James Clear has been writing about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement for over a decade. Author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, he joins to talk about his career and how we can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, so you have a few bad habits. Maybe you bite your nails, maybe you drink too much, too often. Oh and cheese. Is there too much cheese in your life? I know there is in mine. And don’t get me started on flossing. And yet, it’s hard. It’s really, really, really hard to break a bad habit. And it’s just as hard to get a good habit going. Or is it?
James Clear thinks it’s doable, and he wrote a blockbuster best selling book about it titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. James Clear is a writer, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. And he’s here to tell us about his life, his career, and how we maybe can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals. James Clear, welcome to Design Matters.
James Clear:
Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for having me. And I think cheese is only a good habit. I can’t categorize that as bad. That sounds great.
Debbie Millman:
Well, we’re starting out in a very good place. James, I understand that you tend to geek out about ultra light travel bags. Why?
James Clear:
Yeah, I don’t know. In my twenties I had this urge where I really wanted to see the world and get out. I had never been abroad until I was 23 I think. Eventually after I graduated college, I got a passport and started wanting to travel. And I was really into photography at the time, and so I was doing a lot of landscape photography or street photography in different places.
I can remember one trip in particular where I landed in Morocco and I was in Marrakesh, and I was taking some pictures and hanging out and doing some stuff, and. Then a few days later I went to Casablanca and I got off the train. It was 4:00 or something or 3:00, and for some reason I wasn’t able to get to my hotel quickly and the sun was setting soon, and that’s the hour when the light is best for photos. And so I wanted to take pictures for the next couple hours before the sun was gone, but I didn’t have time to drop my bags off. And I was so happy that I had figured out how to travel with just one bag because it would’ve been a ridiculous scene for me to be carting around wheeling all this luggage around trying to take photos for a couple hours. So that was probably the trip where I was like, “It’s definitely worth the effort to try to figure out how to travel with just one bag.”
Debbie Millman:
Let’s go back in time a little. You were born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. Your mom is a nurse. Your dad played professional baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals in the minor leagues, and still live in the same house you grew up in. You used to live in Ohio as well. Why Ohio?
James Clear:
I mean, the main answer I think is family. The main answer is the people I love live here. But I like Ohio too. I have pride in being from here. My parents’ house, which they do still live in. It’s about five minutes away from my grandparents’ house, so I spent a large portion of my childhood running around on my grandparents’ farm. They both live maybe 45 minutes north of Cincinnati. It’s a little more built up now than when I was growing up. I grew up, it was much more rural. Being outdoors, and running around the fields, and feeding the cows, that was all part of how I grew up, and I loved being outside there. I have a cabin in the woods now too that I love to go out to, and I have dreams of taking my grandkids out there the way that I spent time on my grandparents’ farm. I don’t know, it occupies a warm place in my heart and I’m proud to be from Hamilton, and proud to be from Ohio. And all of the people I love are still here, so I spend a lot of time here.
Debbie Millman:
Well, having cows then makes sense regarding your love of cheese.
James Clear:
That’s right. I didn’t think about that, but it started early.
Debbie Millman:
Now I know that every Sunday, you and your family and all of your cousins and extended family would go over to your grandparents’ house, and your grandmother would make dinner every Sunday for 18 people.
James Clear:
I know. She was a saint.
Debbie Millman:
What kinds of things would she make for 18 people? That’s like a Thanksgiving dinner every week.
James Clear:
It was a lot of spaghetti, a lot of pasta a lot of the time. Lasagna and spaghetti are the two that I remember the most. Every Sunday we would go to church in the morning and then we’d go over to my grandparents for breakfast. So my grandma would cook us breakfast. That was just my immediate family and my grandparents. That’s seven or eight people. Then we’d go home for four hours, and then at 3:00 we would come back to their house and then she would cook dinner for 18 people.
Debbie Millman:
You’re right, she’s a saint.
James Clear:
Yeah. And I say that jokingly because of all the work and everything that she did for us. She actually passed away recently. She passed away within the last year. And some of our extended family, some cousins of hers and stuff came down from Columbus for the funeral. And one of them said that he looked at his coworkers before he drove down that day and he was like, ‘I’m telling you, she’s the sweetest lady I’ve ever met.” But I think we all have people in our lives that we love to say things like that about, but she actually is the one person I know that when you said things like that at her funeral, you weren’t just being nice about it and kind of glossing over the tougher parts of her life. I truly don’t know if I ever heard her criticize someone, which is just an insane thing to be able to say about somebody. She’s almost too nice about it. It was one of those things where it was like truly if I didn’t have something nice to say, I just didn’t say anything at all. She was a special lady, and I’m fortunate to have had her in my life.
Debbie Millman:
James, I understand that when you were four years old, you saw a cowboy on TV and decided right then and there you wanted to have lasso and swing it. So you took a screwdriver and tied it to a piece of string, and swung it around your head in the backyard. This resulted in your cutting your eyelid and getting your first stitches.
And fast forward as you’re growing up, you were playing sports and they had a significant role in your life. You swam, you played basketball and football. But because you were always getting hit in football, you switched to baseball. And I was wondering, especially as we’ll go into what happened in high school while you were playing sports. I’m wondering, are you accident prone?
James Clear:
Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think of myself as being super reckless or anything, but I don’t know. I have a lot of experiences with stitches. Yeah, I don’t know. I just wanted to make a lasso and I thought, “I’ll tie a screwdriver on the string that’ll do the trick.” And my mom was in the kitchen and looked out the window and saw me just whirling this around my head. I was really lucky though, and actually that’s kind of a theme throughout many of the injuries that I had is that it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. I cut my eyelid but not my eye, and I ended up getting stitches on my eyelid and kind of sewing that back together.
And then later, I’ve had stitches all over the place. I cut my knee open diving on a broken swing set, and then of course I had my injuries in high school. I had a set of blinds fall in my head one time. I ended up getting 20 staples across my head for that. So I don’t know. I really don’t identify as someone who’s accident prone, but that probably sounds ridiculous to anybody listening to me list all these off right now.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s interesting because all of your accidents really have something to do with being sports-minded or athletic. I am actually accident prone, but I’m the kind of person that trips over nothing, falls over a step, bangs into a wall or a door. I mean all of my stitches, and I have a bunch are all self-inflicted wounds that I encountered by being clumsy.
James Clear:
I think the way that I would describe it for me is I’m very hard on things. My wife is constantly complaining about that. I’m banging doors, plopping onto couches, cracking frames of things. I’m always very hard on things. I don’t buy nice cars for myself because I know that I’m just going to-
Debbie Millman:
Same. Exactly.
James Clear:
I need something that I can be rough with. I guess I am that way with my body occasionally too.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I am the same way. My wife has a gorgeous car. I will not even try to drive it. I insisted on getting a Jeep.
James Clear:
Yeah, there you go. That seems right.
Debbie Millman:
So let’s talk about what happened in high school, because I do think it is a really defining moment in how you became who you are. Like your dad, you wanted to play professional baseball on the last day of your sophomore year of high school while playing with your classmates. You were hit in the face right between the eyes with a flying baseball bat that slipped out of the hands of one of your team members and rotated through the air, sort of like a helicopter into your face.
The hit broke your nose and your ethmoid bone, which is the bone behind your nose, deep inside your skull. Shattered both your eye sockets. Cognitively. You didn’t know what year it was. You lost the ability to breathe, and you began to have seizures.
What happened next? I mean, and we’ll talk a lot about your book. You start your book with this chapter, which resulted in my sort of just not putting the book down till pretty much I finished. It is so riveting and so unexpected to start a book in this way.
James Clear:
Yeah, I guess that was a good call by my publisher. I don’t like writing about myself, so I pushed back multiple times and it’s like, “I just don’t think it needs to be about me.” I’d really prefer to just make it straightforward and about building better habits, but they ended up winning out and they were like, “This has to be in there.” So it seems like people found it interesting.
Yeah, it was a hard moment for me. I don’t know. It’s strange to think about in retrospect. It’s hard to fully parse the experience. I was obviously very out of it for a while. I ended up being put into a medically induced coma that night. I ended up waking back up the next day. And as you said, I had multiple facial fractures. I ended up back into surgery about a week later to get a lot of that fixed up, which interestingly that hurt more than the initial injury was the breaking of my nose, the resetting of a lot of the bones.
The big thing is the road to recovery was so long. I couldn’t drive a car for the next nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. All I really wanted to do was just get back, and play some baseball, and be a normal teenage kid. But it took a long time.
And I did not have any language for describing what I was going through at the time. I never would’ve said like, “I was just trying to get 1% better. I was just trying to find a way to improve.” But that was a time in my life when I had to practice the art of small changes or the art of little improvements, because that’s all I could really handle. I just had to find something to be positive about or some small improvement to focus on, and then wake up the next day and try to do it again. And eventually I was able to make my way back.
It’s funny, thinking back on it now, I don’t remember being really in a bad mood about it. I remember being I don’t know, fairly positive or happy. And I think to your point earlier about what’s special about Ohio or what’s special about being here, it was the people that helped me do that. I mean, my grandpa was a very positive person. My parents are very positive people. And I think their influence was really dramatic and important during that time. And even though my physical progress was slow, mentally, I had a good attitude and I felt pretty good throughout the process. And it was a long road back, but I don’t look back on it begrudgingly.
Debbie Millman:
The hospital that you were flown to was the same hospital your sister went to for her cancer treatment after she was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years prior. And your parents met with the same priest they had met with back then as well. Was there ever a moment where you were in danger of losing your life?
James Clear:
So there was a period of time where I started to lose the ability to do basic functions. Swallowing, breathing. I had a couple seizures as I mentioned. And then at one point, I lost the ability to breathe on my own. So I think that probably qualifies. They had to intubate me, and then they were pumping breaths into me by hand for a little bit because around that same time, I was being transferred to the helicopter. The helipad was across the street. So we were in this ridiculous situation where I obviously was told all this after the fact, I’m being wheeled across the street and we kind of are hitting bumps on the sidewalk. The intubation apparatus popped out, so they had to reattach that. And then were trying to get me on the helicopter at the same time. So I think the nurses and doctors did a great job managing the whole situation, but I was in a very unstable condition for a window of time there.
Debbie Millman:
You were placed in a coma as you mentioned. And when you woke up, you told one of the nurses that you had lost the ability to smell. She then recommended that you blow your nose. What happened after that?
James Clear:
Yeah. I mean it seems like a decent idea. I was just like, “I can’t smell anything.” And she was like, “Well, you have all kinds of gunk and blood, and all sorts of stuff in there, so let’s clear your nasal cavity a little bit. So see if you can blow that out.” Which it didn’t hurt that bad even though my nose was broken. But when I blew, I forced air through the cracks in my shattered eye socket, and so then my left eye bulged out of the socket. It was halfway out. So the situation just became more complicated.
I ended up having double vision for weeks. The doctors all had to confer to try to figure out what to do. They decided not to operate. They said they were pretty sure that the air was going to seep back out of the eye socket and my eye would gradually recede. And that did happen. It took about a month for it to go back to the normal position, but it did slowly make its way back.
Debbie Millman:
Pretty sure is not very confidence inducing.
James Clear:
Right. At the time, that probably didn’t feel as good as I was hoping, but we made it back. We made our way out. It was a really ridiculous 24 hour stretch.
Debbie Millman:
You said that after the injury, you were trying to regain some control over your life. What did that look like for you?
James Clear:
I think it all started with focusing on what you can control. So I mentioned physically, it was physical therapy sessions or whatever. Whatever exercise I was being asked to do. Can I do this well, can I try to give a good effort and do this successfully and have a good day today? So it started with a lot of that stuff.
I had always enjoyed school and always taken pride in getting good grades and being a good student. It’s funny, as an entrepreneur now, a lot of my entrepreneurial friends really are anti school, or are down on school, or didn’t have a good experience. I feel like the opposite. It was kind of a game to me and I enjoyed trying to figure out how to play the game well. So I didn’t know if I have every indication that my intelligence is the same, but is it? Let’s see.
And so I felt good about being able to study in the same way, or get a good grade on a test, or just make my way back there. I do think that helped me gain some confidence and feel like, “You know what? Maybe I can’t move the way I want yet, or maybe I still have a little bit of double vision or I can’t drive a car yet. But it seems like everything’s going to be okay. I’m thinking clearly, and I’ll get there eventually.” So I think study habits played a role in it.
And then eventually, once I was able to start playing baseball again about a year later, then I started to focus more on the physical and the athletic part of it. And I was never as good as my dad, so I didn’t end up playing professionally or anything like that. But looking back on my career, I feel like I was able to fulfill my potential. And that was a pretty long arc. It took me probably a solid five or six years of continuous improvement and just getting a little bit better each year. I barely got to play high school baseball. I was coming off the bench my first year in college. My sophomore year, I ended up being a starter. My junior year I was all conference, my senior year I was an all American. So I just gradually kept making these little progressions.
And that was very confidence inspiring. I had a coach who told me one time, a basketball coach that confidence is just displayed ability. And I felt like each year that went on, I was displaying my ability a little bit more and more. And I was gaining confidence in myself and feeling like, “Yeah, I have ever a reason the world to work really hard this off season or to show up again because I have proof of it.”
Debbie Millman:
I sort of see confidence as the successful repetition of any endeavor.
James Clear:
I like that, the successful repetition of any endeavor. It’s like that coach that told me that, that confidence is displayed ability is kind of like, “Yeah, if you want to feel confident about making free throws, go out there and practice.” And once you knock down 10 in a row, you’re going to feel a lot better about it. Successful repetition of it is going to breed confidence.
It is kind of this interesting thing. I think a lot of the time in life, we talk ourselves out of attempting things. We decide that, “I’m not ready yet. I just don’t feel confident in it. I feel like I need to learn more. I feel like I need to develop my skills.” But the confidence comes after the fact, not before. And you need the willingness to try, and then the confidence arises after the fact.
Debbie Millman:
How do you manage being back on the baseball field? For me, it would’ve been, I don’t know what it was for you. But that first day back on the field holding your mid up to catch a ball, were you afraid of getting hit again?
James Clear:
That’s interesting. Actually looking back, that’s a great question. Looking back, I had a couple advantages that I didn’t really think about. So the first is I actually got hurt in gym class, not in a game. So we were playing baseball, but it wasn’t an actual game. And secondly, I got hit by a bat, but I was a pitcher. So I didn’t have to pick up a bat and get in the batters box that often. I was just standing on the mound pitching. And so when I was playing the game, I was not in the same situation as when I was injured, which is an interesting thing looking back on it. And so I didn’t really have that very much. I didn’t have this fear of playing baseball. If anything, I was just excited to get back out there and get back to it.
I’m not the kind of person that worries very much. Maybe to my detriment sometimes, but I’m not that kind of mindset. I just was able to chalk it up to, “Listen, this is a freak accent.” And sometimes you get unlucky in life and unlucky that day. Yeah. And then you just got to move on.
Debbie Millman:
You got a full scholarship to go to Denison University where you majored in biomechanics. Why biomechanics? What were you imagining you were going to do professionally back then?
James Clear:
Oh man, I wasn’t imagining anything. The only thing I wanted to do in college was play baseball, but I liked school and I was a good student. And looking back, I was able to kind of hack the system to my benefit.
So I don’t have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn’t have anybody to look to. I wasn’t thinking I’ll be an entrepreneur someday. And at that time, I didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurial or whatever. But when I went to college, I looked at all the majors that were there, and I was interested in some stuff. I was a science guy, so I was interested in biology and physics. I took some chemistry classes. I was kind of playing in that sphere anyway. And then my sophomore year I heard, I don’t even remember where, that you could design your own major. And I was like, “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
So I looked into it a little bit more. I just looked at the course catalog and I was like, “I like these physics classes, and I like these anatomy classes, and I like these biology classes. I’ve already taken a couple of these chemistry classes.” And then I just put it all out on the piece of paper and I was like, “What would my major like this be called?” And biomechanics was the closest thing that I could think of. And it applied pretty well. I pitched it to the Academic Affairs Council and they were like, “Yeah sure.”
So looking back, that’s a pretty entrepreneurial thing to do, to be like, “I don’t like any of the options that you have. I’ll make my own.” But I didn’t identify as an entrepreneur at that time. But it’s kind of cool to connect the dots looking backward and being like, “You were sort of always on this path. You like creating things, you like optimizing things. You like creating your own experience.”
Debbie Millman:
You then went on to Ohio State for your MBA. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the St. Gallen Symposium when you were there?
James Clear:
Yeah, so to the point that I just made a few minutes ago where I said all I really wanted to do was play baseball, but I liked school and I was good at school. I hadn’t thought too much about what I was going to do after at Denison. And my default answer was always I’ll go to med school. I thought about doing that and then I looked at a PhD program. I applied for a Fulbright Grant that I didn’t get. So that was kind of sitting there and I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go and get my MBA.” Not because I really knew anything about it. I had never had a real corporate job or anything. Just because everybody said, “Yeah, business knowledge. That’s important. You should know how that works. And then that’ll always be relevant.” I ended up getting a good scholarship, so it made the decision easy. But what I really needed was time to think. I needed two years to figure out what am I actually going to do next.
So I went there and I took the classes, and occasionally these opportunities would come across that they would email out to the class. And there was this one called the St. Gallen Symposium that was a conference that was in Switzerland. And as I had mentioned previously, I had never been abroad at that point. So I was like, “Man, this is an essay competition. And if you get selected, if your essay gets chosen, you get to go to Switzerland. Well, that sounds kind of cool.”
I did actually something that now I use this strategy all the time and or have used it all the time over the last 10 years building my business, which is basically looking at best practices and trying to figure out what parts of those transfer to your own skill set and experience. Or reverse engineering, I guess we could call it.
So the symposium had all the previous winners listed on the website and their essays. And so I downloaded all the essays from the previous 10 years and read them all. And I looked to see how many references did each one have, how long was each one. Was there any similarity in structure in the way that they made their argument? And I did actually end up finding some common themes that it appeared the selection committee liked.
And so when I wrote my article, I had that number of references, and I used that structure, and I wrote with that amount of length, and all of that. And anyway, long story short, the essay got selected. Ultimately, I actually ended up going two years. So the MBA program was a two year program. And I attended the first year. And then the second year, my essay ended up being selected as the winner. And the prize was $10,000. That was more money than I had ever made before. So I was getting ready to graduate, and suddenly I had $10,000 in the bank account. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try to give it a go and try to make my own thing.” Maybe I’ll try to start a business. So that was the money that I lived off of for the first probably six to eight months while I was trying to figure things out and start my own thing. And I really don’t know… at this point I’m kind of like man, I’m so wired this way. I probably would’ve ended up an entrepreneur somehow. But I don’t know how it would’ve happened without that essay. I probably would’ve had to go get a regular job for a while and then figure out some exit plan.
Debbie Millman:
So when you started your own business, what was the business?
James Clear:
Well, my first ideas, my first attempts were really sad attempts at a business. The very first thing I took some of that $10,000 that I got paid. I think I spent 1,500 bucks on getting an iPhone app built. And it let you put… this is pretty Instagram. This is a while ago. It let you put captions on photos and filters on photos and stuff. It didn’t have any kind of social media component or anything, but it was just like a photo editing app. It was pretty bad looking back on it. It wasn’t very well executed.
And I put it on the app store because I was hearing all these stories about people launching apps and making all this money. And I just thought, “If you build it, they will come.” And I built it and nobody came. And that was a good lesson for me. It was an expensive one because I had just burned through 15% of my cash. But I needed to learn that you need to have an audience. You need to have an ability to market, an ability to launch a product. I had no way of getting the word out. I didn’t know how to get in front of people. And so that experience forced me to go back to the drawing board and learn how do you get an audience? How would I get this in front of people’s eyeballs?
And I started reading more and more about email lists, and building an email list, and starting a blog, and all that. And I started to go down that path. As I did over the next year or two, I started some other websites, some of which were other bad business ideas. I bought puppypresent.com at one point.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a good name.
James Clear:
The idea was that my girlfriend, now my wife, she loved puppies like many people. And I was like, “What if you could have breeders rent out time with their puppies and you could just buy it as a gift, maybe buy a puppy present?” And be like, “Hey, for your birthday, I got you two hours with these puppies. Let’s go play with them.” I thought it was a decent idea, but all the breeders I talked to hated it. They were like, “Wait, you just want to play with the dogs, but you don’t want to buy them?” And I was like, “Exactly.” So there were a lot of little hair brain things like that, that I tried that just never panned out. And it took about two years before I started to find my footing.
I was doing some web design gigs in the background to make money try. I had to pay the bills somehow while I was waiting to have a business that was actually spitting off some cash. Eventually, I found my way to writing what is now jamesclear.com. So I started in September of 2010 was when I did that iPhone app thing. And then November of 2012 was the first article on jamesclear.com.
That’s one of the biggest inflection points in my life was the choice to… you could look at it at different levels. The choice to become an entrepreneur, the choice to start jamesclear.com, the choice to start writing rather than, I don’t know, paying people to build iPhone apps. But setting out on the entrepreneurial path has been one of the biggest inflection points that I’ve had.
And it took a long time. It was a really slow burn. There was nothing sexy or glamorous about those first two years where I was struggling and didn’t even have a idea that was working well. And then there also wasn’t anything sexy about the first three years of jamesclear.com where it basically wasn’t making any money. But eventually I got a book deal and Atomic Habits came out, and now it’s great, but it took a long time. It was five years of struggle before anything really hit.
Debbie Millman:
And I remember when I first became aware of your writing and saw how hard you were working, I was very impressed with how dedicated you were and are. But especially before you were atomic, so to speak.
James Clear:
The habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years.
Debbie Millman:
And what gave you this sense? Before you go one, I’m sorry to interrupt because this is my million dollar question for you. What gave you the sense that you could make a business by writing twice a week?
James Clear:
Well, I had a couple people who were proofs of concept. I didn’t know them, but I had a couple people that I looked at. So I was in grad school 2008 to 2010, just kind of stewing on these entrepreneurial ideas. There were the A-list bloggers around that time, two of them. One was Leo Babauta at Zen Habits who Leo’s still writing now. And he was a huge site at the time. And I was interested in habits. I hadn’t written anything about it yet. I just thought, “Hey, this site’s kind of cool. This is interesting, this guy’s making a living.” I think he had six kids and I was like, “Somehow he’s figuring this out and he’s writing about habits.” I was like, “I don’t have any kids. It’s just me. I barely have a bedroom. I can probably figure out how to do one sixth of this.” So Leo was definitely an early inspiration.
And then Chris Guillebeau was also writing. Chris is still doing his thing now too. He was an early inspiration too because I mentioned I was really into travel and photography and stuff. And Chris had this whole travel thing that he was really all about. But also, Chris was the one who was writing every Monday and Thursday. That was just kind of his cadence. Leo I think wrote even more frequently than that. I think he wrote three or four times a week or something.
But I actually can remember one article that Chris wrote, I don’t even remember the title of it or whatever, but I remember reading it. And I was in grad school and I thought, “Man, I feel like I could do this. I feel like I could write something that’s as good as that.” And so then I decided to try one, and it was way worse than what Chris had written.
And I had to be honest with myself and I was like, “This is much harder than I thought it was.” It was a really interesting lesson where I was like, “If it looks easy, they’re probably putting in a lot more work than you think.” And the better somebody is at their job, the easier it often looks. Anyway, I had to a little bit of humble pie there and sit back and be like, “Okay, I need to start giving a better effort.”
But when I settled on that Monday Thursday schedule, I did it partially because it felt like this is a cadence that I can actually stick to. This is something I could actually… I can’t do five days a week. I might not even be able to do three days a week, but I think I could do two.
Debbie Millman:
I know. People like Maria Popova, astonish me that she can do it every single day. Yeah,
James Clear:
It’s absurd. Her output, I saw somewhere on her site, she said she’s published, it was something, it seemed impossible. It was like 60 million words or something. I was like, “How is that even doable?”
Debbie Millman:
She’s a very dear friend of mine and I know she writes every single one of those letters.
James Clear:
Yeah, it’s unbelievable. So I felt like I could stick to it, and I have a very high quality bar. And it was really hard for me to let myself be like, “I’ll just put it out even if I feel like it’s just okay.” I just couldn’t get myself to do it. So I thought, “Well, twice a week is enough that I could spend 20 hours on an article or even 30 hours on an article.” I often did that for the first year or two where I would say the average article was probably eight to 10 hours. And it was frequent that I would spend 15 to 20. The fastest I ever did one in was four or six hours, something like that. So it was consistent enough that I felt like it was going to add up and compound, but it was infrequent enough that I had the space to do what I felt like was good work.
Debbie Millman:
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block or not knowing what to write about?
James Clear:
So I had this moment where I was writing for a few years, and the site was growing, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. And for some reason that number kind of got in my head a little bit and I was like, “Okay, now a lot of people are paying attention. Now it has to be really good.” And so I went through this little phase where rather than just telling myself, “Hey, it’s going well. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Rather than doing that, I thought I need to be more perfect now. So I thought, “Okay, what I need to do is spend even more time writing. More time revising it, more time working it out, more trying time trying to craft a really great sentence.” Interestingly, the writing actually got worse, not better.
What I came to realize is that if I ever feel like I’m running low on ideas, what I need is not to write more. What I need is to read more. And it’s kind of like driving a car where you got to stop sometimes and fill the car up with gas. And the point of having a car is not to sit at the gas station all day, and just keep pumping gas into the tank, and never produce anything, or never go anywhere. But the point is also not to just drive until you run out of gas and then you’re stuck on the side of the road. And so you need this balance between the two. And reading is like filling up the tank for me, and writing is like going on an adventure. And they both feed each other, and I need both of them. And when I’m really on is usually when I’m reading something really great. It’s so good, I can barely make it through a page or two without taking a bazillion notes. And then I’m like, “I got to put this book down and just write about this right now.” And then the ideas take off on the page. So reading and writing are much more intertwined than I think I initially realized. And almost all of my good ideas are downstream from something great that I read.
Debbie Millman:
You said that everything you write about is mostly a reminder to yourself of what you should be doing. Was that how your specialty in understanding habits first came about?
James Clear:
Yeah, it’s funny to call it a specialty. I feel like my readers and I are peers, and I write about this stuff because I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with. It’s like, “Hey, have you procrastinated?” “Sure all the time.” “Do you start something and then you’re inconsistent?” “Yes, absolutely.” “Have you focused too much on the goal and not enough on the process?” “For sure.” I struggle with all that stuff like everybody else does. And so I wrote about it because it was relevant to my own life. I was interested in trying to figure it out a little bit more, and apply it, and I was just kind of curious about it. And so for that reason, because I was interested and because it excited me, I think the writing was better as a result.
Now, it’s probably worth noting that in those early years, that first year or so, I wrote about a lot of other stuff too. I wrote about how to have better squat form in the gym, and the medical system in America, and all kinds of stuff. And the readers didn’t seem to care about those as much. And so I kind of followed my nose a little bit and I was like, “You know what? Every time I write about habits, or strategy, or making better choices, or being creative or productive, those are the topics that the audience also likes and that I like.” There’s a lot of other stuff that I like that people are like, “Well that’s great, but you can kind of keep it to yourself.” And so for those things I just kind of like, “Well, maybe I’ll journal about that and not publish it.” So I gradually kind of found my footing in my area of expertise or specialty as you say. And it was mostly just trial and error. But all the time, whatever I was writing about, I tried to make it something that I was excited about or that I was interested in personally.
Debbie Millman:
I think that’s what makes it so interesting. I work with a woman that helps me with my research. Her name is Emily [inaudible 00:34:10]. And she didn’t know about you before I started working on the show. And initially, she was surprised because she knows that I’m not somebody that is particularly interested in the self-help genre, so to speak. But as soon as she started researching you, as soon as she started reading your book, as soon as we started talking about the way in which you approach what you share, she completely understood why I was so intrigued and excited about talking with you.
James Clear:
That’s cool.
Debbie Millman:
You have a very unique way of sharing information with people. That also happens to be something that could be helpful. I have never in my life recommended what would be considered a self-help book to my wife. But I am insisting that she read Atomic Habits because I think she will benefit from it so much and-
James Clear:
I take no responsibility how this ends up. I hope that she enjoys it
Debbie Millman:
Well, I’ve already started sneaking in some of the techniques. I’m Trojan horsing it in, because she so needs it.
James Clear:
That’s good. That’s good. I think it’s important to be a practitioner of the ideas, and not just a writer of them or a theorizer of them. And I do think that if you’re forced to practice the ideas, if they’re things you actually use in your daily life, there’s going to be a better quality to the writing. And then also, you come to appreciate how difficult it is to make any kind of progress in the world, or to create something new, or to put this idea into practice.
I think because I have struggled with all of these common habit pitfalls like everybody else has had, I think I am in a better position to say something compelling about it because it’s like, “Yeah, I know what this is like.” I’ve struggled through all this too. It also gives me more confidence in the ideas if I can be like, “Yes, I’ve actually used them.” And I’m not saying it’s going to be a perfect fit for everybody and I don’t think it’s going to work in all scenarios, but I know that it worked in this scenario. So I feel better about sharing it.
My kind of approach now is that there is no one way to build better habits. There’s no single strategy to follow. But there are a lot of tools that you can use. And my job is to lay all the tools out on the table and say, “Hey, here’s a wrench, and here’s a hammer, and here’s a screwdriver.” And your job is to say, “You know what? I think for my life or for my situation, the wrench feels like the right fit, or the hammer might be better for this particular experience or this particular situation.”
And I think if I can do that well, if I can lay all the tools out and give everybody a full toolkit to work with, we’re all in a better position to make some of these changes. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy all the time or even that it’s going to work all the time. But I feel like I have a better appreciation for having a big suite of tools because I’ve had to practice it.
Debbie Millman:
Well, a lot of people agree. In 2018, you brought your book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones into the world. In the years since the book was published, you have sold over 9 million copies worldwide. You’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller List, I looked it up this week, for 154 weeks. 154 weeks listeners. Your book has been translated into over 50 languages. Your newsletter is sent out every week to more than 2 million subscribers. And you also travel all over the world with your super sleek bags giving inspiring speeches. Congratulations James.
James Clear:
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. And I don’t think it’s reasonable for any author to expect those kind of outcomes. It just struck a chord, and I’ve been very fortunate. But yeah, I don’t really know what else to say other than I’m glad that people are finding it useful.
I think ultimately, the only way a book can grow that is if it’s word of mouth. It’s far outpaced my ability to sell it or to tell people about it. And what I tell myself when I go to sleep at night is people are finding this useful. It’s growing because people are telling other people about it. And the only reason they’re telling people about it is because they find it helpful themselves. And that certainly feels good. It feels gratifying. Habits have been written about for a long time. They’ve been around long before I was here, and people be writing about it long after I’m gone. And I am just adding a very small piece to the collective knowledge of humanity on the topic. I’m not really saying much that’s very new. My hope is just that maybe when you read it, you’re like, “I never quite heard it put that way before.” Or, “Maybe this gives me a little bit different line of attack than I had previously.” And perhaps that unlocks an opportunity for you that maybe wasn’t there before. And I’m really grateful to all the readers.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I’m only going to push back a little bit here James, because I do think what you’re writing about is new in that it’s your perspective. Which is doesn’t have any shame attached to it. There’s no berating. It’s just very straightforward, very relatable, and really, really helpful.
So let’s talk a little bit about habits. I have two fairly basic questions from my listeners that may have not read your book, maybe the two or three people out there in the world, or your website. So just two easy questions that I think will help frame the rest of my questions. First, what is a habit?
James Clear:
Well if you talk to an academic or a researcher, they’re going to say something like, “A habit is an automatic or mindless behavior that you do without even really thinking about it.” So brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongues, you tap them together twice. Stuff that you don’t even really think about that much.
I think there’s another definition, another way to describe a habit, which is it’s a behavior that’s tied to a particular context. So you can never have a human outside of an environment, where you’re going to live your whole life in some type of environment. And your behaviors are often linked to that environment. So your couch at 7:00 PM is linked to the habit of watching Netflix, for example. Or your kitchen table at 7:00 AM is linked to the habit of drinking tea and journaling.
And I think that reveals something important about habits, which is the environment plays a pretty big role in how they’re shaped, in how they’re triggered, and so on. I think the strict academic answer is it’s a pretty mindless automatic routine or behavior. That’s not how we usually talk about it in daily conversation. If I were to ask you, “What are some habits you want to build?” You might say, “Writing every day or going to the gym four days a week.” And writing is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth might be, but I know what you mean when you say it. You mean I want it to be this regular practice, this ritual, and so on. So it kind of depends on how academic we want to get about the definition. But I think we could just say most of us know what we mean when we say a habit. We mean something I do regularly, something I do frequently, something I do consistently.
Debbie Millman:
So my second basic question is what do we get wrong about habits?
James Clear:
It’s a good question. I think different people get different things wrong. So I don’t know that there is one single answer. There are some common pitfalls that you see people fall into a lot. Like one common pitfall is biting off more than you can chew or starting too big. I mean, this happens to everybody. It’s happened to me a bazillion times. You get excited. Especially if you’re an ambitious person, you start thinking about the changes you want to make and then you’re like, “Let me find the perfect workout program, and it’s an hour long, and you’re going to do it five days a week.” And instead, it might be more useful just to develop the habit of going to the gym for five minutes, four days a week. Just become the kind of person who masters the artist showing up. But we often resist that type of small action because it feels like, “Well, this isn’t enough to get me the results that I want.” So that’s probably not even worth it.
But there are levels to this whole thing. And if you can master the art of showing up, then you’re in a position to optimize, to improve, to advance. So that’s kind of a big part of my philosophy is make it easy to show up.
The other common maybe pitfall or mistake, the things that people get wrong about it. I think one thing that we get wrong is we don’t look at our bad habits enough. We don’t think about what they can teach us for building good habits. So let me give you an example.
Most behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time. So broadly speaking, there’s an immediate outcome, and there’s an ultimate outcome. For bad habits, the immediate outcome is often pretty favorable. The immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It’s sweet, it’s sugary, it’s tasty, it’s enjoyable. It’s only if you keep eating donuts for a year too, that you get unfavorable outcomes.
Or smoking is the classic bad habit example. Well, the immediate outcome of smoking might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you reduce stress on the way home from work. So the immediate outcome might be favorable. It’s only the ultimate outcome five or 10 years later that’s unfavorable.
But, building bad habits is often pretty frictionless. It’s somewhat easy. The way that we all talk about building good habits where we’re like, “Oh man, I just need to get myself to go to the gym.” Nobody says that about eating donuts. Nobody says, “Oh man, if I could just get myself to eat more donuts.” We don’t talk about it that way. And I think there’s a lesson baked in there. Why is that? If we can start to look and maybe unravel our bad habits a little bit more, we notice they’re behaviors that are often really convenient. There are behaviors that are often immediately rewarding. There are behaviors that are often obvious and occupy space in our environments, in the rooms and buildings that we work in all the time. And you can copy and paste those lessons onto building good habits. You can try to find ways to make your good habits immediately rewarding. You can try to make them more visible in the environment. You can try to find ways to make those frictionless and convenient. And the more that you do those things, the more you’re kind of putting those same forces to work for you rather than against you.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by was just in my own environment and online, and in advertisements, maybe you hear things like, “Be healthy for 30 days and then,” or, “Do this thing for 21 days and then.” And you said the honest answer to how long it takes to build a habit is forever. And I’m wondering why you think it’s forever.
James Clear:
Well, what I’m trying to get at there is a habit is not a finish line to be crossed. It’s this lifestyle to be lived. And it’s not like, “Hey, just do this for 30 days and then you’ll be a healthy person.” Or, “Just do this for 60 days and then you will be productive.” You don’t have to worry about it anymore. What I’m really getting at when I say the true amount of time it takes to build a habit is forever is you are looking for a sustainable change. A non-threatening change. You’re looking to integrate it into your new lifestyle, kind of build this new normal. And then once you’ve stuck to it for a long time and it becomes part of your natural cadence of your day, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just like, “This is just part of my daily routine. This is something I can stick to.”
And that’s how habits really last. This idea that let me start the day off by doing this 21 day sprint and then I’ll be the kind of person I want to be. I think once you unpack it that way, almost everybody realizes, “Well, that’s not how it actually works.” But that is what we’re sold a lot of the time. That is what everyone’s telling us. And so I’m just kind of pushing back on that a little bit and trying to be like, “You don’t really need to make these radical changes all the time. What you really need is can we just figure out a way to live a good day today? All you got to do is live one good day. And can we find a pattern that is sustainable, that’s non-threatening, that you can integrate into your daily routine?” And then it can start to become something that this is just normal for me. It’s not like I’m not reaching so much. I’m not trying to be a totally different person.
Debbie Millman:
The part that I found to be most fascinating about your book was this deep-seated notion that our habits are how we embody a particular identity. And you encourage people interested in doing this type of work to start by asking themselves who is the kind of person you want to become, and what is the type of identity that you want to build? And that’s very intentional.
James Clear:
Yes. Yes, it is intentional. We often talk about habits as mattering because of the external stuff they get us, All this stuff we’ve just been talking about, “Habits will help you get fit, or make more money, or be more productive, or reduce stress.” And it’s true habits can help you do those things, and that’s great. But the real reason that habits matter is that as you said, they help you embody a particular identity.
Every action that you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel. But it does cast a vote for I’m a writer. And no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
And this is why I say the real goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat. It’s to become a meditator. The real goal is not to run a half marathon, it’s to become a runner. Then these cases, I’m using labels. Reader, or runner, or meditator, or whatever. But it’s true for characteristics as well. “I’m the type of person who finishes what they start,” or, “I’m the type of person who shows up on time.”
And the more that you believe that aspect or that element of your story, the more you start to integrate that into your identity, the easier it becomes to stick to that behavior in the long run. I mean, in a sense, once it’s part of your story, once it’s like some aspect of yourself that you take pride in, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you see yourself be.
I mean, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip arm day at the gym. Or if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long hair care routine and you follow it every day. And the aspects of our identity that we take pride in or that we kind of say, “Yeah, this is part of who I am.” We don’t have to motivate ourselves to do those behaviors in the same way that somebody who’s maybe just getting started does. It’s kind of like, “No, this is just part of what I do. This is part of how I show up.” And I think that’s ultimately where we’re really trying to get to.
It is a long process. I like that voting metaphor because each time you do a little habit, it’s like casting a vote on the pile. And you kind of build up this body of evidence. And no individual instance changes your belief about yourself or changes the story that you’re telling, but over time, you start to tip the scales in favor of that story.
And this is a little bit different than what you often hear people say. You’ll often hear something like, “Fake it till you make it.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. No, no. I say make it till you make it. Just make it till you make it.
James Clear:
Make it till you make it?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
James Clear:
That’s such a good creator phrase. Just make the blog post until you make it. Make the piece of art until you make it. Just make the thing. Just keep creating until it’s there.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
James Clear:
Fake it till you make it asks you to believe something positive about yourself, right? So it’s not ultimately that terrible, but it asks you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. There’s a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence. We call it delusion. Your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you’re actually doing.
And behavior and beliefs are this two-way street. What you do, the actions you take each day, they influence what you think about yourself. And the mindset that you have, the beliefs that you carry, they influence the actions that you take. But my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to make it till you make it as you say, to start with one small action. To start with a little bit of evidence that, “Hey, in this moment, I was that kind of person.” And eventually, you have every reason in the world to believe that aspect of your story. So yes, your habits are how you embody a particular identity. And even if they’re small, I think that makes them particularly powerful.
Debbie Millman:
But we can also look at the opposite. And what you say about yourself often as you mentioned, will begin to determine who you are or who you become. One of the things that I was struck by, you write about how people can walk through life in a cognitive slumber. And I’m going to quote you here. “Blindly following the norms attached to their identity by stating things like, ‘I’m terrible with directions. I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering people’s names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.'” James, almost every one of those, except the, “I’m always late,” are actually designations that I thought you were describing mean, and how I state my identity. And I read that. Yeah. I’m like, “James is looking deep into my soul and he is telling me that I don’t have to say these things about myself anymore if I don’t want to be them.” That’s what was so personal about my experience reading your book.
James Clear:
That’s funny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to target you like that.
Debbie Millman:
No it’s okay.
James Clear:
It’s interesting though, these stories that we carry around. I didn’t think something like I have a sweet tooth. Before I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have thought anything about that. I love chocolate, I love caramel. Sure. But now I look at it and I’m like, “Each time you tell yourself that, you’re kind of reinforcing that identity.” And it becomes a little bit easier to do that thing the next time.
And I am not an extreme sort of personality in the sense I don’t think that means, “Hey, you should never eat chocolate or you’re never going to forget somebody’s name again,” or whatever. All that stuff’s going to happen. This is just life.
But I do think that it’s worth asking yourself questions given the reality of the situation without ignoring the facts and without ignoring the reality of what needs to be done, what’s the most empowering version of a story that I could tell myself? What’s the most useful version of a story that I could tell myself? Because if you’re not ignoring reality, there’s no sense in telling yourself a less useful version. There’s no sense in telling yourself the least empowering version. But we often do that.
I heard about this interesting exercise one time where I said take two sheets of paper. On the first sheet, you’re going to write the story of your last year or pick whatever timeframe you want your last 10 years. And the only rule for this little game is that you are not allowed to say anything that isn’t true. So it has to be factually true. But the first page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years. And you’re only going to write it in the least favorable way possible. And then the second page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years, and you’re going to write it in the most favorable way possible.
It’s interesting because you’re going to sit there with these two pieces of paper, and there are no lies on either page. Yet which version of these stories are we telling ourselves each day? If you’re not going to ignore reality, if you’re still going to say, “Hey listen, I’m still going to wrestle with the truth and I’ll still make sure that I do what I need to do.” I just can’t see any sense in telling yourself the story that’s on the first page. It doesn’t make any sense to do anything other than what’s going to make you feel useful, empowered, joyful, happy, fun, excited. Let’s tell the version of that story and still do the things we need to do. And sometimes life is hard and you still got to deal with it. But we don’t always do that. And I think we would probably be in a better place if we tried to do that each day.
Debbie Millman:
So I think a really important way of thinking about this than is that habits matter, not because they can get you better results, which they can do, but also because they can change your beliefs about who you are.
James Clear:
Yeah. I don’t think this is unique necessarily to habits. I’m not saying other experiences in life don’t matter or that a one off event or something doesn’t make a difference. Those things do matter. It’s just that over time, your habits are the experiences that get repeated. So the weight of the story starts to shift in favor that just because of the frequency of them. And everything else starts to be like, “That just happened one time, this was a blip on the radar,” or whatever. And so I think they are unique in their long term ability to shape identity. Because day after day, week after week, you’re getting these little bits of proof that, “Hey, this is part of my story.”
Debbie Millman:
One of the most viral aspects of your book is about how important it is to focus on building a system rather than trying to achieve a specific goal or an outcome. And you state that you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I’m wondering if we can just deconstruct that a little bit for my listeners. What do you mean by a system?
James Clear:
So your goal is your desired outcome. What is your system? Your system is the collection of habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. So whatever system you’ve been running for the last six months, or year, or two years, it’s carried you almost inevitably to the outcomes that you have right now.
In many ways, our results in life are kind of like a lagging measure. Or at least to a large degree, they’re a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. We also badly want better results in life. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It’s like fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves.
And there are many things in life that influence outcomes. I’m not saying habits are the only thing that matters. You’ve got luck and randomness, you have misfortune. All sorts of things can befall you. But by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, and your habits are. And the only reasonable, rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So I think for all of those reasons, I encourage people to focus on building a system rather than worrying too much about a goal.
And I totally get why this is hard. Some of it I think is just a byproduct of the way that both major media and social media works. You’re only going to hear about something once it’s a result. You’re never going to see a story that’s like, “Lady eats chicken and salad for lunch today.” It’s only a story once, “Lady loses 100 pounds.” Or you’re never going to see people talking about on the news, “James Clear writes 500 words today.” It’s only a story once it’s like, “Atomic Habits is the best seller.” The outcomes of success are highly visible and widely discussed, and the process of success is often invisible and hidden from view. And I think that leads us to overvaluing results and maybe undervaluing the process of the system.
So all I’m trying to get at with this is a little bit of an encouragement to say, “Hey, goals are great and success is awesome. But let’s maybe put that on the shelf for a minute and spend most of our days focused on what collection of habits am I following? What system am I running?” And kind of adjust the gears of that machine a little bit, and start running a better system. And that’ll carry me to a different destination naturally.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about the brain and habits. You write that the primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future. And this happens in everything. I remember years ago, I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. And I had been very used to habitually walking into my bedroom in a certain way and going to my night table to find something. And suddenly in the days after rearranging the furniture, I found myself blindly walking in the wrong direction because my night table was no longer there. And it struck me how dependent we get on these habits that are unconscious, and how much that impacts the way we live our days. So how is our brain impacted by our reliance on our habits?
James Clear:
Well, it depends on how broad you want to get with this answer or how deep you want to go. Ultimately, every organism needs energy to survive. And anything that you can do to conserve energy or to be more efficient or effective is going to help in the survival of that species. And so your brain is looking to automate things. It’s looking to figure out solutions to future problems that it won’t have to think as much about. And if it doesn’t have to think about that. It can shift its attention and energy to something else. And so habits save you time. They save you effort, they save you energy. And at that very basic biological level, they help you survive. Now of course the environment our ancestors grew up in, it was very different than what we have today. So now we have this kind of paleolithic hardware, we’ve got this biology that is primed to build habits. But we live in a modern society where there’s all sorts of different ways to apply that brain and that kind of thinking. And so now we’re building habits on social media, and we’re building habits in corporate workplaces, and we’re building habits and saving for retirement. And our ancestors didn’t care about any of that stuff. But the machinery works just as well in those situations as it did before.
So ultimately, I think habits are, from a biological level, they’re like an energy saving process. But then in a more practical, modern way of thinking about it, they’re a time saving process. And they help you become more effective and efficient in that way because you don’t have to spend time thinking about what to do.
Debbie Millman:
Well, what’s so interesting about this notion of the brain trying to hack these systems for us, a lot of it is done subconsciously. And when that happened in my bedroom with the night table, I began to wonder how many unconscious habits do I just obey? Because this is the way I’ve taught myself to view the world. And that’s why the shift in identity was so intriguing to me in using these hacks to begin to start to rework certain neural pathways in my brain that I might not even be aware is sabotaging my efforts.
James Clear:
That’s a fascinating question. And I think a lot of the habits that are unconscious, you wouldn’t want to have to spend any time thinking about. If you get up in the middle of the night and you just need to walk over to the bathroom, well you don’t want to have to be thinking carefully about how do I turn to get out of bed, and how do I put one foot in front of the other? And where is the coffee table, and how do I walk around it? Am I going to stub my toe on the side of the bed? All of those non-conscious patterns that we have, they just help you operate through the world. And if you had to actually think about every little thing you were going to do throughout the day, you would never be able to do anything. It’d be hard to move even across the room.
But, there also are all these unconscious thought patterns that we have, these little identities that we care around with us, these stories that we keep repeating, that maybe we don’t even know we’re telling ourselves or realize. And this is another thing that I say in the book, which is the process of behavior change almost always starts with self-awareness. Because it’s really hard to change that story if you don’t realize you’re telling yourself at every time. And there are different strategies you can use for that. There’s some things in the book that are actual tactics like the habits scorecard or something like that where you write all your habits out and analyze them a little bit. That stuff can help.
I think also just a process of reflection and review. Whatever cadence makes sense for you, whatever that exact process looks like can be unique to you. But making time to think about how you’re spending your time and reflecting on whether that represents the values or the identity that you want to build. It’s really hard to self-assess stuff without giving yourself time to think. If you’re so busy that you don’t have any time to sit, and relax, and maybe stew on it a little bit, it’s hard to be self-aware of all those little subtle stories that we’re telling ourselves.
In my case, I have a period of reflection review at the end of each week. I do a really short one each Friday. That one’s mostly business related. It’s mostly looking at what did I produce, how much traffic, how many email subscribers, revenue expenses. It’s just a spot check for the business for the most part. But then I also have one at the end of each year where I do an annual review, and that’s much broader. That’s like how many nights did I stay away from home this year while traveling? Was that the right amount? Should that be up or down? Do I need more family time or less? How many workouts did I do this year? How many on average each month? What were my best lifts throughout the year? How many articles did I write? How many words did I produce this year? Is that what I want to do next year?
So you can get the idea. It’s customized to you and what you’re interested in. But just having those moments of reflection review, I think help make you more self-aware. And boy, it’s really hard to change behavior if you’re not aware of it. So that that process is really important for shaping the habits that you want.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I love that you share those annual reviews with your readers. They’re not just for you. You share the good, the bad, and the changeable every year. And they’re really fun to read. And it’s been fun to see the trajectory since 2018 especially, when the book was published. Looking back on this last 10 year period, what is the biggest thing that you’ve changed about yourself after learning all you have about habits?
James Clear:
I’ll give you two. So I’ll give you what I think is something big that I have changed for myself, which I don’t know if it’s the biggest, but it’s something big. And then I’ll also give you one that hasn’t changed, which I think is also interesting.
So the thing that hasn’t changed is working out has been one of the core habits that my life has been built around for the last 10 years. And I genuinely mean this. I don’t know that I would be an entrepreneur if I didn’t have that one habit. I’m not necessarily saying everybody needs to work out a bodybuilder or anything like that. You can decide what it is for you. But I do think we need some habit that we feel like grounds us, that we feel like is time for us that you can get away from everything. When I’m in the gym, that is the only hour of the day where I’m not always thinking about the business in the background, or thinking about what I need to do, or responsibilities or whatever. That’s the only time that I have where it’s truly just me.
There have been so many days over the last 10 years where I felt like, “Man, I really blew that day. Or we just didn’t get anything effective done. I haven’t made any progress. The book is still a mess.” But, at least I got a good workout in. So that one has kind of been an anchor point for me.
And then I do think something that I’ve grown with is caring less about what other people think and focusing more on, I guess we could just call it trusting myself more or trusting my instincts more. Some of this is going to be natural. You’re not going to have much to trust yourself on early in your creative career, because you haven’t produced much yet. And now I’ve produced a lot more. So I kind of have a better taste for what works and what doesn’t, or what’s good and what isn’t.
But I do look back and think. It’s kind of interesting. For the first two years that I published articles on jamesclear.com, I never shared any of them on Facebook because I didn’t want anybody who knew me to see it. I didn’t want it to color their thoughts about me. I was like, “Well, what if they saw my stupid little blog and thought, ‘I’m surprised he’s doing that. I thought he was going to be doing something more impressive.'” Or, “I’m surprised he’s spending time on that. I wonder if he has a day job. Is this actually the thing that he’s doing is just writing here?”
I definitely was worried about the collective they and what they thought. And looking back now, I’m like it’s kind of silly because if you were to ask me any individual person, “You worried about what Sarah thinks?” I’d be like, “Well no, she probably isn’t judging me like that?” Or, “Are you worried about what Tony is going to say.” No, probably not. He would probably be cool about it. But collectively, I had this image of they will not be impressed by it, or they will not think it’s good enough. I don’t feel that way as much anymore. I’m sure I still fall into that pitfall, but I look back on it now and I hope that I’ve grown a little bit since then.
I think the one thing that helped me get through it, and it didn’t become an enormous roadblock, was that I let that fear or that worry, that concern be the gas pedal and not the break for my work. So because I was worried about what people were going to think, what I told myself was not, “I shouldn’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough,” or, “I should just quit.” What I told myself was, “Now you really got to make sure it’s good.” Now it’s like, “Get to it. Let’s start working.” And I think that made me put a better effort in. And so the result ended up being great.
But I can just as easily imagine a scenario where I tell myself, “I don’t know what people would think. I’m going to look pretty foolish here. I’m going to feel kind of stupid.” So I’m just not going to attempt it. I really try to live this way in my life. I don’t think I always do it, but I try to not be my own roadblock. I try to let the world tell me no before I actually tell myself no.
And there’s not 1,000 ways to do anything in life, but there’s almost always more than one way. And it’s actually very rare that you run into a true hard roadblock where you’re like, “Hey, the world just says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t be persistent anymore. There’s no other way to try this. You have to give up.'” It’s actually very rare to get a full stop like that. There’s almost always something else you can do, some other line of attack to try, if you just have the courage to do it. And I think that’s something that’s changed for me is maybe hopefully, I have a little bit more of that creative courage now than I did before. But I’m glad that it didn’t stop me early on because I could easily imagine a scenario where that would be true.
Debbie Millman:
I think a lot of people are glad that didn’t stop you. My last question James. I read that you might be starting a podcast. Is that true?
James Clear:
The rumors cannot be confirmed or denied. I think it’d be cool. We have lots of episodes that we’re working on, and trying to feel out, and figure out. I don’t have a launch date for it. And as I am sure you can appreciate, as I said earlier in this conversation, when it looks easy for people, it is probably much more work than you were thinking. So I am learning that right now. It is much, much harder to produce something that you’re proud of than maybe you would think on the surface just listening. So I have a lot to learn, but I’m definitely thinking about it and we’re slowly working on it.
Debbie Millman:
Excellent. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you so much James, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
James Clear:
Of course. I appreciate the opportunity, and love any chance to talk to you. Thanks, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. James Clear’s book is titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. You can find out more about James Clear and sign up for his weekly newsletter at jamesclear.com or atomichabits.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.