James Clear on Atomic Habits, Systems over Goals, and Identity-Based Change

James Clear

The two-minute rule is very simple. It just says: take whatever habit you're trying to focus on and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So "read 30 books a year" becomes "read one page." "Do yoga four days a week" becomes "take out my yoga mat."

Sometimes I mention those examples and people resist a little. One guy was like, "Okay, buddy, I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. I'm actually trying to do the workout." I understand where they're coming from. But the two-minute rule does something important.

I have this reader named Mitch — I mentioned him in Atomic Habits. He started going to the gym and he lost over 100 pounds, and he's kept it off for more than a decade now. But when he first started, he had a rule where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes. He'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, and drive home. It sounds ridiculous, like, clearly this is not going to get the guy the results he wants.

But what you realise is he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person who went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. And I think this is a very deep truth about habits: a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimise it into something more. You need to standardise before you optimise.

The two-minute rule helps you do that. It pushes back on that perfectionist tendency, that feeling that you need to have it all figured out or do it perfectly to do it at all. We get very all-or-nothing about our habits. We're so focused on finding the best sales strategy, the perfect business idea, the ideal diet plan, that if we can't find the perfect one we say, "Well, I need to keep researching." But you need to master the art of showing up. If you can't go to the gym for five minutes four days a week, who cares how good the 45-minute workout plan is? It's just a theory at that point. Ed Latimore has that quote: the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. The hardest step is the first one, so master the first step, master stage one, and then advance.

James Clear

We have a very strong desire to believe that there's a secret. The Athletic ran an article a couple of years ago about Michael Phelps and his breathing techniques, and it was one of the most popular pieces they'd had. People want to believe, "Oh, there's a secret he's doing that I'm not, and if I knew what it was it would make the difference." I'm not saying those things don't matter — they probably did help him. But he's also six-foot-six, built like a fish, perfectly designed for the outcome. Was it the breathing techniques, or was it the fact that he didn't miss a swim for 16 straight years?

So when people come to me and ask about building an audience, launching a newsletter, writing a book, or getting in shape, I'll say, "Well, don't miss a workout for two years and then get back to me. Go write two articles a week for two years and then get back to me." Have you done the simple version yet? People want to go from 99.8 to 99.9, but they're actually at 45.

Especially in the beginning, the primary bottleneck to results is: are you doing the obvious things? There are probably only two or three pieces you need to do. Are you showing up consistently? Just do the obvious things and that'll get you 80 percent of the way there. By trying to make it too complicated at the start, you short-circuit yourself and end up focused on the wrong things. Master the basics first, then advance from there.

James Clear

"Lack of patience changes the outcome" — that's a good phrase, and it's definitely true. There are two ways people go astray. One is not being patient enough. The other is that small changes only matter if they're oriented in the right way. We all know people who spend their time on trivial things. So one of the key distinctions is: are your small actions accumulating, or are they evaporating? Are you doing small things each day oriented toward a larger outcome, or small things that are just one-offs and don't add up?

In a lot of ways, the two time frames that matter most in life are ten years and one hour. Ten years is shorthand for the big, meaningful things you want to do — where do you want to be in a decade? Don't let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in ten years. And one hour is: how can I do something right now that's oriented toward where I want to be in ten years? If you can live in both modes simultaneously — thinking long-term but acting short-term — you start looking for the little adjustments that do accumulate.

The second way people go astray is that lack of patience. One example I give in Atomic Habits is the ice cube. You walk into a room, it's cold, you can see your breath, and there's an ice cube on the table. You start heating the room — one degree, another degree, another degree — and the ice cube is still there. Eventually you hit a tipping point, a phase transition, and the ice cube starts to melt. It's a one-degree shift, no different from the shifts before it, but you hit the transition and things change.

Habits are like that a lot of the time. People say, "I've been running for a month and I can't see a change in my body," or "We've been meeting every Friday for six months and we still haven't shipped this feature." That work isn't being wasted — it's being stored. It's like complaining that you've heated an ice cube up a little and it hasn't melted yet. You just haven't hit the phase transition. But that's where people give up.

James Clear

So many things in life are like that. It's not the last workout that got you fit — it's all the hundred that came before. It's not the last sentence that finishes the novel; it's not the last conversation that closes the sale. It's the willingness to keep showing up and hammering on the rock, knowing that at some point you're going to hit that phase transition. But you need enough persistence to keep doing it.

James Clear

This is one of the big lessons for habits: just because improvements aren't noticeable doesn't mean improvement isn't happening. You're not going to see a change on the scale every time you work out, or a change in subscribers every time you publish. But the tricky part is that if something isn't working, that also takes a while to show. So how do you know when to be patient and when to try something different?

James Clear

People say "try, try again." I actually think it should be "try, try differently." You need to keep trying, but along different lines of attack. Naval has this idea that it's not 10,000 attempts, it's 10,000 iterations — an iteration is a different way of doing it. And I don't think you need to do it 10,000 times. Usually doing it five or ten different ways is enough to see that one of them is working better than the others.

That's the second insight: when something goes well, it usually goes pretty well from the beginning. That doesn't mean you'll get the outcome you want right away, but it does mean the results come easier than the other things you've been trying. One of the best pieces of advice I got early in my entrepreneurial career was: try things until something comes easily. It won't be easy, but the results will come easier. One of the big quests of life is to experiment enough to find what comes easy for you — and then work really hard on it. Because if you work hard on the thing you have a natural aptitude for, you're very hard to compete with.

It's the classic explore-exploit trade-off. Early in the process you need to explore and experiment more. Then you start to discover that of the ten things you've tried, these two work best. Now you need to double down and exploit what's actually getting results.

James Clear

There are so many places in life where that's true. I have a friend who was a really strong lifter — squatted over 500 pounds. We were training together, he was on this squat program, and it went great. He made a lot of progress over three months. Then I travelled, didn't see him for six months, and when I came back I asked, "Are you still doing that squat program?" He said, "No, I just got bored." The desire for novelty overpowered the desire for results.

In a lot of ways the process is quite simple. Run a number of small experiments. Once you find something that works, double down on it and keep doing it until it stops working — which is the step a lot of people skip. And once it stops working, go back to the start and try a lot of small experiments again. People shortcut each step. They try one or two things and say, "This didn't work for me." Well, it's not enough to try two — maybe you need to try 20. Then, once they find something that works, they don't double down enough, because doubling down feels risky after you've diversified. And once they're committed, they get bored and don't stick with it until it actually stops working.

This is part of the reason I haven't published another book yet. Atomic Habits is working really well, so I'm trying to take my own advice: don't stop until it stops working.

James Clear

Yeah. Eventually you realise it's not just about results — it's about how you want to live your life, what you want to spend your time on. But those three steps should probably be taken more seriously than they are.

James Clear

Identity may be the most important thing with habits. Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organised. If you study biology for 20 minutes on a Tuesday night, you embody the identity of someone who is studious. The act of doing it is proof that you are that type of person, and eventually you build up a body of evidence for being that way.

One of the core lessons of Atomic Habits is that every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. When you show up at the gym today, you're casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. When you make one sales call, you cast a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you cast a vote for being a writer. Doing one push-up doesn't transform your body, but it does cast a vote for that identity — it provides evidence.

And eventually, as you build up that body of evidence, you start to take pride in being that way. That's where you get to a really resilient place, because now, instead of forcing yourself to do it, you're trying to maintain it — it's a part of your identity you believe in. If you take pride in the size of your biceps, you never skip arm day. So the goal is not to read a book, it's to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, it's to become a runner. It's to adopt this identity: this is the type of person I am.

Behaviour and belief are a two-way street. What you believe influences the actions you take, but the actions you take also influence what you believe about yourself. Every time you show up in some small way, you prove to yourself, "Maybe I am that kind of person." So my encouragement is to let the behaviour lead the way — start with some small action, prove to yourself in that moment that you're that kind of person, and as you build that identity, sticking with the habit becomes easier.

James Clear

One definition I like is that a habit is a recurring solution to a recurring problem in your environment. Something comes up again and again and your brain is trying to solve it. Another way to describe it is an automatic or mindless behaviour — a researcher would point to brushing your teeth or biting your nails. But if I asked you what habits you're trying to build, you'd probably say, "I want to go to the gym four days a week" or "I want to meditate for ten minutes." Technically those aren't automatic behaviours yet, but culturally that's exactly what we mean: reliable, repeated routines.

The third definition, which I find useful, is that a habit is a behaviour tied to a context in your environment. Your habit of watching Netflix at 7pm is tied to the context of your house and your couch at that time of day. Behaviours have a very strong link to environment and context, and that's a good way to adjust them.

James Clear

There's debate among researchers about whether there's even such a thing as a good or bad habit — all habits serve you in some way. You smoke a cigarette because it resolves some need. I understand that, but we all know what we mean. The way I like to define it is: the cost of your good habits is in the present, and the cost of your bad habits is in the future. Eating too many donuts or smoking a cigarette feels good in the moment but creates a cost later. Going to the gym requires effort now but pays off later. So one way to tell whether a habit is serving you is to ask: is it giving me more of what I want in the future, or less?

James Clear

As a general rule, that's true. But the real trick is to make it first-order positive and second-order positive. A lot of Atomic Habits is about making habits as easy as possible so you feel less friction in the moment, while also aligning them with your identity. Everybody wants to work out for the results — to look better in the mirror. The second-order outcome is great, but it's hard in the moment. Where I've eventually gotten myself, after 10 or 15 years of training, is that I like how I feel when I'm working out. So it's not even about waiting for the outcome — I feel good about being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. Now all I have to do is show up.

There's also a first step before the four laws, and if I could add one thing to Atomic Habits that wasn't in it, it would be this: for any habit you're trying to build, ask, "What would this look like if it was fun?" Brainstorm 10 or 20 or 50 solutions. The most common New Year's resolution is to go to the gym, but a lot of people are there in January just because they feel they should be. You can come up with a long list of what an active lifestyle looks like — rock climbing, kayaking, all kinds of things. Spend 20 minutes making that list, then ask which sounds most fun. Because if it's not fun, you won't stick with it when it gets tough. If you're having fun, you're dangerous — you're hard to compete with. You don't want to go up against the person who's having a good time, because they're the one who keeps going when it gets hard.

James Clear

Broadly, there are four things you should do if you want to build a habit. You want it to be obvious — easy to see, easy to notice. You want it to be attractive — appealing or fun. You want it to be easy — simple and frictionless. And you want it to be satisfying — the more satisfying a habit is, the more likely you'll stick with it. I call these the four laws of behaviour change: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. You don't need all four every moment, but the more of those forces working for you, the more likely you'll stick with it.

We can actually learn a lot by looking at the behaviours we call "bad" or that waste our time — what do they have in common? They're often very obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Take scrolling social media. It's obvious because your phone is on you all the time, and it's often the first app your thumb gravitates to. It's attractive because the algorithm has curated content for your exact interests. It's easy — a couple of years ago Instagram would auto-swipe to the next slide so you didn't even need your thumb. And it's satisfying — you get that dopamine hit. Nobody sits around trying to find the willpower to check Instagram more, but plenty of people wish they had the discipline to go to the gym. One of these is obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, and one is not.

James Clear

You just invert each of the four. Rather than obvious, make it invisible — unsubscribe from emails, don't keep junk food in the house. For social media, I deleted all the apps off my phone this past year. I told myself, "If you really want to use them, you can download them and log in." I've maybe done that once or twice — I log in, use it, then delete it again. Rather than attractive, make it unattractive — that's the hardest of the four, and where I'd recommend focusing least, because it's hard to change your desires. Rather than easy, make it difficult — add friction and steps between you and the behaviour. And rather than satisfying, make it unsatisfying — layer on some cost or consequence.

The way I think about my own environment is: walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time — your office, living room, kitchen, bedroom — and ask, "What is this space designed to encourage? What behaviours are obvious here?" A lot of people feel they watch too much TV, but walk into any living room and ask where the couches and chairs face. What is the room designed to get you to do?

I used to buy apples and put them in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge, then forget they were there until two had gone bad. So I bought a display bowl and put them on the counter where they're visible — now they're gone in two days. The inverse works too: if I put a six-pack of beer on the shelf right where I see it, I'll grab one every night at dinner just because it's there. But if I tuck it on the lowest shelf at the back, I sometimes forget it's there for two weeks. It's just about what's obvious.

Another rule I follow: I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. That gives me from nine to noon to work on my own agenda instead of everybody else's. It's only 30 seconds down the hall, but I never go get it. So many behaviours are like that. In one sense you wanted it so badly you'd check it every three minutes when it was next to you — but in another sense you never wanted it badly enough to walk down the hall for it. A little friction can go a long way.

James Clear

It's been awesome. Some changes sound easy but are hard in practice, and others sound hard but aren't hard at all — the hard part is convincing yourself to do it. Deleting social media off my phone was one. About six months in I thought, "What if I did it for email?" That sounded like it would be really hard, but it's been so much easier than I thought. Same rule: if I really need it, I download the app, log in, do what I need, then delete it again. I've downloaded it twice in the last year — once at the airport to send an email before a flight, once to pull up tickets in line at a show.

Before I deleted it, my average time on Instagram was something like 42 minutes a day. You'd look at that and think it must be a really important part of his life. But it just evaporated the moment I deleted it. It wasn't actually difficult.

The one interesting question is: what do you do when there's nothing to do? Most people, standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for the gas to fill up, pull their phone out. So you need something frictionless to fill that gap. I moved Audible to my home screen and listen to an audiobook instead. On my desktop I'm okay keeping social media, except Twitter — I force myself to be logged out because I'll spend too much time on it. I've even set it up so I can't log into my social accounts on my own; I have to text my assistant for the login, because it's tied to a separate phone.

James Clear

Anytime you do something new, by definition you're doing something you're unqualified for. If you already had the qualification or experience, it couldn't be new — it would just be repeating something you've done before. So accepting that there's some uncertainty with anything new is a good starting place.

The second thing is that you don't need to figure it all out today. One framework I like, which I first heard from Shaan Puri, is ABC. A is an honest assessment of your current situation — look at your reality with clear eyes. Z is where you ultimately want to end up. And B is your next step. All you need to know is A, B, and Z. You don't need to know C through Y. But people convince themselves they need to see further into the future.

There's a quote I think is from Ian Wilson, a GE executive: "No amount of information is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future." Knowledge is purely about the past; decisions are purely about the future, which can't be predicted. So you have to become okay with that. The most powerful form of mental toughness is a mindset that can handle uncertainty. We try to control reality, predict outcomes, figure out what will happen ahead of time. But all you really need is the confidence that whatever happens, you'll figure it out. If I had to encapsulate entrepreneurship in a nutshell, it's the trust that you can figure it out.

James Clear

It's practised in small ways and accumulates over time. Sports isn't the only way, but it's how I did it. One great thing about sports is that you have to fail publicly. I played baseball for 17 years, through college. In the early years, you make an error, you let the whole team down — that doesn't feel good, but you realise life goes on. Later, in college, we trained together in the gym. You look at the guy next to you and realise he's a little stronger. So you throw five more pounds on the bar, and you fail in front of everybody. You miss the lift. It doesn't feel good, but 30 seconds later you get back to it.

Failing publicly trains your mind. It teaches you that what matters most is not that you always win, but that you always keep reaching. The important question isn't "What can I succeed at?" but "What is worth reaching for?" As you train that muscle in small ways, eventually you can handle it in big ways. My senior year I remember thinking, "I don't want us to lose, but if we're going to lose, put me out there — I can take it."

I feel that way now in business. I put everything I had into the Atomic Habits launch — we started planning it 15 months ahead. In a lot of places in life, good enough is good enough, but every now and then you find an area where it's not, and you want to do it the best you possibly can. That comes with risk. You're going to spend a year and a half promoting something you poured three to five years into. What if people hate it? What if the reviews aren't good? What if you go on morning shows and the book flops? You sit with all those questions, and because I'd trained that muscle, my thought was, "I can handle it." Once you have that confidence, you can go for it fully. The problem is, if you don't have it, you start talking yourself out of it — you water it down, you don't promote it all the way — and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it certainly won't work if you don't give it everything.

James Clear

In the Women's World Cup final a couple of years ago, the US beat Japan and Carli Lloyd scored three goals. The third she kicked from midfield — a shot you'd never take in most circumstances, not a high-percentage shot. But she saw an opening and went for it right away, with no hesitation. Totally different domain: my wife and I were listening to the Zac Brown Band, and she said what she loves is that there's no hesitation in his voice — when it's time to sing the lyric, he's fully in it. In sports, music, business, you can't have that hesitation. You don't want to be the one talking yourself out of it.

I try not to be my own bottleneck. I don't want to be the first person to tell myself no — I want the world to tell me no first, and then I'll adjust based on the feedback. One of my sayings is that I try to work backwards from magic. What would the magical outcome be? Then I figure out a couple of paths that might get me there, take steps forward, and get feedback from the world. Almost always, you talk yourself out of it before the world actually prevents you. It's very rare that you hit a true hard stop — there's almost always another person you could talk to, another approach, another attempt. You're the one who talks yourself out of it, not the world.

James Clear

One of the biggest things I learned from my grandfather was PMA — positive mental attitude. In any scenario, try to have a positive outlook regardless of the circumstances. It can sound a little woo-woo, but I've tried to get better at practising it and teaching my kids. When you hit something difficult, you rehearse it visually and emphasise the good parts of what could happen — either in retrospect or beforehand.

In retrospect: when I played baseball as a kid, after each season my dad and I would sit on the back deck and talk about the good plays, the best games, the ones we won. I didn't know it at the time, but he was helping me highlight the wins. He once told me, "If you keep sticking with it, you'll find that guys drop off each year — there's a power of longevity in staying in the game." He was right; I became a better player every year I played.

Looking forward: I have a three-year-old who started preschool and had a couple of hard drop-offs — crying, "Don't leave me." So on the third morning I said, "Today's a preschool day." He started to protest, and I said, "Hold on — you like your teachers, right? You got to play with the crayons and glue sticks yesterday, that was fun, wasn't it? You have snack time and lunch. After school you play on the playground and go down the slides." He said yeah to all of it. That was all I said, but I was getting him to emphasise the positive parts of what's about to come. He had a great drop-off that day and has loved it ever since.

So many of our problems come from our brain overemphasising the wrong minor details. What I'm trying to do — with myself, my kids, the people around me — is to encourage emphasising the good minor details. What portion of the day are you latching onto, and what story are you telling yourself? It's like a muscle: the more you do it, the better you get.

James Clear

I don't think about it that much — I'm not that worried about it. The main way I think about it is that I want to be known as someone who is useful. Josh Kaufman has a good framework: true, useful, and clear. You want to write things that are true and accurate, useful and actionable, and clear and understandable.

Ultimately, your reputation is the quality of the work you do. There's a bit of priming you can do — at the top of my newsletter, 3-2-1, it says "the most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web." I'm setting an expectation: you're about to read something dense, high-signal, low-noise. But the flip side is you have to deliver. My Instagram is just text, no photos of me — it's like a peacock's tail. A peacock's tail is a useful hindrance; it shows which birds are strong enough to survive with that superfluous tail. When you can't hide behind anything but words, the ideas have to be good enough.

But the lens should be mostly on the reader, not on yourself. If you're trying to cultivate an image, your energy is pointed in the wrong direction. If you focus on the reader, you ask better questions: How can I make this more useful? More actionable? Easier to understand? Reputation takes care of itself if you take care of other people.

James Clear

Positioning is critical, and I think about it a lot. Any product — the way it's positioned and packaged is probably 50 percent of its success. Atomic Habits has a chapter on deliberate practice. It could have been a book about deliberate practice that talks about habits, but instead it's a book about habits that talks about deliberate practice, and the difference in how those would sell is enormous. If you don't know what deliberate practice is, it takes 30 seconds to explain — and you don't get 30 seconds when someone's deciding whether to buy a book. Just by being part of society, you already know good habits are favourable and bad habits aren't. I don't need to sell you on that. All I need to sell you on is: if you only read one book about habits, this should be the one.

Another example: Authors Equity, the publisher I co-founded, has a book coming out called The Overthinker's Guide to Making Decisions. It's a book about choices, but it could have been called "The Decision Guide" or "The Power of Choice." "The Overthinker's Guide" is a great frame — I've told people about it and the reply is, "Oh, I need that." That's usually the sign you got the packaging right.

A lot of this comes from direct-response copywriting. One core principle is that you should address a timeless, enduring desire, not something merely adjacent to it. Good book titles usually have three or four qualities. First, they address a timeless desire. Second, they tell you what the book is actually about — which sounds obvious, but people keyword-stuff titles. Third, they're an unmistakable, ownable phrase — a bit weird when you first hear it. "Man's Search for Meaning" — you only hear that phrase in the book title. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" — "winning friends" sounds odd, but there's no mistaking it. Before my book, you'd never describe a habit as "atomic" — you'd say little or small or tiny. It's a weird way to describe a small habit, but that's good, because you can own it. And the fourth element is contrast, some element of surprise. "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" — I thought tidying was a small thing, now you're telling me it's life-changing. "Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results." "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" — I thought astrophysics took a seven-year PhD, but I can read this in an hour and a half.

Separately, there's life positioning: how can you put yourself in good positions for things to happen? Every episode you publish, every blog post, every social post is surface area that someone could discover. On the launch day of Atomic Habits I had an interview on CBS This Morning, and it changed the launch from "some guy is releasing a book" to "this is a thing." The way it happened: I'd written a blog post four years earlier called "The Physics of Productivity," taking Newton's three laws and applying them to productivity. It sat there for four years — an average article that did fine. Then a New York Times reporter stumbled across it and linked to it, and a CBS producer read that and asked me to come on. After my segment I told Gayle King, "I have a book coming out in ten months and I'd love to come back." She said, "Sure — just make sure we're your first interview." I got her email, passed it to my publisher, and we linked it all up. When I wrote that article four years earlier, I had no idea it would work out like that. It was just surface area, a piece of value in an enduring format — that blog post had a half-life of at least four years.

James Clear

I think about that a lot. What's the half-life of this idea? I like to work on things — and in formats — that have a very long half-life. Social media has a very short half-life; that's fine, it plays a role, but I'll never make it central. A blog post lasts a bit longer, and a book has a really long half-life. I like formats that are durable and persist, because when you put those elements together you end up with something pretty evergreen.

James Clear

There are lots of examples of positioning with finances, especially margin of safety. If your expenses are much less than what you take in, you can handle a lot of what comes your way. We had a family medical situation once — some customised equipment that cost $200,000. That's a huge expense, but if you've been saving for years and built a margin of safety, you can absorb it. One of my sayings is: life is going to come for you. You don't know when it'll be your turn, but it will come.

That expense wasn't our turn. But a couple of years later my wife fell and broke her knee into four pieces, and I had to take six months off work. I'm so thankful to previous James — the version from ten years earlier who built a business where I could take six months off to take care of her and the kids. Each year I look at my position in terms of flexibility and finances. I don't really care about our net worth that much; what I care about is whether I'm in a stronger position than last year. As long as the margin of safety gets a little larger and my ability to handle uncertainty gets a little better, I'm positioning myself well.

James Clear

I don't know that I want to talk about my personal investments, but I'll share my philosophy. Eventually I realised you can beat the market, but you'll lose your life. It's possible to get outsized returns, but you have to spend all your time doing it. I don't want to be the next Buffett or Munger — that's not how I want to spend my one precious life. I want to spend it creating things that didn't exist before and being with family.

So I'm a huge advocate of JL Collins and The Simple Path to Wealth. His approach is basically dump it in Vanguard and let it ride. It's incredibly simple and I get all my time back. If I'm making 12 percent a year rather than 15, who cares? I'd rather trade the 3 percent and spend my hours the way I want. There's a phrase: remember that the goal is not to beat the market, the goal is to end up wealthy. So many people are so focused on beating the market that they lose all their time and, in many cases, don't even beat it.

Vanguard is incredibly diversified — you get a slice of every company. I've realised I do not have the ability to predict what's going to go well, and I feel that even more now than a year or two ago. With the rise of AI, things are moving so fast. I can't tell you which companies will be at the top of the Fortune 500 in three or ten years.

James Clear

Right. I have no confidence in it. So I'd rather not try to pick winners and instead just play the general trend.

James Clear

When I started, I wrote two articles a week for three years — every Monday and Thursday. About a year in, I hit 100,000 subscribers and got in my head about that number: "Now a lot of people are paying attention, so it needs to be really good." What I should have said was, "Things are going well, keep doing what you're doing." Instead I thought I should spend more time writing, and things got worse, not better. Eventually I realised that to be a better writer, I didn't need to write more — I needed to read more.

It's like filling a car with gas. Reading fills the tank; writing is driving and going on a journey. You need both. The point isn't to sit at the gas station all day topping up a full tank — go see something. But if you just keep driving, you end up stranded. Reading is the primary way I generate ideas. Almost every thought you have is downstream from what you consume. There's even a debate among neuroscientists about whether a truly spontaneous thought is possible. When you choose who to follow, what podcasts to listen to, what books to read, you are choosing your future thoughts. If you want better, more creative thoughts, you need better, more creative inputs.

There's a line about Emerson reading like a hawk flying over a field, scanning for prey. That's how I read a lot of the time — for ideas or chapters, not for whole books. I'm looking for the piece relevant to what I'm writing about right now. Maybe at some later stage of life I'll read more for enjoyment, but right now I read for an outcome: to distil something and apply it.

James Clear

If I read a book that's really good and relevant to what I'm working on, it can take me four hours to get through three pages, because a sentence sparks an idea and I have to stop and write about it for a while. When it's less intense, I prefer physical books. I find passages that interest me, put an open parenthesis at the start and a close at the end, and a star in the margin — so if I leaf through, I can find the stars. Once I finish, I go back, photograph each passage, highlight it on my phone, and copy it into Evernote or a Google Doc. A book I highlight heavily might end up with 50 passages.

For dense books, audio can be better — in print I slow myself down too much, but audio keeps rolling and I still get the idea.

James Clear

I did that for a long time. I've been using Evernote for about 12 years — Notion wasn't even around when I started. For a while I organised notes by book, but they'd just sit there. Occasionally I'd search a term and pull something in, but rarely. What I find more useful now is to have a doc for the project I'm working on — say, the next book — and drop passages into the right place in that doc.

The way I start a book is I try to nail the big-picture concept first. I knew Atomic Habits was going to be a book about building good habits and breaking bad ones, so that goes at the top. Then I just collect notes and ideas — it might get to 20 or 30 pages of random stuff. Eventually there's enough material to start grouping it into sections, and those sections become chapters: this is a chapter about leverage, this is a chapter about tailwinds. When I read something relevant to a chapter, it gets pasted in.

Right now I have two manuscripts — one is 500 pages, one is 600 — that are just organised collections of what I've read. That part is a lot of fun. The very unfun part is taking 600 pages of roughly organised notes and compressing them down to 200 pages of readable chapters. That takes a lot more work, but that work is what makes it easy for the reader.

Sometimes people complain that writing is hard. Yeah, it is — but that's the point. It's like complaining that the weights are heavy. Yes, they're heavy, and that's what makes you stronger. Writing is hard because it's making you a better thinker; the act of writing forces you to clarify your thoughts. It only works because it's hard. If it were easy, it wouldn't require much thought, which means it wouldn't reorganise anything in your mind.

James Clear

That's absolutely right, and a lot of it is the medium being the message. Twitter or Instagram forces compression — you can't unpack a book-length argument there. If you want nuance, you need to play a different game.

When I was working on Atomic Habits, I had 12 chapters at the time — there ended up being 20. I wrote each chapter title on an index card, laid them out on the floor, went to my bookshelf, and grabbed the books relevant to each chapter — usually four to six per card. Then I asked, "How can I take everything genuinely useful from this book and compress it into this chapter, so that if you read the chapter you don't have to read those six books?" I actually think that's a good measure of a great non-fiction book: how many other books can you make irrelevant by writing this one? The first draft of Atomic Habits was about 712 pages; the final was around 230. It got compressed a lot, and my goal was for it to be as high-signal as possible.

One of my big principles is: don't waste the reader's time. Have an extreme respect for it — almost an obsession. Every word you write is an obstacle the reader doesn't want to go through; your book is an obstacle between them and the result they want. So every word needs to earn its place. But there is a time for nuance and depth, and that's one of the nice things about books — they provide the space.

My strategy is to have the compressed version — the sticky soundbite people can walk around with — and then the full argument. "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." That's sticky; you can carry it through your day. But the whole chapter is 20 pages unpacking why identity is powerful and how habits and identity intertwine. Or "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." A lot of companies and teams have used "get 1% better every day." It's good to have the compressed version as shorthand, but the book gives the real estate to make the full argument.

James Clear

I'm a slow learner, honestly — it took me a while, and I don't know that I have it figured out even now, because the bar keeps moving. If you're successful, your opportunity cost should increase every year, which means every year you should say no to things you were saying yes to the year before. I feel like I'm always three to six months behind on what I should be saying no to.

The book hit the bestseller list the first week, then nothing until New Year's week, then nothing for six more months. It wasn't until the summer of the second year that it started appearing every week. In 2019 and early 2020 I felt like I was on the hook for all these things I should have said no to. Eventually I had to do harder things — put my email inbox on an autoresponder, which ran counter to what I wanted, because for the first 10,000 people who joined my list I emailed each of them individually. But at 100,000 or a million you just can't do that anymore. It's the best possible problem to have, but it takes constant reminding to keep increasing the filter.

James Clear

There are a few things I think about now that I didn't have language for then. Not everything checks all the boxes, but I think about how they weave together.

One is leverage: how can I get more output from each unit of effort? Writing in a journal is useful, but if you share what you write publicly, you gain a lot more leverage — other people find it, it becomes a honeypot that attracts like-minded people. Sharing your work publicly is like a magnet. It's the most useful thing you can do for networking, and it's not even networking — it's just being useful in public. A related question I love: what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done? When Atomic Habits came out I did 200 interviews in six months. I don't do radio anymore — not because I have anything against it, but once the segment ends, that work stops working for me. This podcast gets recorded; someone will watch it today and someone in a month. It's almost like there are two versions of me — the one living daily life, and the one recorded right now that keeps working every hour after it's done.

Another is sequencing — doing things in an order where they accumulate. I debated for a year and a half whether to self-publish Atomic Habits or go traditional. Ultimately I decided that if I'm going to try to hit the New York Times list, I might as well do it with my first book, because then I can be a New York Times bestselling author for the rest of my career, rather than self-publishing five books and getting there in 20 years.

I also think about how every project can feed the others and cross-pollinate. It's almost fractal. An idea I write could become a tweet, a newsletter, an Instagram quote card, or the seed of a book chapter — that one hour working for me in many ways. My platforms all point to each other: Instagram points to the newsletter, the book points to the website, the website points to the book. It's a tight web where everything accumulates. And you can do it across businesses: my brand as an author helps me meet other authors, some of whom publish with Authors Equity; I publish my own books through Authors Equity too. I even have a cabin in the woods I'm building that can be a retreat centre for authors.

The last one is tailwinds. Basically everyone I know's email list is getting bigger — there are still a billion people coming online. There's a huge tailwind of readers, and the internet keeps growing. So if you put it together — a big tailwind, sharing your work publicly for leverage, platforms that cross-pollinate — and you do it early in life, you build an audience early and gain enormous flexibility in what you do next. I'm not saying it's the only way to spend your time. The single biggest thing we haven't mentioned is: are you excited about it? Are you passionate? But those are the ways I think about focus and prioritisation.

James Clear

Think about the big, meaningful things in life — raising a family you're proud of, building a great marriage, creating a successful company, getting in the best shape of your life. Almost all of them are multi-year — three, five, ten years or longer. If you're lucky enough to live to 80, you've got maybe five or six of those ten-year movements. So what will you spend them on? And it's even more limited than you realise, because certain things don't make sense in certain decades. If you want to travel the world and party, you probably aren't doing that in your 70s. Building a company you can do whenever, but it's sure nice to do it early. Responsibilities and obligations tend to increase throughout life — each day is an opportunity for a new obligation or obstacle to appear. I started my first business at 24 with no kids and no marriage, and it was as easy as it could be and still really hard. If you wait until your 40s or 50s, there are no rules — you can do it — but you're playing on a harder mode.

Two questions I like here. First, what season am I in right now? Life has seasons — sometimes you focus on earning money, sometimes on time with family, sometimes on creative freedom. When your season changes, your habits often need to change. The closely related question, which is a good one from Derek Sivers, is: what am I optimising for right now? If I don't know, I optimise for enthusiasm — what lights me up? A lot of the time when I'm facing a lot of friction, it's because I'm trying to force old habits into a new season. So sequencing starts with self-awareness — knowing what season you're in and what you're optimising for.

James Clear

This is related to sequencing: what things are upstream of the outcomes and habits you want? You should generally do the upstream things first. Probably the single most important upstream habit is some kind of reflection or review — the habit of thinking. It's almost impossible that whatever you're working on now is the best use of your time. Sam Altman has a line that you should have a very high bar for working on anything other than thinking about what to work on, because choosing a better thing is the biggest point of leverage.

If you have a good work ethic, you get to a point where you use it as a crutch — "I'll just work my way out of it." But you cannot out-work the person who's working on a better thing. You might work 10 or 20 percent harder than you do now, but working on the right thing gets you 100x the results. We should change the definition of working hard: it shouldn't only mean putting in the hours, it should mean out-thinking the other person. If you're not out-thinking them, you're not out-working them.

I do a weekly review every Friday, mostly business — metrics, subscribers, revenue, expenses. Most weeks nothing happens, but occasionally you catch a trend: "That's been going down for three weeks straight, what's going on?" The more important one is an annual review, which is about values. I go through my calendar in detail — how many workouts did I do, how many places did I travel, how many nights away from home, how many articles did I publish? Then I look at my values and ask, "You said this was important — is that where you actually spent your time?" It's a way to course-correct. The last couple of years I've kept the document open all year, adding new principles at the top. One of mine last year was "move like thunder" — you don't see it coming, then there's a big crash. I'm trying to do fewer things with bigger impact.

James Clear

Not a formal one — treating it like a company one-on-one feels too structured and weird. But the biggest thing we've done the last couple of years is a monthly date night, and making sure it actually happens every month — we've done it for 24 to 30 straight months. It's the one time we actually talk. That sounds silly, because we talk all the time, but everything else is logistics — tasks, figuring out the kids, jobs to be done. Then you go out for a couple of hours and you can actually talk. It's been really valuable.

James Clear

The ones that come to mind are consuming the news and browsing social media. One of our grandparents is in her 90s, and she'll say, "Oh yeah, we smoked when we were younger, but nobody knew — everybody did it, it was just how it was." I wonder what I'll say when I'm 94: "We were all on social media, nobody knew, we didn't quite realise the full effect." I don't want to criticise it too much — there are obviously benefits — but we're moving toward a world where if you and I open the same Wall Street Journal article, it'll be two different versions based on our browsing history and political preferences. The technology is basically there. I kind of feel like the only way to win is not to play the game.

It's interesting how essential it feels in the moment — "I can't give this up, it's a big part of my life." But if you give it up for a month, you realise life goes on just fine. You can live a rich, full, fulfilling life where it plays no role at all.

James Clear

Intensity makes for a good story — "I went to a silent meditation retreat for a week," or "I ran a marathon." But consistency makes progress. It's not "I did a silent retreat for a week," it's "I have a meditation practice — I do it for five minutes each morning, it's how I start my day." That's when it becomes part of your identity, part of your lifestyle.

So intensity is often about the story you get to tell; consistency is about the lifestyle you live. What really matters is how you want to spend your days and how you want to show up as a person. And the great thing is that if you do a good job with consistency, it develops your capacity to handle the intensity. I like the saying "consistency enlarges ability." By being more consistent, you enlarge your ability to handle the intense moments and the peak performances — but it has to start with a focus on consistency and lifestyle.

James Clear

I think it's okay if you don't feel like it — sometimes it's a signal. Procrastination isn't always bad; sometimes it's a sign you don't actually want the thing, which is fine.

For a long time I said I was going to go to medical school. I was good in school — I treated grades as a game to win — and medical school is the kind of thing you can say and never be criticised for. You go home at Thanksgiving, someone asks what you're going to do, you say "medical school," and everyone says "that's great." Some people should be doctors, and there's a lot about the profession I'd have aligned with. But what I kept procrastinating on was studying for the MCAT, and that was a sign. At some intuitive level I realised it wasn't what I actually wanted — it was just a story I kept telling.

Meanwhile, I was interning at an orthopaedic practice one summer, and each afternoon I had about two hours with nothing to do. So I started writing about habits — just a Word doc, "James's thoughts on habits," that got to be about 60 pages. Nobody asked me to do that. That's two very different forms of energy: I was procrastinating on a key part of medical school, and doing the habits writing without anyone asking. Try to find the things where you're running toward the next thing, not away from the last one. Same direction, totally different energy. What are you naturally running toward? Those are the places to double down.

James Clear

I've started calling it the tyranny of labels — being beholden to a label, needing to be described in a certain way, needing to be called a bestselling author or a surgeon or a lawyer. If you need that label, you're beholden to doing it that particular way. But if you release yourself from the label and instead ask, "What kind of lifestyle do I want? What kind of impact do I want to make?" — a ton of options open up.

I have friends and family who are professors. If you need the professor label, your job options are very limited. But if you ask what you actually want — flexibility, and to teach concepts to other people — then there are tons of options. You could be a podcaster, a YouTuber, a writer, a coach. There are almost infinite ways to have a flexible life where you get to teach. I've seen very talented, intelligent people restrict themselves because they have to have the label. If you can give up the need to be described a certain way and instead ask what impact and lifestyle you want, you suddenly have far more options.

James Clear

Humans are very social creatures. We care a lot about what others think, about status and prestige, about rising up the hierarchy. People say "don't care what others think," but we all do, often for good reason — if people think well of you, it benefits you, it makes you safer, it feels good. Belonging is a critical part of being human.

But especially in the modern world, the desire to belong often runs counter to the desire to understand or be accurate. If you have to choose between believing something that gets you ostracised from your community, or believing something that may not be accurate but gets you praised and accepted, a lot of the time the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand. People choose belonging over accuracy.

James Clear

Earlier we talked about the power identity has in building habits — as you practise a habit you foster an identity, and once you take pride in being that kind of person, you fight to maintain it. But there's a flip side, a shadow side to identity: the tighter you cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. Once you've adopted a label — "I'm a member of this group," "I'm the type of person who believes this" — it becomes hard to stretch outside it.

So you simultaneously need two things. You need to cast votes for the type of person you wish to become, building evidence of that identity. But you also need to realise your identity doesn't have to be fixed. Some parts you can't get around — I'm male, a father, tall. But other parts can be refined. I'm a writer now, but I don't always have to be. I view it like a painting that's always being retouched — you're slightly adjusting the picture. Progress, both physical and mental, requires unlearning. It requires the willingness to unlearn some of the identities we have.

When people aren't willing to do that, they get stuck. Picture a surgeon who's done an operation the same way for 20 years, and then new robotics come in. He says, "I've served my patients well for 20 years, I'm not switching" — and five years later he's behind the curve. Or a teacher with the same lesson plan for 15 years who won't bring in new tools, and starts losing the students. The only bad mindset is the one you're fixed in — the one you can't get out of. Identity is both a powerful driver of change and a potential pitfall to the next round of it.

James Clear

Sometimes we think the outcome we want is one thing, but actually the outcome we want is to have our ego stroked. How many people would be VCs if you weren't allowed to tell anyone what you invested in? If you couldn't tell people you were an early investor in Uber or Facebook, would you still do it? Some of it is the returns, but a lot of it is the social status and praise. That's fine — we're primates who want to climb the social hierarchy, there's nothing odd about it. But we should at least admit what's going on: we crave the status as much as the outcome.

Some phrases I remind myself of when I'm trying to keep ego from leading me astray: on projects with my team, I'll say, "I don't need to be right, I just want us to get it right." I'll generate a lot of ideas, but the goal isn't for us to pick my idea — it's to get there. And a follow-up I keep asking, again and again: "What is not being said right now that needs to be said?" If I only ask it once it doesn't work, but asking repeatedly sets the table for people to open up.

The other one I come back to is that I am not right — I'm trying to be less wrong. If you start from the position that you're already wrong and just trying to improve, you're in a posture of learning rather than defending. The fastest way to stop learning something is to believe you already know it.

James Clear

That's great, because it's so hard to be right at the start. It's so unlikely your first idea is the one that works. You need to be willing to adjust along the way — that flexibility is critical.

James Clear

I don't have it written down, but I have a consistent pattern. I live by a principle: broad funnel, tight filter. I cast a really wide net — it's common for me to have 40 tabs open. When I was working on Atomic Habits, I found Reddit really helpful. I'd search things like "what's the best habit you've ever built, Reddit" or "what's one habit you struggled with, Reddit," and open 20 or 30 threads, then read all the comments. Most of it wasn't relevant, but I'd find six or seven phrases I really liked — a good description of a real problem someone had — and put those in a list. Look at 50 tabs, end up with eight sentences. Then run the cycle again — on Reddit, in a survey with my audience, in social media comments, in the replies to my newsletter. Really broad data sets, a really tight filter for what gets through.

The tricky part is that it takes persistence. One strength of mine is that I can concentrate on something for a very long time — I can do that for eight, ten, twelve hours. The flip side, a weakness, is that I'm not good at compartmentalising. If that same eight hours were split across six meetings, my mind would feel scattered. But if I can lock in on one task, that feels great.

James Clear

That was a big piece. I'm not the first person to write about habits — there was The Power of Habit, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I went to the three- and four-star reviews on Amazon. One-star reviews, everyone hates it, often for some silly reason — the book showed up with a dirty dust jacket. Five-star, everyone loves it. But the three- and four-star reviews are useful — usually someone who liked the book but had a complaint. I was trying to map the whole habits-book universe: what's been written, what people like, and what feels missing. The main thing that came up was that these books explain habits well but leave you wondering how to actually apply it. Once I saw that enough times, I thought, "I can be the practical guy — the one who translates this and makes habits actionable." My objective became to write the most useful, actionable guide on building good habits and breaking bad ones that's ever been written. I don't know if I hit it, but you'll never hit it unless you strive for it.

James Clear

A lot of it comes back to finding things with tailwinds, leverage, and cross-pollination. If something checks a lot of those boxes, it feels high-priority. I've been trying something new: I bought a bunch of wooden clothes pins — flat on one side so you can write on them — and hung a string from my office ceiling. On each pin I wrote something: each of my kids' names, "working out," and all the projects I want to do. Some make obvious sense, like writing another book; others are outside my normal focus, like a film idea or a music label. Then I drew a red line across the string, and the question is: what earns its way above the line? Obviously my kids and working out go above it. But every year, especially with each additional kid, it feels like I have fewer hours. So I look at the rest and ask, "Is this good enough to earn its way above the line?"

One challenging thing about the really important stuff in life is that it's an endless battle. If you prioritise well today, it earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. Just because you worked out two weeks ago doesn't mean you don't need to today. Just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no points today. We try to resist the endless nature of it — "If I just do this 21-day cleanse, then I'll be healthy and won't have to think about it." But it's not like that. As soon as you accept the endless nature, you look at it differently: it's not about a finish line, it's about living a daily life that feels sustainable, that you like, and that you're fully engaged in. It's about liking my days.

James Clear

The other key piece of getting a habit to stick is finding ways to visualise your progress. Technologies that are great at building habits are great at visualisation. In a video game you have a score in the corner increasing all the time; every time you pick up a gem there's a chime; even the pitter-patter of footsteps signals you're progressing. The feedback is immediate. Compare that to sitting down to write a blog post — in real life the feedback comes much slower.

My parents like to swim, and one challenge with swimming is that your body looks exactly the same when you get out of the water as when you jumped in — it takes two years to change in the mirror. So they keep a habit tracker: they put an X down for each workout, and at the end of the month they count them up and compare to the month before. Putting that X down is a tiny thing, but it's a visual signal that you showed up and did the right thing today. A hallmark of almost any compounding process is that the greatest returns are delayed — you don't hit the hockey-stick portion until later. So in the moment, you do the right thing and feel like you have nothing to show for it. Finding ways to visualise progress helps habits stick.

James Clear

The short version is that success is having power over my days. If I have the freedom to choose how I spend my days, what more could you want? It means I get to choose to spend time with my kids. Before I had kids, it meant I could travel or work on the projects I wanted. After they're grown, it'll mean I can dive into new things. What more could you want than control over your time?

That's the internal version. The external focus is to contribute my little bit to the world — to add my little bit to the pile of knowledge for humanity. One of the great gifts of humankind is that you get to inherit the lessons of the hundred billion people who came before you. My kids are starting school 30 years ahead of where I got to start; everything we've learned in the last 30 years will be taught to them, and that helps them kick the ball of humanity forward. If I can add just some little bit to that, then that's definitely a success.

James Clear

You bet. Thanks so much for having me.