different about your manuscript. It's like now the project's moving forward. Five good minutes of conversation will restore the relationship. and get people back on track. So five good minutes can do a lot. And I think you can scale it down that small and just ask yourself, how can I live five good minutes? How can I, in a sense, each day is a small lifetime and how can you live a good life today? That's really all you got to focus on is can I have a good day today? And then you can wake up again tomorrow and do the same thing. And this idea of getting 1% better each day, it's really encouraging a focus on trajectory rather than position. There's so much discussion about position in life. We have all these different ways of measuring our current position, like what's the number on the scale, how much money's in the bank account, what's the current stock price. We have all these different ways of analyzing what our current position is. And then usually when we get that number, whatever it is, there's some sort of judgment that happens. It's, oh, I'm not where I said I wanted to be yet, or we haven't achieved what we said we wanted to achieve. and what I'm encouraging is to say, listen, measurement's fine, it can be useful, but just for a minute, let's set that to the side and stop worrying so much about our current position and focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. You know, is the arrow pointed up and to the right or have we flatlined? You know, are we getting 1% better or 1% worse? Because if you're on a good trajectory, even if it's just for the next five minutes, you know, then you're on the path where all you need is time. Time will magnify whatever you feed it. If you have good habits, time becomes your ally, and that trajectory will carry you forward. And if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And every day that goes by, you dig the hole a little bit deeper. And so getting 1% better each day, it's really a mindset. It's an approach. It's less about measuring it, oh, is it 1% or 1.6% or whatever? It's not about getting caught up in the numbers. It's about trying to focus on putting yourself on a good path and then letting those days stack up.

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I mean, it can probably be many different things and I don't know all the answers. I think one thing that's common is that the results of success are widely discussed and highly visible, and the process of success is often invisible and hidden from view. You'll never see a news story that's like, Man eats chicken and salad for lunch today. It's only a story once it's like, Man loses 100 pounds. It's only once it's a result that people talk about it. Or like, there's never going to be a story about James writes 500 words today. You know, it's like only a story once Atomic Habits is a bestseller. And so because the results are the thing that gets discussed so much, and it's not, by the way, it's not that results don't matter. Like I consider myself pretty results oriented. It's just that I think we tend to overvalue outcomes because it's all we ever talk about and we undervalue the process because it's just not It's not compelling to talk about what's going on on a daily basis.

So because of all that, I think.

It can get easy to judge yourself. You know, you could be doing the right thing on any given day. Like I could sit down and I could write 500 words and that's actually a really good day, you know? But if the manuscript's still a mess and I'm still a year and a half away from the book coming out and I'm seeing somebody else launch a bestseller this week, then it's you start to judge yourself and feel like, oh, they have what I want to have or I'm not there yet or this is still a mess. I've been working on it for months. Like this is never going to get finished. It's very easy to fall into that kind of mindset, and especially if you're focused on results. So I think the shift is partially it just helps to know that working on habits day in and day out, focusing on building a better process and building a better system is how results occur. And that is very obvious to all of us as soon as you say it, but man, it's so easy to forget it on a daily basis. and so reminding yourself that most of your results in life are a lagging measure of the habits that precede them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your physical fitness is the lagging measure of your exercise habits. Your even like silly stuff, like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. So many areas of life are largely, maybe not exclusively, but largely, influenced by the habits that precede them. And so if you want better outcomes, the thing to focus on is building better habits. And for some reason, we get into this mindset where we're focused on results and we naturally start to compare and that leads to feelings of judgment, resentment and negativity and so on. And if we can just shift it a little bit and just try to focus on having five good minutes or living a good day, or building better habits, then I think maybe you pull yourself back in the present moment. You focus a little bit more on running your own race and maybe a little bit less on what everybody else is doing.

Love that, man. Focus on your own race. You know, over 10 million copies sold of Atomic Habits. You know, if there is anyone who hasn't got this yet, you guys got to make sure you get this. But I'm curious, for those who haven't got it yet and don't know, how long does it take to form a habit? It seems like there's all these different research. This university says this and this scientific study says this. How long does it take to actually form a habit and is dependent on what habit you're trying to create? And are there also different stages of building and forming a habit?

That's interesting. The stages part's interesting. People don't usually ask that. Okay. Very popular question, how long does it take to build a habit? It does depend on the habit you're building. So there are a variety of studies that show, you know, if you pick an easy habit, you know, might only take a couple of weeks. If you pick something really difficult, maybe it takes six or seven or eight months, like, you know, who knows? But it also depends, like the same habit can take very different amounts of time depending on the context. Imagine one person who's trying to build the habit of doing yoga every day. and they live with a bunch of athletes or people who go to yoga studios or whatever. And then the other person is trying to build a habit of doing yoga every day and they live with nobody who works out and they kind of get criticized or poked fun at if they do it in front of them. Well, same habit, but very different situations. And so the environment's going to influence how much friction you're feeling associated with that. And obviously that will influence how easy or difficult it is. So I don't really know that the timing tells you anything. You know, there's all these kind of popular myths, 21 days or 30 days or whatever, and there's not really anything to back that up. But there's also a couple studies that say on average it's like 66 days or something like that. But again, the range can be quite wide depending on the habit. So I think the true answer, the honest answer to how long does it take to build a habit is forever. Because if it stops, if you stop doing it, it's no longer a habit, you know, like, and what I'm trying to get at with that is habits are not a finish line to be crossed. You know, they're a lifestyle to be lived. It's something to integrate into your new normal. It's not like, hey, let me just do this for 30 days or 66 days, and then I'll be a healthy person, or then I'll be productive or whatever, you know, I won't have to think about it anymore. It's like, no, like what we're looking for is a change that you can integrate into your new normal, something you can make part of your lifestyle. And then once it's part of your daily life, great, you can start to look at the next habit and try to integrate that one and It's kind of this endless process and maybe that encourages you a little bit more to look for a non-threatening change or a sustainable change rather than just trying to flip a switch.

Yeah, and it also sounds like a habit is only a habit, and correct me if I'm wrong, if it becomes and is your identity on a consistent basis. And if it's not your identity.

Then.

You'Re not doing it. if it's not your identity?

I don't think most researchers would define it that way, but it speaks to this question you asked about stages. And that that was kind of the first thing that I thought about when you mentioned that question. So like, let's say, for example, let's just take like a classic habit, like going to the gym and working out. So early on, going to the gym is kind of uncomfortable. You know, you're worried about like, are people judging me? Do I look stupid? I don't know what exercises to do. You know, like, I don't know where to put my stuff. Do they have a water fountain at this gym or do I need to bring a water bottle? There's like all these like stupid little questions that you're thinking about when you're getting started. And it's definitely not part of your identity. You haven't shown up enough to be comfortable there and feel like, Hey, this is just part of who I am. And so early on, the kind of the first stage when you're practicing it, I think the number one thing you need to do is scale it down, reduce the scope, and try to make it as easy and as frictionless as possible to show up each day. So that's probably like stage one is.

How do I make this- the opposite of what people try to do when they're like, I'm out of shape. I'm gonna go every day for the.

Next year and I'm not gonna miss a day and I'm gonna eat chicken salad every day. Well, and you know what's interesting is, especially for ambitious people, it's really interesting or really easy to fall into that pitfall because when you sit down and you think about the changes you want to make, yeah, it's easy to get excited about that. I think implicitly you kind of, even though people don't say it, the thing that's kind of in the back of their mind is, what can I achieve on my best day? Like how can I get to peak performance, you know? And instead, I almost think it's more useful to ask yourself, what can I achieve even on the worst days? Like what habit could I stick to even on the bad days? Because then if you start there, now you can start to build some momentum. You can show up consistently, you can establish the habit, and you know, you can keep going. So that's maybe the first stage is scale it down. The second stage is you start to get some like other rewards associated with it. So you've been going to the gym for a few months and then maybe you start to see a little bit of a change in your body. or maybe you start to develop some friendships there and you look forward to seeing your new buddy there and you guys fist bump and you chat a little bit. And it's just like kind of more engaging and fun to do it to go there and, you know, work out. And so these are like other benefits, things that make the habit feel good and they kind of help you show up more and more. So you're starting to get these external benefits that are coming along the way. And then ultimately the, the, maybe the final stage or a later stage, is now it feels like it's kind of part of my identity. I go like, this is where I would say, so I've been working out for a while now, and it's probably like the habit that I care most about, like my, in terms of personal habits, it's the one that feels like it centers me or it's the only time I really get for myself. And so I want to work out now. Yes, of course I want the benefits of it and the, you know, the physical changes and all that stuff. But what I really want is I just feel good when I do it. You know, I feel like I'm being me, I'm being the kind of person I want to be. and it makes me feel like, yeah, this is the identity I want to have, this is the kind of person I want to be. And so I can get that satisfaction instantly. As long as I'm doing one rep, I get that feeling. And so that's a reward that comes maybe later. You got to show up a lot before you get to that place mentally, but I think ultimately that's where you're trying to get to. Now, there is maybe one more stage after that. which is the tighter that you cling to your current identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. And so this is kind of an endless process. You know, like you, we all can sort of think about, like, let's say you have a surgeon who they've been doing an operation a certain way for the last 20 years, and they have a bunch of successful patients and cases from that operation, and they just are like, yeah, you know what? I know it works well this way.

And then a new technology- It's been this way, yeah.

Yeah, a new technology comes along and they're like, you know, hey, you can do this with robots now or you can do it laparoscopically or whatever. And they resist it because they're like, no, I have a lot of evidence for doing it my old way. They cling to that current identity and it's harder to grow. And five years from now, they find themselves behind the curve. Or you've got a teacher who they've been doing their lesson plan the same way for the last 10 years. and they don't want to integrate YouTube or some new learning modality or whatever. And five years from now, they find themselves behind the curve. And so the tighter you cling to your current identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. And it's kind of this endless cycle in the early stages. What you want is to foster the identity, to reinforce being that kind of person because it helps you show up. But then eventually, a couple of years from now, the world changes and you need to adapt. And so it's kind of like evolve or die and you need to continually be retouching or optimizing or refining that identity and your approach. And so that's, those are, there are some various stages there, but those are kind of some of the big ones that I, that stuck out to me. Yeah.

And it's like people who are stuck to whatever fax machines and then it's, you know, then from faxing to email and then email to, you know, cell phones and whatever it is, it's like our grandparents don't keep up with the technology and then we can't call them on FaceTime because they don't know how to turn it on or whatever. So that's interesting. There, it sounds like there's different stages to these habits. And it sounds like when you become successful, the habits that got you here may not necessarily get you to the next stage or season of accomplishment, fulfillment, success, health.

Is that right? Yeah. It's interesting because I would say there's kind of like two categories. There are habits that are like timeless that you, the, we call those the fundamentals of whatever your domain is, you know, like in my case, reading and writing are probably always going to be habits that will serve me as an author, you know? But then there's other stuff, you know, the way that I executed the book launch for Atomic Habits. You know what? Like, if I launch another book in 10 years, a lot of those strategies will probably be outdated. And so you need to upgrade and improve, you need to evolve and change. And so there's, there's both the fundamentals that you always need to stick to, and there's just this continual growth and, and learning process that you also have to be committed to.

What's the habit you think you're gonna need to innovate over the next one to two years in this season of life that supported you to getting here but won't support you to the next level?

Yep. My biggest fear is that I know how to write a good book, but the way that I know how to do it doesn't work for me anymore. So I had a period, the last six to nine months of writing Atomic Habits. where it was just all that I was doing. You know, it was like I would wake up, I'd write for 12 hours a day or edit for 12 hours a day. I'd go to sleep, I'd dream about it. I'd wake up again and do it all over. And that was just like, it was this kind of, I don't know, to call it a dark period is probably too extreme, but it, you know, it was just like this very intensely focused period. And I can't do that anymore because I have kids, I got a family, and like, it just, it doesn't work.

So.

I know that if I can force myself to go through that, which, by the way, like, that was a difficult thing. My little Mantra for that period of life was Elaine de Batton has this quote where he says, of many books, the reader thinks this could have been truly great if only the author was willing to suffer a little bit more. And I just kept telling myself, it's kind of true, though. Yeah. So I just. That was like my little Mantra was like, this can be great, but. just have to be willing to suffer a little bit more. And so I just told myself that like every day. And, you know, I just- It can.

Be true and it's also not true. You know, it just kind of depends on how you create, you know?

For sure. I just can't do it that way anymore. So I have to go back to that little thought experiment that I mentioned earlier where I've got this new constraint. And so now I have to ask myself, okay, if I can only write for one hour a day, How could I write a book that's even better than Atomic Habits? How can I write something even better than Atomic Habits if I can only.

Write for one hour a day?

Now you got a good question. I don't know. I don't know the answer yet, but that's my little question. That's the thing I'm noodling on for right now.

That's the better question that hopefully will- that is a great question. I mean, again, it goes back into maybe you didn't think it was possible with your newsletter because you had to do whatever 10-15 hours a week on it, and now you're doing two. and it's impacting people in a potentially greater way with the results it's getting. I think there's a world in which you could write two hours a week and write a better book.

It's got to be possible. I mean, the obvious answer is like, well, it'll just take longer. But I also don't want to- But.

If you had to do it in the same time, if you had to do it in one year, I bet there's a way.

So that's where the question gets really interesting. There will be another constraint. You say, okay, you can only write for one hour a day and you only get two years. Can you write something that's better than Atomic Habits?

I think you would. I think you would because again, you've got 10, 15 years of experience writing now. You know what works. You can do it faster. You can pull into your archives of memory better. You have all the documentation from the previous, you know, you've got this skill now that it should flow more effortlessly if you allow it to. But we'll see.

I appreciate your enthusiasm and encouragement about it because I'll need it. But I don't know. We'll see. That's my little task is to see if I can find an answer.

I'm curious. It's another personal question for you. When I interviewed Liz Gilbert about, you know, she did Eat, Pray, Love, which I think did 10 or, I don't know, 20 million copies, whatever it's done. It's done over 10 million copies.

Right?

And I remember her talking about.

You.

Know, is my best selling work behind me? Yeah. And kind of that, is it, you know, the fear or the worry or the just the thought about it. I'm curious for you, after writing the best selling book of the year and potentially the decade, I guess, what is the biggest fear that you have moving forward? Is it, the fear of greater success? Is it the fear of potentially not it being as successful what you do in the future, or just the fear of judgment in the opinions of other people, no matter what you do? Yeah.

I remember hearing that Adele said something similar like that after she wrote and released someone like you, that she was like, it's because I don't remember how old she was, but she was in her twenties. and, you know, she was like, I'll never write a song better than that. And that's kind of a strange feeling to feel like the peak of your career is already behind you. I am trying to not think about it like that. You know, I've had some friends who have written bestselling books as well and have gone through stuff like this. And, you know, I've heard about the example or the Liz Gilbert example. I you know what? Like, I'm just trying to look at it as it was a project. And it can just be a thing that went really well. You know, like it doesn't have to be more than that. It's just, I tried really hard. I wanted to provide a great amount of value and it seems that people like it and that's great. Like it doesn't have to become some all consuming thing that defines every bit of my existence. You know, it's just like, it's a project that went well. And now I'm gonna move on to the next project and I'm gonna try to do that one well.

The ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity. So you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. Or you show up to write and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm someone who writes every day. And so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction from being that person and being aligned with your identity, your values, your principles. But you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day. And so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement like eating a donut at the gym. where you're casting votes for two different identities, right? It's like, I showed up at the gym, I'm casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, the type of person who's healthy, but then I eat a donut, so now I'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person. So it kind of washes out, right?

So you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values.

So you essentially have to form your identity first. Is that what I'm hearing? So who you want to be? I think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity, right? So like each time you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Each time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Each time you sit down to write, you embody the identity of a writer. So you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become. And if you cast enough votes for that type of identity, you start to believe that about yourself, right? Like if you, you go to church for 20 years, you believe that you're religious. You study Spanish every Tuesday for 30 minutes, you believe that you are studious. So in that way, your habits provide evidence of your desired identity. And I think that that is probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important. It's true, like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight and all that stuff is great. But in addition to the external results that habits provide, they also shape your sense of self. They like are the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself. Like sometimes people will say stuff like, fake it till you make it. But fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it. And you can do that for a little while, you could do it for a day or a week, but eventually, I mean there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind them, it's delusion, right? And if you're deluding yourself, then eventually you give up on that. But the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in. Yeah, because now I've done it for six months.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, I mean, now you have a.

Lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer. You know, like you do this over and over again. Each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself. And you don't just, you aren't delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer. It's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times.

Right.

And so I think that that's true for any habit, large or small, that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the type of person that you are.

What are the five non-negotiable habits for you on a daily basis?

Oh, that's a good question. So obviously this is going to depend on your goals. For me specifically, I think there are a few core habits that are going to serve everybody and certainly serve me well. So exercise is a huge one. I don't do it daily, but I exercise. Train four times a week. And I feel like if I didn't exercise, I don't know that I would be an entrepreneur. I don't know if I could handle the psychological roller coaster without the physical outlet. Yeah, the release. You probably feel that as an athlete too. Being an athlete for so many years, I feel like I need to push myself physically in addition to mentally. If it's just mental, it doesn't do it for me. I need to have a physical outlet. So exercise. Exercise is one. The other, the ultimate meta-habit is reading. Because if you build a habit of reading, you can solve pretty much any other problem. You know, you want to learn how to be a better podcaster, you can read about that. You want to learn how to meditate, you can read about that. You want to learn how to make more money, you can read about that. And so what you need is to develop a habit of reading and then whatever problem you're facing at the time, you can you have a method for solving that. Okay. Writing for me is huge. I don't actually know what I think about something until I write about it. -I find that if you get your.

Ideas that you get it out.

-If you ask me something right now that I haven't written about before, what is really happening is I'm just talking my emotions. So, what I mean is that you'll ask me something and I'll get an implicit feeling about what that topic is. I'll have some intuition, a gut feeling about it and I'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say. But I don't actually know if that's what I really think, what I deeply think until I have have the time to sit down, to write it out, and you have to logically go through it. Because a lot of the time, if you would ask me the same question next week, I might have a different feeling at that time. So, I'm talking different emotions. So, I think I actually need to have time to sit with it a little bit and write it through to learn what I actually think.

Writing's third.

Exercise, reading, writing.

I don't know.

I would say that those are probably my main three. If I was going to pick five and the other two that I would add, going for a daily walk would be a huge one. That's one that I aspire to because I don't do that every day. But anytime I do, it really benefits me.

In what ways?

Well, you see this with a lot of anybody who does creative work in particular, that something about getting outside and walking, I think there's, this is just me spitballing. I don't actually have science behind this idea, but when your body is moving, It's very hard for you, one, to not be active mentally. Like if you think about someone who's shut down mentally, what does their body language look like? They're usually closed off their arms, like they're sitting, they're not moving very much. Try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically. It's very hard to do. If your body is moving that like that, it's really hard for your mind to be shut down. So that's one thing. It kind of gets like the juices flowing. The second thing, and this is where I'm spitballing I don't know if this is actually true, but I wonder about your non-conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes. And so if you're moving, if you're walking, it gives your non-conscious mind something to do. So you're like, it gets out of the way and now you can actually like have this stuff arise or think in a different way than if you're sitting. So, I don't know. I think that those are two different things. Yeah, that's cool.

Okay, so that'd be the fourth thing.

Sleep is the fifth one. And this is one that I actually am pretty good about. So my cardinal rule is that I don't cheat myself on sleep. So if I stay up late and work till midnight, I'm gonna sleep till eight or nine. Sleeping in.

Yeah.

Like, I'm not gonna get up early because I don't want to cheat myself on that. But, yeah, I think that those are kind of the core things. It's funny. Sometimes people ask, like, oh, how can I double my productivity or something like that? And you'll see articles like that all the time, like, follow this. five minute trick to double your productivity. But the real answer to most of that stuff is like get eight hours of sleep a night, exercise, don't eat like crap, and then instantly you have this boost of productivity and motivation. The fundamentals are covered 90% of it.

Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose, and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of, I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset.

Mindset.

And I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, the greatness mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. You said this. You said you did not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level systems. What are the systems you created to be successful beyond those kind of core habits right there?

Yeah, so this is a really good question. I think first I just want to talk a little bit about that point that you do not rise to the.

Level of your goals.

You fall to the level of your systems. What do I mean by that? So often when we set about to change something or to achieve something, the first step is almost always setting a goal. And this is coming from someone like I was very goal-oriented. for a long time, right?

Like an athlete.

Yeah, I would set goals for the things I wanted to do in sports, the goals for the grades I wanted in class, the goals for how much money I wanted to make in my business. And sometimes I would achieve those, but then sometimes I wouldn't. And so I had this question like, well, clearly I'm setting goals for both, so like that can't be the thing that determines it. And you see this a lot, that the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals. Like every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Sure. every job candidate wants to get the job. So if the winners and the losers have the same goal, then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two. And the thing that distinguishes them is the process, the system behind the goal. This is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment. So, say you're just take a simple example. Say you have a messy room and you get motivated and you set the goal to clean your room? Well, you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room. But if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place, then you just end up with a dirty room again.

Yeah.

So it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause. And habits are a better solution in that case because if you fix the inputs, the outputs fix themselves automatically.

Right.

You don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits. And I think that that's true in a larger make sense as well, right? People want outcomes. They want to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress. But the outcome is not the thing that needs to change. It's the system that precedes it.

So give me the, let's bust the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit. Because there's 14 days, 28 days, 60 days a year. If you do something every single day and maybe it changes for each person, but what's the science or the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit, I guess. So, 21 days is the thing you.

Hear all the time. 30 days, 100 days, whatever. Right now, 66 days is making the rounds. It was the latest...

I saw that in another book. What was that book?

Well, there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average for how long it takes. And as a rule of thumb, I don't think it's terrible. Like you should remind yourself, yeah, this is going to be months of work. It's not just something quick. But even within that study, the range was quite wide. So if you did something simple, like drink a glass of water at lunch each day, it would take like three weeks. If you did something more difficult, like go for a run after work every day, that would be like seven or eight months. But I think actually that question to begin with is sort of a, there's like a broken mentality.

The wrong question.

Yeah, it is. Because if you ask that question, the implicit assumption is when do I have to stop working? Or when is this done?

And is it automatic after a certain period of time?

Well, the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever. Because if you stop, then it's no longer a habit.

It's a constant choice and a decision, right?

I think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed, but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived. And if you look at it as a lifestyle change, then you're saying okay, what's something small and sustainable I can stick to, right? What's something that can actually last over time? So it is true that, and you can actually map this through research, that a habit will become more automatic with practice. But this reveals another important point, which is that there's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built. You could practice something once in 30 days or you could practice it a thousand times. What actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition. So the phrase that I like to use is not 21 days to 30 days, but put in your reps. I mean, that's the real thing is you need to practice. And if you put in your reps, then your brain starts to automate how that process works.

Yeah.

What makes you an expert on habits? Oh, man. Based on lots of other people that are talking about habits. Why are you talking about it differently.

And what have you discovered that's different than everyone else? Okay, so two questions there. So the first one is expertise. And I think that, and I've said this many times before, I'm just going through this with everybody else. I consider my readers my peers in the sense that we're all just trying things out. The only difference is I write about what I learn and share it each week, but we're all just learning along the way. Early on, I had a feeling like that. I was like, who am I to, you know, I'm just a guy. Who am I to write about this? And I had a friend tell me the way you develop expertise is by.

Writing about it every week.

So I wrote a new article about habits every Monday and Thursday for three years. And that was how I developed the expertise on the topic by writing about it.

You did research. You said, Here's what I found. Here's what I tried.

Here's what worked, what didn't work. It's a combination of me reading the scientific literature and reading the research and then trying to distill practical insights from that and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter, a travel photographer, a writer, an entrepreneur. and seeing what that looks like and then the two together. And I think you need both. Like, I don't want to be some new age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower just like theorizing about ideas. It's different what it looks like to put ideas into practice, right? Like, imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to a coach like an MBA team. These guys are like, dude, you need to step on the court if you know what you're right to see what it's actually like.

So you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that. So you're researching and applying it into your life. And what was the second part of that?

-The second question, which I think is probably the more interesting one, which is what makes my angle different? What makes this different?

-Than every other book out there about habits.

-So, you can broadly put books about habits into 2 categories. The first book, the first category is what I'll call motivation models. So, motivation models are about what sparks a behavior. How do you get started? How do you get motivated? The second category is what I'll call reinforcement models. So how does a habit stick? How does it last? Why do certain behaviors get reinforced? And sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the other. A lot of the time they'll just kind of live in separate worlds. That's what I would say is happening in like the self-improvement space. Then you have the academic space, so psychology or neuroscience or and a lot of those books are focused on the why, but not the how. They'll tell you why something happens, why a particular neuron fires, why a particular biological process works the way it does, but they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life. And so what I wanted to do was try to combine the two.

Why and how.

Yes, a book that is both why and how. Why do habits form the way they do? Why are they important? and then how do they actually work? And my hope is that Atomic Habits was able to do that largely because of the framework that I put together. So in the book, I lay out these four stages that all habits go through. And I felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model, but not both. Okay. And you need to understand what both Sparks a habit and what makes a habit Maintains it, yes. If you want to be able to understand how they work and how to make them last.

And what are those four frameworks?

So the first stage of every habit is a cue. The second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes. I'll give you an example of these in a second. The third stage is the response and then the fourth stage is the reward. So you walk into a, the question I had that no model I could find could solve in any good way or explain in any good way was why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way? So let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at five o'clock every day. But then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at five o'clock. Current models don't explain that very well because it's like, well, the cue is five, you should be going to the gym right now. It says the routine follows automatically after the cue. Or why does someone walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies and then they automatically want to eat it, but you could just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room and you're stuffed and you're full and you walk in and you see a plate of cookies and you're like, I'm stuffed. I don't want to eat anything. So what's going on there? And I think these four stages explain it, which is you see the cue or you experience a cue and then your craving or your prediction differs based on your current state. So, the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in.

The way you're feeling.

Right.

And also other things like your beliefs or your identity, the social group that you're part of, right? So, like if you're in a different group, then maybe you interpret things in a different way. You know, you can imagine one group, they practice a particular religion, they walk into a butcher shop and see pork and they don't, they're like, oh, we can't eat that.

Right.

Another person walks in and they're like, oh yeah, I'll have a pork sandwich. because it's obvious and easy and right there. So what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life.

How do you keep yourself there mentally and emotionally so that it doesn't, you don't feel like you have to deliver something as good or better than the last work?

So, is it the Ohio roots?

Is it the, you know, this, your dad now, like what is the, how do you keep yourself emotionally stable in that way.

Yeah, I, you know, I don't know the perfect answer, but I'll just say a couple things that are coming to mind. I, you know, so I think some of it's personality, you know, like, I'm not really the type of person that worries about very much. I've just never really been like that. So I don't know. This kind of seems how I'm wired. I'm more focused on, like, what is the next thing rather than, like, worrying about what could happen. So, um. Having a project that excites me or that I can get invested in, I think it helps a little bit that I'm not ruminating on the last thing and whether it's being judged appropriately or not. One interesting little side effect, and I just want to say before I preface this, this is the best possible outcome, right? Like the best possible thing is that atomic habits did well. So like it comes with trade-offs, it comes with, you know, downsides or problems that maybe you didn't think about solving beforehand. But this is what I was working for. So this is partially... Can I write.

A book that gets 100,000 copies sold and then it does 10 million globally? You were like, okay, it exceeded every expectation and then 1,000 times.

So, it doesn't make any sense to complain about the result that you wanted, even if it comes with trade-offs and other problems that you need to deal with. I remember Charlie Munger said something like that too, where he was talking about, people, once they get into their 90s, a lot of the time that all they talk about is how all their friends have passed away and how much their body aches and the next illness and all that kind of stuff. And he's like, listen, the best possible outcome is that you live this long. So it doesn't, doesn't make sense to complain about it. So that doesn't mean that there aren't problems. And one of the interesting, like, little problems or unexpected things that, that unexpected for me is Before early in my.

Career, I was trying to get as.

Much feedback as possible. Like I would respond to every email that a reader sent. I would, you know, every message on Twitter I would look at or respond to, I was trying to get feedback so that I could learn, so that I could figure out what do people like? What are they not like? How can I get better? How can I improve? And now the feedback is too much. So it doesn't, it like, it's crippling to try to, first of all, it's not possible to respond to it all. But even if it was or you tried to make that commitment, I don't think it's helpful at this point. You're just kind of getting noise. I mean, it's at the point now where I can be pretty confident that Atomic Habits is a good book. I'm not going to say it's the greatest book ever or anything like that. I'm sure that I could have done it better or there are areas that can be improved, but I can be pretty confident at this point that it's good because 10 million people have bought it. And if you look at the hundreds of thousands of reviews, Almost all of them are four or five stars, but there's still going to be some sliver of people who they read at the wrong time or it wasn't in what they were expecting or for whatever reason, they just don't speak to them.

Yeah.

And that's fine, you know, but like there's enough of them now because it has reached so many people that if I just focused on that little segment, I could spend all day just looking at listening to people who don't like it. And that would make it seem like it was this big problem. when in fact it's not a problem at all. Like 98% of people love it. And so there's no issue. There's nothing that needs to be solved. And so just the amount of feedback has scaled to such a degree that weirdly you have to start insulating yourself from feedback because otherwise you spend too much time responding to noise. And that's been a hard thing to figure out a good balance for because I want to continue to learn. I don't want to wall myself off and and not, I don't want to become ignorant or unaware of how my work is landing or what I'm saying or what would be most useful to people. And yet at the same time, there's just way too much feedback to pay attention to it all. So that's been an interesting challenge. I'm not sure how I'll deal with that going forward.

What was the habit in the last decade leading up to Atomic Habits of thinking and feeling that was most consistent for you. The most habit thought, the most consistent thought habit and the most consistent feeling habit that you had created, developed over the decade leading up to it.

For the most consistent thought, and I think this is just kind of my core approach to entrepreneurship, the most consistent thought was I'll be, I'll figure it out. you know, and so, like, you're always facing another thing as an entrepreneur. You don't know what. There's not really any Playbook. You know, they're, they're sort of Playbooks. There's things other people did to grow their business, or there's strategies to use or whatever, but everybody's running their own race, and everybody's in a slightly different situation, has slightly different strengths and weaknesses, slightly different resources and opportunities. And so you got to figure that out for yourself. How do I best put all these pieces together? and you need to have that mindset if you're gonna be like, if you don't have the mindset of I can figure it out, well then you're for sure not gonna do it. Just having the mindset does not guarantee it happening, but you need to at least be in that frame of mind. So that was the most common thing that I told myself is whatever the next thing was on the horizon, like I'll figure it out, I'll figure out a way to make it work, or I'll figure out a way to, you know, utilize my strengths to try to, you know, develop a new line of attack for this or whatever, but I'll figure out some solution. the most common feeling, probably the feeling of, like, waiting or the feeling of delaying gratification.

That.

That was probably the most common thing was like, you just keep showing up and keep doing stuff, but it's not there yet. You know, you.

I.

Especially in my case, because I focus so much on building the audience first and not on monetizing, and so I didn't really make much money for the first, like, three to five years of this business. So do something for five years and try to put your heart and soul into it every day and then don't really have the payoff. It's just a lot of waiting. And so I was fine with it. I had the personality that could work and I would make money on the side doing freelance gigs or I would occasionally have some kind of like, I do like a seminar or a webinar or something that I would sell tickets to and I'd present something to the audience. But For the most part, I was just trying to provide as much value for free. And so it was a lot of waiting. And that was probably one of the most common things that I felt.

The feeling of delayed gratification, I think if more people learned that skill, that habit, and developed it and nurtured it, they would be so much more fulfilled, happy, and there'd be so much bigger payoff for them than the instant gratification or the shortcuts and things like that.

The key part that made that work for me, the reason I could do it, is because I was still making progress. So you like I was delaying gratification, but I could still see that things were on a good path. So the newsletter was growing quickly. I was getting good feedback from the audience.

Traffic was growing on your website.

Yeah, I wasn't traffic was growing. I wasn't feeling like I'm putting work out into a vacuum and there's no response. And so because I could see this snowball was building and rolling down the hill, It was easier to tell myself, Hey, just you're on a good path. Just keep going. You know, you can keep waiting.

And when you saw, I know you're very connected to a lot of the other kind of writers in our space and you guys, you know, connect and do masterminds and stuff like that, people that I've known as well for a long time. When you would see other people in your industry, your friend group or peer group writing New York Time bestselling books over and over again and, you know, launching this thing, and this project and you're kind of just turning away doing the same thing consistently for five, seven years before you launched your book, how do you not get discouraged from your peers doing the things that maybe you want to do in the future but you haven't done yet?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's a good question. I think it's very natural to slide into that kind of feelings of comparison and stuff, but I tried to avoid that. Like, I want these people to succeed. You know, I imagine so, like, there are two scenarios. There's going to be best selling books either way. Okay, so they're still going to happen every week.

Every week.

They're going to have a sale. So the question is, do you know the people who are writing bestsellers or do you not? And I would much rather be friends with all the people doing it than to not be. And I was just looking to learn, you know, I'm just trying to soak up like they're these are really smart people and they, you know, they've done the thing that I'm hoping to do. So what can I learn from them and how can I provide value to them or help them out or, you know, at least be an ear that can listen to the things that they're struggling And so, yeah, I was looking to try to like build relationships with those people, not to turn it into like a competition, but more turn into like a collaboration and try to be on the same team.

Yeah, I think that's so wise. And I, and I think there's a lot of people that hoard their information, that compete with their peers. And I just think that's a losing battle when you try to compete and be the best and, and win. That was kind of my 20s where I was like, how do I be number one and be the best at everything? And then I realized, man, this is exhausting and draining. And then when I launched my show 10 years ago, I was like, how can I make it about everyone else? How can I shine a light on everyone? Not make it the Lewis Howes Show, but make it the School of Greatness and shine the light on others like yourself, James, and lift them up and collaborate instead of compete. And it's so much more rewarding to be in collaboration with people to see them shine, to support their success and be in partnership with people and working together in your own way. But then saying, how do I learn everything for myself and just keep it all for me?

For sure. I think, like I mentioned, the comparison part is natural. And it kind of also it's something that you wouldn't want to shut it off totally. Let's say, for example, that you want to launch a YouTube channel. How do you know what a good YouTube video is? The only way that you know is you look at a bunch of YouTube videos and you start to compare them. You start to compare and contrast and see what qualities make one great and what qualities make others not so great. And so it's the ability to compare things that leads to what we would call taste, or the ability to make judgments. And so you need that muscle, that comparison muscle for that. I think the problem is when it gets applied in unuseful ways. So I tend to think that it's really helpful to compare small things or granular things. So like, and very unhelpful to compare big things. So it's helpful to compare small things like what's the marketing strategy for this particular book launch? Or what kind of squat form or technique is that person using in the gym? And you can look at this little small detail, deconstruct it, and you can learn something from it. Meanwhile, it's pretty unhelpful generally to compare big things. What's that person's net worth compared to mine? How happy is their marriage compared to mine? These are like really big issues and there's so many factors at play and it's really complicated and it's just kind of a losing battle to compare anything like that. It's not really helpful for anybody. But if you can scale it down, deconstruct the small stuff, then yeah, there's often a lot that you can learn. So I think comparison is fine if you keep it in the right lane. And for big picture stuff, it's better to collaborate and maybe for small things, it's better to deconstruct and compare and try to analyze and then you can figure out how to make it work for you.

Right. I'm curious on speaking of scales, before the book launched for you, on the scale of one to 10, let's call it the joy happiness scale, 10 being you're at peak happiness, peak joy, you know, consistently. Maybe some minor moments here and there, but most of the time you're a joyful, happy person is a 10. One is you're miserable. On a scale of 1 to 10 before the book comes out, call it a few months before, where are you on that scale?

So, whenever I get a scale like this, I basically never choose 1 or 10 because I feel like there's 7 billion people in the world and so there's got to be some other example out there that's higher than what I'm imagining or lower than what I'm imagining. So I pretty much never select those. But having said that, well, a couple months before the book came out, I was really quite happy because I was done with the book finally.

Right.

And I've been working on it. If you went like maybe say a year and a half or two years before the book came out, that was a really tough period because I was in the middle of working on it. But I generally consider myself to be a very happy, positive person. And so even years before, even before I got the book deal, you know, like, and I wasn't making much money, but I had this audience that was growing. I was quite happy then, you know, like, I was even before, you know, before I had a career and I was just a regular college student. I was quite happy then, you know? And so I try, I think this is actually a very important version of mental toughness. which is mental toughness often gets framed as grit, stubbornness, discipline in the face of challenge. I'm going to force my way through it. But I think there's another version of mental toughness, which is flexibility, adaptability, things like I can be happy no matter what I'm working on. I can be happy no matter who I'm hanging out with. I can make this work no matter what resources I have available. and mindsets like that are actually very robust and resilient. They're very mentally tough because your mindset, your mood is not dependent on your conditions. If your mood is dependent on your conditions, you're kind of like brittle. You're, you know, you're, you're stuck, you're beholden to the, the situation, and you're being held hostage by it. And so I don't want my happiness to be held hostage by the situation. Like, I'm gonna be happy no matter what I'm working on. I'm gonna be happy no matter who I'm hanging out with. and I try to approach life like that, even though, of course, there will be moments of grieving and sadness and difficulty. Everybody's life is going to have that. But I don't want to be. I don't want to be held hostage by my circumstances. So, yeah. So I would say there were periods two years before the book came out. That period was harder, but I still tried to be happy, even though I was feeling pretty drained.

What does that look like when it's hard for you? in the darkness of writing 20 hours a day, what is that? Is that a seven? Is that a two? Is that a four? What is that on the scale?

Let's say my baseline is I'm usually at like a seven or an eight. And then if I have like a really great day, I'm like living at a nine. And then on the hard day like that, I'm like at a four and I'm just feeling like exhausted. Mostly, one feeling that I don't like is feeling so busy that I can't be thoughtful. So I'm so busy working on stuff. I'm so exhausted by the amount of effort that I had to put in. I can remember this a lot from this period. I would have been working so hard in the book all day and then it'd be like six o'clock and I'd be like, I just need to stop for a minute and go to the gym and work out. And I would go and work out, but I was kind of like a zombie going through my workout. I was just, I was so tired that I was just getting through it and I'd see people and I just, I was so busy. I was so tired. that I couldn't be thoughtful and have a good conversation. I just didn't have the energy for it. But on a typical day, I'd be excited to walk in the gym. You know, I'd have like a bounce in my step and I go in there and I have a great workout and I get to chat with people and kind of cut it up a little bit and then leave. And I just didn't have the energy for that at that time.

So I think that's what being maybe a four looks like compared to being a seven or an eight. And where are you today? 10 million copies sold to young kids, you know?

Yeah. Living a dream. as long as you're getting sleep, I feel good. The kids sleep dictates a lot of things. I would say that I'm pretty consistently an 8 right now. The thing that's keeping me from being at a 9 is wrestling with this new season that I'm in. And I've got all this time that I'm spending with the kids, which is great, and I don't regret it all. But I also have this ambition, this drive to create something great, to continue to build a business, to try to make my little mark on stuff, and I don't have the time for it. So I got to figure out some answers to those questions that we were asking earlier.

I'm curious, in your opinion, what are three to five non-negotiable habits that every human being should, and if they could do on a daily basis, it would improve their lives and everyone's life around them. What are those non-negotiable habits on a daily basis we to do.

Yeah, three habits that would improve everybody's lives on a daily basis. It's so hard to give an answer like that because obviously everybody's, you know, dealing with different stuff. But there are a few things I think I do genuinely think most people would benefit from. So the easy answer would be, or the easy way to frame this would be reading, but I don't think it actually has to be reading books. I think it just is the, the habit of learning something new. So if you, you know, listening to podcasts, reading a book, watching a good YouTube video, whatever, it doesn't matter what version of that it is. But if you go to bed a little bit smarter than you were when you woke up, that's going to improve your life. And just having this thirst for lifelong learning, having an eagerness to learn or discover something new each day, it's going to pay off in a huge way in the long run, no matter what topics you're interested in. So some small habit of daily learning, let's just call it learn something new for 10 minutes each day. some sort of physical activity. You know, this is, I think, an important realization about all habits, which is in most areas of life, there might not be a thousand ways to do something, but there's almost always more than one way. And, you know, I like working out in the gym, but not everybody wants to train like a bodybuilder, and that's fine. You know, like you can. Kayak or go running or rock climbing or ride a bike or whatever, there's like a bazillion ways to live an active lifestyle. And you should choose the version of your habits that is most exciting to you. Like in a, in a way, that's the first biggest hurdle to clear when you're building habits is have you selected a habit that you're genuinely interested in, that you're actually engaged with? Because if it's something that you actually care about, there are going to be like endless opportunities for improvement. if you're not actually care, if you don't actually care about it, if you're just doing it because you kind of feel like society is encouraging you to do it, or your parents want you to do it, or your peers are kind of subtly saying, hey, this is something you should do, then even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a chore, you know? So let's call it 10 minutes of learning something new, some sort of physical activity, whatever is exciting or interesting to you. And then I think the other one is a process, a habit of reflection and review. So it's very easy in life to be so busy or working on stuff heads down or just have the next task come up, whether it's things you got to do for your kids or responsibilities at work, that you never take even 5 minutes to step back and just breathe and ask yourself, Am I working on the right thing? Am I directing my attention and energy to the highest and best use? And boy, there is nothing so wasteful as working hard on the wrong thing. You know, like so many people work really hard, but are you directing your energy and attention to the best spot? And so the only way to discover that, like I know I'm not smart enough to figure it out on the first time. Like I can't just sit down, give me five minutes and be like, oh, this is exactly what I should be focused on. It takes iteration. It takes refinement. It takes a process of reflecting and reviewing. and looking back on the previous day and be like, hey, was that a good way to spend my time? Like, did I live a good life today? And the more that you do that, the more you start to course correct. And the other tricky thing, and the reason this needs to be a habit that you revisit consistently, I don't necessarily think it needs to be daily, but consistently, is the answer changes over time. You know, like what you want shifts over time, the situation you're in or the resources you have or the time you have shifts over time. And so you need to keep coming back to this. Maybe it's every week, maybe it's once a year, but whatever it is, you need a chance to reflect and review and to try to ask yourself, is there a better way to do this? Am I working on the right thing? Am I working on what actually matters? Am I directing my attention and energy in the highest and best way?

Yeah.

Society leans heavily on us all. So if you, There are just broad examples of this.

Salary pressure, religious pressure, media pressure, peer pressure, everything.

Yes.

Let's say, so just some broad examples. You walk into an elevator and you turn around to face the front. You have a job interview and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice. There's no reason it has to be that way, right? Like you could face the back of the elevator. You could wear a swimsuit to a job interview. But you don't do that because it violates the shared norms of the group, right? It violates the shared expectations of what that society has. But that's true not only in a broad sense that we're part of these tribes, like big tribes, you know, what it means to be a Christian or to be American or to be Australian or whatever. But it's also true in the small tribes that we belong to. What it means to be a neighbor on this street or a member of your local CrossFit gym. or to volunteer for a local organization. All of those tribes, all those groups that you belong to have a set of shared expectations, a set of shared norms. And the key, if you want to build habits that last, if you want to change the way that you interpret cues, is to join a group where the desired behavior is the normal behavior. Like there are plenty of people who they want to work out but going to the gym feels like a lot to them. It feels hard, feels like sacrifice. But there are also people who go to the gym every week and it's just normal. It doesn't feel like an obligation. That's the desired behaviors, the normal behaviors. Their lifestyle. -Right. Same thing for musicians. You know, like if you want to learn an instrument, hang out with people.

Who play all the time.

You know, like if you hang out with a bunch of musicians, it's like, well, yeah. -Yeah. We play four days a week. We play seven days a week. -Yeah. Because it just happens. That's what what the tribe does. The caveat to this, and the thing that I don't see people mention a lot, is that the reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe. We want to be friends with those people. And so we don't want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norms.

Yeah, you're not going to hang out with a bunch of vegans and have pork. Right.

And just like be the only one eating that. You won't hang out with them for.

Very long because you're not going to be friends with them anymore. Exactly.

They'll kick you out.

You want to rise to the standard of that group, of that community.

So the key, I think, is to join a group where your desired behavior is a normal behavior and you already have something else in common with that group. So Steve Kamb is a good example of this. So like Steve runs Nerd Fitness, right? And all these people want to get in shape who are coming into his community, but they also love Star Wars or Batman or Spider-Man or, you know, all these other things that nerds are into. and if you show up, it can be intimidating to want to get in shape or work out the first time, but if you can connect with the group over your mutual love of Star Wars, then you're like, oh, well, I'm friends with these people, and now I also want to pick up those other habits with them because I want to belong with the group because we're already friends. And so I think you can apply that methodology to most new tribes that you join. Don't just join a new tribe because they have the desired behavior, also try to find a way that you can overlap with them. Find some shared context. Some other stuff too, yeah. That you can bond over and then.

It'S easier to adopt the habits. Musicians that like to be healthy.

Yeah.

If you want to do both, right? It's like finding that even subgroup. It's like, hey, we love playing music.

And then also you're gonna start eating better because we all want to eat healthy. Exactly, yeah.

Interesting.

Okay, so that's the second part, the.

Cue and then the desired habits, right?

The craving. Cue, craving, response, reward. Okay, what's the response? So this is mostly about making it easy. So this is the habit itself and the easier a habit is, the less friction there is associated with a habit, the more likely you're going to be to do it. So the way that I like to describe this, imagine you have like a hose, right, and there's a bend in the middle. There's a little bit of water trickling out. If you want to increase the amount of water going through the hose, you have two options. You could either crank up the valve and force more water through, or you could just remove the bend. and let it flow through naturally. And a lot of the time, advice is centered on cranking up the valve. It's like you need to try harder, you need grit, you need perseverance, you need motivation, you need to overcome the obstacles in your life. And all those things are fine, but I think they're all short-term solutions. You might be able to do that for a day or a week, but I've never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment. It's really hard to fight that day in and day out. So, The solution I think is to reduce friction. There are a ton of ways you can do this. One way is just to scale the habit down, make it as easy as possible. So people have heard things like this before, start small, small steps, whatever. But even when you know you should start small, it's still really easy to start too big. So, you know, say you want to get in shape and you're like, all right, I want to run a couple days a week, but I know I should start small, so I'll only run for 15 minutes. But even that is like way bigger than what I'm talking about. I mean, it should be so small that you, in the book I call it the two minute rule, but you should downscale any habit to fit within two minutes. So it's like, all right, I want to go for a run three days a week. My habit is I put on my running shoes and I step out the door. Anything else that happens after that is just bonus.

It's a success.

Now, sometimes people resist that because they're like, well, this sounds kind of like a mental trick Right? Like I know the real goal isn't just to put my shoes on. I know the real goal is to.

Go for a run.

So if you feel that way, my suggestion would be only do the first two minutes for the first few weeks. Because what you need to do is master the art of showing up. Like I had a, I had a reader who ended up losing over a hundred pounds. And one of the things that he did was he went to the gym, but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he would show up, be there, do like, half an exercise, 5 minutes would go, he'd leave. He did this for like 6 weeks. -Wow. -Now, it sounds ridiculous.

It sounds silly because it's the opposite.

-You just work out for a half hour. -Yeah, yeah. -But what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up and a habit must be established before it can be improved, right? If you don't establish the habit, there's nothing to optimize.

If you're not showing up at the.

Gym every day, you don't even... Who cares about what workout you're doing, you're not even there. -Don't start running an hour a day if you've never run in a long time. Be the person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day before you worry about how far you're running, what kind of workout you're doing and all that type of stuff.

A lot of times, it's the art of showing up first before going all in on the desired goal you want.

I think that's right. I mean, you can find examples of people who flip a switch and transform their lives or have an epiphany and do it overnight, but I think that it's rare. I think that the more sustainable strategy, the more reliable strategy is to scale it down to the first two minutes, focus on that, establish it, master the art of showing up, and then go from there. So really you should like, usually when people think about building better habits, they optimize for the finish line, right? It's like, how much weight do I need to lose? How much money do I need to make? When can I finish this book? It's all focused on the result. But I think instead if you optimize for the starting line, make it as as easy as possible to start, scale it down, organize your environment so all that stuff is set up. This is another strategy for making it easy, which is that you can prime your environment to make the future action easier. If you chop up a bunch of vegetables and fruit on Sunday, it's now easier to have a healthy snack during the week. If you set your workout clothes out the night before, it's now easier to get into the workout the next day. But doing all that stuff to make it easy to show up, that is probably the more important piece early on. There's also like all these there are all these logistical details for building a habit that nobody thinks about in the beginning. Like what? Well, like take the example of my reader who went to the gym. It's like, okay, what gym are you going to go to? How are you going to get there? Are you going by yourself or you're going to go with a friend?

Do you need to what time are.

You going to go?

Yeah, what time are you going to have your own water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym? And that stuff sounds like silly and small, but when some minds start it, the fact that like, oh, the gym doesn't have a water fountain and I always forget to bring my own, that's enough friction for someone to quit. So by focusing on just the first two minutes, you figure all that stuff out and then once you've got that piece mastered, now you can worry about how long the workout is and what program you're doing and all that stuff.

So figuring out the logistics first is an important step.

I think that's something that just just comes naturally with scaling a habit down. You figure out what's required to show up because you're not worried about the results or the outcome or how long you worked out or judging yourself for running 30 minutes when you should have.

Run 45 or whatever. Got it.

Okay.

So, this is the response still?

Right.

Okay. And what's the fourth? The fourth one, and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick, is the reward or the outcome. So, every behavior is followed by some kind outcome is just basic cause and effect. And if the immediate outcome is favorable, is enjoyable, you have a reason to repeat it in the future. It's kind of like... Donuts.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like that example.

If.

You feel good, if you feel satisfied right after you do something, then it's like this positive emotional signal and it's like, yeah, I should do this again. So you can see this actually business is a really interesting example with this. There are a lot of products, some of the most successful products, have some type of immediate satisfaction that is layered into them. So toothpaste is a very common example. There's no reason a toothpaste needs to taste like mint, but it does because the minty flavor and the refreshingness of it makes sure it gives your mouth this clean feel. It's more satisfying so you have a reason to do it again in the future. I heard an interesting one recently about car manufacturers that some of them are adding a fake guttural roar to the car or the truck when you press the accelerator because it just adds to the actual natural sound of the engine. So it makes it more satisfying to step on the gas and to drive the car. So there are a variety of examples like this. But if you can add, and the key is it needs to be immediate. So like this is, in the book, I refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel successful. If it feels good, you have a reason to do it again.

Is that why video games do so well?

Video games are masters at this. They're masters at it. So, their masters actually at a variety of aspects related to habit formation. So, one is they're really good at this immediate satisfaction. There are all kind of things. You're actually constantly getting feedback in a video game. Even if you're just running, you hear.

The pitter patter of the steps.

That's gratifying. The jingles of picking up another power up or seeing a kill or something like that, whatever the game is, you're always getting constant feedback. Sound, things that are on screen, they're really good at dripping now. Watching the score increase in the top corner, that is immediate feedback. So they have all these ways of making you feel satisfied and when you see that progress, you have a reason to continue in the future. This is one of the most effective forms of immediate satisfaction is progress.

As soon as you feel progress, you.

Have a reason to continue. It feels really good to see that you're making headway.

How important is accountability then in your mind when we are taking on these new habits for ourselves? Is it important to have self-accountability, buddy accountability, coach accountability, social accountability, do those support habits forming these consistent habits? And what are the factors are in play there?

They definitely support them or hinder them potentially, depending on the people you're around and the group that you're a part of. Ultimately, the form of accountability that matters the most is self-accountability. It's almost impossible to exceed the standards that you have for yourself. Like that almost always sets the baseline. You know, if your beliefs or your standards are almost always going to be the limit on what you allow yourself to do or what you accept. Now, it's easier to stick to high standards in a supportive environment than it is in an unsupported one. So there are a lot of things that can influence whether you want to maintain that standard. but ultimately the standard you hold yourself to is going to be the most important thing. Now, having said that, I do think that the social environment, the tribes that you belong to, influence your habits in a really dramatic way. So if I had to pick one topic that I think is even more important now than I realized when I was writing the book, I would probably say the social environment. You know, we're all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are like really large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be Australian. Some of those tribes are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local CrossFit gym. But all of those tribes, large and small, they have a set of expectations. You know, they have a set of social norms. They have a set of beliefs that, Hey, this is how you act in this group. This is what's normal and expected. And the more that your habits align with the expectations of the group, the easier it is to stick with them, the more like appealing and attractive they are because they signal to the people around you, Hey, look, I belong too. You know, like I'm part of this. And the more that they go against the grain of the tribes that you belong to, the harder they are to stick to because you start to get criticized for them. And if people have to choose between, you know what? I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something or I have the habits that I want to have, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized. I mean, the desire to belong will often overpower the desire to improve. You know, belonging will, will, the loneliness will lose to belonging. And so you need to get those two things aligned and join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

It is so true. And it doesn't mean you can't make it happen. There's a great example that that came up this week, someone on my team, on our team call said, I asked everyone on the call, I said, what is one thing you want to let go of next year for your life? Like what's one thing that's not serving you right now that you want to let go of? And this person said, I want to let go of drinking, drinking alcohol, like, or at least drinking as frequently as I do with the social circles that I'm in. And I thought that was interesting because I've never been drunk in my life. I don't drink. It's not, it's not a part of my identity, right? I never did it from sports. And then in after sports, I was just like, why? It didn't make sense to me. Nothing good or bad about it just wasn't fitting my values personally. I have other problems, which is sugar, right? It's like, I've got that, that's my vice, right? So, no judgment here, but I was just like, this never stopped for me, you know, in every, until bringing me in the last four or five years. where anytime I'd go out in college, after college, then the business world, restaurants, networking events, like all that stuff, people would always try to influence me to drinking. And so I had to be, I had to be so firm in my beliefs and really just not even care at all about it that I just knew that people were going to try to influence me. They would try to say a joke. They'd be, I can't believe you never drank all these different things. try to get me to drink for the first time, all that stuff. I knew it would happen every single week. And I just realized, okay, this is going to happen no matter what type of circles I'm in, unless I find people that do not drink, which is very rare. And which is one of the reasons why with my girlfriend, when we started dating, I was like, listen, it's not gonna work. If you like to drink, I don't think I can date you. Like, doesn't mean you're a bad person. I just don't want to be in that environment for the rest of my life with the person I'm choosing to be with. and so I had to make a conscious decision. And she was like, well, I don't really need it. Like, maybe I'll drink a glass of wine once a month. I'm like, okay, that's fine. But if this is a weekly thing, like, it's just not gonna work because I've chosen this to be a high priority of my value for my life. And it's, it's very challenging if there's something you want to do and the people around you are influencing you the other way in terms of accountability. So I think it's It doesn't mean you can't do it, but choosing to be around people or groups or tribes like you mentioned that are supportive, even if it's the local CrossFit gym or whatever it might be, find those communities as much as possible. You know, if your family isn't as supportive, find these other micro tribes to support you in that habit forming. So I think it's really powerful.

It's so much easier to stick to a habit if you're in an environment that supports it. and there's this whole chapter in Atomic Habits, it's called the Secret to Self-Control. And one of the surprising things that I came across when I was researching the book is a lot of these self-control studies, we typically will like kind of the standard story we all tell is, oh man, I wish I had the discipline of that person, or I wish I was, you know, as consistent as this professional athlete or whatever. But in fact, the people who exhibit the highest self-control are often the people who are tempted the least. That's like the predominant pattern that is common across those different contexts is that they are- If you put cookies in.

Your house, you're not going to eat them.

Yeah. And so, you know, you want to stack the deck in your favor and design an environment or join groups and tribes where your desired behavior is normal, where your desired behavior is easy. And if you do that for yourself, sure, you'll still have to put effort in, but it's going to be so much more productive and easy to stick to the habit because you're in a space and a context that's designed to support it. And that's maybe one of the biggest hacks or strategies for building better habits is worry a little bit less about having superhuman willpower and worry a little bit more about designing an environment where you don't need willpower at all.

You did something really smart, which I think a lot of people aren't willing to do. You spent 10 years writing every week an incredible article or articles that were so detailed, so thought out, so researched, and you said, how can I serve the maximum number of people in my niche and then start branching out in space as well and do it consistently over a decade without really making a lot of money, you know, selling other things. And then you came out with a book. And now this doesn't happen for everyone, but then you came out with a book. and it became one of the best-selling books of the year, or the most selling book of last year on Amazon, like you said, top five, I think, this year as well. And it just continues to add value to people. And I think it's a testament to what you created for a decade plus of adding value. So congratulations on everything, man.

Yeah, thank you. That's very, very nice of you to say. It's been a wild ride. There are a couple things going on there. I do try to operate with this core value of always give value before you ask for value. And if you think about in any business, but like in my business writing books, the amount of what it costs a reader or what it costs a customer is not just how much they have to pay for the book. It's also how much time they have to spend reading it or finding it and so on. And whatever that total cost is, time plus money, that's like the amount they have to pay. And then whatever I get paid is what I make. But what they get in return should be well in excess of that. So the value they get minus the time and money they spend, there's some surplus there. And we could call it whatever, but I think about it as goodwill. And I always want to have a surplus of goodwill. And so everything that I create, whether it's an article or a newsletter or the book, I want people to have this feeling that it's like, oh my gosh, I get so much out of this. Of course I would want to open the next email or of course I would want to buy the book. It's such an obvious win for me. So I always try to give value before I ask for value. And I don't think that there's any one way to do this. You could start with the book and not have an audience, for example. But the way that I did it is I wanted to focus on building the audience first, building the platform first, Give as much value as possible, get the audience as large as possible. And then I was able, you know, I didn't have any credentials, right? Like, I don't have any background for, and there was no reason for me to get a book deal. I was just a guy with a blog. And the only reason that any of the publishers in New York met with me is because I spent that time building the email list and developing the audience. And then that got my foot in the door and got the book deal. And then of course you have to execute well on that and create something valuable. And then, you know, ultimately the book being a hit was sort of just all this potential energy that had been built up for two years or five years or whatever, and then it being released when the book came out. So I, in a large to a large degree, I kind of think that's the hardest thing about writing books is all the work is upfront. You know, you have to build the audience and write it and edit it and make the marketing plan and start to record interviews and execute on that. you have to do all of that stuff before you sell a single copy. And most people are just not willing to delay gratification that long. I mean, it's probably, depending on how you measure it, Atomic Habits took somewhere between like three and six years. Definitely at least three years, because that's how long it was from when I got the book deal. But I was doing a lot before I even got the book deal. So it's just a long time to work on something without making a cent from it. And so if you're willing to do that, then you can get a great result.

And what some here's the challenge though, sometimes people are willing to do that and they don't get the result that they're looking for. You know, they go all in, they take two years or four years working on the book. And it's not maybe a flop, but it doesn't get the expectation they might have of like, oh, it's going to sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies or 100,000 copies. And they realize actually how hard it can be to sell books. And that can be discouraging for people to and say, well, okay, this didn't work. I'm not going to do it again. But I think that's not the way to look at it. It's like, when you think, you know, whenever I do any project, and I remember I started this with my podcast 10 years ago, it'll be 10 years in January. I said, if this impacts one person in a positive way, it's worth it for me at the time. Right? And I think about that with my, my books and my work where it's like, if this can, yes, I have goals and yes, I want to do certain things, but if it can impact a few people and really support them, and getting out of a lot of pain or overcoming some challenge that's been a hurdle for a long time, then it'll be worth it for me. Yes, I want to make money. Yes, I want to make return on my investment, all those things. But I think when we get caught up in that focus, we lose sight of the true purpose of it, the mission of why we're creating something.

Well, the two things are connected. Part of it, like I was just saying, if you do a good job of delivering value to people, solving their problems or helping them in some kind of genuine human way, then it tends to be the case that those sorts of products sell better and, you know, spread wider. I mean, Atomic Habits is sold over 10 million copies. My audience, you know, my email list now is 2 million people, but like, where are those other 8 million coming from? And not, you know, I'm not even saying that everybody in my audience bought it, right? So it has far outpaced my ability to promote it. And the only way that that happens is if the product is good enough that other people feel like, oh, I have to tell somebody about this. You know, it's like it's been so useful for me that I have to share it. And so ultimately it always comes back to creating the best possible product. And I like Seth Godin's little like measure for this, which is if you want word of mouth, then you need to create something remarkable. And that means that it's worthy of remark, you know, that it's worth talking about. And so ultimately it comes back to word of mouth. And the only way to really get that is to actually deliver on your promise to actually create something super valuable. Now, that said, there are tons of people out there who pour their heart and soul into a product or to try to their best to deliver value and maybe still don't see the outcome that they want. And so you do need that. Like that's kind of the first hurdle to clear. But there's a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes with a product like Atomic Habits. There's obviously my ability to promote it in my audience. But again, that's not enough on its own. I think a couple things that are really like working in my favor. So the first is the frame of the book or just the topic that you choose. The example I like to give is there's a chapter later in Atomic Habits where I talk about deliberate practice. Now, it could have been a book about deliberate practice. where I talk about habits. But instead, it's a book about habits where I talk about deliberate practice. And the difference in how those two books would sell is enormous because I don't need to convince anybody that habits are important. Like you just kind of get from growing up in society that having good habits is favorable and having bad habits is unfavorable. And so it taps into a desire that people already have. and what I have to do is to say, hey, this is the best possible solution for that problem. This is like the, if you want the most comprehensive guide on the topic, if you want to see all the tools and strategies laid out in an easy to understand way, and if you want these strategies to be easy to apply, this is the book that'll help you do it. But I'm not trying to convince people that it's worthwhile at all. And I actually think, even though most authors don't think about it that way, a lot of the time they are kind of fighting an uphill battle. They're trying to convince people to care about a topic or a framing or a positioning that they're just not naturally interested in. So I think that's just one of many things that you can look for is like, yes, you need to try to provide excess value, but you also need to position the product in a way that you're swimming with the current rather than against it. It's so much easier to promote something if the wind is at your back.

You could write the best book, but if the framing is not in alignment with what people really want and need, it's going to be a hard sell consistently. You might get your core audience to buy into it, but then it's going to be hard to spread if it doesn't have that effect. My friend Rory Vaden says this as an example for himself all the time. He did a TED Talk that did, I don't know, like five or 10 million views about multiplying your time. And then he wrote a book essentially around the TED Talk that's called Procrastinate on Purpose. and he's like, if I would have changed the title to multiply your, like, how to multiply your time or whatever, something around multiplying time.

Yep.

He's like, it probably would have sold a lot more, but it was the same content, but a different framing and a different cover and a title that people are like, why do I need to procrastinate on a purpose? It doesn't make sense to me, but I want to multiply my time. And so it could have been more advantageous.

I mean, I think this is a little insight about it applies to any product, any type of entrepreneur, not just books, but certainly it applies to books, which People don't buy the actual book. They can't because they haven't read it yet. They haven't read any of the pages inside. They buy the Amazon listing. They buy the COVID They buy the promise of what is inside the book, but they don't buy the actual book. Now, you still need to deliver in the actual book because of what we just mentioned a minute ago. People recommend it because of what's in the actual book. Word of mouth is driven because of what's in the actual book. But the initial sale is only made because of how it's positioned and what they see on the COVID So you need both. You can't just have one or the other. And sometimes you'll hear authors kind of complain about this, you know, like, oh, you know, I'm a great writer, but people just don't see it. Or I put so much effort into this book and it's not selling. And my view is like, you know, I get it, you know, you spent a lot of time and energy on it. Like, I'm not trying to dismiss that, but it's kind of like complaining about like trying to make cookies, but not including all the ingredients. Know, it's like, oh, well mine didn't show, well, it doesn't matter that you had like really great eggs, you know, like you need the other ingredients too. Um, and so it's, it's all of those things that make the recipe work. It's not just one. One of the framings that I talk about in Atomic Habits is a lot of the time, everybody starts this conversation with what results do I want? So people set New Year's resolutions and they're like, I want to be the kind of person who loses a certain amount of weight, or I want to be the type of person who makes, you know, a certain amount of money next year or whatever. and so they set this outcome that they want and they think, okay, if I'm going to lose 40 pounds, then I need to come up with a plan. So I'm going to follow this diet and I'm going to go to the gym four days a week. And so we have the result that we want and we got the plan for achieving it. And most of the time the conversation stops there. We just sort of assume, Hey, if I do this thing and follow through on this plan, then I'll be the person I want to be is kind of the implicit assumption. Like I'll be more like who I hope I will be. And my argument is let's flip that on its head and start by asking ourselves not what do I want to achieve, but rather who do I wish to become? You know, who is the type of person I want to be? How do I want to be spending my days? What's the kind of identity I want to have? And then you can ask yourself what habits reinforce that identity. So maybe rather than saying, I want to lose 40 pounds and I'll go to the gym four days a week, you say, I want to become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And you can see how that gives you a different frame or a different lens. You know, suddenly it becomes a little bit less about what you do in the gym on any particular day, and it's a little bit more about just showing up and being that kind of person and being consistent. And you give yourself permission to still feel good, even if you only have five minutes to work out that day, because you're reinforcing that identity rather than, you know, a lot of the time we do this weird thing with goals, which is we say, I want to lose 40 pounds in the next six months. And then six months passes and you've only lost 17 pounds. And so you feel like a failure because you didn't hit this arbitrary target that you set in the beginning. But in fact, you should be feeling great because you're making progress. You know, like you should be feeling really good about the fact that you're in a better position now than you were six months ago. And so goals kind of like play with our minds in that way. And that's why I think it can be helpful to focus on who's the type of person I want to be, what kind of identity do I run or reinforce, and are my habits supporting that?

I think identity is so key and it's a lot of, you know, a lot of people say they want something, but their actions don't enforce the identity behind who they want to become. What is the part of your identity that you're most proud of in the last couple of years? since launching the book and since now, you know, being a father of two young kids, what is the identity that you've had to shift going into, I'm a successful writer, I do this every day, I've written this bestselling book that is a phenomenon. Now I'm becoming a father. And how do you balance both of those identities, I guess?

That's a really good question. You know, you see this a lot in different areas of life. So in my case, I've had a couple different identity shifts. You probably had this too, given Athletic career for a long time. I was an athlete. I was a baseball player. And so when I, my career ended, I was like, what am I now? You know, like, I, I, this thing was a huge part of my life for, you know, 17 years, and then all of a sudden, I'm not doing that anymore. So, it was felt like this loss of identity. I probably had a two or three year period where to call it a morning is probably overstating it, but there was, if something feels like a morning.

Though, yeah, it kind of, it's something.

Felt lost, you know, it was like, man, I feel like a part of me is gone now. so you hear that happen from a lot of people in the military as well. You know, they'll be like, their identity is I'm a soldier, and then they leave the military and they become a civilian. And it's kind of like, well, who am I now? They sort of feel like they lost their footing. And the way that I describe it at this point is I'd like to think about life as a series of seasons. And so one question I ask myself is, what season am I in right now? And so before I had kids and before the book came out, I was in this really career heavy season and my identity was tied up in like, I'm a very hard worker. I try to always provide the maximum amount of value to my audience. I'm not gonna let the number of hours that needs to be done to achieve this or accomplish this outcome, like block me from trying, you know, like I'm just gonna work my way through it. And then I have this shift in seasons and, you know, now like a big part of my identity is being a dad. and you lose a lot of hours, working hours, that are now focused on family. And I love that, right? I love that part of it. I love the family part of it, but I still feel like I lost this other part of being the hardworking entrepreneur. So for sure, I'm still working through that right now. I mean, my kids are young, but it's a signal as a shift in seasons. And usually when your seasons shift, your habits often need to shift with it. I found myself kind of trying to force fit some of my old habits into my new lifestyle and they weren't like serving me anymore. Main thing that I struggled with were creative habits. So it was all around writing and reading and usually I was spending a lot of hours each day working on that. And now it's like, Hey, instead of having four hours a day to do this, now you have four hours a week. So how do you figure out, like one of the questions I had for myself, especially during that first year, okay, I know how to perform at a high level under the previous number of hours, but I don't have that anymore. So it's kind of like a lifestyle that doesn't work for me. So now how do I perform at a high level under a completely new set of constraints? And I'm still figuring that out to some degree, but like one thing I did was I restructured the newsletter. So for the first three years of my career, the habit that kind of launched my career, was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday. And those were usually like about 2000 words. And I would spend somewhere between the shortest amount of time I ever spent was like eight hours on an article. Most of the time it was somewhere between like 15 and 20. And the really long ones would be like 30 or 40, but that was rare.

It's amazing.

So it was basically like that kind of was my full time job was I, you know, I do 15 hours on an article on Monday and then I do 15 hours for the Thursday article and then the rest of the time throughout the week. it would be, you know, the rest of the stuff to run the business. And I did that for the first three years, but then I had to work on the book. So I kind of changed it while I was working on the book, but I had the same number of writing hours. And then the book comes out and then I have kids and now I don't have any of that time anymore. So I restructured the newsletter so that I could do it in a couple of hours, usually about two hours. So now I can just do it on one day. I just need one morning and I can do it in those two hours and it's done. and rather than writing these long form articles, now I do, I call it 3-2-1, but it's three short ideas for me, two quotes from other people, and then one question to think about for the week. And this is another thing I try to do just as an entrepreneur in general, but also for my, my overall life. I like to play this little game, this little, like thought experiment, where if I have constraints that I have to stick to, like in this case, I have so much less time. before. It's easy to fall into this story and telling yourself like, well, this isn't fair. Like, I don't have as much time as the people I'm competing with. I don't have as much time as other people. So I guess I just can't do that anymore. Or the strategies that other people talk about, they won't work for me. And I try to avoid that kind of mindset whenever I can. And instead I flip it around and try to ask myself, okay, out of all the universe of options out there, of all the different ways that you could write a newsletter. Is there a way that I can do this so that it only takes me two hours a week? Cause that's all the time that I have. But the result for the audience is not equal to what I was doing before. It's actually better. Can I actually use this constraint and create something that's even better than what I was making previously? And I usually, maybe I'm just too optimistic, I don't know. But usually I'm like, yeah, if you think about, like, it's hard to imagine all the possible options out there. you're like, yeah, there probably is something out there that is better for them and only takes me two hours rather than taking me 30. And so I, it took me probably like nine months of brainstorming and trying to come up with ideas before I eventually settled on the structure of 3-2-1. But the newsletter is way bigger than it was before. There are way more subscribers. Now, that's not the only measure of whether it's providing value to people. But people seem to really like it and it definitely is performing well. And, you know, it takes me 1/15 of the time. So I think that can be a powerful sort of little thought experiment to play with yourself if you're facing some constraints. And just encourage yourself to try to think a little more carefully about it. There's usually a path for figuring out a better solution, even if you have constraints.

You were mentioning this earlier. It sounds like what what people are doing. Life is going to happen. Things are going to stack on our plate. Seasons are going to change. There's going to be adversities. It's natural. And what I'm hearing you say is that even if that doesn't happen and you just, you know, have a kid and things just need to change for you and everything's still okay, it sounds like one of the most important habits is to ask better questions. is to ask, is this supporting me? Is there a better way? Is there a more effective way? Who could I become that I'll be more proud of? It sounds like there's, you had to ask a different question, a better question, to give you a bigger result in less time and bigger result for you and the audience.

I think questions are crucial. You know, it's kind of funny because I spent a lot of time writing about these ideas and trying to share what I learned with, you know, habits and and improvement, decision making, productivity and all that. And I think it's easy for that stuff to kind of come across as like advice. But I'm not really trying to give people advice. I'm just trying to like lay out a toolkit and say, Hey, here are all the strategies. Here's all the tools. Let's lay them on the table. And then you can choose which one's the best fit for you. Like I don't really have much interest in telling people what to do. I'm more just trying to like share all the strategies. But the other problem with advice is that it's kind of brittle. in the sense that it's very dependent on context. You know, like people, someone can give you actually very good advice. They can give you like an idea that genuinely worked for them. But if your context is different, if the timing or the situation is different, or you have different resources, different strengths, it still might not be a good fit for you. Questions, however, are the opposite. Questions, whereas advice is brittle and context dependent, questions are flexible and adaptable. and they shift, they can naturally transform based on the context. So for example, one question you could ask yourself, like somebody could give you really good advice, so to speak, on what workout program to follow. Or you could just have a question and you ask yourself, what would a healthy person do? And if you keep walking around life asking yourself, what would a healthy person do, you start to notice all sorts of things based on your current situation that maybe you could do. and it's much more flexible and adaptable than just trying to follow one strict workout program, which may not work if you have a knee injury or if you don't have enough time that day or for any number of reasons.

Right.

So I do really like questions, and you're right that I had to ask myself better questions to get better answers. I had to ask myself better questions to kind of get myself in a better mindset. And there are a few questions that I really like that I keep coming back to. And I think maybe anybody listening to this will find it useful as well. So the first question is, what am I optimizing for? And people optimize for different things. Sometimes we optimize for money, sometimes we optimize for free time or family time, sometimes you optimize for creative output or having the ability to choose the creative projects you work on. It can be any number of things, but you need to decide what it is for you. and I think a lot of the time we sort of fall into this rut where we're just kind of optimizing for what we think we're supposed to be doing or what other people are encouraging us to do. And we're not actually optimizing or working on what we actually want to optimize for. So the other challenge with that question is it shifts over time. You know, like what I'm optimizing for today is different than what I wanted 10 years ago or five years ago. So you need to keep revisiting that question. and asking yourself, what am I optimizing for? Now, the second question that I like is, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? So once you know what you're optimizing for, are you on a trajectory that can get you there, or do your habits need to change? Because if you're on the wrong trajectory, if you know you want to optimize for one thing, but your habits are leading you somewhere else, obviously something needs to change. the other way to kind of frame this, if you want to like flip it around and frame it maybe from a, that's like maybe a little bit more of a positive angle. If you want to frame it from more of a negative angle, what you could ask yourself is, how am I contributing to the situation that I say I don't want? Or how am I contributing to the conditions that I say I don't want?

And.

If you look at your current habits, you'll almost always notice that there are a few things that you're doing that are influencing the situation. you know, like most of life is not, it's not entirely under your control, but it's also not entirely out of your control. Right. You know, it's the majority of life is like, kind of like a tennis match. You know, you don't control what the other player does. You don't control their shots or their strategy, but you do influence it with your shots and your strategy. And so it's true that luck and randomness and misfortune, it's true that all that stuff is going to happen to you and you can't control everything, every card that's dealt to you. life, but it's also true that you influence the situation. And so the only reasonable approach is to focus on the elements that are within your control and to try to influence it, to try to shape the conditions to the best way possible. And I think questions like, are my current habits carrying me to my desired future? Or how am I contributing to the conditions I say I don't want? Those questions are, are kind of helping shape that or helping reveal different steps that you could take. By the way, that how am I contributing the conditions question? I think that's from Jerry Colonna, a great like business coach and entrepreneur. So those are a couple that I like. The other question that I asked myself, which I mentioned previously, what season am I in right now? You know, that kind of helps encourage you to get in the right mindset and think, Hey, you know, sometimes habits can be good for you, but they just have outlived their usefulness. Like they were, they were good for a previous season. And so, that doesn't mean that, you know, the habit was bad. It doesn't mean that you should feel bad about doing it. It just means that maybe it outlived its usefulness. So those are just a few of the things I like to kind of prime myself with to try to spark thoughts on what should I really be focused on right now. Yeah.

When you were playing baseball and, you know, in the batting cage for an hour a day, that habit served you then. It doesn't serve you now to swing a baseball bat for an hour. hour a day. So you just got to know what season you're in. I'm curious, you know, you ask a question in your newsletter every week.

Yeah.

What was the most powerful question for you of 2022? All right.

I actually have a couple that I like here. So I have a big spreadsheet where I keep all the questions and ideas and stuff from each week, and I go through them every now and then and kind of mark some of my favorites. But so these are just a few that I liked from this year. so one is, do I need to spend more time searching for better information, or do I need to spend more time acting on the information that I already have? So is the bottleneck strategy or is it execution? Right. Another one that I like, this is kind of the trying to encourage me to try big things or attempt big things is the question to ask yourself is not will I succeed? the question is, what should I attempt? You know, if we get so caught up in trying to succeed, then I think maybe you can talk yourself out of trying things that are worth attempting, even if they don't ultimately pan out the way that you hope they will.

How does someone know what they should be attempting in life?

It's a great question. I mean, I, you know, I don't know the answer. I'm not, I'm not the person that, you know, that has the answer to, to that kind of stuff, but. I think that people often talk themselves out of things before they should. So we're almost always our own bottleneck before the world is actually the bottleneck. If you think about it, if you just try to step outside and above yourself for a second and think about the things that you've tried or the projects you've worked on, it's almost never the case that you hit a true hard stop. That the world is just like, Hey, sorry, there's nothing else you can do. There's nobody else to contact. There's no small action to take. There's no alternate path of attack or line of questioning. There's nothing else you can do. There's almost always something else you could try if you want to give it another attempt. But we talk ourselves out of it way earlier than the world like puts a true hard stop in front of us. And so as best as possible, I try to not be my own bottleneck. I try to not be the I try to let the world tell me no before I tell myself no. and that I don't think I feel like sometimes if people want to push back on something like that, they'll talk about how it's like overly positive or it can get delusional or something like that. And I, you know, certainly I would prefer to not be too negative or too positive. I'd prefer to strike a perfect balance, but that's not possible. And if I'm going to err in one direction, I'd rather err on being too positive rather than too negative. I'd rather err on attempting too many things rather than talking myself out of them. But even though you're trying to be positive and trying to attempt difficult things, that doesn't mean you can ignore reality. You know, like another question I like. So this is actually another one that I marked on the sheet, which is without altering the facts of the situation I'm facing and without ignoring the reality of what must be done, what's the most useful and empowering story that I can tell myself about what's happening and what I need to do next? And there's this little exercise I heard about one time. So all you need, you need to get two sheets of paper or open up two doc, two Google Docs or whatever. On the first one, you're gonna, you can pick whatever time frame you want for this. Just for this example, let's say it's the, the last 10 years of your life. Okay. But you could do the last six months or whatever. All right, so on the first sheet of paper, you're going to write down the last 10 years of your life. You're going to tell the story of the last 10 years. But the only rule of this game is that you can't tell any lies. Okay? Everything has to be true. The first version, you're going to write the least favorable version of your last 10 years. It's got to be true, but it's the least favorable framing. The second version, you're going to write the last 10 years, but it's going to be the most favorable. Now, what's interesting, I feel like you look at those two sheets of paper, there are no lies on either one of these. You know, both sheets of paper are true. And I just have a hard time seeing what telling yourself that first version, that first piece of paper, what that gets you. You know, like if you're not ignoring reality, if you're sticking with the facts of the situation and you're still going to deal with uncomfortable conversations that need to be had or the difficult steps that need to be taken, you might as well tell yourself the most empowering and useful version of that story. That's the story that's going to make you feel best. It's going to get you motivated. It's going to get you moving. So I don't think you should be delusional about it. And it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be hard times or that you're not going to have to have difficult conversations. Like, all of that is still part of life, but you're just trying to.

Not be your own bottleneck. Yeah. It's reframing the story of your life. And when we can frame why we are doing things on a daily basis in a more empowering way as opposed to a disempowering way. It starts to feel like there's a lot more flow, fun, fulfillment, joy in life rather than a drag holding us back. So I love that.

All right, I just, I love these questions. Let me just give you one more. So sometimes I like to do this thing with asking myself a question where both answers can be true. opposites can be true. And the question is not whether it's right or wrong. The question is, what do you need right now? So, for example, this is one that I had in an issue that went out in June. Sometimes we're too hard on ourselves, criticize our mistakes to an unhelpful degree. Other times we're too easy on ourselves and let excuses run our lives. So which way are you leaning right now? Do you need to be harder with yourself? Do you need to be firmer? and more disciplined, or do you need to be easier on yourself, more forgiving, and how can you pull yourself back to center? And, you know, yeah, sometimes like you need to be tough with yourself and disciplined, and sometimes you need to be forgiving and chill out a little bit. And the question is not whether one person is right or wrong. The question is, which one do you need right now? You know, which one serves you best? And so many things are like that. You know, it's not, the question is not, do you need to rest or do you need to train? The question is, which one do you need right now? You know, the question is not, do you need to read and research or do you need to write and produce? The question is, which one do you need right now? And so, opposites can both be true. It's just a matter of timing. And I like to think about balance in general. We talk a lot about work-life balance or balance in life. And I think it's easy for it to kind of get squished into this like average mode where you're just like, well, let me just do a little bit of each. But actually, you can still be really intense if the timing is right, you can, it's like turning it on and turning it off. You know, the question is, let me rest fully or the approach is let me rest fully and let me rest fully and let me rest fully and let me train fully. And so in a way, balance is about timing, not intensity. You know, it's not saying don't do intense things, just like, you know, take it easy and like keep yourself in this average mode. It's saying, no, do like really intense things, but just shut it off every now and then. and give yourself self space to recover and have the right timing.

How do we learn to develop, I guess, that skill or figuring out what we should be doing with our time to make the highest impact for the future? Because it seems like a lot of society is just scrolling and distracted and doing actions that don't support their future self. So how do we figure that out?

I like the way that you framed it there at the end, doing actions that don't support their future selves. I think it's, I think it comes back to asking yourself the right questions again. And some of the questions that I like to ask to try to get to these high leverage choices. So the question I like the most is what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done? So when, when Atomic Habits came out, I wanted to do everything I could to try to propel the book to be a success, you know, try to get the word out. so I did all kinds of interviews, and some of the interviews that I did were on radio. And I don't really do radio interviews anymore because when I put the time in and, like, you know, spend 10 minutes on a segment or whatever it is, as soon as we go off air, the work that I just put in evaporates. Nobody's listening anymore. It's gone. Whereas when I do a podcast interview, it gets recorded, and even right now, as we're talking, there's other podcast interviews that I've done that people are listening to right now as we're sitting here. And so in a sense, there's almost like multiple versions of James out there, you know, that are like still working for me. The past James is still those hours that he put in are still delivering value. And so if you can take that question seriously, what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done? And you don't even have, you don't need every minute of the day to be spent on things like that. But if you can do something each day that will continue to work for you after it's completed, you can turn around in a year or two years or three years, and you just have this enormous high leverage asset of all your previous effort continuing to work for you day in and day out. And so, once you, if you make that commitment and you stick to it consistently and try to do your best each time, you get like three or five years down the road, and getting results becomes even easier because you have so much like you have this like tidal wave of previous effort that's still working for you. So I think that's the core question to ask for taking high leverage action. And the good news about winter is it's always followed by springtime. Historically, some winters are long, some are.

Short, but they're always followed by springtime.

What follows the night, the daytime? What a cool way to set it.

Up if you were God or the universe, right?

So imagine for a second, all of your listeners or viewers, and you think about it too.