James Clear, entrepreneur and author, says that the way we go about trying to form new habits and break bad ones — at work or home — is all wrong. Many people, he says, focus on big goals without thinking about the small steps they need to take along the way. Just like saving money, habits accrue compound interest: when you do 1% more or different each day or week, it eventually leads to meaningful improvement. So if you’ve made a resolution for the new year or have an idea for how to propel your career forward at any time, these strategies will help. Clear is the author of the book Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results.
TRANSCRIPT
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
Success requires discipline. It’s something we’ve seen time and time again in the stories of great leaders. They might get up at 4 a.m. every day, read a book a week, or have a tried and true system for client outreach or interviewing.
Many of these people seem to have superhuman ambitions and work ethics. But here’s another way to frame it: they’ve developed great habits. While most of us are slipping into bad habits doing the easiest work first, making gut filled decisions, watching TV instead of studying a new idea, or even getting enough sleep; achievers are sticking to a plan and getting more out of their careers and life.
Today’s guest says there’s simple and easy ways to develop better habits. I’m talking to him at the end of 2019, when a lot of us are thinking about our New Year’s resolutions. Professionally, maybe it’s to learn a new school or finish a specific project, or attend more networking events. Now and anytime, our guest has some good advice on what it takes to get there.
James Clear is an author and entrepreneur and his book is called Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. James, thanks so much for joining me.
JAMES CLEAR: Hi, nice to talk to you.
ALISON BEARD: As I mentioned in the intro we’re about to start a new year, a new decade even. For those of us who make New Year’s resolutions and then quickly fail at sticking to them, how can we do better?
JAMES CLEAR: There are a lot of entry points to discussing habits through that. So, I’ll give you two. The first idea is that a lot of the time we start with goals or ambitions or resolutions that are really big, and simply scaling your habits down, or scaling those behaviors down to something that’s simple and easy to do is certainly a way to be more effective in the New Year to increase the likelihood that you stick with that.
I refer to this as what I call the two-minute rule. So you basically take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So, read 30 books next year, becomes read one page. Or, do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat.
And sometimes people resist that a little bit because they’re like OK, I know the real goal isn’t just to take my yoga mat out each day. I know I actually want to do the workout. This I think is a deep truth about habits and certainly applies to New Year’s resolutions which is, the habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can worry about optimizing or scaling it up from there.
And then the second thing is focusing more on your identity rather than the outcome. A lot of the discussion on New Year’s resolutions is about how many books we want to read, or how much weight we want to lose, I’d like to earn more money next year, or whatever it is. But I think it’s a useful question to ask yourself, who is the type of person that could achieve those outcomes?
Who is the type of person that could lose 20 pounds? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. And then your focus becomes on building habits that reinforce that identity, rather than on achieving a particular outcome. And you can sort of trust that the outcomes come naturally if you show up as that type of person each day.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, it’s funny you mention the identity piece of it. In the book you write that we limit ourselves by saying things like, and then you give a list of examples: I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.
And I almost laughed out loud because I say all of those things about myself. Even though I know that waking up earlier, remembering names, being on time, getting better at math and technology as a business journalist would make me much better in my job. So how do I change that mindset about myself?
JAMES CLEAR: Think this is maybe the real reason that habits matter, is they can shift your internal narrative. They can change your self-image. And the first time you do something, or the tenth time, or maybe even the hundredth time, you may not think that about yourself or have adopted that fully.
But at some point, when you keep showing up you kind of cross this invisible threshold and you start to think, hey yeah. Maybe I am a studious person, or maybe I am a clean and organized person.
Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so, the more that you show up and perform habits, the more you cast votes for being a certain type of person. The more that you build up this body of evidence, that hey, this is who I am.
And I think this is what maybe makes my approach a little bit different than what you often hear about behavior change, which is something like fake it till you make it. And fake it till you make it, It’s asking you to believe something positive about yourself without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence. We call it delusion.
At some point your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you keep saying you are and what your behavior is. And so, behavior and beliefs are a two-way street, but my argument is that you should let the behavior lead the way. Start with one pushup. Start with writing one sentence. Start with meditating for one minute. Whatever it is.
Because, at least in that moment, you cannot deny that you were a writer, or you were the type of person who didn’t miss workouts, or you were a meditator. And in the long run that’s the real objective. The goal’s not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. And once you start assigning those new identities to yourself, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be. And so I think in that way, true behavior change is really identity change.
ALISON BEARD: How can we bring this into a work context? How have you seen, how have you seen bad habits derail people and the development of good habits really propel them?
JAMES CLEAR: Well, so specifically with work, I think we can broadly lump habits into two categories. So, the first category is maybe habits of energy. So for example, building good sleep habits. That’s sort of a meta-habit that if you get that dialed in, almost every other habit you’re in a better position to perform. And if you’re not well rested, then you’re kind of hindering yourself in your performance each day.
Pretty much any health habit kind of falls in that bucket. So exercise, or stress reduction, or nutrition habits, they all kind of are in that habits of energy bucket. But the second one and the one that is maybe more directly related to knowledge work, is the second bucket of what I would call habits of attention.
For almost all of us, certainly for people who are spending their time doing knowledge work, or who are paid for the value of their creativity, the ideas you come up with are often a product of where you allocate your intention. So, what you read and what you consume often is the precursor to the thoughts that you have, or to the creative or innovative ideas that you come up with.
So by improving your consumption habits, or your attention habits, you can dramatically improve the output that you have at work as well. And we all live in this world that has a fire hose of information. And so the ability to curate, to edit, to refine, to filter your information feed, whether that be the people that you follow on Twitter, or the articles that you read each day, or the news sources that you select, or the books that you read. Those are very important decisions that determine the downstream output. That’s about what you’re bringing in.
But there are also other habits you can build, that kind of the purpose of them is not to bring things in, but to cut things out. It’s to reduce the distractions. So, for example, one habit that I’ve been following for the last year or so, I probably do it about 90 percent of the days. I’ll leave my phone in another room until lunch each day.
And so, I have a home office and if I bring my phone in with me and it’s on the desk, well I’m like everybody else. I’ll check it every three minutes just because it’s there. But if I leave it in another room, then it’s only 30 seconds away, but I never go get it. And what’s always so interesting to me is did I want it or not? In the one sense I did want it bad enough to check it every three minutes when it was next to me, but in another sense I never wanted it bad enough to walk the 30 seconds to go get it.
And I think we see this so much with habits of technology and convenience and modern society that particularly with smart phones or apps. Actions are so frictionless, so convenient, so simple, so easy that we find ourselves being pulled into them, just like at the slightest whim, just the faintest hint of desire is enough to pull us off course.
And so if you can redesign your environment, whether it’s your desk at work, or your office at home, or the kitchen counter and make the actions of least resistance the good and productive ones, and increase the friction of the things that take your attention away. I think you often find those habits of attention start to be allocated to more productive areas as well. But I would probably say habits of energy and habits of attention are the two places to focus if you want to increase your work output.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. What about habits of proactivity? Forcing yourself to do more sales calls, go to more networking events, that sort of thing?
JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, certainly being proactive is a really important part of life. I think it’s a great quality to have. The language that you used about forcing yourself to do sales calls, or forcing yourself to go to networking events or whatever…
ALISON BEARD: Motivating. I would say motivating.
JAMES CLEAR: Yeah sure, OK. I do think that phrasing, motivating, is probably a better way to look at it. Is like there are many ways to do this, or to accomplish the same outcome. And so questions like what is the real goal here? What would this look like if it was easy? What is a way to achieve this that doesn’t add friction to my life?
Those are important questions to ask and kind of revisit, no matter what the task is you’re trying to achieve. Because I think what most of us find are kind of implicitly know is that there are many behaviors that sort of naturally pull us in. And whether that is because they’re attractive and convenient, or because they just kind of naturally align with our personality, or our strengths. There can be a variety of reasons. But focusing on those things that naturally pull you in, rather than things you have to push upon yourself, I think is generally the right approach to take.
As an example, you mentioned networking. So, certainly having a strong network is a very powerful and important thing in the modern work environment. But some people, if you feel more introverted, or you just don’t feel like you gravitate towards chit-chat or whatever, going to a networking event kind of sounds like your nightmare.
The good news is that we live in a time when there’re actually many ways to network. The most effective networking strategy is to do great work and then share it publicly. And that could be writing an interesting article, it could be recording a podcast, doing a YouTube video. Whatever it is, just do something interesting and then put that out into the world. It kind of becomes like a magnet for people who are like minded and interested in the same things. It becomes a much more powerful form of networking than going to a cocktail hour.
My point here is that by asking those questions, what is the real goal? What would this look like if it was easy? Is there a way to add this or do this, or achieve this that would not bring friction into my life? You often find that there’re interesting alternative pathways for achieving the same kind of outcome.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And speaking of, and speaking of buckling down to write something, or working on your most important project, what are some ways that you can encourage yourself to do that work first to spend the most time on it?
JAMES CLEAR: So this story in Atomic Habits about Twyla Tharp, a famous dance choreographer and instructor. And she’s a huge fan of habits and has all these great routines throughout her career. And she has this exercise routine that she does each morning where she works out for two hours. But she always says the habit is not the training in the gym. The habit is hailing the cab outside my apartment.
And I think that’s actually very instructive for anybody who’s looking to do this kind of important work that you mention, like how can I focus on the area of highest importance, or the highest leverage use of my time. And the answer is to make the habit the entry point, not the end point. Kind of view your habits as an entrance ramp to a highway.
What are the productive things that I should be spending time on? What are the highest value tasks? Walk back the behavioral chain and try to find what the tip of the spear is. What is that entry point? And then if you can figure out what those first, that first minute or two minutes looks like, if you can automate that, then you find that the next chunk of time kind of falls in place automatically.
ALISON BEARD: You write how Victor Hugo, how a more novel way of encouraging himself to sit down and work.
JAMES CLEAR: Yes. So this story, Hugo, a famous author wrote a variety of books and the story is that when he signed the deal to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he got his advanced and signed the contract and then did what a lot of us would do. He spent the next year procrastinating. He had friends over for dinner. He went and traveled. He went out to eat. He basically did everything except actually work on the book.
ALISON BEARD: And this was before technology was there to distract him.
JAMES CLEAR: Right. I think maybe we just gravitate toward more fun and satisfying and entertaining uses of time regardless of the time period.
And eventually his publisher got wind of this and they were like dude, something has to change. Either you finish the book in six months or we’re going to ask for the money back. And so now he’s facing this ultimatum and so Hugo brought his assistant into his chambers and they gathered up all his clothes and put them in this large chest, locked it up and took it out of the house. And so all he was left with was this large shawl, this like robe.
And suddenly, he had no clothes that were suitable for entertaining guests. No clothes that were suitable for traveling. No clothes that were suitable for going out to eat. He basically put himself on house arrest and it worked. He wrote the book in five and a half months and it came out, handed it in two weeks early.
And now, in modern society, researchers or scientists would refer to that as a commitment device. And I think commitment devices are powerful because they can be methods for making habits more attractive. So as another example, say that you go to bed tonight and you’re like all right. Tomorrow’s going to be the day. I’m going to wake up and I’m going to go for a run at six. And 6 a.m. rolls around and your bed is warm, it’s cold outside. You’re like well, maybe I’ll just snooze instead.
But if you rewind the clock and come back today and you text a friend and say hey, let’s meet at the park at 6:15 and go for a run, well now 6 a.m. rolls around, and your bed is still warm, and it’s still cold outside, but if you don’t get up and go for a run, you’re a jerk because you leave your friend at the park all alone. So, suddenly you have simultaneously made the habit of sleeping in less attractive and the habit of getting up and going for a run, more attractive.
ALISON BEARD: OK, so you’ve taken that first step. You’re doing the easy entry point ideally every morning. How do you build from there to a more significant progress? Visible progress.
JAMES CLEAR: At some point you want to graduate. This is what I call habit graduation. You want to step up to the next level. And my general rough rule, or my rule of thumb that I like to keep in mind, is try to get one percent better each day. And so, the same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiplies, you repeat them over time. And so, I like to say habits of the compound interest of self-improvement.
Take reading for example. Reading one book will not make you a genius. But if you build a habit of reading every day than not only do you finish one book after another, but you also with each book you complete, you now have a new frame, or a new way to view all the previous books that you’re read.
And the more connection points that you have, the more perspectives that you have, that knowledge starts to compound on top of itself. And a lot of habits are like that. Doing an extra 10 minutes of work each day. Maybe that’s one more sales call. Maybe it’s one more email. Maybe it’s just an extra 10 minutes to review the things that you’ve written or revised, or to tweak or improve.
Doing an extra 10 minutes on one day isn’t really going to be very much. But the difference between someone who doesn’t do that and someone who does an extra 10 minutes every day for a 30 year career, that actually can compound to a very surprising degree. That one extra sales call a day can mean a lot over the course of years and decades.
If you have good habits, time becomes your ally. You just need to be patient. You just need to let that compounding process work for you. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And each day that clicks by you kind of put yourself a little, dig the hole a little bit deeper, put yourself a little bit further behind the eight ball.
ALISON BEARD: That does though make it sound like it’s just this linear progression and you argue very vehemently that it’s not. There’s going to be times when you stall, times when you regress. You talk about valleys and plateaus. So how do you navigate that emotionally and keep pressing on?
JAMES CLEAR: That’s a really good point. The emotional part is a really true thing. You hear this a lot. I hear this from my readers a lot. They’ll say something like, I’ve been running for a month, why can’t I see a change in my body? Or, I’ve been working on this novel for five and a half months now, the outline’s still a mess. Is this thing ever going to be finished?
And when you’re in the middle, when you’re in the thick of the work, it’s really easy to feel that way. And so sometimes I like to equate the process of building your habits, kind of like the process of heating up an ice cube. So, let’s say you walk into a room and its cold, like 25 degrees. You can see your breath and there’s this ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. And you start to slowly heat the room up, 26, 27, 28 degrees. The ice cubes still sitting there. 29, 30, 31 and then you go from 31 to 32 degrees and it’s this one degree shift that’s like no different than all the other one degree shifts that came before it. But suddenly you hit this phase transition and the ice cube melts.
And the process of building better habits and getting better results is often like that. You’re showing up each day and the degrees are increasing a little bit. You’re making these small improvements. You’re getting one percent better. But you don’t have the outcome that you’re trying to accumulate. Those delayed rewards haven’t showed up yet.
And so, you feel like giving up, but the process of giving up after doing a habit for a month or three months, or six months is kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube from 25 to 31 degrees and it not melting yet. The work is not being wasted, it’s just be stored. And the willingness to stick with it –
I really like the San Antonio Spurs. They have this, they’ve won five MBA championships. They’ve got this quote hanging in their locker room that I think encapsulates this kind of philosophy well. It says something to the effect of whenever I feel like giving up, I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock 100 times without showing a crack. And then at the 101st blow it splits in two. And I know that it wasn’t the 101st that did it, but all the 100 that came before.
And I think that’s exactly the kind of approach to take with your habits. It’s not the last sentence that finishes the novel, it’s all the ones that came before. It’s not the last workout that gives you a fit body, it’s all the ones that came before. And if you can be willing to keep showing up and keep hammering on the rock, to keep building up that potential energy, to know that it’s not wasted, it’s just being stored then maybe you can start to fight that emotional battle of building better habits and ultimately get to the rewards that you’re waiting to accumulate.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And I know you were an athlete, not a basketball player, but a baseball player. Sports is obviously a place where people have to develop good habits and routines. You lift weights every day. You do get stronger over the long term. You hit 100 serves every day, you become more accurate. Even if you plateau or regress, you do sort of see that progress. But it seems much harder in a work context where the correlation between the effort that you’re putting in and then the achievement or reward is less clear.
JAMES CLEAR: So the key insight here is that you want feedback to be visible and rapid. I think this is so important that in Atomic Habits, I call it the cardinal rule of behavior change. Which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded, get repeated. Behaviors that are immediately punished, get avoided.
And in sports for example, yeah as soon as you hit the serve, you immediately know if that was accurate or not. Is it in or is it out? And that rapid feedback allows you to make an adjustment, hopefully a slight one for the next time. And then you keep repeating that. You get this feedback almost instantly.
But in the modern work environment, particularly in large corporations, feedback is very delayed. It’s kind of like opaque. It’s very difficult to see what your contribution is delivering to the bottom line, or getting this output.
So I think one of the lessons to take away from this is that one of the most motivating feelings for the human brain is a feeling of progress. In the case of your own individual life you can decide what you want to track. And this can take multiple forms. Like for my business I do a weekly review where each Friday I kind of tract key metrics, revenue, expenses, profit and so on.
My dad likes to swim, for example. Well any day that he gets out of the pool, his body looks the same when he gets out of the water as it does when he gets in. There’s no visual feedback. And so what he does is he takes out a little pocket calendar and he puts an X on that day. And it’s a very minor thing, but it is a signal of progress. It is a signal that he showed up and did the right thing that day.
And I think it also reveals a lesson that probably a lot of managers or entrepreneurs can use as well which is, you want the pace of feedback, the pace of measurement to match the frequency of the habit.
ALISON BEARD: And what if I have a big goal like become a better manager? How do I distill that into smaller steps? The kind that you’re talking about.
JAMES CLEAR: Where I would start is to say OK, I want to be a better manager. Great. That’s good vision. What does a better manager do? What do those daily behaviors look like? What sort of habits does a better manager have? Who is the type of person that could be a better manager?
And then you start to elicit answers from yourself that are things like, oh a better manager gives praise each day. So then maybe you build a habit of saying something positive to start off each team meeting. Or, oh a better manager is a role model and models the behavior of the culture. And it’s like well we often talk about transparency, so now I need to build a habit of doing something transparent each day or each week, or in one on ones, or whatever. Maybe I start each one on one by sharing something about my personal life so that I’m vulnerable first and then my employees follow my lead. And you get my point. You start to see which behaviors that identity is associated with and then you have something more concrete that you can focus on. You can focus on building those habits rather than being stuck kind of in this high level meta mode where you’re like well, I just really want to be a better manager, but that’s very hard to translated into something practical.
ALISON BEARD: So, why is it that good habits seem so hard to form, yet easy to break and bad habits seem so easy to form and hard to break?
JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I thought about this a lot when I was working on Atomic Habits because I think actually, asking that question can reveal a lot about what we want to do to build a good habit, or to break a bad one.
So, let’s say we want to build good habits. Well, how come bad habits stick so readily? And what you find is they have kind of a variety of qualities. So the first quality that bad habits often have is they’re very obvious. So for example, let’s say that eating at fast food restaurants is a bad habit or a habit that you don’t want to perform as much.
Well, in America it’s hard to drive down the street for more than 15 minutes without passing at least a few, if not a dozen fast food restaurants. They’re very obvious. They’re very prevalent in the environment. And so that’s a lesson that we can take and apply to our good habits. If you want a good habit to stick, then you should make it a big part of your environment.
Another thing that bad, another quality bad habits often have is they’re incredibly convenient. They’re very frictionless. The incredible convenience of many bad habits is a big reason why we stick to them so much. And so if you want your good habits to stick, they need to be as easy and convenient as possible.
So another quality that bad habits often have the benefit is usually immediate and the cost is usually delayed. And with good habits it’s often the reverse. Like the benefit of going to the gym for a week is kind of like, I don’t know, not a whole lot. If anything your body’s sore. You haven’t really changed. You look the same in the mirror. The scale is roughly the same. It’s only if you stick to that for a year or two, a year or two or three that you get the outcome that you want.
And so there’s this gap. There’s sort of this valley of death in the beginning with a lot of good habits, which is you start doing them, but you don’t have the delayed rewards that you’re kind of showing up and hoping you get. Whereas with bad habits there’s this mismatch between the immediate outcome that you get, hey this feels great in the moment. I should do this and then it turns out that it ultimately hurts you in the long run.
The cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And a lot of the reason why bad habits form so readily and good habits form so, are so unlikely, or resistant formed, has to do with that gap in time and reward.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well thank you so much for talking with me today. I feel like I learned a lot and hopefully I will make good on all of my New Year’s resolutions.
JAMES CLEAR: Yeah, great. It was wonderful to talk to you. Thank you.
ALISON BEARD: That’s James Clear, entrepreneur and author of the book, Atomic Habits, an Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.
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