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Best of Design Matters: James Clear

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James Clear has been writing about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement for over a decade. Author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, he joins to talk about his career and how we can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals.

Debbie Millman: Okay, so you have a few bad habits. Maybe you bite your nails, maybe you drink too much, too often. Oh and cheese. Is there too much cheese in your life? I know there is in mine. And don’t get me started on flossing. And yet, it’s hard. It’s really, really, really hard to break a bad habit. And it’s just as hard to get a good habit going. Or is it?

James Clear thinks it’s doable, and he wrote a blockbuster best selling book about it titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones . James Clear is a writer, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. And he’s here to tell us about his life, his career, and how we maybe can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals. James Clear, welcome to Design Matters .

James Clear: Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for having me. And I think cheese is only a good habit. I can’t categorize that as bad. That sounds great.

Debbie Millman: Well, we’re starting out in a very good place. James, I understand that you tend to geek out about ultra light travel bags. Why?

James Clear: Yeah, I don’t know. In my twenties I had this urge where I really wanted to see the world and get out. I had never been abroad until I was 23 I think. Eventually after I graduated college, I got a passport and started wanting to travel. And I was really into photography at the time, and so I was doing a lot of landscape photography or street photography in different places. I can remember one trip in particular where I landed in Morocco and I was in Marrakesh, and I was taking some pictures and hanging out and doing some stuff, and. Then a few days later I went to Casablanca and I got off the train. It was 4:00 or something or 3:00, and for some reason I wasn’t able to get to my hotel quickly and the sun was setting soon, and that’s the hour when the light is best for photos. And so I wanted to take pictures for the next couple hours before the sun was gone, but I didn’t have time to drop my bags off. And I was so happy that I had figured out how to travel with just one bag because it would’ve been a ridiculous scene for me to be carting around wheeling all this luggage around trying to take photos for a couple hours. So that was probably the trip where I was like, “It’s definitely worth the effort to try to figure out how to travel with just one bag.”

Debbie Millman: Let’s go back in time a little. You were born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. Your mom is a nurse. Your dad played professional baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals in the minor leagues, and still live in the same house you grew up in. You used to live in Ohio as well. Why Ohio?

James Clear: I mean, the main answer I think is family. The main answer is the people I love live here. But I like Ohio too. I have pride in being from here. My parents’ house, which they do still live in. It’s about five minutes away from my grandparents’ house, so I spent a large portion of my childhood running around on my grandparents’ farm. They both live maybe 45 minutes north of Cincinnati. It’s a little more built up now than when I was growing up. I grew up, it was much more rural. Being outdoors, and running around the fields, and feeding the cows, that was all part of how I grew up, and I loved being outside there. I have a cabin in the woods now too that I love to go out to, and I have dreams of taking my grandkids out there the way that I spent time on my grandparents’ farm. I don’t know, it occupies a warm place in my heart and I’m proud to be from Hamilton, and proud to be from Ohio. And all of the people I love are still here, so I spend a lot of time here.

Debbie Millman: Well, having cows then makes sense regarding your love of cheese.

James Clear: That’s right. I didn’t think about that, but it started early.

Debbie Millman: Now I know that every Sunday, you and your family and all of your cousins and extended family would go over to your grandparents’ house, and your grandmother would make dinner every Sunday for 18 people.

James Clear: I know. She was a saint.

Debbie Millman: What kinds of things would she make for 18 people? That’s like a Thanksgiving dinner every week.

James Clear: It was a lot of spaghetti, a lot of pasta a lot of the time. Lasagna and spaghetti are the two that I remember the most. Every Sunday we would go to church in the morning and then we’d go over to my grandparents for breakfast. So my grandma would cook us breakfast. That was just my immediate family and my grandparents. That’s seven or eight people. Then we’d go home for four hours, and then at 3:00 we would come back to their house and then she would cook dinner for 18 people.

Debbie Millman: You’re right, she’s a saint.

James Clear: Yeah. And I say that jokingly because of all the work and everything that she did for us. She actually passed away recently. She passed away within the last year. And some of our extended family, some cousins of hers and stuff came down from Columbus for the funeral. And one of them said that he looked at his coworkers before he drove down that day and he was like, ‘I’m telling you, she’s the sweetest lady I’ve ever met.” But I think we all have people in our lives that we love to say things like that about, but she actually is the one person I know that when you said things like that at her funeral, you weren’t just being nice about it and kind of glossing over the tougher parts of her life. I truly don’t know if I ever heard her criticize someone, which is just an insane thing to be able to say about somebody. She’s almost too nice about it. It was one of those things where it was like truly if I didn’t have something nice to say, I just didn’t say anything at all. She was a special lady, and I’m fortunate to have had her in my life.

Debbie Millman: James, I understand that when you were four years old, you saw a cowboy on TV and decided right then and there you wanted to have lasso and swing it. So you took a screwdriver and tied it to a piece of string, and swung it around your head in the backyard. This resulted in your cutting your eyelid and getting your first stitches. And fast forward as you’re growing up, you were playing sports and they had a significant role in your life. You swam, you played basketball and football. But because you were always getting hit in football, you switched to baseball. And I was wondering, especially as we’ll go into what happened in high school while you were playing sports. I’m wondering, are you accident prone?

James Clear: Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think of myself as being super reckless or anything, but I don’t know. I have a lot of experiences with stitches. Yeah, I don’t know. I just wanted to make a lasso and I thought, “I’ll tie a screwdriver on the string that’ll do the trick.” And my mom was in the kitchen and looked out the window and saw me just whirling this around my head. I was really lucky though, and actually that’s kind of a theme throughout many of the injuries that I had is that it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. I cut my eyelid but not my eye, and I ended up getting stitches on my eyelid and kind of sewing that back together. And then later, I’ve had stitches all over the place. I cut my knee open diving on a broken swing set, and then of course I had my injuries in high school. I had a set of blinds fall in my head one time. I ended up getting 20 staples across my head for that. So I don’t know. I really don’t identify as someone who’s accident prone, but that probably sounds ridiculous to anybody listening to me list all these off right now.

Debbie Millman: Well, it’s interesting because all of your accidents really have something to do with being sports-minded or athletic. I am actually accident prone, but I’m the kind of person that trips over nothing, falls over a step, bangs into a wall or a door. I mean all of my stitches, and I have a bunch are all self-inflicted wounds that I encountered by being clumsy.

James Clear: I think the way that I would describe it for me is I’m very hard on things. My wife is constantly complaining about that. I’m banging doors, plopping onto couches, cracking frames of things. I’m always very hard on things. I don’t buy nice cars for myself because I know that I’m just going to-

Debbie Millman: Same. Exactly.

James Clear: I need something that I can be rough with. I guess I am that way with my body occasionally too.

Debbie Millman: Yeah, I am the same way. My wife has a gorgeous car. I will not even try to drive it. I insisted on getting a Jeep.

James Clear: Yeah, there you go. That seems right.

Debbie Millman: So let’s talk about what happened in high school, because I do think it is a really defining moment in how you became who you are. Like your dad, you wanted to play professional baseball on the last day of your sophomore year of high school while playing with your classmates. You were hit in the face right between the eyes with a flying baseball bat that slipped out of the hands of one of your team members and rotated through the air, sort of like a helicopter into your face. The hit broke your nose and your ethmoid bone, which is the bone behind your nose, deep inside your skull. Shattered both your eye sockets. Cognitively. You didn’t know what year it was. You lost the ability to breathe, and you began to have seizures. What happened next? I mean, and we’ll talk a lot about your book. You start your book with this chapter, which resulted in my sort of just not putting the book down till pretty much I finished. It is so riveting and so unexpected to start a book in this way.

James Clear: Yeah, I guess that was a good call by my publisher. I don’t like writing about myself, so I pushed back multiple times and it’s like, “I just don’t think it needs to be about me.” I’d really prefer to just make it straightforward and about building better habits, but they ended up winning out and they were like, “This has to be in there.” So it seems like people found it interesting. Yeah, it was a hard moment for me. I don’t know. It’s strange to think about in retrospect. It’s hard to fully parse the experience. I was obviously very out of it for a while. I ended up being put into a medically induced coma that night. I ended up waking back up the next day. And as you said, I had multiple facial fractures. I ended up back into surgery about a week later to get a lot of that fixed up, which interestingly that hurt more than the initial injury was the breaking of my nose, the resetting of a lot of the bones. The big thing is the road to recovery was so long. I couldn’t drive a car for the next nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. All I really wanted to do was just get back, and play some baseball, and be a normal teenage kid. But it took a long time. And I did not have any language for describing what I was going through at the time. I never would’ve said like, “I was just trying to get 1% better. I was just trying to find a way to improve.” But that was a time in my life when I had to practice the art of small changes or the art of little improvements, because that’s all I could really handle. I just had to find something to be positive about or some small improvement to focus on, and then wake up the next day and try to do it again. And eventually I was able to make my way back. It’s funny, thinking back on it now, I don’t remember being really in a bad mood about it. I remember being I don’t know, fairly positive or happy. And I think to your point earlier about what’s special about Ohio or what’s special about being here, it was the people that helped me do that. I mean, my grandpa was a very positive person. My parents are very positive people. And I think their influence was really dramatic and important during that time. And even though my physical progress was slow, mentally, I had a good attitude and I felt pretty good throughout the process. And it was a long road back, but I don’t look back on it begrudgingly.

Debbie Millman: The hospital that you were flown to was the same hospital your sister went to for her cancer treatment after she was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years prior. And your parents met with the same priest they had met with back then as well. Was there ever a moment where you were in danger of losing your life?

James Clear: So there was a period of time where I started to lose the ability to do basic functions. Swallowing, breathing. I had a couple seizures as I mentioned. And then at one point, I lost the ability to breathe on my own. So I think that probably qualifies. They had to intubate me, and then they were pumping breaths into me by hand for a little bit because around that same time, I was being transferred to the helicopter. The helipad was across the street. So we were in this ridiculous situation where I obviously was told all this after the fact, I’m being wheeled across the street and we kind of are hitting bumps on the sidewalk. The intubation apparatus popped out, so they had to reattach that. And then were trying to get me on the helicopter at the same time. So I think the nurses and doctors did a great job managing the whole situation, but I was in a very unstable condition for a window of time there.

Debbie Millman: You were placed in a coma as you mentioned. And when you woke up, you told one of the nurses that you had lost the ability to smell. She then recommended that you blow your nose. What happened after that?

James Clear: Yeah. I mean it seems like a decent idea. I was just like, “I can’t smell anything.” And she was like, “Well, you have all kinds of gunk and blood, and all sorts of stuff in there, so let’s clear your nasal cavity a little bit. So see if you can blow that out.” Which it didn’t hurt that bad even though my nose was broken. But when I blew, I forced air through the cracks in my shattered eye socket, and so then my left eye bulged out of the socket. It was halfway out. So the situation just became more complicated. I ended up having double vision for weeks. The doctors all had to confer to try to figure out what to do. They decided not to operate. They said they were pretty sure that the air was going to seep back out of the eye socket and my eye would gradually recede. And that did happen. It took about a month for it to go back to the normal position, but it did slowly make its way back.

Debbie Millman: Pretty sure is not very confidence inducing.

James Clear: Right. At the time, that probably didn’t feel as good as I was hoping, but we made it back. We made our way out. It was a really ridiculous 24 hour stretch.

Debbie Millman: You said that after the injury, you were trying to regain some control over your life. What did that look like for you?

James Clear: I think it all started with focusing on what you can control. So I mentioned physically, it was physical therapy sessions or whatever. Whatever exercise I was being asked to do. Can I do this well, can I try to give a good effort and do this successfully and have a good day today? So it started with a lot of that stuff. I had always enjoyed school and always taken pride in getting good grades and being a good student. It’s funny, as an entrepreneur now, a lot of my entrepreneurial friends really are anti school, or are down on school, or didn’t have a good experience. I feel like the opposite. It was kind of a game to me and I enjoyed trying to figure out how to play the game well. So I didn’t know if I have every indication that my intelligence is the same, but is it? Let’s see. And so I felt good about being able to study in the same way, or get a good grade on a test, or just make my way back there. I do think that helped me gain some confidence and feel like, “You know what? Maybe I can’t move the way I want yet, or maybe I still have a little bit of double vision or I can’t drive a car yet. But it seems like everything’s going to be okay. I’m thinking clearly, and I’ll get there eventually.” So I think study habits played a role in it. And then eventually, once I was able to start playing baseball again about a year later, then I started to focus more on the physical and the athletic part of it. And I was never as good as my dad, so I didn’t end up playing professionally or anything like that. But looking back on my career, I feel like I was able to fulfill my potential. And that was a pretty long arc. It took me probably a solid five or six years of continuous improvement and just getting a little bit better each year. I barely got to play high school baseball. I was coming off the bench my first year in college. My sophomore year, I ended up being a starter. My junior year I was all conference, my senior year I was an all American. So I just gradually kept making these little progressions. And that was very confidence inspiring. I had a coach who told me one time, a basketball coach that confidence is just displayed ability. And I felt like each year that went on, I was displaying my ability a little bit more and more. And I was gaining confidence in myself and feeling like, “Yeah, I have ever a reason the world to work really hard this off season or to show up again because I have proof of it.”

Debbie Millman: I sort of see confidence as the successful repetition of any endeavor.

James Clear: I like that, the successful repetition of any endeavor. It’s like that coach that told me that, that confidence is displayed ability is kind of like, “Yeah, if you want to feel confident about making free throws, go out there and practice.” And once you knock down 10 in a row, you’re going to feel a lot better about it. Successful repetition of it is going to breed confidence. It is kind of this interesting thing. I think a lot of the time in life, we talk ourselves out of attempting things. We decide that, “I’m not ready yet. I just don’t feel confident in it. I feel like I need to learn more. I feel like I need to develop my skills.” But the confidence comes after the fact, not before. And you need the willingness to try, and then the confidence arises after the fact.

Debbie Millman: How do you manage being back on the baseball field? For me, it would’ve been, I don’t know what it was for you. But that first day back on the field holding your mid up to catch a ball, were you afraid of getting hit again? James Clear: That’s interesting. Actually looking back, that’s a great question. Looking back, I had a couple advantages that I didn’t really think about. So the first is I actually got hurt in gym class, not in a game. So we were playing baseball, but it wasn’t an actual game. And secondly, I got hit by a bat, but I was a pitcher. So I didn’t have to pick up a bat and get in the batters box that often. I was just standing on the mound pitching. And so when I was playing the game, I was not in the same situation as when I was injured, which is an interesting thing looking back on it. And so I didn’t really have that very much. I didn’t have this fear of playing baseball. If anything, I was just excited to get back out there and get back to it. I’m not the kind of person that worries very much. Maybe to my detriment sometimes, but I’m not that kind of mindset. I just was able to chalk it up to, “Listen, this is a freak accent.” And sometimes you get unlucky in life and unlucky that day. Yeah. And then you just got to move on. Debbie Millman: You got a full scholarship to go to Denison University where you majored in biomechanics. Why biomechanics? What were you imagining you were going to do professionally back then? James Clear: Oh man, I wasn’t imagining anything. The only thing I wanted to do in college was play baseball, but I liked school and I was a good student. And looking back, I was able to kind of hack the system to my benefit. So I don’t have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn’t have anybody to look to. I wasn’t thinking I’ll be an entrepreneur someday. And at that time, I didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurial or whatever. But when I went to college, I looked at all the majors that were there, and I was interested in some stuff. I was a science guy, so I was interested in biology and physics. I took some chemistry classes. I was kind of playing in that sphere anyway. And then my sophomore year I heard, I don’t even remember where, that you could design your own major. And I was like, “I didn’t even know that was a thing.” So I looked into it a little bit more. I just looked at the course catalog and I was like, “I like these physics classes, and I like these anatomy classes, and I like these biology classes. I’ve already taken a couple of these chemistry classes.” And then I just put it all out on the piece of paper and I was like, “What would my major like this be called?” And biomechanics was the closest thing that I could think of. And it applied pretty well. I pitched it to the Academic Affairs Council and they were like, “Yeah sure.” So looking back, that’s a pretty entrepreneurial thing to do, to be like, “I don’t like any of the options that you have. I’ll make my own.” But I didn’t identify as an entrepreneur at that time. But it’s kind of cool to connect the dots looking backward and being like, “You were sort of always on this path. You like creating things, you like optimizing things. You like creating your own experience.” Debbie Millman: You then went on to Ohio State for your MBA. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the St. Gallen Symposium when you were there? James Clear: Yeah, so to the point that I just made a few minutes ago where I said all I really wanted to do was play baseball, but I liked school and I was good at school. I hadn’t thought too much about what I was going to do after at Denison. And my default answer was always I’ll go to med school. I thought about doing that and then I looked at a PhD program. I applied for a Fulbright Grant that I didn’t get. So that was kind of sitting there and I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go and get my MBA.” Not because I really knew anything about it. I had never had a real corporate job or anything. Just because everybody said, “Yeah, business knowledge. That’s important. You should know how that works. And then that’ll always be relevant.” I ended up getting a good scholarship, so it made the decision easy. But what I really needed was time to think. I needed two years to figure out what am I actually going to do next. So I went there and I took the classes, and occasionally these opportunities would come across that they would email out to the class. And there was this one called the St. Gallen Symposium that was a conference that was in Switzerland. And as I had mentioned previously, I had never been abroad at that point. So I was like, “Man, this is an essay competition. And if you get selected, if your essay gets chosen, you get to go to Switzerland. Well, that sounds kind of cool.” I did actually something that now I use this strategy all the time and or have used it all the time over the last 10 years building my business, which is basically looking at best practices and trying to figure out what parts of those transfer to your own skill set and experience. Or reverse engineering, I guess we could call it. So the symposium had all the previous winners listed on the website and their essays. And so I downloaded all the essays from the previous 10 years and read them all. And I looked to see how many references did each one have, how long was each one. Was there any similarity in structure in the way that they made their argument? And I did actually end up finding some common themes that it appeared the selection committee liked. And so when I wrote my article, I had that number of references, and I used that structure, and I wrote with that amount of length, and all of that. And anyway, long story short, the essay got selected. Ultimately, I actually ended up going two years. So the MBA program was a two year program. And I attended the first year. And then the second year, my essay ended up being selected as the winner. And the prize was $10,000. That was more money than I had ever made before. So I was getting ready to graduate, and suddenly I had $10,000 in the bank account. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try to give it a go and try to make my own thing.” Maybe I’ll try to start a business. So that was the money that I lived off of for the first probably six to eight months while I was trying to figure things out and start my own thing. And I really don’t know… at this point I’m kind of like man, I’m so wired this way. I probably would’ve ended up an entrepreneur somehow. But I don’t know how it would’ve happened without that essay. I probably would’ve had to go get a regular job for a while and then figure out some exit plan. Debbie Millman: So when you started your own business, what was the business? James Clear: Well, my first ideas, my first attempts were really sad attempts at a business. The very first thing I took some of that $10,000 that I got paid. I think I spent 1,500 bucks on getting an iPhone app built. And it let you put… this is pre Instagram. This is a while ago. It let you put captions on photos and filters on photos and stuff. It didn’t have any kind of social media component or anything, but it was just like a photo editing app. It was pretty bad looking back on it. It wasn’t very well executed. And I put it on the app store because I was hearing all these stories about people launching apps and making all this money. And I just thought, “If you build it, they will come.” And I built it and nobody came. And that was a good lesson for me. It was an expensive one because I had just burned through 15% of my cash. But I needed to learn that you need to have an audience. You need to have an ability to market, an ability to launch a product. I had no way of getting the word out. I didn’t know how to get in front of people. And so that experience forced me to go back to the drawing board and learn how do you get an audience? How would I get this in front of people’s eyeballs? And I started reading more and more about email lists, and building an email list, and starting a blog, and all that. And I started to go down that path. As I did over the next year or two, I started some other websites, some of which were other bad business ideas. I bought puppypresent.com at one point. Debbie Millman: That’s a good name. James Clear: The idea was that my girlfriend, now my wife, she loved puppies like many people. And I was like, “What if you could have breeders rent out time with their puppies and you could just buy it as a gift, maybe buy a puppy present?” And be like, “Hey, for your birthday, I got you two hours with these puppies. Let’s go play with them.” I thought it was a decent idea, but all the breeders I talked to hated it. They were like, “Wait, you just want to play with the dogs, but you don’t want to buy them?” And I was like, “Exactly.” So there were a lot of little hair brain things like that, that I tried that just never panned out. And it took about two years before I started to find my footing. I was doing some web design gigs in the background to make money try. I had to pay the bills somehow while I was waiting to have a business that was actually spitting off some cash. Eventually, I found my way to writing what is now jamesclear.com. So I started in September of 2010 was when I did that iPhone app thing. And then November of 2012 was the first article on jamesclear.com. That’s one of the biggest inflection points in my life was the choice to… you could look at it at different levels. The choice to become an entrepreneur, the choice to start jamesclear.com, the choice to start writing rather than, I don’t know, paying people to build iPhone apps. But setting out on the entrepreneurial path has been one of the biggest inflection points that I’ve had. And it took a long time. It was a really slow burn. There was nothing sexy or glamorous about those first two years where I was struggling and didn’t even have a idea that was working well. And then there also wasn’t anything sexy about the first three years of jamesclear.com where it basically wasn’t making any money. But eventually I got a book deal and Atomic Habits came out, and now it’s great, but it took a long time. It was five years of struggle before anything really hit. Debbie Millman: And I remember when I first became aware of your writing and saw how hard you were working, I was very impressed with how dedicated you were and are. But especially before you were atomic, so to speak. James Clear: The habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years.

Debbie Millman: And what gave you this sense? Before you go one, I’m sorry to interrupt because this is my million dollar question for you. What gave you the sense that you could make a business by writing twice a week?

James Clear: Well, I had a couple people who were proofs of concept. I didn’t know them, but I had a couple people that I looked at. So I was in grad school 2008 to 2010, just kind of stewing on these entrepreneurial ideas. There were the A-list bloggers around that time, two of them. One was Leo Babauta at Zen Habits who Leo’s still writing now. And he was a huge site at the time. And I was interested in habits. I hadn’t written anything about it yet. I just thought, “Hey, this site’s kind of cool. This is interesting, this guy’s making a living.” I think he had six kids and I was like, “Somehow he’s figuring this out and he’s writing about habits.” I was like, “I don’t have any kids. It’s just me. I barely have a bedroom. I can probably figure out how to do one sixth of this.” So Leo was definitely an early inspiration. And then Chris Guillebeau was also writing. Chris is still doing his thing now too. He was an early inspiration too because I mentioned I was really into travel and photography and stuff. And Chris had this whole travel thing that he was really all about. But also, Chris was the one who was writing every Monday and Thursday. That was just kind of his cadence. Leo I think wrote even more frequently than that. I think he wrote three or four times a week or something. But I actually can remember one article that Chris wrote, I don’t even remember the title of it or whatever, but I remember reading it. And I was in grad school and I thought, “Man, I feel like I could do this. I feel like I could write something that’s as good as that.” And so then I decided to try one, and it was way worse than what Chris had written. And I had to be honest with myself and I was like, “This is much harder than I thought it was.” It was a really interesting lesson where I was like, “If it looks easy, they’re probably putting in a lot more work than you think.” And the better somebody is at their job, the easier it often looks. Anyway, I had to a little bit of humble pie there and sit back and be like, “Okay, I need to start giving a better effort.” But when I settled on that Monday Thursday schedule, I did it partially because it felt like this is a cadence that I can actually stick to. This is something I could actually… I can’t do five days a week. I might not even be able to do three days a week, but I think I could do two.

Debbie Millman: I know. People like Maria Popova, astonish me that she can do it every single day. Yeah,

James Clear: It’s absurd. Her output, I saw somewhere on her site, she said she’s published, it was something, it seemed impossible. It was like 60 million words or something. I was like, “How is that even doable?”

Debbie Millman: She’s a very dear friend of mine and I know she writes every single one of those letters.

James Clear: Yeah, it’s unbelievable. So I felt like I could stick to it, and I have a very high quality bar. And it was really hard for me to let myself be like, “I’ll just put it out even if I feel like it’s just okay.” I just couldn’t get myself to do it. So I thought, “Well, twice a week is enough that I could spend 20 hours on an article or even 30 hours on an article.” I often did that for the first year or two where I would say the average article was probably eight to 10 hours. And it was frequent that I would spend 15 to 20. The fastest I ever did one in was four or six hours, something like that. So it was consistent enough that I felt like it was going to add up and compound, but it was infrequent enough that I had the space to do what I felt like was good work.

Debbie Millman: Do you ever suffer from writer’s block or not knowing what to write about?

James Clear: So I had this moment where I was writing for a few years, and the site was growing, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. And for some reason that number kind of got in my head a little bit and I was like, “Okay, now a lot of people are paying attention. Now it has to be really good.” And so I went through this little phase where rather than just telling myself, “Hey, it’s going well. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Rather than doing that, I thought I need to be more perfect now. So I thought, “Okay, what I need to do is spend even more time writing. More time revising it, more time working it out, more trying time trying to craft a really great sentence.” Interestingly, the writing actually got worse, not better. What I came to realize is that if I ever feel like I’m running low on ideas, what I need is not to write more. What I need is to read more. And it’s kind of like driving a car where you got to stop sometimes and fill the car up with gas. And the point of having a car is not to sit at the gas station all day, and just keep pumping gas into the tank, and never produce anything, or never go anywhere. But the point is also not to just drive until you run out of gas and then you’re stuck on the side of the road. And so you need this balance between the two. And reading is like filling up the tank for me, and writing is like going on an adventure. And they both feed each other, and I need both of them. And when I’m really on is usually when I’m reading something really great. It’s so good, I can barely make it through a page or two without taking a bazillion notes. And then I’m like, “I got to put this book down and just write about this right now.” And then the ideas take off on the page. So reading and writing are much more intertwined than I think I initially realized. And almost all of my good ideas are downstream from something great that I read.

Debbie Millman: You said that everything you write about is mostly a reminder to yourself of what you should be doing. Was that how your specialty in understanding habits first came about?

James Clear: Yeah, it’s funny to call it a specialty. I feel like my readers and I are peers, and I write about this stuff because I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with. It’s like, “Hey, have you procrastinated?” “Sure all the time.” “Do you start something and then you’re inconsistent?” “Yes, absolutely.” “Have you focused too much on the goal and not enough on the process?” “For sure.” I struggle with all that stuff like everybody else does. And so I wrote about it because it was relevant to my own life. I was interested in trying to figure it out a little bit more, and apply it, and I was just kind of curious about it. And so for that reason, because I was interested and because it excited me, I think the writing was better as a result. Now, it’s probably worth noting that in those early years, that first year or so, I wrote about a lot of other stuff too. I wrote about how to have better squat form in the gym, and the medical system in America, and all kinds of stuff. And the readers didn’t seem to care about those as much. And so I kind of followed my nose a little bit and I was like, “You know what? Every time I write about habits, or strategy, or making better choices, or being creative or productive, those are the topics that the audience also likes and that I like.” There’s a lot of other stuff that I like that people are like, “Well that’s great, but you can kind of keep it to yourself.” And so for those things I just kind of like, “Well, maybe I’ll journal about that and not publish it.” So I gradually kind of found my footing in my area of expertise or specialty as you say. And it was mostly just trial and error. But all the time, whatever I was writing about, I tried to make it something that I was excited about or that I was interested in personally.

Debbie Millman: I think that’s what makes it so interesting. I work with a woman that helps me with my research. Her name is Emily [inaudible 00:34:10]. And she didn’t know about you before I started working on the show. And initially, she was surprised because she knows that I’m not somebody that is particularly interested in the self-help genre, so to speak. But as soon as she started researching you, as soon as she started reading your book, as soon as we started talking about the way in which you approach what you share, she completely understood why I was so intrigued and excited about talking with you.

James Clear: That’s cool.

Debbie Millman: You have a very unique way of sharing information with people. That also happens to be something that could be helpful. I have never in my life recommended what would be considered a self-help book to my wife. But I am insisting that she read Atomic Habits because I think she will benefit from it so much and-

James Clear: I take no responsibility how this ends up. I hope that she enjoys it

Debbie Millman: Well, I’ve already started sneaking in some of the techniques. I’m Trojan horsing it in, because she so needs it.

James Clear: That’s good. That’s good. I think it’s important to be a practitioner of the ideas, and not just a writer of them or a theorizer of them. And I do think that if you’re forced to practice the ideas, if they’re things you actually use in your daily life, there’s going to be a better quality to the writing. And then also, you come to appreciate how difficult it is to make any kind of progress in the world, or to create something new, or to put this idea into practice. I think because I have struggled with all of these common habit pitfalls like everybody else has had, I think I am in a better position to say something compelling about it because it’s like, “Yeah, I know what this is like.” I’ve struggled through all this too. It also gives me more confidence in the ideas if I can be like, “Yes, I’ve actually used them.” And I’m not saying it’s going to be a perfect fit for everybody and I don’t think it’s going to work in all scenarios, but I know that it worked in this scenario. So I feel better about sharing it. My kind of approach now is that there is no one way to build better habits. There’s no single strategy to follow. But there are a lot of tools that you can use. And my job is to lay all the tools out on the table and say, “Hey, here’s a wrench, and here’s a hammer, and here’s a screwdriver.” And your job is to say, “You know what? I think for my life or for my situation, the wrench feels like the right fit, or the hammer might be better for this particular experience or this particular situation.” And I think if I can do that well, if I can lay all the tools out and give everybody a full toolkit to work with, we’re all in a better position to make some of these changes. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy all the time or even that it’s going to work all the time. But I feel like I have a better appreciation for having a big suite of tools because I’ve had to practice it.

Debbie Millman: Well, a lot of people agree. In 2018, you brought your book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones into the world. In the years since the book was published, you have sold over 9 million copies worldwide. You’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller List, I looked it up this week, for 154 weeks. 154 weeks listeners. Your book has been translated into over 50 languages. Your newsletter is sent out every week to more than 2 million subscribers. And you also travel all over the world with your super sleek bags giving inspiring speeches. Congratulations James.

James Clear: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. And I don’t think it’s reasonable for any author to expect those kind of outcomes. It just struck a chord, and I’ve been very fortunate. But yeah, I don’t really know what else to say other than I’m glad that people are finding it useful. I think ultimately, the only way a book can grow that is if it’s word of mouth. It’s far outpaced my ability to sell it or to tell people about it. And what I tell myself when I go to sleep at night is people are finding this useful. It’s growing because people are telling other people about it. And the only reason they’re telling people about it is because they find it helpful themselves. And that certainly feels good. It feels gratifying. Habits have been written about for a long time. They’ve been around long before I was here, and people be writing about it long after I’m gone. And I am just adding a very small piece to the collective knowledge of humanity on the topic. I’m not really saying much that’s very new. My hope is just that maybe when you read it, you’re like, “I never quite heard it put that way before.” Or, “Maybe this gives me a little bit different line of attack than I had previously.” And perhaps that unlocks an opportunity for you that maybe wasn’t there before. And I’m really grateful to all the readers.

Debbie Millman: Yeah, I’m only going to push back a little bit here James, because I do think what you’re writing about is new in that it’s your perspective. Which is doesn’t have any shame attached to it. There’s no berating. It’s just very straightforward, very relatable, and really, really helpful. So let’s talk a little bit about habits. I have two fairly basic questions from my listeners that may have not read your book, maybe the two or three people out there in the world, or your website. So just two easy questions that I think will help frame the rest of my questions. First, what is a habit?

James Clear: Well if you talk to an academic or a researcher, they’re going to say something like, “A habit is an automatic or mindless behavior that you do without even really thinking about it.” So brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongues, you tap them together twice. Stuff that you don’t even really think about that much. I think there’s another definition, another way to describe a habit, which is it’s a behavior that’s tied to a particular context. So you can never have a human outside of an environment, where you’re going to live your whole life in some type of environment. And your behaviors are often linked to that environment. So your couch at 7:00 PM is linked to the habit of watching Netflix, for example. Or your kitchen table at 7:00 AM is linked to the habit of drinking tea and journaling. And I think that reveals something important about habits, which is the environment plays a pretty big role in how they’re shaped, in how they’re triggered, and so on. I think the strict academic answer is it’s a pretty mindless automatic routine or behavior. That’s not how we usually talk about it in daily conversation. If I were to ask you, “What are some habits you want to build?” You might say, “Writing every day or going to the gym four days a week.” And writing is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth might be, but I know what you mean when you say it. You mean I want it to be this regular practice, this ritual, and so on. So it kind of depends on how academic we want to get about the definition. But I think we could just say most of us know what we mean when we say a habit. We mean something I do regularly, something I do frequently, something I do consistently.

Debbie Millman: So my second basic question is what do we get wrong about habits?

James Clear: It’s a good question. I think different people get different things wrong. So I don’t know that there is one single answer. There are some common pitfalls that you see people fall into a lot. Like one common pitfall is biting off more than you can chew or starting too big. I mean, this happens to everybody. It’s happened to me a bazillion times. You get excited. Especially if you’re an ambitious person, you start thinking about the changes you want to make and then you’re like, “Let me find the perfect workout program, and it’s an hour long, and you’re going to do it five days a week.” And instead, it might be more useful just to develop the habit of going to the gym for five minutes, four days a week. Just become the kind of person who masters the artist showing up. But we often resist that type of small action because it feels like, “Well, this isn’t enough to get me the results that I want.” So that’s probably not even worth it. But there are levels to this whole thing. And if you can master the art of showing up, then you’re in a position to optimize, to improve, to advance. So that’s kind of a big part of my philosophy is make it easy to show up. The other common maybe pitfall or mistake, the things that people get wrong about it. I think one thing that we get wrong is we don’t look at our bad habits enough. We don’t think about what they can teach us for building good habits. So let me give you an example. Most behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time. So broadly speaking, there’s an immediate outcome, and there’s an ultimate outcome. For bad habits, the immediate outcome is often pretty favorable. The immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It’s sweet, it’s sugary, it’s tasty, it’s enjoyable. It’s only if you keep eating donuts for a year too, that you get unfavorable outcomes. Or smoking is the classic bad habit example. Well, the immediate outcome of smoking might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you reduce stress on the way home from work. So the immediate outcome might be favorable. It’s only the ultimate outcome five or 10 years later that’s unfavorable. But, building bad habits is often pretty frictionless. It’s somewhat easy. The way that we all talk about building good habits where we’re like, “Oh man, I just need to get myself to go to the gym.” Nobody says that about eating donuts. Nobody says, “Oh man, if I could just get myself to eat more donuts.” We don’t talk about it that way. And I think there’s a lesson baked in there. Why is that? If we can start to look and maybe unravel our bad habits a little bit more, we notice they’re behaviors that are often really convenient. There are behaviors that are often immediately rewarding. There are behaviors that are often obvious and occupy space in our environments, in the rooms and buildings that we work in all the time. And you can copy and paste those lessons onto building good habits. You can try to find ways to make your good habits immediately rewarding. You can try to make them more visible in the environment. You can try to find ways to make those frictionless and convenient. And the more that you do those things, the more you’re kind of putting those same forces to work for you rather than against you.

Debbie Millman: One of the things that I was really struck by was just in my own environment and online, and in advertisements, maybe you hear things like, “Be healthy for 30 days and then,” or, “Do this thing for 21 days and then.” And you said the honest answer to how long it takes to build a habit is forever. And I’m wondering why you think it’s forever.

James Clear: Well, what I’m trying to get at there is a habit is not a finish line to be crossed. It’s this lifestyle to be lived. And it’s not like, “Hey, just do this for 30 days and then you’ll be a healthy person.” Or, “Just do this for 60 days and then you will be productive.” You don’t have to worry about it anymore. What I’m really getting at when I say the true amount of time it takes to build a habit is forever is you are looking for a sustainable change. A non-threatening change. You’re looking to integrate it into your new lifestyle, kind of build this new normal. And then once you’ve stuck to it for a long time and it becomes part of your natural cadence of your day, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just like, “This is just part of my daily routine. This is something I can stick to.” And that’s how habits really last. This idea that let me start the day off by doing this 21 day sprint and then I’ll be the kind of person I want to be. I think once you unpack it that way, almost everybody realizes, “Well, that’s not how it actually works.” But that is what we’re sold a lot of the time. That is what everyone’s telling us. And so I’m just kind of pushing back on that a little bit and trying to be like, “You don’t really need to make these radical changes all the time. What you really need is can we just figure out a way to live a good day today? All you got to do is live one good day. And can we find a pattern that is sustainable, that’s non-threatening, that you can integrate into your daily routine?” And then it can start to become something that this is just normal for me. It’s not like I’m not reaching so much. I’m not trying to be a totally different person.

Debbie Millman: The part that I found to be most fascinating about your book was this deep-seated notion that our habits are how we embody a particular identity. And you encourage people interested in doing this type of work to start by asking themselves who is the kind of person you want to become, and what is the type of identity that you want to build? And that’s very intentional.

James Clear: Yes. Yes, it is intentional. We often talk about habits as mattering because of the external stuff they get us, All this stuff we’ve just been talking about, “Habits will help you get fit, or make more money, or be more productive, or reduce stress.” And it’s true habits can help you do those things, and that’s great. But the real reason that habits matter is that as you said, they help you embody a particular identity. Every action that you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel. But it does cast a vote for I’m a writer. And no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. And this is why I say the real goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat. It’s to become a meditator. The real goal is not to run a half marathon, it’s to become a runner. Then these cases, I’m using labels. Reader, or runner, or meditator, or whatever. But it’s true for characteristics as well. “I’m the type of person who finishes what they start,” or, “I’m the type of person who shows up on time.” And the more that you believe that aspect or that element of your story, the more you start to integrate that into your identity, the easier it becomes to stick to that behavior in the long run. I mean, in a sense, once it’s part of your story, once it’s like some aspect of yourself that you take pride in, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you see yourself be. I mean, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip arm day at the gym. Or if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long hair care routine and you follow it every day. And the aspects of our identity that we take pride in or that we kind of say, “Yeah, this is part of who I am.” We don’t have to motivate ourselves to do those behaviors in the same way that somebody who’s maybe just getting started does. It’s kind of like, “No, this is just part of what I do. This is part of how I show up.” And I think that’s ultimately where we’re really trying to get to. It is a long process. I like that voting metaphor because each time you do a little habit, it’s like casting a vote on the pile. And you kind of build up this body of evidence. And no individual instance changes your belief about yourself or changes the story that you’re telling, but over time, you start to tip the scales in favor of that story. And this is a little bit different than what you often hear people say. You’ll often hear something like, “Fake it till you make it.”

Debbie Millman: Oh yeah. No, no. I say make it till you make it. Just make it till you make it.

James Clear: Make it till you make it?

Debbie Millman: Yeah.

James Clear: That’s such a good creator phrase. Just make the blog post until you make it. Make the piece of art until you make it. Just make the thing. Just keep creating until it’s there.

Debbie Millman: Right.

James Clear: Fake it till you make it asks you to believe something positive about yourself, right? So it’s not ultimately that terrible, but it asks you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. There’s a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence. We call it delusion. Your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you’re actually doing. And behavior and beliefs are this two-way street. What you do, the actions you take each day, they influence what you think about yourself. And the mindset that you have, the beliefs that you carry, they influence the actions that you take. But my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to make it till you make it as you say, to start with one small action. To start with a little bit of evidence that, “Hey, in this moment, I was that kind of person.” And eventually, you have every reason in the world to believe that aspect of your story. So yes, your habits are how you embody a particular identity. And even if they’re small, I think that makes them particularly powerful.

Debbie Millman: But we can also look at the opposite. And what you say about yourself often as you mentioned, will begin to determine who you are or who you become. One of the things that I was struck by, you write about how people can walk through life in a cognitive slumber. And I’m going to quote you here. “Blindly following the norms attached to their identity by stating things like, ‘I’m terrible with directions. I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering people’s names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.'” James, almost every one of those, except the, “I’m always late,” are actually designations that I thought you were describing me, and how I state my identity. And I read that. Yeah. I’m like, “James is looking deep into my soul and he is telling me that I don’t have to say these things about myself anymore if I don’t want to be them.” That’s what was so personal about my experience reading your book.

James Clear: That’s funny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to target you like that.

Debbie Millman: No it’s okay.

James Clear: It’s interesting though, these stories that we carry around. I didn’t think something like I have a sweet tooth. Before I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have thought anything about that. I love chocolate, I love caramel. Sure. But now I look at it and I’m like, “Each time you tell yourself that, you’re kind of reinforcing that identity.” And it becomes a little bit easier to do that thing the next time. And I am not an extreme sort of personality in the sense I don’t think that means, “Hey, you should never eat chocolate or you’re never going to forget somebody’s name again,” or whatever. All that stuff’s going to happen. This is just life. But I do think that it’s worth asking yourself questions given the reality of the situation without ignoring the facts and without ignoring the reality of what needs to be done, what’s the most empowering version of a story that I could tell myself? What’s the most useful version of a story that I could tell myself? Because if you’re not ignoring reality, there’s no sense in telling yourself a less useful version. There’s no sense in telling yourself the least empowering version. But we often do that. I heard about this interesting exercise one time where I said take two sheets of paper. On the first sheet, you’re going to write the story of your last year or pick whatever timeframe you want your last 10 years. And the only rule for this little game is that you are not allowed to say anything that isn’t true. So it has to be factually true. But the first page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years. And you’re only going to write it in the least favorable way possible. And then the second page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years, and you’re going to write it in the most favorable way possible. It’s interesting because you’re going to sit there with these two pieces of paper, and there are no lies on either page. Yet which version of these stories are we telling ourselves each day? If you’re not going to ignore reality, if you’re still going to say, “Hey listen, I’m still going to wrestle with the truth and I’ll still make sure that I do what I need to do.” I just can’t see any sense in telling yourself the story that’s on the first page. It doesn’t make any sense to do anything other than what’s going to make you feel useful, empowered, joyful, happy, fun, excited. Let’s tell the version of that story and still do the things we need to do. And sometimes life is hard and you still got to deal with it. But we don’t always do that. And I think we would probably be in a better place if we tried to do that each day.

Debbie Millman: So I think a really important way of thinking about this then is that habits matter, not because they can get you better results, which they can do, but also because they can change your beliefs about who you are.

James Clear: Yeah. I don’t think this is unique necessarily to habits. I’m not saying other experiences in life don’t matter or that a one-off event or something doesn’t make a difference. Those things do matter. It’s just that over time, your habits are the experiences that get repeated. So the weight of the story starts to shift in favor that just because of the frequency of them. And everything else starts to be like, “That just happened one time, this was a blip on the radar,” or whatever. And so I think they are unique in their long-term ability to shape identity. Because day after day, week after week, you’re getting these little bits of proof that, “Hey, this is part of my story.”

Debbie Millman: One of the most viral aspects of your book is about how important it is to focus on building a system rather than trying to achieve a specific goal or an outcome. And you state that you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I’m wondering if we can just deconstruct that a little bit for my listeners. What do you mean by a system?

James Clear: So your goal is your desired outcome. What is your system? Your system is the collection of habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. In many ways, our results in life are kind of like a lagging measure. Or at least to a large degree, they’re a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. We also badly want better results in life. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It’s like fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves.

And there are many things in life that influence outcomes. I’m not saying habits are the only thing that matters. You’ve got luck and randomness, you have misfortune. All sorts of things can befall you. But by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, and your habits are. And the only reasonable, rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So I think for all of those reasons, I encourage people to focus on building a system rather than worrying too much about a goal.

And I totally get why this is hard. Some of it I think is just a byproduct of the way that both major media and social media works. You’re only going to hear about something once it’s a result. You’re never going to see a story that’s like, “Lady eats chicken and salad for lunch today.” It’s only a story once, “Lady loses 100 pounds.” Or you’re never going to see people talking about on the news, “James Clear writes 500 words today.” It’s only a story once it’s like, “ Atomic Habit s is the best seller.” The outcomes of success are highly visible and widely discussed, and the process of success is often invisible and hidden from view. And I think that leads us to overvaluing results and maybe undervaluing the process of the system.

So all I’m trying to get at with this is a little bit of an encouragement to say, “Hey, goals are great and success is awesome. But let’s maybe put that on the shelf for a minute and spend most of our days focused on what collection of habits am I following? What system am I running?” And kind of adjust the gears of that machine a little bit, and start running a better system. And that’ll carry me to a different destination naturally.

Debbie Millman: I want to talk about the brain and habits. You write that the primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future. And this happens in everything. I remember years ago, I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. And I had been very used to habitually walking into my bedroom in a certain way and going to my night table to find something. And suddenly in the days after rearranging the furniture, I found myself blindly walking in the wrong direction because my night table was no longer there. And it struck me how dependent we get on these habits that are unconscious, and how much that impacts the way we live our days. So how is our brain impacted by our reliance on our habits?

James Clear: Well, it depends on how broad you want to get with this answer or how deep you want to go. Ultimately, every organism needs energy to survive. And anything that you can do to conserve energy or to be more efficient or effective is going to help in the survival of that species. And so your brain is looking to automate things. It’s looking to figure out solutions to future problems that it won’t have to think as much about. And if it doesn’t have to think about that. It can shift its attention and energy to something else. And so habits save you time. They save you effort, they save you energy. And at that very basic biological level, they help you survive. Now of course the environment our ancestors grew up in, it was very different than what we have today. So now we have this kind of paleolithic hardware, we’ve got this biology that is primed to build habits. But we live in a modern society where there’s all sorts of different ways to apply that brain and that kind of thinking. And so now we’re building habits on social media, and we’re building habits in corporate workplaces, and we’re building habits and saving for retirement. And our ancestors didn’t care about any of that stuff. But the machinery works just as well in those situations as it did before.

So ultimately, I think habits are, from a biological level, they’re like an energy saving process. But then in a more practical, modern way of thinking about it, they’re a time saving process. And they help you become more effective and efficient in that way because you don’t have to spend time thinking about what to do.

Debbie Millman: Well, what’s so interesting about this notion of the brain trying to hack these systems for us, a lot of it is done subconsciously. And when that happened in my bedroom with the night table, I began to wonder how many unconscious habits do I just obey? Because this is the way I’ve taught myself to view the world. And that’s why the shift in identity was so intriguing to me in using these hacks to begin to start to rework certain neural pathways in my brain that I might not even be aware is sabotaging my efforts.

James Clear: That’s a fascinating question. And I think a lot of the habits that are unconscious, you wouldn’t want to have to spend any time thinking about. If you get up in the middle of the night and you just need to walk over to the bathroom,

well you don’t want to have to be thinking carefully about how do I turn to get out of bed, and how do I put one foot in front of the other? And where is the coffee table, and how do I walk around it? Am I going to stub my toe on the side of the bed? All of those non-conscious patterns that we have, they just help you operate through the world. And if you had to actually think about every little thing you were going to do throughout the day, you would never be able to do anything. It’d be hard to move even across the room.

But, there also are all these unconscious thought patterns that we have, these little identities that we carry around with us, these stories that we keep repeating, that maybe we don’t even know we’re telling ourselves or realize. And this is another thing that I say in the book, which is the process of behavior change almost always starts with self-awareness. Because it’s really hard to change that story if you don’t realize you’re telling yourself it every time. And there are different strategies you can use for that. There’s some things in the book that are actual tactics like the habits scorecard or something like that where you write all your habits out and analyze them a little bit. That stuff can help.

I think also just a process of reflection and review. Whatever cadence makes sense for you, whatever that exact process looks like can be unique to you. But making time to think about how you’re spending your time and reflecting on whether that represents the values or the identity that you want to build. It’s really hard to self-assess stuff without giving yourself time to think. If you’re so busy that you don’t have any time to sit, and relax, and maybe stew on it a little bit, it’s hard to be self-aware of all those little subtle stories that we’re telling ourselves.

In my case, I have a period of reflection review at the end of each week. I do a really short one each Friday. That one’s mostly business related. It’s mostly looking at what did I produce, how much traffic, how many email subscribers, revenue expenses. It’s just a spot check for the business for the most part. But then I also have one at the end of each year where I do an annual review, and that’s much broader. That’s like how many nights did I stay away from home this year while traveling? Was that the right amount? Should that be up or down? Do I need more family time or less? How many workouts did I do this year? How many on average each month? What were my best lifts throughout the year? How many articles did I write? How many words did I produce this year? Is that what I want to do next year?

So you can get the idea. It’s customized to you and what you’re interested in. But just having those moments of reflection review, I think help make you more self-aware. And boy, it’s really hard to change behavior if you’re not aware of it. So that process is really important for shaping the habits that you want.

Debbie Millman: Yeah, I love that you share those annual reviews with your readers. They’re not just for you. You share the good, the bad, and the changeable every year. And they’re really fun to read. And it’s been fun to see the trajectory since 2018 especially, when the book was published. Looking back on this last 10 year period, what is the biggest thing that you’ve changed about yourself after learning all you have about habits?

James Clear: I’ll give you two. So I’ll give you what I think is something big that I have changed for myself, which I don’t know if it’s the biggest, but it’s something big. And then I’ll also give you one that hasn’t changed, which I think is also interesting.

So the thing that hasn’t changed is working out has been one of the core habits that my life has been built around for the last 10 years. And I genuinely mean this. I don’t know that I would be an entrepreneur if I didn’t have that one habit. I’m not necessarily saying everybody needs to work out a bodybuilder or anything like that. You can decide what it is for you. But I do think we need some habit that we feel like grounds us, that we feel like is time for us that you can get away from everything. When I’m in the gym, that is the only hour of the day where I’m not always thinking about the business in the background, or thinking about what I need to do, or responsibilities or whatever. That’s the only time that I have where it’s truly just me.

There have been so many days over the last 10 years where I felt like, “Man, I really blew that day. Or we just didn’t get anything effective done. I haven’t made any progress. The book is still a mess.” But, at least I got a good workout in. So that one has kind of been an anchor point for me.

And then I do think something that I’ve grown with is caring less about what other people think and focusing more on, I guess we could just call it trusting myself more or trusting my instincts more. Some of this is going to be natural. You’re not going to have much to trust yourself on early in your creative career, because you haven’t produced much yet. And now I’ve produced a lot more. So I kind of have a better taste for what works and what doesn’t, or what’s good and what isn’t.

But I do look back and think. It’s kind of interesting. For the first two years that I published articles on jamesclear.com, I never shared any of them on Facebook because I didn’t want anybody who knew me to see it. I didn’t want it to color their thoughts about me. I was like, “Well what if they saw my stupid little blog and thought, ‘I’m surprised he’s doing that. I thought he was going to be doing something more impressive.'” Or, “I’m surprised he’s spending time on that. I wonder if he has a day job. Is this actually the thing that he’s doing is just writing here?”

I definitely was worried about the collective they and what they thought. And looking back now, I’m like it’s kind of silly because if you were to ask me any individual person, “You worried about what Sarah thinks?” I’d be like, “Well no, she probably isn’t judging me like that?” Or, “Are you worried about what Tony is going to say.” No, probably not. He would probably be cool about it. But collectively, I had this image of they will not be impressed by it, or they will not think it’s good enough. I don’t feel that way as much anymore. I’m sure I still fall into that pitfall, but I look back on it now and I hope that I’ve grown a little bit since then.

I think the one thing that helped me get through it, and it didn’t become an enormous roadblock, was that I let that fear or that worry, that concern be the gas pedal and not the brake for my work. So because I was worried about what people were going to think, what I told myself was not, “I shouldn’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough,” or, “

I should just quit.” What I told myself was, “Now you really got to make sure it’s good.” Now it’s like, “Get to it. Let’s start working.” And I think that made me put a better effort in. And so the result ended up being great.

But I can just as easily imagine a scenario where I tell myself, “I don’t know what people would think. I’m going to look pretty foolish here. I’m going to feel kind of stupid.” So I’m just not going to attempt it. I really try to live this way in my life. I don’t think I always do it, but I try to not be my own roadblock. I try to let the world tell me no before I actually tell myself no.

And there’s not 1,000 ways to do anything in life, but there’s almost always more than one way. And it’s actually very rare that you run into a true hard roadblock where you’re like, “Hey, the world just says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t be persistent anymore. There’s no other way to try this. You have to give up.'” It’s actually very rare to get a full stop like that. There’s almost always something else you can do, some other line of attack to try, if you just have the courage to do it. And I think that’s something that’s changed for me is maybe hopefully, I have a little bit more of that creative courage now than I did before. But I’m glad that it didn’t stop me early on because I could easily imagine a scenario where that would be true.

Debbie Millman: I think a lot of people are glad that didn’t stop you. My last question James. I read that you might be starting a podcast. Is that true?

James Clear: The rumors cannot be confirmed or denied. I think it’d be cool. We have lots of episodes that we’re working on, and trying to feel out, and figure out. I don’t have a launch date for it. And as I am sure you can appreciate, as I said earlier in this conversation, when it looks easy for people, it is probably much more work than you were thinking. So I am learning that right now. It is much, much harder to produce something that you’re proud of than maybe you would think on the surface just listening. So I have a lot to learn, but I’m definitely thinking about it and we’re slowly working on it.

Debbie Millman: Excellent. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you so much James, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters .

James Clear: Of course. I appreciate the opportunity, and love any chance to talk to you. Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie Millman: Thank you. James Clear’s book is titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones . You can find out more about James Clear and sign up for his weekly newsletter at jamesclear.com or atomichabits.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters , and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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James Clear

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James Clear’s work has appeared in the New York Times , Time , and Entrepreneur , and on CBS This Morning , and is taught in colleges around the world. His website, jamesclear.com, receives millions of visitors each month, and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his email newsletter. He is the creator of The Habits Academy, the premier training platform for organizations and individuals that are interested in building better habits in life and work.

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James Clear: Interview, Biography and Facts

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Why settle for average when you can be so much more?

James Clear, an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer, believes that ordinary people can do extraordinary things and be part of changing their corner of the world. He shares his thoughts, experiences, and insights on his blog, jamesclear.com -The Art of Becoming Better.

I met James last year at the World Domination Summit in Portland and was impressed with his sense of purpose and ability to immediately connect with others.

James is here to do great things and it's truly an honor to be interviewing him. Please join me in welcoming him as he shares his beliefs and his work in this interview.

1. James, thank you for taking time for this interview. How long have you been working on your website, jamesclear.com? What prompted you to start it? Have there been any surprises along the way?

The website has been live since 2013. I publish new content every Monday and Thursday, and I wanted to make sure that I could do that consistently for a few months before I let everyone know about the website. The central question that our community attempts to answer is “how do you live a healthy life?” For my part, I focus on how to use the psychology of behavior change and habit formation to make it easier to live a healthy life. There haven’t been any big surprises yet, but I’m sure there will be many as time rolls on.

2. In one of your blog posts you describe your baseball background. As a high school athlete you went from being a mediocre player to a star. What caused the change? How has that experience impacted how you approach business?

Baseball has played an important role in my life. Most notably, it taught me to believe in myself. Without the confidence that I gained from sports, I’m sure that I would be doing something different than I am right now. As for what caused the change, there were many factors. I had good coaching, great teammates, and I’m sure there was a lot of luck thrown in there as well. That said, there were plenty of things that I did as well. You can read more about the changes that led to my success here .

3. What was your first entrepreneurial adventure? How did it go? What did you learn from the experience? What advice would you give someone who would like to start a business?

I built an iPhone application. Well, I didn’t build it. I paid a development firm from India $1,600 to build it. The app tanked. In total, it made about $100 -- so I lost $1,500 at the end of the day. Since it was clearly a loser, I didn’t bother updating it, so you can’t even find it in the app store anymore. The main thing I learned is that real business success comes from a lot of hard work and is a slow grind. I started with the app because I wanted it to blow up and be an amazing success. I already knew that, but my emotions got the best of me and I still chased the idea of “making money fast.” If you’re thinking about building a business, then don’t do it for the money. Money will always come later (after a lot of hard work) and it will always cost more to get going than you think it will. Start a business because you want to live like an entrepreneur, because you want to make the world a better place, because you want to solve a problem, or because you see a group of people you want to serve. And ideally, do it for all of those reasons.

4. James, you write about “superhumans” who are ordinary people who push themselves to act beyond what they might otherwise. Is there a “superhuman” that influenced you in this direction? Who are the people who inspire you?

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of ordinary people doing incredible things. The single mother who loses 40 pounds while raising 3 kids. The entrepreneur who builds a successful business despite the odds. And all sorts of other examples. I wanted a way to celebrate those people, so I started calling them “superhumans” because they do something beyond the typical human. The people who have influenced me the most are the ones I’m close to -- specifically, my parents and grandparents. I owe them a lot.

5. You primarily focus on people’s physical health and its impact on the rest of life. For many people that requires a reordering of priorities. Why do you think developing a more fitness oriented approach should be the first priority? Would someone who has no interest in fitness find your work helpful?

First, I think that most people would find some value in the things I talk about. Even if you’re not interested in fitness or health, you can apply many of the lessons and ideas I share to other areas of life. Secondly, in my opinion, your health is the greatest single tool you have for creating an impact on the world. Healthy and happy people have more of a chance to change the world than anyone else. And on a more individual level, I find that when my health is at it’s best, I’m also at my best -- physically, mentally, and socially.

6. In one of your blog posts you discuss the need to claim a new vision of one’s identity in order to be successful in changing behavior and habits. Why is this important? How does one go about changing the core understanding of who they are?

The basic idea is that when we set most goals, we try to achieve some performance based metric (i.e. “lift 50 more pounds”) or some appearance-based metric (“lose 20 pounds”). The result is that focus all of our energy on the result and not on forming the habits that could eventually lead to those goals. By starting with your identity (“this is the type of person I want to become”) you can stick to your habits to the long-term and achieve the performance or appearance-based goals along the way. If you’re interested in more, you can read the whole post here .

7. Taking that concept a little further, will people making changes in how they think about themselves and in their behavior be met with resistance from friends and family? For example, someone who has a history of spending a time each week with friends at a bar might well have some pressure to continue that tradition even while changing an alcohol habit. How can someone resist that pressure until everyone has adopted the new identity?

Good question. In some cases the best answer might be to leave your friends, but I don’t think it always has to be that extreme. Most of the time, I think you can stick to your new identity simply by finding new friends rather than ditching your old ones. Find a group that supports the changes you want to make and hang out with them more often. If you like the person you are when you’re with them, then hang out with them some more. Repeat until you’ve found the right balance for your life.

8. You have taken some great photos, James. What kind of photo opportunities do you enjoy the most? Do you approach photography the same way you do writing? How does this art form contribute to your well-being?

Another great question. I don’t approach photography the same way I approach writing -- but I should. I should set a schedule for myself and make sure that I get out into the world and take photos on a consistent basis. That said, I guess I look for two things. If it’s just a cityscape or landscape, then it’s just a composition thing. So I look for good lines, angles, shapes, etc. If the scene has people, then I look for opportunity. The main thing is to find your composition and then be patient. Something interesting usually happens if you wait long enough. For a health perspective, photography plays multiple roles. It allows my analytical brain to shut off, which is a nice change of pace. It gets me out and moving around, which is good exercise. And it allows me to contribute something beneficial to the world -- not for money, just because I love it.

9. There are a lot of approaches to the photography business. How do you operate this part of your work? What kind of needs do your clients have? Do you have a formula for figuring the pricing of photos?

I don’t have clients and I’ve never done paid work. I’ve had photos published in Travel & Leisure magazine, featured on the homepage of Flickr, and I have been nominated for the Travel Photographer of the Year Award … but I’ve never done it for money.

10. James you juggle writing, working out, photography, and business. What does a typical day look like for you? How do you set priorities? How do you balance immediate concerns and long term projects?

Photography is something that I usually do when I travel, so that rarely makes it into my “normal” day. Writing is the main part of my business, so those are one in the same. And working out keeps me sane. Typical day: Write from 8am to 1pm. Workout. Eat. Send emails, do interviews, and write from 3pm to 6pm.

11. Do you have any difficulty separating your personal life from your business? How do you protect your personal time?

Another great question. I’ve found that I’m great at shutting business off if I never get started. In other words, it’s not hard at all for me to take a whole day or a whole week off from business. If I don’t start it, I can usually leave it alone. However, shutting off at the end of a workday is tough. Right now is a great example. I’m answering these questions at 8:51pm and I’ve been working off and on for most of the day. Once my brain gets going it’s hard to shut down. Overall, my work on jamesclear.com is about my life and what I want to contribute to the world. It’s a business that’s centered around what I care about and who I want to help. Most of the time, I try to align my work and my personal life, rather than separate them.

12. Given the inspirational nature of your work, do you do any presentations or motivational speaking? Are there plans for any kind of gathering for the community you are building?

Yes and yes. I’ve given speeches to audiences as large as 2,000 people in the past. Not many though -- perhaps 10 or 12 overall. In the future, I’d like to do more speaking, but I like close connection even more than being on stage. I’ll be doing all sorts of community meetups in the future. Meeting people in person is a huge goal of mine. I can’t wait to shake hands with my readers.

13. What things do you think are key to your business success? What kinds of things do you worry about? How do you approach those issues?

1. Put passion and purpose over profit. Making money matters, but if that’s your first reason for making a decision, then you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Put your mission first. 2. It’s all about habits. Everybody wants the overnight success, the big splash, the huge success. In reality, the people who end up crushing it are simply better at making good daily decisions.

14. What is the most rewarding part of your work? How do you or do you try to build on that?

Connecting with people in person. There’s nothing like one-on-one impact and interaction for me. And you’re providing a good suggestion -- I should try to build on it more.

15. What do you hope to accomplish this year? What dreams do you have for your business?

This year I just want to put myself on the map. To say to the world, “hello, I’m here for real and for good.” My only goal is to help as many people as possible through my work -- and that starts with getting the word out. I’ve got all sorts of dreams -- redefining the way that medicine and healthcare is provided, putting power back in the hands of individuals, and building a community of people who can do far more than I ever could -- and we’ll get to them all soon enough. ***

Biography: Who is James Clear?

James Clear is an American author, entrepreneur, and speaker who has made a name for himself by teaching people how to build good habits and break bad ones. With his New York Times bestselling book, "Atomic Habits," Clear has become a leading authority on the subject of self-improvement, and his work has helped millions of people around the world achieve their goals and live better lives.

Born in Ohio in 1982, Clear had a love for sports from a young age. He excelled in baseball, earning All-American honors twice in college and later working as a baseball coach and strength and conditioning coach. It was during this time that Clear began to develop an interest in habits and performance improvement, which eventually led him to start writing about the subject on his website, JamesClear.com.

Since then, Clear has become one of the most influential voices in the field of habits and behavior change. His writing is clear, concise, and actionable, making it accessible to people from all walks of life. He has been featured in numerous publications, including Time, Entrepreneur, and Forbes, and has appeared on podcasts and radio shows around the world.

What sets Clear apart from other self-help authors is his emphasis on the science of habits. He doesn't rely on vague, feel-good advice, but rather on research-backed strategies that are proven to work. In "Atomic Habits," Clear breaks down the process of habit formation into four key steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. By understanding these steps and learning how to manipulate them, anyone can create good habits that stick.

Clear's writing is not just practical, but also inspirational. He encourages readers to focus on small, incremental improvements, rather than trying to make drastic changes all at once. By breaking goals down into manageable steps, Clear helps readers overcome the overwhelm that often comes with trying to make significant changes in their lives.

Aside from writing and speaking, Clear is also an avid reader, and he credits his love of books with helping him develop the habits and mindset that have led to his success.

James Clear: Quick Facts

* James Clear is an American author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He graduated from Denison University, where he earned a degree in biomechanics. * In 2012, Clear began writing about habits and performance improvement on his website, JamesClear.com. Clear's writing focuses on self-improvement, habits, and behavior change. * He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book "Atomic Habits", which has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 40 languages. * Clear has been featured in publications such as Time, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. He has also appeared as a guest on numerous podcasts. * Clear is a regular speaker at conferences, companies, and universities around the world. * Clear is also the creator of the Habits Academy, an online course that teaches people how to develop good habits and break bad ones. He is a regular donor to charity: water, a non-profit organization that provides clean water to people in developing countries.

What is James Clear famous for?

James Clear is best known for his work in the field of habits and human potential. He is the author of "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones", a book that has gained worldwide recognition for its practical and transformative advice on habit formation.

His work combines elements from a variety of disciplines, including biology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, to provide a comprehensive and actionable guide for individuals seeking to improve their habits and overall life.

Clear is also well-known for his website, where he regularly posts articles on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement, as well as for his public speaking engagements.

James Clear's definition of habit

Clear defines a habit as a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many cases, automatically.

In his book, "Atomic Habits", he breaks down the habit into four stages that make up what he calls the "Habit Loop". These stages are:

Cue: The trigger that initiates the behavior. Craving: The motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire—without craving a change—we have no reason to act. Response: The actual habit you perform, which can be a thought or an action. Reward: The end goal of every habit. Rewards are the satisfaction of completing a habit, the relief from the craving, or even just the inherent enjoyment of the behavior itself.

Clear argues that understanding and manipulating these four stages is crucial to building new habits or breaking old ones. He also emphasizes the importance of making small, incremental changes, hence the term "atomic" in his book's title.

What are James rules in Atomic Habits?

James Clear's "Atomic Habits" presents a simple yet powerful framework for habit formation and breaking, which he calls the "Four Laws of Behavior Change." Here's a brief rundown:

Make it Obvious: This is about designing your environment in a way that the cues for good habits are clear and visible. Clear suggests using habit stacking, which is pairing a new habit with an existing one.

Make it Attractive: The more attractive or appealing a habit is, the more likely you are to stick with it. To do this, you can use temptation bundling (pairing something you need to do with something you want to do) or make the habit itself more enjoyable.

Make it Easy: The simpler a habit is to do, the more likely you are to stick with it. To make habits easy, reduce the number of steps required to perform them, set up your environment to support the habit, and use the two-minute rule (if it takes less than two minutes, do it now).

Make it Satisfying: The immediate satisfaction derived from a habit can help to reinforce it. Tracking your habits or getting immediate positive feedback can make the habit satisfying. Also, try to make the consequences of your bad habits immediately unsatisfactory.

These four laws can be reversed to break bad habits:

- Make it Invisible: Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment. - Make it Unattractive: Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits. - Make it Difficult: Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits. - Make it Unsatisfying: Make sure you feel the immediate cost of your bad habits.

James is an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer. You can find him at jamesclear.com or on Twitter @james_clear

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Podcast With James Clear: Intermittent Fasting, Olympic Lifting, Building Healthy Habits and More

Podcast With James Clear: Intermittent Fasting, Olympic Lifting, Building Healthy Habits and More

james clear travel

James Clear is an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer. 

Most of his work can be found on www.jamesclear.com where James covers topics like improving your health, your happiness and your work.

In this podcast we talk about:

  • How James became an entrepreneur and interested in health and wellness.
  • His favourite exercises and training methodology.
  • The importance of strength training for performance and injury prevention.
  • The “Reminder, Routine, Reward” cycle of building healthy habits.
  • Identity-based habits, performance/appearance based goals and how they can help you workout with better long-term results.
  • Intermittent fasting - how it works and how it helped James lose fat and add muscle.
  • His favourite resources for gaining health and fitness knowledge.

Here's where you can listen to & subscribe to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts

Google Podcasts

Items mentioned in this podcast:

  • JamesClear.com/HN - Get "The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting" here
  • Lifestyle vs. Life-Changing Habits
  • Identity Based Habits
  • The Reminder, Routine, Reward cycle

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Chase and Mellisa Reeves (https://mellisareeves.com) discuss lessons learned on leaving the white picket fence for a lifestyle of travel as a family. (https://chasereeves.co/3) SPONSORS: Pakt Bags (https://paktbags.com/chase)... use code CHASE10 BONUS: 💌 Matterful Monthly (https://chasereeves.co/mm) bi-monthly-ish emails for modern movers MUSIC: Petey: spotify, yt, insta CONTENTS: 1:13 How long we've been travelling 5:38 Point 0: knowing what you want... do you know what you want? Are you heading out on the road to discover what you want? 6:52 Point 1: uncertainty is not the same thing as insecurity. 20:25 Point 2: intimacy concerns... 25:52 Point 3: Everyday relationships are as important as the place you're living and the things you regularly use. 26:25: PaktBags.com/chase 27:48 Trade Coffee Monthly Deliveries (affiliate link): http://bag.gg/Trade 33:41 Point 4: insights about finding time for creative projects and taking care of your self. 47:07 Point 5: your default rhythms will show themselves on the road... (the real beginning happens when you burn through your fantasies and expectations). 54:08 Point 6: traveling helps you find out which relationships can thrive in what conditions. Get this email from Chase: https://chasereeves.co/mm

  • JAN 31, 2021

James Clear on What You Want

In this episode Chase (https://chasereeves.co) and NYT bestselling author James Clear (https://jamesclear.com) pull apart the question "what do you want!?" and discuss life after success (and how James got there). SPONSORS: Western Rise Clothing (http://bag.gg/WesternRisePod)... use code CHASE Pakt Bags (http://bag.gg/PaktPod)... use code CHASE10 BONUS: 💌 Matterful Monthly (https://chasereeves.co/matterful-monthly) emails for modern movers SONG: Petey: spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/4TeKBLCqmYXzvcgYX4t4YA?si=ESNZi94jT-iPoYVg0TrvZw), yt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuePPW8eHxI), insta (https://www.instagram.com/petey_usa/) CONTENTS: 2:14 Why he lives where he lives 6:48 his book has been on the NYT bestseller list for over a year!? 7:46 what it has been like to become successful. 7:59 how he first got started 9:19 early work built up potential energy that released when the book was launched 10:03 James' worry for content creators 15:10 the challenge of relevancy 16:31 often times people practice something different than what they preach 18:58 more practitioners writing (or more people practicing, not just writing) 21:02 "volume/consistency before intensity" 23:26 the actual work isn't hard, PATIENCE is hard. 27:10 "i'm starting to think the most important thing is to know what you want." 29:00 where we waste our energy: chasing status symbols, continuing status quo 31:27 Let your life speak (https://amzn.to/3cuiRQG) by Parker Palmer 32:15 what makes a good answer to the question: what do I want? 36:04 the enneagram (https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions/) 44:55 set directions instead of goals. 50:23 James' minimal travel setup (https://jamesclear.com/ultralight-travel) 51:07 big if true: every thought you have is downstream of what you consume 56:45 "life begins after 40. Before that it's just research." 58:21 life is short, but it's also really long and you have to live with your choices. Chase Lynks: win free gear: https://matterful.co/free-stuff matterful: https://matterful.co patreon: http://patreon.com/chasereeves the podcast: https://chasereeves.co/podcast insta: http://instagram.com/chasewreeves tweeter: http://twitter.com/chasewreeves spotify: http://open.spotify.com/user/chasereeves gear: http://kit.co/chasereeves

Corbett Barr & The State of the Creator Economy

On this week's show Chase (https://chasereeves.co) and Corbett Barr (https://corbettbarr.com) discuss media, independent digital business, and the state of the creator economy. (Table of contents below) SPONSORS: Western Rise Clothing (http://bag.gg/WesternRisePod)... use code CHASE Pakt Bags (http://bag.gg/PaktPod)... use code CHASE10 BONUS: Bonus training (https://gum.co/UywOH) about this episode's content Matterful Monthly (https://chasereeves.co/matterful-monthly) emails for modern movers SONG: Petey: spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/4TeKBLCqmYXzvcgYX4t4YA?si=ESNZi94jT-iPoYVg0TrvZw), yt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuePPW8eHxI), insta (https://www.instagram.com/petey_usa/), CONTENTS: 3:00 Why are people easy to trick? 3:46 Creators rule the world. (https://corbettbarr.com/creators-rule-the-world/) 5:54 Successful digital media Media example: The Social Dilemma (https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/). Jaron Lanier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier) is the name we were looking for. 13:00 Expertise is still the product. 17:19 Proving (without a gatekeeper) that you're relevant. 18:03 The 3 public and digital elements you can actually own. 20:00 Developing consistent creative rhythms. 25:18 The Viability Ratio 28:00 How resonance works Australian multimeter youtuber guy (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2DjFE7Xf11URZqWBigcVOQ) Corbett mentions 33:00 Books are still the model 37:00 Rhythms of accomplishing things 44:07 "I have an opinion" as platform prerequisite 49:00 Artist fires and the John Baldessari documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA&list=PLMm-PdcMVhsy8Nb64SDAYe8mJo-1gBUb4) you need to watch. 53:47 Why some of you are waiting too long to get started (and some aren't waiting long enough)... 58:00 Making your outside — how you look on the internet — look like your inside 59:20 Organizing, conscientiousness and this Rectix SNL commercial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2FkgBIL-kI) 1:01:00 Not just getting it working, but KEEPING it working 1:03:23 Francis Bacon on Arena (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyepHcAe8lM) 1:06:00 Bringing an underlying human message vs. imitating other successes on a platform 1:08:00 Speaking with your own voice 1:11:00 Corbett cleaned his digital house... here's how it went 1:22:00 What we built together at Fizzle.co 1:27:00 What we got right: understanding the customer 1:29:00 Corbett's productivity tools mentioned: Bear (notes), Trello (projects) and Front (email) RoamResearch 1:41:00 Jobs to be done primer (https://justinjackson.ca/what-is-jobs-to-be-done) 1:42:00 Corbett's Jura espresso machine (https://amzn.to/3nTKa9e) Chase Lynks: win free gear: https://matterful.co/free-stuff matterful: https://matterful.co patreon: http://patreon.com/chasereeves the podcast: https://chasereeves.co/podcast insta: http://instagram.com/chasewreeves tweeter: http://twitter.com/chasewreeves spotify: http://open.spotify.com/user/chasereeves gear: http://kit.co/chasereeves

  • © 2024 Chase Reeves

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Great mix of insight, humor, and resources to check out on the old existential journey. Chase does a good job of connecting ideas with roundabout style. Would like to get a bit more of intro to the guests at the start, look forward to keep listening and learning

Insightful, and entertaining.

Good vibes. Chase speaks to the everyday human like me.

Just Amazing

Chase really is putting out great content. All the episodes feels unique and different yet all of them carry a ton of value. Really appreciate you and the thoughts you share in the podcast. I only wish there was more episodes for me to absorb. Keep them coming!

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Learn the art of online business, side hustles, and the entrepreneurial mindset

  • Mastering Your Habits | James Clear

He has started four businesses over the course of his entrepreneurial career and two of them have succeeded.

His real success has been his personal blog. He started consistently posting twice per week in very late 2012 and has not missed a post since.

Not only that, but he has an email list of over 100,000 people, is regularly published by Business Insider, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Huffington Post, as well he now makes a great living off his personal brand.

His work covers a variety of topics, but the central idea that ties it all together is simple: If you can master your habits, you can master your life.

Now, let’s hack…

James Clear.

What you will learn in this episode:

  • The difference between amateurs and professionals
  • The key to building an email list of 100,000+ in two years
  • How a structured environment can help you stay productive
  • Why you should focus on building your platform first

Resources and links mentioned:

  • JamesClear.com

Dig this episode? Wait until you hear these…

  • I’d Rather Fail as a Writer Than Succeed as a Lawyer
  • One Product Does Not a Business Make w/ Ryan Deiss

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Jonny Nastor

Hey, I'm Jonny. My mission is to help you find your focus and do work that matters. To do this, I work as a consultant, bestselling author , and founder of HTE.

Building atomic habits with James Clear (Transcript)

Listen along.

ReThinking with Adam Grant Building atomic habits with James Clear June 27, 2023

[00:00:00] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is James Clear. He's the author of Atomic Habits, which has sold over 15 million copies and might be the most practical book I've ever read. He has a remarkable capacity for distilling complex ideas about behavior change into actionable insights, which he features in his weekly newsletter, 3-2-1. I wrote one of the advance endorsements for his book, but this is the first time we've ever spoken and I have some habits I'm ready to change.

So tell me, how did you get interested in habits?

[00:00:53] James Clear: Early on, like when I was a kid, the main areas where I learned about habits were through sports and through school. And I liked both of those things, but I wasn't thinking about it in any way that I would describe now. Like, I didn't have any language for it.

I was just trying to go to practice and do a good job that day. And then in high school, I had this really serious injury. I was hit in the face with a baseball bat, and it was an accident. The bat slipped outta my classmate's hands and struck me right between the eyes, and it shattered both eye sockets, broke my nose, broke my ethmoid bone, which is a little deeper inside your skull, behind your nose.

And I sort of stumbled back into school and I started answering questions at the nurse's office, but I wasn't answering them very well. You know, they'd be like, “What year is it?” And I would say 1998, but it was actually 2002. I was there, but not really. And then they asked me who my mom was, and it took me like 10 seconds to answer her name.

I lost consciousness, got taken on a stretcher to the hospital, got there, and then I started struggling with basic functions like swallowing and breathing. I had to be intubated. I lost the ability to breathe on my own. And then I was getting ready to go into surgery when we got to the larger hospital, and I had a seizure.

It was actually the second one that I had had that day, and they decided that I was too unstable to undergo an operation right then. So they put me in this medically induced coma. And I stayed in, in the coma overnight, and it was this really long process of recovering from that injury. Couldn't drive a car for nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. I had double vision for weeks, so all I wanted to do was to flip a switch and go back to being this young, normal, healthy person that I was before. And it was the first time in my life when I was really forced to start small.

I, I had to just focus on what can I do at physical therapy that feels like a small win today. ‘Cause I, I really can't do much right now. And gradually I made my way back and eventually was able to drive a car again. And then eventually a year or so later, I got back on the baseball field and ultimately ended up playing in college.

I look back on that time now. And I have a language for it. I have a way to describe it and say, “Oh, you know, I was just trying to get 1% better each day. I was trying to make these small improvements and build habits,” but I never would've said that at the time if you had come up to me. And so I think I had that personal experience with building small habits and recovering from the injury.

And 10 years later when I was writing Atomic Habits, then I started to think about those concepts more carefully, read some of the research on it, wrestle with how that meshed with my personal experience and the topic. And ultimately I think it makes the writing better because the truth is I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with, you know, it's like, do I procrastinate? Sure. All the time. You know, I'm probably procrastinating on something right now as we're talking.

[00:03:34] Adam Grant: I knew there was a reason you took this—

[00:03:35] James Clear: Yeah, exactly.

[00:03:36] Adam Grant: —interview.

[00:03:36] James Clear: This is why I agreed to this, this conversation.

[00:03:38] Adam Grant: What, what, what do I really not want to do? Like, let's do this instead.

[00:03:41] James Clear: Do I focus too much on the goal and the result, not enough on the system and the process? Yeah, all the time. In a lot of ways, I had to build habits to write Atomic Habits. I had to build a writing habit. I had to build habits in my business. I had to build exercise and nutrition habits just to keep myself operating at a high enough level to finish this big project. The personal experiences have made the writing better. Now I look back on them and feel like it was a really formative experience, even though I never would've asked for it.

[00:04:07] Adam Grant: Ideally, not everyone needs to get hit in the face with a baseball bat in order to learn what you've learned, but you clearly made the most of that traumatic event.

[00:04:14] James Clear: Yeah. My grandpa would just say it knocked some sense into me.

[00:04:19] Adam Grant: It sounded like it literally knocked some sense out of you first, but you, you earned it back and then some. So I think the first time I became aware of you and your work was when you had just written Atomic Habits, and you sent me an early copy of it and the first thing that piqued my interest was the title.

And I thought, “Oh, this is clever.” Because on the one hand, atomic forces are enormous, and then on the other hand, atoms are the smallest building blocks. And I thought that juxtaposition was really clever, and I didn't realize that you actually had a third meaning of it too. Talk to me a little bit about what an atomic habit is.

[00:04:56] James Clear: So the first meaning of atomic can be tiny or small, like an atom. And that is kind of how I think about habits. You should scale them down and make them really easy to do. And, uh, we'll talk about a lot of that.

And the second meaning is that atoms build into molecules and molecules build into compounds, and it has this growth or this accumulation effect, and your habits can sort of layer on top of each other as well. They can be these units in a larger system that you're running. And it's actually the collection of habits that you have that are oriented toward your health or the collection of habits that you have oriented toward your business or so on, that drive results. It's very rarely just a single habit.

And then finally, as you said, atomic can mean the source of immense energy or power. And I think if you understand those three concepts, you sort of see the arc of the book, which is you start with changes that are small and easy to do, habits that are non-threatening and sustainable and reasonable, and you start to layer them on top of each other like units in a larger system, and you end up with these really powerful, remarkable results as a byproduct.

[00:05:55] Adam Grant: What I think was different about that from other takes on habits that I've read is the system part. Everybody has been told, “Okay, change a habit. Go to sleep in your workout clothes and then wake up in the morning, and maybe you'll exercise.” Right? I'd never seen somebody so systematically, perhaps not coincidentally say, “We actually need to look at how these habits fit together and compound over time.”

[00:06:16] James Clear: Yeah, I think it's the collection of things that makes the biggest difference. It's very rare to have an actual change that drives 10% of the outcome, or 40% of the outcome. I mean, these big changes in real life, they don't really exist like that. It's the accumulation of many small improvements that ultimately drives the outcome.

And your habits are like that too. If you want to read more books, well, just downloading Audible and putting it on your phone probably isn't gonna do it on its own, but that could be one piece of the puzzle. When I wanted to start reading more, the first thing I did was I selected books I was really excited about, and I think this is one thing that, that people overlook when it comes to building better habits, which is the first and most enormous hurdle to cross is are you genuinely interested in it?

The most common New Year's resolution is people want to go work out at the gym, and I kind of feel like a lot of people choose working out or going to the gym because they feel like they should do it, or they feel like society wants them to do it, not because that's the version of exercise or the version of physical activity that's most exciting to them or fun to them.

And you should start there. I mean, there are many ways to live an active lifestyle: kayak or rock climb, or go for a run, or do yoga. I mean, pick whatever version of it sounds the most naturally appealing to you. So, I chose books that I was excited about. I downloaded Audible, put it on my home screen, on my phone, moved all the other apps to second screen so it'd be the first thing I would see. I bought some of those books in print version, and then I would sprinkle them around the house so that I was, like, never far from a bad idea. And then you can also come up with a plan where you say, like, “When I get in bed at night, I'm gonna read one page before I go to sleep.”

I just described four or five things there. But it's actually the collection of those things that helps drive this reading habit. It's not any one of those changes that's really gonna radically transform your life, but if each of the changes are reasonable and each of the changes are small, and in some cases they're choices that you only have to make once, you start to stack the deck in your favor and you start to have all these forces that are kind of working for you, and by creating this system that is lifting you up and supporting your habits, now you're in a much better position to fall through on them each day.

[00:08:21] Adam Grant: I think one of the reasons that we psychologists miss this approach is we're always wanting to figure out what's the active ingredient. I wanna pull out the one anchor habit that made the difference. And your point is actually there isn't one. And secondly, and maybe even more interestingly, it sounds like you did for habits what high-reliability organizations do to prevent errors, which is they build redundant systems.

Airplanes are designed, right, if one engine fails, right, to have a backup option available. In your case, if you forget the one page tonight, you're gonna see it on the home screen the first thing tomorrow morning, and you're probably gonna make up for it.

[00:08:54] James Clear: I really, I like a lot of engineering, you know, strategies and metaphors like that. You think about backup systems and redundancy and breakpoints, and all, all of those concepts can be applied to building habits as well. When you're making these small changes, it doesn't hinge on any one thing the way, like you just said, like, oh, maybe there isn't an anchor point, or like the one move that changes everything, but there's always a bottleneck.

So in manufacturing process, you're making a car, maybe the car doors are the bottleneck of the process, but that doesn't mean you don't need the tires and the headlights and the roof and everything else, like you still need all the other parts. It's just maybe there's a higher leverage place to focus in the beginning.

So I think both of those can kind of coexist together. Maybe you need this overall system, but there are generally, like, higher leverage places to focus than others.

[00:09:38] Adam Grant: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the things that you've done for a lot of people is you've given them some very… both non-obvious, but ultimately intuitively true and actionable principles to apply to their habit change.

Whenever somebody says, “James Clear”, immediately these phrases go through my head, like, “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Consistency beats intensity. We don't rise to the level of our goals, we sink to the level of our systems.” Talk to me about those concepts and putting them into place.

[00:10:08] James Clear: So those phrases like that, they become shorthand for the overall strategy or approach that we're trying to take. This idea of “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvements,” that's the first one you mentioned. Time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes your ally, and the changes that you're making each day, the showing up in a small way, making some small improvement, it doesn't seem like much on any given day, but it puts you on a trajectory that puts you on a path that starts to compound and multiply over time.

If you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy and you're on a trajectory that's moving you in the opposite direction. So I think that's actually an interesting question to ask yourself, which is, “Can my current habits carry me to my desired future?”

You know, intensity gets a lot of discussion. People are always gonna talk about running a marathon or doing a silent meditation retreat for a week, or you know, just these things that are, like, kind of notable. And this is, I think even magnified by social media; people are almost never gonna post about the process.

You're never gonna see someone, like, post a tweet or hear a news story about like, “Man eats chicken salad for lunch today.” It's only a story once you lose a hundred pounds or something. And I think that causes us to overvalue the results a little bit and undervalue the process. We get so results-oriented because it's all that we see.

Consistency is what drives progress and drives results. Intensity makes a good story, but it's almost always the case that you'd rather have the foundation, the volume of work, the capacity to do the work, the habits, rather than focusing too much on the outcome. Now, not everything in life is driven by habits, right?

You have luck and randomness; you have misfortune. But by definition, those forces are not in your control, and your habits are, and the only rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So that's kind of how I think about that connection point between consistency and intensity.

[00:12:08] Adam Grant: During my diving days, my coach, Eric Best, would always quote his coach John Narcy, and say, “Look, the person who wins the meet is the one who did the most dives.”

[00:12:15] James Clear: The results were almost baked in in a sense. I mean, it doesn't mean performance doesn't matter, right? You still screw it up on that day, but the's really hard to beat the person who's done that dive 10,000 times if you've only done it for a thousand.

[00:12:27] Adam Grant: I think that's exactly right. What I didn't understand at first and then became clear over time was how probabilistic that is, right? That, like, the person with the best odds is the person who's put in the consistent effort day in, day out. But I think what you've also added to that is the idea that, like, the quality of those habits really matters. And I think this is where systems become a big deal because I think a lot of people took the 10,000 hours rule and said, “Okay, this is a quantity game and what I have to do is put in the sheer number of hours.” And you're saying, “Wait a minute. No. There are a bunch of ways to work a lot smarter, and I'm gonna help you understand what those are.” So what are those? I think we all wanna know.

[00:13:05] James Clear: Yeah, Naval Ravikant has this good distinction where he says, “It's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations.” And I think there's a lot of truth in that. Repetition is hard enough on its own, but to try to get 1% better each day to try to improve it and iterate it is a totally different game.

And I think it changes your perspective a little bit. You know, you're not showing up in a lazy way. You're not just trying to like punch the clock and put your time in. You're trying to have this attitude, this mindset where you're looking for some small advantage to carve out. So I think the first step there is like this mindset, this attitude of trying to get 1% better each day and realizing that it's not really about measuring it. It's not like, “Oh, is it a 1% improvement or 1.6%?” Or whatever. It's not, like, getting caught up in the number. It's more this approach and a philosophy of not just showing up and putting the time in, but trying to genuinely find some way to improve and trusting that those small improvements really add up.

It's really important to ask yourself, “What is the system oriented toward? What am I optimizing for?” Sometimes people optimize for making more money. Sometimes they optimize for free time and creative, you know, freedom. Sometimes they optimize for family time. I mean, there can be an endless list, but it's a very personal answer, and you should be wary of inheriting or imitating other people's habits. Start by asking yourself, “Is this what I want my days to look like?” So I think starting there is a really important part of building a better system.

[00:14:24] Adam Grant: Maybe for me, the most counterintuitive idea in Atomic Habits is to focus a little bit less on what you wanna achieve and a little bit more on who you wanna become.

This flies in the face of everything I've ever taught on goal setting and a lot of the research I've read on it. It’s not immediately clear to people that like, if I wanna achieve something, I should actually turn my attention a bit away from that and say, instead, “What kind of person do I wanna be?” And yet I think it can be extremely powerful. So I, I wanna hear you riff on that a little bit.

[00:14:53] James Clear: So, we often talk about habits as mattering because of the external results they'll drive for us. But I think the real reason, the true reason that habits matter, is that they reinforce your desired identity. Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

No, writing one sentence may not finish the novel. But it does cast a vote for, “I'm the type of person who writes every day.” You start to cast votes and kind of build up this pile of, of evidence for who you are and starts to shift the weight of the story. And so the habits that are linked to the aspects of our identity that we take pride in, there, there's something about them that feels like more natural to you, where it's like, “This is just kind of the person that I am.”

It's more like, “How do I get alignment between my goals and my identity? How do I start with this picture of who I would like to become and how my habits feed into that and trust that ultimately it can carry me toward some of these results that I say are so important to me?”

[00:15:54] Adam Grant: I think it’s an elegant explanation of why Christopher Bryan sometimes finds these need, noun over verb effects. Like if you wanna get kids to stop cheating in school, instead of saying “Don't cheat,” you say, “Don't be a cheater.” And all of a sudden that action reflects on my identity, and I don't wanna be the kind of person who cheats. Similar effects on the positive side with getting kids to help by saying, “Be a helper” instead of “help” and getting citizens to vote by saying, “Be a voter,” right? That's a vote cast for the kind of person I want to become. I love that.

I think it's time for a lightning round.

[00:16:31] James Clear: Let’s do it.

[00:16:31] Adam Grant: So you're a fan of book recommendations. I am too. What's a book you think all our ReThinking and WorkLife listeners should read or listen to that they might not have already heard of?

[00:16:42] James Clear: I've really been on this kick of trying to find books that have compressed wisdom. So one that I really liked, it's like 500 years old, is called The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián. I was reading this thing, I was like, “Man, this guy was like me like 500 years ago.” He was like blogging like way, way before, before it was the thing. So I thought that one was really useful.

[00:17:00] Adam Grant: On the subject of compression, one of the things I really admire about you is how good you are at framing and reframing ideas. I've sort of had a negative opinion of what you call compression because it sounds to me like hacking or shortcuts, and you've made me think differently about it. How did you land there on that one?

[00:17:17] James Clear: There are some challenges, like it squeezes out nuance. I would say that's a definite negative. The upside is that it's sticky and that it's easy to remember. I think Balaji has this phrase where he says, “You want this bumper sticker that expands into a Ph.D. thesis?” And I think about it like that. Like what's the bumper sticker that can remind me of this bigger, more important idea? I hadn't had someone tell me this before, what you just said, that I was good at, like, reframing ideas.

But that actually might be the only value that I really provide. I mean, the truth is m-most things that have been covered many times before, I mean, there's 8 billion people in the world, and there's a hundred billion that have lived before us. All this stuff is very well-trod ground. It's very rare that you come across something genuinely new, but maybe I can give somebody, you know, a new angle on it, or maybe I can provide clarity to the thought where if someone says, “Oh, you know, like I'd never quite heard it put that way before.”

[00:18:09] Adam Grant: For the record, I think you strike a really good balance between articulating things that people sort of believe but haven't been able to verbalize. And then also challenging some of the assumptions they hold that actually turned out to be false. And I think it's the combination of those two that makes your words so powerful.

So, you profess to be a fan of architecture and travel photography, so I'm gonna combine those two and ask: what’s your favorite place you've gone to photograph architecture?

[00:18:37] James Clear: St. Petersburg, Russia is a wild city because the Czar basically went around Europe and just plucked buildings like, “I like that one. Let's go build one in Russia.” Like go to Vienna and be like, “I like that one. Let's go build one like that.” So, it just has this really wide-ranging variety of architecture. It also has tons of bridges and canals and water, like, traversing all over the city. And so you end up in this interesting situation where they put the bridges up at night.

I don't remember exactly, but let's say it's from like 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM. So if you're out of the bar and it's like 12:40, like, “All right guys, we gotta make a decision. Like, are we going back home now or are we gonna stay out till 4:00 AM?” Because the bridges are going up soon. I, I thought St. Petersburg was, was fascinating.

[00:19:19] Adam Grant: On that subject also, ultralight travel is one of your passions. What's your favorite tip for lightening the travel load?

[00:19:26] James Clear: When I would travel on my own, I would always only travel with one bag. I still, I still do that now. I mean, like you, Adam, I, I do have to do a lot of speaking gigs. The biggest point of friction is always shoes. So if you can figure out a way to have one pair of shoes that are diverse enough in their use cases to cover the trip. Then the rest of it is, like, usually pretty easy.

[00:19:45] Adam Grant: I agree with everything you said except for the part where you said, “I have to do a lot of speeches.” You get to do a lot of speeches. That’s a choice.

[00:19:51] James Clear: We could have a long discussion about this. I had a weightlifting coach in college who we would come in, you know, everybody's complaining about the workout and how hard it is and blah, blah, blah. He's like, “Okay, listen. You don't have to do it. You get to do it. You know, you don't have to take your kids to school. You get to take your kids to school. You don't have to show up at work today. You get to show up at work today.” And that little reframe of “have to” versus “get to”, it has stuck with me for, you know, 20 years now.

[00:20:16] Adam Grant: You're a fan of great speeches. What's a speech you love that I've probably not seen?

[00:20:20] James Clear: So on jamesclear.com, I have this page where it's called, uh, Great Talks that Most People have Never Heard. And over the last five years or so, I've just collected transcripts from different speeches. Sometimes it's a graduation speech, a little school, sometimes it's an internal talk that got posted on YouTube years later, and the one that prompted the whole project is this talk given by Richard Hamming, who is this engineer at Bell Labs, and it was this internal talk he gave called You and Your Research.

And it's about doing scientific research, but it's actually about way more than that. They're just, like, lessons for everybody in life that are baked in there. And he has so many good little questions in there that as soon as you hear them you're like, “Oh, good.” Like sometimes my favorite questions are ones that, like, cut a little bit.

You're like, “Oh, that just stings a little to even, like, think about that answer.” Like one of his famous questions, he sat down at a table with a bunch of, uh, scientists who were in a different field, and he goes and sits down with them each day for lunch for like a week, and he is listening to them talk about the projects they're doing and the research that they're doing.

And then eventually he asked them, “Hey, what are some of the most important problems in your field?” And they started listing out some of 'em, and he realized that the projects they were working on were not oriented or related to those big problems. And so his question was, “What are the most important problems in your field and why are you not working on them?”

And that is, like, such an obvious thing to ask. But you could say it as an individual—what are the most important problems in your personal life, and why are you not working on them? And you start to realize, like, “Man, maybe like maybe I should be carving out a little bit more time to get extra sleep or to go to the gym or to spend more time with my kids.”

You realize how much time and attention and energy is directed toward relatively low-priority problems, and in some cases, they're actually good uses of time, but they're not great uses of time. And I think that’s, like, one of the most dangerous things on your to-do list are items, let's say items like three to six. But the truth is those are the items that are most likely to distract you from items one and two because you have a good justification for doing them.

[00:22:22] Adam Grant: I, I think that's something we all need to pause and think about. What are the activities in my calendar that by themselves are worthwhile, but in aggregate actually interfere with my higher priorities? What's the worst advice you've ever gotten?

[00:22:36] James Clear: I do think that there's a very common pitfall that I have certainly fallen into many times, which is you see someone who's successful, who's doing the thing that you hope to do or that you aspire to do, and then you think, “You know what? I'll imitate what they're doing.”

And the problem is that if you have just one example or one story for something, you think you're learning something, but actually you're not learning very much at all. Most advice is very contextual. It's very dependent on the circumstances. And so in that way, advice is kind of brittle, actually. If you step outside of that specific narrow circumstance, it doesn't hold up in the same way.

Instead, what I have gradually learned to do after making many mistakes is you want to look at a hundred people who are doing the thing that you want to do, and then you try to find the commonalities or the patterns between them, because if you have a pattern, then there's some signal and not just noise.

[00:23:30] Adam Grant: You just articulated why I have this knee-jerk reaction whenever somebody tells me they love learning from biographies. No, we do social science to figure out which of those insights are actually valid. And also, you're sampling on the dependent variable, and you need to also read biographies of people who failed, not just the ones who succeeded, and then compare them because it's in that comparison that the most meaningful patterns jump out. And then to your point, you have to run a bunch of personal experiments to figure out which of those patterns are gonna work for you.

I'm gonna give you the mic for a second and ask if there's a question for me.

[00:24:02] James Clear: I have a personal question that I wanna know, which is basically how you set up your business and how you balance your days. I don't want to have a big team. I have one full-time employee. I have no desire to hire more. I don't want to have this big, big thing that I'm managing. I think management is kind of a weakness of mine. I'm better at, like, the creative side or, like, making something. That's the part that really lights me up.

So I don't wanna spend much time managing. But if you step outside of the definition of an employee and look at partnerships, well now I've got a book agent and a speaking agency and, and like in your case, you've got this partnership with TED, and you have the podcast production and so on. So you have a lot of people that are touching your business in some way.

And I guess what I'd like to know is how you think about maximizing leverage for yourself and, like, kind of extending your creative reach or your ability to produce work and whether you feel like you are overscheduled or whether you feel like you have the balance that you'd like to have?

[00:25:03] Adam Grant: I would answer this really differently now than I would've a couple years ago. It's been a decade since I became an author. And then all these other things sort of come with it, right, that you don't realize you're opting into. I don't think that much about leverage anymore, in part because the scale we work at is already beyond my wildest dreams. I think what I'm interested in is how do I improve the quality of what I do produce.

And I think for me, that's meant sometimes producing less. So my first book came out in 2013. By 2017, I had published two more books. It was three books in four years. And then—

[00:25:36] James Clear: I think actually we messaged at some point in 2018, and you said, “My goal for the year is to not write a book.”

[00:25:44] Adam Grant: Goal achieved. You know, it wasn't a coincidence, then, that it was four more years and until I came out with my next book, and I really wanted to invest in learning, and that was part of why I started this podcast.

Was, it was an excuse for me to say, like, “I’m not just learning for my own curiosity. I'm gonna learn in a way that hopefully also is interesting and useful to other people.” I was, I wasn't very structured or focused around “What do I wanna learn?” And podcasting created that for me. I think otherwise I felt like I was overscheduled because I was wearing a lot of hats.

And then I said, “Okay, one of the things that just clearly differentiates my sort of periods of creative bursts from, you know, windows where I feel like I don't produce that much of value is do I have at least two days a week with nothing on my calendar?” And so then I, I committed to that and I think I achieve it most weeks. There's some weeks where I fail and then, like, the next month I have to make, make up for it basically.

[00:26:37] James Clear: Yeah. That's great though. I love little rules of thumb like that. All right. I have one more question for you. I didn't know we were gonna do this. We could turn this into another hour where I get to interview you.

[00:26:45] Adam Grant: Easily.

[00:26:45] James Clear: All right. So we talked a little bit about some of my compression. So, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you get to become,” or “You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the love of your systems.” If you were to pick, like, one or two of your best pieces of compression, what would you say that they are?

[00:26:59] Adam Grant: The most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. What I figured out there that I didn't get when I wrote the book is you don't have to be more successful as a giver than a taker or a matcher. But it's the kind of success that's the most rewarding, and that was the thesis I should have led with.

[00:27:16] James Clear: Thank you for sharing.

[00:27:12] Adam Grant: Yeah, no, thank you for asking. It's part of the fun of what we do. I wanted to ask you about post-Atomic Habits. I was wowed by the clarity of the book and wanting to make all kinds of puns about your name, which you're definitely tired of. Even being really impressed by the book when I first read it, I dramatically underestimated how much impact it would have, and I think the main reason that I did that was I, I felt like the habit landscape was already relatively crowded, and there had been a few bestsellers that were, you know, either explicitly about habits or about habit-like concepts. And I know how, how hard it is to break through, even if you're a well-known author and you were very candid about saying, “Like, I'm just a blogger. I don't know if anybody's gonna read this stuff.”

And this book, I think it's the most successful nonfiction book of the last decade, as far as I can tell. Certainly in our genre, it appears to me to be the biggest book since Outliers, and it has incredible staying power. So my question is why? Like what, what, what is different about this book?

[00:28:14] James Clear: Yeah, there's a chapter later in Atomic Habits where I talk about deliberate practice, and it could have been a book about deliberate practice where I talk about habits. But instead, it's a book about habits where I talk about deliberate practice. And I think the difference in how those two books would sell is pretty enormous because i—deliberate practice. If you're not like familiar with it, it takes 30 seconds to unpack it and explain how it's different than regular practice and like—

[00:28:40] Adam Grant: Yeah.

[00:28:41] James Clear: You don't get any of that time with a potential reader.

[00:28:43] Adam Grant: No. It's not sticky. And also nobody wants to practice.

[00:28:47] James Clear: Yeah.

[00:28:48] Adam Grant: If you like practice, you don't need this book per se.

[00:28:50] James Clear: Right. Yeah.

[00:28:51] Adam Grant: Whereas everybody knows they have bad habits and they want better ones.

[00:28:55] James Clear: And I think that what you just said is actually a very important insight that people often overlook, which is if you want any product, not just a book, but any product… I think if you want it to do really well, it taps into a desire that people already have.

It doesn't try to generate or convince people of having a new desire. Classic example like Uber, you know, like, oh, totally redefined transportation, but only sort of. Like people already took taxis. They're not trying to convince anyone of the underlying motivation that drives the app. They're just giving them a new avenue for doing it.

I am just adding my little small piece to the collective discussion about it, like it's a very small contribution. But I don't have to convince anybody that having good habits is desirable and breaking bad habits is desirable. Like, people already want that. I just need to convince you this is the best book on that topic.

If you wanna read one thing that's the most comprehensive and useful, it's this book. Sometimes good titles actually sound a little bit strange when you first hear them, like the phrase “atomic habits”. Now people are familiar with it, but before the book came out, it's a little strange. You might describe a habit as small, but you wouldn't describe it as atomic.

Like that, it just sounds a little different. But that's actually a good thing because it means I can own that language in the reader's mind. If the title of the book were Small Habits, it might work a little bit, but it's just a little general, it's a little too much common language for it to really be sticky. So titles are really hard to get right because you want 'em to stand out, but you don't want it to be too weird.

And it also needs to actually talk about what the book covers ‘cause you have to deliver on the promise that the title makes. It was really common like five years ago for books to try to do this, where they would just stack a bunch of desirable things in the subtitle and say like, you know, “How to make money and be happy, find love,” and they would just like stack all—

[00:30:44] Adam Grant: How to win at work and in life.

[00:30:44] James Clear: Yeah. Like they would just stack all that stuff in there. But that's not actually what the book is genuinely about. So you need to be able to deliver on the promises that are made. Title plays a big role. Positioning plays a big role.

[00:30:56] Adam Grant: Just one, one of the things that I hear you capturing that I don't think has been well articulated for people trying to position any idea is you need to be both really specific and really general at the same time.

[00:31:07] James Clear: Yeah.

[00:31:08] Adam Grant: And those two things together give you distinctiveness.

[00:31:11] James Clear: Habits are like that. They're this universal topic. There's this, they apply to literally everyone on the planet, but your habits are also very personal. You know, everybody wants to build their own, they have their own style, they got their own habits that are kind of part of their routine.

So it's both personal and universal. It's both specific and general. Contrast is a really important element of good titles. If you think about a lot of bestselling books, they have this point of contrast in the title where it's a little bit surprising or it inverts the typical expectation.

Four-hour Work Week. I thought a work week is 40 hours. Now you're telling me it can be four? Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I thought tidying up was just this little thing that I did. Now you're telling me it can be life-changing? Atomic Habits: like really small habits, but also super powerful. Ultimately, my guiding light is always like, what is most useful?

What is, what is most actionable and useful for the reader? And I'm just gonna do it that way. I'm just trying to help people get results. I find that a lot of books, a lot of self-help books in particular, people talk about them as being how-to books, but they're actually what-to books. They tell you what to think or they tell you what you should do, but they don't actually tell you how to do it.

It sounds like a small detail, but taking that extra step of showing people how it would actually look if you implemented this, what specific step they would take, and then giving them a couple examples, that really makes things useful.

Other authors can talk about the science better. Other authors are better storytellers. Other authors are better at a lot of things that I'm not good at. But making it actionable and useful is the main thing that I’m, like, trying to prioritize for.

[00:32:40] Adam Grant: I've sometimes realized what I was trying to say after the book came out when I did the book tour. I imagine one of the blessings and curses of reaching so many people is you've gotten a lot of feedback.

[00:32:50] James Clear: Yeah.

[00:32:51] Adam Grant: What have you learned or rethought since Atomic Habits first came out?

[00:32:54] James Clear: If I had to pick one thing that I would say is more important now than I realized when I was writing the book, it would probably be the power of social environment on habits and how, just how pervasive and strong that force can be.

I did write about it a little bit. I had a chapter in Atomic Habits on the influence of friends and family on your behavior, but it's broader than that and it's more powerful than that. Like, we are all part of multiple groups, multiple tribes. And some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American, and some of those tribes are small and, like, kind of local, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local yoga studio or a volunteer at the local hospital.

And all of those groups, all those different spaces that you step into each day, they have a set of shared expectations for how you act. They have a set of norms for what people do there. And when habits are aligned with the social norms of that group, they tend to be pretty attractive to stick to because we don't only perform habits because of the results they'll get us, we also perform them as a signal to the people around us. “Hey, I get it. I belong. I fit in. I'm part of this community. I understand how we act here.”

And if people have to choose between, “I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in,” or “I have the habits that I want to have, but I'm cast out. I'm ostracized, I'm criticized,” I, I mean, the desire to belong will often overpower the desire to improve.

[00:34:21] Adam Grant: Another way to, to say it that connects to one of your core points in the book is think about the person you wanna become and then say, “Okay, what kinds of groups are full of those people?”

[00:34:32] James Clear: Yeah, for sure. That's a great way to think about it.

[00:34:34] Adam Grant: The scariest thing about having such a breakout success is having to follow it. I'm sure you've thought a lot about second album syndrome. At first, I was wondering, is it scary to think about your next book? And then I thought, no, because this book was the result of thousands of tweets and blog posts and you were experimenting and iterating, and by the time you wrote it, you knew you had something really meaningful. So, how do you think about your future writing?

[00:35:00] James Clear: You know, like the way that I think about it is this is the best possible outcome. I'm incredibly fortunate, but Atomic Habits, it can just be a project that went really well. It doesn't have to be anything more than that. I put everything I had into it and great. It did really well, and it's helping a lot of people, and that's awesome. And now I can just move on to the next thing that I am excited about and I'll try to do my best on that. And it doesn't really need to be some value judgment on how much I'm worth or you know, how creative I am or am not now, or you know, whether it is defining my career or not.

It doesn't have to be that. So that's the headspace I'm trying to live in. The way that I wrote the first book is very different than how I'm writing now. So, I wrote Atomic Habits when I didn't have kids, and now I do, and I had a period there for like six to nine months where I was finishing the manuscript where I worked on it for 12 hours a day.

I went to sleep. I dreamt about it. I did it all over again. Like, I can't do that now. It's kinda hard to get two hours where you're not interrupted when you've got kids running around. I'm like, “Okay, I know how to write a good book, but the way that I know how to do it doesn't work for me anymore. So what does that mean?”

You know, like I kind of need to find a new angle or something. But more than anything, the most important thing is when I wrote Atomic Habits, I knew that I had something to say, and I knew that was the topic that I wanted to write about, and I'm still trying to figure that out for the next book. What is it really that I feel like this is so important and I have so much to say on it that I have to write a book about it? It is not an easy project, and it's not a short project. So if you're just like, “I wanna write a book ‘cause I'd like to have a book,” that's not a good reason.

[00:36:32] Adam Grant: That seems like a very healthy outlook. Well, I'm looking forward to the next one whenever it comes. No pressure.

[00:36:38] James Clear: Yeah. Thank you. So is my publisher. They're probably listening to this thinking, “He should be writing right now, not doing this interview.”

[00:36:44] Adam Grant: Well James, in the meantime, thank you for helping us all build better habits and, uh, occasionally even achieve our goals too.

[00:36:49] James Clear: Awesome. Thanks, Adam.

[00:36:54] Adam Grant: James makes such a compelling case that instead of asking “What do I wanna achieve?” it's more motivating to ask, “What kind of person do I wanna become?” For James, that means he's not focused on the result of how many books he publishes or how many copies he sells, but rather on being the kind of person who has something worth sharing.

I now think this question has much bigger implications than I realized going in. Who do I wanna become? What kind of person do I want to be? That's not just useful for reaching your goals. It's also helpful for identifying your goals, figuring out what's important to you, and then making sure that when you achieve it, It actually aligns with your values.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Aja Simpson, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, BanBan Cheng, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rodgers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard.

Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Alison Leyton-Brown.

I am also recording and, uh, tried to match your hairstyle for today.

[00:38:04] James Clear: Yeah, I know, right? We’re, we got a little club of bald thought leaders.

[00:38:10] Adam Grant: I feel like there are more bald people in that category than people with hair, but—

[00:38:15] James Clear: For sure. Yeah.

[00:38:16] Adam Grant: May—maybe I just pay more attention to them.

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james clear interview

  | 10 min read

James Clear Interview | Master the art of showing up

James Clear’s writing career all started with a blog post that he committed to writing twice a week, which lead to over 400,000 subscribers, which then lead in 2018 to the publication of an International best-selling book, Atomic Habits. That’s quite the story, and it’s a great example of the power of showing up in action.

In this episode of the Stand Out Life podcast, Ali Hill interviews James Clear. And as you’ll soon find out, there’s a strong connection between habits and identity, as well as a few helpful laws on how to make or break habits.

Give the episode a listen or read the transcript below.

James Clear Interview | Stand Out Life Podcast

Welcome to Stand Out Live, a podcast dedicated to living boldly amongst the busyness.

My name’s Ali Hill and as a psychologist I love asking people questions and I thought what better way on do this than to get the people I admire into a studio to share their stories.

This podcast is our corner of the world where all of us can dive deep into what it takes to live a standout life.

It started with a blog post that he committed to writing twice a week, which led to over 400,000 subscribers and in 2018 James Clear published his international best selling book, Atomic Habits.

James unpacks why the tiny changes can create remarkable results. His articles reach 10,000,000 hits every single year on his website and his work frequently appears in publications including the New York Times, Forbes and Business Insider.

With the start of 2020 coming at us, this is a timely conversation to consider what do you want to become this year? In this conversation we dive into the connection between habits and identity, the questions that will pull us back to what really matters and the four laws on how to make or break the habits that you want to change in your life.

James shares his insights into the hacks that will change how you see habits, including the two minute rule and the power of showing up.

Take the time to absorb James’ work and this year could be the true start to a life that you never thought possible, especially if you commit to it. Map out what’s possible, step into new habits with these insights from James Clear.

James, welcome to the studio.

James Clear:

Hi. Good to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

Look, it’s great to have you here.

Atomic Habits is your book. We’re going to talk a fair bit about that today. It came out last year. It’s an international best seller. We were just talking, 1.2 million copies sold around the world?

Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s been a very busy year. I’m very happy with how it’s gone so far.

That’s a huge amount of books that have sold.

Often when we talk about books we talk about the writing that needs to happen, the marketing, the launch. I’m interested in the last year. What’s that year been like and is there anything that has surprised you about that experience?

Yeah. Depending on how you slice it up, it took somewhere between three and five years to write the book and probably nine to twelve months to plan the marketing. There was a lot of building of potential energy that was eventually released when the book came out and this last year has just been kind of a whirlwind because of that. Some of it was expected or at least hoped for. I hoped the book would do well, I hoped that I get to book signings or interviews or things like that.

Then there were quite a few things that were unexpected and most of those were just very random opportunities, whether it was coming to new countries. I think the first six months of the year I was in 13 countries all for the book in some way or shape or form, which for me was a lot of travel, probably more even than I would like, but very exciting. Then also just the range of places that I’ve talked about the book.

I was mentioning earlier, telling my publicist that within the span of one week, I did an interview on CBS this morning, which is a popular morning show in the US, and was in shirt and tie and a very proper and focused interview, and then that same week did a podcast interview with a health and fitness podcaster who I met at a dinner the night before and he was like, “Oh, do you want to come on my podcast?” I was like, “Okay, sure. It sounds good.” I come over the next morning and I went over there and he had in infrared sauna and he was like, “Hey, we should get in this and try it before we do the interview,” and so I stripped down to my underwear, did that for 20 minutes and then did the interview.

Yeah, that range of experiences is very broad, but it’s all talking about the same book and so that is one surprising and magical thing about putting ideas out into the world, is that a book can carry you to many interesting places that maybe you weren’t expecting.

I wonder if the topic of the book as well, being habits, is something that’s so transferable in different areas and different environments as well.

Yeah, I think that does help. Yeah, you’ve got writing habits, study habits, health and fitness habits, meditation habits, study habits, reading habits. There’s so many different types that it gives you a lot of different entry points to both have conversations, but also meet entirely different groups of people.

I’ve given speeches to organisations of dentists, a group of doctors, corporate America, high school students. It’s a very broad range and I think that’s one thing I really like about the topic and one reason why I felt it was worth five years of my time to spend writing a book and researching that, is that habits are so universal and so widely applicable. It’s something that we all need and for most books if you ask who’s the audience and you said everybody, that would be a terrible answer, but I think habits …

Yeah, marketing would look at you and go, “Hang on. No.”

Right. Yes.

We need to niche this.

Who is your target customer? For habits I think that actually there is an element to truth to that, that not everybody in the world will read Atomic Habits, but I think pretty much anyone can look at the cover and be like, yeah, I get why that would be useful for me, I get why building good habits and breaking bad ones, why that’s important and helpful.

In the five years of research was there any point where you might have gone, hey this book is about something else or there’s a branch off of this or was it always coming back to habits? Was that always, I guess, front and centre?

There are two answers to this. The first answer is that it should have always been about habits and there was a phase maybe a year in where my perfectionism kind of spiralled out of control and I just kept collecting books and insights on human nature and habits and human behaviour and it grew from a book about habits to a book about human nature, to a book about all human behaviours, and nobody can write a book on that topic, it’s too big.

What brought you back then, because I could imagine once you start to dive into the research you go down a rabbit warren, you go down maybe the book’s about this or maybe people are interested in that? What brought you back to habits?

I sort of felt like, well if I really want to do a comprehensive job on this, which I still feel this way now, my hope is that Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive book that’s been written on the subject. If you want to understand what habits are, how they work and, most importantly, how to change them, then I want this to be the one book that you should read.

Who knows if I’ve hit that mark or not. If I do an expanded and updated edition in say 10 years, that’s the same thing I’ll be shooting for, but you can see how that starts to spiral out pretty broadly, you start to feel like you need to cover everything.

This is the second part of the answer, which is that there was one question that kept bringing me back to centre that kind of saved me from myself which was, what is the object of the reader’s desire? Whenever I didn’t know what to write, whenever I wasn’t sure if this should be included or not, I could just ask myself, what is the object of the reader’s desire? Well, in this case what they are desiring is to either build a good habit or break a bad one, so if what I’m writing right now is not about that, it shouldn’t be included. If what this chapter is covering is not about that, it needs to be cut.

Did you come to that question through the writing process?

I came across it from another writer, but it wasn’t about writing books. If I’m remembering correctly and I don’t remember the person that it came from, but I was about writing sales pages or advertisements, because the only way that ads work is if they deliver on what you’re desiring and I felt like the book needed to do that as well. That kind of helped me stay focused.

The first draught of the book was 720 pages and the finished version of Atomic Habits is about 250, so I compressed and cut a lot and that question did a lot of the heavy lifting for that, but I sort of thought, well, if one out of every three pages I write isn’t any good then I got a real problem. If we’ve cut it down by that much and there’s not something useful to say here then we’re really struggling.

I think that’s kind of how I write in general though, is I cover a lot of ground and then I compress and try to retain the potency of the idea while saying it in fewer words or in a more effective way.

For mine that’s where you’re describing that’s the niche, so when you talk about it’s only interest two people because it’s so niche.

Why habits?

There are big picture answers and more detailed answers. The big picture answer is that pretty much every area of your life is at least to some degree a lagging measure of your habits, like your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your eating and training habits, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits, your clutter in your bedroom or on your desk at work is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.

There certainly is an element of luck, randomness, uncertainty. All those things impact your outcomes in life, but by definition luck is not under your control, but your habits are and so on I think the only rational approach is to focus on what you can control and because they exert such a strong influence on your results and because they’re under your control, I think it makes them a very important thing to focus on.

I do think it’s worth noting, habits are not the only thing that matters. I think they’re one of the two big pillars for results in life. The first are your habits and the second are your choices, the strategy that you follow.

You can imagine if you have two entrepreneurs, one of them starts a software company and one of them starts a pizza shop. Most people would say the software company probably has the greater potential energy, the higher trajectory, the more promising future, and so that’s strategy, that’s the choice, which one do you choose to start. You can imagine many entrepreneurs who might have great habits and they start a pizza shop, versus someone who has a good software idea but has terrible habits and doesn’t execute, the one with the better habits may end up capturing more of that potential energy and actually getting better results.

Now ultimately but what we want is to have both great strategy and great habits, but I think those two work together and so it’s not only about habits, but man they play a really crucial role and they kind of determine whatever opportunities that come to you in life, whether they’re big or small, your habits determine whether you capitalise on that, whether you gain some of the benefit that is available to you.

I think it’s really powerful to have that discernment to go, well what is my choice and actually consider the strategy, and therefore what are the behaviours or the habits that we might kick into around that.

With the book being so successful and certainly you’ve described travelling internationally and having conversations around habits, I’m wondering in some ways whether you’ve become like the high priest of confessionals when it comes to habits. People sharing with you their deepest, darkest habits or things that they want to shift and change. Is there any that have come to mind that have come up in conversations that you have had while you’ve travelled around the world?

Yeah, it is interesting to see. I tend to get more of those confessionals via email than face to face, so my email newsletter is fairly sizable as well and when I send out messages, like I sent out one today, usually go out to 500,000 people or so and there will be a lot of replies from people who either feel guilt or shame about their habits or they just feel kind of frustrated or like they’re giving up hope, they feel like they change them.

A lot of the big categories are what you would expect. Health and fitness is a really big one, so whether it’s doing pushup each day or not just physical health but also mental health, meditation or reading, things like that, stress reduction. That’s a very common category.

Productivity and time management is probably another very common one, but the category that I wasn’t expecting that I’ve heard a lot about are, I guess for lack of a better word, ones that impact your social relationships. Sometimes that’s marriage habits or things like that or habits of affection, but sometimes it also friend groups and how those impact your habits. A lot of young people, particularly in the United Sates, if you live in a big city you feel like you have to go out to happy hour or restaurants or go out to the bars with your friends because otherwise you get ostracised from the friend group, but it ends up causing a lot of financial stress because they feel like they don’t have money to go out every week, but that’s what everybody’s doing so they feel a social pressure to do so. That’s really interesting and I think I’ve heard a lot more about that than I expected to and it also has raised some questions for me about the influence that the social environment has on our habits and behaviours, because I think it’s a very significant pull. Peer pressure can be positive or negative and I’ve heard a lot about that on both sides.

Yeah. I was thinking about that in terms of even preparation for our catch up today. The influence of our habits are the people around us and sometimes, and when you talk about choices and strategy, sometimes those choices are not ours, they’re our family, they’re our friends, they’re people saying this is what you should do and so therefor we’re trying to fit a mould as it comes into play and I really do wonder if that social impact has a big impact on the clash around some of those habits.

There are a lot of strategies you can use to get a habit to start, but if you want a habit to stick, the social environment is maybe the most important factor. If you just think about some of the normal habits that we perform, things that we almost don’t even consider on most days, like you move into a new neighbourhood and you walk outside on Tuesday night and you see that your neighbour is mowing their lawn or something. Well, why do we mow our lawns and trim our hedges? Partially it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you don’t want to be judged by the rest of your neighbours.

Keep up with Jones’s.

It’s really that social expectation that gets you to perform that habit for the next 25 years or however long you live there, and we wish we could be that reliable with a lot of our other habits, right, we wish we could do something every week for 20 years. I think that’s an important question to ask yourself which is, where is there a group, where is there a tribe where my desired behaviour is the normal behaviour, because if it’s normal in that group then performing the habit will be very attractive to you because it will help you belong.

Most people, if they have choose between I get to have the habits that I want but I’m ostracised from the group or I don’t fit in that much, I’m cast out, or I have habits that I don’t really love but I get to fit in and be with people, most people would rather be wrong with the crowd than right and by themselves. The desire to belong often overpowers the desire to improve. Particularly in the long run. You might be able to run against the grain of the group for a week or a month, but man, at some point that just starts to wear on you and you’d rather just not have the social friction.

I think this is why you often see when people really build habits that stick, they often join new groups where that’s normal. They pick up a reading habit because they’re part of a book club or they change their fitness because they joined a running group or a cycling club or something like that. They need sort of a, it doesn’t have to be their whole life, it doesn’t have to be 24 hours a day, but they at least need some sacred space where they can go where that behaviour is normal and it’s uplifted and reinforced by the people around them. That’s one of the strongest ways to get a habit to last I think.

Do you have any insights or strategies from those conversations, because I 100% agree? I think it is those people around you and those environments and as you say, it’s not that you have to live in that, it can just be where can you go in and out. Sometimes those new environments or new social connections can come with judgement from your previous or your current connections as well, like who are you hanging out with and why are you going to the gym, and there can be judgements around that. Do you have any strategies on how to address that or deal with that in order to keep connected to the behaviours you want to be engaging in?

Right. Yeah, that’s a good questions. There are multiple elements to this. On the one side, even going to the new environment where the habit is praised, you can often feel like an imposter or feel like you don’t belong at first. A lot of people, they go the gym for the first time, they’re around other people who are working out but they feel like they don’t belong, they feel very uncertain or feel like they are being judged. Am I doing this wrong, do I look stupid, things like that. For that reason I think that there are a couple strategies. One is that you can focus on the areas that you already have overlap with those groups.

One of my favourite examples, my friend Steve Kamb, he runs this company called Nerd Fitness, and it’s all about getting in shape but it’s specifically organised for people who identify as nerds and so the workouts are what Spiderman would do for a workout or what Legos can teach you about pushups or things like that. If you show up there to that community, you’re like well, I don’t know what to do, but I love Star Wars and so does this other person who’s already here and we can connect over our mutual love of Star Wars and then I can soak up the workout habit later.

I guess what I’m advocating for here is looking for mutual areas of interest that may not be the habit that you’re looking to build right away, but it will allow you to form connections and it’s really about connection and belonging, and once you belong with the group then you’ll start to take on some of those other behaviours. You actually, you see this kind of thing all the time in different communities, like a Crossfit gym. People who go to Crossfit, ostensibly they go there to work out at first, but pretty soon they’re signing up for paleo meal plans and buying certain types of knee sleeves and buying certain types of shoes. They’re doing all this stuff that they didn’t even … They’re picking up habits they didn’t even intend to pick up, once they feel like they belong with the crowd.

The second thing you can do, and I think this is … We’ve talked a little bit about how to get a habit to stick with the social environment, this is a great way to get a habit to start, which is, I call the two minute rule, but it basically says take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. Read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. Sometimes people resist that a little bit, right?

Yeah, talk to me about this, because…

Well, because they’re like, okay, I know the real goal isn’t just to take my yoga mat out, right?

Yeah, and two minutes, what’s it really going to do?

Yeah, what’s that going to do? Exactly.

I had this reader, this guy named Mitch, I mentioned him in the book, and he ended up losing a lot of weight, 100 pounds, 40 or 50 kilos, something like that. For the first six weeks that he went to the gym he had a little rule for himself where he wasn’t allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. He would get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. It sounds silly, it sounds ridiculous, it’s just like what you just said, what’s that going to do, but if you step back what you realise is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes.

I think that that’s a deeper truth about habits that is often overlooked, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved, right, it has to become the standard in your life before you can optimise it or scale it up into anything bigger. For whatever reason with habits, we’re often so focused on optimising, we’re so focused on finding the perfect business plan, the ideal workout programme, the best diet to follow. We’re so focused on finding the perfect thing that we don’t give ourselves permission to show up even if it’s just in a small way. I think the two minute rule helps you get over that, it helps get past that perfectionism.

I love it, because it actually requires you right at the very start to almost discern what does success look like, because we set these habits, whether you say I want to go to the yoga four days a week, so then if I only go three I’ve lost, whereas what you’re describing is there’s a different layer of success and a success just to start is about showing up, so it’s kind of liberating.

Yeah, I think you’re making an important point there, which we could phrase it in a different way as well which is, one of the most pervasive … What do I want to say? One of the most lasting forms of motivation for humans is the feeling of progress. If you have signals of progress then you have every reason to feel motivated and continue because you’re making progress, you’re moving toward your ultimate destination. In many ways starting with a really small habit, it facilitates feelings of progress, it facilitates signals of that.

If you set your goal to do 100 pushups a day and on the good days, yeah you can figure out a way to get 100 pushups in, but on days when you’re tired or exhausted or you’re sick or your kids need you for something or you have to help out your parents or work is just crazy, you’re not able to stick with it and then immediately what happens is that, lets say on pretty much any day you could do one push up, right, anybody has enough time. If you make that the goal then you feel like a success, but if you made it 100 and you only did one or five or even ten, you feel like a failure because you didn’t hit that mark and so it’s a weird thing that our expectations play on us in that way.

I think for that reason it’s very helpful, particularly in the beginning, before it’s a habit, to set the bar low, develop a feeling of progress and master the art of showing up.

I love it. It feels so counter intuitive, but it’s the regularity, it’s the consistency of it which is what habits are all about.

In the book you talk about the slow pace of transformation, which I think ties into this really, really nicely, is yes show up, but what if you don’t see the results? Again motivation is connected to starting to see some change. How do I know that I’m showing up in the right way at the right time or have I got my ladder leaning against a wrong wall and I should be doing something else?

Yeah, this is great question. I think the answer, at least one of the answers is you need some feedback, because if you are performing an action but not getting feedback, you have no way to measure or know whether or not you’re making progress.

There is a certain level of persistence and grit and consistency that I think does need to be brought to the table to start with. I love the, there’s a quote I mention in the book, the San Antonio Spurs, NBA basketball team, they’ve won five championships and they have this quote hanging in their locker room that says, “Whenever I feel like giving up I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock 100 times without it showing a crack and then at the 101 blow it splits in two, and I know that it wasn’t the 101 that did it, but all the 100 that came before.” I think so many of our habits are like that. It’s not the last sentence that writes the novel, it’s all the ones that came before. It’s not the last workout that changes your body, it’s all the ones that came before. You need some willingness to be consistent and persistent in order for those to show up, but along the way it’s important to have a little bit of feedback.

I think the key here, I have a chapter where I talk about measurement and measuring your habits and there’s more nuance to it, but one of the keys is choosing a pace of measurement that matches the pace of the habit that you need to perform. Take my dad for example, he likes to swim. On any given day when he goes and swims, he gets out of the water and his body looks exactly the same, right? There is no visual improvement, no visual feedback of the benefits of that workout, but he has a little pocket calendar and he pulls that out and he puts an X on that day and that little habit tracker, the Xs on the calendar, that is a form of feedback, a form of visual measurement that matches the pace that he needs to maintain of the workout. If it was just about the number on the scale, that might change too slowly. If it’s just about how his body looks in the mirror, that definitely changes too slowly, but if it’s about how many Xs I’m building up in my current streak, that’s fast enough that it matches the pace of the habit and so it’s a form of feedback that is quick enough to help maintain the motivation.

It’s particularly that habit streaking, there’s something about you don’t want to be in that day, you don’t, not cross that off.

That’s idea can be powerful. Don’t break the chain. You don’t want it to be a day where you mess up or slip up and miss and then all of a sudden the streak is broken.

I will add something to that though, which I think is powerful. At some point every habit streak breaks, right? You get sick or your kids need something or whatever, and when that happens the mantra I like to keep in mind is, never miss twice. It’s like well, all right I wish I hadn’t missed my swimming workout, but never miss twice so let me make sure next morning I get in. I think we all sort of implicitly know this, which is that it’s never the first mistake that ruins you, it’s the spiral of repeated mistakes. It’s letting missing become a new habit that that’s the real problem.

Yeah, that’s a great point. You don’t want to start that streak.

If you can find a way to get back on track. Right. If you can never miss twice then it’s just blip on the radar at the end of the year.

Yeah, and in the grand scheme of a lifetime it’s nothing.

One of the things, you’re not the first person to talk about habits, there’s been a huge amount of research that’s led up and certainly in the five years that you’ve dived into it, but it’s incredibly accessible this book and there is something about it that is powerful. One of the things that really was an ah-ha for me when I read through it was the connection between habits and identity and I think you’ve brought that together in a way I’ve never seen before. Why is identity important when we talk about habits?

Yeah. I think this is a crucial question. Maybe the most important question about habits.

Often when we talk about habits we talk about them as the avenue for changing our external results. They can help you get six pack abs or lose weight or make more money or reduce stress, and it’s true, habits can help you do all of those things and that’s great, but I think the real reason, the deeper maybe true reason habits matter is that they are a method for changing or shifting your self image, for getting you to believe something new about yourself.

The way that I would describe this is that your habits are kind of how you embody a particular identity. Every morning that you make your bed, you embody the identity of somebody who is clean and organised, or if you study biology every Tuesday night for 20 minutes, you embody the identity of someone who is studious. The first time that you do things you don’t necessarily believe that about yourself. You may not study biology one time and then think, I’m a studious person, but if you keep doing it every week at some point you cross this invisible threshold where you’re like, well I guess I have to admit it to myself that part of my identity is that I am studious.

This I think is perhaps the most powerful thing that habits and even small habits do, which is they cast a vote for the type of person that you wish to become. In that way you can sort of summarise the power that habits have by saying, every action you take is a vote for that type of person and so no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for, I am the type of person who is a writer, and no, doing one push up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for, I am the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.

The more that you cast those votes, the more you build up this little body of evidence of, this is the type of person I am, and I think this is more powerful than one of the common things you hear, which is fake it til you make it. Fake it til you make it, I don’t necessarily have anything wrong with it. It’s asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it’s asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it and we have a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence, we call delusion. Right, like at some point your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you’re saying and what you’re doing, and so my argument is, lets let the behaviour lead the way. By doing one pushup you cannot deny that in that moment you were they type of person who didn’t miss workouts. That evidence, that little bit of evidence, even if it’s just for a minute, it is a little bit of proof to root that new identity in.

Ultimately I think that that’s the longterm power habits have, is that they can allow you to shift that identity and it’s why I say, the real goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book, the goal is to become a writer. Not to do a silent meditation retreat, to become a meditator. True behaviour change is really identity change in that sense. Once you’ve become that person or start to identify in that way, you’re not even really trying to convince yourself anymore to do the action, you’re just like, yeah this is just what I do, it’s part of who I am.

Because I’m a runner or because … Yeah. Are people ever resistant to that? One of the reasons why I ask that question is, particularly that one about being a runner, it’s something I’ve picked up later in life, I’ve started doing it. It wasn’t until people started to say to me that you’re a runner and I just went, no I’m not, I’m just out going for a run. I think I had run two marathons at that point, but still wasn’t convinced that I was a runner because runners are fast, they’re super fit, they go out every day, they do 10Ks a day. I don’t do that.

Is there some resistance in embodying those identities that actually can backfire on us in our own habits?

It’s an interesting thing. It probably wasn’t until about three to six months after Atomic Habits came out that I identified as an author, which isn’t it so strange? It’s like no, its already been written, it’s already here.

That’s ironic. Yeah, so was there a moment then or did someone tell you that yore an author now?

Well, there wasn’t a moment, but I think where I currently fall in this is that, so like in your case with running, you’ve got sort of a lifetime of evidence of not being that and it can take a surprisingly long amount of time for the scale to shift, for the amount of evidence on the other side of the scale to outweigh that and for you to feel like, oh okay, this is who I am now.

I think in the long run that’s ultimately what we’re looking for with habits, but in the short run this is why you need a lot of the other strategies that I talk about in the book, whether it’s habit tracking and putting an X on the calendar or using the two minute rule or whatever it is. These other strategies are really useful while you’re bridging that gap and thinking I’m just out for a run, I’m not a runner. All those things can be very helpful for that period as you’re working through it.

I also think about, there’s a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and he talks mostly about writing habits in there and he had a little example that he gave where he talked about, a wolf for example, has a territory and you, as a writer or you could apply it to any other habit, have a territory as well, but the only way that it starts to feel like your territory, like it’s your home, is if you spend a lot of time there. Early on, the first time you go to the gym, you don’t feel like it’s your territory, you feel like this is a foreign place and I don’t fit.

I’m an imposter. Yeah.

Right. There’s this period of time with any habit where you’re doing it and from the outside people look at you and they’re like, you just trained for six months and ran a marathon, you’re a runner, and you’re like no, it still doesn’t quite feel like my territory yet.

The threshold of crossing that I think is just an invisible line and we don’t know exactly when it happens and it changes for each habit we’re talking about, but I do think that there is a time that comes, that when you show up enough you feel like, yeah, this is home now, this is where I belong.

I think one of the things you do in the book is an invitation to bring that consciousness earlier. It’s almost a permission to go, well at least ask what would that look like or when would I define myself as an author or when would I define myself as a runner, which is a really interesting invitation for people to [inaudible 00:33:37], I think.

Is there ever a time where there’s an identity clash in a particular moment? What I mean by that is, I think of myself for example, I’ve got two kids and there are some mornings where I want to embody the person who gets up early and goes for a run and I also wants to embody the parent who’s there for my children, and it feels like in that same hour those two identities can clash. Have you come across that and are there any strategies on how to reconcile that in that moment?

Yeah. This is a big question and we could phrase it in a variety of ways. You could phrase it like identity clashing, you could phrase it as your priorities or your values clashing. For a long time what I thought was, my friend Tim Urban he talks about values or priorities as being a ladder and so well maybe, for example, you’re going for a run is on the third rung, but actually being a parent is on the second rung and so when they compete that’s the one that wins and so you decide I’m going to stay home, I’m not going to do the run, I’ll be with my kids.

You wish you didn’t have to make that trade off, but there’s this ranking of the priorities and I used to think that was a good way to think about it, and it still is to a certain degree, but I think in real life it’s often much more complex than that.

Most people would probably say, oh family is more of a priority for me than work or my health, I know that if I don’t have my health I don’t have anything and so that should be a priority, but actually if you look at how people behave on a daily basis, a lot of people will choose to work late to finish the project rather than to get home by dinner or to spend an extra hour getting into the office and skip the workout or whatever. I think the truth is there is for each value, for each identity that we have there’s a certain level of urgency or priority attached to that on any given day and most of the time, if your health is reasonably good and you don’t have any emergency, that does not occupy the top rung, even if ultimately in the big picture of life we’ll say yes, if you don’t have your health you don’t have anything, most days it’s actually not. There’s much more of a shifting of that on a daily basis.

I haven’t come up with a good way to define that yet, other than to say it’s kind of this collection of moving targets.

The question about what happens when those identities come into conflict, that’s kind of the moment when you actually find out what your identity really is, if it’s not in conflict then you never have to make a trade off, right, and so you don’t actually know what the true priority is. I don’t have … Obviously this is going to differ for each person what the identities are or whatever.

I think sometimes it even differs each week.

Because if I haven’t seen the kids for a week then that becomes a priority, but if I’ve seen them and I’m done with them, I’m happy to have an hour out.

Sometimes that can be what else is happening, is my perspective on it as well.

I’ve actually heard this for a lot of habits. People say, it’s very easy for me to skip my run, for example, if I’ve had four days in a row where I’ve run, because I’m like oh no, things are going well, I’m okay, but if I’ve missed for four days in a row then I’m like, I got to get out there, I have to make this a priority.

It’s very similar to what you just mentioned there with kids or something else. It’s like when your capacity in a given area is high it’s easy to rationalise letting it slip once or twice. I don’t quite know where I fall on that, because on the one hand I feel like maybe that’s the time when it’s most important to get in, because if it’s easy for you to rationalise and let it slip, then it’s easy for it to become something that, oh shoot, two weeks pass and I haven’t done this now.

I think the question that you’re asking is a very important one. I don’t know that I have a good answer to it, but we all have these trade offs that we have to make.

I do have one other thing that I think is worth adding which is, I think any ambitious person, they don’t like the fact that they have to make trade offs because there’s a lot of things that you’d like be able to achieve. You would like to be able run a faster marathon time and be a great parent and do high quality work and so on. The question that I keep coming back to is, what season am I in right now, and so I like this idea that life has different phases of seasons, and you can define that however you’d like. Maybe it’s a big picture one like what is that season of this decade or maybe it’s a much smaller thing, what season am I in this month or this week.

If I ask myself what season am I in, for me currently, I don’t have kids yet so I’m in a pretty career heavy season and personal health focused and if you imagine burners on a stove, the family burner is probably turned down pretty low and maybe the friends burner too even, but at some point I will have kids and that will signal a shift in seasons and now the family burner needs to get cranked up and maybe something else has to get put on low. I don’t like that I have to make that trade off, but I do think it’s important to ask what season am I in and are my habits matching the season that I’m in right now, because habits don’t have to be permanent in your life, they may just be permanent for a season, but that line of questioning can help you figure out.

Another way to say this is like, what am I optimising for? Right now you may be optimising for money or for time or for family or whatever it is for you, but what you optimise for may shift over the decades or even over the weeks and months.

In your book you talk about these four laws and you talk about both, not making new habits but also breaking other habits, and I think it’s the second part of that that we often don’t refer to. We go, well I need to make new habits but we have to have the time for that, right, and sometimes none of us are sitting around going, geez I’ve got a day I wish I knew what to do with it. All our days are full so something has to give. What are the four laws that you unpack in your book? If you could dive into those for us.

Roughly speaking, if you want a habit to form you need about four things to happen. You don’t need all four to happen at the same time, but the more of these that you have going for you the better position you’ll be in.

The first thing is that you want your good habits to be obvious. You want the queues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier they are to see, the easier it is that they’ll catch your attention.

The second thing that you want is you want your habits to be attractive. The more attractive or appealing a habit is, the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it.

The third thing, the third law of behaviour change is you want to make it easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionless, simple your habits are, the more likely they are to be performed.

The fourth and final thing is you want to make it satisfying. You want your habits to be rewarding and pleasurable and you need some kind of … Not every experience in life is rewarding. Sometimes there’s a consequence, sometimes it’s just neutral, but if a habit is not rewarding or if a behaviour is not rewarding, it’s unlikely to become a habit.

Those four, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. That gives you a high level picture for how to build a good habit and then if we want to talk about what you just mentioned, if we want to break a bad habit, then you just invert each of those four. Rather than making the queues of your good habits obvious, you want to make the queues of your bad habits invisible. If you’re trying to stick to a diet, don’t follow food bloggers on Instagram. If you want to spend less money late night shopping, unsubscribe from emails from the latest fashion brands or stores. If you feel like you’re spending too much money on electronics, don’t read the latest tech review blogs. That exposure, make it invisible.

Second, make it unattractive instead of making it attractive. Third, make it difficult instead of easy, so increase friction, add steps. Then fourth, make it unsatisfying instead of making it satisfying. Add a cost, add some kind of consequence to the behaviour.

Those four steps sort of give you the big picture view of how to shape a habit. They give you four different places to intervene if you want to build a good habit or break a bad one.

I can see why. I mean one of my questions was, what about those habits or those things that we do that we know that we don’t want to do anymore but we almost can’t, we feel like we just can’t stop ourselves from doing it, why is that? As you were talking I’m almost going, well it might be because it’s right there in front of you, it’s too easy to do. It’s all the things that you say. You want to create a new habit is actually those things that you’re stopping, so reversing that.

It can partially be because of those reasons that you just mentioned. It’s too obvious, it’s too convenient. Smart phones are like this a lot, the action is so frictionless. Our phones are literally often a millimetre from our skin, they’re right there in your pocket at all times. It’s so frictionless, so easy that we find ourselves sliding into it even if we don’t really want to do it or don’t want …

A good habit that I’ve built recently, over the last year or two, is I’ll leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. I have a home office so if I have my phone on me, if I take it in there, I don’t do it all the time but I probably do it 90% of days, but if I bring my phone in and I’m like everybody else, I’ll check it every three minutes, but if I leave it in another room it’s only 30 seconds away but I never go get, which is always interesting to me. I’m like, well did I want it or not? In the one sense I wanted it bad enough to check it every three minutes when it’s next to me, but in the other sense I never wanted it bad enough to work 30 seconds to go get it.

I think a lot of our technology habits are like that. They’re so convenient, so frictionless that at the slightest whim of desire we act on them. Convenience is a big part there.

What prompted you to change that?

I realised that when I had my phone on me I was spending more time responding to everybody else’s agenda than working on my own and whether that was reading things on social media, replying to comments, checking email and then getting sucked in to whatever thing was there.

Somebody asked me a couple weeks ago, actually it was a reader, it was on Twitter and he said, “What is one thing everybody in the world can get better at?” It took me a while to come up with something I felt was a decent answer, but what I ended up saying was allocating your attention. It’s almost guaranteed that nobody in the world is always focused on the highest and best use of their time and in that sense phones, despite their power and they do have a lot of power and productivity and wonderful things they provide, they also are distraction machines for your attention and it’s very unlikely that the best thing for you to be working on is whatever happens to pop up in your inbox or on social media or the notification on your phone or whatever.

I figured I wanted to be a little more intentional about that and leave it in another room. I got plenty of time in the afternoon and evening where I can check it all, right, but I just want a block of three or four hours where I can work focused without that.

What have you found with your productivity? That’s a great question to ask on Twitter and I was wondering around that, whether you have any tips and hints on performance, particularly in workplaces. How do we get more done with less time and less to do? What have you found in terms of your own productivity with having that phone 30 seconds away as opposed to right next to you?

That helped me stay focused on whatever task I was working on, but I like rather than giving advice, although we’ve talked about a lot of ideas here that are in Atomic Habits, I’m starting to find more usefulness in questions.

Advice is very context dependent in the sense that it only applies in that situation, but questions are much more useful in a very broad range of context. To link this back to something we’ve talked about earlier with identity, one of the questions that came across from a reader as I was working on the book, is she lost a bunch of weight and the question she kept asking herself each day was what would a healthy person do, and that’s actually much more useful than a piece of advice that says, follow this diet or do this workout, because she can carry that question around with her to every context in life and just keep asking, what would a healthy person do here, and then follow that.

In the case of productivity, I think a really good question to ask is, what is the work that keeps working for me after it’s done, because there are a lot of things that we do that they are just a task to be finished and then as soon as they are finished they no longer work for you.

As an example, we’re sitting here recording a podcast. I strongly prefer to do podcast interviews over radio, because let’s say we sit down for 30 minutes in either case, when the radio interview is done, that work no longer works for me because it was aired and then boom, you’re off the air and it’s over. With a podcast it’s recorded and even right now as we’re sitting here in this conversation, there are other podcasts that I’ve recorded that somebody somewhere is listening to right now, and so it’s still working for me even though the work is done.

I think that question allows you to identify high leverage places to work and ultimately if you start making decisions like that each day, man, that really compounds over a long time if you keep doing work.

Writing Atomic Habits, another example. Took me three to five years, but that work now that it’s done, it’s still working for me right now, there are people reading it somewhere and so that ends up showcasing, I think, to you the highest leverage places to allocate your attention and effort and that really lets you compound yourself over the long run.

I love that. What can I do now that will have a latency further down the track.

It’s more like, what are the most durable tasks. What are the task that continue to deliver again and again even though that hour has already been spent?

Yeah. I loved sitting in that question. It’s certainly something I’ve been playing with around the power of questions and the right question at the right time, but also as human beings we have a resistance to … We want to get the answer and I think just sitting in a question is something really, really powerful.

We were talking off mic before around, we we’re talking about this year and what it’s meant for you and what it’s been like and you said one of the surprises has been that the very thing that you did to get here, which was writing, you haven’t had the time for because you’ve had to say yes to a whole bunch of other things. We started talking about the power of saying yes and saying no. What are the things that you say yes to and what are the things do you say no to at the moment?

Yeah, that’s a good question. As I mentioned to you earlier, when you say no to something, you’re only saying no to that one thing and you can still say yes to anything else, but when you say yes to something, it’s like you’re saying no to every other option. In that sense, yes is a responsibility, it’s a commitment, an obligation, and no is an opportunity still and we don’t usually think about it that way.

Another way I like to phrase this is, yes is like a time debt, when you say yes to something it’s a debt you have to pay back again in the future. If you say yes to a meeting you have this debt of one hour for that meeting that you have to pay back later, but no is like a time credit. It retains the option to use that hour for whatever you’d like.

Although I can say that, it’s been much harder for me to practise it.

I was about to say, that sounds so appealing, but no is hard.

I think one thing that’s helped a lot is, at first when the book came out I would get emails about, hey, do you want to come here to speak, or do you want to come be part of this event or we have this really interesting idea for a podcast, do you want to partner on that, or whatever it is. There were a bunch of cool crazy things that came in the inbox and if they came in one by one and I made a decision right then, I would only be thinking about what that opportunity was and I was very likely to say yes or more likely to say yes, but if we collected all of the opportunities and then put them in a list and then we revisited them at the end of the week, then I was looking at opportunities relative to other ones and relative to everything else we had at our list to do, and so it was much more likely that I would feel the trade off that that would force me to experience, so I wasn’t only thinking about that one opportunity, I was also thinking about how it would impact everything else we were focused on.

I guess what I’m advocating for here is a little bit of distance between the opportunity and the decision. The more that you can create space, the less likely you are to be sucked into whatever sounds cool in the moment.

There was another strategy that I thought was a pretty good one. Brian Cox is a physicist, we did a radio show together last week, and he said he’s been struggling with this and one of the things that helped him was that whenever someone asked him to do something the question he tries to turn around in his head is, would I do this tomorrow and if I wouldn’t do it tomorrow, if I wouldn’t drop everything I’m doing to fit it in, then I should probably not do it.

If something is a year from now or six months from now we’re like, yeah sure, I have time, my calendar is free, but then the time comes you’re like, I kind of wish I wasn’t committed to this thing. The compression of time, the making it more immediate, what that cost is, it clarifies whether you should do it or not. This actually ties back to Atomic Habits, this is one of the concepts I call the cardinal rule of behaviour change, which is behaviours that are immediately rewarded get repeated, behaviours that are immediately punished get avoided and if you can feel the immediate cost of that time commitment then you’re much more likely to avoid it or at least to be clear about, yeah, this is actually something I really want to do.

Bringing it forward, because at some point it’s going to be tomorrow.

I think bringing it into the present moment or as close to the present as you can, is a much more powerful way to determine, is this actually a priority I should be focused on.

I love that because it actually at some point it’s going to be tomorrow, whether it’s in a years time or whether it is tomorrow.

Right. Yes. Exactly, at some point it is the present.

Yeah. Yeah, so how do you bring that forward and how does that then sit with me, so I love that discernment. In a really practical level, how do you say no? Even if you’ve made the decision. but you know you’re going to let someone down or it potentially might be a great opportunity, because it might be that you’re saying yes to one but both are really good? How do you say no?

Yeah. Well actually, so two things there. The first, what you just mentioned, they both might be good. This I think is the real challenge as you become more successful or throughout your career you gain more opportunities or whatever. The hard part, most people know they shouldn’t say yes to time wasting things. Whatever, we all do it occasionally, but most people are like, yeah okay, I know I shouldn’t be watching videos on YouTube or watching Netflix or something, and that’s actually not that hard to avoid. It’s much harder to avoid say items three through six on your priority list, the good uses of time but they’re not great uses of time, because you can always rationalise it. You can be like, oh I’m working on item number four, that’s fairly important to me, but actually it’s a distraction.

The most dangerous items on your to do lists are ones that look like opportunities but are actually distractions, because they prevent you from doing the great work and you can rationalise it because it’s good.

That’s integral. That’s high performance, is that ability to decide between …

That discernment between what is great and what is good.

It’s very hard, and not only the discernment of it, which is a crucial element, but the practise of it, yeah, the courage to say no to good uses of time, that’s something that I think is … I’m still trying to build it myself. It’s hard to do.

The other part of your questions was, okay, practically how do you say no? This is something I could probably get a lot better at. I think there’s a book called The Power of the Positive No, and essentially, the rough version of it from what I understand, I haven’t read it fully but I had a friend who told me a lot about it, the rough version is that when you say no, also offer an alternative. For example, no, thank you so much for thinking of me for this keynote event, I’m sorry I won’t be able to speak, I already have a conflict, but here are two other great speakers that you might consider, or thank you so much for offering to partner on building a podcast together, unfortunately I’m focused on core business concerns right now and working on a second book so I definitely can’t focus on that, but here are a couple of ideas that I think would be interesting for a podcast like that or themes that I would love to see a podcast explore.

What ends up happening is that you’re saying no but people often thank you for it. They’re like, oh thank you so much for these ideas or thank you for the additional recommendations for speakers or whatever, and so I do like that. I like being direct but also offering alternatives.

Yeah. I was just about to say, I mean the other thing they’re thanking you for is not the vagueness. Oh maybe or call me in a month, where you’re actually quite clear in that is important.

Yeah. That’s actually brutal and you see that not just with business, but my wife and I, when we sent out wedding invitations we had a few different friends who just put off and put off and put off telling us whether they could come or not. When I think back on it now, I think it was mostly they kind of knew they probably wouldn’t be able to come but they just didn’t want to share bad news, and it would have been way better for everybody if they just had said from the start, no, I’m sorry, we can’t come, and it actually made it worse for them by putting off the conversation they didn’t want to have.

Being more direct I think is helpful. Brene Brown I think has a phrase where she says like, “Clear is kind,” basically.

The more clear you are, that actually is the kind response even if it’s not the response they were hoping for.

Yeah. It might feel impolite, but what’s impolite is making it wait longer and down the track.

Here we are, obviously we’re having this conversation in Australia, but we are coming into 2020, so a new year. We talked a little bit about habits and identity. Who are you going to become in 2020?

That’s an interesting question. I like the track that I’m on right now, so a lot of it I think will be reinforcing current habits that I have, particularly the writing part. I mentioned earlier that it took me a long time to step into the idea of I’m a writer. I held on to my book … Atomic Habit’s only been out for a year, but my business I’ve been writing for eight years, so I identified as an entrepreneur for much longer than I did as an author, but I like the author part now and so I think stepping into that maybe a little bit more. Maybe that means a second book, I’m not sure, but toying with concepts around that.

Then the other one, the one that I feel like is … I just sent this question out in my newsletter today, which is what is the most neglected important area of your life, and if I think about myself for that, an area that I’m just kind of treading water on right now is training in the gym. I haven’t gotten unhealthy this year but I also haven’t made progress and I think a lot of that has been because I’ve been travelling so much for the book and that’s an identity I would like to reinforce and kickstart and motivate more in the new year.

I know I can do it because I’ve been there before, so it’s more about returning to a past self than it is becoming something totally new or unknown, but that’s an element I’d like to be a bigger part of my life.

Is there potentially an evolution in that in terms of how you maintain that on the road, so when you travel, because sometimes it’s that routine of I know how to do it when I’m at home, but this life now is going to be on the road a little bit?

Daria Rose, she’s a nutrition blogger and she has a good concept I like, which is home court habits and away court habits.

That’s great.

Yeah. When you’re in your home court, when you’re at your office or at your house, that’s probably the first place to focus on getting your habits dialled in because you spend most of your time there, but occasionally, depending on your job or depending on the phase that you’re in in your career or whatever, you may be in the away court a lot. You may be on the road a lot and if that’s the case then it makes sense to try to figure out, what can I do to get habits to stick? I do think the strategies are a little bit different, because when you’re at your home court habits are … The way habits usually work is they’re tied to a particular context, so you always journal in your living room or you always do your workouts in the basement or whatever it is, you have some context where the habit typically occurs. You always listen to podcasts while you’re cooking dinner or in the kitchen or whatever. When you’re at an away court, the context is always changing. You’re always checking into a new hotel or in a different city and so it’s really hard for a lot of people who travel a lot to build habits because of that context switching.

I think one strategy that can be useful is rather than building the habit around the context, build it around a part of the sequence that always shows up. For example, after I check in at the hotel I will say one thing I’m grateful for or after I put my luggage on the bed I will do 10 burpees. You don’t know what bed it will be or what hotel you’ll be in or what city you’ll be at, but you know that part of the process will always happen.

You hope there’s a bed.

You got to have that.

True. Depends on where you’re travelling.

[crosstalk 00:58:39] connecting the two.

Focusing on those repeated actions rather than repeated context, that gives you maybe a different entry point for the habit to live or to kickstart.

There’s so many angles I could have gone down and this book is great. It’s incredibly accessible for people to tap into and maybe next time you’re out in Australia we’ll dive into a few other areas, but I’d love to wrap up this conversation by asking a question that I ask every guest that comes on.

The podcast is called Stand Out Life. When you hear that term, what does that mean to you to live a stand out life?

Probably to live an authentic life or a genuine life to you. Humans are imitation machines and we kind of need to be to survive. When you’re a kid you imitate how your parents talk or the habits that they do and then you go off to university, you imitate how your roommate talks and what they do, and then you get into the workforce and you imitate the habits of your supervisor or your boss because that’s how you thrive in that particular workplace. We do that all the time, but I think the downside of that is that we often imitate the goals and objectives of society at large.

A lot of people are living lives that are focused on borrowed goals, the goals that they borrow from the people around them, from their neighbours, from their peers, from what the news says or what they see on social media. If you can step outside of that … It doesn’t mean you should never do those things, but it does mean that you should question whether that’s what you want to optimise for, what is authentic to you. If it is, great, but if it’s not then you need to shift something.

If once you figure out what you’re optimising for, I like the question, can my current habits carry me to my desired future, and if they can’t something needs to change. I think living a stand out life generally means you’re current habits are carrying you toward your desired future, they are carrying you toward that authentic or genuine or unique personal outcome that is right for you, rather than just borrowed from the people around you.

Love it. Thank you so much for your time, James.

If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, then there’s every chance that you might also enjoy reading a copy of my book called Stand Out: A Real World Guide to Get Clear, Find Purpose and Become the Boss of Busy. You can grab a copy by heading to my website www.allisonhill.com.au.

Thank you for tuning into this episode. I wonder if there’s someone in your world, someone who comes to mind that you know who would also love to hear this podcast? Someone who might soak up the insights that you’ve just heard from this episode. If there is someone that comes to mind, I’m wondering if I can ask a favour. The next time that you see that person or the next time that you spend time with family and friends, why don’t you ask to borrow their phone just for a moment, search Stand Out Life on their podcast platform and subscribe them to this podcast. I reckon they’ll enjoy it and it’ll mean that we can keep having these conversations with even more amazing people.

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James Clear is a personal development keynote speaker and the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Atomic Habits. His entertaining talks teach audiences about small habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement.

James doesn’t merely report the research of others. He tries out the concepts for himself as he experiments with building better habits as an entrepreneur, writer, and weightlifter. In the end, his talks end up being one-part storytelling, one-part academic research, and one-part personal experiment, forming a colorful blend of inspirational stories, academic science, and hard-earned wisdom.

As of 2021,  Atomic Habits has sold over 4 million copies worldwide, enjoyed over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, spent over 33 weeks on the Wall Street Journal bestselling list, and topped Amazon’s Most Sold List for over 31 weeks. Readers have given the book consistently high ratings: Amazon (4.8/5 stars), Audible (4.8/5 stars), and Goodreads (4.32/5 stars). Atomic Habits was also featured three times in the WSJ Bestselling Books Week Ended June 2021 under the topics of Hardcover Nonfiction, Nonfiction E-Books, and Nonfiction Combined.

His thought leadership regularly appears in the New York Times , Entrepreneur , Business Insider ,  Medium , and  Time , and he is a regular guest for CBS This Morning. In addition, he helps millions of visitors each month through his website and hundreds of thousands subscribe through his popular email newsletter.

He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work has been used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Through his online course, The Habits Academy, Clear has taught more than 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers how to improve.

Audiences come away from his talks learning how to:

  • Build a system for getting 1% better every day.
  • Break bad habits and stick to good ones.
  • Avoid the common mistakes most people make when changing habits.
  • Overcome a lack of motivation and willpower.
  • Develop a stronger identity and believe in yourself.
  • Make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy).
  • Design an environment to make success easier.
  • Make tiny, easy changes that deliver big results.
  • Get back on track when you get off course.
  • Put these ideas into practice in real life.

James is a supporter of the Against Malaria Foundation, donating five percent of his income to support AMF in distributing nets to protect children, pregnant mothers, and families from mosquitos carrying malaria. It is one of the most cost-effective ways to extend life and fulfills his bigger mission to spread healthy habits and help others realize their full potential.

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Atomic Habits: How to Get 1% Better Every Day

How can you see a dramatic improvement in your personal and professional life? The natural impulse is to attempt big steps to improve. However, taking big steps often results in failure or only temporary gains. You rarely see the permanent results you want. The key to successful change is in small habits. In this entertaining talk, James Clear focuses on the science of small habits, how they work, and how their effects compound and multiply over time. Through research and personal stories, audiences will not only be entertained but also come away with practical strategies they can immediately apply in their personal and professional lives.

Moderated Fireside Chat With James Clear

In this experience, the moderator can interact with James Clear regarding Atomic Habits.  This allows a more unique and customized experience for the audience and how his tools and practical takeaways can be applied. A moderator can be self-appointed or booked with Engage. 

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Screen Rant

Predestination movie ending explained: the fizzle bomber's real identity & how time travel works.

The Predestination movie explained helps clarify lingering questions on the film's ending, how time travel works, and who the Fizzle Bomber is.

  • Predestination's mind-bending time travel elements offer a new twist on a classic plot device.
  • Ethan Hawke's standout performance and chemistry with Sarah Snook drive the film's engaging noir romance.
  • The shocking ending reveals the Fizzle Bomber's true identity and tackles the theme of fate vs. free will.

The Predestination movie explained covers the ending, the Fizzle Bomber's identity, the mind-bending time-travel elements, and so much more. Directed by the German-Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, this 2014 sci-fi action thriller is in a long lineage of time travel movies , and, like the best of them, it offers an original twist on a classic story device . In the film, Ethan Hawke stars as Agent Doe, a New York City detective, but not of the NYPD. Doe's jurisdiction concerns time, not city blocks, and his hunt for a terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber takes him through the decades.

Despite flopping at the box office, critics and audiences loved Predestination . It's a mysterious noir, combined with an engaging romance, and time travel elements that are interesting from the technical side of the film's structure, as well as from a thematic standpoint. In a film titled Predestination , the idea of what is and isn't ordained by fate is constantly put into question. It's one of Ethan Hawke's best movie performances and his chemistry with Sarah Snook as Jane Doe is undeniable, even after Predestination 's shocking ending tilts their relationship on its axis.

Best Movie Plot Twists Of The Decade

What happens in predestination's ending, how does john meet jane.

Predestination 's plot weaves back and forth over itself, and the beginning is as important as the end. At the start of the film, in 1975, Agent Doe is trying to stop the Fizzle Bomber from blowing up a building. He fails, and his face is burned off in the explosion. Doe escapes to 1992, to the Temporal Bureau's headquarters, with the aid of a mysterious man who hands him Doe's time travel device. At headquarters, Doe's face is reconstructed, and his voice altered, so he appears as someone completely new (and someone who happens to look like Ethan Hawke).

Agent Doe then travels to 1970 where he meets a barfly, John, who tells him this story. John was born female and named Jane. After giving birth via Caesarean section in 1964, doctors discovered that Jane was intersex. The doctors did not wait to get Jane's permission before performing a necessary hysterectomy due to birthing complications, and also forcing her through gender reassignment surgery. While these surgeries were happening, someone abducted Jane's child. Jane adopts the name John and goes to a bar , which is where Agent Doe meets him in 1970 and where John tells this story.

The Agent asks John to take his job with his secret agency, the Temporal Bureau, with the promise that John can get revenge on the mysterious man who fathered John's baby. That mysterious man disappeared in 1963, leaving John to fend for himself, and John blames the man for his life, which has since fallen apart. The Agent and John travel to 1963, and John sees Jane and recognizes this as the moment Jane fell in love with the mysterious man. Meaning John fell in love with himself and made a child, with himself .

After John impregnates Jane, the Agent tells John he must leave to complete the mission. John leaves, breaking Jane's (his own) heart. Secretly, the Agent also travels a year forward to 1964, abducts Jane and John's child, and brings her to the Cleveland orphanage in 1945. That means John, Jane, and the child are all the same person . The Agent has helped create a time travel paradox problem .

Agent Doe Is The Fizzle Bomber

An epic twist in a movie filled with them.

The Fizzle Bomber is a terrorist shown at the beginning of Predestination whom Agent Doe fails to capture. However, the bomb that disfigures the Agent's face is not the problem. The problem is that years after 1975, in 1992, the Fizzle Bomber will strike again after lying dormant for over a decade and kill 11,000 people. The Temporal Agency wants to nip this in the bud as early as possible. It is not until the end of Predestination that the identity of the Fizzle Bomber is revealed. They are Agent Doe.

Years of time traveling have shattered the Agent's mind and convinced him that by unleashing his bombs, he will save countless more people in alternate futures. As out of sorts as the Fizzle Bomber sounds, he could be right with how much Predestination plays with time. Exploding a bomb in one reality could very well save many more people in another. The Fizzle Bomber claims that if the Agent shoots them, he will seal his fate, and eventually become the Fizzle Bomber, as predestined.

The Agent, vowing that his future will be different, shoots the Fizzle Bomber before he can use his device. As the film fades to black, a tape recording of a message the Agent left for John can be heard, pondering if the future can ever really be changed.

Mr. Robertson Is Responsible For The Agent's Existence

The leader of the temporal bureau is the puppet master.

One of the few characters in Predestination who is not multiple people is Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor), Agent Doe's superior at the Temporal Bureau. Mr. Robertson first approached Jane to recruit her to SpaceCorp, but she was rejected for being intersex. Later, he approaches Jane again, right after John leaves her, and tells Jane that he lied and that he actually works for the Temporal Bureau. Jane is recruited and rejected again since she's pregnant. Later, Mr. Robertson reveals another twist: the Agent is also Jane/John .

Mr. Robertson has orchestrated the conception, birth, and death of the Agent, creating what he sees as the perfect time-traveling agent. He has no family, no history, no reason to be anything but an agent of the Bureau, unable to be killed even, as the Agent ensures he is born, before he sets off on his quest to stop the Fizzle Bomber. Mr. Robertson even allowed the Agent to become the Fizzle Bomber, claiming that his actions motivated the need and growth of the Temporal Bureau .

Mr. Robertson presents an interesting idea in Predestination . All along it has seemed that the Agent/Jane/John/Fizzle Bomber are unable to change their futures, that their fates are predestined. However, Mr. Robertson has been influencing events himself , leading his Agent from one year to another. If he can so influence the past and future, then it's reasonable to assume that the Agent can if he would ever try.

How The Time Travel In Predestination Works

A head-scratching predestination paradox made clear.

The Predestination time travel rules can begin getting Byzantine if examined too closely, but at its most basic level, the time travel is simple. Any starting point is fine, seeing as the baby, Jane, John, the Agent, and the Fizzle Bomber are all the same person. An infant is placed at a Cleveland orphanage in 1945. That infant grows up to be Jane, a woman who is intersex. In 1963, Jane meets a mysterious man, has a romantic affair with him, and conceives a child. In 1964, Jane gives birth to a daughter who is abducted without her knowing.

Jane undergoes a hysterectomy and gender reassignment surgery in 1964 and begins living under the name John, and relocates to New York City. In 1970, John sits at a bar and is served by the Agent working undercover as a bartender. The Agent brings John back to Cleveland in 1963, where John falls in love with Jane. John is then whisked away to become a Temporal agent. One of his missions is to stop a man known as the Fizzle Bomber in 1975. He fails and John has his face disfigured and replaced. He is now the Agent.

The Agent goes back to 1970 and poses as a barkeep and takes John to 1963. While John and Jane are beginning a romance, the Agent jumps to 1964, steals Jane's baby, then takes the baby to 1945 and places her in a Cleveland Orphanage, starting the cycle of birth. So what happens to the Agent now? Jane's birth is on a loop , but what happens after baby Jane is sent to the beginning of the loop?

The Agent sits and waits for 1975. When John arrives to stop the Fizzle Bomber, the Agent is the mysterious man who helps him and sends him to 1992. Now it's just the Fizzle Bomber and the Agent. How this stand-off comes about is unclear. At some point, the time loop broke, or shifted, or an alternate reality was created, because the Agent undergoes psychosis, something Mr. Robertson warned would happen with too many jumps , and decides that setting up the bombs himself is the only solution.

The Fizzle Bomber warns the Agent that killing him will lead the Agent down a road that will see him as the Fizzle Bomber, but the Agent kills him anyway. It's never shown how the Agent goes on to become the Fizzle Bomber , so it's possible that if there are alternate realities in Predestination , perhaps this time around the Agent managed to avoid his fate.

The Real Meaning Of Predestination's Ending

The agent has to learn to let go of his past.

Predestination is such an excellent time travel movie not because of the mechanics of the actual time travel, but what the film has to say about fate, predestination, and dealing with the trauma of the past. Every iteration of the Agent could choose to change their fate. John could have stayed with Jane, the Agent could have not killed the Fizzle Bomber, and the Agent could have not abducted baby Jane. The Agent's life is a never-ending cycle of trauma , and the Fizzle Bomber tells him that if he doesn't shoot, the cycle could end.

However, the Agent lets his past dictate his future and plays right into a predetermined fate's hands. Instead of confronting the source of his trauma, the Agent starts it all over again, forcing himself to relive it over and over. The tape recorder at the end of the movie, of the Agent wondering aloud to John whether the future can be changed, can be viewed as a grim ironic final note, or it can be a hopeful message for Predestination . This loop, the Agent has failed, but perhaps next time, he'll realize the answer to his own question, is "Yes".

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Predestination

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Travel Itinerary For One Week in Moscow: The Best of Moscow!

I just got back from one week in Moscow. And, as you might have already guessed, it was a mind-boggling experience. It was not my first trip to the Russian capital. But I hardly ever got enough time to explore this sprawling city. Visiting places for business rarely leaves enough time for sightseeing. I think that if you’ve got one week in Russia, you can also consider splitting your time between its largest cities (i.e. Saint Petersburg ) to get the most out of your trip. Seven days will let you see the majority of the main sights and go beyond just scratching the surface. In this post, I’m going to share with you my idea of the perfect travel itinerary for one week in Moscow.

Moscow is perhaps both the business and cultural hub of Russia. There is a lot more to see here than just the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Centuries-old churches with onion-shaped domes dotted around the city are in stark contrast with newly completed impressive skyscrapers of Moscow City dominating the skyline. I spent a lot of time thinking about my Moscow itinerary before I left. And this city lived up to all of my expectations.

7-day Moscow itinerary

Travel Itinerary For One Week in Moscow

Day 1 – red square and the kremlin.

Metro Station: Okhotny Ryad on Red Line.

No trip to Moscow would be complete without seeing its main attraction. The Red Square is just a stone’s throw away from several metro stations. It is home to some of the most impressive architectural masterpieces in the city. The first thing you’ll probably notice after entering it and passing vendors selling weird fur hats is the fairytale-like looking Saint Basil’s Cathedral. It was built to commemorate one of the major victories of Ivan the Terrible. I once spent 20 minutes gazing at it, trying to find the perfect angle to snap it. It was easier said than done because of the hordes of locals and tourists.

As you continue strolling around Red Square, there’s no way you can miss Gum. It was widely known as the main department store during the Soviet Era. Now this large (yet historic) shopping mall is filled with expensive boutiques, pricey eateries, etc. During my trip to Moscow, I was on a tight budget. So I only took a retro-style stroll in Gum to get a rare glimpse of a place where Soviet leaders used to grocery shop and buy their stuff. In case you want some modern shopping experience, head to the Okhotny Ryad Shopping Center with stores like New Yorker, Zara, and Adidas.

things to do in Moscow in one week

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To continue this Moscow itinerary, next you may want to go inside the Kremlin walls. This is the center of Russian political power and the president’s official residence. If you’re planning to pay Kremlin a visit do your best to visit Ivan the Great Bell Tower as well. Go there as early as possible to avoid crowds and get an incredible bird’s-eye view. There are a couple of museums that are available during designated visiting hours. Make sure to book your ticket online and avoid lines.

Day 2 – Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Arbat Street

Metro Station: Kropotkinskaya on Red Line

As soon as you start creating a Moscow itinerary for your second day, you’ll discover that there are plenty of metro stations that are much closer to certain sites. Depending on your route, take a closer look at the metro map to pick the closest.

The white marble walls of Christ the Saviour Cathedral are awe-inspiring. As you approach this tallest Orthodox Christian church, you may notice the bronze sculptures, magnificent arches, and cupolas that were created to commemorate Russia’s victory against Napoleon.

travel itinerary for one week in Moscow

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Unfortunately, the current Cathedral is a replica, since original was blown to bits in 1931 by the Soviet government. The new cathedral basically follows the original design, but they have added some new elements such as marble high reliefs.

Home to some precious collection of artworks, in Tretyakov Gallery you can find more than 150,000 of works spanning centuries of artistic endeavor. Originally a privately owned gallery, it now has become one of the largest museums in Russia. The Gallery is often considered essential to visit. But I have encountered a lot of locals who have never been there.

Famous for its souvenirs, musicians, and theaters, Arbat street is among the few in Moscow that were turned into pedestrian zones. Arbat street is usually very busy with tourists and locals alike. My local friend once called it the oldest street in Moscow dating back to 1493. It is a kilometer long walking street filled with fancy gift shops, small cozy restaurants, lots of cute cafes, and street artists. It is closed to any vehicular traffic, so you can easily stroll it with kids.

Day 3 – Moscow River Boat Ride, Poklonnaya Hill Victory Park, the Moscow City

Metro Station: Kievskaya and Park Pobedy on Dark Blue Line / Vystavochnaya on Light Blue Line

Voyaging along the Moscow River is definitely one of the best ways to catch a glimpse of the city and see the attractions from a bit different perspective. Depending on your Moscow itinerary, travel budget and the time of the year, there are various types of boats available. In the summer there is no shortage of boats, and you’ll be spoiled for choice.

exploring Moscow

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If you find yourself in Moscow during the winter months, I’d recommend going with Radisson boat cruise. These are often more expensive (yet comfy). They offer refreshments like tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and, of course, alcoholic drinks. Prices may vary but mostly depend on your food and drink selection. Find their main pier near the opulent Ukraine hotel . The hotel is one of the “Seven Sisters”, so if you’re into the charm of Stalinist architecture don’t miss a chance to stay there.

The area near Poklonnaya Hill has the closest relation to the country’s recent past. The memorial complex was completed in the mid-1990s to commemorate the Victory and WW2 casualties. Also known as the Great Patriotic War Museum, activities here include indoor attractions while the grounds around host an open-air museum with old tanks and other vehicles used on the battlefield.

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The hallmark of the memorial complex and the first thing you see as you exit metro is the statue of Nike mounted to its column. This is a very impressive Obelisk with a statue of Saint George slaying the dragon at its base.

Maybe not as impressive as Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower , the skyscrapers of the Moscow City (otherwise known as Moscow International Business Center) are so drastically different from dull Soviet architecture. With 239 meters and 60 floors, the Empire Tower is the seventh highest building in the business district.

The observation deck occupies 56 floor from where you have some panoramic views of the city. I loved the view in the direction of Moscow State University and Luzhniki stadium as well to the other side with residential quarters. The entrance fee is pricey, but if you’re want to get a bird’s eye view, the skyscraper is one of the best places for doing just that.

Day 4 – VDNKh, Worker and Collective Farm Woman Monument, The Ostankino TV Tower

Metro Station: VDNKh on Orange Line

VDNKh is one of my favorite attractions in Moscow. The weird abbreviation actually stands for Russian vystavka dostizheniy narodnogo khozyaystva (Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy). With more than 200 buildings and 30 pavilions on the grounds, VDNKh serves as an open-air museum. You can easily spend a full day here since the park occupies a very large area.

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First, there are pavilions that used to showcase different cultures the USSR was made of. Additionally, there is a number of shopping pavilions, as well as Moskvarium (an Oceanarium) that features a variety of marine species. VDNKh is a popular venue for events and fairs. There is always something going on, so I’d recommend checking their website if you want to see some particular exhibition.

A stone’s throw away from VDNKh there is a very distinctive 25-meters high monument. Originally built in 1937 for the world fair in Paris, the hulking figures of men and women holding a hammer and a sickle represent the Soviet idea of united workers and farmers. It doesn’t take much time to see the monument, but visiting it gives some idea of the Soviet Union’s grandiose aspirations.

I have a thing for tall buildings. So to continue my travel itinerary for one week in Moscow I decided to climb the fourth highest TV tower in the world. This iconic 540m tower is a fixture of the skyline. You can see it virtually from everywhere in Moscow, and this is where you can get the best panoramic views (yep, even better than Empire skyscraper).

top things to do in Moscow

Parts of the floor are made of tempered glass, so it can be quite scary to exit the elevator. But trust me, as you start observing buildings and cars below, you won’t want to leave. There is only a limited number of tickets per day, so you may want to book online. Insider tip: the first tour is cheaper, you can save up to $10 if go there early.

Day 5 – A Tour To Moscow Manor Houses

Metro Station: Kolomenskoye, Tsaritsyno on Dark Green Line / Kuskovo on Purple Line

I love visiting the manor houses and palaces in Moscow. These opulent buildings were generally built to house Russian aristocratic families and monarchs. Houses tend to be rather grand affairs with impressive architecture. And, depending on the whims of the owners, some form of a landscaped garden.

During the early part of the 20th century though, many of Russia’s aristocratic families (including the family of the last emperor) ended up being killed or moving abroad . Their manor houses were nationalized. Some time later (after the fall of the USSR) these were open to the public. It means that today a great many of Moscow’s finest manor houses and palaces are open for touring.

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There are 20 manor houses scattered throughout the city and more than 25 in the area around. But not all of them easily accessible and exploring them often takes a lot of time. I’d recommend focusing on three most popular estates in Moscow that are some 30-minute metro ride away from Kremlin.

Sandwiched between the Moscow River and the Andropov Avenue, Kolomenskoye is a UNESCO site that became a public park in the 1920’s. Once a former royal estate, now it is one of the most tranquil parks in the city with gorgeous views. The Ascension Church, The White Column, and the grounds are a truly grand place to visit.

You could easily spend a full day here, exploring a traditional Russian village (that is, in fact, a market), picnicking by the river, enjoying the Eastern Orthodox church architecture, hiking the grounds as well as and wandering the park and gardens with wildflower meadows, apple orchards, and birch and maple groves. The estate museum showcases Russian nature at its finest year-round.

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If my travel itinerary for one week in Moscow was a family tree, Tsaritsyno Park would probably be the crazy uncle that no-one talks about. It’s a large park in the south of the city of mind-boggling proportions, unbelievable in so many ways, and yet most travelers have never heard of it.

The palace was supposed to be a summer home for Empress Catherine the Great. But since the construction didn’t meet with her approval the palace was abandoned. Since the early 1990’s the palace, the pond, and the grounds have been undergoing renovations. The entire complex is now looking brighter and more elaborately decorated than at possibly any other time during its history. Like most parks in Moscow, you can visit Tsaritsyno free of charge, but there is a small fee if you want to visit the palace.

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Last, but by no means least on my Moscow itinerary is Kuskovo Park . This is definitely an off-the-beaten-path place. While it is not easily accessible, you will be rewarded with a lack of crowds. This 18th-century summer country house of the Sheremetev family was one of the first summer country estates of the Russian nobility. And when you visit you’ll quickly realize why locals love this park.

Like many other estates, Kuskovo has just been renovated. So there are lovely French formal garden, a grotto, and the Dutch house to explore. Make sure to plan your itinerary well because the estate is some way from a metro station.

Day 6 – Explore the Golden Ring

Creating the Moscow itinerary may keep you busy for days with the seemingly endless amount of things to do. Visiting the so-called Golden Ring is like stepping back in time. Golden Ring is a “theme route” devised by promotion-minded journalist and writer Yuri Bychkov.

Having started in Moscow the route will take you through a number of historical cities. It now includes Suzdal, Vladimir, Kostroma, Yaroslavl and Sergiev Posad. All these awe-inspiring towns have their own smaller kremlins and feature dramatic churches with onion-shaped domes, tranquil residential areas, and other architectural landmarks.

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I only visited two out of eight cities included on the route. It is a no-brainer that Sergiev Posad is the nearest and the easiest city to see on a day trip from Moscow. That being said, you can explore its main attractions in just one day. Located some 70 km north-east of the Russian capital, this tiny and overlooked town is home to Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, UNESCO Site.

things to do in Moscow in seven days

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Sergiev Posad is often described as being at the heart of Russian spiritual life. So it is uncommon to see the crowds of Russian pilgrims showing a deep reverence for their religion. If you’re traveling independently and using public transport, you can reach Sergiev Posad by bus (departs from VDNKh) or by suburban commuter train from Yaroslavskaya Railway Station (Bahnhof). It takes about one and a half hours to reach the town.

Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius is a great place to get a glimpse of filling and warming Russian lunch, specifically at the “ Gostevaya Izba ” restaurant. Try the duck breast, hearty potato and vegetables, and the awesome Napoleon cake.

Day 7 – Gorky Park, Izmailovo Kremlin, Patriarch’s Ponds

Metro Station: Park Kultury or Oktyabrskaya on Circle Line / Partizanskaya on Dark Blue Line / Pushkinskaya on Dark Green Line

Gorky Park is in the heart of Moscow. It offers many different types of outdoor activities, such as dancing, cycling, skateboarding, walking, jogging, and anything else you can do in a park. Named after Maxim Gorky, this sprawling and lovely park is where locals go on a picnic, relax and enjoy free yoga classes. It’s a popular place to bike around, and there is a Muzeon Art Park not far from here. A dynamic location with a younger vibe. There is also a pier, so you can take a cruise along the river too.

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The Kremlin in Izmailovo is by no means like the one you can find near the Red Square. Originally built for decorative purposes, it now features the Vernissage flea market and a number of frequent fairs, exhibitions, and conferences. Every weekend, there’s a giant flea market in Izmailovo, where dozens of stalls sell Soviet propaganda crap, Russian nesting dolls, vinyl records, jewelry and just about any object you can imagine. Go early in the morning if you want to beat the crowds.

All the Bulgakov’s fans should pay a visit to Patriarch’s Ponds (yup, that is plural). With a lovely small city park and the only one (!) pond in the middle, the location is where the opening scene of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita was set. The novel is centered around a visit by Devil to the atheistic Soviet Union is considered by many critics to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. I spent great two hours strolling the nearby streets and having lunch in the hipster cafe.

Conclusion and Recommendations

To conclude, Moscow is a safe city to visit. I have never had a problem with getting around and most locals are really friendly once they know you’re a foreigner. Moscow has undergone some serious reconstruction over the last few years. So you can expect some places to be completely different. I hope my one week Moscow itinerary was helpful! If you have less time, say 4 days or 5 days, I would cut out day 6 and day 7. You could save the Golden Ring for a separate trip entirely as there’s lots to see!

What are your thoughts on this one week Moscow itinerary? Are you excited about your first time in the city? Let me know in the comments below!

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24 comments.

james clear travel

Ann Snook-Moreau

Moscow looks so beautiful and historic! Thanks for including public transit information for those of us who don’t like to rent cars.

james clear travel

MindTheTravel

Yup, that is me 🙂 Rarely rent + stick to the metro = Full wallet!

james clear travel

Mariella Blago

Looks like you had loads of fun! Well done. Also great value post for travel lovers.

Thanks, Mariella!

james clear travel

I have always wanted to go to Russia, especially Moscow. These sights look absolutely beautiful to see and there is so much history there!

Agree! Moscow is a thousand-year-old city and there is definitely something for everyone.

james clear travel

Tara Pittman

Those are amazing buildings. Looks like a place that would be amazing to visit.

james clear travel

Adriana Lopez

Never been to Moscow or Russia but my family has. Many great spots and a lot of culture. Your itinerary sounds fantastic and covers a lot despite it is only a short period of time.

What was their favourite thing about Russia?

james clear travel

Gladys Parker

I know very little about Moscow or Russia for the\at matter. I do know I would have to see the Red Square and all of its exquisite architectural masterpieces. Also the CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST THE SAVIOUR. Thanks for shedding some light on visiting Moscow.

Thanks for swinging by! The Red Square is a great starting point, but there way too many places and things to discover aside from it!

james clear travel

Ruthy @ Percolate Kitchen

You are making me so jealous!! I’ve always wanted to see Russia.

james clear travel

Moscow is in my bucket list, I don’t know when I can visit there, your post is really useful. As a culture rich place we need to spend at least week.

james clear travel

DANA GUTKOWSKI

Looks like you had a great trip! Thanks for all the great info! I’ve never been in to Russia, but this post makes me wanna go now!

james clear travel

Wow this is amazing! Moscow is on my bucket list – such an amazing place to visit I can imagine! I can’t wait to go there one day!

james clear travel

The building on the second picture looks familiar. I keep seeing that on TV.

james clear travel

Reesa Lewandowski

What beautiful moments! I always wish I had the personality to travel more like this!

james clear travel

Perfect itinerary for spending a week in Moscow! So many places to visit and it looks like you had a wonderful time. I would love to climb that tower. The views I am sure must have been amazing!

I was lucky enough to see the skyline of Moscow from this TV Tower and it is definitely mind-blowing.

james clear travel

Chelsea Pearl

Moscow is definitely up there on my travel bucket list. So much history and iconic architecture!

Thumbs up! 🙂

james clear travel

Blair Villanueva

OMG I dream to visit Moscow someday! Hope the visa processing would be okay (and become more affordable) so I could pursue my dream trip!

Yup, visa processing is the major downside! Agree! Time and the money consuming process…

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

james clear travel

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The Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow, Russia

The Kremlin and Red Square were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1990.

Russian secrets? Here’s the ultimate Moscow itinerary

Tour architectural wonders, discover Soviet history, and savor local flavors in this gold-domed city.

Moscow is a city where the past and the future live side by side. Here you will find everything from medieval fortresses and Soviet monoliths to glass skyscrapers and innovation centers. Moscow’s spirit mirrors its uncontainable size. Muscovites, the city’s approximately 12 million residents, are always on the run, so be prepared to keep pace with their energy. Here’s how to make the most of three days in Moscow .

Day 1: Mosaics and metro stations

9 a.m. Navigate the labyrinth of the Moscow metro , a living, breathing work of art crisscrossing the metropolis. Expect marble arches and pillars, gilded mosaics, and sparkling chandeliers. Each station is unique. Some of the most beautiful stations are Kievskaya and Prospekt Mira (brown line); Mayakovskaya (dark green line); and Ploschad Revolutsii , Arbatskaya and Elektrozavodskaya (dark blue line). Getting lost on the metro is a rite of passage. However, ahead of the 2018 World Cup, most trains introduced route maps and announcements in English to make navigation easier for outsiders.

Three stations take you to Red Square, but Ploschad Revolutsii is ideal. Its platforms have numerous bronze statues of soldiers with their dogs. Locals often stop by to rub the dogs’ noses as they make a wish. ( See pictures of Moscow’s surprisingly elegant subway stations. )

Related: 25 of Russia’s Natural and Cultural Treasures

Kizhi Pogost

9:45 a.m. Head to the iconic Red Square to see the red-bricked towers and the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum, the State Historical Museum , and the psychedelically colorful domes of the St. Basil’s Cathedral . Queue early outside Lenin’s mausoleum for a spooky date with the man behind the Russian Revolution, who has rested in this tomb, preserved in chemicals, for almost 100 years .

The postcard-perfect St. Basil’s Cathedral was built in the 16th century to commemorate Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s victory over the Khanate of Kazan and the transformation of Moscow into a major center of power. Drop in for a quick visit or keep walking south towards the Moskva River and the Bolshoi Moskvaretskii Bridge for spectacular views of the Kremlin and the Red Square.

a woman in the rain in central Moscow, Russia

Another structure that will catch your eye is the golden-domed Cathedral of Christ the Savior , just southwest of the Kremlin. Unlike St. Basil’s, this Cathedral did not survive the communist persecution of religion. The original was destroyed in 1931 and the area was converted to an open-air swimming pool, the largest in the world. The fall of communism brought with it religious freedom and the Cathedral was rebuilt in the 1990s. If you turn around, you will see one of the “Seven Sisters,” the Stalinist monoliths that command Moscow’s skyline .

11:45 a.m. Head back towards the Red Square for a shopping trip at GUM (pronounced goom ), the largest department store in Russia. Much like Russia, the store has undergone many changes. Built in imperial times as a massive trading center, GUM’s Soviet-era badge of honor was being relatively better stocked than other stores. Today, it’s a glittering mall that houses Hermès and Louis Vuitton. Even if you don’t shop, the long, arched galleries and concave glass roof make it an architectural delight. Next, make your way to the third floor for Stolovaya No. 57 (Canteen No. 57), a Soviet-style restaurant with local dishes and a laid-back vibe. Try the syrniki (roughly translated as cheesecakes), buckwheat with mushroom sauce, or meat cutlets.

2 p.m. The Moscow Kremlin , the seat of the Russian Government, was built in the 15th century and houses cathedrals, museums, and unique objects from imperial Russia. Start with the Armory Chamber , a treasure trove of Fabergé eggs, imperial dresses, and gifts presented to the Tsars. Don’t miss the Diamond Fund inside the Armory where guests can marvel at the crown of Tsarina Catherine the Great.

the inside of Marinsky Theater during a ballet in Moscow, Russia

The Bolshoi Theatre hosts ballet and opera performances, including classics like Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

Take a stroll around Cathedral Square to admire the golden domes that mushroom from Orthodox cathedrals. Look out for the 19-foot-high bronze Tsar Bell for great photo ops. The nearby Tsar Cannon is also worth a look. Wrap up in the Kremlin Garden and see if you can spot Cosmos, the lone oak tree that was planted by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, two days after his extraordinary flight in April 1961 . ( Trees that traveled to space now live on Earth. Here’s where to find them. )

7 p.m. Finish your day with a ballet or opera performance at Bolshoi Theatre , one of the strongholds of Russian theatrical excellence since the 19th century. If you are lucky, you might be able to catch Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece Swan Lake on the stage where it premiered in 1877. Performances sell out so book in advance, and arrive early to enjoy the neoclassical building. Russians take theater seriously so wear your best outfit.

Day 2: Fine art and food

10 a.m. The extraordinary entrance to Tretyakov Gallery welcomes guests to Moscow’s most definitive collection of fine arts spanning almost a millennium. You can explore 12th-century icons and mosaics or get lost in the brushstrokes of 19th- and 20th-century Russian heavyweights such as Ivan Shishkin and Ilya Repin. The New Tretyakov wing showcases artists from the Soviet period.

1 p.m. Soak up some summer sun in one of Moscow’s most dynamic open spaces: Park Gorky , a hipster paradise that underwent a major makeover from a Soviet relic to the center of cultural life. Grab some food on the go or sit down for a meal at Grill Bar Zharovnya or La Boule . Wander through the open-air sculpture museum, Muzeon , the home of countless statues and symbols from the Soviet times. Muzeon runs next to the Moscow River and offers a great view of the almost 322-foot-high statue of Tsar Peter the Great.

7 p.m. One place you must dine in Moscow is White Rabbit . The restaurant, which has been featured among the top 50 in the world, owes its success to chef Vladimir Mukhin, whose culinary prowess was featured on Netflix’s Chef’s Table . White Rabbit serves Russian food with innovative twists; think sea urchin caviar and beetroot hummus. Quite fittingly, there is also rabbit on the menu. Did we mention the restaurant’s glass dome offers spectacular views of Moscow City?

Day 3: Markets and museums

10 a.m. If the Moscow Kremlin is stately, then the colorful Izmailovo Kremlin cultural center has a bit of a Disneyland feel to it. Built in 2007, Izmailovo is a great place for a stroll before bargain-hunting at Vernisazh , a flea market with stalls selling Cold War memorabilia. You will find stamps, banknotes, pins, propaganda posters, and even steel mugs from Soviet times. Score great deals on matryoshkas , Russian nesting dolls; khokhloma , hand-painted wooden handicrafts; and Baltic amber jewelry. Don’t miss contemporary twists on traditional Russian gifts, such as nesting dolls of modern politicians and music boxes shaped like Orthodox cathedrals. For a market of its popularity, Vernisazh prices are a steal and you can haggle without hesitation. Saturdays and Sundays are the best days to visit.

Russian nesting dolls in Moscow, Russia

Russian nesting dolls make the perfect souvenir, and are sold throughout Moscow, including at the Vernisazh flea market.

1 p.m. By now, you have probably got the sense that there is more to see in Moscow than time to see it. So pick what you crave most. Want more of Orthodox churches? Head to the UNESCO World Heritage site of Novodevichy Convent , which was once used by the women of the Tsar’s family. Still looking for souvenirs and gifts? Make your way to Stari Arbat (Old Arbat), a historical cobblestone street of shops and restaurants. Want to delve deeper into Russian history? Visit the State Historical Museum on the Red Square. A Cold War buff? The Bunker 42 Museum located 18 floors below Taganskaya metro was a strategic command center and an anti-nuclear shelter. A fan of Russian literature? Check out the Gogol House and the Bulgakov Museum . Want another serving of art? Try the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts or the Garage Museum .

8 p.m. End your stay in Moscow with a nice meal. Café Pushkin offers antique interiors, delicious Russian dishes, and five-star service. Even if you don’t eat here, grab a cup of the Pushkin chai, a signature Earl Grey blend with citrusy overtones. For casual fare, go to Varenichnaya (multiple locations), which has an extensive menu of Russian dishes and decor straight out of a Soviet poster. Mari Vanna (multiple locations) is another choice Russian chain.

Moscow is also a great place to try the food from other Soviet states. Head to Khachapuri to try the namesake khachapuri , Georgian stuffed-cheese bread. For authentic Uzbek plov , make a reservation at Uzbekistan . Want to keep enjoying the outdoors? Bar Strelka is a trendy spot with great views, excellent food, and a dance floor to keep the night going .

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IMAGES

  1. Who is James Clear?

    james clear travel

  2. The Habits that Led James Clear to One Million Books Sold

    james clear travel

  3. James Clear: On Reclaiming His Attention to Focus on What Matters

    james clear travel

  4. James Clear Book Atomic Habit's Review

    james clear travel

  5. Atomic habits james clear

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  6. Deep wisdom

    james clear travel

COMMENTS

  1. Ultralight Packing List: How to Pack Light & Travel With 1 Bag

    Left pocket - Sunglasses, pens (2x), and Prometheus flashlight. Right pocket - Cables, chargers, adapters, headphones, memory cards (4x) Bottom compartment - Rain jacket, Wool Buff, and sleep mask. The best travel backpacks allow you to keep the most frequently used items in the most accessible locations.

  2. Strategies I'm Using to Stay Fit While Traveling

    I'm still learning and experimenting with different ideas, but here are some strategies I've been using to stay fit while traveling. (Plus, the new approach that I'm taking this year). 1. Do what you can, when you can. I think the simplest approach is to fit training in whenever you can. When all else fails, you can always resort to this ...

  3. How to Pack Lighter

    Today I'm sharing how I pack light for one bag travel and show you how you can save weight and bulk from your luggage by utilizing minimalist principals when...

  4. Travel Writing: Morocco

    Travel Writing: Morocco. VISITED: February 2014. LOCATION: Fes, Morocco. DATE: February 21, 2014. First night in Fes and I easily made on of my stupidest travel decisions. The medina in Fes (the ancient part of the city) is like a maze. The alleyways are tight: sometimes only large enough for one person to walk through without brushing the walls.

  5. James Clear

    James Clear. April 25, 2018 ·. After traveling to more than 20 countries, I have slowly optimized and improved my packing list and travel strategy. My hope is that this guide will help you master the art of packing light and eliminate the unnecessary items that we often drag around on our travels, but never actually use. jamesclear.com.

  6. [4K] Walking Streets Moscow. Moscow-City

    Walking tour around Moscow-City.Thanks for watching!MY GEAR THAT I USEMinimalist Handheld SetupiPhone 11 128GB https://amzn.to/3zfqbboMic for Street https://...

  7. Best of Design Matters: James Clear

    Best of Design Matters: James Clear. James Clear has been writing about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement for over a decade. Author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, he joins to talk about his career and how we can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals. Okay, so you have a few bad habits.

  8. Making a Habit of Listening with James Clear

    Coming up next, James is going to explain really elegantly the 125/900 rule. Meaning you speak at 125 words a minute, you think at 900 words per minute, and James is going to explain how the role of an editor can help you listen. James Clear: I like that active form of listening a lot as well. Oscar Trimboli:

  9. James Clear

    Author, weightlifter, and travel photographer in 25+ countries. James Clear's work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, and Entrepreneur, and on CBS This Morning, and is taught in colleges around the world.His website, jamesclear.com, receives millions of visitors each month, and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his email newsletter.

  10. James Clear: Interview, Biography and Facts

    James Clear, an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer, believes that ordinary people can do extraordinary things and be part of changing their corner of the world. He shares his thoughts, experiences, ... James Clear is an American author, entrepreneur, and speaker who has made a name for himself by teaching people how to build ...

  11. Podcast With James Clear: Intermittent Fasting, Olympic Lifting

    James Clear is an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer. Most of his work can be found on www.jamesclear.com where James covers topics like improving your health, your happiness and your work. In this podcast we talk about:

  12. ‎Travel Light with Chase Reeves on Apple Podcasts

    James Clear on What You Want In this episode Chase (https://chasereeves.co) and NYT bestselling author James Clear (https://jamesclear.com) pull apart the question "what do you want!?" and discuss life after success (and how James got there).

  13. James Clear

    James Clear is the author of "Atomic Habits," the creator of the "Habits Academy," a weightlifter and a travel photographer.His writing is focused on how we can create better habits, make better ...

  14. Photography by James Clear

    Photography. Every three months or so, I set out on a photography trip to create art, explore the world, and learn a thing or two along the way. My most recent trip was to Scotland. You can browse all of my image galleries by location below, but if you're looking for a place to start then I'd suggest Morocco, Russia, or Turkey. Camera ...

  15. James Clear on Consistency and Having a Defined Process

    James Clear is an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer in 20 countries. He has started four businesses over the course of his entrepreneurial career and two of them have succeeded. His real success has been his personal blog. He started consistently posting twice per week in very late 2012 and has not missed a post since.

  16. Building atomic habits with James Clear (Transcript)

    Listen along. ReThinking with Adam Grant. Building atomic habits with James Clear. June 27, 2023. [00:00:00] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts ...

  17. James Clear Interview

    James Clear: Yes. Ali Hill: You got to have that. James Clear: True. Depends on where you're travelling. Ali Hill: [crosstalk 00:58:39] connecting the two. James Clear: Focusing on those repeated actions rather than repeated context, that gives you maybe a different entry point for the habit to live or to kickstart. Ali Hill:

  18. ENGAGE

    James Clear is a personal development keynote speaker and the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Atomic Habits. His entertaining talks teach audiences about small habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. James doesn't merely report the research of others. He tries out the concepts for himself as he experiments with ...

  19. 3-2-1: Prioritization, making the most of what you have ...

    Poet Jenny Xie on how reading is a form of travel: "Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. ... Each issue contains 3 short ideas from James Clear, 2 quotes from other ...

  20. My trip to Moscow, Russia Dec. 2021

    Moscow, Yaroslavl, Uglich, Kirrilov, Kizhi Is., Mandrogi, St. Petersburg, Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo). And then on to Helsinki and Talinn. I came of age in the 50's-60's -- the Cold War -- and when I stood in the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square I remarked that I had never believed I would find myself there.

  21. Predestination Movie Ending Explained: The Fizzle Bomber's Real

    The Predestination movie explained covers the ending, the Fizzle Bomber's identity, the mind-bending time-travel elements, and so much more.Directed by the German-Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, this 2014 sci-fi action thriller is in a long lineage of time travel movies, and, like the best of them, it offers an original twist on a classic story device.

  22. Travel Itinerary For One Week in Moscow

    Day 6 - Explore the Golden Ring. Creating the Moscow itinerary may keep you busy for days with the seemingly endless amount of things to do. Visiting the so-called Golden Ring is like stepping back in time. Golden Ring is a "theme route" devised by promotion-minded journalist and writer Yuri Bychkov.

  23. How to spend 72 hours in Moscow, Russia

    Try the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts or the Garage Museum. 8 p.m. End your stay in Moscow with a nice meal. Café Pushkin offers antique interiors, delicious Russian dishes, and five-star ...

  24. Favorites

    Take the guesswork out of habit-building. 11 email lessons walk you through the first 30 days of a habit step-by-step, so you know exactly what to do. Get the tools and strategies you need to take action. The course includes a 20-page PDF workbook (including templates and cheatsheets), plus new examples and applications that you can't find in ...