Stop LOSING! | James Clear, bestselling author of Atomic Habits

well you always need this balance of exploring and exploiting and kind of early on when you don't really know what's working you got to explore a lot and then once you find a couple things that work you you know keep doubling down on that and then once things stop working you explore some more but you never fully give up on exploring you know like it's it's nice to continue to to dip your toe in and try new things and look for different angles and you know like you never know what you kind of unearth and

discover hi I'm James glitter author of atomic habits and an entrepreneur and you're on behind the brand with Brian Elliott everyone welcome to another episode of the show James welcome hey thanks so much for having me I usually ask my guest how did you get this job I stumbled into it I guess I you know I wanted to be an entrepreneur I didn't want to be an author and so 10 15 years ago when I was starting my entrepreneurial career I launched some different projects or tried to build an iPhone app that flopped I built

some other websites that kind of fumbled around and failed and I realized that the reason those early projects were struggling was because I didn't have an audience and so at the time everything I was reading was saying hey you should build an email list you should start writing a blogs you can get email subscribers and then once you have an audience you'll have somebody you can launch your next project to and that made sense to me and so I started writing I started a couple blogs and then eventually kind of learned how to build an

email list and a couple things happened that were surprising the first thing is that I liked writing I didn't really think that that was going to be something that I grabbed gravitated tour but I I liked that um I was a science guy in college and uh so I always thought that I was going to be more involved in the Sciences or I don't know that I would be do doing something more like that and I didn't really think much about English and writing and so on but when I got to choose the topic when

I could write about whatever I wanted I I really liked that so I enjoyed that part of it and then the second thing that was surprising was that I turned out to be like pretty good at building an email list and when whatever quality or combination of traits that you need to build an audience I like that stuff like I like writing consistently I like thinking about design and conversion and how the website is laid out um I like building Partnerships with other companies and Brands to get more distribution or to drive traffic to the

website and you kind of need that blend of traits to build an audience and so I like those two things and that led me down this path of writing and uh The Habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote it new article on my blog every Monday and Thursday for the first three years and so that twice a week writing is what led to the growth of jamesclear.com and ultimately the book deal for Atomic habits put a time stamp on that are we talking about 2012 here yeah so um I started my

entrepreneurial career in September of 2010 the first 18 months I'm kind of fumbling around trying a bunch of different stuff nothing's really sticking or working I'm taking a couple freelance clients on the side to make ends meet I moved into my parents basement for 11 months at one point so I was living there um and then around November of 2012 so November 12th 2012 was the first article that I wrote on jamesclear.com and I started from zero there but I did over those two years prior developed some skills at least I I at least knew

how to build a website or how to start an email list like I I was starting from zero in terms of audience but at least I had some knowledge and uh so it was November of 2012 was when that twice a week writing habit started and that led me through the fall of 2015 when I started shopping book ideas around the Publishers and and ultimately signed the deal that became Atomic habits I was on the same path uh as you about the same time period I was at a big Hollywood studio uh Universal Pictures and

in 2008 I cut the cord and then started my new startup uh heading you know headlong into the Great recession those were tough times that was not you know an easy go but at the same time it was exciting cuz I remember blogs were a thing like uh influential bloggers they were the influencers at the time uh I'm just curious though let's unpack building an email list because I think uh it's still relevant more than ever as a direct way to reach people and build a community so what types of things were you doing you

sort of alluded to the fact that you were consistent but like what other things do you think go into the makeup of building a quality Community via an email list I think there are three big things you know the at the time I actually thought I was late you know I thought I thought all the big email lists had been built already and even now that I'm a decade into it I feel like oh it's actually still quite early um you know my email list now 3 million three and a half million people and the

next million person email list is getting started right now you know there's somebody out there right now starting today on the next huge one so um it's still very early but I would say those three things so the first and the thing that you it's the least sexy answer but is the thing you can never get around which is every marketing strategy works better with great content and so you always have to come back to this like North Star of can you make it as useful as possible can you deliver the most value possible can

you live by this mantra of always give value before you ask for Value um and you you have to do that otherwise the other stuff doesn't work that well um so and why do you think that is it just because so much competition well there is there is more competition now um but I mean I think it's something even more basic than that it's kind of just this law of reciprocity for humans which is you want to trust people once they've proven their value um you know you're more likely to believe in something once it's

been proven to you rather than just somebody selling it to you and so you know I give away 98% of my content for free um you know I've written hundreds of articles on the site I put the newsletter out for free every week I publish a bunch of stuff on social media um Atomic habits is really the only written thing that I've charged for um and that's like $12 and so it's very interesting the way that it works now but the internet enables such Broad contribution and scale that it is an enormous advantage to have

a large audience and so if you're willing to give away a lot of value for free you can earn the trust of a lot of people and then once you have a lot of trust and once you have a large audience there are plenty of ways to make money um you know and I don't I don't really know um all I can say is that that works well for my business you know I don't claim for that to be the best strategy for every business um but for my particular thing it works really well so

um the first step is writing great content and when I was writing two articles a week I was spending the shortest I ever did an article in was eight hours um most of the time it would take about 20 hours and so that's you know there's a 40 hour week right there if you're right too the longest articles I ever did were like 50 or 60 hours but that was rare that was you know I can count on one hand the number of times I did something like that so um but if you put 20

good hours into an article and do that twice a week for 3 years you turn around with a couple hundred that you've written and it turns out that most people haven't put that level of effort into a particular topic you know I had this kind of feeling of impostor syndrome early on where I talked to a friend and I said you know I like I I don't have a degree in this like who you know who am I to talk about it and he was like well the way you become an expert is by writing

about it every week and so I kind of internalized that and just tried to pour my effort into making the best article I could twice a week and you know you turn around two or three years later and you're in a good spot so so that's the first piece is writing great content I would say the second element of building an email list is design so you know you could um have excellent content and you put that on your website but it turns out that what you have is a really leaky bucket so people come

and visit but then you don't really convert them at all you don't get anybody to join the email list and I would say that mostly comes down to design and I use design in a broad sense here I'm including the copy that's on the website so uh that's the positioning that you have for your topic it's the promise that you make to people about what they'll get when they sign up uh and it's the positioning of the forms and the how they're designed and the colors used and all that kind of stuff now I I

generally think of those elements that I talked about the two most important are the position of the forms so did you get them above the fold are they really easy to see see and easy to identify on the site and then the second is the positioning of the content so the promise that you make to people about what they're going to get when they sign up like when you join my email list and sign up for 321 you know that you're going to get three short ideas from me two quotes from other people and one

question to think about and I'm going to send that message out each week and it's going to help you do things like build good habits and break bad ones make smarter decisions be more productive or more creative and that's kind of the promise that I'm making to the the reader so if you're interested in those things that's what this newsletter does and you know there are many other newsletters that talk about different things but they all do a good job of positioning themselves well if they have a large audience um and then the third and

final bucket is basically traffic so it's how do you once you have a good bucket that's you know retaining a fair amount of water and you've got great uh content that's on the site how do you pour more water in the bu how do you get more people coming to the to the website and the answer to this one is trickier Because the Internet moves fast and the answer kind of changes basically every two years so like where I get my traffic from now is different from than where I got it from in two years

ago or in 2014 or whatever um you know there was a couple year period where I got a ton of traffic from quora they had they had like a Blog function for a while and I would publish articles on my site and then I would take that article and republish it on quora but with links back to my website and back to different pages and if it went over well there was a period where qu would actually email out the top posts on their site to their users and so occasionally I would get lucky and

one would go well and you know they'd send a ton of traffic my way so um but they don't do that anymore you know so like that was there for a little bit but then it's gone um I have a couple friends who they built huge audiences and the 2012 to 2014 Range when things went viral on Facebook and there was just there was like the rise of Upworthy and some of these other brands it was it was a huge time for Facebook traffic and now now it's very different it's kind of more you have

to like pay to play basically um but there are always new things coming like LinkedIn works pretty well right now um up until you know a year or Soo Twitter was a good Avenue obviously YouTube is a really good discovery engine a little bit trickier now because that's video and not necessarily text but there's always new stuff coming um in my case the one that worked really well was and this was you know probably sounds basic now but 10 years ago nobody was really doing this big websites like men's health or Inc or Entrepreneur magazine

or whoever they would often republish articles from other outlets so like Men's Health might take an article from Shape magazine and then they would republish it on their site and so I just went to the editors of those Publications I said he you guys are already doing this republishing thing just treat me the way that you're treating some of these bigger Brands and so I'll send you my two best articles from each month I'll give them to you for free but you have to keep the links in there and so um you know they would

get free content and I would get free traffic they would drive a bunch of people back to my site and I get a bunch of subscribers and so on and that worked really well for like a three or four year period And I drove a lot of my early subscribers that way so um The Avenues are always always changing but I think that those three General categories are you creating great stuff do you have solid design and you're getting pretty good conversion and have you figured out a one or two ways to drive traffic um

those are those are I think the main ways to grow an email list I like it uh nice summary brace synct everything I would expect from James Clear um I like the way your brain works I can kind of see it the wheels turning in there uh mind works very similarly uh a followup question to that is do you consider yourself a solo preneur in other words I'm thinking about all this twinking tweaking and tinkering and adjusting you're making are you doing this by yourself or do you have a team yeah so I kind of

have had different chapters um the first five years was all me um and once I signed the book deal for Atomic habits I used some of that advance to hire my first employee and so uh the next like 5 years was me and Lindsay she her name was Lindsay um she was with me for seven years and then she just left to be an entrepreneur and do her own thing recently which is great I'm really happy for her um and I hired a replacement and uh so she's been with me for like a year now

and so it's it's just I I don't consider myself a solopreneur in the sense of like I don't know labeling myself that way or whatever or like having a badge of honor about it just being one person but I do only have the intention of building a business that's very small and having a very small team and for the last seven years it's just been me in one person and for the first 5 years it was just me and I don't ever intend for the business to have like 25 employees or 50 employees or anything

like that I like being small and part of my reason for that is what I would call the cost of consensus so there are a lot of hard costs in business there's like your expenses and software and all this other stuff that you pay for and sometimes there are these variable costs that come in um and that's kind of obvious but the one that is maybe the greatest expense for any business that is almost invisible is the cost of consensus it's the cost of getting everybody on the team on the same page and agreeing that

we're working on the same thing and Rowing in the same direction and the bigger the team gets the higher the cost of consensus gets and um I tried to calculate one time how much it cost me to have an employee not just with their salary and what I came up with in terms of the amount of time that has to be spent to manage people the number of meetings you need to have to be on the same page versus just doing the work yourself uh and a bunch of other stuff is that like 90% of

the cost of having an employee is not their salary it's not the paycheck it's all the other stuff that goes with the costom consensus and so you know who knows if my estimate is right or not but I do generally like the idea of let's keep the business lean I'm kind of like allergic to meetings and to what I would call like pre-work like all of the so much of what you consider to be like stuff that happens in business having conversations about hiring somebody having conversations about promotions anything related to HR and payroll all

the meetings that you have that happen before the actual work occurs all of that is pre-work it's not none of that is the actual value that customers pay you for it's just stuff that you have to do to get to the hour that you spend where you do provide the real value and so I'm trying to out as much of that as possible I love that this series uh we talk a lot about brand and branding um of course there's you know blue trip Brands out there the the Nikes the Levis the upand comers the

Voris um and then there's personal Brands and building a personal brand is really important these days especially um and people come to this show to learn how to build their brand from experts who've done it what would you say is the James Clear brand well ultimately any brand is just the work that you do so in the beginning or you can try to frame it up as something else you can make a promise about something like for example when I started 321 at the top of the newsletter I wrote the most wisdom per word of

any newsletter on the web so that's me trying to establish the brand of what 321 is it if you want a short newsletter that gives you the most value and most is possible in like 5 minutes it's this newsletter but that's only true if I deliver on it right it's only it's only proven to be true by me actually shipping newsletters over the last five years that have delivered on that promise so you can do some shaping of the brand through strategy and design But ultimately your brand always um it always uh is a becomes

the work the actual work that you do so um I would say that's how it's defined and so in my case um I would say James clear's brand and what I strive to do but also what the work has become is it's useful non-fiction topics that are practical and actionable for your life and are explained in a straightforward and simple way and so you know if I do a good job of those things that Atomic habits and 321 and the articles on my website and even a tweet or something I share on social media it

is a useful topic that is explained in a straightforward way and um that's what I'm hoping to do but ultimately it's the work that measures whether that happens or not I like it I'll dig a Little Deeper on that which is so who's it for and this is a question I think you know and I'm talking to the audience now here too if you're thinking about building your brand a lot of us uh have made the mistake we included you know we create something that we've imagined everybody wants we have This brilliant idea we you

know we maybe make a prototype or we write a blog poster or write a book and put it out there in the world and like Tada like you ring the dinnerbell hope everyone comes to get it but sometimes it doesn't happen and so a better approach is to instead of like try to find customers for your product is to find products for your customers so it's like you know find demand first so who's it for so this would usually be a terrible answer I think but something I say occasionally is habits are for everyone you

know and so um I try to write about topics that are Timeless and Universal and I like those those categories because it gives you a better chance of success if it's a really broad Market if there's enormous demand for it I don't need to win everybody over you know I can just have a small segment and still have a successful business so I do like things that are like that um now having said that I think there are a couple tests that you can do that help avoid the pitfall that you just mentioned because I

have done that too I've tried to pursue projects or you know create a product that you thought was clever but it turns out people didn't actually want it so one of my first rules is that you should never try try to create demand you should only tap into a demand that already exists so um what do people already desire um you can get at this in a couple different ways so like if we're talking about books I like writing books that are in categories that already have books that have sold over a million copies so

if you can't find an example of a book that's sold a million copies in that category I don't think there's enough desire already now sometimes authors really resist that creators really resist that because they're like well this is what I want to write about you know this is what I want to create and my response is that's fine and the the secret is that you actually can write about whatever you want but what I'm talking about is the positioning and the framing and so if you can get the positioning right the inside can actually you

can actually take it almost any direction it's really in the case of a book it's really about nailing the first like 5,000 words so that the positioning is right and you're the book is in the it's tapping into a desire people already have rather than saying hey you can't write about this so as an example um later in atomic habits I talk about deliberate practice now if you're not familiar with it deliberate practice takes like 30 seconds to kind of unpack you know you need to explain the concept and how it's different than regular practice

and so on but habits aren't like that you know like just by virtue of growing up in society and kind of being part of culture we all sort of know that having good habits is favorable and having bad habits is unfavorable and I don't need to explain to anybody why you would want to have those things and so it could have been book about deliberate practice where I talk about habits but instead it's a book about habits where I talk about deliberate practice and I think the difference in how those two books would sell is

enormous you know now I don't need to convince you to care about the topic I just need to convince you that hey if you're only going to read one book about habits Atomic habits is the one to read um and that's a much different uh pitch than trying to get somebody to care about something that they don't understand why they should care about it so I think uh I think positioning is crucial yeah go ahead uh so it just leads me down a path of thinking were there what were the alt titles for Atomic habits

I have a huge spreadsheet I have like 400 titles that I brainstorm for the book um and what ended up happening was there was you know you brainstorm a bunch that you know you're not going to use you're just kind of like trying to play with words and play around with stuff and see if it leads you down an interesting path so you know there's maybe 200 of those that you're like oh I was never going to choose that I'm just kind of in the brainstorming mode but then you look at another 100 or 200

and you're like well maybe this is what the book could be about like for a while I thought well maybe instead of habits maybe it's a book about Behavior change in general uh and that seemed even broader at the time and I thought well maybe that would be a good idea but then I decided there's not people care more about habits they care about Behavior change just as a term and so I didn't really like that then there's other stuff that's like uh maybe you make it about productivity and I thought that sounded a little

too businessyoutube and I ended up with like eight that were all sort of testing kind of at the same level and there wasn't any meaningful separation and at that point it just becomes an artistic decision where you're like okay which one of these do I feel like is best and uh so that's ultimately kind of how I got there can you share like the runner UPS yeah there was um the surprising how power of small habits that was a um that was one for a little while that I considered there were a bunch of different

version of atomic habits and maybe Atomic is not like um like maybe Atomic habits is still the title but do you want to play up the atomic thing um in the subtitle like you know how to get a chain reaction of amazing results or something like that but that felt like a little heavy-handed um and then there's other stuff where like Atomic wasn't involved you know so I just wanted to lean on the like tiny changes remarkable results sort of thing um so there's there's kind of a there are a couple different formulas that a

lot of uh titles follow and these aren't like these aren't like known formulas that authors use this is just me backing into it from observing what a lot of titles do but the most common formula is the blank of blank so the Power of Habit the power of positive thinking the subtle art of not giving an F the um you know life-changing magic of tidying up uh you know and so these are all the psychology of money the blank of blank and a lot of times it's the art of blank but it's it's the blank

of blank um sometimes they'll start to throw modifier on it like the life-changing magic of tidying up it's not just the magic of cleaning or something like that um but whenever the title does it well they tend to have an element of contrast that are that's involved so the life-changing magic of tiing up you're like well I thought Tiding up was a small thing now you're telling me it's lifechanging or another formula is like Rich Tad Rich Dad Poor Dad so you contrast these two things but you have this element of contrast that makes the

title interesting in my case tiny changes remarkable results um so uh another formula that's pretty common is you take the topic that the book is about and then you add a modifier to it so extreme ownership by Jacko willing so it's a book about responsibility and taking ownership but it's not just responsibility it's the extreme version of that or deep work by Cal Newport it's not just regular work it's deep work and so by adding a modifier you can kind of make a phrase that's otherwise not that interesting or compelling you can sort of make

it your own so I kind of used a blend of these so like Atomic habits is that it's you know not just regular habits they're Atomic they're both tiny and they're powerful um and uh titles are tough because they have to do a lot of jobs you know they need to hopefully they have an element of contrast like I just talked about which makes it interesting so like in my case small thing big result second thing they have to do which sounds so obvious but a lot of titles don't do it they need to tell

you what the book is actually about so in my case the subtitle is an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones so that tells you what the book's actually about a lot of titles do this kind of keyword stuffing thing where they're like you know how to be happy make millions and live your dream and you're like okay that's not even really what the book is about you're just kind of stuffing stuff in there that you think people will like um and then the third thing that they have to do

is a good a good title owns real estate in the reader's mind so I think you know a lot of the time a good title's almost a little weird or strange when you first hear it like the 4-Hour Work week it's a little it seems a little odd uh you know or like Atomic habits you probably before the book you wouldn't have described habit as atomic you might have said they were small or little but you wouldn't have said Atomic that would sound a little strange and that's actually a good thing because then you can

own that real estate in the reader's mind and I think a great title does all three it has contrast it owns the real estate and it tells you what the book is actually about and uh it's hard it's hard to do all three of those things in a short Punchy way I love that Insight that was super fun inside baseball I know you we're both baseball players uh what what position do you play at I I was a pitcher pitcher okay yeah yeah I I did a little pitching I did a little catching they moved

me to Third Base then I didn't grow as big and so they moved me to second base I end up playing the infield and uh yeah awesome so 2018 you write this book 15 million plus copies later uh multiple multiple countries translated into different languages is uh what have you observed as the most surprising thing that people have taken away from your book in other words you know you're trying to teach people it seems uh how to have better habits how to you know eat the elephant one tiny bite at a time it's that's been

tremendous insight for me not being overwhelmed and doing my thing but what have you observed just anecdotally heard other people we'll talk about how the book has benefited them it's really gratifying to write something to have people find it useful you know I still consider it to be kind of like a minor miracle that anybody is paying attention um you know like you just you write this stuff on your blog and then now all of a sudden I'll see a picture on Instagram of somebody in India or Dubai or Australia reading it and you're like

how did the idea even get over there you know I mean it's kind of so it's it's sort of unbelievable that it's spread the way that it has um you know I tried really hard to make every idea in the book useful and so the first draft of atomic habits was like 710 pages and the finished version is 250 and I I kind of wanted the opposite problem that a lot of business books have you know you hear that classic CR critique which is this could have been a blog post basically and so I you

know I was like well let me start by writing way too much and then I'll just cut out everything that isn't excellent and um I think it worked well and I I do think that um I or at least I hope that a lot of the ideas in the book are really genuinely useful and I one nice thing is that when I look at feedback whether it comes in through social media or if you look at reviews on Amazon or Goodreads people mention different things it's not like it was just one idea and that's the

thing that's stuck with everybody like different people pull different things out of the book and that I feel like is a really nice thing because I don't my stance is that there actually is no one way to build habits there are many ways and my job is not to tell you like the way to do it my job is to try to empower you and equip you with a broader tool set and if you have a bigger toolkit then you're better positioned to figure out which strategy works for you now having said all of that

um I would say the one thing that has surprised me is that there was there was a lot that was already written about breaking things down making them small and about getting better results and that's usually the thing that we talk about when we talk about habits hey habits will help you make more money or be productive or get fit or you know reduce stress and it's true that habits can do those things but one of the biggest things that people have gravitated to from Atomic habits is this concept that every action you take is

a vote for the type of person you wish to become so it's that your habits are how you embody and shape your identity not necessarily the focus on results now there's still a lot in the book about driving better results but that has been interesting I think to see is that really what a lot of people have gravitated to what the aha moment was for many readers was when they made this shift from worrying about their results or using their habits to drive better results and instead asking who is the type of person I wish

to become you know how do my habits reinforce that how to my habits cast a vote for being a type of certain type of person and then trusting that if I build that identity and Foster that identity that the results will kind of come along the way so I would say that's probably been the biggest surprise yeah can I tell you mine uh can I give you a little testimonial uh well so I bought the book just like the rest of the world um and during that time I was having a bit of a Health

crisis I mean it wasn't uh the kind of Crisis that you went through with your injury but um I was you know 30-some and finding myself having debilitating headaches and I really thought oh shoot like do I have a brain tumor am I dying so I went got all the health checks it turned out everything was fine um but I was just having these really uncurable headaches um I bought your book I started reading it uh I went down a path of learning that I needed to change my diet and nutrition and sleep habits and

all that thing and the number one take away from the book If I Could Just net net it was that it was like the habits that you uh create help you become the person that you want to become and so for me there was lots of triggers causing my own problems one of them was eating poorly uh specifically I had a sweet tooth um and I had to say because it was really hard I I was addicted to sweets like in my glove box you could find a little box of Hot Tamales or in my

uh I would just have little snacks stashed everywhere I could get down a sleeve of Oreos before you even blink like I was just bad uh just a sweet fiend and so when I read that in your book I thought I'm someone who doesn't eat sweets anymore that's just who I am I am someone who doesn't eat sweets and I'm someone who goes to bed on time and I am someone not like I don't do that it's like this is who I am this is my identity this is who I I want to become that

helped me so much James I can't thank you enough that just so so crystallized uh what I needed to do and I just want to say thank you it was amazing thank you so much for sharing that and I'm glad it was helpful you know that's like I said that's the whole the whole point is to try to be useful so anytime anytime somebody finds it helpful I think it's just the the best so thanks for sharing that and I've stayed on that path thanks to that advice uh that process I I haven't uh binged

or or you know gone back uh since 2018 so I've been on this clear path for what six going on seven years so uh um how about you are there any non-negotiables in your life you know talk about routines Foods systems Etc what are some of these non-negotiables for you there were before I had kids um I I uh I you know so there are there are some things that if you just look at uh my behavior then you're like well even if he says it's not negoti uh it says it's negotiable it must be

pretty non-negotiable like I've never missed an issue 321 for example so that's been going on for you know five years and you know comes out every week so clearly that's something that is non-negotiable um I've been training consistently in the gym for about 15 years now but I have had periods you know post a baby being born or uh you know I had my elbow opera on at one point or well whatever there's just like stuff that I've had pockets of a month or two where I haven't done it but I don't know that I've

ever gone like say 8 weeks without getting a workout in um so you know I've had I've had Pockets where it's been down but uh for the most part I've been pretty consistent for a decade plus um other than that I would say that it's more Project based so here's a this actually reveals I think an interesting insight about habits which is a lot of the time when I talk to readers about habits or I'll do a keynote or something and people you know ask questions afterward um what you realize is that in a lot

of people's minds even if they don't say this explicitly what they think it means to be successful with a habit is they would pick a habit and they'd start doing it and then they're going to do it forever until they die like that that's what they would think it would mean to be successful and I actually think it's quite rare that you would have a habit that would fall into that category I think most of the great habits that will serve you really well throughout your life they probably have a season or even if they

don't have a season where you just never do it again they have a season for that shape that they take so let's take my writing habit for example um you know I mentioned for the first couple years for the first three plus years I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday so that was the shape of that habit at that time and it worked really well for me and then I signed the book deal and I spent the next three years writing Atomic habits and the the writing habit needed to change shape in that

period and so I wasn't publishing every Monday and Thursday I was publishing one new article and then I would republish an old article uh once a week so I and then I after a while I switched to just once a week so so it you know it shifted and then starting in 2019 after the book came out and I'm kind of doing a book tour and doing a lot of events and a bunch of other stuff um I started publishing 321 and so now it's not an article it's a shorter newsletter and that's once a

week and I have had a consistent writing habit for the last you know 12 plus years so I think in general we would probably say I do a pretty good job with my writing habit but if I was judging myself off of oh I don't publish articles twice a week anymore you know know I I would feel bad about it and I think um you need to have at least enough flexibility that you can figure out the shape that your habit needs for the current season that you're in and so this interesting Insight arises which

is that the way to be consistent is actually to be adaptable you know we often talk about consistency as discipline stubbornness the willingness to grit through it no matter what the situation has um um but in reality what it often means is adapting if you don't have enough time you scale it down if you don't have much energy you do the easy version you know you like figure out a way to not throw up a zero for that day and to show up even if it's smaller than what you ultimately hope to do and if

you're good at being adaptable then you maintain the habit and if you maintain the Habit then all you need is time and so um flexibility and adaptability I think are kind of big part of that discussion I like that because then that also helps us avoid sort of the self-sabotage which is you you know inevitable if we feel like we're failing and then we start beating ourselves up and then you know you know I'm speaking for myself it sort of becomes this you know uh spiral you're just like well it then like you s he

was we're talking about doing like a running um habit it and he was like you know I'll do this for 3 weeks or whatever and then one day I won't have enough time to go for a 45 minute run or whatever the plan was and so I'll miss and then I'm like well what happens then and he says well you know I start this selft talk or I'll say you know oh I knew this was going to happen like this always happens you always try to get in shape and then you fall off track and

then you know like why even bother basically and my view is like why does it have to be that way you know like we don't have to turn this into this whole evaluation of yourself worth the little phrase that I like to keep in mind is reduce the scope but stick to the schedule so you know maybe you do the 45 minute Run for the first three weeks and that's great but then you turn around the fourth week and you only have 20 minutes and you what a lot of people do is they think oh

I don't have time to do the full thing so I have to miss it today but my phrase is reduce the scope but stick to the schedule so go run for 15 minutes and you know there's no reason that it has to become this bigger thing like find a way to be adaptable and to not throw up a zero and even if you do less than you had ultimately hoped it still feels good to make progress and you can channel that into the next time and show up you know maybe you get to do 45

minutes the next time um but it's it's about finding ways to continue to show up even when the circumstances aren't ideal yeah I love that advice uh that happened to me actually recently I came back from a flight from New York I was just wiped out I didn't feel like doing anything but I'm was like you know what I'm committed to doing something so I just took a you know 45-minute walk with my dogs I couldn't get to the gym uh I was just exhausted jet lagged you know but I was like I'm just going

to get out and move my bones a little bit and that was good enough for that day and then I you know then I recovered and got back got back at it um inch my way through my workouts you know like I starting is always the hardest part so that there's all there's like tons of times where I don't feel like starting so um what I'll do is I'll say okay just do the first set and then see how you feel and so I'll go I'll do the first set and then of course as soon

as you start moving you start feeling a little bit better but even then I will still have times where I don't feel like finishing it so I play this little trick on myself where I write the next set down in my workout Journal so I kind of record my workouts manually and I think well I already wrote that set down so I need to do that one and so then I do that one and then I write the next set down right away and you know I wait in two or three minutes between sets or

whatever and like time goes by I'm like all right this guy already wrote the next set down so now you got to show up and do that one so I just kind of like inch my way through and um you'd be surprised how often you end up turn around 45 minutes later and you got a good workout in I love that I I kind of do that a version of that too I'll sandbag myself so like um I get the maybe I put two plates on right I'm doing like 225 lifting really heavy I'm like

ah this is really heavy today and I'll go I know you're supposed to do eight of the these but just do two cuz that's all you just do two two is fine and then you get it up off the bar and you start lifting it you're like ah maybe I could squeak out three four okay five and then maybe get to five all right so come to sandbag myself mentally um and then once like it's this works better if you've had a little if you've been working out for a little while like a couple years

or something and you you're kind of you know a little bit more experienced or familiar with your body but sometimes I will play this little game with myself where I say okay I'm I'm only going to do what feels easy you know so like I I'll go in I'll like warm up pick a weight that feels easy and then you're like okay like I'm a little loose I I'll pick like a slider heavier weight but still something that feels fine you know and like I'm and you end up you can end up getting a really

good workout in if you like you know I'm not trying to do Max effort but I am trying to like work the muscle and move the weight and um yeah you'd be surprised like where you can end up with that and I like that that mindset of okay I'm gonna do the sets but I'm just going to do what feels easy it makes it feel unintimidating to me you know it's like oh okay like there's no reason I can't be doing this and it almost makes it a little bit more fun and uh so yeah

I don't know those little mindset tricks are are good to get through some of the days talk about this idea of Temptation bundling you know like uh giving yourself an incentive like if I if I do this then I can get reward myself with this a researcher at uh pen and she um she had this little inside this is where this temptation bundling idea comes from at the time she was really into reading The Hunger Games and so this was like when that book series was out and everything and um she all she really wanted

to do when she wasn't working was like dive back into the book but she was like I still need to go to the gym like do a workout so she created this little rule for herself where she was only allowed to read or listen to The Hunger Games while she was on the treadmill and that became her Temptation bundle so it's it's basically this combination of something you want to do so reading the book and her with something you need to do like going for a run and people can use it for all kinds of

stuff like you know processing um processing your inbox over to work emails this is something a lot of people procrastinate on or avoid but maybe what you want to do is watch your favorite show and so you could say well I can only have my show on in the background if I'm working through my inbox or something like that so it's it's just this concept of trying to pair something you want to do with something you need to do and it doesn't always work but you can come up with like some pretty clever pairs like

I only listen to my favorite podcast when I'm folding laundry or when I'm like chopping vegetables for dinner or something like that and so the thing that you kind of are procrastinating on now it seems a little bit more fun and engaging did you discover anything like that those types of hacks or brain hacks while you were writing the book um I have H so I didn't have anything like immediately like a Temptation bundle that helped me write the book but I did have quite a few things that I did that were like sequencing like

that that helped a lot so the main one was and I have this example in the book put my headphones on and turn on the same playlist every time that I sit down to write and it's remarkable how well this still works for me like when I hear that first song Start I my brain is like oh you need to start right like my fingers are like ready to move um and so it takes a little while to get into that Rhythm but once you've done it 10 or 20 or 30 times it's almost like

flipping a switch in your mind and it's kind of like the pregame routine has started and you the onramp to that habit is smoother and easier so I really like stuff like that little things that can kind of get me in the right mindset to get started I feel like broadly you could say that with building habits there are two big problems that everybody faces the first problem is getting started and the second problem is sticking with it but if you really think about it what does it mean to stick with something it just means

you get started each day and so really you could say all problems boil down to making it easier to get started and so whatever strategies you come up with that reduce the friction of taking the first step or starting the first minute or doing the first rep that's almost always really high value stuff in terms of getting habits to stick I think that's great advice it sounds like what you're saying is you've got to customize it for what works for you I'm thinking of like you know who David goggin is you know David Goggins doesn't

take any and especially he doesn't take it from David Goggins so like when he wakes up and he's like it's too cold or it's raining outside or I'm tired he just berates himself and says you know you're doing it you you know get up out of bed and then he like remembers all the hateful comments that people have given him that's what incentivizes him to get up out of bed all those that have wronged him or kicked dirt in his s in his face uh that doesn't work for me um you know I've got to

find other techniques and I love the suggestion about the playlist because that's very pavlovian right like uh one of my favorite shows yeah and one of my favorite shows is the office and I remember that scene where Jim is conditioning Dwight with the Altoids and he plays the uh the little Q from the computer member and and Dwight's like I feel like I need a mint that's what you're talking about it's like condition your brain even subconsciously it becomes the subconscious thing it's like you know you get yourself in a good mood or positive you

know momentum and then before you know it you've done eight or 10 reps or you know you've accomplished the goal so I love I love that idea of customization for whatever works for you um just as long as you do it um talk can you talk a little bit more about this idea I've heard you talk about I've heard you say that people want incentives not advice um can you explain that a little bit more well nobody really wants advice they only want what they hope the advice can get them so you know the the

reason we give advice because we think well maybe it'll help me get the results or you know something like that but if you look at what people actually do or what they actually follow people basically Never follow advice unless it aligns with the incentives um and so it's really um it's really just I mean at some level it boils down to what is in your self-interest and that can mean a lot of different things does it help you achieve the result that you want does it help you gain status or increase your station in society

does it help you solve a basic core problem of life like food or shelter you know things like that um there there are many different forms of self-interest but incentives ultimately tend to align with that and um I'll give you a story and maybe this will help illustrate what I'm trying to get at so in the I think it was in the early 90s but somewhere around that time frame um Boeing the airplane manufacturer made the shift from manually D manually driven planes to softwar driven and on the first test flight where they're going to

try out this new software they required that the engineers who build the software be on the flight and and partially there were some reasons for that like you know they wanted to see how it responded and they may make some adjustments in flight but also I just always thought like man what a beautiful alignment of incentives you know like better get it right because your neck is on the line too and I think if we ask you know for honest with ourselves are the incentives that cleanly aligned in most of our organizations or governments or

institutions you know a lot of the time the answer is no and I think a simple way to try to figure this out is to ask yourself three questions so one who's doing the work two who who reaps the rewards and three who Bears the consequences and when the incentives are aligned it's often the same person that's doing the work that's reaving the rewards and that's bearing the consequences and when the incentives are misaligned somebody else is doing the work somebody else is getting the reward and somebody else is bearing the consequence and um incentives

are tricky because there's there m going on at once it's not just about optimizing for one thing and Society is complicated and there are a lot of relationships and a lot of priorities to balance and so it's not always possible to have the incentives align cleanly but it is such an important driver of behavior that I do think it's worth putting some real effort and some real thought into that question and leaning against it for six months or year or two years and trying to figure out for your business or for your project or for

your life can you get the incentives more cleanly aligned and when you can occasionally find those situations where really is like win-win or to use the term from the office win-win win um it when you can do that um it's really beautiful and it works so well and you're not like trying to swim upstream and when the incentives aren't aligned you're always kind of trying to find a hack or a second workaround or some other way to force fit things in so I think that it is even though it's a tricky problem it's worth thinking

about carefully I like it um so uh are you thinking about building new businesses outside of the let's see outside of your lane so you know you've you've been doing this now consistently you know arguably since 2012 but most recently since 2018 you're on a path you're speaking you've got you know you're actively writing You're Building Community you're in people um but are you thinking about launching a new business or new businesses outside of the scope of what you're currently doing well so the immediate answer is I'm thinking about ways to expand the scale of

what I'm currently doing so you've got a Tomic habbits and as you said you can do keynote speaking or you can you know launch the newsletter off the back of that or whatever there's other things that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about like new new Ventures so you have a venture did before yet so the most different thing that I've done is um Adams which is the app that I launched so that now all a sudden I'm in software you know it started out as a writer as an author now there's this like

whole new software project but even that is an extension of the atomic habits brand and IP and thinking and so on it's this app that helps you build better habits um I'm also doing some investing right so like I'm investing in new businesses I'm not doing the work but I'm you know like dipping my toe in or being exposed to businesses in that way I think I will always be an entrepreneur first and an author second I don't think I'm you know if I'm fortunate enough to live to be 80 years old or something I

don't think I'm going to turn around and have like 30 books you know maybe I'll have three or five or something like that um so writing will always be a part of what I do but I think being an entrepreneur will always be the the tip of the spear and I definitely am interested in starting other businesses but I'm not going to do it just to do it you know just to like be a Serial entrepreneur um I'm going to do it if I have something that I feel like I can't not do you know

um I I remember thinking this when I was starting out as an entrepreneur because I didn't have any I didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family or any close friends that were entrepreneurs and so I'm reading all this advice about being an entrepreneur all these you know trying to learn from other people who are doing it and a lot of the things that I was hearing was something along the lines of hey this is going to be really hard you probably shouldn't do it uh and I remember reading that and being like well maybe but

I kind of still have to do it and I I honestly think those are like maybe the people that should be entrepreneurs are the people who are told listen this is probably not a good idea and it's pretty unlikely to work but even if you hear that you still are like I need to do this thing um and that's that's the kind of person that should go for it and so what I'm waiting for is another project where it's like listen this is probably an uphill battle like yeah you were able to do this thing

and as an author and that was great but like this is a different industry and your previous success doesn't buy you any bonus points here and uh it's probably going to be really hard and you're unlikely to succeed and I still feel like yeah but I still got to do it um so I don't have anything that's like that yet but I can definitely see there being another chapter in the future where that is true I'm going to push back a little bit so let me ask it a different way if you could trade jobs

with anyone or any industry you know like off camera we talked a little bit about uh my friend and client cam Mitchell who's got you know 60 60 plus restaurant businesses they're all a little bit different um and in the Y Necker of the woods like do you have any interest in jumping into the restaurant business like where where are your passions at outside of what you're doing like if you could just trade jobs with someone to even test the waters for like you know a couple of months without risk yeah I I where are

my passions at is an interesting question because I think I have a brain that is very easy for me to get excited about a lot of different things and so restaurants yeah for sure like that soundss really cool I would love to to do something with that um creating a boutique chain of luxury festar hotels yeah that sounds like really interesting I think that could be fun um there's all kinds of stuff related to software that could be interesting I don't think I would want to touch social media that seems like too thorny of a

problem and like there is no way to be happy running a site that's that big um but a lot of other software businesses I think could be really fun something that could potentially have like net negative um and just become like a compounding machine that there's some element of that that's kind of cool to my mind um so there are lots of things that are like that that sound interesting to me I would say that topics I wrote about were kind of like that too I had this thing early on the first like six months

or year where I wrote about a bunch of different things not just habits I wrote about how to have better squat form in the gym or the medical system in America and when I wrote about some of those other topics the feedback from the audience was like well that's nice but maybe keep it to yourself you know and when I wrote about habits that was when people were like oh I want to hear more from you on that and so I'm kind of looking for the overlap and the vend diagram of what I'm excited about

which is a lot of stuff and what people actually want to hear from me on which is a much narrower set so um yeah I think I think in that sense there are a lot of things that light me up that said I was sitting in a restaurant in Chicago a couple months ago and I was eating alone and uh so you know I was just sitting there kind of people watching and enjoying the meal and I don't know anything about the other people in the restaurant you know but I'm kind of looking around and

there been plenty of people seemed happy and like they had good lives and so on um but I went all around the restaurant and I thought I don't want to trade places with anybody um and so I guess what I'm saying is I have a ton of respect for all kinds of entrepreneurs and there are many different ways to live a great life and there are plenty of people who have better lives than I have in some sense but I have enough and um I don't I don't have this feeling of wanting to trade or

of wanting to do something different I just want to appreciate what I have and to try to make the most of the opportunities that I have and so in that sense I'm like really satisfied and uh I want to do things because I'm like being pulled into them not because I'm trying to like run away from the last thing or run away from some element of my life and so yeah I feel I feel good respect I respect that uh can I share what's on my mind and I I want to go back and visit

this James Clear Boutique Hotel what it might look look like or feel like or what amenities it might have um so put a pin in that um I'm super happy and fulfilled in my business so I run a production company and we make all kinds of TV commercials and original content uh you sort of mentioned uh Marie condo's book Marie's my client I love Marie uh and I love Japan so I I did a study abroad there and that's how I speak fluent Japanese and actually recently I've been thinking about uh one of these cities

I visited uh in Hokkaido which is Northern Japan and they are known for their incredible milk and dairy products and I was thinking about making a bespoke butter brand um just a little like passion project but like it's it's the most incredible you know tasting Dairy you've ever had uh maybe second only to like New Zealand which has the the best milk on the planet apparently but uh Hokkaido milk is number two and I was thinking how cool it would be one of my favorite Butters is this uh carry gold I don't know it's like

this Irish brand right so I was thinking man it would be cool to like maybe create this U bespoke butter brand based on imported Japanese butter from Hokkaido cuz that's you know everyone knows Hokkaido who who is from Japan maybe uh North America doesn't know about it yet but like I T for sure yeah Soro Olympics Olympics were in Soro in 76 but yeah I was thinking about this idea of uh of creating a little butter brand I think it's really cool I love um I mean this is kind of like the boutique lury hotel

thing too which is like small scale curated experience really high quality product and so I I love stuff like that and I love purchasing things like that too because you know I like really like using something that's a quality product or that you can sense a lot of care and thought was put into it as an entrepreneur I it's interesting hearing you talk about it and then realizing I need to like realign my mindset or something I you know for the last 10 plus years I have been in this mode that is all about optimizing

for reach and scale and so you know getting millions of email subscribers selling millions of books increasing distribution around the world getting translated into 60 plus languages like I'm trying to make the biggest splash possible and increased distribution to the greatest degree possible so the first thing I think when I think about this Boutique butter is yeah but you're only going to make like 700 units a year you know like it's not going to be it's not going to scale and that's not the point of the project right it's to scale so you like I

guess what I'm getting at is for me for my like little brain I'm not in that chapter right now now like I'm still in the scaling chapter and so I feel like the resistance I have to the boutique hotel or to whatever um is mostly based around that it's around like how limited the distribution might be or how how much time and effort I put in there versus could I spend the same time and effort selling another million copies or getting distributed in another country or something like that um and uh yeah like there this

doesn't scale is not the only reason to run a business and like a lot of things about my business are not choices made around that like I only hire one employee you know I'm not trying to scale the staff so on like one hand I live that in some ways but then obviously in other ways my mindset like isn't there yet um so I don't know it's it's interesting I think it's just a question of like what lights you up the most and ultimately it becomes a measure for how do you want to spend your

time rather than like what leads to the most scale in Revenue you know i' I've realized I had this um moment of growth I guess we'll call it in my business with like personal decisions too so again for 10 years you know I feel like I'm knocking on every door trying to get people to pay attention like hello please will somebody read this article like you know can you please take a look at this um and so you're you're paying very careful attention to the reach that you have with the work that you're doing and

how to reach more people and so I'm thinking about how my time is spent how much is each hour worth should I be investing in it in a better way how can I invest my time to get the highest output and so on and eventually I came to this realization which is that works pretty well for the business it actually works very poorly for other areas of my life like nobody's ever going to pay you to go to the park with your kids or to take your wife on a date or to get coffee with

your dad and so the whatever the however you value your time whatever the cost of your hour is doesn't matter for those choices and the same thing is kind of true for building this Boutique butter brand or whatever it's not really about the scale and the reach and the revenue it's just about you want to invest your time in something that you love and I feel like that's almost a mindset that's like post economic you know like most people don't have the luxury to make choices like that and for so much of your career you're

chasing this um you know opportunity to not have to worry about money and to be able to just spend your time on what you love and when you finally get there it's hard for a lot of people to get out of that mindset because you the switch has been turned on for so long that you're like oh I need to suddenly be a different person or look at things in a different way to um to make those choices yeah uh well said and I think uh kind of Bring It full circle to your advice about

building habits it's accustomed job so uh you know we're sort of talking about this uh idea that maslo came up with all these years ago about these hierarchy of needs uh at the top is fulfillment and so how are you fulfilled you know some people I'm thinking about my brother-in-law who could have been this incredible talented uh sports caster I mean he knows every Sports fact uh he's like a bob cus kind of guy just knows everything uh he's risk he doesn't like Risk uh and so he got a stable job and he's doing great

and he's been working 9 to-5 for the past 20 years and just you know clocking in clocking out and uh he's got a very safe stable thing and and that's how he feels fulfilled uh risk doesn't bother me as much of course you know it's a little unsettling at times but like I am a bit more adventurous and so how am I fulfilled I'm fulfilled uh trying new things I get what you're saying like you got the tiger by the tail you don't want to let go you've got you've got this building Community thing good

things are happening you see a future maybe you know you actually end up spending more time with your family because uh you're now getting these economies of scale get it um I think it was like 3M or maybe it was also Google and they give their employees uh I think 10% of their time or 20% of their time to go out and do new things and if I was going to give any advice from people who have the kind of mindset that I do I would say the best time to go out and try new

things is when you're feeling great and fulfilled in your business when your family life is going great when everything like don't go out shopping when you're starving or desperate like that's the worst time to try new things because you don't have a lot of uh room to fail it's like you know you're on a Razor's Edge and venturing out could like cause this mortality versus things are going great for me things are going great for you maybe this is a time for you to say I'm I'm going to put aside 5% of my time or

money and try something that may not work and if it doesn't work no big deal you know and that's how I think about this butter idea it's like now is the time for me to do a little experimentation because I can well you always need this balance of exploring and exploiting and kind of early on when you don't really know what's working you got to explore a lot and then once you find a couple things that work you you know keep doubling down on that and then once things stop working you explore some more but

you never fully give up on exploring you know like it's it's nice to continue to to dip your toe in try new things and look for different angles and you know like you never know what you kind unearth and discover I um your question or what you were getting at about what fulfills you I didn't even really know this about myself until recently like maybe a year or two ago but I think the answer is pretty clear for me now which is I'm happiest when I'm creating and that can be that could be creating a

book or writing a newsletter so something small or something written like that it could be building a business um I bought a cabin about an hour from our house that I'm like building a new trail system so that's like a ve very physical thing um but as long as I'm creating something new um I'm happy and so it's really the the process of call falling forth something that didn't previously exist that it provides the most meaning to me and um so I don't know what shape that'll take in the future but I'm sure that I'll

keep going down that path in some way I love that let me take us out on a TS Elliot quote we must not cease from exploration and the end of all of our exploring will be to end where we first began and to know the place for the very first time I mean we were just sitting back you know ch it up reminiscing about the good old days and all that you know tracking my roots where I came from and where I'm [Music] going but like I say man