James Clear on Getting 1% Better Daily With Stoicism

i don't want to limit myself i want to think as big and as ambitiously as possible and so like the phrase that i like is i want to work backwards for magic what is the magical outcome and then let's work backwards from that hey it's ryan holiday welcome to another episode of the daily stoke podcast my guest today is actually someone that i met i can't even remember now it must have been six or seven years ago i was at a conference and i was talking about the process of putting together books i got this

question from a guy in the audience he was saying you know why would i do a book you know i've got this big email list i write directly to my audience why would i ever traditionally publish a book and we talked a little bit about it and and i think i convinced him because he ended up publishing one of the best books of the last several years a book that i think about on a regular basis and even if you just think about the title it should influence you which is to me a sign of

a great book i'm talking about james clear in his book atomic habits atomic having a double meaning not just meaning explosive habits but also the the sort of the smallest possible size of a habit focusing on the little things that put in forth a chain reaction that that can in fact be explosive james is someone uh who has helped change my habits directly we're in kind of a mastermind group with a bunch of different authors which i look forward to attending every year because accountability is a big part of habits and changes and certainly that's

something that's big in stoicism marcus de realis would not be who he is without rusticus without his teacher fronto just as epictetus wouldn't have been who he was without musonius rufus and on down the line i see james as someone who's a bit of an accountability partner like that for me plus someone who's just doing high quality work out in the world that inspires me to try to up my game so please check out atomic habits definitely a book worth reading check out his newsletter at jamesclear.com he sends out this sort of best of thursday

thing that's fantastic and of course does his uh his very famous articles as well which i'm sure you've read so here's my interview with the one and only james clear you know originally we were going to do this uh in early january but it's actually i think more fitting that we're talking at the end of january because it's the it's like i would imagine a good chunk of people that have bought my books and your books and started out the year trying to think about new year's resolutions have already quit on them and uh like

we did this new year new challenge thing for daily stoic and and it's 21 days and it's like you know the first the first email it's like 100 open rate then the next one it's like 90 then 80. and by the end something that people paid for you know they're at like 40 open rates after three weeks so it's it's amazing to me how we it's like we start out with really clear intentions but we can't we can't follow through yeah it's so common so true i also like you know i've had this happen to

me many times you know it's not like i'm immune to the to the the phenomenon like we all get excited and amped up about things early on and then it comes time to execute and life happens and things like you know taper off this is what you're kind of getting at though this whole discussion about new year's resolutions this is one of the central things i talk about in atomic habits is this idea of like starting with identity rather than results and i do think there's something to that that like at the beginning of the

year people are very excited about the results they can imagine for themselves losing weight or making more money or you know meditating every day or whatever um but they still don't see themselves in that way they don't consider themselves to be a meditator or a writer or an athlete or whatever the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and so i usually encourage people start there like start with the the identity that you want to have or start with the lifestyle that you want to live and then start doing small habits that reinforce that identity

rather than just being like oh i'm going to lose 40 pounds and then when that doesn't happen in three weeks you inevitably feel you know demotivated well that's something that they talk a lot about in sports so people have heard about it a thousand times and we pay lip service to it but then in our own lives we don't actually follow it which is a new year's resolution the problem with that is that you are focusing you are starting with the result i want to lose 40 pounds i want to learn i want to know

spanish you know like you're picking a thing and you're saying i want to get that result when really what you're talking about identity you're also talking about process it should be i want to i want to eat better meals on a daily basis as opposed to i want to get a certain thing or i want to write a book is is not the right goal it should be i'm i'm going to start writing like you know it's the doing the thing versus focusing on the outcome well and this is kind of one of the i

don't know discoveries i had as i was working on the book and writing about the topic more is that when you stick to the process like you're saying right now when you like perform habits consistently every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become and so by doing those habits you're casting these little votes for the type of person that you are the identity that you believe you have you're sort of reinforcing that internal narrative and so by building small habits by sticking to the process you are

in that moment reinforcing that identity and ultimately once you get to that point where you say hey actually you know i've done this enough times i think this is part of my story like i am a basketball player or i am a meditator or i am a writer or whatever it is um you're no longer pursuing behavior change at that point because you're already you're not trying to be someone new you're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be and you know like take you know you're a great example

of this as uh say someone who has the identity of a writer or an author now that doesn't necessarily mean the task of writing is easy for you or that it doesn't require any effort but the act of writing every day is in alignment with how you view yourself the the internal narrative of i'm an author or i'm a writer you're not like trying to convince yourself or in the case of many habits or new year's resolutions people say things like i need to get motivated or i need to get amped up or like i

need the willpower to do it and like you don't necessarily need to get motivated to be a writer you already view yourself in that way now you still need to stick to the habit you still need to do the work but i think it's the the work takes on a different characteristic at that point once you start to identify as the type of person who does that consistently and it's it's sort of paradoxical so i get why it's it's hard for people to understand like you you hear bill belichick or someone talk about the process

and you're like but you've won the most games out of anyone or or in zen in the art of archery you know he talks about you know put the target out of your mind you know what's the point of archery if you're not aiming at the target right so it it feels insane and that's probably why people have resistance to it and i i think where i've come down is like okay obviously having goals is better than someone who has no goals but then it's like once you have the goal philosophically you get to a

place where the goal becomes not important so it's it's a weird contradiction that you're asking people to wrap their heads around well and i kind of feel like if you really care about the goal you'll focus on the system you know like if you if you actually care about getting the result which supposedly is what we all are doing this for the archer is trying to hit the bullseye the football players trying to win the championship and so on supposedly results matter so much we care so much about them and this is coming by the

way from someone who is very results-oriented like i've kind of had to you know like do therapy on myself or whatever to get myself to focus on the process more and not be so hung up on the outcome but if you do care about the outcome so much then you need to focus on the system in the process because that's how you actually achieve it and furthermore being outcome focused will help you achieve a goal one time but if you want to keep winning again and again you have to be focused on the system and

so goals are good for uh one-time wins systems are for people who want to win repeatedly and i feel like that's kind of where i um how i think about the distinction between the two yeah what's that what's that joke where it's like uh once you're lucky twice you you have good systems you know or twice you're good you know it's like doing it once is easy or it can be random but if you're trying to replicate it there needs to be some sort of process right and i i'd be curious too as an author

like again this because the sports thing is you have you want your book to be successful no one writes a book and then they hope nobody reads it but then there they also the place this this uh process comes in mark surrealist talks about this he goes like sanity is tying your happiness to your own actions you know like if your goal on your book it like you can't really have a system that guarantees you too much of the external results like you can't have a system that is going to make your book a number

one new york times seller you can have a system that should generate a good book you know like you can have the system to focus on the parts that are in your control and then you also have to get to a place where you write off the parts that are not in your control as being much less consequential yeah i kind of think about it like you have things that you don't control at all the weather for example then you have things that you influence but you don't control them you know like if you're playing

someone in tennis you can influence the outcome you can't control how they play or where they should hit their shots or whatever and then you have things that you're like fully under your control you know what you choose to wear today or whatever and most of the things that really matter in life fall in the middle category you can influence them but you can't totally control them and so at some point at least for myself like with writing atomic habits i had to kind of be at peace with the effort that i put in or

something like i didn't want to get to the end of it you know depending on how you measure it it took somewhere between three to five years to finish the book your whole life i didn't want to get to the end of that process and feel like i hadn't given the best effort i could um now i hoped it would do well and hit a best sellers list and sell a bunch of copies and all that but i can't control that but i just wanted to feel like i had influenced every bit of that process

that i could and then you know then we'll see what happens and um you know there's always something more you could have done but i'm at peace with the effort i gave you know and i feel like that's uh that was probably the most important thing for me and then the fact that has worked out well you know just makes it all feel much better afterward yeah that's that's the extra but i mean imagine if you'd gotten the results but you knew that it wasn't as good like you know like that's that's a weird position

to be in that i've been in at different times in my life and i'm sure you've seen it with articles or something where you did a pretty good job but it wasn't like your best yeah there's a there's a weirdness to it i mean you still enjoy it there's something about the um there's something about the struggle that makes the outcome more uh you know enjoyable like i think about imagine if you had spent your whole career you played football as a kid and through high school and college and you're finally like the kicker on

the super bowl winning team and you kicked the field goal to win the game and how that would feel after spending 25 years of your life dedicated toward that that goal versus being like a professional soccer player and then you retire and you're like hey you know what i might try out for a team and then you turns out you can be the kicker and then the starter gets hurt and you end up kicking the game-winning field goal in the super bowl and it's like it would still be really cool but i don't know that

it would be the same because you don't have the struggle before it and so there needs to be some kind of yeah the height of your joy is tied to the depth of your sorrow in that sense and the more that you the more effort that you put in the the better it feels when you do have some success there's a there's a story i just found and you can't steal it because it's going to be in my next book but um uh jimmy carter was a was a nuclear engineer before he was a a

a a politician and before i guess before he was a peanut farmer but he he he went to the naval academy and uh he was sort of up for this promotion as a naval officer and he was he was interviewed by admiral rickover who single-handedly basically invents the idea of a nuclear submarine and anyways he's in this he's in this long interview and these are these notoriously like insane interviews um he was like a really difficult guy to please and so he's asking jimmy carter about all his accomplishments and goes you know uh you know

how did you how did you do in your class at uh at the naval academy and he says oh i was 59th in my class of 400 which is extremely difficult he said how did you do on this posting and he goes through and he's like sort of beaming listing all his accomplishments and um rick over looks at him and he just goes did you always do your best and he was like he was going to be like yes you know look at all my accomplishments and then and then he he thought about it and

he said no i i didn't always do my best and then uh rickover just got up and left the room and he jimmy carter said the rest of his life was trying to provide a better answer to that question and so it was interesting to me to go like he'd had this incredible career as one of the top people in the navy top of his class but as soon as he had to look at it from the side of like was it actually the best he was capable of doing the accomplishment became totally meaningless and

i think that's a good that's a good microcosm of life yeah that's fantastic that's a yeah it's a wonderful example of this idea and it also encourages you to measure outcomes in a different way you know like we spend so much time measuring outcomes on how they are relative to everyone else you know how much money am i making relative to the person next to me or what is the number on the scale relative to the other people and you know on the team or in my class or whatever all these other things that are

like status symbols of some sort and this is like an internal measure which is um also interestingly both of those are about feelings one is about how you feel compared to others and one is about how you feel with like your self-esteem and reputation with yourself and um i don't know there's i think there's probably a strong encouragement to measure it more in the second way than the first well it's funny because both our mutual friend mark manson and i use this the story of dave mustain in in our i did an ego's the enemy

and he did it in uh the subtle art but you know here's this guy he gets he he's the lead guitarist and founder of mega death that seems like a great accomplishment but in light of the fact that he was kicked out of metallica that's a not an accomplishment um and it's like so many people would kill to have sold the amount of books that you've sold but then you so you can and if i told you at the beginning of your book this is what you're going to have you'd be like that's an unmitigated

success but you can still but but that's the problem with comparison and and focusing on things that are outside your control is you can immediately render your own accomplishment meaningless by by looking at someone who sold one more than you and that's like the shitty thing we do to ourselves i don't know why we do that you know like i fall into that just as much as everybody else you could get like whatever your current level of output is or successes that becomes your new baseline and then you just look at whoever is slightly above

that and then you you feel the way you did before and it's like you need to remind yourself when you wanted what you currently have you know like there are so many things about my current lifestyle that i've spent the last decade working toward and like i thought that was the thing i really wanted you know and then you get to hear and uh you feel differently so i don't know i um there's some kind of recalibration that goes on there there's some kind of encouraging uh type of encouragement that we all need to like

focus on those good bits that we have earned already rather than uh looking always looking toward the next milestone and i think this also connects back to what we were talking about a minute ago with process versus goals or systems versus outcomes which is that this is one of the downsides of being goal oriented is that you're always looking at the next milestone versus being process oriented or system oriented which is you know i can feel really good about myself right now because i got two good hours of writing in this morning and that was

an accomplishment and it felt like a good day already you know like the day has already been a victory i don't need to like be thinking about all these other huge goals and then all of a sudden turn it into a failure well it's very clear why we do it right like evolutionarily it makes total sense why we would never be happy with what we've accomplished and then you have to ask yourself what am i optimizing for am i optimizing for for evolutionary gains or am i opting for contentment and happiness and you're right i

think like for me like uh one of the weird parts about being a writer is that suddenly you have less and less time to do the thing that you actually like doing and so you have to you have to figure out what makes you happy is what make if you're a goal-oriented writer chances are you're only going to have fleeting moments of happiness when you hit the best-selling list or you sign the deal or you sell the thing or you get recognized or do you want the day in and day out happiness of like actually

enjoying the thing and then that comes back to which one is more likely which one you have the most control over and uh which one is actually easiest to sustain over time yeah you have this weird phenomenon where success kind of eats itself it's like the better you get at something the more opportunities come your way and the more opportunities come your way the more likely you are to get distracted from doing the thing that got you those opportunities in the first place and so as you continue to improve and find yourself enjoying more results

you have to like upgrade your ability to say no you know there are all kinds of things that i like have to say no to now that would have been like the coolest thing that had come across my desk you know like two or three years ago and that's a very fortunate position to be in but it's been a very hard lesson for me to learn i seem to be very dumb and slow at learning it like i keep saying yes to things that i should not be saying yes to and what you end up

finding yourself in is like you get all these commitments that are they sound cool on the surface in the moment so if you're goal oriented you're like oh man i got invited this cool conference i get to speak at this thing i get to sign this new deal whatever but then you find yourself living a lifestyle that's different than the one that makes you happy you know that day so to your point about like are you going to be driven by signing the deal or are you going to be driven by i like the lifestyle

of writing each day or whatever it is for you and so i think we need to spend more time like the first question to answer is what what do i want my days to look like you know like what do i want my normal lifestyle to look like and optimize for that and then within that how can i do the coolest stuff possible or the biggest stuff possible or whatever um and you can let your ambitious side live there but you don't want to it sounds so obvious when stated plainly but you cannot consider yourself

to be winning or living a successful life if you hate the lifestyle like if it's only about these successful results but you hate the lifestyle that is a failure not a success no i've written about this a bunch of times it's design your perfect day and reverse engineer your choices from there and the other one is like i've i've it's like what is your definition of success is your definition of success money is it fame for me i came to realize that the definition of success for me i think was a very stoic idea the

definition of success is autonomy how much control do you have over your life so it's weird you end up saying yes to things that you think that's autonomy you're choosing but then you're actually choosing to have less control day to day by agreeing to do these things so like i've talked about this before like when i look at my calendar like today i'm talking to you and one other person and those are the only two things in my calendar um and and so that meant that i had a free morning to write it meant uh

i leisurely read and ate lunch before i was talking to you i can leave the office whenever i want i can spend as much time as i want with my kids like that is so success is on the one hand being being able to write and do the thing that i like doing and that's what keeps it all going but but it's also not being controlled by anyone or any other thing uh even if those are lucrative or fun opportunities yeah there's this yes and no or like we kind of conflate them and put pair

them together because we you know they seem like these like oh two sides of the same coin or whatever but they're actually very different you know like no is a decision you say no to something you move on to the next choice yes is a responsibility as soon as you've committed to something you now have to you've like already and also like no is sort of like a form of a credit you know like by saying no to something you have retained this block of time in the future that you can redeem for whatever you

want to spend it on and yes is like some form of a debt you know and so like by saying yes to like you know this this talk is a good example like by saying yes to this i put myself on the hook for how i was gonna spend this hour and once i committed to that one way of spending it i had to do it that way i couldn't spend it in any other way i can't be writing the book right now or playing with my kids or walking around the you know forest or

whatever and so um i like to i j again i'm terrible at doing this and figuring out how to say no better so i keep coming up with these ways of trying to remind myself that like yes is a commitment no is the choice and as much as possible you want to kind of accumulate those credits that you can just spend your future time however you want rather than accumulating debts that you're on the hook to spend in a certain way hey everyone it's ryan i've raved about athletic greens before with all the things we've

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the winter months they're offering my audience a free one-year supply of vitamin d you'll basically never have to buy vitamin d again plus you'll get five free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit our link today these are great if you're competing in an event training on the go staying healthy while you're on a long drive for flights and more simply visit athleticgreens.com stoic join us in making this commitment to your health just go to athleticgreens.com and get your free year supply of vitamin d plus five free travel packs today well i think

about yes and no as as also the opposites of each other so each time you say no to something you're saying yes to something else and each time you're saying yes to something you're saying no to something else and if you can sit down and do some analysis like where like where does this bill come due so i found like um okay if i say yes to stuff who who is that taking time away from right it's not taking away time from eating i still managed to go to the bathroom during the day i still

seem to find time to watch television it's like who ends up cashing this check or you know and what account does it come out of and i think unfortunately it almost always comes out of the spouse account or the children account and and then you have to ask yourself are you really getting that return so i think for instance i'm glad you did this with me but i've said i've scaled almost to zero the amount of podcasts that i agree to be on because an hour is an hour and you can't do anything else as

you said and and also the and you talk a lot about this in atomic habits which i love is the way that different habits and decisions ripple out into other things so i find because i don't schedule stuff now like let's say i agreed to do this conference call that could have been an email that honestly i shouldn't have been involved with the beginning now it now is a 30-minute conference call at 2 30 p.m let's say now my whole [ __ ] day from the beginning it begins with the recognition and the acknowledgement that

i have to do a thing at 2 30 and now the entire center of gravity of what should be a day that's mine is pivoting around this thing that i don't want to do to begin with yeah not only you're spending the 30 minutes on it you're also planning the rest of your day around it yeah right i think it's even deeper than what you said too about like the opposite or you know like when you say yes something you're saying no to something else even more so when you say yes to something you're saying

no to everything else for that time slot and when you say no to something you are saying um yes to the option for pretty much anything else so like one is retaining multiple pathways and the other one is closing every other pathway right so there's yeah the i think the the punch line here is the more the value of saying no is higher than probably we appreciate and uh hopefully i can get better at it well because what you're saying yes to is also the least um what's the word it's it's you're saying yes with

the and you're paying the highest price so like when you it you do buy something or you don't buy something with money it's one thing but when you say yes and then you pay with time you never get that time back and it's interesting seneca talks about how how intensely protective we are of money and property and then time which is the most rare of all the things we're willing to be like well i don't want like if someone's like can i have ten dollars you'd be like can can i give you ten dollars i

don't know yes or no but if someone's like can i have ten minutes of your time you're like it's only 10 minutes and which is such a re i don't it's it's so insane that it almost defies explanation that we would be so casual with the one thing that we'll never get back it is crazy and like i said i'm still learning this lesson myself but um the other wild thing is that by the way you choose to invest your time determines all the other resources anyway so you can if you're like oh it's you

know just a little bit time i'd rather like i'll use this time to you know get some money or whatever like you can just figure out how to get all that stuff that you protect so dearly um just by spending your time in a better way so it's it's the one thing that you have to optimize above all the others well that leads me to something i was going to ask you so so obviously you think a lot about systems you think a lot about process a lot about habits and then the pandemic comes along

and it's the largest that i've called it this before like the the largest forced lifestyle experiment in human history it just blows up everything we thought about how you have to do this job or that job how you have to wake up and live this life or that life how has how have your habits and systems changed uh with i first i want to know about that pandemic then i have another version of this question but how has your life changed in the last 12 months given what's happened well atomic habits came out in october

of 2018. so for the like year and a half after that i was running it pretty hard um i had been traveling more than i ever had before and i think the year after the book came out i spent like i added it up it was something like 42 percent of nights in a bed that wasn't my own you know it was like just it was just way too much time on the road and um i love travel but that was like definitely my ceiling and uh so i still had all these cool opportunities and

things coming my way and you know a bunch of you know whatever speaking requests and different things like booked when the pandemic hit and so all that stuff of course got cancelled and moved virtual and so on and um i was planning on slowing down or tapering it back but i never would have slowed down to the degree that i was forced to and i never would have done it for as long as i've been forced to and it has been a really great thing um it's been exactly what i needed was to stop like

running so hard and to get back into like a more patterned daily lifestyle you know this is something my readers have talked about a lot and that i've talked about it you know speeches and so on is like how do you build habits when travel is a big part of your lifestyle or when you're always switching context and there are things you can do but the punch line is yeah it is harder you know habits are behaviors that are tied to a particular context you know your living room at am is where you meditate or

your you know kitchen at 3 p.m is where you do the bills or whatever like things get any kind of habitual action tends to get tied to the context it happens in so if you're always switching contacts uh you're always changing habits so i guess the answer to your question is for the year uh prior to the pandemic my habits were basically in maintenance mode like ideally i work out four times a week the that year i was working out about two times per week on average because i was just i wasn't home as much

and it was like it was enough for me to tread water and so in the years since the pandemic um things have been better for me on the habit front because my day and lifestyle has been so scheduled and i've been in the same place every time so in that sense it's been easier yeah it's sort of if when you travel or you're busy or you have sort of the unpredictability of life you always have an excuse right so i i felt like it's like i write every day but when i'm traveling maybe i'm only

70 effective this is something i realize when i'm traveling it's like if you try if you're let's say you know you're when you travel or you're not in your normal routine you're 70 as good as what you're doing that means that basically every three days it's the equivalent of taking a day off right and so uh it was occurring to me i was writing every day but i was i was like gutting it out i was doing my habits like white knuckling it and then i i did think there was i i knew there was

some cost but i was massively underestimating the cost of creativity happiness exercise diet etc that as soon as i was in one place i was i was getting the full results so i was like you probably you're like well what happens to this income what happens to all these things if if you're suddenly in one place and the answer is it's like if you lose your sense of taste your sense of smell gets better like it actually it just corresponding adjustments and you may actually end up in a better spot yeah i um workouts are

a good example for me with that like if i'm at home i train you know with weights in a gym a squat rack and all that you know i got this equipment if i'm on the road then i'm doing a lot of bodyweight workouts in hotel rooms and you know like just doing things in a sub-optimal way and so yeah all those 70 days you know i i think uh simultaneously two things are true here one is that i'm still glad that i did those workouts because like we were talking about earlier it casted a

vote for being the kind of person who didn't miss workouts and reinforce the identity and all that stuff and so in that sense sometimes the bad days are even more important than the good days because you prove to yourself that you can show up even when it's not ideal and yet the other side is also simultaneously true which is if the bad days become your normal day and you just keep throwing up 70 over and over again then that actually is a very high cost over the course of six months or a year or so

on something needs to change right no that's that's a good point it's a very stoic concept too where um look it's easy to be disciplined and and this is the point it's easy to be disciplined it's easy to be on top of it it's easy to be consistent when you are living in what we're currently living in which is a literal bubble like you can't go anywhere no one can come over you're not supposed to do anything every day is exactly the same and the unpredictability has gone way way way down and that and and

i think about that as someone who's into habits and into routines is is these these things can almost they almost become like a level of ocd-ness where where you almost become fragile and you're not able to deal with life so so to be able to have good habits and good systems while you travel while your wildlife is crazy is actually really good practice and and you don't you don't want to be someone who can only like you can only eat well work out when you have a personal chef and a trainer and you're you know

renting a house on the beach like of course everyone can be good there can you you can stay sober in prison because you can't get access to stuff what happens when you're in the real world now you need some resiliency too yeah i actually have a passage from the daodejing and atomic habits that says something of like the way of life is to be supple and you know flexible the way of death is to be brittle and hard and so like the flexible prevail and you need to have some element of that in your both

your mindset and just your ability to adapt to different situations but then when you're i kind of uh daria rose has a good concept that she calls uh home court habits and away court habits when you're at home you're on your own court you can design it and optimize it for you like let's make that as optimal as possible reduce distractions give you exactly what you need to perform at the highest level possible when you're on your the away court when you're traveling around or whatever you need to be flexible and you know able to

make something happen even if it's suboptimal yeah i talked about russell westbrook and stillness like he's this guy has insane habits routines rituals and then he gets traded twice in two years you know how do you you know he had like a parking spot he had a chapel he had like a trainer who made him the same thing every day and and that was great when he spent the vast majority of his career on one team where he was the top guy and then life throws you a couple of curveballs that's where you backslide and

not that he did but you know what i mean you have to be able to absorb the uncertainty and the changes or or you're just very fragile a little detail to add to that i always thought this was a good example um in the art of learning josh waitzkin talks about how he took his um so he competitive chess player also competitive martial arts martial artist and for his martial arts performances and competitions before he would go out he had like a little ritual that he did and you know a lot of athletes had this

kind of pre-game routine or whatever and gradually over the course of a few years he started paring it down and compressing it making it smaller and smaller until he got it down to where it was just like 30 seconds or so and it ended up serving him really well because he was at an international competition and he either was given the wrong information or misread the schedule or whatever and he was taking a nap on one of the benches and they were like hey you're supposed to wrestle in like three minutes and he woke up

like groggy and kind of like goes through his 30-second routine and he was ready to compete and um i've tried to develop something kind of like that with writing where you know if i'm at home i face a wall that doesn't have any windows i put on my headphones i listen to the same playlist every time i grab a glass of water like i try to set up the environment the optimal way but the one thing that i have to do is i have to put my headphones on i have to play the same playlist

every time in the same order and i can do that basically anywhere i do when i'm on a plane i do it in a hotel room and by compressing it down to something that's really short like that i make it easier for myself to like get into the state of flow and perform at a high level even if things aren't optimal and so it's nice to be able to not rely you know i think about like the what russell westbrook example i don't know what his routine is but i'm like man if you have to

go to the same chapel and park in the same parking lot and do all you've got to do all that stuff it's actually kind of brittle and so you need to be able to have like something that you can carry with you and utilize that to get into your flow state or get ready to go and then that leads me to my next question which is i know you became a father and that sort of blows up your whole life right it just blows up your life in ways you can't possibly imagine and so i'm

curious how how have you kept those systems or routines or what have you learned about habits and routines that maybe you weren't thinking about when you're writing this book as as uh what's there's that there's that expression there's like an acronym that's like a dual income no kids a dinks i think is what it is where you're just like you're just living the [ __ ] life you know and uh it's easy to be an artist or creative person or have good systems when you're only responsible for yourself yeah i just didn't try um i

took uh i took three months off and that was a huge huge benefit you know just to be able to spend that time um there have been a lot of lessons but i would say probably the two that come to mind immediately the first is for me i've had to change the way that i write books uh when i wrote atomic habits i did it you know i didn't have kids it was kind of like this all-consuming project i did it at all hours it was like the thing that i thought about all day i

went to bed i dreamt about it i woke up i worked on it more like there was it was just this kind of all-consuming project and it's not possible for me to operate that way right now as a as a parent and so um i've changed to i just make sure that i have two sacred hours every morning where i do my writing and um so first it's the first thing i do in the morning like i wake up take a shower get a glass of water and then i do that so i try to

fit it in before everybody else's agenda like creeps into my agenda um secondly i do that whole ritual that i just mentioned a minute ago about like you know putting on my headphones listening to music etc and the idea is by not facing windows i reduce like just visual distractions by putting on headphones i reduce auditory distractions and i want to just like live in the document basically for those two hours and finally i picked a length of time two hours which is long enough for me to actually get into the work and actually get

something done because you kind of have this startup cost with any creative work but short enough that i finish the session and i feel energized good and i can go to sleep and wake up again and i know that i can do it tomorrow so in other words i'm not trying to do like six hours of writing because then like i don't know if i could actually do that again the next day it's also a reasonable amount of time to ask for right so and for i would point that out because lots of people who

are thinking about doing their first book or thinking about some project or like i i can't dedicate myself totally to do something but it's like it's it's not impossible to carve out two hours that's waking up an hour earlier and you know staying up an hour later let's say or that's hiring a help for two hours or that's just asking your spouse or your partner to take over for two hours it's not you know what you think goes into being an nfl player so it's not as insane as you think it is yeah and you

know that's just what works for me like people can find whatever is sustainable for them but that was the the frame i had was like what can i actually sustain and you know atomic habits was easily the longest project i had ever worked on um and when you get on the other side of a really big project like that you realize that you can do these big things um but you do have to show up every day and so i knew that that was something that i could sustain and would actually show up and that

i just need to be patient and like but i know that the project will finish itself at some point and i will say that is probably there are many things you know people like to criticize books as not being a great business model or whatever i actually love books and think they're an amazing business model um but all of the great things that books can provide there is one massive trade-off which is that all of the work is up front you have to do the reading the research the writing prepare the marketing plan record a

bunch of interviews you have to do all of that before you've even seen the single copy before you sing i've sold even a single copy everything is all that work is stacked up front it's all delayed gratification but if you can do all of that then the outcome can be really really great um but many people most people possibly don't have the patience for that and the other really challenging part of it is that like today i showed up and i worked for two hours and i have this huge manuscript and it was a mess

when i started and it's still a mess right now and then you need to wake up again tomorrow and do the same thing again and this process of showing up every day for two or three or four years and working on something that feels like a mess 96 of the time that is a that can be a draining thing if you're not in the right mindset and so you just i think you really have to scale down and focus on the process and just getting a couple good hours in each day no that strikes me

as something that's sort of very endemic to your mindset there's this uh there's this quote from epictetus where he says uh first you know decide who you want to be and then do what you need to do but i i would say that james the james clear tweak on that formula is decide who you want to be do what you want to do and then it's like start with the absolute smallest unit of measurement on that thing which is obviously the double meaning of atomic habits but but your point of like okay this two year

or six year or ten year project i'm going to measure in two hour increments on a daily basis and that's how you get to the final product you know i've actually been thinking more about this which is i feel like my style and something that i i guess i'll recommend it just because it works for me i don't know if it'll work for everybody but find it a bit more ineffably it gives you the flexibility if you actually care about those things which i think goes to your point earlier you have to truly love the

thing yeah or or else you're going to end up making compromises to make it easier you're you want to be able to find out what is the best combination of your things given the constraints and the reality of what you're talking about i recommended this book a couple times but there's a new victor frankel book um you wouldn't think there would he they found this like lost series of lectures but i read and i loved it and he was talking about like obviously he wanted to be like the greatest psychologist of his generation he wanted

to be great at it he didn't think that that would have you know uh detours through the holocaust right and losing his entire family and and all the horror that he went through in his life but that's what life does it it blows up your plans and then so he's talking about how you have to you have to find out what you were meant to do within the co the guard rails of of the stuff that's happened to you um this is um circling or we're kind of like hinting or dancing around what i feel

like is a really important point which is that if you pick any specific domain so let's take your example of become the best-selling author of your generation if you pick that what's really tough about this and this is particularly true for anyone who considers themselves to be an ambitious person or you know to be uh driven we live in a world of seven billion plus people and when there are seven billion people you're going to find a few who are willing to sacrifice every other area of their life to work on that one thing whatever

that particular thing is in your domain and so this is challenging because if you're the type of person who is like i'm really ambitious actually i it doesn't excite me to be like well i'll just operate at the 80th percentile like i'll just dial it back a little bit actually you're like shooting for you know the 98th percentile or whatever well what you end up realizing or coming to discover is that you have to end up playing your own game you know like you have to end up defining your own rules sort of the way

that you did a minute ago where you said oh you know i want to be a great author and a great husband and you know like you have multiple aspects that end up defining what success is for you and you can be all of those things but you just need to define it in a way that aligns with your particular values and i think this starts to come back to a lot of goals and status metrics and things that we end up spending our lives shooting for are actually not your goals even though you set

them they were inherited from something else they were mimicked from society or copied from you know the celebrities the people around you or whatever people that seem seem to have what you want but the real work is to become self-aware and to ask yourself questions and re revisit those questions again and again around what is important to me what are my values what does my ideal day look like what do i actually care about who am i when i'm my best self and when you start to answer those questions and have a more clear answer

to what is it do i that i really want um then you can define your own game rather than getting trapped into some of these things where you know you end up competing with people who are actually playing a different game than you but you just didn't realize it well the game the game is rigged right let's say you want to hit the most home runs in the history of baseball and you find out oh certain people are willing to cheat to accomplish that same goal and so now your your ethics and the the goal

are in conflict with each other this is why i think meditations is such a fascinating book you have marcus ruiz the most he he gets there he becomes the most powerful man in the world the thing that you know a handful of people have ever done and he just sort of immediately realizes that it's not it's not that great and it's just a job like anything else and that that you know it wasn't it actually wasn't that fun to be alexander the great or julius caesar or any of these things and and so that's the

problem is yeah you're in competition with people who for whatever reason maybe they had a crappy childhood maybe something in their brain broke um maybe they're a sociopath or a psychopath who is who is who is not operating on it's like you're you're you as a as a somewhat healthy person are subject to gravity and the realities of of happiness and meaning and you're in competition with someone who's not moored by those things and you're now going to deprive yourself of happiness because they have one more or 10 million more than you you know you're

you're never you're you're selling out the happiness and contentment and peace you could have now to get this thing that's actually an illusion that the other person's not even enjoying even if even if it exists which kind of circles back to a point you made early on which is how can we have these internal measures of success rather than external because all of the stuff that we're kind of mentioning here is related to measuring yourself relative to someone else and if instead we can shift back to am i at peace with the effort i gave

you know do i feel like i'm uh you know exerting myself and or influencing the situation in the way that is satisfying to me then you don't have to worry about the other stuff yeah like did did you do your best and i think and because the reality is you'll fail so so that's what i think is interesting to pull this back to jimmy carter most people think jimmy carter wasn't a good president and i i'm i'm still reading a lot about him so i i don't want to make a judgment but let's say he

what let's say universally we all agree he's not a good president well it's a really hard job and maybe he like the only way you can walk away from failing at that level not just failing but failing in public many people think he just sucks and can how do you walk away from a book failing or a president's uh presidency failing or or a goal uh you know you wanted to lose 30 pounds by march and you know you you only lost 19 and and you you're mad at yourself how do you how do you

carry on you have to know that you gave your best that's the like that's the only way what you know what if your book had come out the day of a terrorist attack or my book had come out the day of a hurricane and it just all got wiped away and you lost that moment uh and and you just did you didn't get it i mean that that happens too that's why i i mean there can be it's harder to do it than what i'm about to say but i do think there can be a

simple philosophy that you can carry around which is just have one good day you know just have one good day and then repeat it like that that's all i really was trying to do today you know like did i have two good hours of writing i'll go get a workout in and i'll play with my kids and that that's a good day you know and then like i can show up again and i can do it tomorrow and what happens to the project whenever it comes out like i will try to influence that as best

i can but i can't control it and so instead if it flops i'm just gonna wake up tomorrow i'm gonna try to have a good day again did you have you i've talked about this too did you see the movie palm springs no i haven't seen it it's so it's so good uh it's it's the perfect movie to watch during quarantine but yeah it's realizing like oh i think that's what i've found during the pandemic it sort of radically shrinks uh life as well so yeah you're like a good day followed by a good day

followed by a good day and they all just blur together and that's really all life is life isn't this place that you have to get or these numbers of things that you have to do it's really like day to day is it enjoyable and how do you how it's a little more epicurean than stoke but sort of how do you get to a place where uh your day to day is good because the truth is life is made up of days so why and to go the james clear philosophy why not go to the smallest

unit of measurement and try to optimize it yep i mean this is the value that habits have i think you know like if you can figure out good habits for yourself whether it's writing for two hours or meditating for one minute or doing a push-up or whatever then you can start building those into your days and they are likely to become better days because of that and uh just by mastering your habits you can end up reaping a lot of long-term benefits not only in results and outcomes and success and all of that but also

just in happiness or feeling like you fulfilled your potential or that you gave your best effort and so on and i don't remember this if this is in the book but in the william james thing on habits he talks about like no the the converse of what you just said is also true which is that no one he says no one is less happy than the person who doesn't have habits who has to make every choice anew right so it's like it you'd think that it would be wonderful to be able to do whatever you

want every day but the truth is that's actually miserable because you're exhausted by all the choices and all the uncertainty and you make the wrong choice a bunch of times and so if you know what you want your data is then you're like this is all that i have to do today and i know it's manageable there's well there's a scientific argument first of all it's just impossible your brain is automating things whether you know it or not you're building habits either way but let's set that aside and just talk about like the choices that

you could make and kind of william james point about you know like you don't want to have to make each choice anew this is one of the like uh i don't know sort of a common criticism but also i think people are just kind of trying to poke holes or be snarky sometimes they're like well i don't want to be a robot i don't want to pigeonhole myself for you know like have every hour of the day planned or do the same thing every single time or whatever and like first of all just separate from

that i don't know anybody who actually is like that like i i don't know anyone who actually can live life that way because life doesn't work that way every day like introduces other emergencies and things like i the idea that you would it kind of reminds me of people were like well i don't know if i want to lift weights because i don't want to get huge like a bodybuilder and i'm like it does not happen that fast trust me i've been trying to make it happen that fast for like 10 years and it still

doesn't work that quickly so cross that bridge when you come to it yeah yeah but uh the truth is what you're kind of similar to what you're mentioning habits don't restrict freedom they create it you know it's usually the people who have the worst habits that actually have the least amount of freedom right it's like the people who have the worst like knowledge and reading and learning habits always feel like they're behind the curve people have the worst financial habits always feel like they don't have enough money or they're wondering where the next dollar is

going to come from people will have the worst health and fitness habits always feel like they don't have enough energy or you know they they aren't quite sure how they can they feel exhausted they don't show up and get it all done so it's actually by optimizing your habits that you create capacity and space to have that additional autonomy and freedom um you know like the fact that i wrote for two hours a day makes me feel really good about my productivity and i can move on with the rest of my day i don't have

to be working every hour because i know that i already got some good stuff done now i can you know spend the rest of the day the way i want it um yeah and so that's true for many many things you win early and then the rest is extra right yeah i love it well thanks man i don't want to take up more of your time i know we both scheduled an hour so we'll uh we'll give it and then we'll we'll follow our own rules and move on to the next thing all right i

love it thanks ryan appreciate it dude i appreciate it you