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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today is James clear, you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at James. Clear James is a writer and speaker focused on
habits and continuous
Improvement is the author of the number one, New York Times Mega bestseller. I'm adding the mega Atomic habits, which covers easy and proven ways to build good habits and break bad ones. The book has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
On average comic habits to sold one. Copy every 15 seconds since it was published. So, by the time I finish reading this intro, two or three coffees will have been sold. James, is also the creator of the 321 newsletter, that's 3 hyphen to hyphen one newsletter, which is one of the most popular email newsletters in the world. That has more than 2 million subscribers. Each issue contains three short ideas from James, two quotes from other people. And one question to consider that week, we're going to talk a lot of my questions. In fact, shortly with James
You can sign up for free at James clear.com. He is a regular speaker at Fortune, 500 companies. And his work is used by players and coaches and the NFL NBA and MLB in college. He was an academic, All American baseball player and he is an avid weightlifter for those who cannot see the video. We seem to go to the same stylist. We've got the same handsome, bald look at, and the same log sleeve Turks, turban book and you can find James at James clear.com, and as mentioned on Twitter and Instagram at James.
James is nice to see you. Hey, great to talk to you. Thank you so much for the
opportunity. Absolutely. I'm thrilled to be having this conversation and I thought we would start with something that's also on my mind, but the topic of annual reviews comes up for some people once a year. And we are now winding down on this year, about to head into the new year, could you please describe your annual reviews and perhaps just walk us through the process?
And also describe or explain why for at least a period of time you published all these publicly, you can tackle that in any order you like
so, you know, it's nice to have a process for reflection review. I actually think, I'm sure we'll talk a lot about habits in this conversation and one of the kind of meta habits, that's really helpful.
Some kind of habit of reflection
review because it allows you to course-correct, nobody sets out to get off course, or to make a mistake, or to do something that goes against their values. But we just kind of
Of this natural drift in life and as time goes on well you kind of find ourselves in situations where maybe we're not doing the optimal thing anymore and an annual review is a chance to check in. I also think it's helpful to have shorter Cycles the review so like on Fridays I usually do some kind of short little business review where I look at revenue and expenses and new email subscribers and stuff like that. But at the end of each year, I like to ask myself some big questions, I'm glad you started here because I think that questions can be very useful. If you ask better questions, you can get better.
Answers, but also questions are very resilient, they're very adaptable to the context and that's something that's different and perhaps a little bit better, than advice, you know, advice is actually kind of brittle and context-dependent. So I'm going to have a really good plan. A really good piece of advice to give you, but if it doesn't fit your context, then it's actually not great advice for your particular situation. Whereas questions are very adaptable. So I think maybe what I should do is just go through some of the questions. I like to ask myself for my annual review,
And and throughout the rest of the year. So I guess we could say this. First category is just kind of like questions that help improve self awareness or help kind of bringing back to Center. So like the first thing I think actually this might be a question from Derek severs or some version of it from him, just one of my optimizing for you know sometimes people optimized for money sometimes optimized for free time sometimes they optimized for Creative output or being able to choose the projects that work on all kinds of stuff but that answer probably changes.
Our time. What I'm optimizing for today is different than what I was optimizing for five years ago or ten years ago. So, I think it's a helpful question to keep revisiting, and you need to decide what it is for you. Otherwise, it's easy to kind of slide into this status signaling or just kind of like doing the things that you feel like you're encouraged to do by Society or by your friends, or peers, or your parents, or whatever. So, what am I optimizing for another way of phrasing that is, maybe, like, what's the real objective here? Like, what am I actually trying to achieve?
So, some version of that question. I also, like, does this activity, fill me with energy or drain me of energy, you can tell a lot just by whether it like, fills up your cup or not. And ideally you'll be spending more time in the next year, on things that fill you with energy and less time on things that drain you with energy. Speaking of the things that drain you may be like a sub question that I like to keep in mind, is those the amount of attention I'm giving this match, its true
importance, and
man, there are so many
Years, when I find that I'm giving something a lot of attention that actually is not that important, and it's nice to check in and kind, of course. Correct that
are you asking these questions? As you're going through the calendar of your past year in what set of circumstances are in? What context? Are you asking this question or these just broadly speaking questions that you're applying more or less all the time for self-awareness and different types of Cycles?
I don't think you need to wait and only do it once a year. But right, when I am asking these questions for the Andrew
I usually am writing like maybe a paragraph for each one, and it's almost like a journaling prompt and I do have things that I check for this process. There's a lot of measurement so to speak that happens throughout the year, even if you aren't thinking about it that way. So for example, my calendar measures, how many new cities I went to or how many nights, I spend away from home. Those are kind of important
things. How do you do that? Oh I see it measures that meaning it logs it
right like I can see like oh I was in Dallas from
A Thursday and so because I know that I was there, then I'm like well that was two nights or three nights where I wasn't sleeping in my own bed and so then at the end of the year, I try to figure out how many nights I spend away from home. Is that more than I want to spend? Is it less, you know, like what, how did that for the air? Yeah, totally I write down my workouts in an actual Journal like a pen and paper Journal. So I've got all the sets log to have how many workouts I did and then I can look back on the dates, how many workouts I do for each month, what was the average number of workouts per month? So a lot of that,
Stuff. I'm not thinking about tracking it throughout the year, but it's kind of there for me as I sit down to review the year, those measurements are there as I'm kind of going through these questions and then trying to figure out, where did I direct my attention? What am I optimizing for
my spending? My energy on things, that fill me up or things that drain me.
Another question I think is helpful, is, if you want to answer one of my optimizing for you can ask yourself, can my current habits carry me to my desired feature.
And that's really about figuring out what kind of trajectory you're on. And if they can, then maybe all you need is patience. But if they can't something needs to change, you know, like you need to develop or build some new habits, another question, I love. And this is actually the core of a lot of what I talked about in atomic habits is how can I create an environment that will naturally bring about my desired change rather than trying to like fight this and force my way through, rather than trying to grit my teeth and make it happen, even if the circumstances aren't ideal.
How can I look around and structure my physical environment? My social environment and the tribes. I'm a part of in my strategy for what I'm trying to achieve. So that it's almost natural that I'm moving in that direction. So I have a bunch of questions. I got like, 20 that I go through but those are just three or four that, you know, kind of come to
mind. Well, we may come back to the remainder of the list because I am a
question junkie no big surprise there but I wanted to maybe reference the
I shall see thee, but one of the key points in the first chapter of atomic habits which is you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, which is a modification of one of my favorite quotes, wish I can actually speak the original language. But I cannot alas from the Greek poet and philosopher ARCA Locus, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we falls to the level of our training. So to the system's piece, I think about this.
A lot and have found for myself and certainly for many people in my audience, that stacking the deck. So that is harder to fail goes a lot further than trying to rely on Willpower, right? It's almost difficult for me to imagine precise steps. You can take to hone something that is labeled as broadly as well, power. So how can you set up accountability? How can you set up incentives, Etc. What are some of the systems?
That you have for yourself for various habits,
so we can pick a couple different habits like let's take Fitness for example, and then also do it for like writing and business. So for Fitness, which I consider to be this, this is kind of one of like Mike or habits. It's one of the ones I feel like is most important for how I structure my day, but I try to do whatever I can to reduce friction and make it as easy as possible to do it. So, the first thing is, I give myself permission to reduce the
Scope, but stick to the schedule. So if my typical workout, takes 45 minutes but I only have 15 that day. It's easy to get into this story where you're like, I don't have time to do it all. Like, why bother, but instead, I try to remind myself to reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule and there have been a lot of days where all I have time for is to go in and do a couple sets of squats but I'm glad that I did that rather than doing nothing and it counts for a lot to like not throw a 0 up for another day in a sense in the long run, I almost feel like the bad.
Days matter more than the good days. Because yeah, if you shine upon the bad days, even if it's less than what you had hoped for you, maintain the habit and if you maintain the Habit, then all you need is time. So, it counts for a lot. You also proved yourself, you know, you can look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the night and be like, you know what circumstances weren't ideal situation wasn't perfect, but I still found a way to show up and you know, like get some reps in today. So that's the first thing. It's kind of like mindset and approach second.
Thing is and I've gradually increased what I do for this. So I first it's there's basic stuff, like, set your workout clothes, next year, set them out the night before, have, you know, everything like ready to go have your water bottle
filled up, stuff like
that, but I've gradually kind of reduce the friction even more. And now, I used to work at a gym for like 10 years and so I would do all that kind of stuff. Now, over the last year or two, I build a home gym. And so, all I have to do is get down to the basement and I can just work out there, but I'm gradually accumulating more and more equipment. You know, I'm becoming like this equipment hoarder,
Now I have enough stuff that like I don't have any excuses like all I have to do is just walk downstairs and I can be doing that exercise in 15 seconds. So it's really just about reducing friction. Some of that is strategy to if you don't have equipment or you don't want to pay for a gym membership there, a great body weight programs or you could just do 10, Sprint's up and down the sidewalk and they're like almost no excuses. If you have the right strategy for reducing friction and just figuring out ways to get a decent
workout and I think the reduction of scope that you mentioned is really critical.
That if you don't have time for 60, it doesn't mean you have to go to zero and I'm guilty of this. This happens to me. Sometimes, not gonna lie, but I will also just add. If you dont have space for an entire gym you almost certainly have space for a functional doorstop AKA kettlebell. You could get one kettlebell or even build a kettlebell from some basic materials that you can people can look it up, t-bar kettlebell for swing.
And if you can just do one set of swings, I mean you're going to head a lot and I would love to hear while the see a few things if you don't mind me. Just yeah, adding my commentary. Sure. So the first is underscoring, another thing you said which is I don't want to say it doesn't matter but it matters much less. What happens on the days where you feel like doing the things that you have set up his your habits are or goals behaviors Etc. What matters is what happens
when you don't want to do those things. And this is where the systems and the lack of excuses and accountability. And so on comes into play, how do you apply? This will actually one more thing, which is the exercise because I'm glad you brought it up first. And many people might think well, that's fine. That's just exercise, but exercise for me, and sort of the cascading upper level of the waterfall. And if you take care of your body, your body takes care of your brain, and mood, and so many other things. So, in a sense, it's
The force multiplier categories. I'm glad we spoke about it first. What other types of systems? And I'll sort of put that in air quotes because it could take I'm sure a lot of different forms but what might be examples of systems or scaffolding that you've set up in other
areas. So, just what quick point on what you just mentioned first. So I think it's worth asking yourself what habits are Upstream from other things that I want to do other things that set me up. You have a good day and what?
Kind of describing is that a workout habit at least for you. And I would say for me is Upstream from a lot of other good things that happen like I get the benefits of the work out. Sure. But also I tend to have that post-workout high for an hour or two or I give this good period of concentration. I tend to eat better when I'm training. It's kind of like I don't want to waste it. It's actually what I'm not draining that I get lazy and you know, start eating, whatever I want. I tend to sleep better at night because I'm tired from the workout, which means I wake up the next day and I have better energy. And at no point, was I trying to actively build better.
Sleep habits or nutrition habits or whatever, but it just kind of came as a natural byproduct of getting that one habit of a good workout in. And it doesn't have to be Fitness, you talk to some people, you know, comedians for example, we'll talk about how or athletes will talk about how they have this visualization habit before they step out on the stage. And if they get that in the kind of recite what good performance is going to look like that helps them perform in the moment or CEOs will talk about a meditation habit. And if they get their 15 minutes of meditation in the morning,
Ting, that sets them up for the rest of the day being productive. So I think it just comes down to asking yourself when I'm living a good day when I'm on, what are some of the key habits that are part of that? And then maybe rather than worrying about everything and trying to hit every little Domino along the way? What's the lead? Domino? What's that? First action that's Upstream from the other productive things and can I just pour my energy into making sure I do that today and kind of trust that the momentum will carry me forward. Okay so your question was, what are some other examples?
Apple systems. It can take many different forms. It could be a physical thing that helps you be more productive. So for example, this doesn't work for everybody's job but it works for mine and I don't do it every day but I probably do it 72 or 80 percent of the time which is I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. Now it gives me a chance, it gives me space to just work on my agenda rather than responding to everybody else's agenda. You know. Like I can actually show up and have a few hours where I can do some creative work.
So that's a system in a sense, it's a physical environment that promotes or benefits. The Habit that I'm trying to build which is creative output or writing or whatever. It could be digital things. So for example, each week I write 321, this Weekly Newsletter and there are three short ideas for me to quotes from other people. And one question in each newsletter, and I have a spreadsheet that has three tabs. One of them is ideas. One of them is quotes and one of them is questions and I've got hundreds of ideas that
Generated or quotes that I've run across in red or questions that I've kind of like spit ball and maybe this could be a newsletter sometime and because I have this system, which in this case is just this spreadsheet of
raw material,
it only takes me an hour or two to write the newsletter because I have a lot to start from a good starting material. And so the system of, when I read a book and come across a quote that I like I type it down and put it into the spreadsheet. That's a very simple system but it makes the process of writing the newsletter each week much.
Juror. So, there are many different forms that could take and you could be almost infinite and it's variations, but it's any way that you set up the environment, physical digital or social to make the Habit easier and more
frictionless. Let's assume in on the creative process a little bit. And we're going to talk about also email list building email, because I feel as though, what was all this once New? Again, always like every few years, I have to be like, guys.
You need a way to communicate with your audience. They cannot be taken away from you immediately by platform. Yeah, email another died and everybody talks about how instead. Yeah, it's like the cat came back. The very next day, we thought it was a gun but it wouldn't stay away mean. Email is not going anywhere anytime immediately, right? So we'll come back to that because it is a vehicle for transmitting. Some of this creative work as you described.
I haven't
read a bit about your use or past. Use of Asana, for capturing ideas. I think this was for asymmetry of the time, at least in the article. I read on every day.to and then I separately read about a 600 page of Google doc that you put together and we're compressing in various ways where have you landed with idea capture Maybe.
Capture. Let's add that in because it may be a separate category. What is your portfolio of tools? First of all I don't think the
tool matters that much. I think. When does matter is crafting, great information flows and capturing the good ideas that you come across and then depending on what you're trying to do. In my case, I'm trying to create books or to write
newsletters using that raw material that you collected to create something great.
So, I would say the big picture game is always the same, which is first. I'm trying to
Craft better information flows. Almost every idea that you have is Downstream from what you consume. We don't usually think about it that way, but like, when you choose who to follow on
Twitter, you're choosing your future thoughts. In a sense, you're
creating the information
flow. What the timeline with the feed is going to look
like or when you choose what book to read or which podcast episode to listen to your choosing, the thoughts that are going to arise now, you may not necessarily know what
they are. But over time, you can start to learn which
Which sources of information are higher signal than
others. And I almost feel like that is, like the main Habit to try
to build especially in our current modern society because
information is overflowing and so widely accessible the person who creates better information. Flows gets better
thoughts. How do you consume? What do you choose? I've
spent kind of an unreasonable amount of time. Curating my Twitter feed, I think that makes me feel better about spending time on it. I don't, I'm not necessarily saying it's like the best
place but because
I
have found a really good set of people to follow. I do get useful ideas from Twitter and it's easy and I'm probably spending more time on it than I should. So at least now maybe it's a little more valuable. But the single highest thing for me is when I find a book that is relevant to what I'm writing about if it's relevant to the topic and you and I mean that in like a more granular fashion. Like let's say for Atomic habits. For example, I don't mean a book about habits. I mean, hey, I'm writing a chapter on self-control and this book has a
We that releases self-control or
this book has, you know, piece of research that relates to that particular chapter. And when I find the right thing, it's hard for me to even get through a page because I'm taking so many notes and sparking so many ideas to write about. I don't take me an entire morning just to get through like three
pages. How do you find it? The gems that are that dance mean. I have my own thoughts and how I approach this but there are ya 100,000 plus books yesteryear in the u.s. in English alone. Probably something along those lines.
How do you spare it your way through the maze to find some of those
books? First thing is, you gotta be willing to QuickBooks fast. If you have baggage around finishing books, then if you feel like you have to finish something because you started it, then you're all years is going to be stuck and you won't move on quickly enough. There's this quote about Emerson, I think where it says something like, he read like a hawk looking for prey like scanning over the field. And I think about that. Like I try to read like that. I'm not reading for the enjoyment or like, slowly.
Making a book the way that I would with a Sci-Fi novel or something. I'm trying to find, you know, an Insight. So that's the first thing is start more books. Quit most of them. The second thing is suggestions from friends, are always helpful and so if you let people know, hey, I'm writing about this topic. What's a good book that I should read? I have found a couple great ones that way, so just kind of putting it out into the universe. If you find a book that's good. Go to the back of the book and see what the references are. And then go through those and just scan those books on Amazon and
And a lot of the time, you'll find a couple other ones that are useful. If you find a book that had something, but you feel like maybe didn't quite hit it, go to Amazon and check all the
three star reviews for that book or the one star reviews sometimes
and they'll be other
books recommended in there. So they say instead of reading this you should rehearse one. Yeah. So the three star reviews is a key, right? Because the five star reviews are just overly a few set overly. I don't want to slam five star reviews. I love by certain things but they tend to know
Not. And I would say, for me, at least one star reviews or sometimes, like I ordered a toaster and they sent me a book and you're like, oh come on. Yeah, you bought a bucket, like pay attention to what you're clicking, but the three star reviews like the most helpful or most critical three star reviews. You tend to get a lot of really helpful feedback I lied to for for folks who might just be curious because I read for people who can see behind me. I have bookshelves and many many more wood shelves.
I will very often go to Wikipedia and Goodreads. I will see if the book is old enough, it will very often if its iconic enough or has stood the test of time, which is not true for all books, that I've read or do we need? But there will often be Wikipedia page and there will almost always be quotes from filmed like book Goodreads. If you search that on Google, you'll get a good selection so you get a feel for instance, finite and infinite games by car.
Is that something you want to read? Well, you can get a very good taste death. Like, if you don't like the trailer for the movie, you're not going to like the movie rights. If you don't like the Goodreads highlights, you're not going to like the book. I can almost guarantee you and side note on that you were mentioning, you know, what am I optimizing for? Which sounds very much like, it could be a Derek severs question, he has a lot of good questions a variant on that that I'm also found helpful is, what game am I playing? We're all playing games. So it's like, aside from shelter.
Food. A handful of the basics at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs that we're all playing games. So what games are you playing? What are you trying to win?
And becoming cognizant time for that is for me, at least Step 1.
And I think I don't know if this is a question that you've asked before but like, is that game worth winning, you know, like, is this something that like, am I climbing the right mountain? Or do I need to be climbing a different one because it's very
important to make sure that you're in the right game. Yeah, totally. So, you mentioned the tools, not mattering. So much. Choosing the inputs. We talked about books.
For caption when you're like, that's
good. I also, you're right, I do use the sauna mostly, it's a very messy process and asanas, just kind of like a holding ground for it, but I have the app on my phone and I got it pulled up in my, you know, browser all the time. And so it's always right there. I don't really care what the tool is like, in this case, this is what I've been using for the last few years, but it just needs to be something that is always present. And as soon as you have an idea, it always goes into one place. You don't have to think about where you're going to record it and you don't end up with
A random note on your iPhone and another one and Evernote. Doc and the third thing in a Google doc. And you know, like now it's hard to find the ideas if you have on one's like the
story of my life right now. Yes which is why I'm very interested in your use of Asana because Asana, I've used a sonnet on I still use. Yeah. Asana for project management task management but idea capture wasn't a use case. I had really considered. So you would you mind just for people listening explaining? I know this is so
I am very like pedestrian, but like how do you do it without stuff getting
lost? Part of this is again, I'm trying to like simplify things as much as possible and this is maybe we make talk about this more as we kind of go through the conversation. But I have a really small team, it's me and one employee and I'm not interested in having a large team and I want to be as effective and as high leverage as possible. And that means that we need to think really carefully about where we spend our time. And if I always have a bunch of different tools, or I'm always switching between different apps, that's just time. That's kind of wasted. If the job could be done.
Done in the same place. And so we use the sauna to run the book launcher to run the newsletter calendar or two, you know, like for all the other stuff that we do throughout the day. And so I was like well I can write it down here just as well as I can write it down somewhere else and then once it gets categorized, it goes into the appropriate dock for that project. So as an example, let's say I'm reading a book and I come across an idea that's relevant for the newsletter and it's a quote. So I'll probably label the task or the new thing that I put into a saint.
I guess they usually call them Tas but I label Things based on the project it's going to. So I'll just say quote and then I'll paste the quote in and it's labeled. And so I'll go through all those quotes or Lindsay. My employee will go through all this quotes and we'll put them into the spreadsheet. So they're in the right tab or let's say, the next thing I'm reading, I come across an idea that Sparks a thought for me or my co. That would fit into the next chapter for the book. And so I'll write the idea out and then I'll label it based on whatever the topic of the book is so for Atomic
It's the label might be habits. And so at the beginning of any idea, I come across that would fit for the book, I'll put habits. And then a lot of the time, I'll actually put like a second category for the chapter. So let's say that this particular idea was for the chapter on self-control. It'll be habits self-control and then I'll type the ID out and then, you know, a couple times a week. I'll go through everything that's labeled as habits and then put it in the right place in the dock and then it's all kind of there. You could imagine one way to do this.
Faster, which is you could just put it straight into the dock that it needs to live in. Instead of putting it into a saint, I could put it straight into the 321 newsletter sheet or I can put it straight into the chapter for the book, but I've noticed that the problem is, I got a lot of projects going at one time and a lot of notes from places where things could live. And so, if I'm always having to remember, which thing to pull up, then you either end up with like a bazillion tabs open, or it just as hard to remember, which things need to go. We're at the exact moment when you have the idea and
and a lot of the time, I'll have an idea what I'm on a walk or in the middle of a workout. And so I'm not in a position to pull up the book manuscript. I just need to be able to get it down and then I can sort it
later for people with saying what I'm trying to do in this conversation, will see how successful it is is to zoom in and zoom out, and we'll zoom out and we'll talk about conceptual framework or particular focal point, whether it's within the atomic habits Paradigm, or outside of it, just given what you focus on.
And then zoom in. So we can take a look at how this jams, run systems or develop systems in location X in his life. Right. So the one employee small team is where I'd like to go next. Sure if that's okay with you. Yep.
How do you suppose try to build systems? Ensure maximum leverage with a very small team? This is always of interest to me. I have a small team, it has always been of interest to me like small Giants by Bo Burnham. Think of the subtitle is companies that choose to be great. Instead of big or something like that. I've always been fascinated by positive constraints. So, one you can set is I'm not going to have a big team. Yeah, I'm not.
Going to hire a lot of people so then you have to make decisions that fall in line with optimizing not optimizing for that but operating within that constraint.
Sure. What are some of the productivity
principles guiding questions and so on that? You have
the first I'll just say like, I'm not saying this is out, everybody should run their business, it's just how I choose to run mine and you have to choose what you're trying to accomplish. And in my case, like I don't want to have a big team, but I do want to make as big of an impact as possible. And so, the first question is
Ask is like rather than optimizing for money. Let's optimize for time. So how do I want to spend my days? And then I try to make as few choices as possible. The violate that answer and you got to keep coming back to that. How do I want to spend my days? What I want my time to be spent on and within that. How can we reach the most people possible or make the most money possible? But not without violating that because there's like all kinds of things you doing. I got staff up like a build a bigger Business Without but like I'm not interested in spending my days like that.
So that's the first thing is, you got to decide what you're trying to do, a question that I love and I keep coming back to for increasing leverage, and I try to encourage both Lindsay and I to think about this over and over again, is what is the work that keeps working for us once it's done? So as an example, when Atomic habits came out, I did a ton interviews and some of those interviews were on radio and I don't really do radio interviews anymore, because as soon as I get done with that 10 minute segments or whatever it was,
All the work that I put in it, vanishes, nobody's listening anymore, it's off the air, whereas a podcast, like, you know what we're doing right now is being recorded and so people can continue to listen to it and, you know, I've done a bunch of podcast for the book and there's somebody Somewhere listening to one of them. Right now, it's almost like there are multiple versions of James out there and they're all continuing to work right now. And that's an example of like the work that keeps working for you. Once it's done, if you can do one or two things, a day that are going to keep
Keep working for you in the long run man. You end up like two or three or five years later and you just have this tidal wave of previous effort that is working for you. So let me give you a couple different examples and stories from my personal experience. I wrote this article a couple years ago is called the physics of productivity and it was just taken like you know Newton's three laws and applying them to productivity and kind of this. Hopefully clever way and it did find it. Didn't the article didn't blow up or anything but it's just kind of a normal piece and it's that they're on.
Site and people would occasionally read it. And then a couple years later, this journalist from The New York Times read that article and they were writing this piece and they linked to the original article in it and it wasn't much. It was just like a sentence but they link to the website.
Well, there's this producer for
CBS that read the article in the New York Times and then click through to my site and sent me an email and said, hey, do you want to come on CBS This Morning and talked about this piece? And so I was like, okay sure, so they flew me to New York and I did the segment and it was my first time on TV.
And so I was all nervous about it but can try to do my best and have a good segment and as soon as it got done, I went over to Gayle King and I said, I have this book coming out in 10 months. So this was like ten months before Atomic habits. I would love to come back and do a segment about
that when Mark when book
comes out and she said, sure thing, we'll have you back, just make sure that where your first stop. Don't do any other interviews on TV shows before for us and so as soon as I left, I got her email and I sent a message to her and the publisher and everybody. And I got on the calendar for launch day.
And that was how I got on CBS This Morning for the launch of atomic habits. And that ended up being, I think a kind of an important moment for the launch of the book because
It made it feel like a thing, you know, it wasn't just a guy launching a book. It was like, oh, this is a bigger event and I don't know how many books that segment sold. I've tried to calculate it probably more than 1,000 probably less than 10,000 probably somewhere in that range, but as soon as the segment got over they put that clip on YouTube and then like two hours later we took the YouTube clip and emailed out to my audience and that was the launch email for the book that day was like, here's my second. I'm sending us this morning. The book is out and so
So what I'm getting at is that work of writing that article about the physics of productivity, that work continued to work for me and really big ways three or five or six years later. Even though the initial article didn't seem like that big of a deal and the reason it worked out is because that was work that kept working for me once it was done. So anytime you create an asset that can compound a blog post a podcast episode, even simple stuff like Twitter posts and Instagram posts are less likely.
Because they kind of have a short half-life but even those can be examples of putting work out there that is still being recorded and still being stumbled across by people online, and you're creating a large surface area. For good things to kind of break your way if you spend time doing that. Now, I think you can even do better than that, which is not only, can you create assets that compound and keep working for you, you can do it in a way where they layer on top of each other. So I'll spend 20 minutes on a tweet.
And that seems kind of like an excessive amount of time to spend writing two sentences, but the time that I put into that, I'll put it out there and it's it's own little asset. And then maybe if it does well, I'm like, hey, I should we should use that in the newsletter. And so it goes in the newsletter and then maybe becomes the seed of an idea for a longer chapter or an article in a book or something, or it gets added to related ideas that can become something bigger. And so now that 20 minutes is actually doing a lot more work than just gaining a few Twitter followers.
Yes. And if you can find ways to layer, those little assets on top of each other, then you get three or five or six years down the line and you really have a dramatic effect. So those are a couple different ways to kind of like try to operate in a high leverage way with a really small
team.
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In the last week, recording this towards the end of December 2020. To Twitter is one example has made a number of changes that have suspended a number of my Twitter accounts and there's no explanation provided, no particular bad behavior that I or my team can identify but suspended the last and then they get reinstated and then two days later, they get suspended again. Can't figure it out, but what this means is much
Gwen say, Facebook started out on state, requiring highly encouraging boosting, AKA paying for promotion of posts to reach your previously. Organic audience, people's business models and audience size. Started to effectively disintegrate and having email is so. So valuable, which is why I'm also spending some time on this, and it's important to me that's just a background setting the table so that I can ask you when something is going wrong aside from reaching out to
Say your email service provider and saying hey this is something funny. Got something broken, is there a monkey wrench in the work? Yeah. How would you go about figuring things
out? I like to think about it as there's internal distribution. So those are the things that I own and you really can only own kind of a few assets. Like you can own your website, you can on your email list, you can own your podcast. That's kind of roughly about it. Print and then the other bucket is external so this is other people's platforms that you can have.
Shit on YouTube, Tick, Tock, Twitter, Facebook, Etc, and as much as possible. I think the web is it is very platform Centric right now, and people spend a lot of time on those platforms. I don't want to be on all of them because I don't have enough time and energy to be good at all of them, but they're probably a few that are a good fit for my audience. So, Twitter and Instagram are the two that we've decided to focus
on and talk dances coming. So
Tick-Tock routines yet. Yeah.
Figure out how to tie that into habits, will will see what gums. So I post on those two platforms and then I try to build an audience there, but also you'll notice a lot of the posts that I put up on their so Instagram. For example, I have a very weird Instagram account because I don't share any pictures of myself. I'm not like, not
really interested in like me as an individual being out
there, but it's all about the ideas. And so it's just a bunch of text, but on many of them, at the bottom of the image or in the caption, it'll say, you know, here's a quote. And then at the bottom will say
You know, get more ideas like this, sign up for three, two, one and then it will have a link to the newsletter. And so the idea is to subtly be encouraging people to go off platform and join one of the assets, or one of the pieces of audience that I do. Own one of the internal ones like the website, or the newsletter, or whatever. And so, I try to get those things to work together, Aang, like, cross link between the two, and then they can start to build each other and I do it the other way, as well, like, when I send out a newsletter sometimes, if the
Diaz are short enough and they would make a good tweet. All include a little link under each idea. No, just say click to tweet. And so now the newsletter is driving action on Twitter and so that it all kind of like you create this little spider web this kind of ecosystem where everything is kind of driving each other and, you know, it all kind of grows together, but
The ultimate idea is to try to point back the external platforms to the distribution sources that you do own. So that you're not the Holden to any particular one when they decide to change their strategy or
approach. Yeah. Which is specifically, why a whole bunch of stuff is getting banned or Shadow band right now and Twitter and this is the best theory I could come up with and I can't get this verified or denied is that because some of these accounts which were created for a new podcast.
They came out have legitimate contact but they all link out to Apple podcasts this. The only plausible explanation that we can come up with for why they have been locked and they keep getting unlocked. So I don't want to make anybody seem like the bad guy here, but it highlights the fragility of having something that is entirely dependent on.
A platform that you don't owe and also, if you were to read your terms of service, you're probably giving all of that content to the platform as well on some level. And I recall chatting with this guy, this is many years ago before the organic reach was throttled a lot on Facebook chatting with a guy who had a multimillion-dollar business built on a few Facebook pages and massively successful and I asked him what it felt like to run those businesses and he said,
Ed. I feel like I have the most profitable McDonald's in the world built on top of an active volcano. Yeah. It could go away any minute and I don't want to live with that anxiety. Also and I just could add a few things just to feather the men with your comments, you know, one is
It's very important to adapt. I would add something to that, which is it's very important to adapt, but I think it's really critical to have a good explanation for how you are adapting and not to discard for the sake of discarding. And just as an example to give people a window into my thinking, read it in. Some of these other platforms, still can drive a lot of traffic, but they're not sexy and people start to neglect them. So there's far less competition.
On some of these older let's just call it platforms that are actually still innovating quite well in the case of Reddit. So I've thought about revisiting some of the Vintage powerhouses because there's been such a mass migration to particularly short form video. It just seems like a bloodbath and I would also say something. I think you've done very well is set constraints on what you will or will not do today on social platforms. Because one of the
Risks of adapting is that you become a slave to the audience in such a way that you morph into this fun house mirror caricature of yourself. And I've seen this happen to a lot of people where they put out 10 posts and the most extreme of those gets the most engagement or feedback or positive lights etcetera. And so they then put out five more like that. The most extreme gets the best response and a year later.
It not only has their social feed become like the craziest infomercial pitch man, yelling circus, but this is the greater risk, is that they in real life, have started to become the mask that they've created for themselves. This is a very real risk. The setting up the constraints on what you will or will not do in advance before you get on that playing field. I think is really really
The, at least for me very, very important, how do you think about that? Or have you thought about
that? Well, this connects to one of the core ideas and atomic habits, which is your habits or how you embody a particular identity. So the aspects, the behaviors that you perform each day are reinforcing or shaping the story that you have about yourself. I think it's important to ask yourself, like who is the type of person? I wish to become, you know, like what's the type of identity? I want to be a reinforcing, and your habits are not, the only things that in,
Influence that in life. Like every experience is part of who you are but by virtue of the fact that they get repeated again. And again, they have an outsized influence on your story and so, you know, the phrase I like to keep in mind as every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. And so as you show up each day and make another YouTube video or do another Tick Tock video, You're casting a vote for being that kind of person and if you let the algorithm run it, if you let yourself kind of fall,
To this, as you said, mask that you're wearing for the audience, pretty soon, you actually are like casting enough votes that the bulk of the evidence starts to support that part of your identity. You start to become that kind of person. And this is why I come back to some of those questions that we were talking about earlier. Like, what am I optimizing
for, or how do I
want to spend my days? Because you got to start there and set the positive constraints for yourself who's the type person? I wish to become, what am I trying? What kind of Lifestyle my trying to create?
Myself. And then within that
constraint, how can I have the biggest audience,
or how can I make the most money, or how can I make the biggest impact? But I think that's a way of trying to Anchor yourself and not like lose yourself and let the algorithm kind of run the show. So I think it, your habits, and your identity or very connected and the actions that you take shape or support, they provide evidence for the type of person that you are. And so it's worth asking yourself what are my actions moving me closer to and you want to make sure that your honor
Path. May I read something from your fantastic website. So this is on identity-based habits. I want to highlight this and add it to what you just said, because I think it's critically important and feel free to revise any of this and can't believe everything you read on the internet to. So, who
knows, even if it comes on my website, I don't think I see.
Sofia is infiltrated your website or anything like that. So let me, let me just give this a rude. The key to building lasting habits is focusing on.
Creating a new identity first. That's the sentence. I'd love to get your take on your current behaviors, are simply a reflection of your current identity, what you do now is a mirror image of the type of person, you believe that you are either consciously or subconsciously to change your behavior for good. You need to start believing new things about yourself. You need to build identity-based habits.
You like to add anything to that. The creating a new identity first is, I think the piece that is of greatest interest to me, how would somebody go about doing that? Let's say they're listening to this, just moving into the new year, James please tell me.
Well, it's kind of a two-step process decide the type of person you want to be and then you prove it to yourself with small wins and the more small wins, the more small habits that you perform
The more votes that you cast for that identity, the more you build up evidence to being that kind of person and eventually you start to take pride in that aspect of your identity and man once we start to take pride in a part of our story, like it's much easier to stick with those habits. If you take pride in the size of your biceps, you like never skip arm day at the gym. You know, you take pride in how your hair looks. You have this like long hair care, routine, all these Hair Care habits and you do them every day. It's going to say
and might be past that point for you and I think you and I have not had
What is a good way to phrase that? So if someone wants to have not a mission statement, but some type of
Yep, see for this is the type of
person I want to be. I think it's I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or I'm the type of person who shows up on time, or I'm the type of person who finishes, what they start, whatever aspect of your identity that you're trying to reinforce that's kind of the the story. You can also phrase it as a question. So for example, rather than saying, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. You could have this question, that's related to the identity. You want to build and you kind of carry it around.
All day and like in this example, maybe the question is, what would a healthy person do? And so you're just kind of walking around all day asking yourself, what should I get for lunch? Well, what would a healthy person do? Or should I take an Uber? Should I walk to the next meeting? Well, what would a healthy person do? And you just kind of like go around your day and try to make decisions that you feel like support that identity? But I think you start with who is the type of person I wish to become. So let's say I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, and then the second step is prove it to yourself a small wins.
So, which small actions, what little habits cast votes for being the kind of person who doesn't miss workouts? Well, maybe one thing is
Rather than doing a 45-minute workout when I only have 10 minutes, I reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule, and I do a couple Sprint's or I do, you know, five sets of push-ups or whatever it is. And so you find ways to reinforce your desired identity, even if it's small, especially in the beginning. Because if you can show up consistently, if you kind of mastered, the art of showing up and Performing these small habits, you build up this sense of momentum. You kind of start to reinforce and shape that
Identity and the more evidence that you have for it at some point, you kind of cross this invisible threshold where you're like, oh, I guess I am that kind of person, you know? Like if you go out and shoot a basketball, 45 minutes, you don't think, oh, I'm a basketball player. But if you do it every day for six months, or a year or two years, like, at some point, you cross this invisible line, you're like, you know, I guess playing basketball is kind of part of who I am. So yeah, I think you're trying to accumulate
Actions that support your desired
identity.
So, let's do a case study, and we're going to take a look at. This is purely selfish at email because you've been very methodical and executed very well with email. I also have the five bullet Friday which has been going for God. I'm not missed it. We can kind of how many years, it's been a long time. It's pretty wild. It serves assessor of a diary for me too. I love. This is true for you, but looking back at these additions is actually very fun for me. Excited.
Be like oh three and a half years
ago. Oh yeah, that week. Wow, look at that dumb past him was pretty hot. President Kim is so much smarter. I've learned so much.
Oh gosh! Yes. One kept waking
dream like a dream. So let's
say one of my resolutions and this is going to be a bit of a force fit but not necessarily. So like I am someone who prioritizes email above all the other platforms and grows it consistently. And you may have some familiarity with my
Newsletter and how we do things and I know you have had some exchanges before. What might be some small wins or just changes that you would make? Then yes, you would add try test, anything at all.
So I like was browsing your website a little bit before this conversation. And I kind of feel like the main difference. Also, first of all, I just need to say you already have an enormously Melissa like to do
some kind of,
you know, to do some sort of like, intervention on somebody who's got millions of subscribers is like, kind of a
Ridiculous premise to start with but I'll tell you the question seriously. No no I want to
give credit where credit is due. I think you have more. I think that you're prioritizing is better reflected in your actions and decisions with respect to email then in my case
it's interesting you say that that was what I was about to say is I feel like the only difference, the only primary difference is you emphasize the podcast as your like number one and I emphasize email as like my number one
One and something has to leave the day now that, you know, of course, this does not mean that's a bad decision by you, right? Podcast is enormous. And it probably is, the more important thing for your business. But each person needs to decide what that is in my case. If you go to my website it's very clear. Like the if something is going to be the primary call to action on the homepage, it's the email list, not a podcast or you know whatever. So that's just a question that like you need to have is like are we willing to emphasize this more? And if not then that's a positive constraint your setting and
You can decide, okay, given that emails going to be number two to the podcast. How can we grow it
more? Well you know you've raised such a simple idea for me. I right now. If you look at the homepage right? It's hot guy. Yep, on the top on the banner and then you have the email sign up which is sort of right below that to the right. Yep. And it could be as simple as I. Alright, well look, this doesn't have to be a forever decision. Let's just swap those two for a period of time, make the top, the email, the whole thing is email. Everybody's bias to how their story played out. So I'm biased.
Say emails, the
most important but my stance on it is make the banner on your home page, the email list and then you can email all the podcast episodes out to these people.
Yeah, every time I think about it sensibly.
Email is the most important because you can share the podcast, much more easily via email that you can share the news letter via podcast because to share email via podcast requires task-switching. Yep, almost I do want to say always but probably 90% of the time find it didn't just pull a number out of my ass. People are listening to a podcast as a secondary activity.
Very different Beast than someone who sits down opens, an email and clicks on links. They are opening an email, explicitly in the case of 50 Friday. And perhaps also in the case of your email to find things to learn and investigate.
Well this is kind of what you're getting at. But email is in a position where both of the assets are very flexible. You can talk about whatever you want in a podcast and you can write about whatever you want in a Nino but email has the advantage of having links that you can click on.
Right away and so it can be immediately acted upon whereas as you mentioned, often people are listening to a podcast while they're on a run or making dinner or in a car and they're not in a position to click on a link right then. And so even if you tell them give them a great URL to go to it. Just the conversion rates not going to be nearly as high because people are busy and then by the time they get home they don't remember to do it. And you know, so anyway, I for all those reasons I like you more and honestly I kind of feel like they're really only two things that came to mind. The
First is, are you going to emphasize it more in the web design? So put it above the banner at the top of the page, or above the fold. And then the second thing is, how are you cross-pollinating between your different assets? So, I mentioned Instagram for me, that's like of the top five ways that we drive email subscribers, Instagram is one of them and the reason is because a lot of the posts have Links at the bottom, that encourage people to sign up for 321, or they mention the newsletter in the caption or a story that we post will have
Like an actual Link in it, that you can click to the sign up on the page. So we're you using your other assets like Instagram or Twitter or the podcast to drive email subscribers example, for the podcast would be. I know for previous episodes. I don't know if you do this for every episode, but sometimes you'll mention five bullet Friday at the end. What if we mentioned it at the beginning of the show? Rather than the end of the show, more people are going to be listening in the first minute that are going to be listening in the 120th minute. So it's really just
Out using the other assets to cross pollinate and to do it at strategic points that are high leverage. I would rather make fewer asks, but to do it at the exact right moment. Then to kind of like sprinkle calls to action everywhere.
Those are the two things. Yeah, I'm one. I want to share one of your questions if that's okay. This is from your newsletter. Someone compiled, your questions over two years, put them in a blog post and one of them have many highlighted this is one that related.
To my prioritization of email. And as you pointed out focusing on the podcast, the placement of the mention of fiber or Friday being at the end, as opposed to the beginning and it is, if someone could only see my actions, and not hear my words, what would they say or my priorities? That's a good one. It's a good one. Like a don't tell me what's important to show me your calendar pal. Yeah. Okay there we go.
We all have stories that we tell ourselves, you know, like it's very easy for us to justify internally.
If you just look at how you're acting, what do you actually emphasizing? I think we all have felt that pain at various times, which I should say. These are just questions. I come up with for like, the readers. Like, these are all things I need to ask myself, you know, I pretty much everything. I write is intended to help me get back to Center, or, to course,
correct. And also, to reinforce something. You just said, The more success you have even if it's small amount, although I do think it tends to go.
Go somewhat exponential. At some point, there may be exceptions to this but among my friends and peer Group, whatever, that might mean, uniformly, I have seen the more success you have, whether it's a base set or a double or a home run or 10 home runs the harder, it becomes to focus or a lot of people because in the beginning stages of your career or maybe mid stages you're choosing between
I mean, unattractive, options. And maybe one or two attractive
options, you're trying to generate attractive options. There like nitride are you trying to create them, ya know, our fire trucks because they're interactive options.
Exactly. Once you go from having one attractive option to to attractive options on your menu,
Things really changed dramatically and then when that goes to ten things and then it goes to 10, interesting people with 10, interesting things, it gets harder. So it's, and I'm not saying this to ask my audience to cry a river for me, I don't expect that. You know, woe is me. It's these are quality problems, but you really want to sharpen the axe of asking these types of questions and building these systems before.
Or you have.
Your first one or two base hits because if you try to sharpen the axe when you are feeling as though you are just up to your neck and water kind of floating down the Rapids. It's going to be very very hard. I would just say
well success generates not only opportunities but also distractions. And so in a sense like success almost comes to
selling, you know, it's like yeah
do you get good at something? And so then that brings new opportunities your way some of them are novel or
A different. And so you do those and then you turn around, six months later and you don't have any time to do the thing that made you successful in the first place. So, you gotta be careful about what you say, yes
to. I'd like to ask you that two goals / habits, / behavioral modifications that are of interest to me personally. And also, I would imagine of Interest other people listening, and I'm curious because you've had 10 million copies, sold you've interacted with, or certainly observed. A lot of your
Readers people have tested different things from the book. Let's start with. Well, the two that come to mind, and I've actually good at the second, but the two are cutting back on caffeine and meditating. So, the meditating is an addition, the cutting back on caffeine, and a lot of people would think of, as a subtraction. I would love to hear any thoughts. You might have on cutting back on caffeine.
If you want to break a bad habit, there are kind of three potential paths you could take. So, the first is, you can eliminate
It entirely. So elimination second option is you can reduce it so you could like curtail it to the desired degree. I don't want to never drink caffeine or just want to drink less of it. And the third option is, you could substitute it. You could replace it with a different habit and of those three often times replacing, it is actually the more effective option. So, for example, if you get your caffeine from drinking Coke or soda or something like that, then maybe you find out hey, you know, something I really love her.
This experience is, I actually just like drinking a carbonated beverage and so it's the carbonation that I like and maybe if I substitute it with sparkling water or something like that. I still get the carbonation sensation but I don't have the caffeine associated with it anymore and so that's a way of substituting for that behavior and you still get something that the experience provides. This
is actually kind of an important, larger picture, big picture
thing about habits, which is every habit that you have.
We build habits
to solve the repeated problems that we face in life and I'm using problems in a very general sense here. You know, like let's say that you come home from work, and you feel tired and exhausted from a long day. Well, in a sense coming home from work at 6 p.m. and feeling tired is a problem and especially if you experience it repeatedly you got to come up with some kind of solution for that and generally speaking we just kind of like try things out in life and so
So you can imagine one person solves. The problem of feeling exhausted by scrolling Instagram mindlessly, for 30 minutes, and another person solves that problem by playing video games, for an hour and a third person solves it by going for a run for 20 minutes and those are all solutions to the same kind of underlying problem, but some of them are more healthy or more productive or service better than others. And what do you think the odds are that the solutions you've come up with to the repeated problems?
In your life are the optimal one like it's just so unlikely that whatever you happen to have stumbled into throughout life is the perfect way or the best habit that serves you most. So I think what I'm trying to get out there is maybe take a little bit of the pressure off yourself and don't worry about judging yourself so much. You're just trying to solve the repeated problems that you face. But once you realize that it's unlikely that you're still current Solutions are the Optimal Solutions. Well, now maybe we can step outside and above ourselves and look down and try to
To come up with a better solution. So rather than drinking a Coke to get the carbonation, we can drink Sparkling Water. So that's one example, for the substitution, if we want to take the other path of reduction, something I've noticed about myself is if I get a six pack of beer and I put it in the, the front of the fridge, like, in
the door, or
on a shelf, that's like right at eye level. I'll drink one every night just because there, but if I take it, and put it on the lowest shelf in the fridge, and like it's kind of all the way back in the corner. I can't really see it. Unless I'm bending down.
It'll sit there for two weeks or three weeks like, and so I'm, like, did I want it or not? If it was obvious, then I grab one. But if it wasn't, then I avoid it. And I think that's a simple question to ask yourself. Where do I get my caffeine. Is it coffee? Is it soda? And is that really obvious? Is that like the coffee sitting right out on the counter is the the soda. Like the first thing I see at eye level when I open the fridge and how can I make it less obvious in atomic habits? That are kind of what I call the four laws of behavior change. And it's just this big
Big picture view of how to build a good habit. So, if you want to build a good habit, you want to make your habits obvious attractive, easy and satisfying. And if you want to break a bad habit, you just do the opposite of those four. So you want to make it invisible. Make it unattractive. Make it difficult and make it unsatisfying. And so, I think, how can you make coffee or soda invisible? How can you make it difficult to drink? Like, keep it outside of the house. Etc. So there are a variety of strategies you could use here, you know, like let's say you live with a family and other people are going
Want to drink it but you don't want to. There's this little kind of diabolical, tupperware container called the kitchen safe and it has a lockbox code on the top of it. And so you could give the other family members the lockbox code, but then they don't give it to you and you just put the soda inside of that. And so it stays in that Tupperware and you can't access it. So finding ways to increase friction, or to make it difficult, or to make it less obvious. Those are all ways to potentially curtail the caffeine
habit, a locking.
In tupperware. What is it called? Again, it's
called the kitchen safe, the kitchen
safe. There are a few variations of this, and I know a number of families who use them for our phones. So, they will have mealtime, or evening, time or whenever it is and I'll put the phones in the safe. Sure. And that's where they sit until the phone free time. As I've
had readers, use it for like late night snacking. The chips go in at 7 p.m. or they're just they just stay in that type of work and it's
It sent a lock from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. And so they just, you know, they can't get to him late night. I'm
just imagining myself. So I'll give you a confession. So I love brownies and two days ago for the first time made brownies and spiced cider is like a whole Christmas celebration thing even though it's not Christmas yet. And I ate all the brownies last night. I'm not proud of this. I'm not beating myself up about it because I'm gonna yeah, I'm working out, it's fine, it's not a big deal but I'm just imagining if I
I put the brownies into this lock and container. And do you know what, a bear been has their these here. Contraptions that you use for cabin was imagining me, like swatting, the safe around smashing on the ground, trying to get the brownies up. Anyway, that's more for my own gratification folks. So, thanks for listening. Let's talk about positive and you already alluded to the for, yeah, principles or laws or ingredients. But meditating, sure, I think for a lot of folks meditating is in the air.
They've heard about it on this podcast. I know I should do it. I just don't know about the time. I have my coffee and do this and make the sandwiches for the kids. It's too late. How would you suggest people approach saying meditating in the morning
couple things to think about here. So again, let me just run through the the four laws
real quick just as a primer for this
answer. So if you want to build a good habit, roughly speaking, there are four things that you can do. You want to make it obvious?
You want to make it attractive, you want to make it easy and you want to make it satisfying, so obvious attractive, easy, satisfying. Now, if you're sitting there and you're thinking, how can I get myself to meditate more, you can just turn those into questions and you can say, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying and you'll start to notice different things you could do. So for example, how can I make meditation more obvious? Well do you have a clear space where you're going to do this?
Like maybe you need a meditation pillow. And it's in the corner of your bedroom or it's in the corner of some other room. That is the dedicated meditation space, and this is exactly where it happens. So it's obvious where the behavior is going to occur.
Make it attractive,
there are many different types of meditation, and there are a lot of ways to get into it, and this is true for any habit, by the way, for some reason, I think we often choose habits that we feel like we should do, but it's not necessarily the one that we want to do individually.
And you know, there may not necessarily be a thousand ways to do everything in life, but there's almost always more than one way and you should choose the version that you're most genuinely excited about. You know, that is most appealing and interesting to you because if you're genuinely interested in it, then there's going to be all kinds of ways to improve. You'll find all sorts of things that you could like it refine or make it better. But if you're not actually interested, if you're like, not genuinely engaged in the task, even the obvious stuff is going to feel like a hassle, you know.
This is going to feel like a chore even if it's straight forward. So do you want a guided meditation? Maybe it'd be nice to have somebody kind of walk you through it, or do you want to find a meditation that has like lovely music associated with it? Do you not want anything? Do you just want silence? And you want to be able to like hear yourself think, for a minute or listen to your own breath for five minutes? And that's kind of the objective. But what sounds most attractive and appealing to you. Try to find a version of The Habit that you're actually interested in. This actually, I think connects to the timing piece that you were talking about
About Tim which is yeah in the morning is a great time for a lot of people but if you have young kids and like your four-year-old is running around, you're trying to figure out how to get pants on them and you need to make, you know breakfast. But like that's probably not a good time to do it. So like find a time in a space where that habit can live where it's attractive and you're not just going to end up frustrated because you're trying to like swim upstream, make it easy. So, rather than doing 15, or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of meditation, which hey, that sounds great. Because your favorite Guru does it?
But listen like why not just do 60 seconds because if you can Master the art of showing up if you can just do it for a minute and actually stick to that day in and day out. Then you're starting to build the habit and now you have something you'd like gained a foothold and you can advance the next level. One of the things I recommend in the book is called the two-minute Rule and it says, just take whatever happy you're trying to build and you scale it down to some of them takes 2 minutes or less to do. So read 30 books, a year becomes read one page or meditate.
Five days a week for 30 minutes, becomes meditate for 60 seconds. And you're just trying to master the art of showing up a habit. Must be established before it can be improved. It's got to become like the standard before, you worry about, optimizing it into some perfect thing, so make it easy to do, make it easy to show up and then the final thing is make it satisfying. Now, if you've done those first three steps, well, it's obvious, it's an attractive version of it. It's pretty easy to do. You're probably going to feel pretty good about yourself because you're at the end of The Meditation session now. So like that'll probably be pretty sad.
Defying, but you can layer on some kind of additional benefit, maybe you get to have your favorite type of coffee or your favorite drink after that or maybe you get to have a bubble bath or a walk in the woods or whatever sounds motivating to you. So find some way to add some additional positive emotions to the experience, because if you feel good about it, you're going to want to repeat it and this is something that an atomic habits. I call it the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is
Behaviors that get rewarded, get repeated and behaviors to get punished, get avoided and is so basic, it's so obvious, but all humans want to feel good, you know, we all want to have positive emotions to be supported to be loved, to be rewarded to have something that feels good. And so, how can you get that feeling and associated with your habits? That's kind of the, the core idea. And ultimately this connects back to what we talked about with identity, which is the perfect version is when
You perform a habit and you feel good because it's reinforcing your desired identity. You know, I'm the type of person who wants to meditate each day or I'm the type of person who doesn't miss meditation sessions. And then, even if it's only 60 seconds, you can feel good about doing it because it's reinforcing your desired identity. So, that's kind of a quick case study on how to apply the
ideas. Yeah. Totally, as you're speaking, I'm thinking about all these other questions and how you could phrase the I'm the type of person who looks
Coordinating, right. Like how do you make that a true soon and it actually brought me back to San Francisco many many, many years ago before I took my first meditation training and so on and so forth. I began I hadn't thought about this like, a decade. At least I began with listening to. I think it was we're going to party like it's 1999 by Prince. One song nice. And in the morning I would just sit down lean against the wall getting good posture and just breathe deeply while extending to Prince for one sock. That was it.
And it made a difference, it made a difference because as you said, I've never thought of it in these terms, but I became accustomed to showing up and Simply Having however small it might have been, it was small a tiny slot in my mental calendar, which was, when I wake up, I'm going to sit down and do this thing. And then when I did Transcendental Meditation training, later in the experimenters, many different forms of meditation since going from 3 minutes to 20 minutes,
Was a dilation of the amount of time required but it wasn't introducing an entirely new species of calendar slot. We've met is already there.
Once you've mastered the art of showing up, scaling it up, increasing the scope is much easier. Once you're already the kind of person who's doing it every day. You know? And those are good examples. I think actually. Maybe I don't know if it's your question, Tim right. I feel like I've heard you say it before but this idea of what would this look like? If it was easy, you know, or how, what would that look like?
The kind of person who looks forward to riding or looks forward to meditate and looks forward to working out. Its own question worth taking seriously because you can usually design The Habit to feel like, hey, this isn't a tour, like this is how I want to be spending my days and that's really where you want to get to. Because for a habit to last, it's got to be part of your normal lifestyle. It has to be something that you want to show up and do this each day. And so you're trying to find the version of it. That benefits you the most.
What would this look like? Or what? Might this? Look like if it were easy as a question, I ask myself.
All the time. And part of the reason for that is that I for most of my life prided myself on having high pain tolerance, being able to do the hard things in service of the long-term and when you're starting out like you said, kind of clawing your way to any good opportunity, or any open window, and you're just kind of slipping back on the mud slope of establishing any type of
your opening windows that are closed. People are like, that was locked.
Not anymore clawing like a raccoon at the window, trying to figure out the lock. And
At least for me, I think I began to associate result with grinding or some degree of effort, the association would be if my effort isn't above a certain threshold, I am not doing the thing that will produce an optimal result in the past, a certain point that can be a false filter if that makes any sense. So I asked myself that constantly, if I'm recording a podcast,
And I thought, just even example, I haven't done this yet but I thought, you know what? The technology is good enough. Why do I do podcasts? At least as it stands right now in a static position, why not figure out get the best headset available, figure out connectivity and go for a walk figure out a way to record a podcast while I'm walking. Yeah. And I would, I would check off a number of these laws that you mentioned, microphone and one hand
Starling dish in the other, you're just going to be
Yeah. Tim's gonna be right and you'll be like the ultimate version of the guys like sifting for gold on the beach, like you're going to be. Oh
yeah. I've been amazing. Yeah. Just put the star like on the back of my head. Yeah. Mounted on top of the headset. Let's use Atomic. Haven't says the case study yeah. How would you deconstruct Tomic habits both in its writing but then also its launch right? Because those are intertwined. Yeah. In what made it successful, what were the things that really seems to be the Archimedes?
Hers for producing to the extent that you can figure on one side of the tennis net. Yeah. So any examples,
this will probably be a long answer because there's a lot to talk about. So let's break it into two categories writing and marketing. The truth is the honest answer might be like, I don't know, I got lucky, you know, like that, that maybe that's maybe that's the truth. But I suspect that there are a lot of things you can do to influence the outcome and I'll walk you through what I tried to do. So on the writing side, I think you
Have to operate with this Assumption of like let me create more value than I'm going to capture the try to produce a hit. The ultimate thing that drives Book Sales is creating something that is actually genuinely valuable to people and it has to be so good that people will talk about it word-of-mouth. You know Atomic habits has sold over 10 million copies of this point. We could argue, I'd be interested to know what you think the estimate is too, but there's some number of copies that you could sell just by having it.
Audience and a good marketing plan and sheer force of will and putting a lot of effort in maybe it's 25,000, maybe it's 100,000, I don't know, at some point. There's some number where you can't get beyond that. Even if you have a large audience, just by the marketing energy, it has to be word of mouth. And I think certainly once you're in the millions or tens of millions of copies, like the only way a book grows that much is people recommend it and I like Seth Godin has measure for this which is says, if you want Word of Mouth,
With you have to create something remarkable and that means that it's worthy of remark, right? Then it's like worthy of talking about. So you have to start with that. So like the three things that I always focus on our am I writing something that's Timeless. So if it's Timeless and Evergreen, then you have a longer period where it could become a hit. If it's something that's just really relevant to the current moment. Two years from now. You've kind of past your window for it, taking off.
Looks like the blog post you wrote. They got to the producers for
Of us. Yes, right, exactly. There's apple right in my writing, something that's pretty Universal. So, that's another kind of filter for me. Everybody has habits, everybody's trying to build good habits to break bad ones, even if they're not thinking about it like carefully, it's just kind of part of life. And so, not everybody in the world is going to buy the book but pretty much, anybody can look at the cover and be like, yeah, I get why that would be useful. That's a thing that, you know, most people are going to want. So Timeless is a universal and then I feel like you have to pick something that fascinates you
Because if you're genuinely interested in it, that comes through in the writing, I think, Morgan housel has some kind of line where it's, like, writing for yourself is fun and it shows writing for other people is work and it shows. And, you know, I have a good BS meter for
that quick side, sell for Morgan the psychology of money. The title may seem to narak. The book is outstanding. Yeah. More than great
really enjoying it. Yeah, yeah, he's fantastic. Okay, so that's, that's kind of like my rights on the timeless.
Read something Universal, write. Something that fascinates you and do all that with the intention of creating something genuinely remarkable or that creates value for people. Those things sound good. I think it's worth asking like what does it look like in practice to actually do that abso as something? Let me just give you
some examples and I'm just going to keep interrupting because because I've had too much caffeine, I'm going to blame it on the cafe. I would also love to at some point. You're going to give some examples. I would love to know how you thought about.
Modeling other books were constructing the format and layout of your book not the visual layout per se. No, I know what you mean, structuring the books. I've seen many examples of you. Deconstructing sentences quiz.
Application essays, we probably won't
get to that. But when you went to Switzerland, right? Yep. You're very good at modeling. So at some point, I'd love for you to speak to that. Yeah, I think you should
deconstruct the cool things that you see in life, you know, like when you come across something that you really like or that you think school zone my case, like I was writing a book so how do I deconstruct bestsellers? What's going on there? And if you find a single example of something, it doesn't really tell you anything, but if you start to find patterns, then that's probably something to pay attention to.
To. So, I think actually is a great segue to kind of some of these examples, I was going to give. So let's say, when I was writing a time a cab it's early on, I was like, how I know what I'm trying to achieve and trying to write the most comprehensive and most useful book that's ever been written on habits now. I have no idea if I achieve that and it's not really for me to decide if we're being honest, like I don't get to choose that it did that. It's, that's up to the readers to decide. Is that a Mark? That you hit or not? But I think that has to be the target. You got to start there. Otherwise you're never.
Just going to stumble into that outcome, you know? So like you have to, like, try to intend to create something great. So, how do we do that? I looked at a bunch of books, not just about habits, but also other best sellers. One of the first things I did was I went to the table of contents for all those books and then I was like, how are these books are arranged. And what you'll find is that a lot of best-selling books, they break things into thirds, or it doesn't always have to be thirds, but they have like a clear structure that the book goes through so that you can look at the table of contents and
even though you don't know what's in the chapters, you know exactly where you're headed as a reader, what people don't want is they don't want to open up a book and feel lost feel like I have no idea where this guy's going to go with this. And it kind of feels like they're wasting their time. So a couple examples and I thought about these, but I didn't actually use these for Atomic habits. I could have had a table of contents that was like, habits of the past habits of the present habits of the future, you know, pretty clearly like where that books going to go. If you see those categories in the table of contents or Power of Habit,
Another example, if you look at the table of contents there, I think he does habits of individuals, habits of businesses, and then habits of societies. So it's like individuals organizations societies. And you can see how he's kind of moving up the hierarchy as you go through the book. Another one that I looked at, I can't remember which one account Newports books. It was, but it was either deep work or something like that. He had a section on here are the, the rules that you need to follow. And then there were, you know, for rules or six rules and so each one of those got their section in the book and the
It is just, there needs to be a clear roadmap for the reader and if you start looking through what other best sellers are doing, you can start to think about how to transport that onto your own experience. Another thing I did was I tried to look at what is the average chapter length for a lot of these books when I sign the book deal, the publisher, and the editors I was working with which I love my publishing team by the way. But they were kind of encouraging me to write longer chapters like 6,000 or eight thousand words and I was coming at this as like a blogger, you know, like most of the things I
We're like two thousand words or 1500 words. And eventually what I settled on was most of the chapters were between two and three thousand
words. Yep. And just for folks to have a reference point, I mean, one printed page, what would you say? It's roughly like 300, the most of my chances were
about 10 pages so just yeah, so yeah, so 300 words, yeah. If it's the 3000 word chapter, maybe it's 10 or 12 Pages, some like that. So yeah, figuring out the length. And not I started to notice other things that like novels would do or
Or books that weren't necessarily nonfiction. The chapters are really short, and there's kind of this momentum that gets into it. Like it kind of gets you flipping pages and it's easier to keep churning through the chapters. And so I wanted to have that kind of chapter length, I actually think Atomic habits is still a little bit longer than I was hoping. I just couldn't figure out a compress. It more. My initial manuscript for the book was 700 was like seven hundred twelve Pages or something and the finished version of the book is like 250. So you know I yeah I compressed it by
Six percent or whatever. So it's much smaller than it started out as which I think is good because I feel like a lot of books, especially business books, they could have been like a blog post or a 20-page paper and they get turned into a 200-page book. So I wanted to do the opposite, hate
that still worst, so bad. But I
actually think if you look at books that sell really well, a lot of the time they're like 180 to 220 Pages. They're actually a little bit. Even a little bit shorter than what I ended up hitting. So these are all examples of deconstructing the
Sellers what's going on, probably the most important place to do this is with titles so I have a spreadsheet of hundreds of titles for books than I the way that I did it was I said I'm only going to look at books. Have sold a million copies or more. That's what I'm trying to achieve. So let me just see how many books I can find that I've done
that quick question. Tactical question, did you do that through access to Nielsen bookscan?
I didn't have access to books can because I was just a poor blogger. Who was, you know, trying to make it look so I didn't have access to any of that stuff. But what I did was
Just did tons of Google searches and usually what happens is that when an author hits a million copies or form Delta ever, they'll let you know. Yeah. They let you know so there's all kinds of stuff or you'll find. Like if you just search a title and then copies sold, there's York Times articles that profile and author and they say you know their books like six million copies or whatever. So it was just a bunch of leg work like that. Anyway, I put together that spreadsheet. Let's say I got like 150 titles or something and then I started look for patterns
So what format do all these titles follow? And I think I ended up coming up with their about six. I won't be able to remember them off the top of my head but the most common format is the blank of blank. So the Power of Habit, the life-changing magic of tidying up The Power of Now, The Power of Positive Thinking, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, the blah blah. So it's always the blank of blank. And that's a very proven the war of art. It's a very proven format the psychology of money like we can just keep going on.
Not that there's so many examples like that and usually what people do is they take their topic and that's the second piece and then they take some type of descriptor and that's the first one and ideally you're combining things that are not usually combined. So the life-changing magic of tidying up. So tidying up is the
topic of the book
but now you're telling me that it's life-changing and what you find is a lot of these best-selling books, they have some element of contrast in the title. There's something that's unexpected.
Read about
it. Subtle art of not giving a fuck. Right.
Exactly. Usually thinks that alive. Yeah, the F-word is actually the least subtle thing. So like, there's this interesting, there's this interesting contrast between the two, another common format, this is the one that I use for Atomic habits, is you take the topic of your book and then you layer on some kind of unexpected descriptor before it. I'll get to Atomic habits in a second but like extreme ownership by Jocko. So the idea is you take ownership and responsibility for your life. But your do it. Like in this extreme
It's not just like a regular idea of taking ownership or Cal Newport deep work, you're doing work, but it's a special kind of work. It's not the normal type of thing that you're thinking about. So these are just examples, there are a couple more patterns that I found and then ultimately you got to decide like which one makes the most sense for me, you know, which one feels like it's the best fit for my
book and which one can you live with forever?
Yes. Titles are really titles are really tricky because they need to pass a lot of filters. They need to cover what the book is actually about. So like in my case,
It needs to actually talk about habits. I think it's important to have some element of contrast. So like in my case, Atomic has multiple meanings. It can be tiny or small so your have it should be easy to do. It can be the fundamental unit in a larger system, so like Adams build a new molecules. And you know, systems versus goals is like a big part of the book. It can be the source of immense energy or power. So I think if you kind of combine all those three meanings, you get the like Big Arc of the book, which is you make changes that
Small and easy to do. You layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system and then you end up with these kind of powerful or remarkable results as a by-product. So for all of those reasons that kind of felt like atomic was a great word to describe it. So needs to describe what the topic is it needs to be interesting and compelling or like a little bit different. Sometimes good habits are like a little bit weird in a sense like nobody was really using the phrase Atomic habits before. The book came out, you know, it wasn't like a way that you would
describe a habit. You might describe it as small, but you wouldn't describe it as like Atomic. Yeah,
good habits. Also fitted been good habits just for people out there, right? You're going to be competing with the entire
internet. I actually think a lot of titles fall into this pit fall, which is they use a phrase that is commonly used? And you want a phrase that you can like own in the readers mind you don't want to be competing with ya. All the other things that use the phrase good habits, you know, 4-Hour workweek is a good example. This nobody really used that phrase before
The book it was like a little bit weird in the sense that it wasn't part of normal conversation and that allowed you to own it, for sure. It also had that element of contrast. We're like, man, I work for 40 hours a week. You're telling me I can work for for, you know, it's like it's the surprising thing. Another example that might be like Rich Dad, Poor, Dad, you know, so that book has this element of contrast between the material. So it needs to be like something that you actually want it needs to cover the topic of the book and he's have this element of contrast. Like there's there's a lot of filters for de past and that's why
coming up with good titles
as hard. You let me add one thing too because there may be some I'm a lot of Engineers and computer scientists and so on. It was in this podcast. If you guys are starting to develop hives because this sounds like, oh my God, this is marketing. I hate marketers. All marketing Flyers. I'd like to emphasize that if you want anything. I shouldn't say anything. If you want a bookie right? To be remarkable. There are some prerequisites.
In other words, what are the antecedents to something being or becoming remarkable? One of them is it needs to be remembered people can't remember the title to very hard to remark upon it in any way that is Meaningful. And this also translates and applies to the table of contents, right? So in the four hour work week, I had this is deall structure. And I thought very, very, very intently about how to structure the book but then also have to label the different structures and I had multiple options that could have worked if you have
Book in your hand. Almost all of them could have worked, but if I want someone to be able to remember apply, and also talked about which requires recall the elements in the book, having something that is an acronym deall. That is easy to remember.
Was I think a critical ingredient, it's to your point. Given, how many things are outside of your control not sufficient to guarantee in any way that something will hit the bestseller list but necessary. So necessary but not sufficient. I think, what were some of the critical decisions or suppose critical decisions is most interesting to me, but it could also be lucky happenings that you set the conditions for if
It makes any sense.
First of all, the launch of atomic habits, I started playing in about 15 months at a time. So it was like a 15-month process. That doesn't mean it has to be that long. I think you could still do an excellent launch in nine months. Maybe, but you're going to need a lot of time. Like, sometimes I'll hear from authors in the biz, Okay, My Books coming out in two months like, you know, what should I do? The I still think there are plenty of things to do, but in a sense, you're kind of like, you're already like a year behind, you know? So it's a long process and to take it that seriously, it's not like an accident. When you see a lot of these books,
Doing that like people aren't spending a lot of time on it. So that's the first thing is you take it seriously and give it enough time. So what do you do with that year? Well, we didn't really do much different. There's not many things that I did that, you like have never heard of an author doing before but we did them at a larger scale than most people would have done. So let's Take podcast, for example, doing a podcast or for your book is very popular, typical thing to do when your book comes out. So I went through iTunes and I clicked on every category of shows,
That we felt like could be relevant to the book so Health and Fitness business, you know, Etc. And went all the way through. We went all through all the for each of those categories think usually iTunes list like 100 shows or so in each category. So we went through all the hundred for each of those categories and then we identified every show that was already an interview show. So I wasn't trying to convince anybody to bring me on that wasn't already talking to people then put all those shows in the spreadsheet. I think we ended up with like maybe 300 and then I wrote individual
Nails to all 300 hose. So that takes a long time, you know. Now we had like kind of a general template but I would customize each one and there was a section in each email where I would say, hey you've had on this previous guest, you know, in this episode, are you talked about this topic in this episode? I feel like I could, you know, provide something new or expand on that. It seems like it already went over well with your audience, if you're interested. I'd love to come on. I'm sure the show is going to be successful whether I come on or not. But if you're interested, you know, let me know. And I feel like we could have a good conversation and
And you got to send 300 of those emails for 100 of them to work out. And so I wrote the drafts up and then I think about 3 to 4 months before the book came out, it was about 4 months. We started sending them all out getting interview scheduled. I spent like a two-month span before the book came out recording as many as I could, and I ended up getting about 75 interviews recorded before launch week, we asked everybody to release during launch week. Now, not everybody did but pretty much everyone at
It would either do that week or like one of the weeks before or after and this is one of my core principles for the launch, which is you want a concentrated strike. You want to have as much energy as possible in the, like a tight window and the idea which Tim, you know, this better than almost anybody. The idea is to make it seem bigger than it actually. Is, you know, you want to feel like it's everywhere. So, I have 75 interviews, hit during launch week, I did an additional 25 during the month of the book came out. So, by the time we, the book was out for
A month. I had 100 interviews that had hit within that same month span. So you've got a lot of action going on there at this point. By the time the book came out my email list was around 400 450 thousand subscribers somewhere around there so I have my own energy that I was trying to provide. So we sent a sample chapter we sent the first chapter of the book out. I sent a couple excerpts during launch week. I had that segment that I did on CBS This Morning on launch day and we sent that out. So there were probably four or five emails that were
Around that time similar to what you did with for our body and so on I did like a series of bonuses. So if you bought the book during launch week though I think there was like a private webinar with me and we could ask any question. If you bought three copies, you got some extra PDF downloads and a secret chapter. If you got ten copies, you got something else. I think I only had three categories, one copy, three copies and 10 and I did have one additional higher tier was like, if you buy 500 books or 1,000 books, or something like that, I would come and give a keynote and I would
Not do that one again because I am I ended up giving a keynote and Malaysia and a keynote is Australia just because it provides. Yeah. So there were those who are people out there internationally who were like, this is a great deal for us. So, anyway, but it was fun. It was all, you know, is all part of the launch and so I did the bonuses. I did the emails to my audience. We did the podcast push, and all of that action is happening more or less in the same two-week window, but definitely in the same like one month window.
So we've got all this kind of energy happening. We also sent out influencer copies or you know, whatever you want to call that Advance copies to people. I did not want to send any work in process copies. One of those called they're not this, not like the Finish saying galleys. Yeah, galleys. I didn't want to send any galleys to anybody. I only wanted to send a finished copy because I wanted their experience to be like the actual finished book. Wanted to be as good as possible. So we waited just send those loud will list of advanced folks. Yes, but my
My thing again, the same way with like the podcast, I only wanted to do it with people who opted in, I'm not trying to spam people with the book. So again, just takes a lot of effort, like we had to come up with a list of people who we thought would be a good fit and then we sent them all messages and said, hey I got this book coming out, would you be interested if so what's the best address to send it
to? How did you find this people? It was a good fit.
So the obvious answer the one that everybody thinks of is oh it's people with a big audience who are interested in the topic that I'm writing.
But I actually think you can do much better than that, which is we made a list. So again, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to give the book a push and help but generate word of mouth. So I think one thing that you could do is say which communities already have a lot of Word of Mouth, what are the type of things that people are interested in that? They just can't shut up about. And so I came up with a list of things, crossfitters vegans, bullet Journal, errs, parenting and Mommy blogs. Like I
had to write, you know, I just, I came up with a bunch of categories of people who they love to talk about their thing, and so I think I ended up having, like, 15 categories or so,
right? That's brilliant. So now, James can I pause for one second? There's a restaurant here in Austin called, and Gizelle are real. And they're famous for their signs, they put outside and they have these really pithy sayings and these are become books now bugs, everything because they're so clever. And one of them was if
One does CrossFit and is vegan. Which do they talk about first course? I thought was pretty good. So
continue there are things that people get genuinely excited about and love to talk to other people that are in that industry about. And so we're interested in that thing. So let's come up with a list of those and I think I had like 15 or so. And then I went through those 15 and I started asking, okay, which of these communities is the book a good fit for which, where
do I feel like there's other smart very
special. Then I came up with a subset, let I don't remember what it was.
Let's say it was like five or something and crossfitters were one of them as an example. And so I think one of the first sets that we did was we said let's try to find all the big crossfitters on Instagram. And then I think the first kind of batch that we sent out. We did like 30 crossfitters, we did like 30 Venture capitalists and we did like 30 parenting and Mommy
blogs. Why Venture capitalists that stands out from the others? There
was a lot in the book about growth, getting one percent better each day. Continuous improvement, process and business.
It's building a successful company. I am often asked to speak at companies or to speak to sales teams about those types of things. So, all of that focus on systems and continuous Improvement, we felt like it overlapped. Well with business and Venture capitalists are seeing lots of businesses and their kind of the kind of modern version of venture capitalists. A lot of them have like public presence on Twitter or like they've got their own podcast or whatever. So it was the kind of thing where we felt like the topic overlapped and they had an audience that they could talk to.
So let me take a little bit on this. Yeah, because I'm fishing and it may be a Fool's errand, but I can kind of illustrate something. Even if it doesn't apply to you, were you sending them to the Venture capitalists in part because if you had say endorsement or broadcast in some fashion to their audiences, maybe it wouldn't result in a lot of copies sold but if one of your income streams is speaking to businesses and so on that it could be
Ulster that size that might be
true. That was definitely not what I was thinking. When I was doing the launch, it might be true, might be a good idea, maybe I should have been thinking about it, but all I was thinking about the launch was
Where are my potential readers hanging out? And how can I get in front of them or make it known to them that this book exists? And they would probably enjoy it? And again, this all kind of goes back to this feeling of this concentrated strike or having to not wanting to have a lot of energy in a small window. So we sent out those influencer copies. What ended up happening is that the crossfitters were the best fit? And I think part of the reason is Venture capitalists for example, I don't even know how many, like they all opted in. So I only sent him to people. That said, they wanted to copy
Like, I message Sam hinkie, for example, and he was like, yeah, I would love a copy. So that I said, listen, you know, send him one or whatever, so, it was that kind of thing, but they just didn't talk about it as much or maybe they was. They had a lot on their plate and they didn't read it right away. Whatever, the reason was the crossfitters did best, and I think it was kind of interesting to them. I feel like if you're a crossfitter and you have like a million followers on Instagram, you're probably sent a lot of workout gear. A lot of supplements stuff like that, but you're very rarely sent a book and it was like, oh, this is kind
Cool. Like this is a topic that will help me in my training and I don't usually get this and so they opened it up and a lot of them took a picture and then share it on Instagram. We didn't ask for any of that. By the way, we just ask people who opted in and then we tried to get them a book that we felt like was a great fit for what they were already interested in. And what ended up happening is. I've got all these podcast sitting, I have the emails going out. I got the CBS segment and then 20 of the top crossfitters all posted about it on their story within the same.
I'm like two week span now, if you're into CrossFit and you follow the top cross L on Instagram,
surround, you see means every everyone is seeing
this book, right? And you're like, man, everybody, I know is reading this right now, and that's not true at all, but it feels like it in your little Universe, right? And so again, it's like, how can you make it? Feel like it's everywhere for that window of time. And so once we figured out that it worked well for crossfitters, then we started saying, okay, let's Branch out and fitness. So then we send it to a bunch of bodybuilders, a bunch of
Powerlifters. You know and so on. And it has turned out that it's been a really great fit for people in Fitness and they loved the book and they recommend it to their clients and they find it useful for their own training and so on. And so we had to try a variety of things for that to work out. I actually do think it's one that a lot of venture capitalists like now and recommend but it just was a slower burn with them. It didn't it didn't work during the the influencer push as much anyway, you get the idea, none of those strategies are radical or new, everybody's familiar with that if you're looking up house,
So I launched a book but what's different is we tried to do it all at the same time and we tried to do it all at a larger scale than most people were doing.
You also chose a few very specific targets where I think a lot of folks who I observe lodging books, they kind of half-ass. Two dozen things that sounds to pejorative maybe but they really try to scatter sprinkle effort across a ton
Of different things. I have never seen that work well, and if we're trying to quantify it, right, let's just say, one of your goals is to be on the best seller list. That could be the Wall Street Journal, which least last I checked, is a truer bestseller list. It's compiled based on Nielsen. Bookscan and other metrics. The New York Times list has sales input but it's largely an editors
Choice. Socialist, I think the best one is Amazon because the Amazon
Charts are the only source that compiles print ebook and audio into a single number. Now, they don't have every book sale right there only counting what's on Amazon but that's I don't know. 80% 90% of print buddy percent, it's probably 95% of audiobooks audibles like basically. The only way that people listen to audio books and it's most ebooks to because Kendall's the way that most people listen to or read ebooks. So I think it's probably the truest number of what books are actually selling best is the
Don't get list on Amazon.
It is the truest, however, just like you are morning, TV, show The New York Times just as a specific list as a mind share that these other best selling list does not
have. Well, what do we put on the cover of atomic habits? We put number one New York Times bestseller. Not number one on Amazon chart. Right. Exact, you know, isn't that interesting? It gets it's the truest number but it doesn't have the branding.
Yeah. So if you want to hit that list at least last I checked depends on the category and so on. But
You really want to have? Let's just say the possibility of selling again, depending on your week. And I would suggest people do research and choose a soft weak. If you're competing in this way. That's that's what I did with four hour work week. Just as a side note, you can study these things. If you have a cookbook maybe you shouldn't come out right before Thanksgiving and Christmas like you're going to be fighting monsters if you try to do that. So pick your timing but if you have to sell let's just call it or have a chance of selling.
20,000 copies for two consecutive weeks. If you could only choose one way to do that one, medium podcasts email fill in the blank, which would you choose. Okay.
And then if you had the ability to add on
the second which would you choose if you had to shake your entire launch strategy around that? Then what would you do? I think it's just a thought exercise in his work doing so that you do not succumb to the distraction end well-meaning advice.
As many people who will say, you have to be on this, you have to be on this. You must do this, this, this, this this. And before, you know, it you're going to have a must-do list of 20 different things. Many of which are mutually exclusive if you're trying to be excellent. In any one of those question for you, what do you think would have happened? Had you not had your email list or instead of it being 450,000 people at the time and had been 4,500
people. Obviously, there's no way to know, but it made an enormous difference and it in my personal story
It's the only reason that the book happened to begin with because I was just a lowly blogger, I have no credentials. I don't work for the New York Times. I don't teach at Harvard. The Publishers in New York, would probably tell you, oh, we were looking for a book on habits and we really like his writing and stuff. But the truth is they would have never, let me in the room. If I didn't have an email list of hundreds of thousands of people. That's the thing that got me in the door. So this is one of the things that I love about writing which is
Competence matters more than credentials. Anybody can write on any topic and that is a good thing and a bad thing. Like the bad thing is that means you need to be careful about what you read because people would just make stuff up and write whatever they want. But the good part is competence is what matters. You don't need permission from anybody. What you need is to write something exceptional. You need to write something that genuinely makes a difference in as useful in people's lives and if you genuinely deliver on the problem that you're writing about, then you're in a good position to make a career out of it.
That wasn't a direct answer to your question but I think the email list was an enormous important part of it. It got the book deal to begin with and it also really move the needle on book sales during launch week, the little hypothetical you threw out a minute ago. If you could only do one thing. If I had to choose one thing, I choose email now, you know, I have two million email subscribers, so that's maybe that's kind of an obvious choice. But even if it was smaller, I would spend time building the audience and building the email list because it does so many things that are helpful as your
Leading the list, as you're as you're writing each week, you're refining your ideas, your learning what resonates with people, you're figuring out what your best concepts are and all of that can inform writing a better book which puts you in a better position. And then you're also building the audience along the way. And so now you have, you know, people that you can launch to if I had to pick one thing that like let's say your books coming out, you know, in five months and you don't have an email list but you have a book that's written. What would I do then? I would focus externally and I would probably just try to do as
As many podcasts as possible and
use your
current advantages to achieve and gain new advantages. So, right now, your main advantage is time, you got five months, how you going to spend it, and then if you can knock it out of the park with one podcast, now you have a really good episode. Maybe you can get that published right away and you can send it to some other shows that are like one level up and prove that you're worthy to come on as a guest. Then you try to knock those out of the park and then if you have a really good one you use that and send it to the next level up.
So on and you just kind of try to keep going like that. So I do email first but if I didn't have an email list I think I'd pick podcast.
How many Instagram followers would it take if any for you to give up your email list? Oh, so let's say 10 million. Oh Auntie million. What would the minimal
compelling number be? I don't think I would do it either. It would have to be over 100 million. I don't know that I would do it say more. I'm not in control of it.
It so, you know, like Instagram can be the algorithm can change. My account could get, you know, suspended. They could whatever. There's like, you know, I don't write about provocative stuff, but you get the idea. Like I'm not in control. If you had 100 million followers, I mean, you also I'm assuming some level of Engagement here, right? Like, it's not just like, Phantom followers. Like, you're assuming that you've gotten engaged. I don't either way.
Yeah. I mean, like, if Kim Kardashian were
like, I want you to comb. Yeah home. Yeah. She's like, I'll give you all my strength followers. You give me all your email
list. Yeah, yeah. Right. We'll do like
Captain. Yeah. Like booty fitting dresses and then we'll have habit, right? Yeah, you get every Wednesday. I
know my next, my next book is booty habits. It's like, yeah. Yeah. Just saying, Sony man that I don't know. I, there's obviously some number where it'd be stupid not to do it, but I don't know. Emails. Just so
Isabel and how you can use it and Instagram is like pretty constrained. It's got to be an image and I'm not a very, you know, I don't post images of
myself. I'm in a similar boat. If somebody said, I'll give you a 50 million, I wouldn't trade. I'll give up just tip for folks. Also, this is what I did with the first book and pretty much every book since if I'm sending out Advance copies, I will send out galleys and some cases, at least with the earlier books, I did because it allowed me to just have a longer lead time, I
Have very long books, especially people know, they heard you violate. Every rule of length tend to be gigantic and it takes a while for people to explore these books. So I will send out galleys. Usually they're pretty much in final form. Maybe there are few citations, No, appendix probably no page numbers in the table of contents because of that stuff is moving around but otherwise they're pretty solid. They will not have
A final cover as an example, but what I will do if I'm sending out Advance copies rather their galleys or actual final product is in, this is very old-fashioned and it takes time. But I feel like if people skip some of these time-consuming steps on the front end, they are sacrificing a lot of long-term potential because they may not ever reset escape. Velocity. Get some Post-it notes and pick specific chapters or sections.
So that you can say, if you don't have time to read the whole book and I don't expect you to read the whole book. I tabbed the chapter that I think is going to be most interesting to you, or that might be most interesting to you, which requires you to do some homework. Like you did when you were sending pitches to these podcasts. You had. So, and so on, you talk about a b and c. It's like your audience really responded, well, to X. Why don't we do a b, and c, or would you be open? If you'd be open to anybody?
B and C and that due diligence pays incredible dividends. And what you did with podcast, was exactly what I did for bloggers.
For the 4-Hour workweek, I micro serialized so I can offer different blogs, different places like Lifehacker and so on exclusives on a particular facet of the book and that required, an incredible amount of research on the
front end. It's worth it. I did the same thing for sending out the advance copies, I can remember sending a message to Nepal and saying, hey, you know, I know, you're super busy. I do genuinely think you'll find a book. Interesting, if you only have time to read three pages, I think these are
The three to read. I have no idea if you write it or not, but he was like, thanks. You know, I got in. So you know, that was it and you just it takes a long time to do it in that way. But actually writing real emails to the podcasters and not just doing a template and actually, selecting the pages that you think will be most useful for each Advance. Copy and not just spray and pray, you know, like that. That stuff. Is it helps? It actually
works you know? Yeah also if you're being very deliberate,
And very thoughtful about how you are picking these recipients, it often times, it only takes one or two and doing that.
Diligence and research on the front end increases the likelihood of you at least having one
or two. Actually think the word that you just used, which is thoughtful. That's the word that I come back to again and again. And that I hope, I actually hope that's the primary lesson that people take away from this portion of the conversation, talking about writing Atomic Abbott's and talking about, deconstructing the marketing of it and the launch of it, I don't know, maybe some people be like, oh this sounds like a lot of marketing or whatever, but I don't think about it that way at all. I hope what comes through is that what I'm trying, is that it each level of this
Experience, the research of the product, the creation of the book, The launch in the marketing of the book, I'm trying to be as thoughtful as possible, you know, to create the most compelling or most useful version of the book to share the best examples in the book to find and identify the people who will be the best fit for the book. And to deliver it to them in a way that is the most thoughtful and makes it as easy as possible for them to consume the book and share it with others. And if you're thoughtful at each stage of
That process. You're just going to end up with such a better outcome and if you are just trying to like write a book but get it out there quickly because you want to have a book you don't want to write a book or if you're just trying to Market it and get it to as many people as possible because you want to have a popular book, you don't really care about who it is that it resonates with? If you cut Corners like that then it's just really hard to have a great outcome but if you're thoughtful at each stage, then it tends to work out much
better.
Yeah, 100% agreed. Coming back to the Frameworks and principles in atomic habits. Are there any sections chapters principles? Anything that you wish more people paid attention to, right? There's something that you put in
That gets glossed over or maybe doesn't stick for whatever reason, as much as other things. But you think it or these things are important. I mean, I certainly have examples from from my books from like shit, like I don't know if I made a mistake in the way I presented that, but it's not getting its Fair Shake in the sense of it's
important. Sometimes you might just be like, maybe I thought that idea was better than it actually was, you know, but
there might be that I do.
Yeah, I have a couple so there are two things that came to mind. The first one is there's a little example. I give in the book about maybe about halfway through or 40% through or I talked about having a pregame routine and kind of doing things in the same sequence each time, the same Order each time and that helps get you in the mindset and kind of initiate the Habit. So I played baseball through college and I have the same pregame routine that I did before each game and that kind of like flips the switch in your mind where it's like, hey, like it's time to compete now, you know, like it's game mode or the example I gave in the book.
Was this guy who he would do his writing at the library and he would go to the library sit at the same desk each day and put on his headphones and play the same playlist. That little sequence was a pregame routine that got him in the mindset to do his writing happen and one day he turned around and realized that no music was playing. He just had his headphones on and it was just supposed to silent but he was writing and he was like 20 minutes into writing before he realized it. And it's a good example of how like just that sequence of doing it the same way each time and having that
Same pregame routine that little ritual. Got him in the mindset. He didn't even need to press play that day. He was just ready to write. So if you can come up with what that little pregame ritual is for you, that can be a great way to initiate a habit and I don't usually see people talk about that. I think actually, I've heard some examples like this on your podcast, previously. Tim. Like I think you when you talk to Josh waitzkin at one point, some time he gave this example, maybe was in his books, maybe the conversation with you where he was competing in this national competition, martial arts. And he was told that he was going to
Pete. It's one time and they came up to him and he was like sleeping or laying on a on a bench and they were like, hey, sorry timing was wrong. You're actually up in like six minutes and he was like, normally I would have been thrown off but he had this little pregame ritual that he did and he tried to as he developed it over time it started out maybe it was ten minutes and then he tried to compress it. So 7 minutes and then it was three minutes and then eventually got it down to where his little ritual was just something he did for like 30 seconds so they woke him up.
On that bench. He's got to compete six minutes later, but all he needed was 30 seconds to kind of like get in the right frame of mind. And he was like, okay, now I'm ready to go and so those pregame rituals can be really powerful if you make it your own and come up with something that like you do every time and it helps get you into the mindset to compete or to
perform.
yeah, for sure, Josh has given could be his personal example is also talked about Marcelo Garcia, whose nine-time world champion, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, arguably, maybe uncontroversial, you probably one of the best, if not the best, who's ever competed in Brazil agency, who has a similar ability to throw a switch minutes before he'll compete in a world championship bout and it applies furthermore,
Two, most writers who I have had on the podcast, will have some type of boot up sequence much like this person who went to the library and people can take solace in the fact, there's no consensus. There's no gets very
personal and I think you need to let anyone make it your own.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're also people who will say like, yeah, I just dick around for the first two hours, I get literally, but that's not wasted time because it takes that long for me to just like, Scribble or complain about my day on the page. So that I'm filling the page or something and then it turns into an hour later. Some paragraph that is the Nugget of the beginning of what I need to work
eventually. The pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it and they take
action. Yeah, yeah, right.
Right, Aaron Hill game. And he's like, yeah, I go to the cabin and I'm, I don't have to write, but I'm not allowed to do. I believe that rule
that's great.
And BJ Novak also has his own approach, who's done a lot about ton of television and film work. And for me, like right now, you know, working on fiction for the first time over the last, let's call it six months, finding the routine like how I make the coffee when I sit down the exact same.
That's how I set up my laptop and the laptop stand. I mean it's very Monkish but it does make a big difference so that was one the pregame secret
developing a pregame ritual that works for you. And then the other one that I feel like this is something that
If I had to pick a topic that I feel like is more important than I realized. When I was writing the book, I would probably say this and that's the power of the social environment. You know we are all part of multiple tribes. Sometimes those tribes are like large like what it means to be American and sometimes they're they're small like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of the local gym. But all of those tribes that you belong to the large groups and the small groups, they all have this set of expectations. They've got a set associative.
Shal norms for what you do when you're in that group. And what the typical way is to act and behave and what kind of habits they follow? And the more that your habits, go with the grain of the expectations of the group, The more attractive, they feel like to you because it's like, hey, I fit in I belong. I'm part of something. And the more that they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, the harder they are to stick to, especially in the long run. Maybe you can do it for a day or a week, or, I don't know a month or two but like,
Some point, you kind of keep rubbing against the, you have this, like, friction, where your conflicting with the group and it becomes hard to stick to that for the long run. And so, the little takeaway that I kind of think of now is you want to join groups to join tribes, where your desired behavior, is the normal behavior, because of its normal in that group, then it becomes really motivating to stick to it. And furthermore, the kind of like ancillary habits that are part of that group, The, the other expectations are
The things that you're probably going to soak up people will join a CrossFit gym because they think they want to get in shape. But then you turn around, six months later and they're all eating paleo and we're in the same brand, knee sleeves and they buy the same workout gear. And like it's all these other habits that they never intended to build, but they just kind of soak them up because that's what the group was doing. And ultimately I think this comes back to this kind of deep need that we all have which is this need to bond and connect. You know we all want to be a part of something.
Thing we want to belong, we want to fit in and if people have to choose between, 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, I mean, most of the time, the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve. So, as best as possible, you got to get those two things aligned, and surround yourself with people where your desired behavior, is the normal behavior.
They absolutely the whole you are, the average of the five people you associate with most type of thinking and also for people who are starting off the new year or about to and thinking about how to best ensure that you cohere with a group that leads to these new behaviors front-loaded. Make it painful not to do it. Pay in advance, right? Make make some type of bet with one
Of your friends and you do each other money. If you miss workouts, like set it up, so it is painful not to do. It might sound like I'm favoring. The Stick Over The Carrot, you're also going to use the carrots, like, you can use the carrots but make it compelling from a incentives perspective.
Did, you can also use the carrots, like the flip side of that is so yes, like make it painful not to do it and make it easy and frictionless and obvious to do it. Try to design.
On your environments of the things that you say are important to you are the obvious and available things. I think, one interesting thing you can do is just think about one happy you're trying to build and then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time, each day, kitchen office, bedroom, whatever. And just look around and ask yourself what behaviors are obvious here. You know, what is this space designed to encourage, right? And yeah, it's really all start to notice different things that you can tweak to make it the good habit, more obvious, and easy.
Seer and the bad habits are the things you want to avoid less obvious and maybe a little higher, friction, and making one or two little adjustments. Like that is not going to radically transform your life, but if you make a dozen or two, dozen or 50 and your Chi, all these environments are all these rooms are you're spending space. Each day are primed to support the habits, you want to build. Now you've got a Tailwind rather than a headwind and so it's become so much easier to appear as if you have great will power or that you're really consistent.
Aunt, when really, you're benefiting from the environment that you already
set up,
And I'll also say sometimes, one or two changes can make a huge difference coming, back to my brownie, binge yesterday. There's a reason I don't cook brownies all the time, right? There's a reason, I don't have pics of my house because I will eat all the fucking chips. I will eat everything. I love chips and I, rather than view that is failing. Like, yes, I could take the hard path, like crawl on my knees through broken glass, like, develop the willpower to stare at these chips every day, and
Not eat them or I can just not have the chips in my pantry. So
put yourself in positions to succeed, a lot of it is positioning you know, like if you have a dog and you're walking it down the street and your dog doesn't get along well with other dogs and you see one coming toward you go to the other side of the street. Don't like put the dog in a bad situation that kind of thing is obvious with our pets, or with our friends or our family members were like, oh, why would you do that to yourself? And then we do it to ourselves all the time, you know? So like try to design a space where
You are being served by your environment rather than being hindered by it.
Yeah, totally. I think it was, I don't want to misquote of, but when I had Jerry Seinfeld on the show, I think he said something like, your mind is a stupid little dog that you have to train something along those lines. If you think about it, right? I think now you got me on dog training. I think about doctoring a lot and I train my dog Molly, took it super seriously and worked for teachers and trainers and then tried to modify it and so on surprise surprise, there are these basic things.
Where it's like. If you talk to somebody and they have a problem because their dog, chews shoes as an example and you can ask well,
Where did the dog spend most of its time for its first? Two months in the house as a puppy in the back, I like ran around the house and I worried did your shoes on the floor. Yes, that's how the dog developed a habit of chewing on shoes. But if you crate train your dog and you simply prevent them from chewing on shoes. For the first few months, they're not going to choose is there's not going to be a thing, generally speaking and for humans to it's like if you don't eat chips every day, Tim Ferriss. Then don't leave the shoes on the floor. Don't leave.
Ships in the pantry. This is a solvable problem. I find a lot of reassurance in the fact that it doesn't. It doesn't have to be Brute Force, willpower. And I'm not saying this to you because in place of something nebulous like that you can set up systems and you can also rank order your habits in such a way that you are looking for the Upstream habits that make the downstream habits easier. So, whenever
Never I have wanted to get in better shape, or someone is asking me for advice, they're like, what should I eat? And I'm like, let's talk about exercise first because if you eat, well, it doesn't necessarily lead exercise but if you exercise very often, you're not going to want to spoil the exercise you did by eating a bunch of crap, right? If you exercise you're like, wow, I put in a lot of effort, I feel great.
You're going to have this sunk cost fallacy benefit of having put in that effort and you'll be less inclined to screw it up. They'll be too much cognitive, dissonance. And in making those types of decisions, you can actually make behavioral change a lot easier for yourself. And I'm also looking at my environment, I'm like, coffee coffee, coffee coffee, I want to reduce my coffee consumption. Maybe I should change this room that I spent so much time. And my goodness, anything else that you would like to say, James we've been
Now for almost three hours and I think this is probably a good place to begin to wind down. But is there anything else you'd like to mention
the trajectory of your life, Ben's in the direction of your habits? And a lot of what we've talked about today? Whether it's launching a book or writing a book, whether it's, you know, building an exercise habit or a meditation habit, growing an email list or developing a creative habit, it comes back to consistency, it comes back to doing small things. Well, each day,
Day trying to live one good day and then waking up again tomorrow and doing the same thing and the world is very results-oriented and that's fine. You know like that we all want to get better results but almost all the results that you want are lagging measure of your habits. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits, your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your training habits. Your even like silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is lagging. Measure of your cleaning habits.
Also, if you want your results to change the habits that precede them are the things that actually need to change. It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves, and I don't think that means you have to be radical about it. You know, it doesn't mean that you have to upend your entire life. Really. All you need to do is focus on having like five good minutes, you know. Like you can do a lot with five good minutes. Five. Good minutes of exercise can reset your mood five. Good minutes of conversation can restore a relationship five. Good minutes of
Writing can make you feel great about the manuscript again and so it doesn't take much to feel good to get back on the path, to continue to make progress and small habits showing up in little ways. Mastering the art of showing up trying to get a little bit better, each day. Those are all things that you can keep in mind as you try to just live one good day today and be on a good trajectory. And that really one of the core ideas of atomic habits is getting one percent better today, and it's really about that. It's really not, it's not about measuring it.
And like those are 1% broom in our 1.6 percent, or whatever. It's it's not about the numbers, it's like a mindset, it's a philosophy. It's an approach that I'm going to focus on the trajectory that I'm on. I'm going to try to stay on a good path, even if it's just in small ways and then trust that, that will compound multiply and turn into something much greater over time because the truth is time will magnify whatever you feed it. You know, if you have good habits, time becomes your Ally and all you need is patience. But if
You have bad habits, time becomes your enemy and every day that goes by. I kind of dig the hole little bit deeper. And so the idea is an atomic habits the strategies for, you know, making small changes for kind of letting these behaviors improve over time. It's all about getting time to work for you and I think you can start and really small ways and begin to reinforce your desired identity and hopefully this time next year, you'll be really happy with, with where you're at. In the progress you've made
here. Here, I'm not going to spoil that with adding any
Commentary. This is unnecessary. I've got the strong way to close games. Clear, you can find them at James clear.com on Twitter and Instagram at James. Clear will link to everything, including the 321 newsletter, which everyone should check out in the show notes as per usual. 10 top log /, podcast games. Thanks so much for taking the time. This is great, Took a ton of notes. I have homework, I have changes to make. I have perhaps a few bags of coffee.
These or remove from my immediate space. And this says, rekindled my enthusiasm Amplified by dou Z as mm for the new year. So I appreciate you sharing so much in being so game to play the tennis matches. This kind, of
course, thanks to him for the, appreciate it, man.
And to everybody listening, be just a little bit Kinder than is necessary today, that includes to yourself, set up systems. Remember, our dear friend Arc and locusts we will not rise to the level of our goals.
And there are hopes but fall to the levels of our training and our systems. So best of luck to you and thanks for tuning it.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little fun before the weekend, between one and a half and two million people. Subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things. I found or discovered for have started exploring over that week, kind of like
My diary of cool fix it, often includes articles and reading books, I'm reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks, and so on that gets sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something think about if you'd like to try it out
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