What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from
ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. On this show, I
talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a
sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are
today? How do they make their decisions at their companies? And what exactly makes
their businesses tick? And the goal, as always, is so that the rest of us can
learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. Today,
I have the pleasure of speaking with James Clear. James is an entrepreneur.
He's the creator of JamesClear.com, and he's the author of a brand new book
called Atomic Habits. James, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for
joining me. Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. It's exciting to talk to
you. Yeah, same. I have a ton I want to talk to you about, actually. You are many
things in addition to what I just listed earlier. You're also a public speaker, an
educator, a weightlifter, a photographer. But this show is about building
companies, so I really want to hone in on your career as an entrepreneur. And I
also want to talk about your new book, Atomic Habits, and how we can apply the
principles found there to form habits that can help us build more successful
businesses. So let's start with you. How did you become interested in
entrepreneurship? Well, I didn't really have anybody in my family who was an
entrepreneur, so I didn't really have much to go on early on. And I'm not sure
if it's this way for other entrepreneurs, but looking back, there were a variety of
things that I did early on that were fairly entrepreneurial, but I didn't know
that at the time, or I didn't have the language to describe it. So when I was in
college, Amazon was getting started and had been around for a little while,
and they had their marketplace feature, and you could resell your
textbooks on there. So I started reselling my own textbooks, but then I
also started doing it for everybody that was on my floor, and then in my
dorm, and would just keep five bucks from each one, or whatever. And that
wasn't really a business, but it was kind of entrepreneurial. As a student, I found
out that you could design your own major, and so I listed all the options as like,
I don't really like any of these, so I just like came up with a collection of
classes that I thought sounded interesting, and then like slapped a
label on it, and called it biomechanics, and it ended up being like a combination
of the science classes that I was excited about. Academic Affairs Council
approved it, and that ended up being my major. So that's also fairly
entrepreneurial, so like look at the set of options and be like, well, I kind of
want to create my own thing instead. So I had little decisions like that, and then
when I was in graduate school, I worked in the Center for Entrepreneurship, and
my job was to analyze venture capital investment in the region, and so I saw
all these people starting companies, and that was where I kind of got the itch to
really start my own thing. I was like, well, all these other people are doing it,
like maybe I should try it too. So rather than get a job out of grad school, I just
tried to launch my own company, and kind of floundered around for about two years,
which now I refer to the period as the period where I incubated my skill set.
But that was really the time when I kind of like honed my skills, and learned what
a website was, and how to design one, and what an email list was, and how to launch
product, and all that type of stuff. And then in November of 2012, I launched
JamesClear.com, and I've been running with that ever since. I talked to a lot
of founders who have this sort of drive to create their own path like you did,
almost a disdain for walking along the beaten path. As somebody who reads a lot
and writes a lot about psychology, do you think that's something that you're just
born with, or is there something in your life that made you that kind of person?
Yeah, well, I don't know. It's hard to say from like a broad perspective, like what
what does that look like in society, or how does it influence other people? I can
only tell you, like from my own experience, I do think there's something
genetic or personality-wise that makes me very curious, or innately, like I'm
definitely a learner, and ask a lot of questions, and want to be curious, and I
don't know how. It's really hard to stoke the flame of curiosity if someone
doesn't have that. There are ways to do it. It actually is, it's related to
motivation in general. I actually write about this later in Atomic Habits, but
there's this concept that I refer to as the Goldilocks rule, where it's this idea
that humans experience peak levels of motivation when they work on a task of
just manageable difficulty. So not too hard, not too easy, just right. And you
can imagine this is like a student. You could, you know, reading skills are big
when you're like in first grade, or second grade, or whatever, and so if you
want to foster reading skills or an interest in reading in students, it's
really important to have them like just on the edge of their ability, where
they're being challenged, but they're also experiencing enough success that
they have a reason to come back and read again the next day. If you give them
something that's multiple grade levels beyond them, then they just get, you know,
dejected about it. And the same thing is true, you know, you could imagine playing
like tennis. If you play against a professional, well, it might be cool for
a second, but it gets boring pretty quickly because you're gonna lose every point. If
you play against a five-year-old, it's gonna get boring pretty quickly because
you win every point. But if you play against someone who's your peer, who's
like just kind of running around the same level as you, you win a few points, they
win a few points, you have a chance to win, but only if you really try hard.
That's like the most motivating level to be at. And so if you can maintain that,
then you can perhaps like stoke curiosity up a little bit or to keep you
on that razor's edge. And in fact, many products, especially like video games, are
amazing at this. They're really good at keeping players right on the
edge of their ability so that if you start to struggle, they'll offer you more
power-ups and weapons and things like that. And if you're doing really well,
then you face more challenges or difficulties. But the idea is to always
keep you kind of like on that border, which keeps you engaged and curious and
motivated and excited. But in real life, it's in the physical world, it's hard to
maintain that. And that's doubly true for an entrepreneur who is building a
business and you know, like there is no roadmap. So keeping yourself right on the
edge of your ability is really hard because you're not quite sure what you're
working on all the time or what your abilities are or what you need to be
focusing on the next moment. So from a practical standpoint, it's difficult to
do that. And if you don't have some level of innate personality that's interested
in learning and being curious and kind of diving in, being a problem solver, then I
feel like it would be harder. And again, you know, I can't speak for everybody
else, but I can say from my own experience, I do think I'm kind of like
wired that way.
Yeah, I've heard about other things that motivate people as well, particularly
about an article recently about how entrepreneurs have a high incidence of
being unemployable. People who think that they simply won't be able to get a job
or if they do, their skills will be undervalued, which I think can be sort of
a motivating factor for starting your own business. Let's talk about this area,
this period of time where you are sort of learning, learning what a website is,
learning how technology works, and sort of becoming the person you are today. What
do you think were the most valuable skills that you learned during this
period?
Well, probably the most valuable thing is learning to trust myself. In a sense,
entrepreneurship is just the ability to trust that you'll figure it out, because
you're constantly facing some challenge or problem no matter where you're at on
the curve. I mean, you could have $100 million business, there's going to be
some challenge that you're facing next that you haven't faced yet. And if you
have the trust, the faith that you'll figure it out, then you have a reason to
show up and keep doing the work. It takes a little while to learn that or to
believe that about yourself, you need like some evidence, you know, you have to
solve a few problems before you really are like, yeah, I can, I can figure that
out, I can make that happen. And early on in your career, there's a surprisingly
long amount of time when you're like, is this still really going to take, you
know, like most entrepreneurs, I know it's still paranoid that like the bottom
is going to fall out of their business and things are going to collapse overnight.
And even if you don't feel it every day, after you've been established for two or
three or five or 10 years, you still feel it every now and then. And so it's
important to have that, that like trust and confidence in yourself. Then there
are just a long list of skills and technical skills that I learned over
those first two years. And this is true for any business, the, the particular
skills you learn differ based on what you're working on. But you go through
this period where there are all these initial costs with starting up a
business. And I don't just mean like financial costs, but also time costs.
And those are maybe even the more painful ones to go through. So, you know,
early on, I had no budget. I didn't have any resources or money to draw from.
So it's like, well, the website needs to get designed. I guess I need to teach
myself web design. So, you know, there goes a few months or a couple of weeks
working on that. And it can be frustrating to deal with those problems
over and over again. It's like, all right, we need to put a product up for
sale. So now I guess I need to figure out like how to get a buy button on the
site or I hear email lists are important. So I guess I need to learn what an
email list is and how to build a form and all that type of stuff. And again,
the problems differ depending on what your business is, but it's particularly
frustrating early on because you're like, man, I know if I just had a little
bit of money to pay a programmer to do this, they get it done in 45 minutes.
But for me, it takes 14 hours. So there are all kinds of things like that where
your hand is kind of forced early on. And that was a lot of what those first two
years were for me. They were just the period of building those basic skills
that now, yeah, if I need to build a form on the website, it's gonna take me five
minutes. But there was a time when that wasn't true and I didn't even know what
a form was. And so it just takes a while to learn all that stuff up front. The
second piece of advice that I got early on that was really helpful was to try
things until something comes easily. And I've since learned that this is
basically what's called the explore-exploit trade-off. And the idea is
that in the beginning of any process, there should be a broad period of
exploration. And you could compare this on multiple timescales. So say like with
your career, early in your career, you should probably try a bunch of different
things to see what you like, get exposed to different things. And this is one of
the ideas behind internships, but I don't think it should stop when you're in
school. I think after you leave school, I think it should continue through, you
know, maybe the first decade of your career. And you continue to experiment
with things. And then whatever turns out is best aligned with your interest and
your skill set and your opportunities, maybe you start to exploit that one
after you've had this period of exploration. But the thing could be said
for each project that you work on. So early on in the project, you should
probably look for multiple ways to solve the problem. And then as you get closer
to the deadline, you start to run out of time, you should probably shift your
focus and start to exploit the best option that you found so far and actually
get some results. And so I utilized that idea for the first couple years, you know,
I tried probably four or five different websites. I ended up having one that was
about like small business marketing. And I grew that email list about 20,000 or
so. And that was kind of the first time that I tried to exploit a little bit or
like double down on a particular area and put some of those ideas into
practice. Because for whatever reason, that seemed to go well. But then I knew
pretty early on in that that I wasn't super interested in that site. But it
was even though it was working a little better than anything else I had found at
that time. And then in November, November 12, 2012, I wrote my first article on
JamesClear.com. And the growth on that site for whatever reason, I mean, maybe
it was because I was writing about something I really enjoyed. Maybe it was
because I had a few years of experience and I like knew what to focus on now. But
maybe it was just the right time to write about it. But that site took off
much faster than anything else that I've worked on. So I think, you know, I started
at zero. And then a year later, I had 34,000 subscribers. And then the next year,
100,000, then 225, the end of year two or beginning year three, then 400,000 and
on and on. So it's been, it's been a process of exploration and then refinement.
And it's kind of the phrase, broad funnel type filter, start with a really broad
funnel, cast a wide net, explore a lot of options, read a ton of books, talk to a
bunch of people, and then be very selective and filter really tightly about
where you focus your time and attention. So there's a lot there. And I spend a lot
of time talking to not just entrepreneurs, but people who are passionate about
starting a company but haven't actually started yet. And one of the most common
things that I run into is, where do people draw the line between learning and
acting? At what point do you know enough to get started? At what point should you
stop reading, stop listening to podcast episodes, stop buying books, and actually
decide what kind of business you're gonna work on? It sounds like for you,
those two processes, learning and acting, were intertwined. So how do you think
about navigating that line? And how did you shift from one to the other? Yeah,
that's a good question. And I mean, first of all, inherently, the balance between
these two is challenging. I mean, this is one of the things that makes building a
business or learning and implementing anything difficult. You know, if
everybody knew what the ideal solution was, it wouldn't be that hard. But the
way that I think about it now, and this is, again, a little contextual for me
since I'm an author and a writer and writing is kind of the backbone of my
business, but I would compare it to a car. So knowledge, learning about something
for your business is kind of like filling the car up with gas. And you need gas to
get around. But the point of going to the gas station is not to sit at the gas
station, just pump gas into the car all day. You know, at some point, the tank is
full, and there's nothing else to do. You're just pouring gas onto the concrete.
So you need to get out and drive and implement a little bit. But if all you do
is drive, then you start to run yourself dry at some point. And so I don't think
there's ever a point where you just stop learning or stop reading or
stop talking to people or interviewing people, stop exploring new ideas. That
needs to be part of the process in the long run, just like going to the gas
station occasionally needs to be part of the process. I actually experienced this
in my own business. So I, you know, I had a period early on where I read a ton, and
I just kept notes to myself before the site launched. I had like a Word doc
that was maybe 60 or 65 pages long. And it was just sort of James's thoughts on
habits. It wasn't anything specific. And I had that document for a while. And then
eventually I was like, all right, I should just publish something from this,
right? Like, I should just take a chunk of it and make one article out of it. And
so working off of that document, that period of reading and learning, I was
able to come up with a variety of articles over the first year or two. And
then at that point, by year in, I had an audience now I had people expecting
work from me. And I thought, okay, now people are paying attention, like I
really need to focus more and really do great work. So I should just spend all
my time writing. And I tried to do that. And actually, the quality of my writing
got worse. And I think it was because I was doing the equivalent of driving a
car without filling it up with gas. It was like I was trying to put out all
this knowledge, but I wasn't taking anything in. And so I actually need a
balance of the two in order to perform it like an optimal level. And I think
that in many areas of business, that's probably true, like the world shifts.
And so you need to evolve with it. This is true, not just for writing and
consuming new ideas that you stay fresh and come up with interesting insights
yourself. But it's also true for marketing and growing through the
business. I mean, the areas where I get traffic today are very different than
some of the areas that I got traffic from even just two years ago. So as the
internet changes, you have to be willing to adapt with it. And part of that
process is learning and consuming and making sure that you're staying up to
date with what is changing. So then you can adjust your execution for next time.
I want to walk through the story behind how you were able to grow your
subscriber base and become better as an author and make James clear calm into
what it is today. But I also want to do so through the lens of habit formation.
So let's switch gears for a second and talk about that. Your book is called
atomic habits. What is an atomic habit exactly? And how is it different from a
normal habit?
Hmm, good question. Okay, so it doesn't necessarily have to be different from a
normal habit, but I chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons. So the
first is, the word atomic can mean tiny or small, you know, like an atom. And
that is one of the core pieces of my philosophy that habits should be small
and easy to do. The second meaning of atomic is that it is the fundamental
unit of a larger system. So atoms built into molecules, molecules built into
compounds and so on. And in the same way, if we you can sort of think of
habits as like the atoms of our lives. And if you you build them on top of each
other, or if you kind of layer these little 1% improvements or these small
easy habits, on top of one another, you end up with a powerful system as a
result. And I think that that actually is how you drive change, whether it's in
a business or in your personal life, it's not like there's one magical habit
that does it. It's the combination of a variety of habits organized in an
overall system. And then the third meaning is that atomic can also mean
the source of immense energy or power. And I think that that helps kind of
describe the narrative arc of the book, which is that if you make these small
habits, and you layer them on top of each other and build a powerful system,
you can end up with some really remarkable results in the long run. So
that's, that's kind of the meaning behind the phrase atomic habit.
One of the things that strikes me whenever I enter a conversation about
habits is that most of the habits that we form in life are unconscious, we just
sort of end up with the habits that we have, and we find ourselves on these
varying paths going through life. How do we make and form habits consciously?
And how did you do that in the early days of learning the skills that you
learned in order to become James clear, but James clear of today?
Yeah, that's a really good question. So in a sense, you can think about your
habits as like the solutions to the problems that you face repeatedly in
life. So let's say that you come home from work, and you're stressed and
exhausted. Well, that's a problem that you need to come up with a solution
for. And so for one person, they might find that the solution is that they
play video games for an hour. And for another person, the solution is they
smoke a cigarette. And for a third person, the solution is that they go
for a run for 20 minutes. And any one of those habits could solve the problem
that you're facing. But the point that you just brought up is that, as we go
through life, we're just kind of looking for a solution to the challenges that
we face repeatedly. The original habit that you build is not necessarily the
optimal habit for solving that problem or that situation. And so then the
question becomes, well, can you design that process rather than fall into it
without thinking, can you be the architect of your habits or the victim
of them? And that was one of the reasons why I thought writing the book would
be important. And the punchline, of course, is that I think you can. And
there is a framework that I lay out in the book for kind of designing any new
habit. But to answer your question about how I applied this in my own business
and work, there are a couple different areas. So some of them are business
related, some of them are not a few of them that are outside the scope of the
business, but impacted in meaningful ways are things like exercise. So, you
know, weightlifting is really important to me. I go to the gym four or five
days a week. And I have said many times that I don't think I would have a
business if it weren't for the habit of working out. I don't think I'd be able
to handle the psychological roller coaster ride that, you know, being an
entrepreneur puts you on. Sleep is another huge one that, you know, my
cardinal rule is that I don't cheat myself on sleep. The downside of that is
sometimes I have trouble powering down. So that's a habit that I struggle with
is that I go to bed too late sometimes. But so if I'm working till midnight or
one, then I'm not going to wake up to late or nine because I'm not going to
cheat myself on sleep. But anyway, we can talk more about that if you'd like.
But the exercise and sleep habits are kind of these overarching ones that
really have a big influence on the work that I do. I think for many people, if
you want to become more productive, you would see more value from getting eight
hours of sleep every night than from like reading an article on how to double
your productivity. And then there are a set of habits that are within the
business. So the most obvious one is writing. So for the first three years
that I worked on jamesclear.com, I wrote a new article every Monday and
Thursday. And it was really that writing habit that changed the trajectory of
the business. And this is indicative of maybe a larger lesson about habits and
rituals and routines and practice, which is that whenever we're starting a new
project or trying to accomplish a new goal, it's easy to get focused on stuff
that makes like the last 5% of difference. So people want to get in
shape. They are like, all right, what running shoes do I need to buy? Or what
knee sleeves do I should I get or which protein powder is the best, but like all
that stuff makes like last 2% of difference. The thing that makes them
98% of the difference is are you getting your workouts in? Are you not missing
workouts? Are you putting in your reps? And so the real answer to the like, how
do I get in shape is like, well, don't miss a workout for two years and then
get back to me. And I think we could say something fairly similar for a lot of
areas of business. You know, like, how do I build a big audience? Or how do I get
100,000 email subscribers or whatever? It's like, well, you know, I wrote a new
article every Monday and Thursday, and I spent 10 to 15 hours on each one. And I
did that for three years. And there are a bunch of strategies that are also
involved or tactics about driving traffic and conversion and design and
you know, a bunch of stuff that I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute. But the
thing that makes the biggest difference is that kind of core fundamental habit.
So that's just kind of like a brief overview. I relied on both early on and
still today. Yeah, I really want to get into this habit you formed around
writing every Tuesday and Thursday. One thing you mentioned that I thought was
very interesting is that we go through our lives developing solutions to
problems. So what you mentioned specifically was you might come home
from work exhausted. And the solution to that problem is you play video games for
an hour. I think what's interesting to me is that often we don't even think about
it in these terms. We just feel a craving to come home and play video games, to
come home and eat a slice of cake, to come home and watch TV or something. And
we might not even be aware that it's solving any particular problem. We just
feel like that's what we need to do because we know that it works. When you
form your habit of writing, did that feel like a craving to you? Did you crave
sitting down and writing or was it something you had to force yourself to
do even after you develop a habit? Yeah, so this is a good question and it leads
into kind of a deeper understanding of what a habit is and how it works. So in
the book I lay out this four-step process for for how habits work and you
can sort of think of it as a habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough
times to become more or less automatic. And so if you want to describe habits
appropriately, you probably need a framework that describes more or less
all of human behavior appropriately. So I think that pretty much any action you
take goes through what I would call these four stages. And so the first stage
is there's some kind of cue which you can just think of as like raw data or a
bit of information that gets your attention. You know, you walk into the
kitchen and you see a plate of cookies. So that's like a cue, a visual cue in
that case. It doesn't have to be visual but it often is. Humans are very visual
creatures. The second stage is your interpretation of that cue. And this is
like a key step that's often missed or glossed over when people talk about
habits. But how you interpret the cues in your life is heavily dependent on your
beliefs, the people that are around you, and a variety of other factors, your
current state. But your interpretation determines the response that follows. So
you know, you could imagine two people walk into a room and see like a pack of
cigarettes on a table. For one person, if they're a smoker, they interpret it as,
oh, you know, I have this craving, I should smoke. The other person, if they've
never smoked, is like, oh, it's just a pack of cigarettes. It doesn't mean anything. So same
cue, very different interpretation, and as a result, very different response. So
there's the craving, there's the interpretation, which I call the cue, the
data, that's the first step. Then there's the craving, which is the interpretation
of the cue. Then the response, the actual behavior you take, and finally there's a
reward, some kind of benefit from it. So to go back to that example, I just use
about the cookie. So you walk into the kitchen, you see a plate of cookies,
that's a cue. If you are, say, hungry, you might interpret that as, oh, I should eat
one of those, it'll be tasty, it'll be sugary, it'll be good. Response, you eat the cookie,
and then the reward is two things. One, you satisfy the craving that you had
right beforehand, your expectation, and you also reinforce the behavior for next
time. The reward is sort of like a positive emotional signal in your brain.
It's like, hey, this felt good, you should do this again next time. And so if you
have that positive emotional signal, you have a reason to repeat the process
again. And so those four stages are kind of, they form like a loop, and as it gets
reinforced, as the loop gets reinforced, the behavior becomes tighter and more
fluent and more automatic, and so on. However, you can just as easily imagine a
situation where you walk in, and you see a plate of cookies, and say, like, you just
finished a big meal in the other room. And your current state is different, so
now your prediction is different. You see it, and you're like, oh, I'm stuffed, I don't want to eat
anything. And so different prediction, or different craving, and so you get a
different response, and then the behavior doesn't occur, or in that case,
the reward is that you don't eat the cookie, or that you avoid the pain, so to
speak, of stuffing yourself even fuller. But my point here is that when it comes
to procrastination, or bad habits, or things that we'd like to avoid, it's
often true that as soon as you see the cue, the craving arises naturally. But
your question was, well, what about this writing habit? What about these good
habits? You know, like, did you have this craving to sit down and write? And the
answer is that early on, the answer is often no, you don't. And so it becomes
important to focus on, you can think of sort of like each of these four stages.
In the book, I have what I call the four laws of behavior change, and so there's
one for each stage. And each law is kind of like a lever, and when the levers are
in the right positions, building good habits is easy. And when the levers are
in the wrong positions, building good habits is hard. And so if the craving
doesn't arise naturally, well, now you need to focus on like the other ones. You
need the cue to be really obvious, you need the behavior to be really easy, you
need the reward to be kind of immediate and enjoyable. And if you do those, well,
then maybe you can do it even if your craving or motivation is fairly low.
So let's talk about you and your writing habit. I assume the cue for you, since you
wrote every Tuesday and Thursday, was, you know, maybe a calendar event, an alarm, or
just knowing that, hey, today is Tuesday, it's time to write. How did you adjust
sort of your craving response and the reward so that you actually built this
habit? Yeah, so there are a couple of different things here. The first one is
making it obvious, making the cue obvious. So for me, that means timing is, it can
be a crucial thing here. So I would write early in the morning or late at night,
rather than during like the middle of the afternoon or something. I just found
that that time wasn't good because I was often getting interrupted or being asked
to do other tasks to work on the business or calls or emails or whatever. So I wake
up, I take a shower. Shower is kind of like my coffee. That's like how I wake up,
get dressed, and then I get a glass of water and I immediately open up Evernote.
And that's where, that's like, as soon as I start writing. So the cue there is
sitting down with my glass of water and opening up Evernote. As soon as I do that,
then I have a set of like, it's essentially like a log of a bunch of
ideas that I've just kind of brain dumped into this Evernote notebook. And there
may be like 600 or so that are there right now. And I go through that list and
start to see like, well, you know, are there four or five that are all about the
same topic? And then I kind of lump them together. And that forms like the
backbone of an article. And so from that kind of like longer draft or more
expanded note, I can then use that to start to riff on the article and do some
more research and fill in the gaps and so on. And then once it gets long enough,
I move it into WordPress, actually, you know, start revising the article. I start
at the top and read a sentence. And if that's good, I'll read the second. And if
that's good, I'll read the third. And at some point, I get to a sentence that it
doesn't sound good yet. So I'll edit that. And then I'll go back to the beginning
and start all over again. And that's the key part of the process for me. Like, I
don't really consider myself a very good writer. I think I'm a better editor. And
so by the time I publish something, it's been revised probably, I don't know, 50
times, probably read through it 50 to 100 times from top to bottom. So that helps
a lot. Then the reward is and I didn't realize how crucial this was until I
wrote the book. With articles, the cycle time is very fast. I come up with an
idea, I can work on it like that day or that week or whenever I started to build
it out. And it's pretty much written within a few days and then it gets
posted. And then I'm getting feedback almost immediately, right? Like, as soon
as we email it out, I'm getting emails from inbox within an hour. What people
liked or didn't like, I'm hearing from people on Twitter and so on. And that
feedback, that's kind of the main reward for me. And knowing that other people are
finding it useful or helpful or insightful, that gives me the momentum or
the energy or the reason to show up again the next day and do it all over
again. With the book, that was a real challenge because I wasn't sharing it
with anybody. I was just writing for a few months. And then I was kind of in
like a hole. I was in this cave and I would write something and nobody was
reading it. So it wasn't until I had an editor help me a few months later that I
finally realized, man, I just need feedback from somebody. It doesn't have
to be thousands of people. I just need someone to tell me like, this is good or
this is bad. So that was kind of a lesson there. And I think it's also a lesson
about habits in general, which is that the more immediate you get a signal of
positive feedback, the more likely the behavior will be repeated in the future.
And if you don't have that immediate signal of positive feedback, you don't
have much reason to return again, that can get depressing or demotivating.
Yeah, I think a lot of founders get stuck on this reward step, especially if
it's your very first business, you haven't really done much in the past, you
can spend a lot of time building something or working on something and
have absolutely no audience, no users and have no real external motivation for
why you should continue the slog into the future. How did you get over that hump
in the very beginning of JamesClear.com? Before you had 400,000 subscribers,
before you had millions of people coming to your website, was there a period
where you would write an article and there were crickets and no response
whatsoever? Early on, I would get maybe one email from a reader a week. And that
one email, I can still think of one in particular, that that was enough to get
me to show up again the next week. And so you really start to appreciate any bit
of encouragement that you get from people, any signal that things are moving in
the right direction. I mean, one of the most effective forms of motivation is
progress. So you need some signal of progress to show up again. And there are
some things that you can do to make this easier. Like habit tracking is one that
can be an effective use for any habit, but certainly applies to business as
well. Like the most basic form of habit tracking is to just get a calendar and
then each day that you perform a habit, you put an X on that day. And I have a
friend who's a freelance videographer. And so any day that he does 30 minutes
of video editing, he puts an X on the calendar. Even if you know, you can
imagine you're working on a big project and it's taking a while and you don't
feel like you're making progress. But if you have that calendar, you can look at
it and be like, hey, you know, like I have done this six days in a row now. And so
seeing that streak can be kind of motivating. And in that sense, measurement
can be useful to kind of help you continue to move forward. But it's also
informative for when measurement is not useful, which is you need to pick the
right measure because you need to be able to, the point of the measure in this
case is to see progress. So you have a reason to show up each day. So if you
pick the wrong measurement, like, you know, this is very common if people are
trying to lose weight, the scale moves a little bit in the beginning. And then
when the scale stops moving, it's actually the opposite effect. You get
demotivated because the measure isn't moving. And so then it can be useful to
shift to a different form of measurement, qualitative or quantitative, that shows
that you're making progress, which is why people talk about things like non-scale
victories, like, oh, my, you know, the scale is the same, but my skin looks
better, or my mood is better, or I feel more energetic, or whatever. But the key
point here is that it's really important to feel some type of progress early on,
and whether that's a habit tracker, or a little bit of feedback from a reader, or
user, or just like encouragement from your social network, and from people who
are effectively on your team, other entrepreneurs, that can be enough to get
you to show up again the next day. So let's draw things back for a little bit,
and I want to ask you, how important overall is it to have good habits as a
founder? I've talked to hundreds of founders over the years. Some of them
have terrible habits. Some of them don't sleep at all. Some of them never
exercise. Some of them will toil away in obscurity for months or years without
any sort of positive reward or feedback whatsoever. Why is it that some people
can succeed with seemingly bad habits? Or is it that they actually have good
habits that we just have trouble identifying? Well, there are a couple ways
to answer this question. I mean, first of all, all humans are complex and have good
and bad habits. So you know, nobody's out there like a robot just knocking it down
every single time. But the second thing is that habits are only part of the puzzle.
So you know, let's say that the two pillars of success or achievement that I
like to think of are decision-making and habits. And so let's say that you decide
to be an entrepreneur. And you could decide to like open a local pizza parlor
or you could decide to start a software company. Now, either way, you're going to
be working really hard because being an entrepreneur is tough. It's going to take
a lot of effort. But your initial decision effectively kind of like to
start determines the amount of leverage that's available to you. So you could
imagine, for example, that like you have this dotted line kind of mapping out
from your initial choice. Maybe the the pizza parlor would be like a little bit
of a lower slope or a little bit less of the growth curve. And the software
company might be more of this like hockey stick style growth, more scale, and so
on. But how much of the potential of that initial decision, how much of that
leverage you capture is determined by your habits. So your your initial
decision determines the trajectory available to you. Your habits determine
how far you walk along that path. And so it's possible that you know, you could
start the local pizza parlor. And if you had really killer habits, you could end
up more successful than, you know, than the person who started a software
company, but just didn't have good habits and couldn't execute. Now, of course, the
what we all want is to both make great decisions and have great habits. And so,
you know, if you're looking at founders who seem to be so flawed in some sense, I
mean, again, first of all, we're all flawed. But secondly, it's possible that
luck is or randomness is driving a lot of that. Like maybe they just made a
really great initial decision, or they caught a really good break. And that's
helping kind of like provide this tailwind. It's also possible that they
have terrible habits in one area, but they have really killer habits and like
a few key areas related to building the business. Maybe their sleep habits are
awful, but they're like sales and biz dev habits are amazing. And so there's a
variety of lenses that you can kind of look at that problem through. But I
generally like to break it into decision making and habits. Yeah, that's a very
clean way to separate it. I want to talk a little bit about the decision making
that you had at the beginning of your your website, JamesClear.com. What was
your vision for your personal blog at that time? And why did you start it? Well,
early on, I thought it was gonna be more of a health related site. So I wrote more
about strength training, and I wrote about health. And I was also concerned
going to med school at that time. So I was like writing about the healthcare
system and things like that. And it was all behavioral-based or performance-based,
but it had more of like a health tilt. And then gradually, I wrote a few
articles just about habits in general, and those did better. And so I was like,
well, maybe I'll focus there a little bit more. And so I wrote a few more of these
kind of like, I guess we'd call them more like big idea pieces. And those did well.
And so I was like, all right, maybe I should think about this a little more. And
my MO or my mantra has always been to try to be like a bridge between the
academic research and the scientific, scientifically-based ideas, and practical
application in daily life. So I want the ideas to be evidence-based but
highly actionable and practical. And so I started writing more of that style, and
that caught on better than other stuff. And so I started to shift my focus there.
So I didn't add a language for it at the time, but it was kind of that explore,
exploit trade-off that I talked about earlier. Like I was trying things out, and
then as I started to hone in on what worked, I just gradually shifted a little
bit more of my energy toward that direction.
And I think what's cool about having a blog and writing, I've talked about this
on the podcast before, but starting a SaaS business, trying to code an app from
the ground up is tough because in a way, you only get one shot. I mean, you can
iterate on what you've built, but it takes a lot longer. Whereas if you're
writing, you can crank out an article, and like you said, 10 to 15 hours, and see
what kind of response it gets. And then, you know, two days later, it's time to
crank out another one, and you can sort of iterate based on what you've done
before very quickly. And so I think explore, exploit ends up being a much
more effective algorithm if you're writing than it does if you are building
an app or doing anything else where the cycle times can take months rather than
just days.
Yes, that's probably true. I mean, the explore, exploit, another approach, it's
basically focused on experimentation and feedback cycles. And if you can, I mean,
this is kind of what machine learning is based around, is that if you can run 10
million or 10 trillion feedback cycles, a human could never do that in their life,
but a machine can become very good at chess or whatever, by doing that within
just a few days or weeks or however long it is. And by getting way more feedback
cycles, the machine learns much faster than a human does. And so whenever
possible, you want to apply kind of some type of similar framework to your own
business of life. How can I test this in a smaller, faster, quicker way so that I
can learn faster? Because if I can learn faster than I can direct my resources to
the right area more quickly. So I mean, this is part of the idea behind lean
startup or minimum viable product and so on. But the idea is, I think, a sound that
applies to a lot of areas of life, which is scale it down, test as quickly and as
cheaply as possible, and try to get feedback and learn as fast as you can.
Yeah, I think one of the most common challenges that entrepreneurs run up
against is that we often start off with this massive vision, this huge way we want
to change the world, this product that we want to create that's going to be
magnificent. And obviously, it's going to take years to get there. And like you
said, having an MVP, a minimum viable product can help you take sort of a first
bite off of that problem. And maybe it's not impressive, maybe it's not something
that looks great, but it helps you cycle faster and course correct. And when you
have a job, when you have a family, when you have TV shows you want to catch up
on when you have hobbies that you want to do, it can be hard to find the time to
work on something. How did you in the beginning of James clear.com find the
time to do all this stuff? And how did you convince yourself to break things
into sort of a small, small chunk rather than working on some massive business?
Well, it's a good question. I now I think about life as kind of like a series of
seasons. So what's the season am I in right now? And what behaviors and areas
of focus are best for that season? And so the the short answer to your question is
that, well, the way that I did it was by pretty much eliminating everything else.
Like, I just kind of like made it my life and focused on that. And there were
only a few key areas, other areas that fit in there. So I already mentioned
sleep and weightlifting. And then I had my girlfriend, now my wife at that time,
who was getting some of my time, but I didn't spend much time socializing or
going out. I was busy working and building my business. I didn't spend time
on other hobbies, really, I didn't have a television. So I didn't really watch TV.
I am someone who has like a very wide range of interests. So it's not that I
didn't want to do those things. I think all that stuff is fun and great. It's
just that it wasn't the right season for it at that time. Similarly, and you know,
some of this is just like luck with how my story played out. And I decided to
become an entrepreneur earlier in life rather than later, but I didn't have kids
yet. And so that made a big difference. Whereas, you know, if in a few years I
have kids, that's going to be a very different season. And so it'll probably
be less career focused and more family focused. I still am applying some of
these ideas now, you know, like I would love to learn an instrument, or I can't
read music, I love to be able to do something musical. But it's not the right
season for that. Because every hour that I put toward learning an instrument or
learning how to sing or whatever, is an hour that I couldn't put toward building
the business or being in the gym, or doing some of the other stuff that's
really important for me in this season. So, I mean, this is just, it's just about
trade offs and time, and everybody faces those trade offs. But I think you need to
be strict about that. And the focus of life as like a series of seasons has
helped me get over this hurdle of feeling like, Oh, I want to do it all now, rather
than being like, Well, it's just not the right season for that I can get to it
later.
Yeah, I think that's something that's not talked about often enough, because it's
pretty easy to look at someone else who's super successful, and he's doing a lot and
assume that they're doing everything at once, assume that they're building their
business, and they're watching every episode of Game of Thrones, you know, and
they're raising a family. And in reality, you know, they're only doing one of those
things. And it reminds me of you mentioning sort of the technique of habit
tracking, where you set a goal, and every single day you do it, you put an X on the
calendar, I've done that myself. And what happened was, eventually, I said, Well,
why don't I track like 15 different habits this way, instead of just one, and
at that point, it all fell apart, and I lost some motivation to do it, because it
was just too much.
Yeah, so you don't need to track every habit as you like found out yourself. But
I think it's also important to, you can bra I broadly lump habits into two
categories. So the first category are like things that I don't know, brushing
your teeth or tying your shoes or unplugging the toaster after each use,
like stuff that you just do once you it's set, you don't really need to think
about it anymore. Like I don't need a process of continuous improvement for
time issues. Then there's a second category of habits, which are things that
actually are really important to you. And you do want to continuously improve. So
for me, it's probably things like weightlifting, photography and writing. And
those areas, the key distinction between the two is that those are the areas that
you should track and have a process for like reflection review, so that you can
refine them. But you don't need to like measure and reflect on every habit that
you're trying to build.
One of the things I think that's interesting about interviewing you is
that most people that I interview are, you know, first name, last name of
whatever company. So Austin Allred of Lambda School. But you're just James
Clear, perhaps of James Clear.com. The business that you built for yourself is
really kind of a personal brand. What are some of the advantages and
disadvantages of going that route versus building a business that's entirely
separate from yourself?
Well, the the one of the advantages is a very, it's good for someone like me who
has a brain that likes to jump into a bunch of different areas. So right now, I
just finished this comprehensive book on habits. But if in a year I want to write
a book about decision making or consciousness or some other topic that's
interesting to me, then I can do that fairly easily. You know, like it's not
it's not betterhabits.com, in which case I would be kind of locked into, you know,
like one type of work or one one type of topic. So a little bit more flexibility
that way. I ended up doing it not for that reason, though. I did it because I
had this spreadsheet of like 300 or 400 names that I had brainstormed for the
business, like what the site should be called. And you know, of course, some of
the issue was the dot coms weren't available. And then some of the other
names just weren't that great. I showed a top 10 list to some of my friends. And
the feedback was pretty much unanimous. People were like, Yeah, really, these are
good. I was like, Yeah, I agree. So I was like, Well, if Seth Godin's name is good
enough for him, or Oprah's name is good enough for her, like, I'll just go with
money and figure it out later. And so in a lot of ways, I'm still just figuring it
out later. But the disadvantages. In the beginning, there is a little bit of a
disadvantage with not having a brand because a well chosen brand can help kind
of drum up the initial support easier. A well designed brand gets people to
identify with it because of what the brand stands for. And so the right name
can help with that and can kind of like pull people in early on. However, in the
long run, I don't really know that it makes that much of a difference. Because
in the long run, any business's brand is actually the work that they do, and not
the name or the slogan or other stuff. And so, in a sense, as long as I keep
putting out articles that are of high quality, and they're scientifically
minded, and that are insightful and actionable, that becomes my brand,
because that's how I show up and do the work every day. So it takes a little
while to get over that hump early on, because you don't have the body of work
to be evidence of that. But I think in the long run, that's not that big of a
downside. Yeah, but there are definitely pros and cons.
So let's talk about this work that you do because being sort of a personal
brand, it's not as simple as you make a product and you sell it for recurring
revenue, you're doing all sorts of different things. You're super curious.
You've got multidisciplinary interests. How do you make money as a personal
brand?
Yeah, so that's a good question. And actually, it made me immediately think
of one of the other disadvantages. And this is, this depends on what your
personality is and what you want out of the company. But I actually, it sounds
weird for someone whose name is the name of the brand, but I don't, like I
have no interest in being famous. I don't want to be known. I have, there's
like one picture of me on the website. It's kind of hard to find. They're like,
no, it's just a very clean site. Just white background with black text. Like all
of my pictures on social media are me from like very far away. You can't see
my face. Like I'm not interested in being, I'm not doing it to be famous. I
really want the challenges. I want the ideas to be famous. I want the ideas to
be well known and well used, but I don't really want to be at the center of it
myself. So that's definitely a disadvantage of a personal brand. And
it's hard because like, what are your options? You could, you could write
it. You could write anonymously, I guess, which is an interesting option, but like
a little bit of a challenge with building the brand around that. Cause
people, I think there's a little bit of a resistance to anonymous brands. People
kind of want something to latch onto. They want to be able to put you in a box
and understand it. You could, you could write for another company. You know, you
could write for the Atlantic or the New York times or something, but there's,
you know, then you're not building your own thing and you don't have control.
So anyway, that's kind of, kind of one of the challenges, but the answer to your
question, what are the revenue streams? How does a personal brand make money?
There are a lot of options that other people are pursuing, but I'll tell you
the three or four that we focus on. And so first one, we've already talked about
book deal. Uh, so I'm publishing this book with penguin random house, which
means I get in advance. And then, you know, if the book sells well, I'll be
making money from each copy and so on. I have a course called the habits academy,
which is sort of like the premier training platform for individuals and
really organizations that are looking to build better habits in their employees.
So if you have a team that's looking to foster that the habits academy is where
I would appoint them. The book is a great starting point as well, but the
course is more focused toward that kind of work than I do speaking events.
So I don't want to be on the road a lot. Uh, I do about one speaking events per
month. I think, you know, after the book comes out, if I could raise my rate,
maybe like cut that down and do like one every other month, something like that.
That's probably kind of what I have in mind. So I'm pretty strict about that
already. I have experimented with advertising and sponsorships. I hate
ads from a user standpoint. I don't like what they do the user experience.
I really like having a clean site. So I keep that fairly minimal, even if we
are testing it, but that's one thing we've played with. And then the fifth
option, the final area of revenue is affiliates. So I have specifically said
blanket statement. I'm not doing any affiliate deals for online courses or
products or anything like that. The only thing that we'll do it for is Amazon or
like, um, like a physical product, like a camera or something like that. And so if
I mentioned a book in an article and somebody buys the book on Amazon, that's
like 80 cents for me, but if you get 2 million visitors a month or whatever,
then that can add up. So those are, those are kind of the four or five
main areas of revenue.
Yeah. It strikes me as a lot of different things that you're doing. It
reminds me a little bit of the earlier days, 90 hackers back when I used to
try to generate revenue from the site and the community. And I also had like
four or five different ways of generating revenue. How do you keep it
together? How do you focus and decide which area to pour more of your
attention to at any given time?
Well, it's important to remember that a lot of those don't require ongoing
work. So, you know, fake like the affiliate links. Well, once I write the
article, it's not, I'm putting the link in there anyway. It's not really that
much more work to just grab the affiliate version from Amazon. Um, so,
and then I just click post and then I never think about it again with
speaking. I do it for that day, but there's no follow up. I don't do ongoing
consulting or anything like that. And then I just have a speaking page on the
site. So I'm not spending any time doing sales or like outreach. People just,
they come through the site to me. So there is a much work for that. The only
ones that really require ongoing work are the book and the course. And, uh,
that's fine because the main work that I do is writing, uh, or teaching in the
sense. And so, you know, I'm always writing new articles and this just
happens to be the book that I've been working on. And then, you know, at some
point I'll probably shift and focus on a new topic. So it may sound like a lot,
but it's actually really not that much. And when it comes to working on it day
to day, you talk in your book about how having an accountability partner can
really improve your ability to form good habits. And I think in the land of
entrepreneurship, that person is most likely to be a co-founder who actually
helps you start and run your business. How do you think about the trade-off
between being a solo founder and potentially bringing someone in to work
with you as a co-founder?
I think it'd be fun. It's like hiring. So, you know, one thing I've learned is
I've been hiring for my own business is that making an all-star hire will make
your life five times easier. It's so worth it, but making a bad hire will
actually make things worse. And I would say that co-founder is probably like
that. Like if you want to create the hierarchy of building a business, it's
probably like have a great co-founder is at the top, then be a single founder is
underneath that and then have a bad co-founder is like at the bottom of the
run. So it can either be way better or way worse. And early on, I bet there are
all kinds of benefits if you have a good co-founder, you know, like you have
somebody else who's motivated. So it's kind of like having a workout partner,
you know, like you might both not feel like working out every day, but one of
you will probably feel like putting a workout in each day. And so that's
enough to get the other person on board. So it's good for motivation. It's just
great to have somebody else for sanity to like go through it and talk about
that. I mean, most entrepreneurs have somebody they got to talk to, you know,
like a lot of masterminds between entrepreneurs end up after the first
like, I don't know, five or six months where you everybody gets a feel for
their business. And then you talk through things. And like, at some point,
it gets, it just kind of turns into like a therapy session where ever all the
entrepreneurs just talking to each other about what it's like to be an
entrepreneur and what they're struggling with and whatever. And that's just
because people need that. So if you can have a co-founder, then you kind of get
that like implicitly or automatically. And then you also get this division of
labor, which is great. I mean, for me, early on, I had those challenges, like I,
you know, mentioned earlier, it was like, well, I guess I need to spend 30 hours
working on this web design project, even though, you know, if you had a co-founder
that was good at design or like a program or something like that, well, then they
can do that. And that's like right within their wheelhouse of expertise. And you
could just focus on sales and marketing or something else. So the division of
labor aspect helps a lot, especially when resources are thin, which they almost
always are in the beginning. So I think there are a lot of advantages, but the
downside is that like any team, one bad personality can be toxic for the entire
culture. And so if you don't get the right person or if people have competing
priorities, then it actually just ends up creating additional friction and building
the business. Then you end up spending all your time on stuff that isn't even
really the work you're like battling over founder shares or discussing like the
direction for the company, or you're not even servicing customers anymore. You're
just creating like all this internal conflict. Unfortunately, I've seen it play
out that way just as often for my friends as it has played out favorably.
So when it works, it can really work well, but there's definitely a risk. How
do you as a solo founder find people to hold you accountable? I guess it comes
from a couple different areas. Like I mean, first of all, I like I'm just I'm
not perfect. There's a lot of places I should be more accountable to that I'm
not one of the biggest issues in my particular business is that I'm the
bottleneck for a lot of stuff. So, you know, like I know Lindsay, she's like
kind of my, my marketing master, and she like runs all of our marketing stuff in
the book launch and like a lot of other things. And she's great. But man, like it
sucks for her if she's got a bunch of projects she needs to work on. She's still
waiting on me to get done with like the latest article or the latest, you know,
like piece of content or something. So in a sense, I'm accountable to my employees
and my team. So that helps a little bit. The expectation is the rest of the team.
The readers for me, again, this is like a little bit of a unique dynamic because
of my business, but I send out an article to 400,000 people. So I, the
quality of my ideas is constantly being held accountable by the audience. If I
get something wrong, well, I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible to
write an article and please 400,000 people that you just can't do it. But it
actually, it ends up benefiting me in the long run because if I get something
wrong, I hear about it immediately. So I can, I can update the article pretty
quickly, but also I hear about a lot of things that are like on the periphery of
what I write about that end up making my future work better. So like, I just wrote
one of my recent articles. The whole reason that article came was because I
wrote a previous article that a reader responded to and said, you know, this is
interesting, but I feel like you missed the boat on this. I feel like you missed
this point. Then I shared a little bit of research and asked like a really good
question. I kind of got my wheels turning. And so then I was like, well, this should
be a whole separate thing. And so then I ended up writing that article and that
happens a lot. It's like, you forgot this piece of research or, you know, what about
this example or have you thought about it from a different angle? And that's
super helpful. And ultimately, you know, I've mentioned this already, but I care
less about me being well-known or anything like that. I care more about am
I sharing useful ideas. And so ultimately, that's probably the best form of
accountability for me is that the the audience kind of holds me to that
standard. Speaking of your audience and your users, how do habits and habit
formations play into the way that you design your website, the way that you
write your articles? How much thought do you put into your audience developing a
habit of reading the stuff that you put out?
The short answer is a lot. I give a lot of thought to the reader experience. And
there are a couple different things that that I do that are sort of direct
applications of the concepts that I cover in the book. So, you know, I
mentioned those four stages earlier, and the four laws of behavior change. And one
of the laws is to make it obvious. So you want to make the cues that you're asking
people to engage with as obvious as possible. Well, I do that all over the
website. I kind of run every page that's on the website, I run it through two
filters. So the first filter in my mind is a returning visitor. If someone's
been here before and they're coming back, what are they going to be looking to do
quickly? And how can I make that as obvious and as easy as possible for them
to do? So, you know, I think there's that famous web design book. It's like, don't
make me think, but that is basically bad idea. You know, like, how can I show them
what they need without them having to think about it or dig around for it? And
then the second filter is a new visitor. So if someone, you know, comes across an
article from me on Facebook or Twitter or something, and they click through, what
is that person for their very first engagement with the site? What are they
looking to do? And how can I get out of their way and make it as easy as possible
for them to do that? That's kind of an application of what I call the third
law of behavior change, which is make it easy, which is all about reducing the
friction associated with your desired task. So there are all kinds of little
ways that I think about that when it comes to how we're laying out an article
or how we're laying out the, really the information architecture of the site, and
even the email newsletter itself. Like when it shows up in someone's inbox, how
can we make that as delightful of an experience as possible? And in many ways,
design is, it's kind of like an invisible service to the reader. You know, the
reader is probably never gonna say that themselves. They're not gonna say, well,
the line height in this paragraph is like really easy to read, or the width of
your content feels like it's just right from my eyes on the screen. But by doing
that stuff and a million other little things, it ends up making the overall
experience really enjoyable. That ends up making the habit of reading my articles
as satisfying as possible or contributing to that in some way. And
that, of course, is what's gonna get someone to come back. So there are a lot
of ways to apply that. I actually put together an appendix for Atomic Habits
that's specifically about how to apply the ideas to business. And I go over
some more examples in that. But yeah, I definitely have used it in my own
experience. Yeah, I think there's a lot of correlation between founders who spend
a ton of time thinking about things from their readers or their audience or their
users' perspectives, and how successful their blogs or their products or their
apps end up being. Because ultimately, the things that we assume people care
about are often wrong. And if we don't put that explicit time to thinking about
what they want, then it's really easy to just totally miss. Well, people will only
repeat an experience if it's enjoyable. And the things that make an experience
enjoyable are not only the obvious things like, does this help me make money or
does this help solve the problem that I'm coming to you for or whatever. But
also, whatever friction is associated with that task, I mean, if it if it helps
you, but God, there's so much friction with using this product, then it kind of
like it's it's like a leak in a bucket, it takes away from the value that you're
ultimately able to hand over to them. And so as many of those leaks as you can
plug and as seamless and frictionless as you can make that experience, what ends
up happening is that people feel like, Oh, my gosh, this was such an amazing
positive value, I got to come back here and read this again, or use this again,
or whatever. It's really only with a very detailed focus on the experience that you
can end up creating something that helpful.
One of the things I think is challenging about being a founder in terms of habits
is that we tend to form a habit of following the path of least resistance.
As you said, we like to do things that are enjoyable, we don't like to do things
that are hard. And it turns out that starting a business is hard. And so we
end up gravitating towards what's easy, we stick to what we know, people who are
great at sales will often neglect marketing, people who are good at Facebook
ads will often neglect, you know, ranking high in the Google search rankings.
People who are skilled designers might overemphasize the importance of design
while neglecting other important things. How can we as founders improve here and
break the bad habit of just doing what comes easily?
The common theme with all of those examples that you just gave was that it felt
immediately satisfying to do that thing because you knew you were good at it.
So, you know, this is what I call the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is
that behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that are
immediately punished get avoided. And so it's really about the speed of how
quickly you feel successful as something that gets you to come back or to to
enjoy that experience. So what you need are little bits of reinforcement that
give you a reason to show up again and work on the thing that feels hard to you.
So if you're if you're avoiding it, it's often because you don't think you'll
feel some kind of progress or satisfaction after working on it.
So there are a couple things you do. I mean, there are external reinforcers that
you can use. But the ultimate form of this is internal reinforcement or
reinforcing your desired identity. So let's say, for example, that you're a
person who's really strong with design. And so you tend to overvalue design and
you tend to not spend enough time on sales and outreach and business development.
Well, really what we're talking about doing here is having a little bit of a
shift or an upgrade or an expansion of your identity from someone who currently
identifies as a good designer to someone who in the future identifies as a good
salesperson or someone who's good at partnerships and business development.
And whatever beliefs that you have about yourself, and this is one of the reasons
habits are so important, you often hold those beliefs because of the evidence
that you have for them. So it's kind of like every vote or every action that you
take is like a vote for the type of person that you think that you are. So
another way of thinking about is your habits are how you embody a particular
identity. So if you, every time you make your bed, you embody the identity of
someone who's clean and organized. Every time you sit down to write a blog post,
you embody the identity of someone who is a writer. Every time you go to the gym,
you embody the identity of a fit person. And eventually, this is kind of like a
two-way street. Once you build up enough evidence and cast enough votes for that
type of identity, you have a reason to show up and do it again. It's like, hey,
I'm a fit person. I like, I want to go to the gym because that's who I am. And
that's really the ultimate form of behavior change. It's kind of like true
behavior changes, identity change, because it's, it's one thing to say like,
I am or I want this, but it's something very different to say, I am this, you
know, like I am this type of person. I'm the type of person who doesn't miss
workouts. Well, once you believe that about yourself, then going to the gym
feels kind of easy. You're really, in a sense, you're not even like pursuing
behavior change. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person that
you already believe that you are. And so the question is, well, how can I get
there? You know, if I view myself as a designer, how can I do that? And, you
know, view myself as the type of person who makes two sales calls every day or
something like that. That's where small habits become really useful because
they are the method through which you embody this identity and the method
through which you cast votes and build up evidence of being this new type of
person. And so if you can do that in very small ways, it doesn't have to be a
lot. You know, like I have a friend who is a writer and his habit is just to
write one sentence per day. And it sounds like nothing, you know, it's like,
would you do just five pushups a day? A lot of people go like, well, no, why
would I do that? It's not going to get me in shape. But the point, sometimes
it's not really about the result. It's more about reinforcing being that type
of person so that even if you have a super busy day or things are crazy and
it's not working out for you, you can still write one sentence or do five
pushups and reinforce the identity of I'm the type of person who writes every
day or I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And the same thing
applies when building a business. You can make just one sales call a day, but
each time you do that, you're reinforcing the identity of I'm someone who works
on business development every day. And eventually it's kind of like adding a
little grain of sand to that side of the scale. And you start to tip the scales
in your favor and actually believe that about yourself and upgrade and expand
your identity to include a new skill that you didn't previously identify with.
So I think that that's maybe the practical and long-term way to achieve
that kind of change. Yeah, that's great to be able to look back in the past
and see that you did something for a few months in a row or a few weeks in a row
and say, okay, I am the type of person who's done this because I did it in the
past and so it can't be that scary to do it right now.
I think that's an important distinction between, you know, sometimes you'll hear
people say things like fake it till you make it, but fake it till you make it
actually, it asks you to believe something about yourself that you don't have
evidence for. And a belief that you don't have evidence for, I mean, there's
a word for it, we call it delusion. So it's really important to have habits
like that, that accumulate evidence of that, that as you just said, I've been
the type of this person in the past because now you have something to root
the new belief in or the new identity. Right. And so I think that's probably
the ultimate reason that habits really matter. I mean, we talk about habits a lot
for like, oh, they can make you more productive or help you sleep better or
make more money or reduce stress. And all those external results are fine.
That's all true. But the real reason that habits matter is that they're the
most effective method for upgrading and expanding your identity, for believing
something new about yourself, for like fostering a new sense of self-image.
Well, I think that is an excellent answer to end the podcast on. James, thank you
so much for coming on the show, talking about your book, your journey as an
entrepreneur and sharing your wisdom around forming positive habits. Can you
let listeners know where they can go to learn more about you as a person and
also the things you're working on and where they can buy your book?
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
So the book is called Atomic Habits and you can find it at atomichabits.com.
And also on that page, there's a secret chapter that's not included in the book.
There are some audio by chapter by chapter audio commentary guides and files
from me where I talk about like why already chapter and thinking behind it.
There are a few bonus chapters like the appendix I mentioned on how to apply the
ideas in the book to business and how to apply the ideas to parenting and then
just a bunch of like worksheets and templates and things for implementing the
ideas that are in the book. But anyway, all of that is at atomichabits.com.
Thanks again, James. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you
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