James Clear
Appearances
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
That's interesting. Yeah, I think to a large degree, many of the themes and concepts I write about originated in nature or you could be inspired from them there. Like if you think about building habits or making positive change, what we're talking about is some kind of transformation or evolution. And of course, you know, evolution is this huge driving force in nature.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And so there's a lot of inspiration and crossover there. far as like what my profile picture is and why i chose that i i have very odd social media accounts you know like i never show my face um my instagram account is just like blocks of text and you know different quotes and sayings it's a very strange feed but my my way of thinking about it is like
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I don't really care about being front and center. I want the ideas to be front and center. And I want a brand that's known by name, not by face. So like Calvin Klein or Kate Spade or something like that, like, you know, some people might know what Calvin Klein looks like, but the vast majority of people know the name, but not the face. And I think that's fine.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Like James Clear can be like that, too. And I also feel like it's a useful handicap. You know, like I always think. I don't have anything to hide behind. It's just the ideas. They better be good, because otherwise people are going to stop paying attention. We'll be back with more James Clear right after this break.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
They're looking for the same thing everybody else is looking for, which is consistency. Most of the time, they know the things that they want their team to do. They're just trying to get them to do them more frequently. I think we all could do this.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I mean, you know, we all do it because we're all kind of thinking about how can my next year be better than my last year? And, you know, what am I hoping to achieve and so on? So it's a very natural thing. I don't think there's anything wrong with using that momentum or using that motivation for you.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
If you were going to just do a classic 80-20 analysis on your job, you're going to write down everything that you do, and then we're going to draw a line at the top 20%, and you're not allowed to do the bottom 80% of tasks. But If you really crush it on the top 20%, if you just totally knock it out of the park, you probably still have a job because those are the things that really move the needle.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
We all sort of implicitly know what some of those things are. And all these companies are the same way. They know what really matters. And so what they're trying to do is to get their team. I'll speak to 800 salespeople or their top 300 executives or something like that. They're trying to get people to direct their attention towards those things more and to do them more consistently.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
At some root level, it is the same, but I do think there are some meaningful differences. The primary difference is that when you set goals for yourself, you're the one who's setting them and you're the one who's in control.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
In business, often as the executive or as the leader or whatever, you're setting goals for a bunch of other people who didn't choose that goal and then are asked to fall through on it. And that often does not go well because people want to be in control of their time and attention and energy and so on.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I think the key in either case is that it's really helpful to be able to draw a through line from the goal that you're asking people to follow. to the type of person that you're asking them to be and how it serves them. So in the individual case, I call this identity based habits. And the core idea is that you don't start by asking yourself, what do I wish to achieve?
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You start by asking yourself, who do I wish to become? And by focusing on the type of identity that you want to build and the type of person that you're hoping to become, you can see how your habits are reinforcing a particular action.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So, for example, rather than worrying about like, oh, I want to lose 30 pounds in the next six months, you focus on building the identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. Now, in the team context, this becomes a little broader because often when we talk about identity in a business, we're talking about like, what is the culture? And so.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
There also isn't any reason to wait if you feel like making a change earlier in the year or at a different time. There's nothing special about waiting until January, but certainly momentum is a powerful thing. And if you feel like you have some now, then go ahead and take advantage of it.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You need to be really clear about who are we and what are we trying to achieve. And if you can get people to buy into that vision or that shared identity, then it becomes a little easier if you can connect the goal to that. And you can say, hey, listen, we all said that we're in on this. We all said we want to become this. Here's how these goals kind of feed in to that bigger picture.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So I think that helps with some alignment. There's one more thing that I want to mention that I think is particularly important with business goals and just driving results in business, which is getting incentives aligned. And this is one of the trickiest things with companies because incentives are hard. But there's this story that illustrates, I think, this well.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So in the early 90s, somewhere around that time frame, Boeing, the airplane manufacturer, the story is that they – We're switching from manually driven planes, manually driven wings by the pilots to software driven. And on the first test flight where they were going to test this software, they required that the engineers who designed the software be on the flight.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And partially there was a reason for that. Like, you know, they're going to test things out. They may adjust some things on the fly and so on. We wanted to see how the system responded. But also, I always think like, man, better get it right. You know, like what a beautiful alignment of incentives. The person who designs the thing, their neck is on the line, too.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And I think if we ask ourselves, honestly, are the incentives that cleanly aligned in most of our businesses or institutions? A lot of the time, the answer is no. And I always think you should ask yourself, like, first, who is doing the work? Who reaps the rewards? Who bears the consequences? And when the incentives are aligned, it's often the same person for all three.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And when the incentives are misaligned, somebody else is doing the work, somebody else is bearing the consequences, and somebody else is reaping the rewards. And so as best as possible, you need to figure out ways to get the incentives aligned, and people will naturally want to do things that serve them and avoid things that punish them.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Oh, man, there are literally hundreds. I actually keep a list of sources on my website. So if you go to jamesclare.com slash thanks, it's like a thank you page to all the people that have been various inspirations and sources of ideas to me. I am...
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
would be impossible to list everybody there you know hundreds of sources and atomic habits alone and i feel like i'm always looking i don't even really read books anymore i kind of like read chapters or read sentences like i'm just like looking for a little bit of insight oh i really like how that was phrased or oh i really like how the way that they unpack that maybe i can you know like take that and make it my own or use that in some way
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So pretty much everything that I share, two things are true. The first is pretty much everything is a reminder to myself. So like I struggle with all this stuff, too. And it's just a way of me trying to pull myself back to center. And then the second thing is. Almost nothing that I share is something that I originally thought of.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I feel like my value is that I try to put it in a way that is easy to understand and easy to apply, but the ideas almost all originated elsewhere. And I think we have this somewhat incorrect view of creativity, that creativity is origination, that it is like the creation of something from nothing. But actually, I think almost every form of creativity is synthesis.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
It is the connecting of ideas that were previously unconnected. It is the sharing of something that has already been out there, but has never quite been put that way or has never quite been delivered in that fashion.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And that I feel like is my job is to come across the very best ideas I can and then to deliver them in a way where you think, you know what, I always have kind of felt that, but I just didn't have the way to the language for it. Or I've always believed that or seen that in my life, too, but I've never heard it put that way.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And if I can do that and try to deliver ideas in a more useful or more actionable or practical fashion, then I feel like that is a lot of value. And I'm happy to play that role and other people can play different roles.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So two things, one big picture, one tactical. So big picture, a lot of the time I feel like the two best timeframes to focus on are 10 years or one hour, you know? So like 10 years is, think about any big meaningful thing in your life that you'd like to achieve.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Creating a successful marriage, raising kids that you're proud of, getting in the best shape of your life, launching a successful business, finishing a book, like whatever it is, it's probably like a multi-year thing. And so you can keep that big picture 10-year vision in your mind and then scale it down to one hour.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Well, there are many examples of this kind of thing in business and in life. There's failure premortem, as they call it. Basically, it's so unlikely that you will stick to a habit and just do it forever. Everyone is going to fall off course at some point, and there's going to be some interruption of life that weasels its way in.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
What can I do in the next hour that moves me toward where I want to be 10 years from now? And if you can do that, then I think you start to see how small changes can really add up, how these small actions day in and day out and can accumulate into something meaningful. And it really doesn't take much to feel good about yourself or to feel like it's moving forward.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You know, like all you really need is five good minutes. Five good minutes of exercise can reset your mood for the day. Five good minutes of conversation can restore a relationship that's been shattered or has been fragmented. Five good minutes of writing can make you feel like the manuscript's moving forward again. So it doesn't take much. So that's the big picture view, 10 years or one hour.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And then the tactical thing is utilize what I call the two minute rule. So very simple, just says take your habits and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And sometimes I mentioned this and people resist a little bit, you know, but I had this reader, this guy named Mitch mentioned in Atomic Habits, and he started going to the gym. And he's lost over 100 pounds now, kept it off for more than a decade. And when he first started going for the first six weeks, he had this strange little rule where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous. You know, it sounds silly, like this is obviously not going to work. But what you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up. And this is this deep truth about habits that people often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn it into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize. So I'm reminded of that quote from Ed Latimore, where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. Like there are a lot of things in life that are like that.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So think about the big 10 year vision, scale it down to the next hour or five minutes or two. few minutes, make it as small as possible, cast some little vote, make some little action today that moves you toward that big picture view that you have for the future.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Maybe it's your kids get sick or you have to travel for work or you need to do something for your parents or whatever it is. But we all have things that come up. And when your habits fall off track, it's helpful to have a plan for how you how you're going to get back on track quickly.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And I think actually, as I have studied more and more people who build habits and looked at people who are kind of top performers, so to speak, in their particular domain, these people are human just like everyone else, right? They make mistakes and they fall off course. But one pattern that they do tend to share is they get back on track quickly.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And if the reclaiming of your habit is fast, the breaking of it doesn't matter that much. So you get to the end of the year and it's just a little blip on the radar where you slipped up two or three times. So for all of those reasons, it's very helpful. And of course, I think we all know that having some kind of consistency has power.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And so if you can get back on track quickly, then you can often get the results you want without needing to be perfect.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think broadly we could break a habit into two different kind of core problems. The first problem is getting started and the second problem is sticking with it. Now, at some level, what does it mean to stick with something? Well, it basically means that you get started each day. So we could say ultimately this boils down to being good at starting.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And if you can just do that day in and day out, then you are consistent. And there are a variety of things that you can do to make starting easier. You can optimize your environment. You can scale the habit down to make it easier to get going. There are ways to track progress and kind of try to build up a feeling momentum. And we can talk about all that stuff in more detail if you want. But
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You do in the beginning, I think, need to have a couple things in mind that maybe you don't need to worry about as much once you're already going with a habit or once you're picking up a habit that you've done consistently. And I would say two of the core things to think about when you're trying to build a habit for the first time. The first one is, what would this look like if it was fun?
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You know, what would it look like if it was fun to meditate every day? What would it look like if I enjoyed exercising? What would it look like if it was fun for me to write? And, you know, there are not a thousand ways to do everything in life, but there's almost always more than one way. And it's worth it to think about what is the version of this habit that I am most genuinely excited about.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You know, the most common New Year's resolution is to do some form of exercise. And I kind of feel like a lot of people go to the gym in January just because they feel like they should be going to the gym or like society wants them to go to the gym. And you should choose the version of that habit that's most compelling to you. You know, yoga, rock climbing, kayaking, go for a run.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Like we could come up with a very long list of ways to live an active life. And you should choose the version of that that's most appealing to you. So I think it's worth leaning against this question of what would this look like if it was fun for me? That's a really good place to start.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think you have to play with or sit with the question of like, how good can you get at golf if you're not on a golf course? And so at some point, this might come down to prioritizing your time and figuring out how to actually get out to a course more consistently. But assuming that that's not possible and you are going to be in the city more.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
You got to come up with like a list of all the things that you could potentially do, whether it's, you know, getting to a simulator or installing some kind of putting green in your apartment or whatever it is. And then I think there are a lot of once you figure out what the actual behavior is going to be, there are a lot of things you can do to optimize it.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So, like, let's take the putting green in the apartment. I had one reader who he would go to a he would go to his guitar lessons and he would practice and play with his instructor. And then he'd go home and he wouldn't really do anything throughout the week. And they go back the next week and start to be like, you didn't practice. You're not going to get better at this. And
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
So he took his guitar stand and put it in the middle of the living room where he'd pass it 30 times a day. And now he's much more likely to play. So that's one simple example of environment design. And we could think about doing the same sort of thing for golf. If you're only practicing when you're going to see an instructor, you might improve a little bit.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
But if you're not going every day or practicing every day, it's going to be hard to really get better. So making it more obvious is one example.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And then I kind of think given the environmental constraints of this one, it's going to come down to being creative and figuring out, like, how can you tack on around a golf to every work trip or how can you tack on around a golf to every time that you like leave the city to visit your family?
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Basically, any time that you're getting out to somewhere where it's more likely to to be able to actually get onto a course.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
That's interesting. Do you love to win or do you hate to lose? Okay, so there are two thoughts that come to mind. The last part of your question, what is the more effective motivator? They are both effective motivators. I find that in the long run, it is often better to have some kind of positive motivation to pull you forward.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
In the short run, negative consequences for sure will shape your behavior. And, you know, you touch a hot stove once and burn yourself. You don't do it for most of the rest of your life unless it's an accident. So like that negative consequence certainly has shaped your behavior. And we can think of many examples of that throughout life.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
However, there is an interesting strategic piece to this, which is. In some cases, you can actually win by avoiding loss better than you can by chasing victory. So the classic example of this is if you're playing tennis.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
At the amateur level, if you're playing tennis in high school or against somebody in your neighborhood or something like that, almost always the way to win that match is to just have fewer unforced errors. Just keep the ball in play. Keep going until your opponent makes a mistake. And so in that case, avoiding failure is actually the best path to win.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
However, at the high level, if you're playing in your Roger Federer or Serena Williams or something, the pros have to play to win. They can't play to not lose because their opponent will keep the ball in play all day long. And so I think it's worth asking yourself, at what level am I playing? And what am I actually working on here?
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
In a lot of cases, you can make a great deal of progress by avoiding mistakes. But when you're at the top of your field, you often have to play to win. And so there's the strategic side of this, but then there's also the... question of like, do positive reinforcements or negative reinforcements work? The answer is yes. But I think positive is better in the long run.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
so the short answer is yes i believe in them um but i actually think that they are much more common than they realize and they take a much different shape than the than we realize and they for sure work in both positive and negative ways the way that i would describe this you know most people think about an accountability partner and they think about like actually signing up with a group or enlisting a friend to you know keep track of whether they did their workout or something
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I would say if we just broaden this a little bit to say, what is the social dynamic and how does your social environment influence your habits? The answer is in a great and very meaningful way. So we are all part of multiple groups. Some of those groups are large, like what it means to be American.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Some of those groups are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local CrossFit gym. And all of these groups, large and small, they have an influence on your behavior and habits.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
and when actions are aligned with the expectations of the group with like the social norms habits are pretty attractive and the social environment will really help like usher you along and when habits go against the grain of the expectations of the group when they kind of add a little bit of friction between you and your social relationships that's a form of accountability too sometimes not always the kind that you want and habits will be very hard to build
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And ultimately, this comes back to one of the deepest human needs that we all have, which is a desire to bond and connect. You know, we all humans are social creatures. We all want to be a part of something, even if it's just your little family unit.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And so if people have to decide between, you know, I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something, or I have the habits that I want to have, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized. A lot of the time, the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve. And so as best as possible, you need to get those two things aligned.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And I think the punch line is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior, because if it's normal in that group, then it's going to be really motivating to stick to it.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I mean, you could do it, but you're just playing the game on hard mode, you know, and it's like it's so much easier if you're surrounded by people who have the habits that you want to have and then you can rise together. This is something that I talk about in Atomic Habits. There's a chapter called The Secret to Self-Control.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And one of the surprising things about a lot of the research regarding willpower is that when you look at people, elite athletes or someone who you aspire to be like, and you think, oh, if I just had the discipline they had or I just had the willpower they have.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Certainly people can have varying levels of willpower, but the primary finding from a lot of this research is that the people who appear to have great willpower are the people who are tempted less frequently. And so they are the benefits of favorable situations. Sometimes they're just lucky, but sometimes it's a situation they design. And I always think that's an interesting way to think about it.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
If you – In the long run, your willpower will almost never beat your environment. And so it's up to you to design an environment and hang out with a set of people and put yourself in situations that serve the habits that you want to build rather than hinder them.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Yeah, well, there are two things that I wish I would have either emphasized more or added. And actually, we've touched on both of them briefly. So the first thing that I didn't write about that I wish I would have is what would your habits look like if they were fun? And finding the version of the habit that is most genuinely appealing to you.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
In a lot of ways, I feel like that is like maybe the most enormous hurdle to cross, because if you're genuinely interested in a habit, there are like endless ways to improve it. But if you're not actually interested, you're just kind of forcing the issue or making yourself do it. Even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a chore. So that's the first thing.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
The second thing is I talked about the influence of family and friends on your habits and how that can kind of shape things. But I think I undersold the importance of social environment. If you're if you look at habits that really last, like in some cases, years or even decades, like let's say I walk outside my home in the summer and I see my neighbor mowing their grass.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
I might think, oh, I need to cut the grass, too. And like you'll stick to that habit of mowing your lawn for five, 10, 30 years, however long you live in the house. And like we wish we had that level of consistency with a lot of our other habits. And it's like, why do you do it?
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you don't be judged by the people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And so it's actually the social expectation, the social norm for what it means to be a neighbor on your street that helps get that habit to stick.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Yeah, it's totally fine. You know, there actually is some research that shows that I think they call it like the fresh start effect, but basically beginning of the day, beginning of the week, beginning of the year, beginning of the month. Anytime that you kind of have this feeling of rebirth or starting anew, there is a little bit of a rise in motivation. So it's a natural thing.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And so many of our habits are socially driven like that. So those are the two things that I wish I would have emphasized more.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
Sure. So that's one way to do it. Picking two friends that are also interested in reading and starting a book club is another way to do it. You don't even have to start one. You could just join one that's already going. There are tons of ways to be part of that. Start browsing subreddits with people who love books and just like engage there and leave comments.
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And then now you're kind of like surrounded by other people who are reading and feel like you have a little bit of momentum. There are many ways to do it. But the core idea is like, how can I build connection with people who already have the habits I want to have?
Morning Brew Daily
James Clear Explains How to Set Goals and Instill Habits for 2025
And the more that those people start to become your friends or start to populate your thoughts, the more that you're going to feel compelled to do those things as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
To be honest, there were areas that I avoided because I thought I would struggle. So I think it was more about me being fearful and avoiding anything I thought I would be bad at than it was about watching him and being like, oh, look at him floundering around. I think I had to overcome that wiring over the course of a decade or two.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It took me a long time to start to take more risks and take on things that I didn't think I would be good at rather than just trying to like stack the deck and just do what I thought I would do well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah, I did an episode on his podcast as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, first, I think I'm probably similar to you in the sense like exercise has always been on the easier side for me. Nutrition has always been on the harder side, which is kind of interesting there. I don't know exactly what that reveals, but it's just interesting to think about where you have certain inclinations and maybe not others. With respect to free will, I understand the argument.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Once you start to walk through, it's like, okay, yeah, there's this very long chain of atoms that are essentially colliding and leading us inevitably to the next action or the next thought or whatever. And if we could map them all out, then perhaps we could just predict everything that's about to happen. I get that as a thought experiment.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I tend to, when I'm living my daily life, fall in the same space that it sounds like you fall in, which is, well, I'm going to continue to act as if I have free will. And ultimately, the more that I think about it, I usually come down on that side where it's like, listen, the truth is nobody knows the answer one way or another. We have good arguments perhaps for each, but nobody knows for sure.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If it is all predetermined, then it kind of doesn't really matter. I'm going to do this anyway. And if it isn't predetermined, I might as well choose the thing that I think best serves me. So whether I'm making that choice that best serves me or whether it was predetermined that I'm going to make the good choice, it kind of doesn't really matter to me. Like I might as well choose to act that way.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So I don't know. I would be very curious to hear what Sam's thought on that is. But I from a practical standpoint, I don't see a reason to not choose the best option that you can. In the event that you do have free will, you'll be glad that you chose it. In the event that you don't have free will, you didn't get a say anyway. So who cares?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah, a couple thoughts to add on to that. I thought of this when you first brought this up a few minutes ago. I don't know if you're familiar with David Epstein, his work on sports gene and range and so on. David's great and a good friend of mine, a really nice guy, and just very thoughtful with the way he puts arguments together, which I always appreciate.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I was having a conversation with him about some of this stuff.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And he said one of the things that surprised him when he was researching the sports gene is that characteristics that he thought would be mostly genetic strength and speed and things like that turned out to be heavily influenced by training and choice and a lot of other stuff and qualities that he thought would be a choice like grit and perseverance and desire to train turned out to have a much higher genetic component than he realized.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I always love the example. I think this is in Sports Gene. He talks about Steffi Graf just happened to be in a tennis study when she was young. She was like 14 or something, and she was part of this cohort of young Germans that were being studied.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And she not only tested the highest for physical abilities like strength and speed and quickness and so on, but also tested the highest for competitiveness and desire to train and all these other things. I just love when combinations like that come together. Like think about how pointless this is to compete against her. Not only is she better than you, she also wants it more.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm excited to talk more.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So I do think that there's a heavy genetic component to some of the mental characteristics that would make you more likely to train some of these aspects or more interested in some things than others. To your point about Phelps, whether he had ever been dropped in the pool or not, on the surface, it seems like something that would make you less motivated. You would say, oh, well, why even try?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I'm never going to be Michael Phelps. Or if genes play such a large role, what's the point? But I actually think that's the wrong lesson to take away. The primary lesson, I think, is that genes don't tell you not to work hard. They tell you where to work hard or they don't tell you not to have a strategy. They just inform your strategy.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
This is another line that David told me in a conversation once where he said, a lot of people talk about grit and perseverance and discipline. But what if that is just your natural propensity based on the thing that you're working on? What if I just happen to look kind of gritty in my terms of weight training or working at writing a book compared to the average person?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But I just look that way because I happen to like those things. And he said, yeah, there's this whole line of thinking that like grit is fit. And so actually the way to increase your perseverance and discipline is to find areas or categories or skills where you're highly interested in them.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's very hard to beat the person who's having fun because they're going to want to keep working longer than the person who's suffering. So grit is fit, I think is one way in which you can maybe try to stack the deck or stack the odds in your favor and get your genes aligned with the things that you're working on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then there are going to be things like Michael Phelps in a pool where you're like, listen, this body was just designed to do this thing. It's very hard to find somebody who's more optimally designed to move through the water than him. Not all of us are going to have the good fortune of discovering whatever that thing is for us in our lives at age four or six or whatever.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I don't think that that means you should stop searching. This is one of the benefits of trial and error. The person who is curious and willing to explore a lot of things is more likely to come across an area where they are fascinated or they are interested. And it also is a really good fit for their natural abilities or propensities or interests.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's kind of the primary lesson that I take away from the genetic side of things is similar to what you said. Anybody can improve. Doesn't mean anybody can be Michael Phelps, but you can always improve your ability. And let's try to find that thing that I'm fascinated with, that I'm interested in.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So where it doesn't feel like I'm suffering in the same way that other people are when they're trying this thing. You often be surprised how far you can go, how willing you are to build habits and improve skills if you find some of those things that you're truly fascinated by.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I have that same takeaway watching the last dance. There was that one summer where he was recording Space Jam and they set up like a tent for him outside the movie studio. And all the NBA players came in like each night to play pickup games. Just got done filming like 12 hours a day, but he just could not handle losing a pickup game.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It would just bother him so much to not get it right, to not win. I got to think that that is maybe not exclusively, but at least largely just he can't turn it off. He doesn't know any other way to be personality or genes or whatever you want to call it. That's just how he's wired. And I actually love it when I see that characteristic in any domain. Maggie Rogers, who's a musician.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
She had this post she put on Instagram. It was all of her notes on a particular song that they were working on. And like, you know, hey, I think we need to bring the symbol in second earlier here and a bunch of other stuff. And then she shared a little clip of her listening to it with her producer and so on. And you could just tell that she cared so much about the details.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It would bother her if the song was not as good as it could possibly be. And maybe that's the musician's version of hates to lose. I love it when I see that characteristic. It kind of lights me up and makes me want to be that way about whatever thing I'm working on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If you can find that area where it would bother you for it to not be right, I got to think you're going to get much better results there than most people, because most people get bored or move on or get tired or frustrated. And the person who just will not stop unless it's right will is going to end up with better results.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It sounds simple to say the way to have great results is to not lower your standards. But in a lot of ways, it turns out to be more true than you would expect.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I watched that documentary. I'd never heard of him. I know very little about Formula One. It was awesome. After watching that, I was like completely hooked. It was a fascinating sport.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, first, thank you for saying that. I feel like that's the ultimate measure of whether a book is good or not. Is it worth rereading? That's a high bar. There are many books I've reread. But yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to do it twice. So what excited me about habits? I think there are a few things.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The second half of that question, I'm not sure of. Generally, I think both of those things are universal. I think one, it's universal that one of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is the feeling of progress. And I think it's fairly universal that progress feels good.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
In a sense, at the most base level, we are goal-directed organisms in the sense that we have a goal to get food or water or to procreate or to be safe. And We want to move toward those things and resolve the tension, the gap between that goal and our current state as much as possible.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The first is you're building habits all the time, whether you're thinking about them or not. So depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 40 and 50% of our behaviors seem to be automatic and habitual. But most of the time, those studies are looking at things that are like more or less automatic, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, unplugging the toaster after each use.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Now, with our complex brains and modern society, we come up with many other goals that are outside of just our basic needs like food and water. We have goals like getting a promotion at work or losing 10 pounds or whatever it is. But that same tension between where you are currently and where you want to be, we want to have that resolved.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The more progress that you feel like you're making toward one of those things, I think that generally feels good. I feel like that's pretty universal. I also do think it seems to be fairly universal that we have some bias toward status, some bias toward prestige and rank and hierarchy. And
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It feels good for pretty much anybody to win the game or to have the best score on the scoreboard or to climb the leaderboard. And the more that you see yourself occupying a higher rung relative to those around you, whether it's with wealth or money or fame, the better that feels too. And it probably is a spectrum or maybe each of those is a spectrum.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And some people have the dial turned up real high on the status part and maybe lower on the internal measures and other people have it the reverse. But I generally think we all have them to some degree. And you probably will find yourself feeling good if you happen to succeed on either of those metrics.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
First, I should say, this is coming from someone who's been very goal-oriented for most of their life. I would set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weight I wanted to lift in the gym, for the numbers I wanted my business to hit. And at some point I actually found this sheet that I made my sophomore year of college for the goals that I wanted to hit by the time I graduated.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It was funny looking back on it like 10 or 11 years later, because about half of them I hit, the other half I didn't. And I was like, obviously setting the goal was not the thing that made the difference. If it did, I would have hit them all. So something else is going on here. It was like a little remedial training session for myself or something, realizing that goals are not...
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
the primary thing that drives results. And in fact, if you look at the performance in most domains, the winners and the losers have the same goal. Presumably every Formula One driver has the goal of winning the race when they take off from the starting line. If you have a job opening and 100 candidates apply for the job, presumably every candidate has the goal of getting the job.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The goal is not the thing that makes the difference in the performance. And if the winners and the losers have the same goal, it cannot be the distinguishing factor. Maybe it's necessary. Perhaps there's an argument it's necessary for success, but it's not sufficient for it. So that got me thinking more like, well, what is it then that drives it?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I, in the book, the way that I describe is the difference between systems and goals. Your goal is your desired outcome, your target, the thing you're shooting for. Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. All these little gears in this overall machine.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But I think the true influence of your habits is even greater than that because a lot of the time the behaviors that you're taking are shaped or influenced by the habits that preceded them. So you can imagine standing in line at the grocery store or having three or four minutes free in your kitchen and you habitually pull your phone out of your pocket.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, if there's ever a gap between your goal and your system, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed for your current results.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So whatever system you've been running for the last six months or year or whatever, you talked about shooting a bow and arrow, presumably whatever system of movements you have going on there, pre-shot routine, how you draw it back, everything. It kind of is inevitably carrying you toward the result of where the arrow ends up. The irony of all of this is we also badly want better results in life.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You know, we also badly want to make more money or to reduce stress or lose weight or whatever. but the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It's kind of like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
There are some areas like shooting a bow where that is, the connection is quite obvious, but there are other areas where for whatever reason, we don't see it as clearly, but I think the pattern is still there, which is let's adjust the habits. Let's get this machine running in a more fluid fashion. And you'll find that the results kind of come naturally.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think just appreciating that helped rewire mindset a little bit. I was so focused on outcomes and goals for a long time and now realizing that actually the way this is driven is with the system. That helped me shift from what I would say now is like goals are for people who care about winning one time.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You set a goal to run a half marathon and you train for three months and you do it and you complete the race. But then maybe you stop training after that. But systems are for people who care about winning again and again. And if you care about sustaining that success, then you're like, I'm a runner.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I care about the system that I'm building for how I train, how many miles I'm getting in, all kinds of other stuff. And whether I have a half marathon three months in the distance or not, It doesn't really matter because I'm going to be running my system either way. Making that mental shift, I think, can be useful for sustaining results.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The original quote, I think it's from Archilochus, I believe a Greek philosopher, and said, you don't rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your training. And in Atomic Habits, I tweaked that or adjusted that to say you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And so it's actually your habits that kind of create that baseline.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So it's interesting which meanings people pull out when they see it. So I chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons. The first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small, like an atom. And I do think habits should be small and fairly easy to do, especially in the beginning. The second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's the one that people often overlook. Atoms build into molecules, molecules build into compounds, and so on. And your habits are kind of like that. Each little habit is like an atom in the overall routine of your day. You put them all together and you end up with your lifestyle or your daily routine.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then the third and final meaning is the one that you mentioned, the source of immense energy or power. And I think if you put all three meanings together, you sort of understand the narrative arc of the book, which is... Make changes that are small and easy to do. Layer them on top of each other like units in a larger system or atoms in a molecule.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The next five or 10 minutes might be spent thinking carefully about what email you're responding to or the video game you're playing or scrolling social media. but that conscious, maybe non-habitual behavior was shaped or set by the habit of pulling your phone out. So the reach of our habits is very wide and it's influencing our behavior all the time. So that's one reason why it's important.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Collectively, you can get some really powerful or remarkable results. And so I feel like the phrase atomic habits not only encapsulates that kind of small change in the system that you're looking to build, but also the powerful results that can emanate from that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Two things before I unpack the idea a little more fully. First is, of all the ideas in the book, this is probably the least scientific. There are actually some studies, which I cite in that chapter, and it's not like there's no science behind it. But the majority of the book, I try to be very robust in the way that I was thinking about how do we build habits and what actually gets in the stick.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And there also are just a bazillion social psychology and cognitive psychology studies that illustrate a lot of the examples that I talk about. But this is more of a mindset, I would say, or a philosophy on how behavior change works. Second thing is, it's maybe the only unique idea that I have.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Pretty much everything else that I share is stuff that's been widely covered by other people or things that we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But I felt like this was something that maybe I could contribute to the conversation. Part of the reason I started thinking about it is I started asking, why do habits really matter? We seem to care about them a lot as a society.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's something a lot of books get written about, something we talk about a lot. There's clearly some kind of deeper importance to them. So what is it? The surface level answer is that we care about habits because they get us these external things that make us more productive and more fit and so on. Habits can help you do all of that stuff, which is great.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But I think the real reason, the deeper reason that habits matter, is that they are a signal internally to ourselves about who we are and what we care about. And they're kind of a signal of like the story that we're telling ourselves. So in a sense, every time that you perform a habit, you are embodying a particular identity.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. When you shoot a basketball for 30 minutes, you embody the identity of someone who is a basketball player. You do those things once or twice. It doesn't radically transform the story you have about yourself.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But if you keep showing up and shooting a basketball every day for six months or two years, or at some point you cross this sort of invisible threshold where you're like, yeah, being a basketball player is like part of who I am, some aspect of my identity. And so your habits provide evidence. They provide proof of the story that you're telling yourself.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And that I think is a very powerful thing, a very deep personal thing that habits can provide. And perhaps the real reason why they matter. So to come back to your question about process versus outcome versus identity, where how we change. Usually when people set out to make some kind of change, they start by thinking about the results or the outcome that they want.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So they say, I want to lose 40 pounds in the next six months. And then from that outcome, they back into a process or a plan. So they say, all right, if I want to lose 40 pounds, then I need to follow this nutrition plan. I'm going to need to work out four days a week. And maybe there are details to those plans and everything, but that's usually kind of roughly where it stops.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I think that if you're going to be building habits anyway, you might as well understand what they are and how they work and how to shape them so that you can be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of people feel like their habits are happening to them, like they don't get a whole lot of influence on it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then the assumption is if I do those things and I lose that weight, then I'll be the kind of person that I want to be. The argument that I try to unpack in that chapter is what if we worked backwards from this? What if instead we said, who is the type of person I wish to be? What is the identity that I'd like to have?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And in fact, we could even ask the person who has that identity, what kind of habits would they have? And then we use that identity to inform the process, the habits, and we let the outcomes come naturally. There are a variety of examples of this. One reader of mine, she lost a bunch of weight. I think it was 110 pounds in total. And she's kept it off for over a decade.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And the question that she sort of carried around with her as she was starting her weight loss journey is what would a healthy person do? And that's very much aligned or oriented with that identity piece. It's like, okay, would a healthy person take a cab or would they walk four blocks the next meeting? Would they order a salad and chicken at lunch or would they have a hamburger and fries?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And she could just kind of carry that question around with her to every context she was in and make a choice that she felt like aligned with the identity that she wanted to have rather than worrying necessarily about something specific like the number of macros she's getting or, you know, whatever. Now, I should say, I think it can work both ways.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like I count my macros and it works really well for me. But I think that's partially because it aligns with the identity that I already have. And if you don't have that shift in internal story yet, it's hard for the behavior to follow suit. Imagine you went up to two people. You said, hey, would you like a cigarette? And the first person says, oh, no, thanks. I'm trying to quit.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And the second person says, oh, no, thanks. I'm not a smoker. Technically, they've done the same thing. They've both turned down the cigarette. But the second person kind of has signaled a shift in identity change. The first person is trying to be something they're not. No thanks, I'm trying to quit. And the second person is saying, I'm not a smoker. It's just not something that I do.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think once you get to that stage, that shift in identity, you're in a much more powerful place from a behavior change standpoint than Because you're not even really trying to change anymore. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be. So we can talk about ways to do that, but that's kind of the quick version on identity versus outcome.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, I think in this particular case, the primary difference is I had an internal story or have an internal story that I am a healthy person already. And so just doing things that are aligned with that, like counting macros, feels totally fine. Whereas for her at that early stage, she did not feel that way and did not genuinely believe that about herself.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And partially, I think it's just because, you know, it's this process your brain is going through all the time to try to automate and make behaviors more efficient. But if you don't really know what's happening or where to adjust it, then it kind of feels like it's happening to you rather than happening for you.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's possible to have an epiphany and to change cold turkey or to just flip a switch and suddenly start acting in a different way. I do think it's possible. I think sometimes people have experiences like that. Ironically, I think it rarely happens from some kind of bolts of lightning inside. I think one of the most common ways it happens is by reading books.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think people will sometimes read a book that really changes their worldview and they start to do things completely differently after that. You can imagine a bunch of nutrition examples like Somebody reads a book that convinces them that carbs are the devil and the grain is terrible.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
All of a sudden the next day, like they want to throw out all the bread in the house and it's very quick switch has been flipped. So I do think it's possible. However, I don't think that changing through an epiphany is a very reliable way to change. And I don't know that it's something you can bank on or can plan around or strategize for. It might happen to you a couple times in your life.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I don't think that it's an efficient way to try to build a new habit. So if you can't change or hope to change through an epiphany, then what are your options if you want to change your identity? And I think the best avenue that you have is to cast votes with your actions. So in a sense, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So no, doing one pushup does not radically transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence may not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. I think this is like a meaningful difference between my approach or what I recommend and what you often hear.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like you often hear something like fake it till you make it. I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. It's asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence. We call that delusion.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like at some point, your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you're saying and what you're actually doing. And so to bring it back to your question about my friend who lost all this weight, I think you have to genuinely believe that story about yourself in order for the actions to start to feel aligned.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And what do you do if you don't genuinely believe you're a healthy person or don't genuinely believe that I'm the kind of person who would track my macros or whatever? Well, I think you have to start with these very small habits. You have to start by proving it to yourself in some little way. Maybe it's just that you did walk the three blocks to the meeting and didn't take the taxi.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then I would say the second thing that kind of really got me diving in deeper and thinking about it more carefully is just the realization that most of us in life want some kind of results. We want to get better at a skill or we want to lose weight or to make more money or reduce stress and gain peace of mind.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Or maybe it's just that you did order a salad for lunch and not a burger and fries. And none of those things individually are going to change your body or even the story right away. But if you keep casting votes for that behavior and keep casting votes for that identity, then then eventually you get to the point where it's like the basketball example.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You kind of have to admit that you're a basketball player because you've been shooting hoops for the last two years. And like, this is just part of who you are now. So I think that that's the primary difference between the two of us is that I already kind of had that story. And early on, she didn't. Now she does. So who knows?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Maybe now she could just track her macros just as easily or even easier than I can. I don't know. But I think that that shift there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like I don't ever want to eat that again. Yeah. Well, you said something similar to that a few minutes ago about how like it bothers you to not work out sometimes. Nir Eyal, who also has written about habits, has kind of a little measure for that where he's like his measure for whether it's a habit or not is does it bother you when you don't do it?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think that's a signal that it's kind of aligned with your identity. It's like, oh, I kind of feel like I'm not being me if I don't do this. To your point about it taking a long time, it can take much longer than you would think. I mean, my friend told me she had to lose 60 pounds before the first person noticed, before she ever heard anything from somebody else.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's a lot of weight and a long time to be working in essentially what feels like a vacuum. It feels like you're just doing it for yourself and no external feedback from the world. So this comes back to a lot of the things we've already talked about, about process and falling in love with the system and a lot of things that go into it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But it definitely is an internal journey and it definitely will take longer than you would imagine in a lot of cases.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And whatever the results are that you're looking for, most of the time, your results are a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your nutrition and training habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Possibly. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of variables that go into it, but it does align with there's like this whole category of behaviors that I feel like if you wanted to hack a radical change in your life, you want to figure out a way to get, like you said, this epiphany to stick. Massive environment changes or lifestyle changes are a good way to do that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Perhaps one of the strongest ways to do that. So having a kid, getting married, changing jobs, moving to a different city, even something small like getting a dog can lead to rapid behavior change. And I think one of the things that is really crucial about it is that most of those decisions tend to be irreversible or at least very hard to reverse. I had one that I struggled with for a long time.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Sometimes people ask me, you know, what habits have you struggled with or whatever? And I tend to be pretty good about getting enough sleep. I almost always get eight hours or even nine if I'm training hard. But I would fall into this pattern where it'd be like nine or 10 o'clock at night and I would kind of get a second wind and I'd be like, well, maybe I'll just send a few emails or something.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And of course, it's never just a few. You turn around and it's midnight or one and you're like, okay, am I going to sleep for eight hours? Because if so, that means I'm not getting up till nine. And I know that I prefer to get up early. I know that I feel better throughout the rest of the next day. 10 p.m. James is kind of ruining things for tomorrow, James, by staying up late.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I tried a bunch of different things. There's a little device called an outlet timer. You can buy it for like 10 bucks on Amazon. You plug it into an outlet and you can set the time for when it kills the power from that outlet. And so like if you plug your internet into it, then like the internet shuts off at 10 p.m. or whatever you set it for.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So I tried different things like that, but then you could just pick your phone up and get around it. But the thing that finally made it stick was getting a dog because the dog is going to get up at 7 a.m. Whenever I go to sleep, it doesn't matter. And I need to go take it for a walk. And you can only do that for a few days before you're like, all right, I'm not going to play this game anymore.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I'm going to bed at 10. It's because it was fairly hard to reverse that got it to stick. And I think, you know, in the case of having a kid, they're going to be there every day now. Maybe you could rationalize it a bunch of times before that, but that's not going to change. They're going to be around.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And weirdly, because presumably this person's wife was pregnant, so they obviously saw that throughout the whole pregnancy, but that didn't get them to change. But once the child is there, man, it's really immediate. You're taking a puff and you have those little eyes looking back at you. The feedback loop is even tighter than before. So I would imagine both of those things probably play a role.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But more generally speaking, those kind of irreversible or hard to reverse lifestyle changes also tend to be big drivers of quick behavior change.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Even like the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so habits are not the only thing that influence outcomes in life. You have luck and randomness. You've got misfortune. But by definition, randomness is not under your control. And I think the only reasonable approach is to focus on what's in your control.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I don't think it is actually. We all have habits that are like that. There's two things that made me think. The first is it connects to our conversation about identity from a few minutes ago, which is you started to take pride in it. You cared about how you presented. And the more that we take pride in certain elements of our identity or aspects of who we are, certain parts of our story.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
the more strongly that behavior starts to stick. You can imagine a woman who takes pride in how her hair looks. She probably has all kinds of hair care habits and products and things that she does. And she probably doesn't have to convince herself to do them the same way that we talk about convincing ourselves with a lot of other habits.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Oh, I wish I could write or I wish I would work out or whatever. It's just an element of her identity. She takes pride in and shows she does it like fairly consistently or the guy who gets complimented on the size of his biceps. And so he just never skips arm day in the gym because it's an aspect of his identity that he takes pride in.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
What I'm kind of getting at is like, what parts of your story do you take pride in? And once you start to take pride in it, man, you'll fight for it pretty hard to keep it. And in many cases, you'll find yourself doing it. somewhat naturally or at least internally motivated to continue doing it. So that was the first piece.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The second piece, and this is something that since Atomic Habits has come out, I think is even more important than I realized when I was writing the book, which is the influence of the social environment on your habits.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So in your case, the med school interviews, it was actually the image in your mind, the expectation about what other people might think and how you would present in that interview and so on. the judgment of others, essentially, that help drive that change. And if you look at behaviors that really stick, the ones that tend to stick for 10 or 20 or 30 years, a long time,
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
there's often a strong social component involved. So for example, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American, or some of those tribes are small, like being a member of your CrossFit gym or being a neighbor on your street. Take the neighborhood example. You might walk outside,
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
and see your neighbor mowing their grass on Wednesday night or something and think, oh, I need to cut my lawn. And you'll stick with that habit of mowing your grass for 20 or 30 years or however long you live in that house. Like we wish we had that level of consistency with most of our other habits. And why do you do it?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn, but mostly you do it because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And so it's actually that social norm, that expectation for what it means to be part of this neighborhood and how you act in this group or this tribe that helps get the habit to stick.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think the practical takeaway there, if you really want a behavior change to last, is to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that group, it's gonna seem much more normal and typical for you to do it. I mean, Peter, I'm sure you're part of multiple groups that do what most people would determine are like weird habits.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And over long time horizons, your results tend to bend in the direction of your habits. So I think because your brain is building habits all the time anyway, and because your results are heavily influenced by the habits that you repeat, those are two primary reasons that I feel like got me interested in the topic, but also just good reasons for anybody to be fascinated with habits.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like I'm sure there's a group of friends who are really into driving cars. And there's probably another group who's like really into bow hunting and archery. And there are all kinds of habits that these little tribes do.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And it might seem strange to the normal person, but it's probably very casual or typical or easy relatively for you to stick to those habits, especially when you're part of those groups or talking with those guys, because it's just part of something that it's part of what they do. And I think maybe the deeper lesson here is that we don't just do habits because of the results they get us.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
We also take behaviors because they are a signal to the people around us that, hey, I get it, I fit in, I understand how to act in this group.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Most people, if they have to choose between having the habits they want to have, but they kind of go against the grain of the group, they like don't really fit in well, they get ostracized, or having habits that they don't really love, but they get to go along with the crowd, they fit in, they get praised for being part of the group.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Most people will choose belonging over loneliness, like the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve. And so you want to make sure you get those two things aligned to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Real quick, before we get into these four, I just want to explain the framework a little bit in particular for this episode or this show, because I feel like your audience will appreciate it more than most audiences. So I like to divide a habit into four stages. And as you said, those four stages kind of have what I call the four laws of behavior change that come out of it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But when I was working on Atomic Habits and researching this framework and trying to understand why do behaviors happen and how do they happen, how do habits form, I had a couple questions that I felt like previous frameworks did not answer that well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
While researching the book, I was able to find 40 different models of human behavior that biologists and neuroscientists and psychologists, a bunch of different industries had come up with over the last, say, about 150 years. broadly speaking, those models of human behavior tended to fall into one of two categories. The first category are what I would call like motivation models.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So they explain things like internal drives and motivations and cravings and kind of like what compels us to act. And then the second category were what I would call reinforcement models. And so they described the rewards that we get from behaviors and how those things kind of reinforce our behavior and essentially what happens like after an action.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And what I wanted to do was try to come up with a model that I felt like accurately described both the motivation that may come before and the reinforcement that may come after and how those things influence the actions that we take. And there were a variety of what I thought were fairly simple questions about human behavior that weren't totally answered by the previous models.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So things like what causes somebody to try a habit in the first place? You haven't experienced the reward at that point. So why would you take the first bite of a pancake or the first smoke of a cigarette? What would motivate you to do that? Started with BF Skinner stimulus response reward.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Charles Duhigg in Power of Habit kind of popularized his cue routine reward, but we say, okay, habits are a cue, and then there's the action, there's some kind of outcome. Well, how come two people respond differently to the same thing?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like, why would one person see a cigarette and feel like, oh, I have to smoke and another person's like, I've never smoked a day in my life, I'm not interested at all. Because if it's just the cue that leads to the action, you would think they would do the same thing. Why would the same person respond differently to the same cue?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
How come when I walk in my kitchen at 7 a.m., I see a loaf of bread and I think, oh, I'm going to make some toast for breakfast. But then I walk in at 4 p.m. and I see that same queue and I don't think anything of it. I just move on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So to summarize all of this, I think one of the meaningful distinctions about the four stages that I put together and why I feel like it accurately describes human behavior is. and sort of the insight that I came across as I was researching. A neuroscientist named Lisa Feldman Barrett, she has a bunch of studies and a couple books on this topic.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
One book in particular that was useful for me while I was researching is called How Emotions Are Made. The key insight is that we often think that human behavior is reactive in the sense that somebody does something and I respond or somebody says something and I feel a certain way. But in fact, human behavior is mostly predictive.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You are kind of endlessly going through your experience in life, predicting about what to do next. It's actually this prediction that I think was the key thing that was missing from a lot of the previous models of habits and behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
There's a bazillion studies on dopamine, of course. Also, I should say, like, I think if you only talk about dopamine, it's not the full story about habits. Like there's many neurochemicals that are involved in the process and dopamine is just one part of the overall picture. But it does play a very important role. For a long time, we thought it was about reward and satisfaction and enjoyment.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But in fact, it seems that the crucial role dopamine plays is about prediction and anticipation. And so the first time that you take a bite of a pancake, you don't know what to expect. And so you take that bite and then afterwards you get a surge of dopamine, almost as if to like mark the experience or to teach you, hey, that was favorable. You should do that again next time.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like if you happen to see a pancake again, that was a really great outcome. So then the next time around, you know what to expect. And in fact, what we find is that dopamine tends to spike before you take a bite, not after. And there are a bunch of studies that show this. Gamblers get a spike before they roll the dice, not after.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Drug addicts get a spike before they take a hit of cocaine, not after. Dopamine, I think probably the more accurate way to describe it in this context is is it's a teaching molecule. It's a learning molecule. And it helps you mark experiences that are favorable so that you'll remember them next time. And then when you come across a similar situation, it spikes in anticipation.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So after you see the cue, you get this craving. And it's actually that craving or anticipation or prediction that motivates you to act, drives the response, and then there's an outcome.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
There are examples like that for alcohol and drugs and all kinds of things. And I'm not an expert on addiction, and I didn't write the book about addiction, so I don't want to speak out of turn or step out of my lane or anything. But I don't know that I have a good answer to it. But from what I understand and from what I've seen as I was researching the book,
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
it does seem to have a strong, basically genetic or neurochemical component. It seems like, in a sense, drugs kind of hack the system. This is, I think, one way to define an addiction, which is The process of learning is actually broken.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Addicts know that the behavior does not benefit their lives in a lot of ways, but they still can't get themselves to stop doing it, even though they know it doesn't benefit them. And I think part of the reason that happens, or perhaps the primary reason, is the drug kind of hacks the system. It gives you this spike of dopamine, even though you shouldn't be getting it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Usually your brain would not be doing that. It would not be trying to teach you to repeat that, but you're artificially spiking it by taking the substance, and so then the process of learning breaks.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I do think there's a genetic component. Some people are more sensitive to certain substances than others, or at least it appears to be so. However, it does strike me as like very possible that a good chunk of it is learned and that now you have a story that junk food is the way that I cope or the way that I soothe myself when I need that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And in a sense, your habits are these solutions to like recurring problems that you face. So say you have somebody who comes home from work and they feel exhausted. And one person, that's a recurring problem that they feel often. And so one person comes home and they play video games for 30 minutes. And another person comes home and they go for a run. And a third person smokes a cigarette.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And all of them are solving the same underlying recurring problem, but they're choosing different methods through which to do that. And I wonder about how the grooves kind of get formed. Once we learn that a certain method is effective in solving that problem, we tend to default to it, even if it's not the only way to solve that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Even if, yeah, going for a run would make me feel better, but I'm just used to smoking cigarettes now. Then we start to develop a story around it. It starts to become a little bit of our identity. We start to use it as a crutch. I do think there's definitely a learned component to that as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the four stages are cue, craving, response, and reward. The cue is something that you notice. So for example, you see a plate of cookies on the counter. That's a visual cue. Starts the habit of eating a cookie. The craving is the prediction or the meaning that you assign to that cue. Often happens relatively automatically or quickly.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So you see the plate of cookies and you think, oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. It's that favorable meaning that leads to that dopamine spike that we talked about that motivates you to take the third step, which is the response. You walk over, you pick the cookie up, you take a bite. And then finally, there's the reward. Oh, it is in fact sweet, sugary, tasty, satisfying.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Now, not every behavior in life is rewarding. Sometimes things have a cost or a consequence. Sometimes they're just kind of neutral and don't really mean a whole lot. If a behavior is not rewarding, then it's unlikely to become a habit because you don't have any reason to repeat it again in the future.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You need some kind of positive emotional signal associated with the behavior for you to stick with it. At least, as we've already talked about, an immediate signal that says, hey, that was enjoyable.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So I don't know the answer to the question, but I do have some thoughts on it, and I feel like it probably does skew somewhat recent for one particular reason, which is generally speaking, our ancestors lived in what was primarily an immediate return environment. The majority of the decisions that you would make that meaningfully impacted your survival
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's even more. There have been tons of studies done on variable rewards. The basic answer is yes, you're right. Variable rewards tend to accelerate or intensify behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
it can get even more twisted than that in the slot machines example because what they have found is that the sweet spot tends to be right around 50 50. you can imagine getting a reward at very different schedules like you could get it 95 of the time or you could get it five percent of the time well if you only get it five percent of the time then you learn pretty quickly like hey this isn't a very fruitful action maybe i should stop doing this but if you get it around 50 50
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
tends to work out for you a lot, but not every time. And it still is coming at it like a roughly a random pattern. Even if, you know, over 10,000 trials, it works out to be about 50% of the time, man, you will just keep pressing that slot machine button over and over and over again. There've been studies done on mice where they would get a squirt of sugar water when they poke their nose in a box.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And if they did it at a variable reward schedule, they would do it. I can't remember the exact number. I want to say it was like 6,000 times in an hour, many, many times. We laugh at it thinking about mice, but we're not that different. The average slot machine player will press the button like 800 times in an hour.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so we're just basically doing the same thing, getting the reward, but not knowing exactly when it's going to happen. it gets you to do it more frequently. And you can think about examples like this in everyday life. Imagine a remote control where the battery's dying and you press the power button, but it doesn't turn on right away. And you're like, God, did that work?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then you press it again a little harder. And then maybe you press it again a third time. Now, if you do it eight or nine or 10 times, you're like, okay, the batteries are dead. But if on the second try, it turns on, the variable reward got you to do it again or got you to try the behavior more. So that variable reward schedule is definitely something that can intensify behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Incredible reference. Yes. Fantastic. Little did we know that Will Ferrell was a cognitive psychology fan.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. 50% of the time it works every time. I'm going to be honest with you. That smells like pure gasoline. It's got bits of real Panther in it. Oh, it's made by Odeon. So those are the four stages. What I like to do and what I consider to be the hallmark of my work. I'm just interpreting the research, like pretending to be an academic. I'm not actually an academic, but,
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think the value that I try to provide is to make these ideas actionable and to turn them into something that we can operationalize or apply to daily life. And the four laws of behavior change are how I have attempted to do that. So if we understand that a habit has those four steps and how do we actually change our behaviors, we can follow these four laws and there's one for each stage.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The first law of behavior change is to make it obvious. You want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier it is to see or get your attention, the easier it is to notice, the more likely you are to act on it. The second law is to make it attractive.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So the more attractive or appealing or exciting a habit is, the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it. So again, this is about anticipating it or something you anticipate more, feel more motivated. The third law is to make it easy. The more easy, convenient, frictionless, simple a habit is, the more likely the behavior is to be performed.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
were ones that were relatively immediate in nature. So taking shelter from a storm or avoiding a lion in the savanna or foraging for the next meal in a berry bush. These are things that had a pretty quick payoff in your life.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable, pleasurable a habit is, the more likely you are to repeat it in the future. So those four laws give you like a high level overview of how to build a good habit. So make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You don't need all four every single time, but the more that you have those four things working for you, I think the more likely it is that the good behavior will stick or that you'll find a way to start on it. If you wanna break a bad habit, then you just invert those four. So rather than making it obvious, you wanna make the cue invisible. Unsubscribe from emails, reduce exposure to the cue.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If you're trying to be on a diet, don't follow food bloggers on Instagram. Reducing exposure to the thing that starts the process. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. Rather than making it easy, make it difficult. So increase friction, put more steps between you and the behavior. And rather than making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Layer on some kind of immediate consequence or cost to the behavior. Those four, make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying, give you a high-level framework for how to break a bad habit.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It is two things, but I view them as two sides of the same coin. In many cases, you know, we can come up with edge cases or examples where the behaviors start to get more specific. But generally speaking, I think there are three ways to break a bad habit. You can eliminate it entirely. So you can just go cold turkey, cut it out, never do it again.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You could curtail the behavior to the desired degree so you can reduce it a little bit. You still do it sometimes. Instead of drinking a beer at dinner every night, you just have it maybe once a week. You could also replace it. So rather than drinking a beer, you replace it with water.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If you fast forward to modern society, though, and we could define that however you want, but probably say the last 500 years or something like that, certainly the last 100 years, Modern society seems to have created quite a few structures that favor not an immediate return environment, but a delayed return environment.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
When I'm thinking about myself personally, when I actually am changing behavior, I don't usually think about breaking bad habits that often. In fact, most of the time I'm focused on building or establishing new good behaviors.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think a lot of the time it does, and that's why I tend to focus on that for my personal life, is that it's kind of like two plants. One plant, if it grows a little bit more and spreads its leaves a little further, it starts to crowd out the other plant, just soaks up more energy and resources and sunlight. And your good habits are kind of like that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I mean, we all, in some sense, it is zero-sum in the sense that we only have 24 hours in each day. And so... If you have somebody who says, even if they're unrelated habits, they say, hey, I want to start doing something healthy. I'd like to start working out for an hour each day. And I also want to watch less TV. I just feel like I watch Netflix too much.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, if you usually watch Netflix for three hours each evening and you decide to insert your workout from 6 to 7 p.m., by definition, you're not watching Netflix while you're doing that. You start to crowd out the bad behavior just by focusing on building a workout habit, even if you don't think about the TV thing at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So my sort of general approach is, look, I'm trying to spend my 24 hours in the highest leverage way possible, the best way possible, the way that is moving me toward whatever I'm optimizing for. Let me just try to continually think about how to upgrade those behaviors.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I also like that mindset more than the breaking the bad habits one because it gives me a reason to improve even once I have good habits. I'm continually looking for the higher leverage action. Even if what I'm doing is already good, okay, fine, how can I make it great now?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I tend to focus on that style rather than thinking about breaking bad ones, but they definitely are related to answer your question.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah. So to take the smoking example, I think it's helpful to divide it into the specific instances in which it happens. So we kind of lump smoking into a single habit. But the truth is, it actually might be a collection of like a dozen habits throughout the day. It might be that you have a habit of smoking when you get in your car for the morning commute.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So you go to work today so that you can get a paycheck in two weeks, or you study at school today so that you can graduate in four years, save for retirement today so that you can not have to work a couple decades from now. And there are a lot of structures that are like that in modern society that tend to reward delayed gratification.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then you also have a habit of smoking around 1030 when you take a break with your coworker. And then you also have a habit of smoking after dinner on your porch. And all three of those are going to have their own cue, craving, response, and reward. In a sense, you kind of have to intervene in like 12 different places to try to come up with a solution for each one of those.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So you might find that like for the morning commute, maybe instead of having a cigarette, you come up with something else that you can do on the morning commute that fulfills that desire. Maybe even just a cup of coffee is what wakes you up instead of a cigarette. That may not work for the 1030 session with your friend. Maybe there you actually need like an e-cigarette to start.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Want to have the socialization of feeling like you're smoking with a friend. You may need to like take it in different stages and break it down. Degree where it's easier to have a line of attack.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Environment is like a form of gravity pulls on you and you can resist it for a little bit, but maybe a day or week or a month. But at some point it just starts to drain on you, sucks you back in.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And to your point about going back to the environment that prompted the behavior in the first place, I mean, this is one of the stories I share in Atomic Habits, but it was the surprise that we saw from the Vietnam War, which is so many soldiers were getting addicted to heroin and drugs when they were over there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then they came back and we were like, what are we going to do with all these addicted soldiers? And it turns out that 90% of them or more ended up being fine because they didn't go back to the place where they got addicted. They went home to their friends and family and they didn't have all the same signals that were prompting them to pick up the habit.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so they were able to drop it much more easily than we thought they would. And compare that to the typical drug addict who does the reverse. They go into rehab and that's where they leave all of their cues and influences behind. And then once they get clean and they detox, we send them back to the same place where they got addicted before. That is much, much harder uphill battle.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So I think in a sense, we're kind of walking through this modern society that rewards ourselves for patience. And we still have this like paleolithic hardware where we prioritize instant gratification and immediate returns in a lot of ways in some kind of evolutionary sense. And you can see how there's a little bit of a mismatch there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So environment, I think it's kind of like the invisible hand that drives our behavior. As you said, it's kind of like water, you know, fish and water. We don't realize it, but we all have these things that we say are important to us. Oh, I would like to lose weight or I'd like to build a business or I want to finish a book. But then you look around the spaces where we live and work.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The cues of those habits are not a big part of the environment. We all are. Busy, strapped for time, minimal energy, we have kids to take care of or parents to do chores for or friends to see. And whenever we have limited capacity or limited time or we're low on energy or exhausted, what choice do we make? We often choose the thing that is most obvious in the environment.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
We choose the thing that is the easy choice or the path of least resistance. And so if I'm recommending a place to start for changing behavior, it's usually either the first law or the third law. It's making it obvious and making it easy. Because we can talk about making it easy, but scaling habits down obviously makes it more likely that you're able to complete the task.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And making it obvious essentially creates an environment where the good choices are right in front of you, where they're the path of least resistance. And individually, I think it's easy to overlook the importance of this because individually, one change to the environment does not usually meaningfully move the needle or change your behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But collectively, making a dozen or two dozen or 50 little choices to how your office is laid out and how your living room is laid out and how your kitchen is laid out Yeah, now all of a sudden you're working and thriving in a space that is stacking the odds in your favor.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's making it more likely that you will just choose the good thing because the healthy food is on the counter and the TV is behind a wall unit in a cabinet where you're less likely to see it. And the remote controller is inside a drawer and there's a book in its place. And you have a couple books that are scattered around on your desk waiting for you to pick them up and open them.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You can do it with digital spaces too. When I wanted to start reading more, I took Audible for audiobooks and I moved it to the home screen on my phone and took all the other apps and moved them to the second screen.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's a very small thing and it doesn't guarantee the behavior, but it's another way to stack the odds in my favor that whenever I open up my phone, I'm reminded to listen to an audiobook for a few minutes rather than browse Instagram. And the more that you do those kinds of things, the more likely good behaviors are to arise.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I wonder if it's that modern mismatch that has led to the desire to change our behavior and to adjust habits. And perhaps it wasn't something that we thought about as carefully or cared about as much a thousand years ago or 5,000 years ago or longer. It is interesting, though, to say that some aspects of modern society are mismatched with that ancestral wiring, but some of them are not.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Isn't it kind of fascinating? Like you're someone that I think most people would describe as disciplined and high performing and talented and skilled. And you like look at yourself with that and you're like wheat thins beat me every time. I think about myself.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I was doing an interview with somebody else a couple of weeks ago and he was joking about how the number of cookies he can eat is either zero or 30 because if they're there, then he's going to eat them all. And I'm exactly that way. One of the best hacks that we've come up with is
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I love chocolate chip cookies and my wife will make them, but she'll make the balls of dough and then freeze them and put them in the freezer. And at night after dinner, we'll take them out and just take out two and put them on the pan and warm up the oven and put them in And it's actually a better experience because you get to eat like fresh baked, warm chocolate chip cookies.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But you'll only eat two because all the rest of them are frozen. It's just enough friction to know that this is going to take another 15 minutes if I want to take two more out and heat them up. I don't actually need another cookie. Like I just wanted to eat it. What limits you from putting five on the tray? We just haven't gotten in the habit of doing that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So hopefully that question won't wreck my psyche. And now we'll be doing that every night. Is part of that the accountability though, between you that probably you say, I want five, at least she's going to say, she'd be like, come on. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting the ways in which there's a whole discussion we can have about habits and marriage and relationships and how that influences things.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Cause you soak up each person soaks up a little bit of the other partner and But we've seen it work in a very positive way for training, which is there are going to be some days where I just like don't feel like working out after a full day at work. But she's like, all right, we're going to go to the gym. And then I'm like, OK, I'll change. And then other days I'm like, OK, I'm ready.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And she's like, all right. You know, and she didn't feel like it. That's really helpful for the long term consistency. But I've talked to other couples who have said my nutrition habits actually got worse because like one day I won't feel like cooking. I'll be like, hey, can we just order out? And she'll be like, OK, fine. And then the other day she won't feel like cooking.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like, hey, why don't we pick up something from? And you're like, OK, fine. And so you can see how it goes in both directions. And I don't have a good way to describe these upward and downward spirals that we often get into where.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
the momentum once it's moving in that direction you just kind of like it becomes your default behavior and you just sort of keep rolling with it but there's something very powerful about that in life that if you get on a nice trajectory and you got a good spiral working for you then that momentum just kind of carries you if you start to get in a downward spiral you really got to find a way to just reverse course and gain a foothold even if it's a really small thing just to get the momentum moving in the other direction but anyway there are a lot of potentials there
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Why do we care about delaying gratification to get a PhD or delaying gratification to save more money? Primarily because it affords some form of status, which is very hierarchical and very, we think, evolutionarily wired in. So there's still connections there. It's just that not all of it is aligned.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah. Never miss twice is the idea that I try to, the little mantra I try to tell myself. Stuck to the diet for nine days, binge ate a pizza on the 10th day. Well, I wish I hadn't happened, but never miss twice. So let's make sure the next meal is a healthy one. And I think we all know this implicitly from going through life, but it's easy to forget in the moment, which is.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's rarely the first mistake that ruins you. It's like usually the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. That's the real problem. It's like letting slipping up become a new habit. That's the real issue. If you can cut that off at the source, if you can never miss twice, get to the end of the year and those mistakes are just like a little blip on the radar.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's really about getting back on track quickly. I think actually you see this with top performers in many different industries. Like, you know, think about any athlete. I mean, this is something that like Nick Saban's teams at Alabama pride themselves on. The screw up a play or have a bad drive, throw interception for a touchdown or something. But the focus is on the very next play.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I'm making sure that you don't let that mistake become another mistake. And the teams and the athletes that are really good at doing that and having a short memory and getting right back on track. They end up having really successful careers and you can scale that down to your own life.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Gretchen Rubin actually has this, I thought it was a clever little idea, which is divide the day into four quarters. So you got like morning, afternoon, dinner and night or evening and night. If you make a mistake, keep it contained to that quarter. So you don't lose the day, you just lose the quarter. And then the next one you get back on track.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If you can keep your failures small like that, if you can contain the damage, then I just think it's easier to get back on track quickly and to maintain the momentum, build consistency, all the other positive benefits that we've talked about.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And to your point about judging yourself or feeling guilty or turning this into like some kind of self-berating session, playing the victim never makes it better. It doesn't make any of it easier. I think generally in life, we all have things that happen to us. Some of them are terrible things.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And you can be the victim, but I don't know that it ever benefits you to play the victim, to accept that role. Bad things can happen to you, but that doesn't mean you have to start to identify as someone who is worthy of them or someone who is, you know, it's inevitable for that to be part of your story.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so the more that you can like cut the judgment out of it, cut the guilt out of it, the story, the narrative piece and take that away and just accept the event for what it is and move on to the next instance. I think probably the better off you'll be.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Rapid course correction is probably a deeply applicable lesson for many areas of life. The world is complex and situations evolve. Life is dynamic. It's not static. Your preferences also evolve. What you optimize for or want is different today than it was 10 years ago and probably will be different five years from now or 10 years from now.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And given that many changing dynamics, it's not possible for someone to predict the optimal course of action. And even if you could, it is very unlikely that it will remain the optimal course of action. Given that things are going to be changing, you're going to be off course at some point.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And the ability to correct for that and to correct for that quickly, I mean, it might be one of the all optimal life skills. The ability to assess where you are in the moment, see what the next step is going to be, keep in mind where you ultimately want to go, and then correct as needed is possibly the path to like living a great life.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I heard recently this, I thought it was a great little framework, which is A, B, Z. It came from Sean Puri. He's an entrepreneur. And basically he said, you need to know your A, B, Zs. A is where you are right now. It's like the truth of the situation, the reality. B is your next step. And Z is where you want to go. Ultimately, it's where you want to end up.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I think the key, this is me talking now, not him. For me, the key is working backwards. It's knowing Z first, knowing what you're optimizing for, and then jumping back to A and being honest about the situation. What is the truth of the situation? What are the resources I have? The skills I have? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What's reality say? But
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then knowing that I wanna head towards Z and knowing honestly where I am today, what's the next step? I actually don't need to know C through Y right now. I don't need to have the whole thing planned out perfectly, but I do need to make sure that my next step is directionally correct. If it is, then you can just keep running that A, B, Z process over and over again until you finally get there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The only thing I'll add to that, which I like Annie's framework, and I think working backwards is it's a really powerful thing, particularly if... You can not be your own bottleneck in the process. The phrase I like is work backwards from magic. What would the magical outcome be? What would the ideal outcome be? And then let me work backwards from that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And a lot of people have trouble with that brainstorming part of the process because they think, well, if it's unrealistic, why would I even try? And the point is like, listen, there's way too early for that. Most people become their own bottleneck long before reality prevents them from doing it. Which is kind of this great irony.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
We're like, oh, you know, why would I attempt this like super impossible thing? And it's like, well, the world hasn't even told you it's impossible yet. You have. I think work backwards from the magical outcome. But my key is I want to be very clear about where I'm going, but very flexible about how I get there. I don't need it to happen.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If I work backwards, I don't need it to happen only through that chain of that potential path. Because if you can only have one way to get there, you're actually kind of brittle. You become hostage to things working exactly in that way. But if I know where I want to get to with a very clear vision, I'm flexible on how I get there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, now I can start to spring on opportunities as they arise and just take whatever the most fruitful path seems to be. But I do think that that whole process starts with working backwards. So it's, I think, a more fruitful way to think about where you want to go than just trying to predict.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think there are exercises or strategies you can use. So you sort of hinted at this a few minutes ago, and I meant to say it, but I forgot, which is the process of behavior change, strategically changing your behavior. We need to make a separation here, a distinction between the types of behavior change, because people change their behavior all the time.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
We're always responding to the situation we're in or the circumstance or the conversation we're having. This is like one of the great myths about behavior change, which is behavior change is hard. Actually, it's one of the easiest things that you do. Like your brain is designed to change your behavior to match the situation that you're in. So you're making adjustments all the time.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The question is, can you reliably change your behavior? Can you design your behavior in a fashion that you want? And if you want to design it, if you want to be in control of it more, I think it almost always starts with the process of self-awareness. And that's kind of what this question is getting at. I don't even know what the cues are. I don't even know what my habits are.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So the two exercises I recommend, the first one I call the habit scorecard. And you just go through your day and you list out every habit that you already do. Try to get as detailed as possible. So usually there's a big lump in the beginning. Like I wake up, I take a shower, I step on the scale, I brush my teeth, I go to the bathroom, I get dressed.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like there's all this stuff that you do to start your day. And then there's things for breakfast and starting your workday and on and on and on. And the more that you have that list, again, the goal is not to judge yourself. It's almost like you're at the zoo looking at animals and you're one of the animals. It's like, oh, how interesting that they would do that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You're just trying to get a lay of the land and see how do I actually spend my time? What habits am I actually doing if I'm being honest about it? So that's just to understand what habits you have to figure out what the cue is. Basically, you're just asking like five questions, who, what, when, where, why you're essentially just trying to get a lay of what's going on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So let's say that you're like, man, I eat a lot of candy bars, but I don't know why I do it. I don't know what the cue is. Well, each time that you find yourself eating a candy bar, just pull up a note on your phone or have an index card or a notebook or whatever, somewhere to record it, write down what time is it? Where are you at right now? What's the context? What's the environment?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Who are you around? Are you near the do you eat these by the same kind of people? What were you doing just before this? Was it a break from writing emails or doing something else? And the more that you start to answer those questions about the context, the better you'll start to understand, hey, maybe that was the cue.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I bet if you do that exercise for whatever the particular habit is that you're working on, just do that for, you may not even need to do it for a week, but if you do it for five days or seven days or something, you're going to start to develop a good sense for what it is that's prompting the behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Maybe. I'm not going to say it's not a risk. I'm sure it's a possible risk. But I think what's more likely to happen is rather than not being able to see what's going on, assuming you're being honest with yourself, It can be hard to honestly observe your own behavior. You have a lot of biases and stories for why we do what we do.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So assuming you're doing that to the best degree possible, I think you're probably still going to get a good idea of what the cue is, what I think is more likely to happen if there is some influence on your behavior. is you may find yourself changing the behavior anyway, just because you're tracking it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And there are quite a few studies that show this, like with nutrition, for example, there are some studies about food journaling. People who just keep a food journal, they're not even trying to stick to a certain calorie level or a certain macro profile or anything. They just are tracking what they're eating.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
tend to change their eating habits and eat less just because they're tracking it, even if they don't have a specific program they're trying to follow. So the mere act of observing something or measuring something often changes the behavior associated with it. You may find that to be the case here. You're like, well, I keep writing down when I have candy bars, so I'm like, maybe I'll skip this one.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think that's probably the more likely outcome, but who knows? There could be other biases as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I have this like theory about technology and innovation and that the technologies that most radically change the world or change our behavior are all just kind of different forms of vision. You have obvious examples like x-rays, which allow you to see the broken bone or MRIs or whatever that allow you to see some tissue in a way that you couldn't see before.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so that gives you information that then you can act on and make a diagnosis and make some kind of change. But the glucose monitor is like another example. It's just like now you can see the spike and because you can see it, you change your behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Even stuff like the number of email subscribers to my website, because my email platform tracks that and I can see how many people are signing up each day, I make a change to the form and, you know, conversion and so on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I do think there's some deeper lesson there about behavior change and about what drives human behavior, which is if you can visualize your progress in some way, maybe it's a chart on a screen, maybe it's an actual printout, maybe it's something that you actually see looking through lenses or something. But if you can actually visualize it, then the behavior often follows suit.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And that's why even simple strategies like a habit tracker, where you just put an X on each day, Seems very rudimentary, very basic, but it can still be meaningful because it gives you a way of visualizing your progress. So anyway, the glucose monitor is an interesting one.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's kind of like an adult version of I spy. Walk in, you're like, I spy the red thing. And then all the red stuff in the room lights up. Right now you're like, I spy water. And everywhere I go, that's what I see. And you find opportunities and you find ways to change it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So let's talk about the second law. Yeah. So the second law is making it attractive. And I think there's a simple example I could give here, which is let's imagine that you wake up tomorrow and you're like, all right, I listened to this guy talk about habits all day today. So tomorrow's going to be the day I'm going to wake up and I'm going to go for a run.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So you set your alarm for 6 AM and 6 AM rolls around, but your bed is warm and it's cold outside. And you're like, well, I'll just press snooze and sleep in. Like maybe I'll do it tomorrow. But if you rewind the clock and come back to today and you text a friend and you say, hey, you want to meet at the park at 615 and go for a run? Well, now 6 a.m. rolls around.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Your bed is still warm and still cold outside. But if you don't get up and go for a run, you're a jerk because you leave your friend at the park all alone. And so you've kind of simultaneously made it more attractive to get up and go for a run and less attractive to press snooze and sleep in. Now, you haven't made the run itself any easier. That's still going to be as difficult as it was before.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So the habit, the difficulty is kind of the same. But you have changed the calculus that's going on in your mind about like whether you should do this or not or how attractive it seems. So there are a bunch of examples, strategies like that and stuff I talk about in the book and that you could use to kind of make habits seem more attractive than they otherwise are.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But that's sort of what it comes down to on a short-term basis for making habits attractive. On a long-term basis, I think it's about what we've already discussed about the social environment and being part of a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Because those behaviors become very attractive even a year or two or five from now if they help signal that you're part of the tribe.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah, I think the social side, the community side of it is the strongest piece of the whole thing. It's the part that's hardest for any other exercise program to replicate. That's for sure. It does. It gets people to stick to it. I mean, it becomes sounds extreme to call it a form of a religion, but it becomes kind of like that for them. I mean, the box is like their church in a lot of ways.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You know, they go six days a week instead of one day a week. There are a lot of strong community elements there. You also see crossfitters pick up a bunch of habits they didn't even expect.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like they thought they were going to start working out, but then six months later, they all are buying the same brand of knee sleeves and they have a certain type of weightlifting shoe and they're all eating paleo. And it was like, we didn't even plan on doing that stuff. I just was gonna go to a gym to work out. But all of those are behaviors that signal what it means to be part of that group.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And again, once you start to build friends in that group and start to become, ingrained in that society or in that tribe, you start to soak up some of those other behaviors as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I think it's more about making it obvious. I would lump it more in the first law. Design the environment to make the good habit the obvious one, to make the good habit the path of least resistance. Some other nudges that are very popular people talk about is like default choices on forms. The very famous example being the organ donor study.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I'll kind of give a roundabout answer here, but I'll come back to your question. So What is it that determines whether a habit is good or bad? You know, we use these phrases a lot of the time in conversation. We say, oh, it's a bad habit, it's a good habit. And sometimes people will ask me, like, well, why do I repeat this habit if it's bad for me?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
default opting in every employee to a 401k and making them opt out is a nudge. I think that's also another example of making it obvious. Or we could also say making it easy. Nothing's easier than letting it ride. All of those are examples. To your point about default food environment, Daria Rose, who writes a nutrition blog, she's got a great concept. I just like it. It's kind of sticky.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Home court habits and away court habits. The argument is like, try to optimize your home court habits first. What's the environment where... It's your kitchen. It's your apartment. You get to set the tone and let's just try to prime all of that. Whatever happens at a restaurant or when you're at a hotel traveling or whatever, let's don't worry about that as much right now.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Let's just optimize the home court. I like that. If you can build a home court advantage for yourself, then you get in a good situation. You start to build some momentum. You handle the thing that you're probably going to be doing 70% of the time or 80% of the time. And then after that, you can move on to the way court stuff.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
to be seeking the approval of others and all those sorts of other things is there any research to support this idea i don't know of any studies that like distinguish clearly between those two it's quite possible there are plenty out there i just may not know of them but i can see it working well on both sides and i also see complexities on both sides so a lot of the time when people talk about accountability partners they join a facebook group or they join a course or a program or something and they get matched up the way that you described
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But I can actually see that form of accountability kind of falling apart fairly quickly for a simple reason, which is it's a stranger and you don't really bear much cost for them thinking you did a bad job or you may not really value or care that much about their opinion.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Compare that to the example I gave earlier, which is you walk outside and your neighbor sees that your lawn is very sloppy and you haven't mowed the grass in three weeks. That actually you may care pretty deeply about because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood and you don't want to have friction with your neighbor and so on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You know, if it's so terrible, then how come I keep coming back to it? And I think we can divide, in a sense, if you want to get really pedantic about it or really academic about it, some researchers don't even like to use the word good or bad because they're habits and they all serve you in some way.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so there's much more of a cost there. And that form of accountability is a lot stronger because there's some reason why you really want to fall through on it. Now, you could say that that same thing is true for, you know, for example, a marriage or relationship. I don't want to let my partner down. I don't want them to think poorly of me and so on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But you have to remember in that particular case, you're so close that there are actually a lot of additional complexities there. Like you want to be fairly forgiving of your partner because you're living with them all the time. Or even if it's not someone you're married to, say it's your brother or your parents or whoever. There's just a lot going on in those relationships.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so is the other person really going to become like an enemy just over you skipping your workout routine on Tuesday? Because you guys got to get dinner together on Wednesday night and you have to babysit their kids over the weekend. And there's a lot of other stuff that's involved there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so in those cases, I think the relationships are so tight or so complex that that person may not actually want to be a strict accountability partner because of the other costs may need to bear. You're kind of in this weird situation where you don't want there to be other things on the line that would influence their ability to hold you accountable.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But you do actually want to care about their opinion and to bear some cost if you don't follow through. Perhaps this is the reason why having like a coach is a good example, because that's somebody that presumably you want to do a good job because you're going to see them repeatedly, even if it's not as dicey as the neighbor situation where like you do bear some social cost for it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
you probably bear a financial cost because you may be paying your nutrition coach $500 or $1,000 or whatever. And the more that there's some kind of painful cost associated with it, probably the more that you're going to be willing to fall through on that accountability.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Boy, that's a big question. I'm not a coach. I've been fortunate to have some good ones. And I've also had a bunch of mediocre ones, too. And thinking about the difference between them. we could have a whole conversation about coaching and about the art of that because there is a really fine balance there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I think there also is a big difference in the, I'm going to use athlete, but of course you can have a coach for many things, but there's a big difference also in the intensity that the athlete might have. You can imagine I was into Olympic weightlifting for a time and it was kind of the main way I was training. I had the fortune of training with a really great team.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I was very average, but Holly Mangold was on that team and she competed at the Olympic Games in London in 2012. Just watching the interactions between the coaches and her and what was required for her to make it to the Olympics. was interesting to see. There is every element of a tight relationship there. I mean, there's tough love and there's actual love.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Right. Yeah. I think we could make a meaningful division in the sense of how we use it in most conversation and say that pretty much all behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time. Broadly speaking, we could lump it into an immediate bucket, an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. And what you find is that for most bad habits, the immediate outcome is actually pretty favorable.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And there are some days where you have to be really harsh and some days where you have to be really soft. And there's all the dynamics of the athlete's internal mindset. There are days when you go out and you feel like you're a world killer and like nobody can touch you.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then there are other days where you just feel completely broken and you're like, can I keep this training up for another six months? The more intense the objective is that you're trying to achieve, I think the more detailed and balanced and nuanced all of that becomes.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then you have just your standard CrossFit coach who's coaching a 35-year-old dad of two who just wants to get in better shape. And that I think may be a totally different relationship. I don't know that I have a good answer there, but I do think it's a really important thing. Great coaches are incredibly valuable. They're rare by definition. That's why they're great.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's probably much more complicated than a lot of us realize.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
you said rule number one and rule number three were probably the most important rule number three is now make it easy yeah so if i could only recommend one thing if you forced me to say hey where's the one place i would start i would say start with this start with me do you hate being asked that question by the way if you would just do one thing you know how it is you know like if somebody said what was the one thing i would do to get healthy you'd be like okay come on this is like a very big picture there's a lot of stuff here same story here i do think this is a good place to start though and so if i had to pick
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I would say follow the two minute rule, which says take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes people hate that because they're like, okay, buddy, I know I'm not actually just trying to take my yoga mat out.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So if this is some kind of mental trick and I know it's a trick, then like, why would I fall for it basically? And I get where people are coming from, but I have this reader, his name's Mitch, and I mentioned him in Atomic Habits. He lost a ton of weight. Another guy, I think he lost definitely over 80 pounds. I think it was probably over a hundred.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Kept it off for a long time. He had this interesting rule for himself though. When he went to the gym for the first six weeks that he started working out, he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You're like, obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants. But if you take a step back, what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And I think this is like a deep truth about habits, something that we often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up into something more.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
If you want, you can come up with a better theory, like you could come up with a perfect plan, but unless you're acting on it, it doesn't do you any good. It's just a really good idea. For whatever reason, we get like really all or nothing about our habits. We tend to have this tendency to be like, well, if I can't do the full marathon training program, then why go for a run at all?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Or if I can't follow through on the perfect lean startup business framework, then like why bother starting a company?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The two-minute rule kind of helps you get over that tendency of perfectionism and just start to master the art of showing up, find a small way to establish the habit, make it part of your new normal, and then you can gain a little foothold and start to scale up and expand from there. There's that great quote from Ed Latimore where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's true for a lot of things in life. The hardest part is getting started. So let's master that and make it part of your lifestyle. And then once you're the kind of person who's showing up consistently, we have all kinds of options for how we can improve and optimize and so on.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The classic example is smoking a cigarette. But if you smoke a cigarette outside the office at 10 a.m. with a friend, well, then immediately you get some socialization. Maybe it curbs your nicotine craving or just lets you like de-stress for a couple minutes or get a break from work. There are all kinds of things that you might be benefiting from.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's also surprising how few people actually have two minutes in their day where they stop and do nothing except breathe. That alone would deliver more value than you might expect. And there are a whole host of other behaviors that go along with this. You think meditating for two minutes sounds very small, but if you start to back out of it, you realize you got to pick a space.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Where is it going to happen? What time of day is it going to occur? Is this something that you're going to do before work or after work? Do you do it on your lunch break? Try to do it with somebody. So you have a little bit of social accountability or is this just like a private thing that you're going to do in the corner? Do you need a pillow to sit on or are you fine to sit on the floor?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Like what's your flexibility like? Are you going to get interrupted by your kids? If you do this at 7 a.m., it might be nice to get it done in the morning, but is that when you're getting them ready for school and getting them dressed? A lot of little questions like that that people don't think about.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so finding a very small version of the habit allows you to get all of that other stuff kind of handled, figure out the logistics of it, and just to do it for a minute or two.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then once you get all that stuff handled and you don't have to decide anymore, you have a little bit more mental capacity and energy to actually focus into, okay, let me scale this up a bit and do it maybe in the way that I was hoping I would.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yeah, so this is the final piece. It's really about just making a habit that's pleasurable enough that you wanna return to it, giving you some reason, some emotional signal that, hey, this is worth it. And there are a bunch of different ways you can do this. Some of them are short-term, some of them are long-term. The short-term stuff is mostly about reinforcement.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So classic examples are things like, oh, you can reward yourself with a bubble bath or with ice cream or buying something that you wanted or whatever. I think the key with those short term reinforcements is you want to make sure that the reinforcement also aligns with the long term identity that you're trying to build.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You go to the gym and you do a workout and then you eat a bowl of ice cream. It's like, okay, you're casting votes for two different identities. Or let's say that you're trying to get your finances in order. And so you're like, okay, I want to budget consistently and save money for retirement.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, if you reward yourself with that, buying a leather jacket, then it's kind of like, okay, on the one hand, you're trying to be a saver. On the other hand, you're being a spender. So I like to pick things that we feel like are aligned.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's only two or five or 10 years later that the ultimate outcome is negative. With the good habits, especially the first time you perform them, it's often the reverse. The first week of training in the gym, your body looks the same in the mirror, you're sore, you don't really have much to show for the effort that you're putting in. You feel kind of stupid in there.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So like in the fitness example, you could say, well, if I don't miss any workouts this week, then I'm going to reward myself with a bubble bath and kind of like an hour alone of peace and quiet on the weekend. And that's like a vote for taking care of your body. That seems pretty aligned. Or if I save consistently for retirement this month and I make a contribution each week.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
then at the end of the month, I'm going to reward myself with a hike in the woods. And that's like another example of a lifestyle of freedom and of controlling your time. So anything that's aligned or reinforces that story you're trying to build, I think that can make a great immediate reinforcement.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
In the long run, the way to feel rewarded, the kind of ideal form of making it satisfying is when the behavior starts to feel like it reinforces your desired identity. So if you're the kind of person who feels like, yeah, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, then in the middle of doing a set of squats, you can feel satisfied because you're being the kind of person you want to be.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so this comes back to kind of the point you made a little bit ago about, I just don't want to miss a workout. Like I kind of feel off. I feel like I'm not being myself and I miss. And so just getting the reps in that alone is satisfying in the moment. And that's sort of the ultimate version of making it satisfying because you don't even need to wait for the reward.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's just happening as you're in the middle of performing the behavior. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Those four laws and the various ways to intervene and do that increase the odds that you're going to fall through on a good habit.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
You're wondering if people judge you or if you're doing it the wrong way. There are a lot of upfront costs and it's only two or five or 10 years later that you get the outcome that you're looking for. In a sense, the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The point about people self-selecting by picking up the book is interesting. Sometimes it's like you're sort of only helping the people who already want to be helped in that sense. It's interesting to think that most of the time the people who most need to read the book are not the people who pick it up to read it.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The people who read about habits are usually the ones who have fairly decent habits and are pretty interested in it. The people who need it the most, they've never read a book on habits and they don't want to read it. They're not interested. Something interesting about that. But I think the points you bring up are very true and challenging. Changing your own behavior is hard enough.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Changing other people's behavior is like a whole other level of difficulty, a whole other order of magnitude of difficulty. I'll offer maybe three ideas that could apply. The first one, and we've already talked about this in various ways, but I do think you have to make it really small. So you said taking a pill is the smallest version, but it doesn't always have to be that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It could be, you know, if you're trying to get them to exercise, it could literally be doing one pushup, walking around the block one time or something. And this is that version of like, can I just go to the gym for five minutes sort of thing. Let's just scale it down, make it super simple. Along with that, it's very hard for it to be simple if people are being pulled in multiple directions.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so I think if you're giving people a plan that has five things on there for them to do, can we eliminate four of those for now? Stay at phase two? And can we just do one right now? Let's take one thing and scale it down and stay focused and just try to get a little bit of momentum going on that.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And then once we've established that and started to gain a foothold there and get a little bit more consistency with that one thing, we can take that momentum and transfer it into the next one. So yeah, ideally, probably a lot of patients will be doing these five things or these 15 things, but it doesn't mean you need to do all of them right now. Let's pick one and stay focused.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So that's the first thing is try to keep it as simple as possible. Pretty obvious answer, but I still think a useful one. The second thing, again, fairly obvious, and we've talked about it a bit, but still I think useful, is the environment design piece. Even the laziest person, even the person who has zero interest naturally in these topics, is a product of the environment that they're in.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Imagine this lab experiment where you're locked in a room that only has healthy food options. Even the laziest person is going to eat healthy there. They have no other choice. And that doesn't mean that they need to change everything in their home so that it's that control lab experiment feel. But look, there's a lot of low hanging fruit that can be done here that you don't actually need someone.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And this, I think, is one of the reasons why I like environment changes. You don't actually need someone to be motivated every day to do this. You really just need them to be motivated for like one afternoon so that they change the environment a bit. And that can actually serve them.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And that misalignment between when you feel rewarded and when you feel punished helps to explain why we tend to fall pretty easily into a lot of things that we would categorize as bad, like eating donuts or smoking a cigarette or whatever, and fall less easily into things that we would categorize as good or feels like I have to force myself to write or whatever.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
In some cases, it can serve them for months, but in most cases, even food related cases, it could serve them for the next three days or five days or seven days just by getting junk food out of the house. That serves them for the next couple of days. You only need little pockets of motivation. And if you can direct that pocket of motivation toward a high leverage action,
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
like redesigning the environment, then it can continue to serve even a lazy person for a good chunk of time. So that's probably the second thing. So make it small, optimize the environment. And then the third thing, and this is maybe more of like a coaching thing as someone who deals with patients or has clients or whatever,
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
The general strategy is easy to say, but very hard to follow, which is praise the good, ignore the bad. It goes against the grain of what we want to do because they're like, you're telling me I just want to ignore the mistakes that they're making. And certainly there's a place for rectifying mistakes. And I don't mean that every problem should just go unresolved.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But especially early on, the thing that you really want to build is momentum and you want to reinforce the good behaviors. And as we talked about a good plant crowding out another, a way to encourage that is by praising the good and ignoring the bad.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
There was a hilarious op-ed that was written, I think it was in the New York Times, this wife who, her husband would never throw his dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, and it was driving her nuts. Occasionally he would do it, but it was like pulling teeth all the time to get him to do this consistently.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
She tried nagging him, she tried annoying him, you know, whatever, just all kinds of different, put the laundry hamper in a different place. Don't even have it in the closet, just have it out on the floor in the bedroom, and he still wouldn't do it. Sometimes he'd throw the clothes next to the hamper. She's like, you're already throwing it over there, just put it in.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
eventually what she settled on doing was that every time that he happened to put it in the hamper she would make a huge deal about it she'd run over give him a kiss give him a hug say thank you be like oh you're making my life so much easier thank you so much over the course of about a year she effectively trained him to always put the clothes in the hamper because every time that happened something good happened he got praised it felt good almost like training a dog in a sense which is
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
All kinds of organisms, dogs and humans, love feeling praised. We like feeling good. We like being rewarded. And so if you praise the good actions and ignore the bad actions, it's again, almost like a form of gravity. People naturally gravitate toward the things that they get rewarded for, the things they get praised for.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And you'd be surprised how often people don't do something like this, or in fact, do the opposite. You can imagine the quiet kid in the household who comes down for dinner with the rest of the family. And it's like, oh, look who showed up. They decide to share something about their day. And it's like, oh, a fact about your life.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And you can imagine a parent or somebody saying something sarcastic like that. And all of a sudden you're punishing the very behavior that you wanted to see. So praise the good, ignore the bad. I think it applies in a lot of situations and can be more powerful than you realized. The tricky part is it requires a lot of patience. You got to do it for six months or a year or three years.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
It's hard to stick with that in the long run. Last example of this is a weightlifting one. I was at the gym on a Friday night one time and I was there with a friend and we were doing a quick workout. It's probably like 20, 25 minutes. We got done and we're putting our shoes on. And this guy who's just kind of a jerk went over and was talking to her. It was like quick workout for a Friday night.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
She just kind of moved on. But that's like exactly the opposite of the type of feedback you want to be getting, especially if you're someone who's like new coming into the gym or feeling kind of uncomfortable there. What people should be saying is, oh, it's great that you got in here, even though it's the weekend.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Now that's very similar to what you just mentioned about the immediacy of the feedback. Bad habits are giving you pretty immediate feedback, kind of like riding a bike. Good habits are giving you pretty delayed feedback, maybe a little bit analogous to swimming. I think that example of the medium that you're in, air versus water, is fascinating to think about water as being a feedback dampener.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And a little cutting comment like that is all that people need to not show up again the next day. the more that you can be lavish with praise is maybe stating it even too strongly, but it doesn't really cost you very much to be kind. And you may not even remember it, but it's the kind of thing that might be enough to get that person to show up again the next time.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
So in the long run, praising the good and ignoring the bad can count for a lot.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
I am. Yeah. And working is the correct term. Currently kind of slogging and battling against the manuscript. I seem to find whatever way requires the most suffering to write books. Atomic Habits, the first draft was like 720 pages, and then I cut it down to 250 eventually, which for the finished version, this manuscript's like 600 and something right now. So I'm in the trimming phase.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
What's this book about? It's a book about strategy and choices and decision-making and how we direct our attention. I'm still kind of finding it and discovering it in a lot of ways. But one question that you could have after finishing Atomic Habits is, okay, that's great. I know how to build better habits, but which habits should I be focusing on? What's the high leverage action?
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
How do I figure out where to direct my energy and attention? And so those are a lot of the questions that I'm exploring now.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's great. Thanks, Peter. Appreciate the opportunity.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But there is another element to it, which you also mentioned, which is the strength of the feedback. Falling on the ground off a bike and skinning your knee is pretty painful. You learn quite quickly. Technically, making a bad stroke in the water, you don't really pay too much of a cost if you're being sloppy with your form. It's unlikely that you rectify that quickly.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And this is a phenomenon that I think is so critical or so important to behavior change. I called it the cardinal rule of behavior change in atomic habits, which is Behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that get immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed and the intensity of that feedback.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And generally speaking, the quicker you can get feedback, too intense is maybe a bit much, but at some point it needs to be high enough to move the needle. It can't be so low that it doesn't register. So you need both meaningful feedback and quick feedback if you want behavior to change.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Yep. Sophomore year of high school.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
Well, I wasn't someone who had a hard time, but it depends on the context. Keep it simple, like homework, sports, those things. So with school, definitely. I always liked school. I was like the nerdy kid on the sports teams I was on. But in the science lab or something, I was like the jock, which is kind of funny how you change based on the room that you're in.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
And so I always felt like I kind of played that middle ground between those two. I think it helped me learn how to get along with both groups and, you know, was helpful socially and all that. But earlier in my life, I think I thrived more in school than I did in sports. I barely got to play in high school.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
That's one of the punchlines of that early story in the book is I ended up playing a total of 11 innings in high school. Now, I kind of blossomed once I got to college and ended up being an academic All-American by the time I graduated, but that came much later. So it really sort of depended on the context.
The Peter Attia Drive
Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)
But generally speaking, I would say, yeah, people probably thought that I was disciplined, but I do think it depended on where we were. If it was just looking at school, then I think people would say that. If you're looking somewhere else, then maybe not.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, even if they're little and seem relatively minor on any given day, You'll continue to put yourself in a stronger position day after day. In many ways, if you have good habits, you're on the right trajectory. And so all you need is time. You just need some patience. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And every day that goes by, you kind of dig the hole a little bit deeper. And so this idea that small habits can make an enormous difference, what it really is about is about emphasizing time. trajectory rather than position. You know, there's a lot of discussion about position in life. How much money is in your bank account? What's the current number on the scale? What's the stock price?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
What are the quarterly earnings? We have like all these ways of measuring your current position. And then if the measurement isn't what you wanted it to be or you haven't achieved what you set out to achieve, you kind of start judging yourself or feeling guilty for it or you feel bad about it. And what I'm encouraging is to say, listen, just for a minute,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Let's stop worrying so much about our current position and instead focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. And this is why one of the key things I talk about in Atomic Habits is getting 1% better each day. Are you getting 1% better or 1% worse? Is the arrow pointed up and to the right or have you flatlined?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Because if you're on a good trajectory, even if it's a very modest gain on any given day, all you need is time. And if you're on a bad trajectory, even if you're in a pretty strong position right now, it's not going to end well. And so building better habits, making these small improvements, it's really about getting you on a path that can lead to where you want to go.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
I really like that question of can my current habits carry me to my desired future? And if they can, then great. Maybe you just need to be patient and let the days work for you. But if they can't, then something needs to change about your trajectory.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And so your habits are one of the things that kind of set you on that path and determine how far you're going to go and whether you're improving day in and day out. And so for all of those reasons, I like to refer to habits as the compound interest of self-improvement.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
You know, the same way that money multiplies with compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them across time. Many of your outcomes in life, many of the results that we all so badly want to have, They're kind of like a lagging measure of the habits that precede them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even little stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so we also badly want better results in life. But the somewhat ironic thing is that the results are not actually the thing that needs to change.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
You know, it's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Adjust the habits and you'll be set on a different path and carried to a different destination naturally.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So this concept of getting 1% better each day, it's really a philosophy and attitude and approach of showing up, trying to make some small improvement and trusting that that little improvement can compound in something much greater over a broad span of time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
let's stop worrying so much about our current position and instead focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. And this is why one of the key things I talk about in Atomic Habits is getting 1% better each day. Are you getting 1% better or 1% worse? Is the arrow pointed up and to the right or have you flatlined?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Because if you're on a good trajectory, even if it's a very modest gain on any given day, all you need is time. And if you're on a bad trajectory, even if you're in a pretty strong position right now, it's not going to end well. And so, Building better habits, making these small improvements, it's really about getting you on a path that can lead to where you want to go.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
I really like that question of can my current habits carry me to my desired future? You know, and if they can, then great. Maybe you just need to be patient and let the days work for you. But if they can't, then something needs to change about your trajectory. And so your habits are one of the things that kind of set you on that path.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
and determine how far you're going to go and whether you're improving day in and day out. And so for all of those reasons, I like to refer to habits as the compound interest of self-improvement. You know, the same way that money multiplies with compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them across time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Many of your outcomes in life, many of the results that we all so badly want to have, They're kind of like a lagging measure of the habits that precede 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.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Even little stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so we also badly want better results in life. But the somewhat ironic thing is that the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. You know, it's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Adjust the habits and you'll be set on a different path and carried to a different destination naturally. So this concept of getting 1% better each day, it's really a philosophy and attitude and approach of showing up, trying to make some small improvement and trusting that that little improvement can compound in something much greater over a broad span of time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, even if they're little and seem relatively minor on any given day, You'll continue to put yourself in a stronger position day after day. In many ways, if you have good habits, you're on the right trajectory. And so all you need is time. You just need some patience. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And every day that goes by, you kind of dig the hole a little bit deeper. And so this idea that small habits can make an enormous difference, what it really is about is about emphasizing – trajectory rather than position. You know, there's a lot of discussion about position in life. How much money is in your bank account? What's the current number on the scale? What's the stock price?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
What are the quarterly earnings? We have like all these ways of measuring your current position. And then if the measurement isn't what you wanted it to be or you haven't achieved what you set out to achieve, you kind of start judging yourself or feeling guilty for it or you feel bad about it. And what I'm encouraging is to say, listen, just for a minute,