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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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Building atomic habits with James Clear (Transcript)

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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.

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

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 rambles about his baggage in search of smooth passage. Creative work, deeper meaning and a more authentic expression.

Travel Light with Chase Reeves Chase Reeves

• Society & Culture
• 4.9 • 101 Ratings
• FEB 12, 2021

6 Lessons: Leaving the White Picket Fence for Travel Life

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

Customer Reviews

101 Ratings

Business papers

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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James Clear: Interview, Biography and Facts

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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Ultralight Packing List: How to Pack Light & Travel With 1 Bag – James Clear

Travel the world in a Tom Bihn Synapse 19! I love his list of stuff. Fantastic choices!

http://jamesclear.com/ultralight-travel

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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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Minimal Travel Packing List: 2 Years Living Out of One Bag

Jeremy Maluf  is a founder/designer/creator living in New York, who enjoys building stuff from scratch. Oh, and he travels a lot and lives out of one backpack. A 30L Prospect from Timbuk2. And he’s been kind enough to share his packing list! 

I’ve always liked the idea of traveling indefinitely with only a backpack, so in 2016 I decided to try it. I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in an 18L laptop backpack and replaced everything else with the best version of it I could find. I’ve been living out of my backpack ever since.

My pack contains everything I need for traveling to virtually every country on earth. It works for all weather, and I’ve tested it in subzero snowstorms and on hiking trips in the Sahara and Mojave deserts. The core idea is to keep the number of things I own to a minimum but to never not have something that I need.

My bag currently weighs 13.67lbs/6.2kg and I own ~fifty things. My goal is to drop the weight to 11lbs/5kg, a carry-on limit a few airlines are implementing.

Backpack. Lately I’ve been switching between the  Timbuk2 Prospect ,  Division , and  Rogue . I haven’t yet found the perfect bag.

Travel pouch. Custom travel folio.

Tech 13″ 2014 MacBook Pro. I love how durable the older MacBooks are, but it’s a quarter of the weight of my bag so I’m thinking about replacing it with a lighter model soon.

iPhone 7. Two, one as a backup in case I lose my main phone or to switch SIMs.

Apple Watch. For health tracking and ‘Hey Siri, remind me’.

AirPods . Easily the best tech purchase I’ve made. Airpods are literally magic for travelers.

RAVPower 26,800mAh battery . It holds about a dozen phone charges and is the largest powerbank airlines allow on board. I’ll eventually replace it with the  30W version , which could charge laptops and drones, or this  Kickstarter  one if it lives up to the hype.

Solar Cells. Two 5.5W solar cells. These can charge my phone almost as fast as a wall outlet in ideal conditions. Great for outdoorsy trips longer than a few days.

Joby GripTight ONE Micro tripod . I replaced my larger tripod for one I could keep in my pocket. This tripod is so small it can actually fit inside that tiny watch pocket all Levi’s jeans have.

Universal travel adapter . Compact outlet adapter that works in most countries.

MacBook wall adapter. This thing is massive, I really need to upgrade my laptop.

29W Apple wall adapter. One is enough since I also charge stuff off my powerbank.

Lightning cable. Two, in case I break one.

Micro USB cable. For the powerbank. Two, in case I break one.

Apple Watch charger. 0.3m version.

Outdoor Research Transcendent down jacket . This jacket is compressible enough to fold into its pocket and disappear in the bottom of my bag, while also warm enough to go anywhere. Eventually I will replace it with the lighter  Montbell Plasma 1000  or  MH Ghost Whisperer .

Outdoor Research Helium II rain jacket . Compacts to the size of a fist and is more waterproof than jackets that weigh 10x more. Undisputedly the best rain jacket ever made.

Hanes hoodie . I exclusively wore startup swag hoodies before I decided to drop branding from my clothing. I liked how durable my swag hoodie was though, so I looked it up and got the same one off Amazon. No idea how they make hoodies this good for $11.

Buff . Multi-purpose headgear. Useful as a face mask in cold weather.

Nike Flex Experience Run 7 . Compact, cheap, and durable.

Next Level t-shirts . Four shirts, all in one color, no branding. Not quite as good as  Outlier’s  shirts, but if I break one I can replace it for less than a cup of coffee.

Uniqlo AIRism boxer briefs . Four pairs. Rated as one of the best travel boxers for good reason. They’re also the only clothing product I’ve purchased in a physical retail store in a few years.

Darn Tough socks . Four pairs. So indestructible that if they rip the manufacturer will ship you a brand new pair. I’ve walked/run 500+ miles with every pair I own and they all still look new.

Levi’s 511 Slim Fit jeans . Jeans are great for traveling because they’re durable and last weeks between washes. Worn with a canvas belt .

Swimsuit . A cheap pair of board shorts off Amazon.

Sweatpants . A cheap pair of sweatpants off Amazon.

Miscellaneous

Wallet. A minimalist leather wallet I made myself. It contains my debit/credit cards, ID, NYC/LA/SF subway cards, and  Cash card  ($1 off coffee shops!).

Passports. Obviously.

Sunglasses. A $1 pair of sunglasses I bought when my Snap Specs broke.

Umbrella . I compared dozens of expensive umbrellas only to find out that a $15 umbrella was the most compact. This  one  is even smaller, but I can’t find a place to buy it in the US.

PackTowl . These things are amazing since they dry fast and stay clean. The version I use is 3oz heavier than their ‘ultralight’ style, but also more durable and comfortable.

Screwdriver set. In case I need to replace my iPhone screen or something.

True Utility Keytool . Probably the world’s most compact bottle opener multi-tool.

Toiletry kit. Contains a  Quip  electric toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, a razor, and deodorant.

Medkit. Contains Advil, bandaids, gauze bandages, medical tape, antiseptic wipes, alcohol swabs, and tweezers. Also a sewing kit, fishing kit, water purification tablets, and duct tape.

Other travelers’ one-bag lists that have inspired me over the years:  Tynan ,  James Clear ,  Matt Mullenweg ,  Vicky Lai , and  James Blackshine .

Follow Jeremy on Twitter .

Enjoyed this article? You might like these too:

The Best Backpacks for One-Bag Travel

The Best Travel Shoes for Every Type of Traveler Right Now

9 Amazing Travel Pants for Long Flights and Beyond

The Best Men’s Travel Pants for One-Bag Travelers

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Passing Thru Travel

The Best 10 Places for Snorkeling in 2024

Posted: March 23, 2024 | Last updated: March 23, 2024

Snorkeling offers an accessible and magical way to explore the underwater realms that cover much of our planet. This guide, crafted with the discerning traveler in mind, explores the world’s premier snorkeling destinations. Each location is selected for its vibrant marine life and crystal-clear waters and its commitment to conservation and sustainable tourism practices. From the kaleidoscopic coral gardens of the Great Barrier Reef to the serene, turtle-filled waters of the Gili Islands, these destinations offer unparalleled opportunities to immerse yourself in the beauty of the underwater world.

1. The Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Debra James

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system, comprising over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching over 2,300 kilometers. This UNESCO World Heritage site is home to an extraordinary diversity of marine life, including over 1,500 species of fish, 400 species of coral, and a myriad of other marine creatures.

The reef’s vast size means snorkeling spots are suitable for all experience levels, from shallow, calm waters for beginners to more challenging sites with strong currents for experienced snorkelers.

Insider’s Tip: Visit the outer reef for the clearest water and most vibrant coral formations. Many operators offer eco-friendly tours that contribute to reef conservation efforts.

When to Travel: The best time to visit is from June to October, during the Australian winter, when the water is clearest and snorkeling conditions are optimal.

How to Get There: Fly into Cairns, the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, with international connections through major Australian cities. From Cairns, numerous tour operators offer snorkeling trips to various parts of the reef.

2. The Maldives

Image Credit: Shutterstock / MaszaS

The Maldives, a tropical paradise in the Indian Ocean, is renowned for its crystal-clear waters, vibrant coral reefs, and abundant marine life. The archipelago’s atolls offer some of the best snorkeling in the world, with easy access to the reefs right from the islands’ shores. Snorkelers can expect to encounter a wide array of marine life, including colorful fish, sea turtles, rays, and even whale sharks in certain areas.

Insider’s Tip: For a unique experience, choose a resort that offers night snorkeling tours to see the reef’s nocturnal creatures come to life.

When to Travel: The dry season from November to April offers the best snorkeling conditions, with calm seas and excellent visibility.

How to Get There: International flights arrive at Malé International Airport. From there, seaplanes or boats are typically used to reach the various islands and resorts.

3. The Silfra Fissure, Iceland

Image credit: Shutterstock / VicPhotoria

The Silfra Fissure offers a unique snorkeling experience in the crystal-clear glacial waters between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The visibility in Silfra is unparalleled, often exceeding 100 meters, allowing snorkelers to see the stunning underwater topography and vivid blue colors of the fissure. The water temperature is cold year-round, but dry suits provided by tour operators ensure a comfortable experience.

Insider’s Tip: Book your snorkeling tour early in the morning for a more serene experience before the site gets busy with other tourists.

When to Travel: Snorkeling in Silfra is possible year-round, but the summer months of June to August offer more daylight and slightly warmer water temperatures.

How to Get There: Silfra is located in Þingvellir National Park, about an hour’s drive from Reykjavik. Guided tours can be arranged from the city.

4. Raja Ampat, Indonesia

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Ditras Family

Raja Ampat, located off the northwest tip of Bird’s Head Peninsula in West Papua, Indonesia, is considered one of Earth’s most biodiverse marine habitats. The archipelago’s clear, warm waters are home to over 1,000 species of coral-inhabiting fish, 700 species of mollusk, and more than 500 types of coral. The shallow reefs offer easy access for snorkelers, providing up-close encounters with the vibrant underwater life.

Insider’s Tip: Stay at an eco-resort to support sustainable tourism practices and gain access to exclusive snorkeling sites.

When to Travel: The best time to visit is from October to April when the seas are calmest, and visibility is best.

How to Get There: Fly to Sorong via Jakarta or Bali, then take a boat to your chosen island within the Raja Ampat archipelago.

5. The Bay of Donsol, Philippines

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Dudarev Mikhail

The Bay of Donsol is renowned for allowing snorkelers to swim with whale sharks, the largest fish in the sea. These gentle giants frequent the waters of Donsol from November to June, attracted by the abundance of plankton.

Snorkeling with whale sharks in Donsol is regulated to ensure the safety of both the animals and snorkelers, providing a responsible wildlife encounter that is both thrilling and respectful.

Insider’s Tip: Opt for a morning snorkeling session when whale shark sightings are most frequent and the water conditions are ideal.

When to Travel: Visit between November and June for the best chance to snorkel with whale sharks, with peak sightings from February to May.

How to Get There: Fly to Legazpi City from Manila, then travel by road to Donsol, which takes approximately 1.5 hours.

6. The Belize Barrier Reef, Belize

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Globe Guide Media Inc

The Belize Barrier Reef is the second-largest coral reef system in the world, offering an incredible diversity of snorkeling sites, including the famous Great Blue Hole. The reef is home to a vast array of marine life, including endangered species such as the West Indian manatee and the green turtle. The clear, warm waters and the reef’s proximity to the coast make it an ideal snorkeling destination for all skill levels.

Insider’s Tip: Include a visit to Hol Chan Marine Reserve, where the shallow waters are teeming with fish, rays, and occasionally, nurse sharks.

When to Travel: The dry season from November to May provides the best snorkeling conditions, with calm seas and excellent visibility.

How to Get There: Fly into Philip S.W. Goldson International Airport in Belize City. Take a domestic flight or boat to your chosen destination along the reef from there.

7. The Red Sea, Egypt

The Red Sea is famed for its clear, warm waters, vibrant coral reefs, and abundant marine life. The extensive fringing reef system offers easy shore access for snorkelers, making it possible to explore the underwater wonders just steps from the beach. The Red Sea’s reefs are well-preserved, with strict conservation measures in place to protect the delicate marine ecosystem.

Insider’s Tip: For an off-the-beaten-path experience, visit the reefs around Marsa Alam, where there are fewer crowds and abundant marine life.

When to Travel: The best time for snorkeling in the Red Sea is from March to May and from September to November when the water temperatures are comfortable and the weather is pleasant.

How to Get There: International flights arrive at several airports along the Red Sea coast, including Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh. Numerous resorts and snorkeling sites are easily accessible from these cities.

8. The Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

Image Credit: Shutterstock / npavlov

The Galapagos Islands offer a unique snorkeling experience, with the chance to encounter an array of endemic species above and below the water. The nutrient-rich currents attract diverse marine life, including sea lions, marine iguanas, and countless fish species. The islands’ remote location has helped preserve their pristine condition, offering a once-in-a-lifetime snorkeling adventure.

Insider’s Tip: Consider a liveaboard snorkeling cruise to visit the islands’ most remote and unspoiled snorkeling sites.

When to Travel: From December to May, the warm season offers the best snorkeling conditions, with warmer water and calmer seas.

How to Get There: Fly to Quito or Guayaquil in Ecuador, then take a domestic flight to the Galápagos Islands. Snorkeling tours are available from both Santa Cruz and San Cristóbal islands.

9. The Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Image Credit: Shutterstock / huang jenhung

The Yucatán Peninsula is home to the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef and a unique system of freshwater cenotes offering diverse snorkeling experiences. The reef provides a habitat for various marine species, while the cenotes offer a glimpse into an otherworldly underwater landscape of crystal-clear waters and dramatic rock formations. Snorkeling in the cenotes is an unforgettable experience, with the sunlight filtering through the water, creating a magical atmosphere.

Insider’s Tip: For a truly unique experience, snorkel in the cenotes early in the morning before the crowds arrive, when the light and visibility are at their best.

When to Travel: The best time to snorkel in the Yucatán Peninsula is from November to March, during the dry season, when sea conditions are calm and visibility is high.

How to Get There: Fly into Cancún International Airport, a gateway to the Yucatán Peninsula’s snorkeling destinations. The reef and cenotes are accessible by car or tour from Cancún and the Riviera Maya.

10. The Seychelles

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Iryna Shpulak

The Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, is renowned for its clear waters, vibrant coral reefs, and diverse marine life. The islands offer a variety of snorkeling experiences, from the shallow, sheltered reefs ideal for beginners to more adventurous sites with stronger currents. The Seychelles’ commitment to environmental conservation ensures that its marine ecosystems remain healthy and vibrant.

Insider’s Tip: Visit the Sainte Anne Marine National Park, where you can snorkel among hundreds of fish species and pristine coral gardens within a protected reserve.

When to Travel: The best snorkeling conditions in the Seychelles are from April to May and from October to November when the water is calmest and visibility is at its peak.

How to Get There: International flights arrive at Seychelles International Airport on Mahé, the largest island. From Mahé, inter-island ferries and domestic flights provide access to the other islands.

The Bottom Line

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Patryk Kosmider

As you embark on your snorkeling adventures, remember that the beauty of the underwater world is a treasure to be cherished and protected. By choosing destinations committed to conservation and practicing responsible snorkeling, you contribute to preserving these ecosystems for future generations. Snorkeling allows you to experience the incredible diversity of life beneath the waves, a reminder of the interconnectedness of all living things, and the importance of our role in safeguarding the planet’s natural wonders.

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The post The Best 10 Places for Snorkeling in 2024 republished on Passing Thru with permission from The Green Voyage .

Featured Image Credit: Pexels / Daniel Torobekov.

For transparency, this content was partly developed with AI assistance and carefully curated by an experienced editor to be informative and ensure accuracy.

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• Independent Trave...

Independent Travel to Moscow and St. Petersburg

My wife and I have traveled independently to many European countries and, after reading many of the comments in this forum, feel like we may be able to do so in Moscow and St. Petersburg as well, although we feel somewhat less comfortable than the other countries where we have traveled in Europe.

My biggest question is how much we will miss by visiting the main sites without a tour guide. In the other European countries we have visited on our own we have been comfortable and satisfied with the level of knowledge we have gained by studying and visiting on our own, although we believe a tour guide or tour company in any country would normally be able to provide greater insight than visiting a site on our own, but about in Moscow and St. Petersburg?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Unless you speak at least some Russian and read the alphabet it would be difficult without a guide. Very few signs in English especially in Moscow. Also not too many people speak English there.

I visited St Petersburg last Autumn for a protracted period , and did not find it anymore daunting than any other European city . As Ilja says , learning the Cyrillic alphabet is a big plus . I also found that it was fairly easy to grasp . It will , among other things , enable you to read signs with relative ease . I would answer the main part or your question ( about tour guides ) thus - I am not enamored of tour guides or tours. While I only use a tour under duress ( A sites rules prohibiting an independent visit - ie Glasgow School of Art , Municipal House in Prague , etc ) . Doing your own preparation and homework is the best way , in my opinion . My wife and I ventured through St Petersburg with nary a concern ,and made two day trips outside of the central district ( one was twenty five miles away , and no English speakers in sight ) Figuring out the logistical details , did not present any difficulties . While I never use tours , I am an inveterate eavesdropper , have done so many times , and find , that on balance , the information that they impart is fairly elementary . If you want greater detail , they are unlikely to supply it . I also prefer to go at my own pace , not being rushed and being able to dwell on things that most other visitors barely give a passing glance . If you are interested , let me know . I would be happy to provide you with information that will enable you to travel independently

Thank you, Steven. I am encouraged by your comments and feel the same way you do about tour groups. We are very much willing to prepare in advance and learn the basics of the Cyrillic alphabet to help us have a better experience.

I would be very interested in learning more about your experience in Russia and receiving any additional information you can provide on independent travel there, starting perhaps with obtaining the visa.

I am not opposed to hiring a private or small group guide for a specific site or for a day trip outside St Petersburg and Moscow, but, like you said, I much prefer the freedom of staying at places as long or short as I want and seeing the sites that interest me most. For example, neither my wife nor I are big into shopping, yet most tour itineraries leave afternoon time for just that. Not interested!

Please provide whatever you may feel would be helpful for us.

Russ , I see you are quite near San Francisco - you can start by looking at the VISA procedure , it's fairly straightforward . Since there is a consulate in San Francisco - look here http://www.consulrussia.org/eng/visa-sub1.html

And here - http://ils-usa.com/main.php

Having always traveled independently, we thought we could do a better job than any tour. How misguided (pun intended) we were. Now that we have had the experience of having someone native to the area walk us around and explain things through a personal perspective we realize how much we missed. For St. Petersburg I highly recommend http://www.peterswalk.com/tours.html . This is not a traditional guided tour, but an opportunity to receive some orientation to the area as well as insight into the "Russian soul". I think if you did this upon arrival the rest of your time would be much more meaningful. We really liked the http://www.pushka-inn.com . The location is superb (just around the corner from the Hermitage square), the rooms lovely, the included breakfast at the restaurant next door ample and overall an excellent value. We used this company to get our visa: https://www.passportvisasexpress.com/site/san_francisco_customer_service Note that it costs about the same for a 3-year visa as a one-year, and you never know if you might want to return within that more extended window of time. It is not cheap, so factor that into your planning.

If you like traveling without a guide in other countries and find this satisfying, the same will be true in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Of course it's not either/or - you can certainly take a guided walk or boat tour, for instance.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of learning Cyrillic if you're going on your own. The book I used was Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script, which was great. It breaks down the alphabet into letters that are the same as English, letters that look the same but are pronounced differently, etc. It's out of print, but you can get used copies on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Beginners-Russian-Script/dp/0071419861/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1459701143&sr=8-2&keywords=teach+yourself+russian+script

Russia is indeed a bit more "foreign" than say, Italy. However, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I found enough English to be able to get by. Many restaurants had English menus and/or English speaking staff, for instance. This was most emphatically not true in Vladimir and Suzdal (two cities in the Golden Ring outside Moscow). I went with my sister, a Russian speaker, and if she hadn't been there, I would have been in big trouble. So, if you want to see places outside these two big cities, use a guided tour (even if just for that part). Also, Moscow and St. Petersburg are huge cities. Coming from New York, I wasn't intimidated, but those not used to a megacity may not be so cavalier (even I found them overwhelming at times, especially Moscow).

I found both Lonely Planet and Rough Guide to be helpful, and both to have various errors. Look at both, buy whichever one has a more recent edition, and then be prepared to have to discard some of the advice therein. Also, these places change more quickly than places in Western Europe. Be very careful of outdated advice. For instance, I was there in 2001 and 2010, so I won't give you any specifics on getting a visa - that changes constantly.

Just as a teaser, two things I saw and loved that I doubt would be included in any escorted tour are the Gorky House in Moscow (an Art Nouveau wonder) and the Sheremyetov Palace in St. Petersburg (it's now a museum of musical instruments, and the decor is amazing, particularly in the Etruscan Room).

Thanks for all the good advice. Any additional thoughts are welcomed.

One of history's seminal works pertaining to Russian history and culture and a MUST for anyone contemplating a visit or simply interested , is this fine work from 1980 - http://www.amazon.com/Land-Firebird-The-Beauty-Russia/dp/096441841X

This is about you and not about Petersburg. Do you like guided tours? We don't and didn't find that a guide added to our experience in China where we did hire private guides mostly for the logistics; it was easy to have someone drive us places. But once at a site, we didn't need the guide. I felt the same way about our 9 nights in Petersburg. We did hire a guide for the trip to the Catherine Palace again for the ease of logistics for us Olds. Here is our visit: https://janettravels.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/an-easy-trip-to-the-catherine-palace/ There are also snapshots of the Church on Spilled Blood in this photo journal. Having someone pick us up at the apartment and get us in without line ups and shepherd us through the palace steering clear of the tour groups was lovely. But we didn't need commentary because we can read and prepare.

You certainly don't need a guide for the Hermitage (we spent 4 days there), the Russian Museum, the Kazan Cathedral or Church on Spilled Blood or the Faberge Museum. We enjoyed a number of self guided walking tours including a couple from Rick Steves guidebooks. We took the canal cruise suggested by RS that had an English commentator. I would not take one without that as you will be totally clueless. The commentator was not all that good but at least we had some idea what we were seeing. So for people like us who like to do our own thing and can read a guidebook and don't particularly like to be led about, a tour is not needed. If you enjoy tour groups, then go for it. Petersburg is easy to negotiate. It helps if you can read the cyrillic alphabet and it is also useful to have the google translate ap on your phone. We found ourselves translating packages in grocery stores with it and the occasional museum sign or menu. I have one food I need to avoid and so it was handy to have the translator to talk with waiters (I could either show them the sentence, or play it for them or play it to myself and then repeat it to the waiter -- that all worked well)

Dear Russ, I cannot help you with Moscow, but about four years ago, my husband and I went to St Petersburg on our own. But, we did use a private guide for 4 half days. We both feel that our guide absolutely made our trip (we stayed 6 or 7 nights). We used a company owned by Tatyana Chiurikova, www.tour-stpetersburg.com I cannot say enough good things about her and our experience. I emailed her and we worked out a schedule/ sights that was tailored to our interests. She also offered some recommendations, which we took. The guide will meet you at your hotel. And frequently, at certain places, with the guide, we were able to skip the long entrance lines. We had an half day driving tour of the city (car, driver, & guide). You are taken to & go in places such as Peter & Paul Fortress, some of the cathedrals, etc. We had a half day with the guide at the Hermitage which ensured that we would see the major sights there. And, of course, you can stay after your guide leaves or return another day. Also, we had the guide for Peterhof (a must & go by boat) and Catherine's Palace. I hope that you will go to the website. As I said, our guide made our trip. I am positive that we would have missed quite a bit on our own everyday. And I'm sure we would have wasted a lot of time trying to get to various place.This was the best of both worlds, a guide where needed and plenty of time on our own. Whatever you do, I'm sure that you will love St Petersburg! Ashley

I am curious about the lines as we encountered no lines on our trip -- but it was in September. We got tickets for the Hermitage at machines and skipped those lines and our guide for the Catherine Palace which was our only guided experience (as noted before, chosen for the logistics of getting there) had arranged tickets and we didn't have a line, but then we also didn't see lines. We did not find lines at any other site.

Both Moscow and St Petersburg I've done on my own, that is together with the Dear Partner. I can't remember any problem getting where we wanted to go. The Metro systems are well signed, and with a little exercise and patience you can recognize the station names. With a good map and a good guide - we had the Rough Guides - that part of the logistics is solved. The language is a major problem, but the usual tricks of pointing, looking helpless, and making a joke of it all do wonders. I would hate to be led by a guide, but for others it is a comfortable thought.

We also did both cities on our own. I found the DK Eyewitness guide for Moscow has the best map. I used the one from our library (kept the book at home). Took the smaller RS book for St. Petersburg ( his book on northern cities). His map and restaurant ideas were all good. We also downloaded the Google maps in our Android Samsung tablets/phones for both cities and then could get directions to any place we typed in. The blue ball guided us everywhere. I'm sure we missed somethings by not having a guide, but we just enjoy walking around and getting a sense of a place. If you like art, The Hermitage is great. We went 3 times and still missed alot. In St. Peterburg we stayed at the 3 Mosta which we loved (quite and not far from the Church of Spilled Blood.) We also loved the Georgian food in both cities. There's a great Georgian restaurant near the 3 Mosta hotel. We're now in Belarus- very scenic. Enjoy your trip!!

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