← The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
660: James Clear (Live at Ohio University!) - The Four Laws of Behavior Change, Systems vs Goals, Building Better Habits, Mastering the Two-Minute Rule, Having a Great Marriage, & The Plateau of Latent Potential
01:19:19
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- [00:03]
Ryan Hawk
Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Haw. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com now on to the night's featured leader. The great James Clear is the author of one of the most influential books of our generation, Atomic Habits. He sold over 25 million copies worldwide and has helped millions of people transform their lives through the power of small changes. And this one is really cool. We brought the podcast to my alma mater, Ohio University, where we recorded live in front of 250 of the most impressive college students I have ever met.
- [00:54]
It was so cool.
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The energy in the room was electric. During our conversation, we discussed how to design your life so that exceeding your goals becomes inevitable. Then why your environment matters far more than your willpower. Then James talks about how every opportunity in life comes through relationships. The cool part of this one was at the beginning. I surprised James to start the event with a video from Morgan Housel which James later told me this was the coolest start to a podcast ever. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with James Clear. This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. I love the leadership team and the.
- [01:41]
People at Insight Global.
- [01:42]
Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.comlearningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com learningleader.
- [02:20]
To start, I had a conversation with a mutual friend of ours last week and unprompted, out of nowhere he started talking about you. And I thought, good or bad, you'll see. You'll see. This is a guy named Morgan Housel though and Morgan Housel is one of the few people that could maybe be deemed as a peer of James as a writer as far as both the excellence of the writing and book sales. Not 25, but Morgan's got a bunch. Guys, if you could, could you play the quick video so James can see what Morgan said about him.
- [02:51]
Morgan Housel
One of the people who has been the biggest inspiration in my career as a writer is James Clear, who wrote the book Atomic Habits Psychology. Money would not exist if it were not for Atomic Habits, full stop. And James has inspired me so much and he is a dramatically more successful writer than I am objectively. And I have absolutely not a single cell of envy for him because he is the nicest guy you will ever meet. You will not meet a nicer human than James Clear. You will not meet someone who is as successful as he is and more humble than he is. He is another saint in my life and because of that I look up to him and I'm like, I adore every bit of this guy, so I cannot envy him. And so I am just inspired by his success, full stop.
- [03:41]
Ryan Hawk
It's pretty cool.
- [03:42]
James Clear
That was very nice of Morgan to say.
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Ryan Hawk
How does that make you feel?
- [03:45]
James Clear
Great. Yeah. Morgan himself is an incredibly nice and generous person and he was very generous to say that. So thanks for sharing.
- [03:54]
Ryan Hawk
Absolutely. So I want to talk about actually something we haven't talked about before. When you were in college, you go to Denison, you're captain of the baseball team, really good athlete. And I read this new thing. You were a writer. Not surprising. This St. Gallen Symposium which you won Global essays. So we have a lot of college students here. I'm curious what you draw from your college experience. Writing, playing sports that has helped you progress in your life and your career. That could be potentially helpful for them.
- [04:23]
James Clear
Yeah. So. Well, what he just mentioned, the Saint Gallen Symposium is this essay competition in Switzerland. Each year they still run it and I found out about it when I was in grad school and I think there are a couple little lessons from it. So the short version is that if you apply to this essay competition, they take essays from all over the world and the top 100 submissions get selected to go to St. Gallen to go to Switzerland for this conference. I had never been abroad before. I didn't have a passport. When I was growing up we went to Kentucky State Parks for vacation, which is great, but I had not traveled widely and I wanted to, you know, I wanted to get out. I had this urge and so I applied and the first year I was selected and I got to go and I was like, wow, this is really cool. And second year I was like, let me apply again. And I ended up winning that year. The first place prize is $10,000. It actually was €10,000. I think the exchange rate was like $9,000 or something. And so when I got done with grad school, I had $9,000 in the bank account. And so I went and moved home. I lived in my parents basement for 11 months and I lived off of that $9,000. So without the St. Gallen Sy, maybe I would have Figured out another way to be an entrepreneur. But, like, it would have taken me a while. I would have had to go get a regular job and wait 10 years and figure out some different path. So that essay competition was kind of what led to jamesclear.com eventually. Wow. So a little lesson from this. So one of the first things I did when I applied for the essay competition was that they posted all of the previous year's winners on the website. So I downloaded the previous, like seven years and I looked at all of those essays and I wrote down how many pages are they? What's the word count? How many citations does each one have? Is there a particular format that they go through or whatever? Because you learn what the judges like. And so I was like, well, I'm going to write an essay that hits that word count and has that number of citations and follows that format. And the prompt is different each year. But you can take lessons from the successful people that have come before you and try to figure out what do the patterns look like. And I do a lot of that pattern matching now with the business that I run. It's like, what kind of outcome do you want? Let's look at other people who have been successful. You can't just look at one, because if you look at one, there's not a whole lot that you can really infer from that experience. Maybe they got lucky or maybe it was a unique situation or something. But if you look at 100 now, you can start to see patterns and then you can start to pick up, okay, which of these patterns fit well for me and how can I put all that together? Wow.
- [06:43]
Ryan Hawk
Okay. That leads me to another story that tell me if it's true. I heard this from Donald Miller. Okay. I did a live show with Don like this, actually, and he said that before Atomic Habits, you went on Amazon and you looked at every three star reviewed book on productivity habits on Amazon, because those are the books that people liked them. But maybe something was missing. Something was missing and you wanted to learn what was missing. And then capital.
- [07:07]
James Clear
Is that right? Yeah, I mean, almost all the three star reviews, they'll say, hey, this book is really well written, but I wish it was more practical. Or, oh, I really liked this story, but they were missing this. And so I found a lot of that. And with habit books, I am not the first person to write a book about habits and I won't be the last one either. So I'm just kind of adding my little bit to the pile. And I was trying to figure out how do I share something unique and interesting? How do I add something to what's already out there? I don't want to just repeat what's been done. And a lot of the popular Habit books, the feedback was, this is really well written, or this is really well researched. But I'm left wondering, how do I apply this? How do I use it in the real world? And so I thought, all right, I can be the practical guy. Like, that can be. My thing is, I can figure out how to actually use this in daily life and work. And so my quest, partially with Atomic Habits, was to write the most practical habits book that's ever been written. You know, I wanted it to be like, if you just read this one book, you don't need to read anything else. Now, I don't know if I hit that or not, but that was the objective going in. I actually did this exercise when I was working on the book I would lay out. I had. At the time, I had 12 chapters. I ended up with 20, but I had 12 at this particular moment. And I wrote each chapter on an index card, and I laid them all on the floor. And then I went to my bookshelf and I grabbed each book that I could find that was about that particular chapter. So, like, one of them was about, like, environment design, for example. And so all the books that were about behavior and environment and whatever, I laid them out there. Most chapters had, like, four to six books in front of them. And so once I had all of those laid out there, you know, what is that, 50 books or so I looked at it, and I said, all right, how can I write this chapter so that these four or six books are completely irrelevant? Like, you don't need to read those books anymore. You know, like, what's. When you read a book, you don't remember all 200 pages or 300 pages, right? Like, you usually take five or ten ideas with you. Maybe usually it's like two or three, a couple pages. And so I said, what is the stuff that, if you really dig into it, this is the stuff you're taking from this book. Can I compress all of that into this one chapter? I think that that is a good measure for. At least for practical nonfiction. Fiction's a different story. But for a practical nonfiction book, I think that's a good measure. Visit a good book. How many other books can you make irrelevant? You know, now you read this one, and suddenly you don't need to read those other 50. And again, I don't know if I did that. Or not, but that was the objective. Going in.
- [09:28]
Ryan Hawk
We have a room. I mean, hopefully there's lots of writers in here, but there's probably not a lot that will publish a book like you did. What could someone who is not going to publish books take from both of those stories and implement into their life that could say, oh, this is useful, this is practical for me?
- [09:44]
James Clear
Well, most areas of life, good enough is good enough. It's fine. It's fine to do an okay job in most things. First of all, you don't have enough time, nobody does. To try to do everything at the 99th percentile. It's not possible. In fact, a good way to end up very average is try to divide your attention across doing seven different things and then you don't have time to do any of them really well. But every now and then and you'll have to decide what it is for your life. There's a thing that good enough is not good enough and it is worth it to spend the time to do it at an excellent level. And I decided for me that Atomic Habits was going to be one of those things. And so depending on how you measure it, it took me three to five years to write the book. I just said if I'm going to spend the next three years of my life working on this, I want it to be the best book on habits that's ever been written. And I don't, again, I don't know if I actually did that or not. But you're never going to just stumble into that outcome, you know, you're never going to be like, oh, I just worked on it. It happened to be the best that anybody's ever done, you know, like, it's not going to happen that way. You have to strive for that level to have any hope of coming close to it. And so I think that is a lesson for everybody. What are those one or two or three things in your life? I start to think about it as like seasons in my life you probably get as an adult, most really big. The like really big powerful, meaningful things in life. You know, like for me, writing this book or building a business. You're proud of getting in the best shape of your life, you know, raising a family that you're proud of or having kids, creating a successful marriage, whatever it is, right. Most of those big meaningful things, they are multi year, sometimes multi decade things and you can kind of roughly block and put them in like 10 year blocks. You know, you get like a 10 year season to try to work on this. I had about a 10 year season to start writing online. I started with this little blog and email list and grow that up and then get a book deal, work on Atomic Habits for five years. Launched this book. It was about a decade of my life that was given to that kind of habits chapter. So maybe you get five of those as an adult, you know. And so what do you want this season to be about? What do you want this decade to be focused on? And what's that thing during this decade that where good enough is not good enough? You're going to try to do it at a really high level.
- [11:57]
Ryan Hawk
So that may be like a big goal somebody sends, okay, I want to do this, I'm going to do that. And goals, usually there's something within our control and there are sometimes things that are not within our control and there may be better ways to achieve those goals. That's one of the things that I think you have really figured out, and that's systems to implement to help achieve giant goals. So can you walk me through the importance of developing and implementing systems in your life in addition to any big extravagant goal that you may set?
- [12:29]
James Clear
I mean, I think this is kind of one of the reasons this idea resonated so strongly from Atomic Habits. I think is because as soon as it, everybody's like, yeah, that is the reality. That is the truth of how it works, which is that it's very easy to want the results. Everybody wants great results. Like, who doesn't want a better outcome? But what really matters is do you want the lifestyle attached to those results? Do you want the daily process? What are your days gonna look like? I think whenever I focus on a new business project or something that I wanna do in my life, one of the first questions I ask is, how do I want to spend my days? Because if you don't want to spend your days doing that thing, you're in a really bad position to get the outcome. You know, like the result might be very attractive and sexy, but it's not gonna happen for you because you don't wanna spend your time doing that. So I think start with drawing a box around how do I wanna spend my days? And then inside of that box, how can I have the most success? Reach the most people, make the biggest impact, make the most money, whatever it is you're optimizing for, but not outside of it. And a lot of the time people do that in reverse. They start by saying, well, what do I wanna achieve? What's the really cool outcome? Well, making a lot of money sounds Fun or reaching a million people would. A popular YouTube channel would be great. It's like, yeah, but do you want to spend all day editing videos? That's what the lifestyle is. So I think start with the lifestyle and then go to the result from there. But once you know what you want, then there's a series of questions that you can ask and an approach that you can take for building a better system. So that's what a lot of atomic habits is about. How do I design an environment that is conducive to what I want to create? One of the questions I like is, how am I creating the conditions for success? So I say that I want to do these things, but am I setting up the environment that I'm in each day to make it easy to do that? Really obvious examples, like, if you take fitness, a lot of people are like, oh, I hope I feel motivated to work out today. But that's kind of the opposite of what I would recommend, which is, let's prime the environment for success. You want to go for a run, Set your running shoes out the night before, Fill your water bottle up the night before, set your running clothes out. I have one guy who wears his running shorts to bed so that all he has to do is get up, put his shoes on, and then run out the door. But you're trying to make it as easy as possible to do the thing that you want to do. And it's not just about fitness.
- [14:38]
Ryan Hawk
Right.
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James Clear
It's about anything. I think an interesting question is walk into the spaces where you spend most of your time each day. Your living room, your kitchen, your bedroom, office. Where are you spending most of your time? And then look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? Like, what behaviors are easy here? What habits are easy here? What habits are obvious? And can you adjust the environment to make the good habit? The path of least resistance, the thing that you want to do, the obvious choice. And the more that you do that now, the easier it is to follow through. A lot of people feel like, oh, I just wish I had more willpower. But some of the studies that show people who have this, they display high levels of willpower. The primary factor is that they are in an environment where they are not tempted. That's the number one thing that determines whether someone displays high levels of sugar.
- [15:26]
Ryan Hawk
Out of your house.
- [15:27]
James Clear
Yeah, just, you know, it's just all that stuff applied to whatever you're working on, you know? So how can I adjust the environment to make the good habit obvious and easy?
- [15:34]
Ryan Hawk
I always Wonder about this. You and I have talked about it, but I'm curious. Like, how do you set your house up? Like, how do you design your house? You and Christy now with three kids, we probably envision it. You're like, dude, it's. I'm just trying to survive the next day.
- [15:46]
James Clear
But, like.
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Ryan Hawk
But, like, what's your house design like? To make sure you don't have to depend on willpower, which. That science is fascinating. To do what you want to do.
- [15:55]
James Clear
Yeah, I just gave up. Look, I think there's a balance here. So I'm not the only person in the house. Right. So I shouldn't get to determine everything. So I focus on the areas that I have control over. Like my office, for example. That's my space. I design my office to make it the way that I want. One new thing that I'm thinking of. So this is a little bit tangential to what you asked, but the more kids you have, the tighter your time gets. And so my time has been getting very tight recently. And I have all these projects I want to do. I have all these things that I wish I had time for. And so I got this little string and I hang it from the wall in my office. And I have these clothespins, little wooden clothespins. Take a Sharpie and write each project on a pen and then write each kid's name on a pin. And then also other stuff that you wanna fit in, like working outs or something like that. And then I put, like, a red line on the string. And the question is, what makes its way above the line? Obviously, the kids are gonna make it above. Working out is gonna make it above. But all the other projects got to work really hard to earn their way above that line. Because the truth is, I don't have enough time to do them all. And so I need that visual reminder to force myself to say I'm only going to do the things that really matter most. And the tricky thing about focus or prioritization or whatever we want to call this that we're talking about, is that if you do it well for one day, that earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. Right? Like, you have to show up again tomorrow and make a. If you show up tomorrow and you get distracted and you're on YouTube for hours, and, you know, it's like, it doesn't matter. That day is a wash. It's like many things in life, many of the most important things, which is it is an endless race. And you have to get comfortable with the endless nature of it as soon as you accept that it's endless, then you stop worrying about hitting the finish line. At some point, then you can just get into the pattern of living that way. And I think that's another shift that I try to encourage people to have about habits. Very common question. People ask, how long does it take to build a new habit? And I get why people ask it, but I think the honest answer is forever. Because if you stop doing it, it's no longer a habit. And so you need. It's like, how long does it take to be a good spouse? Well, if you were a good one yesterday, that doesn't earn you any bonus points for today. You have to show up again today and do a good job. How long does it take to be in shape? Well, if you stop working out yesterday, it doesn't matter anymore. It's like the endless nature of these things needs to just be accepted. And then you start saying, all right, how can I design a daily life that feels good and aligns with that endless nature?
- [18:22]
Ryan Hawk
It reminds me of, like, I'm asked frequently, okay, 650 of these conversations. What do you see? And usually the words are not the sexy ones that you want. Usually the words are like, consistency, right? Some discipline that goes along with that. And I forget who told me this, but they said, I don't usually or ever win with brilliance. I win with endurance. You probably have both, but, like, most people don't. But you can choose to endure. You can't always choose to be brilliant. And so I feel like that's a really in line with the way that you teach and what you've written in Atomic Habits. And what I've heard you talk about in the past is, hey, how can I create an environment to endure over time, to then give yourself a chance to get lucky or give yourself a chance to hit the goals you want in your career.
- [19:07]
James Clear
So, yes, I want to take that and run with it. But then we're going to end up in a different place than where we just started. So I think that's totally right. All of us have skills right? Now you have some skills, right? You can chop a tomato in half, right? You can tie your shoes. You can do, like, you can do all kinds of stuff. You have tons of skills already, and every one of those skills you did not know when you were born. So all of us are learning machines, right? Humans are a learning machine. You are able to develop and build and learn new skills. And any skill that you have, you got better at it by practicing it. And that is true. For anything in life. Whatever you practice, you will get better at. Now, I am not saying that if you just go practice basketball for the next six months, you'll end up playing for the Philadelphia 76ers, but you will be a better basketball player in six months than you are today. And so the first thing is to realize that that is true. That is, I think, partially the endurance or the consistency thing. Whatever you practice, you will get better at. The second piece is that everybody has strengths. And so some people, if they do practice basketball, they will end up playing for the 76ers, but there's just very few of them. And your task is to figure out, what is that thing for me? You know, what is my strength? That when I practice it, it turns out I'm actually quite good at it. And there are a couple questions that I think you can ask to help reveal what that is. So one question is, what do I do that? I almost. People say I'm good at it, but I almost have trouble explaining why I'm good at it. For me, one of the things is, people tell me that I'm good at writing in a compressed way. Tweets or the pithy little sayings or a punchy sound bite or something. I can't really describe to you why I'm good at that. It's just something that I seem to like doing. My brain likes to take a paragraph and say, how can I compress that into a sentence that gives the same result? So you need to think a little bit to figure out what that is for you. The second question is, when do most people dip out? Because it's kind of painful, but you will keep going. You actually, the pain of it doesn't bother you as much as it bothers other people. You know, you can kind of sit with that a little bit. It seems difficult for most people, but you're like, no, it's okay. I'm fine with it. That's also another signal that maybe you're kind of built for that. All right, so we put these two things together. You have some kind of consistency, and then you're trying to identify your strengths. This is where we end up in a different place than I think the word endure. The word endure makes you think you're suffering through it. But in fact, I think the key to endurance is to ask, what would this look like if it was fun? Because if it's fun, then you want to stick with it. Now, the truth is, nothing is going to remain fun for the long run. Right? You're Always going to run into roadblocks and barriers. But the person who is having fun at the start, that is the person who's going to stick with it when it gets tough. The person who feels like it's a hassle or it's a chore or it's kind of a pain in the neck at the beginning, as soon as it gets hard, they're like, well, I didn't really like this to begin with, you know, like, they're not gonna keep going with it. And so I think part of the lesson, and this is what I hope for my kids, is that they can. I don't really care what they end up doing, but I hope they find something that lights them up, you know, something that they're really interested and excited and engaged with. Because if you're excited and you're having fun, then you're dangerous. Nobody wants to compete against that person because once it gets tough, they're gonna want to keep going. They're having a great time. You know, everybody else is kind of suffering. And so one time, David Epstein, who wrote Sports Gene and Range and a number of other books, he told me, grit is fit. And what he means is that when you have a good fit with something, when you are well suited to it, that's when you're gritty, that's when you show up and you continue to stick with it. So, yes, endurance is the driver of results and skill development and whatever else we want to call it. But the driver of endurance is a good fit. Being well suited, having fun, finding something that you're curious and interested in. And if you have that deep fun, excitement, and interest, then it's really easy to keep going.
- [22:58]
Ryan Hawk
I think it's helpful to find a way for the work to be the win, the actual doing of the thing. I try to help people start podcasts from time to time. And my first question I always ask are, why? Why are you doing this? Why do you want to do it? And if they want some crazy result, like I want to get big, expensive speaking gigs or a book deal or whatever, that is a red flag, because it means the work isn't the win. If it's like, I love having deep conversations with people like James Clear, and I want to record them, that's the work. That's the work of preparing. That's the work of doing it. So it's like figuring out. But, James, for people I met with a number of the students, that's a good distinction.
- [23:36]
James Clear
That's like what I was saying earlier. Do you like the lifestyle.
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Ryan Hawk
Yeah, right.
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James Clear
Everybody wants the book deal. Do you like recording conversations 650 times? Because that's what the days look like.
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Ryan Hawk
If you would do it for free, which I did for three and a half years, like didn't make a lost money. Right. But I think that's because it was. It's still the coolest thing in the.
- [23:54]
James Clear
World sometimes I think that's the purest that it ever was. Was the beginning because it couldn't have been about the money because you weren't making any anyway. No.
- [24:00]
Ryan Hawk
You know, you're losing money now.
- [24:02]
James Clear
So it's like the first three years that I wrote, like I didn't make a dime from it, but it was like that's. I was doing it because that's what I wanted to do.
- [24:08]
Ryan Hawk
Yeah. You know how, how has it changed now that, you know, 25 million copies later, you don't publish as much. On James Clear.com I read every article before. That's why we recorded before the book came out.
- [24:20]
James Clear
Like, yeah, some of that is just a consequence of time. You know, it's like having three kids and dealing with everything that Atomic habits has brought. I just don't have. You know, those articles used to take 20 hours and I would write one every Monday and Thursday. So that's a 40 hour week. Just with those two.
- [24:33]
Ryan Hawk
That's insane.
- [24:34]
James Clear
But that, you know, that's what it took for them to be good and that I'm not smart enough to do them in six hours. Like it took me 20, you know, so that's fine. I feel fine about it. You know, it's just the chapter that it was, it has not changed in the sense that what you need to do for the work to be good is the same still. Like there's that line of figure out the cost of success and then don't bargain over the price. Everybody finds out what it takes and they're like, but could I shortcut it? And you're like, no, just, you know, do the. If you stop looking for shortcuts, the work would be halfway done by now. So it hasn't changed in that sense of what's so required. I think what has changed for me specifically is my profile is higher now. And so it's a little bit harder to experiment because as soon as you try something, a lot of people are watching. And it's just hard to try something and do it well the first time. So you gotta be okay with looking more like a fool when you try stuff or looking like a fool to more people. So that's an interesting muscle to kind of have to develop, but do you.
- [25:31]
Ryan Hawk
Miss that, like, being able to look like a fool?
- [25:33]
James Clear
Yeah, I do. I need that. I didn't appreciate it in the moment because in the beginning, when you don't have a big audience, what you're doing is. Is you're trying to scrap and claw and do everything you can to build it up, and so you don't take time to pause and think, boy, it sure is nice that I have a chance to look foolish here. So you don't really see it that way. In the moment.
- [25:53]
Ryan Hawk
We're talking about the work being the win. What are you optimizing for? So a number of these students have got these amazing internships at big companies, and they'll probably get multiple offers from big companies when they graduate from here. You and I run our own business, so I've worked within a big company. I understand what it's like. There are good parts. There are, unfortunately, a lot of not so great parts. What about for somebody who's gonna work within whatever, PNC or wherever, a big company? How do you find. How do you. What advice do you give to them to find, like, the joy of excellence? Even though you're not running the show, you're working for a bunch of other people.
- [26:28]
James Clear
Yeah, man. I'm probably, like, the worst person to ask. I've, like, never had a real job. Okay. So I don't know that I have a lot to offer. But I will say this, which is every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. So we don't usually put this amount of weight on it. But when you choose who to follow on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, in a sense, you are choosing your future thoughts, because that's what's coming into your feed next week or next month. And almost every thought you have, it's almost. There's a debate between neuroscientists on whether this is true or not. But it's almost impossible to have a spontaneous thought. It's always, Ryan says something, and that makes me think of something. Or somebody cuts you off in traffic and that makes you feel a certain way or whatever. It comes as a result of this continuous chain of events that you're experiencing throughout your days. And when you choose what to read, what podcasts to listen to, what YouTube shows to watch, that is part of that chain of events, and it's sparking the thoughts that are coming to you. And so whether you're an entrepreneur or working in a large company, if you Want better, more productive, more creative thoughts, then you need better, more productive, more creative inputs. And so we don't think about it with this amount of weight, but you're kind of building your own Little City on TikTok or Twitter or wherever, whenever you choose who to follow. So choose wisely. Think carefully about what podcasts you listen to or where you're getting your information from, and that will help shape the things that you want. So I feel like that matters. No matter what, you end up doing.
- [27:59]
Ryan Hawk
The same with people like your boss may change who you go to work for. I've had that happen where I went for a specific person, he was the best, and he gets fired four months later. That's life. But I think you try to optimize for where's a place I could go and learn who are people that just seem like high character, high competence, live through their values. Now, again, things change when you work. That's like the only constant is changed. But I think those are other things to think about. I think atomic habits can help deal with change, which is one of the only. There's only a few certainties of life. Change is one of them. That's something. You want it to happen this way, and then adversity strikes and you have to find a way to respond. What have you found to be some of the best tools, the best systems that you could put in place to manage any type of adversity or any type of unwanted change in your life?
- [28:51]
James Clear
Well, the typical version of mental toughness, perseverance, something like that is, I'm going to grit my teeth and make it happen no matter what. Some kind of that sort of thinking. But I actually think there's a different type of mental toughness that is more useful and more widely applicable, which is essentially adaptability. It's when you are not dependent on your circumstances, that is when you are actually mentally tough. So it's thinking things like, I can work with this. I have what I need to figure this out. I can make this happen. Maybe I don't feel fine right now, but I know that I'll be fine eventually. Those feelings, that ability to manage uncertainty and adapt and flex with it, that is really critical. And this ties back into the consistency piece, the endurance piece that you mentioned before. A lot of the time, adaptability is consistency. You know, it's when you don't have enough time, do the short version. When you don't have enough energy, do the easy version. Find some way to show up, even not throw up a zero for that day. And so that's kind of my favorite form of mental toughness, is this adaptability and flexibility. In a way, the ultimate form of preparation is a mindset that can handle uncertainty. You know, a lot of you look at a lot of people who are. And this is. I think this is particularly true. I say this because I was a student like this, you know, high school. I got good grades as student council president, like, did all that stuff. I was probably very uptight when I got to college. Getting good grades was like a game that I wanted to win. It was important to get A's. That was like the thing that mattered whether I learned or not was kind of secondary. And you look at some of those students early on and you say, wow, look at these high achievers, right? They're getting good grades. They're doing so well. But the truth is, that mindset where you try to control everything is actually quite brittle because if things don't go exactly to plan, then you fall apart. And when you need things to go perfectly, you are held hostage by the situation. You know, you are a victim to the context. In fact, the most resilient person is the one who doesn't need the situation to be anything and knows that they will be able to adapt to that based on what they face. And so I think there's a key element of flexibility and adaptability that needs to be part of any perseverance and toughness, mental toughness.
- [31:05]
Ryan Hawk
One of the things that I think has made for a great life and career that I didn't think about when I was in college playing football here, even though people tried to help me and I just didn't listen, was building genuine, mutually beneficial relationships. Relationships literally make the world go round. If you want to be happy, it's building relationships. If you want to get good jobs or work with good people, it's about relationships. And I feel like this is something that you've written about the importance of them. What have you done specifically to build. I don't call this networking on purpose. I'm talking about building genuine relationships with people. What have you done to build such good relationships with people like Morgan Housel and others out there?
- [31:46]
James Clear
Yeah, I never think about networking. I never think of it that way or approach it that way. You're absolutely right. So, first of all, a lot of the time people will say, oh, I wish I had better opportunities, or I just need to get my lucky break, or something like that. But every opportunity comes through a person. It is attached to a person. People are the opportunities. And so Anything that you want to achieve, it's by getting to know the right person or developing relationships with them, providing value to them. I don't think about it as networking, I just do two things. So the first is you share what you are interested in publicly. That could be just telling somebody in conversation. You'd always be surprised what that bubbles up. But usually the people you think are going to be helpful or not and then the people who you don't expect to be helpful are you, but it's by sharing what you're interested in and they'll say, oh actually my neighbor's into that or my uncle does this or whatever comes up. There's a version of doing that at scale which is what I've done with my career and you've done with your career which is write a blog or start a podcast or create a YouTube channel. But when you talk about your thing publicly then all of a sudden people come out of the woodwork. It's not really about who you know, it's about who knows you. It's about who knows what you're interested in and then the opportunities come to you. You know this opportunity today came to me. I didn't go out and try to find it and it's because Ryan and Simran and you know, some other people at OU knew about my work and that led to this. So share your work publicly is the first thing. Sharing your work publicly is kind of like a magnet for like minded people. Like you can put up, put up an article on the Internet, put up a blog post about, pick any topic like I don't know, like how to grow heirloom tomatoes in your garden or whatever. People who are interested in that are going to find it and then you're going to talk to more people who are into that. So it doesn't matter what it is, but it's going to be like a little magnet, a little honey pot for the people who are into that. Second thing is give value before you ask for value. I am always trying, not always succeeding, but always trying to give as much value as I can. Like Morgan is a good example. When Morgan was writing and he wasn't thinking about a book, I was dming him on social media and talking to him and stuff and saying I really love this article or this was really good. Have you thought about putting this into a book at some point? Like you should do that and whatever, that's fine. I don't know, that's a ton of value. It's just telling somebody you like their Work. Then he signs a book deal. We talk a little bit through that process. I kind of give him a little, you know, some thoughts there. When it came time to come up with the title for Psychology of Money, he had like four or five other things that he was going to title it, and he shared those with me. I have this whole conversation where we basically figured out the title for Psychology of Money. And eventually we got there, and then he had a subtitle that I thought was okay. And then we tweaked it a little bit, and then that ended up being the one that he went with. And I don't know if he even remembers that, but it's just trying to be valuable. It's trying to help somebody out. I didn't get paid for it, and I just thought it was fun. It was just kind of nice to help somebody when they're in the middle of that process. Then it came time to launch the book, and I'm like, okay, what are you doing for book launch? Let's map out what you should do and when those things should come and so on. More recently, he launched a second book, and it didn't do quite as well as Psychology of Money. So he's got questions about that. How do I wrestle with all that? I don't know. My solution was don't write a second book. But anyway, the point is not that I had any of these really compelling answers. The point is that you just try to show up for people. And the more that you're there and try to provide value, the more that that comes back to you in some way. And you cannot predict how it comes back to you, but eventually it does.
- [35:13]
Ryan Hawk
And you don't go into it with that intention. Your intention was to be useful, was to be helpful, was to be a friend, right? So I like that idea. And I'm sure you probably had these conversations with Cal Newport, another guy who wrote a book called Be so Good they Can't Ignore youe, which is off of a Steve Martin quote. When people are coming to Steve Martin, hey, how do I get famous? How do I become an actor, a comedian? How do I get the right agent? And you just, like, be so good they can't ignore you. I mean, James is a prime example of being so good that he can't be ignored.
- [35:43]
James Clear
With Morgan, it's a direct relationship, right? It's like face to face. But my career in Atomic Habits is a good example of it where there's kind of this faceless. The readers out there. It was the same objective Though, how do I be as useful as possible? I really like the word useful. For a long time, that was kind of like my guiding light as a writer is, can I write something that's incredibly useful? That means it has to be practical. It has to be simple enough that you can apply it. It has to be understandable. It's got to cross all these thresholds. It needs to be true. So there's just lots of things that being useful forces you to do that I really like. And eventually, after writing these articles for three years and getting the book deal and then working on the book for three years and the book coming out, Atomic Habits shows up and hits the bestseller list and looks like it's this success. But really what you are seeing is the release of, like, six years of potential energy that was built up from trying to be useful every week. And I think a lot of careers probably.
- [36:38]
Ryan Hawk
I read your. I read every annual review. You wrote them from 2013 to 2019. I think you told me privately, you gotta stop when you know it gets wildly successful, so you stop writing them. But 2013, you wrote, next year, I'm gonna publish a couple books. A couple of books. If you read 2013, couple books, and in Atomic Habits, what, five years later or whatever finally comes out. But I think that leads me to this idea of.
- [37:02]
James Clear
That's also part of my personality, which is, like, overly optimistic. That's good.
- [37:06]
Ryan Hawk
That's good. We want to be around optimists, right? That's a big part. Writing, writing. To me, I push every single leader I work with to have some sort of writing practice, whether it's publicly or not. If it's publicly, it gives a chance to create a magnetic effect that James is talking about. But I want you to talk about why every single person in this room should create some form of a. Or maybe not force people to do it, but why, if they do, how it could be helpful?
- [37:33]
James Clear
Well, yeah, it's kind of similar to how I feel about the gym. Not everybody wants to lift weights, and I'm not trying to force everybody to lift weights, but if you go into the gym and you lift weights, you get stronger. And sometimes people complain and say the weight is really heavy. And you're like, well, that's kind of the point. You know, it's like, that's how you get stronger. And similarly, with writing, people will complain and say, riding is hard. And you're like, yeah, that's kind of the point. That's how you think better is by going through the difficulty. Right? The fact that you do reps in the gym and it's heavy is how you get stronger. The fact that you work on writing and it's hard is how you think.
- [38:02]
Ryan Hawk
Better or more clearly, think better. Not just become a better writer, a better thinker, a wiser person for sure.
- [38:07]
James Clear
My responses to you right now in this hour seem way better. I look, I don't even know if I look smart right now, but whatever level I do look is much higher than I actually am because I have written about all of these things. And so when you write about it, there's. You see something on tv, news story or something, it makes you feel a certain way, happy, mad, whatever the emotion makes you think, you know what you think because you feel a certain way, but you don't really know it unless you can write it down. And as soon as you start to write it down, you realize, I didn't know this as clearly as I thought I did because I can't even form a sentence about it. And so the act of writing about it forces you to clarify your thoughts, or at least to express them in a way that can be translated to another person. So that practice, I think, is why anybody could or benefit from writing. I'm not going to say anybody should write. You do whatever you want, but you could benefit from writing. Because if the act of it, the act of it will force you to clarify your thinking exactly, whether you share it publicly or not is totally up to you. That's a different scenario. Where do you want to attract like minded people? But the act of doing it, even if it's just in a private journal, will force you to clarify your thinking. Writing is thinking in a sense.
- [39:18]
Ryan Hawk
I think excellent leaders are usually really clear thinkers. This is a tool to become a much clearer thinker, right? You have these cloudy thoughts in your head and you're thinking about it like, oh yeah, I know what that is, I know what I think about that. Then you go and say, I'm going to write an essay about that thing and you realize, oh, I actually don't.
- [39:38]
James Clear
I do this. I mean, obviously I do this for my job. I do this in personal relationships. Sometimes if we have somebody in our family who's dealing with something, you know, someone in our extended family is dealing with a really challenging situation right now. I'll just write about, just sit down and write a whole page about it. Don't stop yourself. Just write about it as much as you can and then compress it down. Once you get done, look at the page or two that you just wrote. And just delete everything except the one or two sentences that summarizes the situation best. And it almost always, like, leads to a much clearer vision of what's actually happening. You're like, oh, this is the root cause. You know, I couldn't figure it out before, but now that I just wrote about it for a page, I can see it clearly.
- [40:11]
Ryan Hawk
Let's apply some of the systems, from atomic habits to leadership in general. There's a ton of future leaders here. I heard the process just to be a part of this room and the things these people have went through is insane. I would have never, never made it in college. You're like, you play football and nothing else. Not going to work. So super, super impressive people. Let's apply some of the things so.
- [40:32]
James Clear
Specifically, I'm disappointed are you guys right now.
- [40:35]
Ryan Hawk
Specifically when it comes to, like, leadership and becoming really, really good at inspiring others at building a business, at being a VP of whatever within a company someday. Which people in this room will be. What are some things they could take from habits, systems, goal setting that you think would be helpful for them?
- [40:53]
James Clear
Okay, I don't know if I'm going to follow exactly the systems kind of layup that you just gave me, but I have a couple things that come to mind. So I recently was talking to this Navy SEAL who trained. He was a Navy SEAL who eventually became the trainer for the Navy SEAL sniper team. And what he trained them on was mental performance techniques. And there are two things that he mentioned that stuck with me, which are the techniques that he teaches them that now he is a father of three and he teaches to his kids. So the first is positive outlook, no matter the situation. So whatever situation you're faced with, you have some kind of positive emphasis. What you do is you emphasize the ways that this could go well. Right. And the second thing which is tied to it is a visualization practice. Whenever you go into something, you visualize what it would look like for it to go well. So let me give you an example of how I used this recently. So I have a little three year old son. He just went to preschool for the first time. So we took him to preschool. He really had a bad drop off the first day or two. He's crying. He doesn't really like it. He doesn't want to be away from us. He just isn't really sure what's going on. So the third day we went down for breakfast. I take them down in the morning, get them breakfast, and he's looking at me. I said, all right, guys, Today's a preschool day. And he was like, I don't want to go to preschool. I said, okay, hold on. I was like, actually, you really like preschool. Remember your teachers, Ms. Caitlin, Ms. Jayla? You like them, don't you? He said, yes. And I said, okay, and what about. Did you like playing with glue and crayons yesterday? And he said, yeah, I do. And then I said, all right, what about you get to have snack time and you have lunch, Right? Do you like eating your snack? He said, yeah. And I said, what do you do after preschool gets done? He said, we go outside and we play on the playground. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to do what this Navy SEAL did with the snipers, which is coach them through the process they're about to do in a way that is positive, has a positive outlook, and they're visualizing the good things that could happen from it. Right. And so he's now visualized what his day is going to look like, and that was it. I didn't mention anything else. I think if you go too far, kids will see through that BS immediately. You know, be like, don't you really love preschool? And they'll be like, come on. You know, if you take it too far, it's over the top. But all you're trying to do is just emphasize the parts of this that could go well. And you can see how this practice can follow them all the way through their life. Right? When they're in fourth grade and they gotta give their first presentation in front of the class, like, let's visualize what this would look like for it to go well. You know, when they're in eighth grade and they're gonna go to their first dance, like, let's visualize what a fun night is gonna look like. And you can just take it all the way through. You know, they're in high school and their basketball game's coming up. You can use it everywhere. And so techniques like that can be very powerful for priming you to have a good day and to set things up well. So anyway, that wasn't a direct answer to your question, but I like stuff like that.
- [43:30]
Ryan Hawk
Yeah. I'm gonna ask you one specific question in a second. I'm gonna just tee you up. We're gonna open it up for everybody to ask questions. I'll give you a second to think. I'll ask James another question, and then we'll open up to you guys. We'll have some mic runners to go around. Is that cool? Okay, this is A completely sideways question, but I think it's important, especially given the age of the people we have here. Miranda and I have got a chance to go out to dinner with you and Christy, your wife. And it seems like not only are you this amazing writer and leader, but also have an incredible wife, family man. Right. We heard what Morgan said. So the combination of all the success, all the sales, plus humility, plus great marriage. I'm sure you have challenges like everybody else, but I think it's useful. I would love to hear what you think about marriage and picking a life partner and how you actively work at that, because I think this is a good time for people to think about that right before they might do it. At least I hope they choose to do that.
- [44:25]
James Clear
Yeah, yeah. No, it's a good point. A lot of you in the room are in a, let's call it 5 to 10 year window where that decision gets made. It's probably the most important decision that you make in life. It's probably the most important one. You're not going to interface with anybody more frequently. No one else is going to change the arc of your life more, or at least influence the constraints or the choices that are made more. So, yeah, it's probably the single most one that is important to get right. Having said that, I think that the decision starts not with them, but with you. And what I mean is that most of the people who. Now I'm getting old enough, now I'm in my late 30s. I'm getting old enough to see people who have started relationships, who've gotten divorced or who are like, in tougher spots in their marriage or whatever. And a lot of the ones that don't work out, the person went into that relationship either in a time in their life when they weren't as confident or didn't feel as good about themselves, or they have something else that they haven't worked through. And so the more healthy your relationship is with yourself, the better positioned you are to have a good relationship with someone else. It's just hard to have a good relationship if you're always kind of feeling like, I wish I could get away from myself. One of my hopes for my kids is that if you told them when they're 14 or something or 20, hey, you gotta spend the day on your own, that they would think, oh, this is gonna be a good day. This is gonna be a fun day. But some people are like, oh, if I was gonna be on my own, I was just me and my thoughts the whole time. It's like, that sounds terrifying to them. And so my hope is that they can develop a good internal monologue, you know, a healthy conversation with themselves, so that whenever they have time with themselves, they're like, yeah, it sounds great. Tim Urban told me one time that actually he thinks the rankings for usually it feels like people generally rank it as like being in a relationship is better than being single. But the way that he feels like it should be ranked is being in a great relationship, being in a good relationship with yourself, being in a poor relationship or an average relationship with someone else, and then being in a bad relationship with yourself. And I think that, yeah, like, if you see it that way, then you're like, oh, well, I would not accept a bad relationship because that'd be worse than just me being on my own. So I think that's just like a primer for all of it, which is, the better positioned you can be as an individual, the better positioned you are to find a great partner and be in a good position.
- [46:38]
Ryan Hawk
Very similar to leadership in general in the fact that you will never be good at leading anybody else if you're not good at leading yourself. And the fun part is that that game never ends, that working on yourself never goes away. You never, like, say, I made it. I'm good. Not even, you know, you look at these guys, he's still working on himself. We're all still a work in progress. This never arrived. Always becoming mindset is necessary, I think, if you. If you want to keep having this type of trajectory.
- [47:07]
James Clear
So last thing I'll say on that, I don't want to not mention my wife, because she really is great. It never felt like work does, and I think that was one of the big things, you know, a lot. She. She shared a meme with me the other day that was like, oh, it's our anniversary. And like, I hate my husband, but love is the best. And, you know, it's like all this stuff like that. And, you know, we were just talking about how silly it is, and it never felt like that for us. It just. It was a relationship that we got into. And it always felt. It's not that every moment is easy, but it always felt natural. It always felt easy. It wasn't. It wasn't hard to love each other. And I think that that was. I don't know if that's helpful, but that's like. That's when I knew, you know, it was like, when it. When it felt like it was easy to love each other.
- [47:49]
Ryan Hawk
Love it.
- [47:49]
Let's open it up. We got mics in the crowd.
- [47:52]
James Clear
We can.
- [47:52]
Ryan Hawk
Okay, who wants to go? It's always the first one's always tough.
- [47:57]
Student Leader
First off, thank you so much for coming down to campus. As a student leader, I see a lot of, you know, freshmen, sophomores who are trying to develop their values. Cause I think you develop that a lot more in college or in this kind of stage of life. What advice would you kind of give to them for not only developing their values, but being able to apply their values when they're entering into their careers, their first internships, stuff like that?
- [48:20]
James Clear
I mean, to a large degree, it's about having standards. You are not guaranteed to get what you strive for, but you are always guaranteed to get what you accept. And so if you just don't accept less than your values or less than your standards, you won't end up with that. Now, you may find yourself in tricky positions every now and then where you're kind of in between and you're looking for something still. But a lot of it is about what you choose to accept. And similar to what I said earlier about how a lot of the time good enough is good enough, and every now and then you find a project where that's not the case and you need it to be better. It's not always worth it to die on every hill, you know. And so you need to figure out which of these values am I willing to, you know, like, really draw a line in the sand for? And which things am I maybe okay with flexing on? But I think that's, you know, that's a very personal conversation that you have to have. Ultimately, none of these things are one time decisions. So I think probably the most useful thing I can say is to have a practice of reflection and review. You know, every person in this room would say, oh, I'm a person of integrity. So nobody goes out and starts down this path where they expect to make a decision that doesn't have integrity. But what happens is it's like death by a thousand cuts. You make a couple choices that lead you in a certain direction, and then all of a sudden, three years later, you find yourself in a position, you're like, how did I end up here? And so I think what you need is a continual process of reflection. Review. I do weekly and yearly. You choose whatever you want. I don't think there's anything magical to that cadence. But every Friday I do a weekly review that's mostly business related. It's looking at metrics for the business. It's looking at where we Spend time, stuff like that. And then as Ryan mentioned, each year I do an annual review, and that's more values driven. Where did I spend my time this year? I go back and look at my calendar. How many places do I travel to? How many nights did I spend away from home? What does that look like? What projects did I work on? How many things did I write? How many articles did I publish and so on. How many workouts did I do? And then after I have everything listed out there from the year, I say, what are my core values? And where did I live by those this year? And where did I say that those are my values? But actually it didn't match up. And so if I didn't do that process, then I think I probably would end up four or five or six years down the line and be like, oh, I'm surprised that I haven't worked out in two years or haven't done something. You know, it's like things, time creeps up on you, but because I'm reflecting, it's like a way to pull yourself back to center. It's kind of similar to that line of pilots. When they fly a plane, they'll say 95% of the time the plane is actually off course from its destination. And the job of the pilot is to continually move the nose of the plane back on course after the wind blows them or that, you know, whatever, they drift a little bit and there's just that constant little course correction. And those weekly reviews or monthly reviews or whatever it is help you do that. Your values will also change over time. What is important to you today is going to be different than what it is in 10 years or 20 years. And so it's not a one and done thing.
- [51:10]
Student Leader
Hi.
- [51:10]
Student
Hope you're doing well. This question's a little bit of a doozy, so feel free to stop me at any moment.
- [51:16]
James Clear
Can't wait.
- [51:18]
Student
Yeah, so feel free to share your thoughts. Just for some context. I do want to work in like an international environment. So my question is, so when you're in a foreign environment, like another country, you may have to like, break your habits to kind of fit or like adapt within the culture. Is that like considered a fail in your eyes, like a breaking of a habit, or does that kind of go back to your point of like, finding a way to adapt to, like, show up?
- [51:43]
James Clear
Yeah, it's a great question. So forget about the foreign environment for a second. I'll come back to that. In general, I think this is a conversation that we need to have about our Habits, no matter where we're building them. I have gradually learned that sometimes when you tell people, okay, you're going to build this new habit, what they think in their mind without saying it. They may not even say this explicitly, but their kind of assumption is, if I was going to be successful with this habit, what it would mean is that I would just do it for the rest of my life. And in reality, basically, no habit is ever going to work like that. You know, it's in your life for a season, and that's totally fine. That does not mean that it's a failure, you know. So let's take my writing habit, for example. For the first three years, I wrote two articles a week, every Monday and Thursday, like I said, took about 20 hours each. And that was my writing. I had a really consistent writing habit of publishing 2,000 word articles twice a week for three years. And then I signed the book deal for Atomic Habits. And I don't have the capacity to write a book on top of that, so I had to choose. So I changed the way my newsletter worked and I wrote the book for the next three years. Does that mean that my twice a week writing habit is a failure now? I don't think so at all. I think what happens is you go through different seasons of life and your habits need to change shape. And so I think one of a couple good questions that anybody could ask are, what season am I in right now? You know, when your seasons change, your habits often need to change. And there can be any number of reasons for a change in seasons. You know, it could be big stuff like we have a kid or we move to a new city, or you start college or whatever. It could be small stuff like you're in a job and you take on a new project, or, you know, you move in with a new roommate or whatever. But there's all of these little and big shifts and seasons, these inflection points throughout life, and your habits need to change when those seasons change. I find that I have a hard time, kind of a slow learner, and so I have a hard time doing this. When we had our second child, I kept trying to force fit my old habits into this new lifestyle. And I did that for like 18 months before I finally realized, okay, you're being kind of a dummy about this, like, things need to change. And eventually I shifted and now, you know, things are running much more smoothly. So I think that's the first question is what season am I in right now? The international piece, I think, is just a subset of this overall approach, which is, yeah, like different country, different people, different business. Maybe things need to change shape, and that's totally fine. That doesn't make you a failure. This is what I mentioned earlier when I said I really want my kids to have a good internal monologue, a good discussion with themselves. A healthy, you know, I don't think anybody should be walking around when something doesn't work out and think I'm a failure. Like, that's not. You don't want to live in that space. Instead you could live with something like, I'm learning, you know, or like I'm figuring out how to make this work. I'm on the path to figuring out something that's going to work for me, but we don't need to label it. Also, whether you call something a failure or a success is highly dependent on that moment in time. So atomic habits, for example, if you were. I signed the book deal in November of 2015 and I was supposed to turn it in in November of 2016. I blew that deadline. And so if you had come to me in November of 2017 and said, is this book a success? I would have said, no, it's a failure. It's not written yet, it hasn't been finished. And then you come to me in March of 2018, still a failure, it hasn't come out yet. And then suddenly you come to me in March of 2021, you're like, oh, it's this huge success. And you're like, well, what was it? Was it a failure or was it a success? And the answer is it was both. You were just at different points along the line. I think so many things in life are like that. It's just where you happen to be in that moment. So don't feel things too strongly. Just keep moving forward.
- [55:19]
Student
Hi.
- [55:20]
Ryan Hawk
Hello.
- [55:20]
Student
Thank you so much for like sharing all these tips. I kind of want to go back to the concept of reflection and review, especially when it comes to I guess, goal setting, like short term goals versus long term goals. I know you mentioned like when it comes to building up like, like that lifestyle, those habits. You want to ask yourself, okay, how do I see myself spending the days? But I think sometimes, at least for me, it's easy for me to get lost in either or either the long term goal, like the vision or the current day to day habits. So could you expand on going about building those stepping stones in our everyday but also being able to balance of like. But this is like the long term goal.
- [56:05]
James Clear
That's a great question. It's a really, there's a lot going on there. It's just a really good question. In a lot of ways, I think the two time frames that matter most in life are 10 years and 1 hour. 10 years is shorthand for like any of the big, really important stuff that you care about. You know, you have to have some long term vision for where you want to end up in life. Whether that's the career that you want or the relationship you want, or, you know, what you're hoping to do for your kids or whatever, you know, like that you need to have some vision of where you're trying to go. And to Ryan's point earlier, that endurance is like an edge in life. It's a competitive advantage. A lot of the time, all that really means is thinking a little bit further out than most people think. So many people, their lives are, and I'm not really trying to blame them, a lot of this is just they feel like their hand is forced or they're so busy that they can't look out in the distance or whatever it is, but they're focused on like one week to one month, maybe six months or a year out. But like very few people are genuinely thinking carefully about what's happening more than a year from now. And if you can have a little bit of that longer term vision, you make different choices. You know, if you start optimizing today for what you want in 10 years, you choose to do something different today. So 10 years is let me have a clear vision of where I want to go. That's the long term. One hour is how do I spend the next hour doing something that moves me toward that 10 year vision. You know, sometimes I'll say, like, never let a day pass where you don't do something that's going to benefit you in a decade. Okay, so do something today that's going to pay off for you in 10 years. And the more that you practice that kind of dual mindset, the more that you can live in kind of both of those places at once, I think the better your outcomes get. The only tricky part of it, and I seem to be built for it, I seem to have an attitude or disposition that kind of likes doing things like this. But I think anybody could do it. The only tricky part is you have to be okay with this middle ground, which is like one to five years out where it hasn't happened yet. And that's when you start to, you know, like I got done with grad school and all of my peers, all the other students are going to get jobs at Deloitte and Accenture and anywhere else, and they're making 50,000 or 75,000 or $100,000 a year. I don't know what the starting salaries are now, but that seemed like an ungodly amount of money to me at the time. And that year I'm like, whatever, this is what I want to do. I want to start a business. But two years in, when I'm still in my parents basement and they're making money and buying their first car and putting a down payment on a house, I start feeling like an idiot, you know. And so the tricky part is having enough faith in that two to five year timeline where you keep making choices that get you where you want to go in 10 years, but you have to be willing to do something today that most people are not if you want to get to somewhere where they are not going to be in 10 years. And I don't even like really framing it up that way because that makes it sound competitive and it's not really about that. What it really is about is cultivating the life that you want. But my point is that you don't live in a vacuum and you will need to have some confidence in your choices to trust that it will ultimately work out.
- [59:09]
Eric
Thank you both for being here. My name's Eric. I'm a senior in the Wandel Leadership Fellows program. I'm really sitting with what you said, James, about the adult life being like a series of maybe five, ten year seasons. And I'd be curious to hear what you've learned about transitioning out of one of those seasons. It sounds like you're transitioning out of the writing about habits season into something new. What have you learned from that? And what have you learned from achieving success after such a long time and then pursuing something new with the same level of excellence?
- [59:44]
James Clear
Yeah, great question. I think about this more than I feel like people probably would think. I guess we could kind of call this like life strategy. So if you have five or six ten year periods, like this is a very limited number. You know, you don't get many shots now. You know, obviously you're not locked into doing anything for 10 years. So you can always change your mind if something doesn't go well after a year or two. And I think that is a big part of it is having this philosophy of like experimentation early on and figuring out is this actually how I want to spend a good chunk of time? And I don't think you even need to go into it thinking this is going to be exactly 10 years. It's not really about that. It's more just realizing that you only have a certain number of things that you can dedicate your life to. I do think there is some strategy to it. There just are certain things that some decades are better suited for than others. You're probably not going to go party in Ibiza when you're in your 70s. You know, like that decade's not well suited to that. If you want to do that, that's great. But like your 20s or 30s is probably the time. And so I don't know that I have. Well, I am sure of one thing, which is I have not gotten all this right. But I'll tell you about some of the moves that have kind of worked out so far and how I'm sort of thinking about it. I mentioned that I had never really traveled abroad during my childhood. And so I played baseball through college, you know, whatever. I spent a lot of time playing baseball and going to school, school. And that was great. I loved that. But I had this itch to get out and see the world. And so my 20s was a decade where I did a lot of that. I tried to find any excuse I could to go abroad. So I mentioned applying to the essay competition for Switzerland. I did that twice. There was another sort of like young leaders sort of thing that happened in Russia. I got to go to Moscow and St. Petersburg. The punchline of all this was I did a bunch of things like that where I ended up going to. I think I've been to 42 countries and like an eight year span or something. And so that was a chance for me to get out and see the world and do a lot of that with that chapter. And it was before I had kids and mostly before I was married. And so I was able to do that then. And then the next 10 years was this decade of like build a business and write a book and try to be successful entrepreneurially. On the tail end of that, you know, we've had kids the last couple years and got married. So there's like some family stuff that's happening there now. I feel like I'm entering this 10 year span where it's way less career focused and way more family focused. You know, we have all these young kids that we're trying to raise. And then also 30s and 40s is kind of an interesting period because a lot of people's careers are really picking up steam. But also you often have young children and so you're raising them and Your parents, if they're still around, are starting to age. And so I look at this, like, we just last week. We just spent the last week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and we took my parents there out, because I'm like, I probably have, like three to five more years where if we, like, I'm not going to take my parents around Europe when they're 78. You know, like, if we're going to do it, we probably need to do it now. And so you have this, like, very limited window where both your kids are at home and young, and your parents are young enough that they can still do stuff. And so you're like, I kind of want to take advantage of that now. And you have this tension of my career's taking off, but I have all this family stuff I want to do. And what I've kind of decided is I'm just gonna make family the priority and the career stuff's gonna have to wait. And that means I haven't written a second book. And it means, like, I write a lot less, and it means I do fewer things than I would otherwise. But that's just the season that I'm in right now. And it's fine. The kids will grow up in 10 years and, like, they probably won't be as interested in hanging out with me when they're in high school or college, and I'll have plenty of time to write another book. So if that's what I wanna do. And then I look at some stuff, this is further out, so I'm not as worried about it. But I still thinking about a little bit. What would it look like to live a really good decade in your 70s? You know, what would it look like to have a really good decade in your 80s, and you're just. The subset of things that you can do is just more limited physically then. And so there's some stuff that maybe it's just better if I wait on that, you know, like, it'd be better if I'm lucky enough to live that long. Maybe that's the right time for it. Mentoring, teaching. I always thought, oh, it'd be kind of cool to be a professor. Maybe that's something I do then, you know, I don't know. I don't know if I want to do that or not. But the point is, you maybe get five, six, seven big movements throughout life, but you can't just interchange them perfectly, you know, like, some things are better when you're younger, and some things are better when you're older. And so it's kind of important to think about what that stuff looks like. And I don't think that there is any right answer to it but I do think that there are always trade offs. And so what you need to be is comfortable with the trade offs that you're making. You know what's not good is to wish you were traveling when you're at home or to wish you were at home when you're traveling or to wish you had a family when you don't or to wish you were single when you're married. You want to make sure that you feel comfortable with the trade offs that you're making.
- [64:21]
Ben
Hi, I wanted to echo the thanks given today for you guys time and being down here. My name is Ben. I'm also a senior with the Wandl fellows as well. And like probably many people in this room, we're going through that job hunt we're going through getting a lot of feedback back to us. So I was wondering how do you apply feedback to habits and building those habits and maybe you know, you are stretched thin sometimes, like how do you apply the feedback to maybe create a better habit or adjust a habit a little bit?
- [64:47]
James Clear
That's a great question. Feedback is kind of the secret to building habits. One of the secrets at least your brain is building habits all the time, whether you think about them or not. And I feel like that's one of the important reasons to understand what a habit is and how it works because you go through life and you experience different situations and habits are the solutions to recurring problems that you face. So let's say for example that you have a long day at school and you get home and it's like 5 o' clock and you're stressed and tired. Well, that is a recurring problem that happens anytime after you have a long day and your brain starts looking for solutions. So one person's solution might be they play video games for two hours. Another person's solution might be they go outside and smoke a cigarette. A third person's solution might be that they go for a run. And you know, I'm not trying to make any value judgments but you can see that there's a range of answers to the problem that keeps recurring. And one thing that you start to learn once you get to be about your guys age is that a lot of the solutions that you have to those recurring problems are inherited or learned basically from your family and your friends and the environment that you grew up in. And that's fine. There's no need to judge yourself for whether they're good or bad. But once you get into your 20s, it starts to become your responsibility to come up with better solutions to the recurring problems that you face. And if you just think about it mathematically, what are the odds that for the typical problems that come up again and again, what are the odds that your current solution is the best one out of all the things you could do? It's very unlikely that the way you're doing it right now is the best way to do it. So this is kind of a base position that I have or try to live with, which is assuming that I am wrong and I'm trying to be less wrong. I'm not trying to be right, but I'm trying to be less wrong. And I think that puts you in a position where one, you're a little bit more humble about it, you don't feel like you have all the answers yet, and two, you don't need to judge yourself or feel bad about not having it all figured out. That's fine. We're all wrong. We're just trying to get a little bit less wrong each day. And the feedback is a way to do that. It's a way to learn about what you're doing and how you're moving forward. So you're going to have many, many habits. You're literally going to have thousands of habits. Tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, whatever. You don't need to think about most of them. But the question is, what are those big habits that when I look at my days and I say, am I living a good day or a bad day? What are the things that tend to be part of a good day? For me, I can pin it down to two or three things. I know that if I get my workout in, I tend to have a good day. If I get enough sleep, I tend to have a good day. Usually I really feel good about myself if I finish writing something and ship something. So that could be pressing, send on an email or a newsletter. But if I complete a piece of writing, even if it's only a paragraph, I feel really good. And so if I can get those three big things in in a day, that's great. I'm living a good day. And so the way that I would think about feedback or environment design or habit systems, all the things we've talked about today is how can I organize things to help me hit those big markers? And those are really the ones that I want to have better solutions to. If I have problems that are preventing me from doing those big things, that's Where I need to come up with better solutions. The other habits I won't worry about as much.
- [67:59]
Student
Hi, my name is Siobhan. I'm with Emerging Leaders here on campus. When you spoke about having that healthy internal monologue, I kind of just wanted to ask what that looked like for you and where you draw the line between setting yourself up for success but not beating yourself up too much.
- [68:18]
James Clear
Yeah. I said earlier, like, what are some of the things that you kind of have trouble describing? But that's a strength for you. You're like, you're good at it, but you don't even know how to really explain it. I have learned that this is one of those things for me. I just. I mean, I don't know what else you would think, but I just always thought everybody thought this way. So sometimes when I hear people talking themselves out of stuff or, like, beating themselves up, I'm like, what is going on? Because I didn't realize that people are doing this to themselves inside. I try to never be my own bottleneck. And so one of my little phrases is work backwards from magic. Let me start with what the magical outcome would be. What's the thing I really want to happen? And then work backwards from there to try to figure out different ways to make it happen. And the key is you can't have a single path to success. You need to have multiple paths, because you never know which one's going to work out or which one's going to fall apart. But if you don't have a single path to success, then your path is not blocked. It's like, there's not always a thousand ways to do everything in life, but there is almost always more than one way. And so you need to be okay with taking a different path. To give you an example from my life, I thought for a long time that I was going to go to medical school. If you were to. I was a science guy in undergrad. I studied biomechanics, mostly chemistry and physics classes, a little bit of anatomy stuff mixed in. I liked the sciences. And if you were to come up to me when I was 19 or 21 or even 23, when I was in grad school, what I said was, I was getting ready to go to medical school, and it actually wasn't that good of a fit. There are some things about being a doctor that I would have really liked and I think would have been good for me, but there are. There were a lot of things that just weren't a good fit for me. And the reason I was Giving that answer is because you'll never be criticized for saying that you're going to go to med school. You know, like, you go home for Thanksgiving, and everybody's like, wow, that sounds awesome. And so it just was an easy. I wouldn't have said this at the time, but looking back, it was just an easy answer to give that you kind of feel like you would be rewarded for. When you're a student, especially if you're focused on getting good grades and playing that game, it's very easy to keep going down that path. You know, the guardrails are set there for you. It's like, okay, you're gonna go from 10th grade to 11th grade and 11th to 12th and freshman year to sophomore year. Like, it's gonna keep. You're gonna just keep going that way. And so you're like, well, I already know this game, and I'm good at this game, so let me just keep going. I'll go to medical school, and then I'll graduate, and it's all kind of built there for you. And some of you will probably be doctors, which is great. I'm not trying to talk you out of it. But it ended up much better for me once I stopped trying to play this status game in my head and instead just did what was best for me and best suited for me. And so the internal monologue was a big part of that. It was trusting myself. You know, I think if I could go back, I'd probably tell myself a few things. Like, one is, your parents want you to be safe, but you want to grow. And those things are sometimes aligned, but sometimes they're not. You know, I have incredibly supportive parents. They've been, like, really amazing for me, but they want you to be safe. And so when I said I was gonna start my own business, they were kinda like, are you still thinking about med school? And even, like, a year in, they were like, do you think, like, maybe you'd want to, like, intern into medical practice or start something or whatever, you know? And then atomic habits came out, and they were like, you're not still thinking about med school, are you? But what they want is the safe thing. And what I wanted was to grow and, you know, and evolve. So anyway, I don't know that that's a perfect answer for you, but that is kind of how I think about it. It's like, how can I not be my own bottleneck? How can I work backwards for magic? How can I practice some of those things I mentioned earlier, like, I did with my son Visualize the positive outcome. Try to think about, you know, in any scenario, emphasize how this could be good for me. I'll give you one more little exercise. You can take a piece of paper or whatever, word doc, whatever you want. You got two pages, right? On the one page, you're going to write down the story of your last year. Okay? And the rule for this game is that nothing that you write can be false. It has to be true, right? Each sentence has to be true. But the first version, you're going to write down the most positive version of your last year. Okay? So you're going to focus on all your wins, all the things that have gone well, all the things you're excited about. The second page, you're going to write down the worst version of your last year, all the things that didn't go well, the bad moments, whatever, and you get done and you look at these two pages and what you realize is that there are no lies. Both of these stories are true. And you tell that story to yourself each day. So I think the question is, what page are you emphasizing? There's no reason to ignore the reality of life. I'm not trying to get you to hide from the facts, but you choose which facts you emphasize each day and you might as well tell yourself the version of your life that is the most empowering, that is the most useful, that helps you move forward and make better choices. But a lot of people spend a lot of time on that second page. They live there day in and day out. You know, I said earlier in this talk, you will get better at whatever you practice. Look at what a lot of people are practicing each day. They're practicing the art of getting mad on social media. They're practicing the art of like terrifying themselves by what they read about or what they focus on or what they emphasize. They're practicing the craft of berating themselves. So what are you getting better at each day? What are you emphasizing? I think try to spend more time on that first page.
- [73:26]
Student
Hi, my name is Chloe Lime Gruber and I'm a sophomore and with the Wanda Leadership Fellows. And when creating our own habits and making decisions in our lives, a lot of that is driven by our own wants and needs. I feel like a lot of it is also influenced by the people we surround ourselves with and the influence of others. So my question to you is, to what extent do you think we should allow others to influence our own habit making and decisions?
- [73:55]
James Clear
Well, I don't know that you're going to need to choose to allow it it's just going to happen naturally, you know, like you are going to soak up some of the people that you're. So I think that's the first thing is realizing that life is a two way street and you're going to be getting some of that influence. So I think the better question, or maybe the next question is how do I shape the people that I'm around? How do I choose what groups and pockets I'm getting into? I always tell the story. So I played baseball for a long time, but I also swam when I grew up. And the swimmers, you go to college and the top GPAs for all the sports teams, it's always the swimmers and the cross country country runners and the baseball players are always like down at the bottom. And I'm not saying that if you want your kids to be smart, you should put them in swimming. But what you see is that when you're surrounded by that, you know, like when you grow up with that. So I grew up with that and it's like, well, what are my friends doing? They're gonna go study for the test. So I wanna hang out with my friends. It's like, I'm gonna go over there too. And there starts to be this like, you know, subtle competition of what grade did you get? Or whatever. But it's just all, it's part of what's happening in that group and other groups doing different things. And so I think the question is, what do you want your groups to be doing? Where are the people that are already doing what you want to do and how can you hang out with them? Sometimes those groups are ready made. Like if you want to get into yoga, great, there are yoga studios. You can go there for an hour and be around people where your habit is the normal behavior and you can learn, learn there. But other times those groups are not pre built and you have to be the one to help facilitate them. And that takes a little bit of courage. So, like, good example for me, when I started my career, I started hosting these retreats where I would get six or eight authors together. Morgan actually has been to one. And I would just say, hey, we're just going to rent out an Airbnb for like two days. Everybody split the costs. Let's all come together, talk about how to write books, launch books, build an audience, do all that stuff. You know, Ryan's done stuff like this before too. And I didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family or any authors in my family. And so those. I would do this twice a year. And those two weeks were like two weekends were like the best weekends of my year because I would have like six months worth of stuff to go execute on. And it was a time, and I think this is the punchline where my desired behavior was the normal behavior, right? Like you get out of that group and you're like, not a lot of books sell 100,000 copies. But now I know six people who've just done it. So it doesn't seem that crazy, you know, like, why don't I just do what they did? And so every time I would send out the invites to that weekend, I was terrified because you don't want to look like an idiot and send out these. And everybody says no thanks, but everybody always said yes. And it's because everybody wants the same thing, which is for somebody to create the space for like minded people to get together. And so if you have something that you're excited about, maybe you can find a place where you can go get that. But if you can't, maybe you need to be the one to bring people together for a day or an evening. Could even just, just, just be a dinner. But the more that you can surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is your normal behavior, the more that you can rise together and soak up some of that stuff. So great question.
- [76:54]
Ryan Hawk
All right. This is awesome, man. Thanks again and thanks again for having us. This is so much fun. Everybody give it up for James Clear.
- [77:02]
It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note. Ryan learningleader.com Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with James Clear. A few takeaways from my notes. I just loved the Morgan Howell moment at the beginning. It was so cool to see James reaction to it. You can actually watch it on YouTube.com Ryan Hawk if you want. Morgan said quote I have absolutely not a single cell of envy for James because he is the nicest guy you will ever meet. You will not meet a nicer human than James Clear. You will not meet someone as successful as he is and as humble as he is. He is a saint in my life and because of that I adore every bit of this guy. So I cannot envy him. I am just inspired by his success, full stop.
- [77:53]
That is so cool.
- [77:54]
We should all strive to be that for the people in our lives. And then which it leads to my next point. Every opportunity in life comes through a person. Relationships are usually the most important thing. If you want to achieve more there is a relationship that can unlock better results. If you want to make a meaningful contribution, helping others is a great way to do it. And then Willpower People with tremendous self control aren't that different from those who struggle. They are simply better at structuring their lives in a way that doesn't require heroic willpower. It's not about determination, it's about environmental design. I think that's pretty liberating. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader show with James Clear. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple podcasts and you subscribe to the show and you rate it hopefully five stars and you write a thoughtful review. By doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, and for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon.
- [79:07]
Can't wait.