438: James Clear On Creating Atomic Habits In Your Life

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now it’s the holiday season and I’m currently on break. And can you believe that there are over 400 plus episodes on the podcast? Now there’s no way that you’d listen to them all, so I picked a couple of classics for you to review. Enjoy.

00:23
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my buddy James Clear back on the show. And in case you missed him last time, James is on the podcast back in episode 202, where we broke down his strategies on how to build a blog that gets millions of visits per month. But in today’s episode, we’re going to take it up a level and discuss how to build good habits and break bad ones, tactics that James has uncovered over the years from studying the habits and routines of entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and high-powered individuals. And I’m proud to say,

00:53
James’s most recent book atomic habits has hit the New York Times bestseller list and at one point I think he was the number eight best-selling book on all of Amazon and With that welcome the show James. How are doing today? Hey, yeah, I’m doing well. Thanks so much for having me back It’s gonna talk to you. Yeah, so first off congrats on the book Thank you. I’m actually just curious what it takes to hit the New York Times bestseller list these days It’s like is there a strategy for doing so is there a way to game it?

01:23
So there are two answers here. So the first answer, what does it take? I can only tell you what it took for me. So the kind of high level was I wrote two articles a week on JamesClear.com starting in 2012. I did that for like three years and built my platform up and got an audience of, I think it was around 200, 250,000 email subscribers around that point after about three years.

01:49
And I leveraged that the size of that platform, that audience to get introduced to agents and publishers. And we put together a book proposal that took about three months and pitched it to, I think, 17 or 19 publishers. And then I think it was 19. And I think we got meetings with seven. So I flew to New York for a week, went and met with all these publishers with my agent. We were lucky. We had a good amount of interest. So we got bids from four.

02:19
and then ended up selecting our favorite one out of the bunch. then I signed the contract to write the book in a year. It became very apparent that I needed more time than that. And so I went back and asked for an additional year, and they very kindly gave it to me. So it took me two years of writing and research. That was easily the hardest part, the most suffering. I felt like…

02:46
I was really hard to write under contract. felt like there were a lot of expectations to produce something great. I was really worried that people wouldn’t enjoy it or that the publisher wouldn’t think it was good enough. Um, handed that in actually three months late from the extended deadline. So two years and three months of writing. And then we spent nine months planning the launch and, uh, marketing and prepping and doing interviews and all that stuff, getting the book, you know, on the publisher side, they were getting it typeset and printed and all that type of thing. And,

03:16
Then the book released. The three months before launch, I did 85 interviews in like 10 weeks or 12 weeks, something crazy like that. A bunch of blog posts, emails to my own audience. Basically any and every favor I could call in. I was like working on that. And that culminated with a bunch of exposure on launch day. I was on CBS this morning. I did a TV segment. So just like a ton of marketing.

03:43
push in addition to trying to write like a really fantastic book. And all of that came together and we had a really great launch week and then ended up hitting the New York Times bestseller list and then we hit it again. So the first time was we were number five in advice and how to and then the second time and still right now it’s number three in business. And so yeah, the book, the launch has done really well, but that’s what it looked like for me.

04:12
So that’s the it really and I like give that whole process because it was definitely not like a one-week thing I mean it was like a so yeah, I know that I was just kind of curious how many books you actually have to sell it’s in like the first week, right? Yeah, so they have two different types of lists. The first one is calculated weekly so And the second one is calculated monthly and so we we ended up hitting both So one is based on weekly sales one is based on monthly sales

04:42
For weekly sales, it does depend on what category you’re in. So some categories like general nonfiction, like memoirs and things like that. I’m not sure what the numbers are for that. I think they’re actually a little bit lower from what I’ve heard from people, but I don’t know for sure. Then what you need in like advice and how to, which is the category I was in.

05:04
And this gets a little bit to your question of like, is there a way to game it or not? Certainly many people have tried. I was not really interested in doing some of those things that are, I guess you would say like on the margin of like, oh, is this, you know, allowed or not? Like some people, some speakers will try to do things like buy, I won’t name any names, but there are people who have bought like, you know, 10,000 or 20,000 copies and then have them sitting in their garage. And so they’re like,

05:34
They bought the books so that it would look like that number of sales came through during the first week and they could get on the list, but they didn’t actually go to readers or anything like that. So I was like really adamant about every copy we sell needs to go to an actual person. you know, or stuff like you’ll see a lot of speakers will trade their fee for books.

05:54
So, you know, they’ll say like I’ll come talk but in you if you do it in these three months when I’m prepping for launch then you won’t have to pay me you can just buy, you know 500 books instead or something like that. So people will try to do stuff like that. There are some really weird services that you could hire. I don’t actually know if they still exist because I think the New York Times like became savvy to them but for a while people would pay like

06:21
They would pay a service, I don’t know, 10, 20, $30,000. I don’t know how much it was. It was definitely in the tens of thousands. And they would, that company would have like a bunch of little, uh, they would have people go out to different stores and like buy individual copies of books or place individual orders on Amazon. Now you were really buying like 10,000 copies through that company, but they would have their employees like place them all as individual orders. So they all looked like they were individual people buying and they would spread them out across the country and stuff.

06:50
And all of that stuff is just like a lot. mean, first of all, I just don’t know if it’s a good way to spend your time, whether it’s ethical or not. But also just it’s all just an effort to try to get on the list. Yeah. Now, some of the bestseller lists like I think USA Today, we hit the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, bestseller list, the USA Today list, Publishers Weekly, the Independent Booksellers list.

07:19
And some of them are strictly based on sales. Like I’m pretty sure the publishers weekly list and the USA Today list are like whatever book sells in most copies. That’s the number one book. Now the New York Times list is a little bit of a black box. I mean, it’s the most elite list to be on and nobody quite knows how it works. But from what I can tell you, you asked earlier how many copies you need to sell. I think 10,000 is roughly

07:49
The the minimum like kind of rule of thumb you’ll hear people throw out now that doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna get on because it depends on what week you’re launching and how many copies other books are selling that week but as a rule of thumb if you do 10,000 in a week then that’s kind of the beer in the game now just because you have that money sell does not mean that you’re gonna get on the list and The New York Times will sometimes make an editorial decision and say, you know this is not the kind of book that we want to have on here or

08:18
We think that the way you got these sales looks a little suspicious. so like I’ve heard from people who I heard from one author who sold 4,000 individual copies and then they had one company that purchased 6,000 copies. So they thought, Hey, I sold my 10. Like I should be, uh, you know, I should be in the running here. But I think the New York times looks at that and they think, well, really you sold like 4,001, um, because you just had like one big customer that said, yes. Um,

08:46
And so if they’re comparing, that person to somebody else who sold 10,000 individual orders, I think they tend to give the nod to the person who has the more individual readers. so, you know, authors love to complain about it because there are a lot of authors that think they should have been on because they had a certain number of sales. They, you know, they got like taken off or whatever. And whether that was true or not, who knows? Because, you know, nobody knows exactly what numbers the New York Times is getting each week and how many sales other books made.

09:16
But once you make it, now I’m like, yeah, that’s great. I love it there. But I think it’s awesome. So it’s funny to be on the other side. I felt comfortable asking that question because I knew you’re not the type of person to game the system. I thought like a lot of people do it. And I guess you could make an argument for it if you were like, well, if I get on the list, then my main thing is speaking like for me, speaking is a small portion of my business. I don’t really do that much of it.

09:45
But I guess if you were like a full time one, people find ways to rationalize it. They’re like, Oh, well, I’ll just buy my way on the list for 20 grand. And then, you know, I’ll be able to charge more at every speaking event for, you know, into the future. Cause I can say I’m a New York Times with a seller. So I think people rationalize it that way. Um, but for me, I, again, separate from the ethical considerations, which I think are questionable in themselves, but like, could you really be proud of it?

10:11
I don’t know. I, you know, I mean, I just spent six years building an audience and three years writing a book and planning this launch. I mean, I put everything I possibly had into it and it felt great to hit the list because there was so much sacrifice before it. But if I knew that I’d just got on there cause I wrote a check, I feel like it would be a totally different experience. And so, um, I hear you in a sense, I, I like, wouldn’t have wanted to do it anyway, even if I had a good business reason.

10:40
Which I don’t but you know, even if I did I I feel like it would have taken away from it. So anyway, I’m kind of going on about it It’s it’s it’s a little bit of a black box and But I can say that it feels fantastic with it if it works out in your favor so let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about habits and What I wanted to do actually was frame our talk in the context of starting or growing a successful business because a lot of my readers and listeners

11:08
They start out strong, but they kind of fizzle out in the long run if they don’t see immediate gains And so what I was hoping to do actually is maybe use your book as a framework How does one develop the proper habits to follow through on a business idea until things finally start taking off? Yeah, it’s a great question. So I mean first of all just from a high level I like to think about habits is what I call like the compound interest of self-improvement and

11:33
The reason I like that phrase habits are the same way that like money multiplies through compound interest. You know, you save up a little bit. It doesn’t feel like much in the beginning. Uh, in many cases that curve, that compound interest curves, like really flat, almost like a plateau. And then the hockey stick portion is only years or decades down the line. Um, so it doesn’t feel like much at first, but then you turn around two or five or 10 years later and it’s like, wow, this really added up.

11:58
I think habits are kind of like that as well. The same way that money multiplies their compound interest, the effects of your habits can multiply as you repeat them over time. And on any given day, you know, the same way that like saving 10 bucks doesn’t really feel like much. Making a choice that’s like 1 % better, 1 % worse, a little bit improved, a little bit better habit or a little bit worse habit doesn’t, it doesn’t really feel like much. You know, what’s the difference between

12:26
Eating a burger and fries for lunch or eating a salad It’s not really a whole lot on any given day like your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night The scale doesn’t really change but it’s only when you look back five or ten years later that you’re like oh wow that choice of what I ate for lunch really does matter and So this is one of the core philosophies of atomic habits one of the core ideas in the book this idea of how can we try to find ways to get 1 % better each day?

12:52
And if you can capture those small advantages, if you can master those little habits, stay in and day out, then you can end up with a really remarkable or powerful result in the long run. And I think that not only applies to our lives, but it certainly applies to our businesses. If you can just try to find a way to get a little bit of a 1 % margin for improvement daily in something you do or monthly in the financial state of your business, I mean, that can really add up over the broad span of time. And what does that look like in the context of

13:20
Like what is like a 1 % gain or something that you might do we can talk about your blog or how you built up an audience for sure Yeah, so I think the the first thing is You don’t need to do something more than what you’re already doing You just need to find a way to show up more consistently than you have before so like in other words You don’t need to increase the intensity like I’m not saying for then. This is I’m focusing on the very beginning now What’s the first thing I do? Like I’m not saying well you need to write a radically better blog post

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or you need to become massively better at sales calls, or you need to massively improve your skills at writing a sales page. What I am saying though is, let’s find a way to make it easy to show up and do those things more consistently than you’ve done before. So it’s kind of like, yeah, you could do the same workout at the gym, but let’s just make sure you miss fewer workouts. that’s the first piece. So in the context of my business, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday.

14:18
for the first three years. And it was really that consistency, it was really that writing habit that set me on a different trajectory as a writer and an entrepreneur. And that was the thing that made it possible for me to build this audience and get the book deal and so on. Okay, so I mean, it’s easy to say that, right? But how do you make sure you stay on that schedule? How do you have self-control to do that? Okay, so I wanna answer this in two ways. I wanna come back to the self-control piece.

14:47
So the first part is I like to suggest people utilize what I call the two minute rule. So you take whatever habit you’re trying to build, whatever habit is relevant for your business, whether it’s writing blog posts or making podcasts or making sales calls or whatever, and scale it down to just the first two minutes. read 40 books a year becomes read one page, or call 20 clients every month becomes make one sales call, or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.

15:16
So, you whatever the habit is, you scale it down to just the first two minutes. Now, sometimes it sounds silly to people because especially with like health examples, you know, I’ll say something like, um, there’s a reader of mine, he ended up losing over a hundred pounds. And one of the things he did was he, uh, went to the gym, but he didn’t allow himself to stay for longer than five minutes. So we were like, well, that sounds ridiculous. Like going to the gym for five minutes, isn’t going to get you in shape. Um, but what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up.

15:46
And this is a crucial thing about any habit, business related or otherwise, a habit must be established before it can be improved. And so like, if you don’t become the type of person who goes to the gym for five minutes, you don’t have a chance to be the type of person who works out for 45 minutes, four days a week. Or if you don’t become the type of person who makes one sales call, you don’t have the chance to be the person who makes 20 sales calls every month, month in and month out. And so we’re trying to scale it down to that, like, I guess we’d call it a gateway habit.

16:15
the thing that initiates the response. And let me give you another example here. So I like to refer to these moments as decisive moments, these two minutes that determine the next chunk of time or get you moving in the right direction, a little bit of momentum. So for me, there’s a moment every morning where I’ll sit down at my computer and either I open up Evernote and I start working on the next article I’m going to write or

16:44
I go to ESPN and I check the latest sports news. And what happens in the next hour of my day is really determined by what happens in those like 45 seconds. It’s like if I can master that decisive moment of opening up Evernote and starting to write, then I’ve got a productive hour in front of me. And I think that no matter what your business looks like, there are going to be four or five, maybe eight or 10 of those decisive moments throughout each day. And if you can just pour your energy into mastering that,

17:14
then you can live a productive day. You can have a more effective time working on your business. So that’s the first lesson, master those decisive moments. The second piece comes back to your question about self-control. And this is, think, the common narrative for habits, for productivity, for effectiveness, is you just need to want it more. You need to try harder. You need grit and perseverance. You need to work smarter.

17:41
You need to make sure that you try to optimize things. certainly working hard is valuable and it’s an important skill. But if you look at some of the research on self-control, and I cover this more in chapter seven of Atomic Habits, a lot of the research will show that the people who exhibit the highest self-control, who you look at from the outside and you’re like, wow, they must have a lot of willpower. Actually, the thing that distinguishes them from most other folks is that they operate

18:11
live and work in an environment that has fewer temptations. So they are able to exhibit more willpower simply because they’re being tempted less. And I think that that is the lesson to take away from this is what’s the best way to improve my willpower? What’s the best way to make it more likely that I’ll show up and do the right thing each day? It’s not to push harder or to just try harder or to say work more. The solution, the best lever to pull is to redesign your environment.

18:40
so that you’re tempted less. Put the objects that prompt your good behaviors in more obvious locations, reduce the friction of taking a good task, and put the objects that derail you or distract you in less obvious locations, and reduce the, or increase the friction of doing something unproductive. And we can talk more about that, but I’ll just pop It’s funny because I’m just thinking about all this in the context of raising my kids right now. And we’re kind of picking and choosing our kids as friends based on like both their personality and their work ethic.

19:10
Because we want our kids to hang out with those other kids who are trying really hard hoping that it’ll Just kind of rub off on them. Really. I mean, it’s the it’s the environment that they’re in that’s actually a brilliant strategy because Children are our master imitators, which you know anybody who has like a two-year-old can tell you that right? Like you say a cuss word and then they pick it up instantly even if you don’t want them to or like, you know They imitate whatever you do But as children age they tend to they continue to imitate

19:39
but they tend to stop in imitating their parents as much and start imitating their peers much more. so there’s a great book called the nurture assumption by Judith, rich Harris that talks about the influence of peer groups on how children grow up. parents have a significant influence too, but that influence is largely genetic. It’s largely passed down through the genes. But, but the way that parents can influence one of the best levers they can use to influence their children is by

20:08
Choosing, you know, what city you live in, where you go to school, what extracurriculars you’re a part of. In other words, choosing like what other kids they get exposed to. And so your strategy there of trying to pick their friends by what their friends’ are is a smart one. We pick up all kinds of habits from the people around us and often we want to do the things that our peers are doing. And so that’s a good way for parents to subtly shape or at least influence in a little way.

20:34
The the habits of their kids can’t control it totally but that’s actually probably more effective than like Trying to force them to do something you want but you’re not always gonna be in the ideal environment, right? So there’s got to be a little bit more to this Yeah, absolutely. So In the book I offer four different strategies for building good habits and breaking bad ones and I’ll just go over them real quickly here they’re

20:58
tons of examples in the book, of course, but we can go over a few of them as they relate to business in this conversation. before I do, I’ll just say that not all four of these will always be working for you. And so you can really look at them as like a toolbox or a set of strategies that you can rely on. And when one thing isn’t working in your favor, maybe you pull on the other three levers, and that’s enough to get you to do the more productive or more effective action. So let me guide us a little bit.

21:27
One common thing at least that I have a problem with is procrastination. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, let me give you all let me give these four and I’ll give you some examples related to procrastination and procrastination is a really broad topic, right? Like there’s a million ways you could procrastinate, but I’ll just go over some common ones. So the four stages that I like to break a habit into and again, this is all in detail in the book, but just real quickly, I break a habit. I heard it from you, the man himself.

21:56
Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, so cue, craving, response, reward. These are the four stages. So there’s some kind of cue that precedes the habit, which is like a prompt that gets you to pay attention to what’s going on, something that’s happening in your environment. There’s a cue that picks up your attention. I’ll give you an example in a second. Second, there’s a craving. There’s some kind of interpretation of that cue, what it means.

22:20
And based on what you think it means, you take a particular action. So that’s the response, which is the third stage. And then finally, your action delivers some kind of result. There’s some type of reward or consequence that comes after that. So for example, let’s say you walk into the kitchen and you see a loaf of bread on the counter. It’s in the morning. So the loaf of bread, visual cue. So that’s first stage. Your prediction is, oh, I want to make some toast or that would be tasty. And so you take out a piece of bread, put it in the toaster. That’s the response.

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pops up a minute later, you get the toast, you get to eat it, that’s the reward. Okay, so cue, craving, response, reward. But you can just as easily imagine that at a different time, say, you know, 10 minutes later after you’ve eaten breakfast, you walk back into the kitchen and you see that loaf of bread. And now the cue has a different meaning. Your state has changed, you’re full instead of hungry. And so you interpret that cue in a different way. Now your craving is not there, it’s non-existing, you interpret it as, there’s the bread, but I’m not hungry now.

23:19
and so you don’t take the same response. So this type of thing is happening all day long. We’re taking in cues, we’re making predictions about what to do next, we’re taking action, and then getting some kind of outcome or result. So from those four stages, we can have a step for each stage for making it easier to build good habits and harder to fall into bad ones. So I call these the four laws of behavior change.

23:47
The first law is to make it obvious. So you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious and available and visible. The second law is to make it attractive. The more attractive a habit is, the more likely you’ll fall into it and perform it. The third law is make it easy. So the more easy, frictionless, convenient a behavior is, the more likely you are to do it. And the fourth law related to reward is make it satisfying.

24:13
The more satisfying and enjoyable an experience is, the more you want to repeat it again in the future. if you want to, so those four, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying, explain how to build a good habit. And if you want to break a bad habit, you just invert them. So rather than make the cues obvious, you want to make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. And so let’s go through a couple of examples of what this looks like for procrastination since you mentioned that.

24:43
Real quick though, making something attractive, the thing here is a lot of what’s involved in creating a business kind of sucks, right? It’s boring. So I’m kind of curious, maybe once you address the procrastination question, how do you make something that’s really mundane and boring attractive? Yeah, it’s a great question. Well, so I’ll just answer that right now when we come back to procrastination as a larger topic. So make it attractive. There are a couple different things that influence this.

25:12
First of all, let me answer just a, I’ll give you a quick tactic before I talk about the kind of the overarching thought here. So quick tactic for making something more attractive, you can use a strategy that’s called temptation bundling. And so the idea is you stack something you want to do, something you enjoy doing with the thing that you know you need to do. So one of the examples I give in the book, there’s this guy, he was an engineering student.

25:39
And he knew that he needed to be exercising more, but he also knew that he liked watching Netflix and probably liked it too much. And so he linked up his computer to a stationary bike so that Netflix would pause if the bike was not running. So he had to be cycling the whole time if he wanted to watch, you know, a 30 minute show or something. And that’s a good way of forcing yourself to do the unattractive thing or making the unattractive thing, which in this case was cycling.

26:08
more attractive because it meant, hey, now I get to watch Netflix. And you can do that with a bunch of things. Like if you are really bad with your email inbox and you feel like you never focus on that. I heard of a woman who she only gets a pedicure if she works on overdue emails while she’s getting it. So just like that, reward yourself by doing the thing you don’t want to do.

26:32
Another one, Katie Milkman, who’s the researcher at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. She was the one who came up with this name, Temptation Bundling. And she realized that she really wanted to read The Hunger Games. She got like really obsessed with the book series when it came out. And so she made a rule for herself where she was only allowed to read The Hunger Games while she was on the treadmill at the gym. And so those kinds of strategies are ways to make the unattractive thing more attractive.

27:01
And you can do that in different ways. Like there’s a one that’s real. I think some habits that are really good. This is really good for or what I would call habits of avoidance. So things like don’t drink alcohol for 30 days or don’t spend money on Amazon or don’t go out to eat and stay at home and make a meal instead. And habits like that are like inherently difficult because you’re just resisting temptation. It’s like all you’re doing is not doing something. And so that doesn’t feel good. You just have to sit with this craving.

27:30
But you can flip it on its head a little bit. so one of my readers, he and his wife, they wanted to eat out less and save money by cooking more. so normally they’re just resisting the temptation to go to dinner, to go out to eat at the restaurant. But instead what they did was they set up a little savings account and they labeled it trip to Europe. And then anytime they stayed home and cooked dinner instead of going out to the restaurant, they would transfer $50 over to the savings account.

28:00
And so they still had to put the work in of cooking the meal, but they got the immediate enjoyment of seeing the savings account grow. And that’s really the ultimate lesson that I’m sharing here with this temptation bundling strategy is how can you give yourself a little bit of an immediate enjoyment from something else while you’re doing the difficult thing? And so there, you obviously this depends on what you, what is enjoyable to you, but like from a business standpoint, there was someone that I worked with who

28:28
uh… he hated taking these meetings these calls and he really just didn’t like being inside all day like he didn’t like being hunched over his desk and so he changes so that he only took meetings while going on a walk through the park that was near his office and so taking a meeting that he got to go outside and go for a walk and uh… it can be in large or small ways but anytime you get an immediate bit of satisfaction enjoyment with it suddenly the unattractive thing becomes a little more attractive you know i’m just looking back at my childhood right now and i think my mom did this to me uh… i really hated

28:58
I like I hated it, but she would take me to ice cream after every single piano lesson and after a while I started looking forward to them just for the ice cream mmm Yeah, playing piano meant getting ice cream. Yes. It’s like we framed what that that cue or what that habit meant in your mind That’s really smart Yeah, so that’s so that’s one way to think about how to make it attractive But there’s a there’s a broader conversation here, which I think is really important for entrepreneurs certainly was very important in my

29:27
business kind of narrative and story Which is that the social environment really changes what habits are attractive to us and which ones are unattractive You know like when I was a kid and I don’t know that any kid grows up thinking Wow I’d really like to think more about email funnels and like, know workflows You know, like no kid is thinking that you know But now it’s kind of exciting and interesting to me and part of that is because my skills have improved but another big part of it is that

29:57
I get rewarded for having a big email list. And not just like, you know, financially with the business, but also, you know, people will praise you for it or congratulate you on it or ask you, how did you do that? That’s interesting. How did you grow that? And all of those social signals increase the attractiveness of thinking about the conversion rate and how I design forms and, know, like, how could I improve this a little bit more? And so my point is the thing that we’re rewarded for, the thing that we

30:27
get little markers of social status for or respect from others for naturally becomes more attractive. And that is dependent not only on your results, but also on the group or tribe that you’re a part of. Like I could be around a bunch of people, people I went to, some of my friends from college or things like that. They don’t think about email lists, they don’t know about it, they don’t care about it. And so, like in that group, I can throw out a number and they’re like, well, you

30:55
Great, I guess that’s good for you, but like it doesn’t mean anything doesn’t have any status associated with it and so It would be less attractive for me to work on those things when I’m hanging around that group You know we hang out for other reasons, but it’s not as it’s not as important there because I’m not as rewarded for it and so So that kind of just circles back to your environment point that you made earlier Yes, but earlier when I was giving examples I was talking mostly about the physical environment and this I would say is mostly about the social environment

31:25
And both are crucial factors for building better habits. so I’ll talk, let me come back to the procrastination question you asked and I’ll give some physical environment examples. But just to wrap up the social environment idea, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be French or Australian. And some of them are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your local CrossFit gym.

31:53
or a volunteer at the local school. And all of those tribes, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act as a member of that tribe. And you can see this in people’s habits all day long. you walk onto an elevator, and you’re in this little tribe of three people. And the expectation is you turn around to face the front. If you face the back of the elevator, it’s a little weird. It’s not what people are expecting.

32:23
Or you go to a job interview and maybe there are four people interviewing you and you’re sitting there and the expectation is you’re going to wear a suit and a tie or a dress or something nice. Now it doesn’t have to be that way. Like you could face the back of the elevator or you could wear a bathing suit to a job interview, but we don’t do that because it violates the shared expectations of the group. And so the point here is that when habits go with the grain of the tribe that you’re in, they’re very attractive.

32:52
And when they go against the grain of the tribe that you’re in, they’re very unattractive. And so one way to kind of hack your habits or to increase the odds that you’ll do the thing you want to do is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it’s normal in that group, then it will become attractive for you to do it because doing so helps you fit in. And this was huge for me as an entrepreneur because I did not have any entrepreneurs in my family.

33:20
and really didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurs either. I kind of vaguely knew that like some people run businesses, but I didn’t have anybody to look to. And so for the first like three to six months that I started out, I just emailed a ton of people, well over a hundred that were already doing the kind of thing that I wanted to do, but they were already full time. And I just asked if they wanted to chat on Skype and most of them said no, but I would say like maybe 30 or so said yes.

33:48
And so by the time I got six months in, now I had a few dozen people that if I had a problem or if I was dealing with, had an idea, I could go to them with the questions that had. And I could also see what, like, what are they doing normally? You know, what are their habits daily? And I didn’t have to like consciously ask that question, right? You just kind of soak it up as you’re part of a tribe, as you’re part of a group, you see what everybody else around you is doing. And then you start to imitate and do those things because that’s the normal thing to do there.

34:17
You know, you see this all the time, people join like a CrossFit gym and then they start to eat paleo and they buy a certain type of knee sleeves and a certain brand of workout shoes and like, you know, they’re picking up all these other habits that they never really thought about doing, but that’s just what people do in that particular tribe. Yeah, in the context of business then, that’s why it’s key to go to conferences and events where you can meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. At least that’s how I started taking off in my business. It started when I started going to events.

34:46
100 % and I, you know, so I did those Skype calls. Then I went to my first conference about six months in and what was really nice for me in that case was that I already knew like maybe 10 people from those Skype chats and those emails that were going to be there. And so I didn’t go in cold. I had like a couple of people I could hang out with or talk to at least, which was nice. And then of course I met a bunch of other people from those conferences. So I did, I did some conferences for the first two or three years.

35:11
And then the last couple of years, I’ve started to host my own events, which are small, usually like eight people or so. But, you know, it’s a really great high touch way to see, you know, soak up all of that kind of implicit knowledge that everybody else has about what they do and why they do it and all that type of thing. But the overarching point there is no matter what habit you’re trying to build, the habits that are normal within your tribe will be attractive to you because they help you fit in, they help you belong.

35:39
and we all have a deep desire to belong. So James, I don’t mean to skip around, but I said this question just kind of popped into my mind also. One thing that I see among people who just kind of starting out in business is they’re looking for quick wins and oftentimes the payoff is like many years later, but it’s painful for those many years, right? And you gotta, you gotta get used to what I call like the suck. So how, if you’re not getting immediate gratification,

36:08
How do you train yourself to kind of persist? Yeah, it’s such a great question and it’s really it’s not just business. I mean central to all habits, right? There’s kind of this like plateau in the beginning so the the analogy that I like to use or the metaphor that I like to bring up is the story of an ice cube So, you know say you’re in a room and the room is cold it’s like 25 degrees ice cubes sitting on the table and you can like see your breath and Slowly the temperature starts to increase 26 27 28 29

36:37
still this ice cube is sitting there like nothing’s changed, 30, 31. And then all of sudden you get to 32 degrees and you hit this phase transition, the ice cube begins to melt. This is like this one degree shift, no different than all the other one degree shifts that came before it, but suddenly something new happens. And I think that in many cases, the process of achieving a change or building a business, it’s like that because you’re…

37:04
you’re stuck on this plateau of latent potential early on. You’re putting work in, you’re banking reps and effort and time and energy, and you don’t really have anything to show for it. The ice cube still hasn’t melted. But if you’re willing to stick with it, then you hit this phase transition. And so the question that you had is like, well, how do you get through that period? I think first of all, just knowing that it happens is helpful. It helps reset your expectations a little bit because a lot of the time we think that

37:32
Progress should be linear that we put a little bit of work in and we get a little bit of results. So if we put a lot of work in, we’ll get a lot of results. But actually it’s not this like 45 degree angle linear progression. It’s more like that hockey stick or compound curve that I mentioned before, where you’re kind of stuck on this plateau for a while and all the greatest gains are delayed. So that’s the first thing. The second thing though, I think that this is

37:59
One of the reasons that small habits really matter, perhaps the deeper purpose why they matter, which is they reinforce a particular type of identity. They’re reinforced being a certain kind of person. so, like in the book, I use this phrase of, you know, the goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book. The goal is to become a writer. And I think we could say that about entrepreneurship as well. Like the goal is not to build a business. The goal is to become an entrepreneur, to be that kind of person.

38:28
to be a creator or to be financially independent or to have that identity and I think the way to foster that identity is through small wins through small habits on a daily basis and so in a sense Every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person you want to become it’s like You’re these little habits or how you embody a being a particular type of person or having a particular type of identity. So

38:57
Every day that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized, or each time that you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer, or every time you make a sales call, you embody the identity of someone who is good at selling. And so on any given day, those little actions don’t count for very much, but each time you do them, it’s like casting a vote, building up a little mound of evidence that this is who I am. And I think that.

39:26
Ultimately true behavior change is identity change because it’s like it’s one thing to say I want this I want a million dollar business. I want to have a best-selling book I want to have a popular blog, but it’s something very different to say I am this I am an author I am a blogger I am an entrepreneur because once you believe that about yourself You really aren’t even pursuing behavior change anymore you’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you already believe that you are and So I think the way to get through those

39:56
that get through the suck as you call it to get through those periods where it’s really difficult and you don’t have the results that you want is to focus on fostering that identity. Even if you’re not happy with how your body looks and you still want to lose weight and all you could do after a long day of travel was five pushups before you collapsed on the bed, well, maybe that’s not the result you want. Maybe you’re still in the suck from that standpoint, but.

40:22
you did those five pushups and at least you’re the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. At least you’re the type of person who fostered that identity. And I think that on the hard days in business, that’s what I tried to remind myself of. Like how can I show up and cast a vote for the desired identity, even if the results are still long in the future? So it means you just try to show up, even if it showing up in this particular case isn’t spending a lot of time or whatever. You’re just, you’re just out of habit.

40:52
Working on your business, even if it’s not a whole lot at that given moment You’re trying to cast a vote for being the type of person that you want to be rather than worrying about what the results are in that moment and I think that you know There are all kinds of ways that you can show up in small ways and we I think we all either have done this or know someone who does this where you Waste time on frivolous things, you know You just like putter around and do a bunch of little things that don’t make much difference and that’s that’s different than what I’m talking about that that feels like a waste of time, but I’m

41:22
What I’m talking about is taking a small action that reinforces your desired identity, the long-term identity of you or your business that you want to foster and the type of person you want to become. It sounds like step one is to actually figure out what that is, right? I think so. And that’s why I talk about in chapter two of the book. I think it’s a very central question to ask yourself. Now, the good news is I don’t think it needs to be that hard. I think most people know

41:47
They may not, questions like what identity do you want or what are your values? Those are like big questions and sometimes they’re hard to answer. But I think most people do know what kind of results they want. So you can just say, you know, what do you wanna, maybe you lose 40 pounds in six months or maybe you want to double your income this year or something like that. And once you get a pretty clear picture of the result that you want, then you can sort of reverse engineer it and ask yourself, well, who is the type of person?

42:13
that could lose 40 pounds? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts or who’s the type of person that could double their income? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who creates one new product each month or something like that. And once you reverse engineer the outcome and ask yourself that question, who is the type of person that could achieve that? Then you become a little more clear on what that identity might be. Like if I want to become a New York Times bestselling author,

42:42
I would probably follow in your footsteps and then write set aside time to write two days a week and be consistent about that for three years, for example. That’s a great example of scaling it down. It’s like who’s the type of person that could write a New York Times bestseller? Well, it might be the type of person that has a really big email list, like hundreds of thousands of people that they could tell about the book when it comes out. Okay, well, who is the type of person that could have an email list of 500,000 people? Well, maybe it’s the type of person that writes every week. And so then that becomes the identity that you’re trying to build. I just want to be the type of person who writes every week.

43:12
And that line of questioning, I think, leads you more, it leads you a little bit away. What it does is it clarifies the fact that your outcomes in life are a lagging measure of your habits, right? Like, the number of email subscribers I have is a lagging measure of my writing habit. And your weight is a lagging measure of your reading habits, your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. You’re really just trying to figure out how do I need to show up each day to get that long-term outcome that I’m looking for.

43:42
Right. And then adopting the little detailed habits of that individual to get where you want. in the case of writing a book, the writing part is just one little habit. And all these little habits that you do, if we were to delve deeply into your life, James, all add up to where you are today. Right. And the things that we were talking about earlier, like optimizing your environment or choosing the right tribe or tweaking little elements of that, the two minute rule and scaling it down,

44:10
Like all of those are strategies for building those habits that surround that core identity of I want to be the type of person who writes every week. Right. James, I think that’s actually a good point to to conclude this interview because we’ve already been chatting for quite a while. Where can people find more about your book? Where can they get it? Yeah, thanks so much for chatting. I enjoyed the conversation. So the book is called Atomic Habits and you can get it at Atomic Habits dot com.

44:38
And on that page, I have a couple bonus downloads and stuff too. There’s a guide on how to apply the ideas to parenting, a guide on how to apply the ideas to business. There’s a cheat sheet for the core ideas in the book and just a one-pager you can look at and review, a template for tracking your habits. Anyway, so all of that is at atomichabits.com. What’s funny about this is just our little chat today has kind of reinforced my parenting style a little bit.

45:07
because I’ve been pushing my kids hard because I want to get into the habit of feeling like they’re smart and at the top of their class. And I talk to certain people and they think I’m crazy, but maybe that just means I need to change my environment a little bit. Nice. Well, congratulations. I’m glad that habits are on the top of mind and important for you. think they’re, something all parents should think about deeply and, and really all people. mean, they, they impact all of our lives.

45:35
And just for the benefit of the listeners here, I have actually read James’ book and it’s excellent. And I was just kind of playing dumb in the interview today because I wanted to highlight some of the key points that resonated with me. But thanks a lot, James, for coming to the show. I really appreciate your time. Wonderful. Thanks, dude. All right. Take care.