Re:Thinking with Adam GrantBuilding atomic habits with James Clear | ReThinking with Adam Grant
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
40 min read · 8,331 words- 0:00 – 0:02
Intro
- AGAdam Grant
[upbeat music]
- 0:02 – 3:42
James Clear’s origin story: recovering from a traumatic injury through tiny wins
- AGAdam Grant
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. [upbeat music] My guest today is James Clear. He's the author of Atomic Habits, which has sold over 15 million copies and might be the most practical book I've ever read. He has a remarkable capacity for distilling complex ideas about behavior change into actionable insights, which he features in his weekly newsletter, 3-2-1. I wrote one of the advance endorsements for his book, but this is the first time we've ever spoken, and I have some habits I'm ready to change. [upbeat music] So tell me, how did you get interested in habits?
- JCJames Clear
Early on, like when I was a kid, the main areas where I learned about habits were through sports and through school, and I liked both of those things, but I wasn't thinking about it in any way that I would describe now. Like, I didn't have any language for it. I was just trying to go to practice and do a good job that day. And then in high school, I had this really serious injury. I was hit in the face with a baseball bat, and it was an accident. The bat slipped out of my classmate's hands and struck me right between the eyes, and it shattered both eye sockets, broke my nose, broke my ethmoid bone, which is a little deeper inside your skull behind your nose. And I sort of stumbled back into school, and I started answering questions at the nurse's office, but I wasn't answering them very well, you know? They'd be like, "What year is it?" And I would say, "1998," but it was actually 2002. I was there, but not really. And then they asked me who my mom was, and it took me, like, 10 seconds to answer her name. I lost consciousness, got taken on a stretcher to the hospital, got there, and then I started struggling with basic functions like swallowing and breathing. Had to be intubated. I lost the ability to breathe on my own. And then I was getting ready to go into surgery when we got to the larger hospital, and I had a seizure. It was actually the second one that I had had that day, and they decided that I was too unstable to undergo an operation right then, so they put me in this medically induced coma. And I stayed in, in the coma overnight, and it was this really long process of recovering from that injury. Couldn't drive a car for nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. I had double vision for weeks. So all I wanted to do was to flip a switch and go back to being this young, normal, healthy person that I was before. And it was the first time in my life when I was really forced to start small. I, I had to just focus on, what can I do at physical therapy that feels like a small win today? 'Cause I, I really can't do much right now. And gradually, I made my way back, and eventually was able to drive a car again, and then eventually, a year or so later, I got back on the baseball field and ultimately ended up playing in college. I look back on that time now, and I have a language for it. I have a way to describe and say, "Oh, you know, I was just trying to get 1% better each day. I was trying to make these small improvements and build habits." But I never would've said that at the time if you had come up to me. And so I think I had that personal experience with building small habits and recovering from the injury. And 10 years later, when I was writing Atomic Habits, then I started to think about those concepts more carefully, read some of the research on it, wrestle with how that meshed with my personal experience on the topic. And ultimately, I think it makes the writing better because the truth is, I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with, you know? It's like, do I procrastinate? Sure, all the time, you know? I'm probably procrastinating on something right now as we're talking.
- AGAdam Grant
I knew there was a reason you took this-
- JCJames Clear
Yeah, exactly
- AGAdam Grant
... interview.
- JCJames Clear
This is why I agreed to this-
- AGAdam Grant
Like, what-
- JCJames Clear
... this conversation.
- AGAdam Grant
What, what, what do I really not wanna do? Like, let's-
- JCJames Clear
Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... do this instead.
- 3:42 – 4:20
From personal struggle to practical systems: building habits to write and live well
- JCJames Clear
Do I focus too much on the goal and the result and not enough on the system and the process? Yeah, all the time. In a lot of ways, I had to build habits to write Atomic Habits. I had to build a writing habit. I had to build habits in my business. I had to build exercise and nutrition habits just to keep myself operating at a high enough level to finish this big project. The personal experiences have made the writing better. Now I look back on them and feel like it was really formative experience, even though I never would've asked for it.
- AGAdam Grant
Ideally, not everyone needs to get hit in the face with a baseball bat [laughs] to learn what you've learned, but you clearly made the most of that traumatic event.
- JCJames Clear
Yeah, my grandpa would just say it knocked some sense into me.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- 4:20 – 5:55
What “atomic habits” really means: tiny, compounding, and powerful
- AGAdam Grant
It sounded like it literally knocked some sense out of you first. But you, you earned it back and then some. So I think the first time I became aware of you and your work was when you had just written Atomic Habits, and you sent me an early copy of it. And the first thing that piqued my interest was the title, and I thought, "Oh, this is clever." Because on the one hand, atomic forces are enormous. And then on the other hand, atoms are the smallest building blocks. And I thought that juxtaposition was really clever, and I didn't realize that you actually had a third meaning of it, too. Talk to me a little bit about what an atomic habit is.
- JCJames Clear
So the first meaning of atomic can be tiny or small, like an atom, and that is kinda how I think about habits. You should scale them down and make them really easy to do, and, uh, we'll talk about a lot of that. And the second meaning is that atoms build into molecules, and molecules build into compounds, and it has this growth or this accumulation effect. And your habits can sort of layer on top of each other as well. They can be these units in a larger system that you're running, and it's actually the collection of habits that you have that are oriented toward your health or the collection of habits that you have oriented toward your business or so on that drive results. It's very rarely just a single habit. And then finally, as you said, atomic can mean the source of immense energy or power. And I think if you understand those three concepts, you sort of see the arc of the book, which is you start with changes that are small and easy to do, habits that are non-threatening and sustainable and reasonable, and you start to layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system, and you end up with these really powerful, remarkable results as a byproduct.
- 5:55 – 8:22
Why systems beat single “hack” habits: stacking the deck in your favor
- AGAdam Grant
What I think was different about that from other takes on habits that I've read is the system part. Everybody's been told, "Okay, change a habit. Go to sleep in your workout clothes, and then wake up in the morning, and maybe you'll exercise," right? I'd never seen somebody so systematically, perhaps not coincidentally [laughs] say, "We actually need to look at how these habits fit together and compound over time."
- JCJames Clear
Yeah, I think it's the collection of things that makes the biggest difference. It's very rare to have an actual change that drives 10% of the outcome or 40% of the outcome. I mean, these big changes in real life, they don't really exist like that. It's the accumulation of many small improvements that ultimately drives the outcome. And your habits are like that, too. If you want to read more books, well, just downloading Audible and putting it on your phone probably isn't gonna do it on its own, but that could be one piece of the puzzle. When I wanted to start reading more, the first thing I did was I selected books that I was really excited about. And I think this is one thing that, that people overlook when it comes to building better habits, which is the first and most enormous hurdle to cross is, are you genuinely interested in it? The most common New Year's resolution is people wanna go work out at the gym, and I kinda feel like a lot of people choose working out or going to the gym because they feel like they should do it or they feel like society wants them to do it, not because that's the version of exercise or the version of physical activity that's most exciting to them or fun to them. And you should start there. I mean, there are many ways to live an active lifestyle. You could kayak or rock climb or go for a run or do yoga. I mean, pick whatever version of it sounds the most naturally appealing to you. So I chose books that I was excited about. I downloaded Audible, put it on my home screen of my phone, moved all the other apps to the second screen so it'd be the first thing I would see. I bought some of those books in print version, and then I would sprinkle them around the house so that I was, like, never far from a bad idea. And then you can also come up with a plan where you say, like, "When I get in bed at night, I'm gonna read one page before I go to sleep." I just described four or five things there, but it's actually the collection of those things that helps drive this reading habit. It's not any one of those changes that's really gonna radically transform your life. But if each of the changes are reasonable and each of the changes are small, and in some cases, they're choices that you only have to make once, you start to stack the deck in your favor, and you start to have all these forces that are kinda working for you. And by creating this system that is lifting you up and supporting your habits, now you're in a much better position to follow through on them each day.
- 8:22 – 9:38
Redundancy, bottlenecks, and leverage: an engineering view of habits
- AGAdam Grant
I think one of the reasons that we psychologists miss this approach is we're always wanting to figure out what's the active ingredient. I wanna pull out the one h- anchor habit that made the difference, and your point is, actually, there isn't one. And secondly, and maybe even more interestingly, it sounds like you did for habits what high-reliability organizations do to prevent errors, which is they build redundant systems. Airplanes are designed, right, if one engine fails, right [laughs] , to have a backup option available. In your case, if you forget the one page tonight, you're gonna see it on the home screen the first thing tomorrow morning, and you're probably gonna make up for it.
- JCJames Clear
I really, I like a lot of engineering, you know, strategies and metaphors like that. You think about backup systems and redundancy and break points, and all, all of those concepts can be applied to building habits as well. When you're making these small changes, it doesn't hinge on any one thing the way, like you just said, like, oh, maybe there isn't an anchor point or, like, the one move that changes everything. But there's always a bottleneck. So in the manufacturing process, you're making a car. Maybe the car doors are the bottleneck of the process, but that doesn't mean you don't need the tires and the headlights and the roof and everything else. Like, you still need all the other parts. It's just maybe there's a higher leverage place to focus in the beginning. So I think both of those can kinda coexist together. Maybe you need this overall system, but there are generally, like, higher leverage places to focus than others.
- 9:38 – 12:27
Compound interest, consistency, and the limits of intensity-driven motivation
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the things that you've done for a lot of people is you've given them some very both non-obvious but ultimately intuitively true and actionable principles to apply to their habit change. Whenever somebody says James Clear, immediately these phrases go through my head, like, "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Consistency beats intensity. We don't rise to the level of our goals. We sink to the level of our systems." Talk to me about those concepts and putting them into practice.
- JCJames Clear
So those phrases like that, they become shorthand for the overall strategy or approach that we're trying to take. This idea of habits are the compound interest of self-improvement, so that's the first one you mentioned, time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes your ally, and the changes that you're making each day, the showing up in a small way, making some small improvement, it doesn't seem like much on any given day, but it puts you on a trajectory. It puts you on a path that starts to compound and multiply over time. If you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy, and you're on a trajectory that's moving you in the opposite direction. So I think that's actually an interesting question to ask yourself, which is, "Can my current habits carry me to my desired future?" You know, intensity gets a lot of discussion. People are always gonna talk about running a marathon or doing a silent meditation retreat for a week or, you know, just these things that are, like, kind of notable. And this is, I think, even magnified by social media. People are almost never gonna post about the process. You're never gonna see someone, like, post a tweet or hear a news story about like, "Man eats chicken salad for lunch today."
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- JCJames Clear
It's only a story once you lose 100 pounds or something. And I think that causes us to overvalue the results a little bit and undervalue the process. We get so results-oriented because it's all that we see. Consistency is what drives progress and drives results. Intensity makes a good story, but it's almost always the case that you'd rather have the foundation, the volume of work, the capacity to do the work, the habits, rather than focusing too much on the outcome. Now, not everything in life is driven by habits, right? You have luck and randomness. You have misfortune. But by definition, those forces are not in your control, and your habits are. And the only rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So that's kinda how I think about that connection point between consistency and intensity.
- AGAdam Grant
During my diving days, my coach, Eric Best, would always quote his coach, John Narsi, and say, "Look, the person who wins the meet is the one who did the most dives."
- JCJames Clear
Mm. The results were almost baked in, in a sense. I mean, it doesn't mean performance doesn't matter, right? You can still screw it up on that day. But It's really hard to beat the person who's done that dive 10,000 times if you've only done it for 1,000.
- 12:27 – 14:25
Beyond 10,000 hours: 10,000 iterations and optimizing for what matters
- AGAdam Grant
I think that's exactly right. What I didn't understand at first and then became clear over time was how probabilistic that is, right? That [laughs] the person with the best odds is the person who's put in the consistent effort day in, day out. But I think what you've also added to that is the idea that the quality of those habits really matters, and I think this is where systems become a big deal because I think a lot of people took the 10,000 hours rule and said, "Okay, this is a quantity game, and what I have to do is put in the sheer number of hours." And you're saying, "Wait a minute. No. There are a bunch of ways to work a lot smarter, and I'm gonna help you understand what those are." So what are those?
- JCJames Clear
Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
I think we all wanna know.
- JCJames Clear
Naval Ravikant has this good distinction where he says, "It's not 10,000 hours. It's 10,000 iterations," and I think there's a lot of truth in that. Repetition is hard enough on its own, but to try to get 1% better each day, to try to improve it and iterate it is a totally different game, and I think it changes your perspective a little bit. You know, you're not showing up in a lazy way. You're not just trying to, like, punch the clock and put your time in. You're trying to have this attitude, this mindset where you're looking for some small advantage to carve out. So I think the first step there is, like, this mindset, this attitude of trying to get 1% better each day and realizing that it's not really about measuring it. It's not like, oh, is it a 1% improvement or 1.6% or whatever.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- JCJames Clear
It's not, like, getting caught up in the number. It's more this approach and a philosophy of not just showing up and putting the time in, but trying to genuinely find some way to improve and trusting that those small improvements really add up. It's really important to ask yourself, "What is this system oriented toward? What am I optimizing for?" Sometimes people optimize for making more money. Sometimes they optimize for free time and creative, you know, freedom. Sometimes they optimize for family time. I mean, th- there can be an endless list, but it's a very personal answer, and you should be wary of inheriting or imitating other people's habits. Start by asking yourself, "Is this what I want my days to look like?" So I think starting there is a really important part of building a better system.
- 14:25 – 16:31
Identity-based habits: becoming the kind of person who…
- AGAdam Grant
Maybe for me, the most counterintuitive, uh, idea in Atomic Habits is to focus a little bit less on what you want to achieve and a little bit more on who you wanna become. This flies in the face of everything I've ever taught on goal setting and [laughs] a lot of the research I've read on it. It's not immediately clear to people that [laughs] like, if I want to achieve something, I should actually turn my attention a bit away from that and say instead, "What kind of person do I wanna be?" And yet I think it can be extremely powerful, so I, I wanna hear you riff on that a little bit.
- JCJames Clear
So we often talk about habits as mattering because of the external results they'll drive for us, but I think the real reason, the true reason that habits matter is that they reinforce your desired identity. Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No, writing one sentence may not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who writes every day. You start to cast votes and kind of build up this pile of, of evidence for who you are, and it starts to shift the weight of the story. And so the habits that are linked to the aspects of our identity that we take pride in, it, there, there's something about them that feels, like, more natural to you, or it's like this is just kind of the person that I am. It's more like, how do I get alignment between my goals and my identity? How do I start with this picture of who I would like to become and how my habits feed into that and trust that ultimately it can carry me toward some of these results that I say are so important to me?
- AGAdam Grant
I think it's an elegant explanation of why Christopher Bryan sometimes finds these ne- noun over verb effects. Like, if you wanna get kids to stop cheating in school, instead of saying, "Don't cheat," you say, "Don't be a cheater."
- JCJames Clear
Mm.
- AGAdam Grant
And all of a sudden, that action reflects on my identity, and I don't wanna be the kind of person who cheats. Similar effects on the positive side with getting kids to help by saying, "Be a helper," instead of help, and getting citizens to vote by saying, "Be a voter," right? That's a vote cast for the kind of person I wanna become. I love that. I think it's time for a lightning round.
- JCJames Clear
Let's do it.
- 16:31 – 20:16
Lightning round: compressed wisdom, reframing, and favorite recommendations
- AGAdam Grant
So you're a fan of book recommendations. I am, too. What's a book you think all our ReThinking and Work Life listeners should read or listen to that they might not have already heard of?
- JCJames Clear
I've really been on this kick of trying to find books that have compressed wisdom. So one that I really like that's, like, 500 years old is called The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián. I was reading this thing, and I was like, man, this guy was like me, like, 500 years ago. He was, like, blogging, like, way, way [laughs] before, before it was a thing. So I thought that one was really useful.
- AGAdam Grant
On the subject of compression, one of the things I really admire about you is how good you are at f- framing and reframing ideas. I've sort of had a negative opinion of what you call compression because it sounds to me like hacking or shortcuts, and you've made me think differently about it. How did you land there on that one?
- JCJames Clear
There are some challenges. Like, it squeezes out nuance. I would say that's a definite negative. The upside is that it's sticky and that it's easy to remember. I think Balaji has this phrase where he says, "You want this bumper sticker that expands into a PhD thesis," and I think about it like that. Like, what's the bumper sticker that can remind me of this bigger, more important idea? I hadn't had someone tell me this before, what you just said, that I was good at, like, reframing ideas, but that actually might be the only value that I really provide. I mean, the truth is m- uh, most things that are, have been covered many times before. I mean, there's eight billion people in the world, and there's 100 billion that have lived before us. All this stuff is very well trod ground. It's very rare that you come across something genuinely new, but maybe I can give somebody, you know, a new angle on it, or maybe I can provide clarity to the thought where if someone says, "Ah, you know, like, I'd never quite heard it put that way before."
- AGAdam Grant
For the record, I think you strike a really good balance between articulating things that people sort of believe but haven't been able to verbalize-
- JCJames Clear
Mm
- AGAdam Grant
... and then also challenging some [laughs] of the assumptions they hold that actually turn out to be false, and I think it's the combination of those two that makes your words so powerful. So you profess to be a fan of architecture and travel photography, so I'm gonna combine those two and ask what's your favorite place you've gone to photograph architecture?
- JCJames Clear
St. Petersburg, Russia is a wild city because the czar basically went around Europe and just plucked buildings, like, "I like that one. Let's go build one in Russia," or like go to Vienna and be like, "I like that one. Let's go build one [laughs] like that." So it just has this really wide-ranging variety of architecture. It also has tons of bridges and canals and water g- like traversing all over the city. And so you end up in this interesting situation where they put the bridges up at night, I don't remember exactly, but let's say it's from like 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM. So if you're out at the bar and it's like 12:40, you're like, "All right, guys, we gotta make a decision. Like, are we going back home now or are we gonna stay out till 4:00 AM [laughs] because the bridges are going up soon?" I, I thought St. Petersburg was, was fascinating.
- AGAdam Grant
On that subject also, ultralight travel is one of your passions. What's your favorite tip for lightening the travel load?
- JCJames Clear
When I would travel on my own, I would always only travel with one bag. I still, I still do that now. I mean, like you, Adam, I, I do have to do a lot of speaking gigs. The biggest point of friction is always shoes, so if you can figure out a way to have one pair of shoes that are diverse enough in their use cases to cover the trip, then the rest of it is, like, usually pretty easy.
- AGAdam Grant
I agree with everything you said except for the part where you said, "I have to do a lot of speeches." You get to do a lot of speeches.
- JCJames Clear
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
That's a choice.
- JCJames Clear
We could have a long discussion about this. I had a weightlifting coach in college who we would come in, you know, everybody's complaining about the workout and how hard it is and blah, blah, blah, and he's like, "Okay, listen. You don't have to do it, you get to do it. You know, you don't have to take your kids to school, you get to take your kids to school. You don't have to show up at work today, you get to show up at work today." And that little reframe of have to versus get to, it has stuck with me for, you know, 20 years now.
- 20:16 – 22:22
Choosing what matters: great talks, sharp questions, and priority discipline
- AGAdam Grant
You're a fan of great speeches. What's a speech you love that I've probably not seen?
- JCJames Clear
So on jamesclear.com, I have this page where it's called, uh, Great Talks That Most People Have Never Heard. And over the last five years or so, I've just collected transcripts from different speeches. Sometimes it's a graduation speech at a little school, sometimes it's an internal talk that got posted on YouTube years later. And the one that prompted the whole project is this talk given by Richard Hamming, who was this engineer at Bell Labs, and it was this internal talk he gave called You and Your Research. And it's about doing scientific research, but it's actually about way more than that. They're just, like, lessons for everybody in life that are baked in there. And he has so many good little questions in there that as soon as you hear them, you're like, "Oh, good." Like, sometimes my favorite questions are ones that, like, cut a little bit. You're like, "Oh, that just stings a little to even, like, think about that answer." Like, one of his famous questions, he sat down at a table with a bunch of, uh, scientists who were in a different field, and he goes and sits down with them each day for lunch for, like, a week. And he's listening to them talk about the projects they're doing and the research that they're doing, and then eventually he asked them, "Hey, what are some of the most important problems in your field?" And they started listing out some of them, and he realized that the projects they were working on were not oriented or related to those big problems. And so his question was, "What are the most important problems in your field, and why are you not working on them?" And that is, like, such an obvious thing to ask, but you could say it as an individual. What are the most important problems in your personal life, and why are you not working on them? And you start to realize, like, man, maybe, like, maybe I should be carving out a little bit more time to get extra sleep or to go to the gym or to spend more time with my kids. You realize how much time and attention and energy is directed toward relatively low-priority problems. And in some cases, they're actually good uses of time, but they're not great uses of time. And I think that's, like, one of the most dangerous things on your to-do list are items, let's say items, like, three to six. But the truth is, those are the items that are most likely to distract you from items one and two, because you have a good justification for doing them.
- 22:22 – 24:00
Bad advice and better patterns: don’t copy one success story
- AGAdam Grant
I, I think that's something we all need to pause and think about. [laughs] What are the activities in my calendar that by themselves are worthwhile, but in aggregate actually interfere with my higher priorities? What's the worst advice you've ever gotten?
- JCJames Clear
I do think that there's a very common pitfall that I have certainly fallen into many times, which is you see someone who's successful, who's doing the thing that you hope to do or that you aspire to do, and then you think, "You know what? I'll imitate what they're doing." And the problem is that if you have just one example or one story for something, you think you're learning something, but actually you're not learning very much at all. Most advice is very contextual. It's very dependent on the circumstances. And so in that way, advice is kind of brittle, actually. If you step outside of that specific narrow circumstance, it doesn't hold up in the same way. Instead, what I have gradually learned to do after making many mistakes, is you want to look at 100 people who are doing the thing that you wanna do, and then you try to find the commonalities or the patterns between them. Because if you have a pattern, then there's some signal and not just noise.
- AGAdam Grant
You just articulated why I have this knee-jerk reaction whenever somebody tells me they love learning from biographies. No, we do social science [laughs] to figure out which of those insights are actually valid. And also, you're sampling on the dependent variable, and you need to also read biographies of people who failed, not just the ones who succeeded, and then compare them, because it's in that comparison that the most meaningful patterns jump out. And then to your point, you have to run a bunch of personal experiments to figure out which of those patterns are gonna work for you. I'm gonna give
- 24:00 – 27:17
Work design and creative boundaries: Adam Grant’s rules for making better work
- AGAdam Grant
you the mic for a second and ask if there's a question you have for me.
- JCJames Clear
I have a personal question that I wanna know, which is basically how you set up your business and how you balance your days. I don't wanna have a big team. I have one full-time employee. I have no desire to hire more. I don't wanna have this big, big thing that I'm managing. I think management is kind of a weakness of mine. I'm better at, like, the creative side or, like, making something. That's the part that really lights me up. So I don't wanna spend much time managing. But if you step outside of the definition of an employee and look at partnerships, well, now I've got a book agent and a speaking agency and, and like in your case, you've got this partnership with TED, you have the podcast production and so on. So you have a lot of people that are touching your business in some way, and I guess what I'd like to know is how you think about Maximizing leverage for yourself and, like, kind of extending your creative reach or your ability to produce work, and whether you feel like you are overscheduled or whether you feel like you have the balance that you'd like to have.
- AGAdam Grant
I would answer this really differently now than I would have a couple years ago. It's been a decade since I became an author, and then all these other things sort of come with it, right, that you don't realize you're opting into. I don't think that much about leverage anymore, in part because the scale we work at is already beyond my wildest dreams. I think what I'm interested in is, how do I improve the quality of what I do produce? And I think for me, that's meant sometimes producing less. So my first book came out in 2013. By 2017, I had published two more books. It was three books in four years.
- JCJames Clear
I think, actually-
- AGAdam Grant
And then [laughs]
- JCJames Clear
... we messaged at some point in 2018, and you said, "My goal for the year is to not write a book." [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Goal achieved. You know, it wasn't a coincidence then that it was four more years until I came out with my next book, and I really wanted to invest in learning, and that was part of why I started this podcast, was it was an excuse for me to say, [laughs] like, I'm not just learning for my own curiosity. I'm gonna learn in a way that hopefully also is interesting and useful to other people. I wa- I wasn't very structured or focused around, what do I wanna learn? And podcasting created that for me. I think otherwise, I felt like I was overscheduled because I was wearing a lot of hats, and then I said, okay, one of the things that just clearly differentiates my sort of c- periods of creative bursts from, you know, windows where I feel like I don't produce that much of value is, do I have at least two days a week with nothing on my calendar?
- JCJames Clear
Mm.
- AGAdam Grant
And so then I, I committed to that, and I think I achieve it most weeks. There are some weeks where I fail, and then, like, the next month I have to make f- make up for it, basically.
- JCJames Clear
Yeah. That's great, though. I love little rules of thumb like that. All right, I have one more question for you. I didn't know we were gonna do this. We could turn this into another hour where I get to interview you.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Easily.
- JCJames Clear
Um, all right, so we talked a little bit about some of my compression. So every action you take is a vote for the type of person you get to become, or you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. W- if you were to pick, like, one or two of your best pieces of compression, what would you say that they are?
- AGAdam Grant
The most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.
- JCJames Clear
Mm.
- AGAdam Grant
What I figured out there that I didn't get when I wrote the book is, you don't have to be more successful as a giver than a taker or a matcher, but it's the kind of success that's the most rewarding, and that was the thesis I should have led with.
- JCJames Clear
Thank you for sharing.
- 27:17 – 32:51
Why Atomic Habits broke through: desire already exists, plus distinctive positioning
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah, no, thank you for asking. It's part of the fun of what we do. I wanted to ask you about post-Atomic Habits.
- JCJames Clear
Mm.
- AGAdam Grant
I was wowed by the clarity of the book and wanting to make all kinds of puns about your name, which you're definitely tired of. [laughs] Even being really impressed by the book when I first read it, I dramatically underestimated how much impact it would have, and I think the main reason that I did that was I, I felt like the habit landscape was already relatively crowded, and there'd been a few bestsellers that were, you know, either explicitly about habits or about habit-like concepts. And I know how, how hard it is to break through, even if you're a well-known author, and you were very candid about saying, like, [laughs] "I'm just a blogger. I don't know if anybody's gonna read this stuff." And this book, I think it's the most successful nonfiction book of the last decade, as far as I can tell. Certainly in our genre, it, it appears to me to be the biggest book since Outliers, and it has incredible staying power. So my question is, why? [laughs] Like, what, what, what is different about this book?
- JCJames Clear
Yeah. There's a chapter later in Atomic Habits where I talk about deliberate practice, and it could have been a 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 pretty enormous because deliberate practice, if you're not, like, familiar with it, it takes 30 seconds to unpack it and explain how it's different than regular practice, and, like-
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah
- JCJames Clear
... you don't get any of that time with a potential reader.
- AGAdam Grant
No, it's not sticky, and also, nobody wants to practice. [laughs]
- JCJames Clear
Yeah. Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
If, if you like practice, you don't need this book, per se.
- JCJames Clear
Right. Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
Whereas, uh, everybody knows they have bad habits and they want better ones.
- JCJames Clear
And I think that, what you just said, is actually a very important insight that people often overlook, which is if you want any product, not just a book, but any product, I think, if you want it to do really well, it taps into a desire that people already have. It doesn't try to generate or convince people of having a new desire. Classic example like Uber, you know, like, oh, totally redefined transportation, but only sort of. Like, people already took taxis. They're not trying to convince anyone of the underlying motivation that drives the app. They're just giving them a new avenue for doing it. I am just adding my little small piece to the collective discussion about it. Like, it's a very small contribution, but I don't have to convince anybody that having good habits is desirable and breaking bad habits is desirable. Like, people already want that. I just need to convince you this is the best book on that topic. If you wanna read one thing that's the most comprehensive and useful, it's this book. Sometimes good titles actually sound a little bit strange when you first hear them, like the phrase atomic habits, now people are familiar with it, but before the book came out, it's a little strange. You might describe a habit as small, but you wouldn't describe it as atomic. Like, that, it just sounds a little different, but that's actually a good thing because it means I can own that language in the reader's mind. If the title of the book were Small Habits, it might work a little bit, but it's just a little general. It's a little too much common language for it to really be sticky. So titles are really hard to get right because you want them to stand out, but you don't want it to be too weird, and it also needs to actually talk about what the book covers 'cause you have to deliver on the promise that the title makes. It was really common, like, five years ago for books to try to do this, where they would just stack a bunch of desirable things in the subtitle and say like-
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- JCJames Clear
... you know, how to make money and be happy, find love, and they would just, like, stack all-
- AGAdam Grant
How to win-
- JCJames Clear
Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... at work and in life.
- JCJames Clear
Like, they would just stack all that stuff in there, but that's not actually what the book is genuinely about, so you need to be able to deliver on the promises that are made. Title plays a big role. Positioning plays a big role.
- AGAdam Grant
Just o- one of the things I, I hear you ... capturing that I don't think has been well articulated [laughs] for people trying to position any idea is you need to be both really specific and really general at the same time.
- JCJames Clear
Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
And those two things together give you distinctiveness.
- JCJames Clear
Habits are like that. They're this universal topic. There's this, uh, they apply to literally everyone on the planet, but your habits are also very personal. You know, everybody wants to build their own. They have their own style. They got their own habits that are kinda part of their routine. So it's both personal and universal. It's both specific and general. Contrast is a really important element of good titles. If you think about a lot of best-selling books, they have this point of contrast in the title where it's a, a little bit surprising or it inverts the typical expectation. Four Hour Workweek. I thought a workweek was 40 hours, now you're telling me it can be four. Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I thought tidying up was just this little thing that I did, now you're telling me it can be life-changing. Atomic Habits, like, really small habits, but also super powerful. Ultimately, my guiding light is always, like, what is most useful? What is, what is most actionable and useful for the reader? And I'm just gonna do it that way. I'm just trying to help people get results. I find that a lot of books, a lot of self-help books in particular, people talk about them as being how-to books, but they're actually what-to books. They tell you what to think or they tell you what you should do, but they don't actually tell you how to do it. It sounds like a small detail, but taking that extra step of showing people how it would actually look if you implemented this, what specific step they would take, and then giving them a couple examples, that really makes things useful. Other authors can talk about the science better. Other authors are better storytellers. Other authors are better at a lot of things that I'm not good at. But making it actionable and useful is the main thing that I'm, like, trying to prioritize for.
- AGAdam Grant
I sometimes realized what I was trying to say after the book came out when I did the book tour. I imagine one of the blessings and curses of reaching so many people is you've gotten a lot of feedback.
- JCJames Clear
Yeah.
- 32:51 – 34:34
What he’s rethinking now: social norms as the hidden engine of habit formation
- AGAdam Grant
What have you learned or rethought since Atomic Habits first came out?
- JCJames Clear
If I had to pick one thing that I would say is more important now than I realized when I was writing the book, it would probably be the power of social environment on habits, and how, just how pervasive and strong that force can be. I did write about it a little bit. I have a chapter in Atomic Habits on the influence of friends and family on your behavior, but it's broader than that, and it's more powerful than that. Like, we are all part of multiple groups, multiple tribes, and some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American, and some of those tribes are small and, like, kinda local, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street, or a member of the local yoga studio, or a volunteer at the local hospital. And all of those groups, all those different spaces that you step into each day, they have a set of shared expectations for how you act. They have a set of norms for what people do there. And when habits are aligned with the social norms of that group, they tend to be pretty attractive to stick to because we don't only perform habits because of the results they'll get us. We also perform them as a signal to the people around us. Hey, I get it. I belong. I fit in. I'm part of this community. I understand how we act here. And if people have to choose between I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, or I have the habits that I wanna have, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized, I mean, the desire to belong will often overpower the desire to improve.
- AGAdam Grant
Another way to c- to say it that connects to one of your core points in the book is think [laughs] about the person you wanna become, and then say, "Okay, [laughs] what kinds of groups are full of those people?"
- JCJames Clear
Yeah, for sure. That's a great way to think about it.
- 34:34 – 38:18
What comes next: avoiding second-album pressure and finding a new writing process
- AGAdam Grant
The scariest thing about having such a breakout success is having to follow it. I'm sure you've thought a lot about second album syndrome. At first, I was wondering, is it scary to think about your next book? And then I thought, no, because this book was the result of, like, thousands of tweets and blog posts, and you were experimenting and iterating, and by the time you wrote it, you knew you had something really meaningful. So how do you think about your future writing?
- JCJames Clear
You know, like, the way that I think about it is, this is the best possible outcome. I'm incredibly fortunate, but Atomic Habits, it can just be a project that went really well. It doesn't have to be anything more than that. I put everything I had into it, and great, it did really well, and it's helping a lot of people, and that's awesome. And now I can just move on to the next thing that I'm, am excited about, and I'll try to do my best on that. And it doesn't really need to be some value judgment on how much I'm worth or, you know, how creative I am or am not now or, you know, whether it is defining my career or not. It doesn't have to be that. So that's the head space I'm trying to live in. The way that I wrote the first book is very different than how I'm writing now. So I wrote Atomic Habits when I didn't have kids, and now I do, and I had a period there for, like, six to nine months where I was finishing the manuscript where I worked on it for 12 hours a day. I went to sleep. I dreamt about it. I did it all over again. Like, I can't do that now. It's kinda hard to get two hours where you're not interrupted when you've got kids running around. I'm like, "Okay, I know how to write a good book, but the way that I know how to do it doesn't work for me anymore, so what does that mean?" You know? Like, I kinda need to find a new angle or something. But more than anything, the most important thing is, when I wrote Atomic Habits, I knew that I had something to say, and I knew that was the topic that I wanted to write about, and I'm still trying to figure that out for the next book. What is it really that I feel like this is so important and I have so much to say on it that I have to write a book about it? It is not an easy project, and it's not a short project. So if you're just like, "I wanna write a book 'cause I'd like to have a book," that's not a good reason.
- AGAdam Grant
That seems like a very healthy outlook.
- JCJames Clear
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Well, I'm looking forward to the next one, whenever it comes. No pressure.
- JCJames Clear
Yeah. Thank you. So is my publisher. They're probably listening to this thinking, "He should be writing right now, not doing this interview."
- AGAdam Grant
Well, James, in the meantime, thank you for helping us all build better habits, and, uh, occasionally even achieve our goals, too.
- JCJames Clear
Awesome. Thanks, Adam.
- AGAdam Grant
[upbeat music] James makes such a compelling case that instead of asking, "What do I want to achieve?" it's more motivating to ask, "What kind of person do I wanna become?" For James, that means he's not focused on the result of how many books he publishes or how many copies he sells, but rather on being the kind of person who has something worth sharing. I now think this question has much bigger implications than I realized going in. Who do I wanna become? What kind of person do I wanna be? That's not just useful for reaching your goals. It's also helpful for identifying your goals, figuring out what's important to you, and then making sure that when you achieve it, it actually aligns with your values. ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Aja Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quinn, Benvam Chang, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansel Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown. I am also recording, and, uh, tried to match your hairstyle for today.
- JCJames Clear
Yeah, I know, right? We're [laughs] we got a little club of bald thought leaders.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] I feel like there are more bald people in that category than people with hair, but-
- JCJames Clear
For sure. [laughs] Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... may- maybe I just pay more attention to them.
Episode duration: 38:20
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Transcript of episode M7kFkagIu1Q
