The Daily Stoic - James Clear on How to Build Better Habits

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Ryan talks with author James Clear about practical ways to shift your internal narrative, how to begin and maintain productive habitual action, being flexible with your goals as you set and achieve them, and more.  James Clear is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Atomic Habits, as well as a world-renowned speaker. His weekly 3-2-1 Newsletter has over 1,000,000 subscribers and is sent out every Thursday. 🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast where it's coming up here in the year. And I was thinking about habits, how to have better habits in 2023. And I was gonna put together a whole compilation of habits. And I thought, you know what?

I want to defer to the expert, someone who not only talks about great habits, but practices great habits, someone I know of immense discipline and focus, and the author of one of the best-selling books literally in the world for the last several years running. When discipline and decedity came out, it was the number two on the New York Times best seller list. And I know how many copies it sold.

It probably should have been number one. It's a little tricky when you have your own bookstore. They sort of determine how they're going to count those copies or not. But the number one spot was James Glear and I shot James and Emo. I was like, you can't really have sold that many copies this week. Can you? And he was like, yeah, more or less, this week, every week, for like hundreds of weeks in a row,

atomic habits is just a monster of a bestseller, a really, really, really good book. But sometimes when something is like super, super, super successful, you, something you discount it, but you are a little cynical about whether the person knows what they're talking about or not. And James really does know what he's talking about.

In this conversation, which we actually had almost two years ago, you're in a half ago, I can't even remember with the pandemic in time. This conversation with James Clear, I think illustrates it, So I wanted to run it on the podcast again. One of my favorite interviews, one of my most popular interviews ever. And I thought a great way to wrap up the year. If you've already listened, I suggest listening again, you get something out of it a second time.

I re-listen to it as I decided to rerun it. If you haven't listened, enjoy. If you haven't read Atomic Habits, well, there's a reason the book is a monster bestseller. And it drives with a lot of my thinking and you'll see us dive into a lot of that in today's episode. So without further ado, I will bring you my interview with James Clear. And I would also say, as we wind up this year, procrastination is a perennial theme. And maybe you've been procrastinating, signing up for the daily stoke, new year, new you challenge. If you want to be a better person, you want to have some atomic habits in the next year,

you want to realize your potential in the next year. If you want to start the year off with a bang, start it fresh, start it with some really good habits that force you out of your comfort zone that challenge you. It's called the Daily Stoke New Year, New U Challenge for a reason. I'm not promising it's fun or easy. It's not going to tell you everything you want to hear. It's going to force you to do some stuff, but I know I benefit from doing that at the beginning of the year every year and have now. This will be our fifth year doing the challenge. So I've got five years of compound and cumulative returns as a result and a bunch of other people do.

It's going to be really fun. I would love for you to join us. You can sign up at dailystoke.com slash challenge. And James's work is influenced a bunch of the thinking there. So pick up Atomic Havits, join us in the Daily Stoke, new year, new challenge, DailyStoke.com slash challenge, and enjoy this week's episode. We've got some awesome stuff coming,

not just in the challenge, but episodes for the next year. And I'm excited to bring all of that to you in the meantime. Let's get after it. I was thinking about, you know, originally, we were gonna do this in early January, but it's actually, I think, more fitting that we're talking at the end of January, because it's like, I would imagine a good chunk of people

that have bought my books and your books and started out the year trying to think about New Year's resolutions have already quit on them. And like we did this New Year New Year challenge thing for Daily Stoke and it's 21 days. And it's like, you know, the first email, it's like a 100% open rate. And the next one, it's like 90, then 80.

And by the end, something that people paid for, they're at like 40% open rates after three weeks. So it's amazing to me how we, it's like we start out with really clear intentions, but we can't, we can't follow through. Yeah, it's so common, so true. I also like, you know, I've had this happen to me many times, you know, it's not like I'm immune to the phenomenon.

Like we all get excited and amped up about things early on. And then it comes to execute and life happens and things like, you know, taper off. This is what you're kind of getting at, though, this whole discussion about New Year's resolutions is one of the central things I talk about in the time of habits. This is the idea of like starting with identity rather than results. I do think there's something to that that like at the beginning of the year people are very excited about the results they can imagine for themselves losing weight or making more money or you know meditating every day or whatever.

But they still don't see themselves in that way. They don't consider themselves to be a meditator or a writer or an athlete or whatever, the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And so I usually encourage people to start there, like start with the identity that you want to have or start with the lifestyle that you want to live. And then start doing small habits that reinforce that identity, rather than just being like, oh, I'm going to lose 40 pounds. And then when that doesn't happen in three weeks, you inevitably feel, you know, demotivated.

Well, that's something that they talk a lot about in sports. So people have heard about it a thousand times and we pay lip service to it, but then in our own lives, we don't actually follow it, which is a New Year's resolution. The problem with that is that you are focusing, you are starting with the result. I want to lose 40 pounds. I want to learn, I want to know Spanish. You know, like, you're picking a thing and you're saying, I want to lose 40 pounds. I want to learn. I want to know Spanish. You know, like you're picking a thing and you're saying, I want to get that result. When, really, what you're talking about identity, you're also talking about process. It should be, I want to,

I want to eat better meals on a daily basis as opposed to, I want to get a certain thing. Or I want to write a book is not the right goal. It should be I'm going to start writing. Like, you know, it's doing the thing versus focusing on the outcome. Oh, and this is kind of one of the, I don't know, discoveries I had as I was working on the book and writing about the topic more is that when you stick to the process, like you're saying right now, when you like perform habits consistently, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so by doing those habits, you're casting these little votes for the type of person that you are, the identity that you believe you have. You're sort of reinforcing that internal narrative.

And so by building small habits, by sticking to the process, you are in that moment reinforcing that identity. And ultimately, once you get to that point where you say, Hey, actually, you know, I've done this enough times, I think this is part of my story, like, I am a basketball player, or I am a meditator, or I am a writer, or whatever it is, you're no longer pursuing behavior change at that point because you're already, you're not trying to be someone new, you're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be. And you know, like take, you know, you're a great example of this as say someone who has the identity of a writer or an author. Now, that doesn't

necessarily mean the task of writing is easy for you or that it doesn't require any effort, but the act of writing every day is in alignment with how you view yourself. The internal narrative of I'm an author or I'm a writer, you're not like trying to convince yourself or in the case of many habits or New Year's resolutions, people say things like, I need to get motivated, or I need to get amped up, or like, I need the willpower to do it. And like, you don't necessarily need to get motivated

to be a writer, you already view yourself in that way. Now, you still need to stick to the habit, you still need to do the work, but I think it's the work takes on a different characteristic at that point. Once you start to identify as the type of person who does that consistently. And it's sort of paradoxical. So I get why it's hard for people to understand. Like you, you hear Bill Bellic, checker, someone talk about the process and you're like, but you've won the most games out of anyone or or in Zen in the art of archery, you know, he talks about, you know, put the target out of your mind, you know, what's the point of archery if you're not aiming at the target, right? So it feels insane and that's probably why people

have resistance to it. And I think where I've come down is like, okay, obviously having goals is better than someone who has no goals. But then it's like once you have the goal, philosophically you get to a place where the goal becomes not important. So it's a weird contradiction that you're asking people to wrap their heads around. Well, and I kind of feel like if you really care about the goal, you'll focus on the system.

Like if you actually care about getting the result, which supposedly is what we all are doing this for, the archer is trying to hit the bull's eye, the football players trying to win the championship and so on. Supposedly results matter so much when we care so much about them. And this is coming, by the way, from someone who is very results oriented. Like I've kind of had to, you know, like do therapy on myself or whatever to get myself to focus on the process more and not be so hung up on the outcome. But if you do care about the outcome so much, then you need to focus on the system in the process because that's how you actually achieve it.

And furthermore, being outcome focused will help you achieve a goal one time. But if you want to keep winning again and again, you have to be focused on the system. And so goals are good for one time wins, systems are for people who want to win repeatedly. And I feel like that's kind of where I, how I think about the distinction between the two. Yeah, what's that, what's that joke where it's like once you're lucky twice, you have good systems, you know, twice you're good, you know, it's like doing it once is easy or it can be random, but if you're trying to replicate it, there needs to be some sort of process. Right?

And I'd be curious too, as an author, like, again, this goes to the sports thing, is you want your book to be successful, no one writes a book, and then they hope nobody reads it. But then they also, the place this process comes in, Mark's really talks about this, he goes, like, sanity is time, your happiness to your own actions. You know, like if you're a goal

on your book, it like you can't really have a system that guarantees you too much of the external results. So you can't have a system that is going to make your book a number one New York Times or so. You can have a system that should generate a good book. You know, like you can have the system to focus on the parts that are in your control. And then you also have to get to a place where you write off the parts that are not in your control as being much less consequential. Yeah, I kind of think about it like you have things that you don't control at all. The weather, for example, then you have things that you influence, but you don't control them, you know, like if you're playing someone in tennis, you can influence the outcome. You can't control how they play

or where they shoot, they hit their shots or whatever. And then you have things that you're like fully under your control, you know, what you choose to wear today or whatever. And most of the things that really matter in life fall in the middle category, you can influence them, but you can't totally control them. And so at some point, at least for myself, like with writing

atomic habits, I had to kind of be at peace with the effort that I put in or something. Like I didn't want to get to the end of it, you know, depending on how you measure it, it took somewhere between three to five years to finish the book. I didn't want to get to the end of that process and feel like I hadn't given the best effort I could. Now, I hoped it would do well and hit a best sellers list and sell a bunch copies and all that, but I can't control that, but I just wanted to feel like I had influenced every bit of that process that I could and then we'll see what happens. There's always something more you could have done, but I'm at peace with the effort I gave.

And I feel like that was probably the most important thing for me. And then the fact that it has worked out well just makes it all feel much better afterward. Yeah, that's the extra. But I mean, imagine if you'd gotten the results, but you knew that it wasn't as good. That's a weird position to be in that I've been in at different times in my life. And I'm sure you've seen it with articles or something where you did a pretty good job,

but it wasn't like your best. There's a weirdness to it. I mean, you still enjoy it. There's something about the struggle that makes the outcome more enjoyable. Like I think about, imagine if you would spent your whole career, you played football as a kid that makes the outcome more enjoyable. I think about, imagine if you would spend your whole career, you played football as a kid and through high school and college,

and you're finally like the kicker on the Super Bowl winning team and you kick the field goal to win the game. And how that would feel after spending 25 years of your life dedicated toward that goal, versus being like a professional soccer player, and then you retire and you're like, hey, you know what, I might try out for a team. And then you turns out you can be the kicker.

And then the starter gets hurt and you end up kicking the game when you feel goal and the Super Bowl. And it's like, it would still be really cool. But I don't know that it would be the same because you don't have the struggle before it. And so there needs to be some kind of, yeah, the height of your joy is tied to the depth that you're sorrow in that sense.

And the more that you, the more effort that you put in, the better it feels when you do have some success. There's a story I just found, and you can't steal it because it's gonna be in my next book. But Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer before he was a politician and before, I guess before he was a peanut farmer before, I guess, before he was a peanut farmer, but he went to the Naval Academy and he was sort of up for this promotion as a

naval officer and he was interviewed by Admiral Rickover, who single-handedly basically invents the idea of a nuclear submarine. And anyways, he's in this long interview and and these are notoriously insane interviews. He was a really difficult guy to please. So he's asking Jimmy Carter about all his accomplishments and he goes, how did you do in your class at the Naval Academy? He says, oh, I was 59th in my class of 400, which is extremely difficult. He said, how did you do on this posting?

He goes through and he's sort of beaming, listing all his accomplishments. And Rick over looks at him and he just goes, did you always do your best? And he was like, he was gonna be like, yes, look at all my accomplishments. And then he thought about it and he said, no, I didn't always do my best.

And then Rick over just got up and left the room. And Jimmy Carter said the rest of his life was trying to provide a better answer to that question. And so it was interesting to me to go like, he'd had this incredible career as one of the top people in the Navy, top of his class. But as soon as he had to look at it from the side of, like was it actually the best he was capable of doing the

Accomplishment became totally meaningless and I think that's a good that's a good microcosm of life Yeah, that's fantastic. That's a yeah, it's a wonderful example of this idea and it also Encourages you to measure outcomes in a different way, you know like we spend so much time measuring outcomes on how they are relative to everyone else. You know, how much money am I making relative to the person next to me? Or was the number on the scale relative to the other people and, you know, on the team or in my class or whatever. All these other things that are like status symbols of some sort. And this is like an internal measure, which is also interestingly, both of those are about feelings. One is about how you feel compared to others

and one is about how you feel with like your self-esteem and reputation with yourself. And I don't know, there's, I think there's probably a strong encouragement to measure it more in the second way than the first. Well, it's funny because both our mutual friend, Mark Manson and I used this story of Dave Mistain and I did an egos the enemy and he did it in the subtle art but you know here's this guy he gets he's the lead guitarist and founder of Megadeth

that seems like a great accomplishment but in light of the fact that he was kicked out of Metallica that's a not an accomplishment and it's like so many people would kill to a sold the amount of books that you've sold. But then you so you can and if I told you at the beginning of your book, this is what you're going to have, you'd be like, that's an unmitigated success. But you can still but but that's the problem with comparison and and focusing on things that are outside your control is you can immediately render your own accomplishment meaningless by by looking at someone who sold

one more than you. And that's like the thing we do to ourselves. I don't know why we do that. You know, like I've fallen to that just as much as everybody else. You can get like whatever your current level of output is or successes that becomes your new baseline. And then you just look at whoever is slightly above that. And then you, you feel the way you did before.

And it's like, you need to remind yourself when you wanted what you currently have. There's so many things about my current lifestyle that I have spent the last decade working toward. And I thought that was the thing I really wanted. And then you get to here and you feel differently. So I don't know. I, there's some kind of recalibration that goes on there. There's

some kind of encouraging type of encouragement that we all need to like focus on those good bits that we have earned already rather than always looking toward the next milestone. And I think this also connects back to what we were talking about a minute ago with process versus goals or systems versus outcomes, which is that this is one of the downsides of being goal-oriented, is that you're always looking at the next milestone versus being process-oriented or system-oriented, which is, you know, I can feel really good about myself right now because I got two good hours of writing in this morning,

and that was an accomplishment, and it felt like a good day already. You know, like the day has already been a victory. I don't need to, like, be thinking about all these other huge goals and then all of a sudden turn it into a failure. Well, it's very clear why we do it, right? Like evolutionarily, it makes total sense why we would never be happy with what we've accomplished.

And then you have to ask yourself, what am I optimizing for? Am I optimizing for evolutionary gains or am I opting for a contentment and happiness? And you're right. I think like for me, like, one of the weird parts about being a writer is that suddenly you have less and less time to do the thing that you actually like doing. And so you have to, you have to figure out what makes you happy is what makes, if you're

a goal-oriented writer, chances are you're only going to have fleeting moments of happiness when you hit the bestseller list or you sign the deal or you sell the thing or you get recognized, or do you want the day in and day out happiness of actually enjoying the thing? And then that comes back to which one is more likely, which one do you have the most control over? And which one is actually easiest to sustain over time? Yeah, you have this weird phenomenon

where success kind of eats itself. It's like the better you get at something, the more opportunities come your way, and the more opportunities come your way, the more likely you already get distracted from doing the thing that got you those opportunities in the first place. And so as you continue to improve and find yourself enjoying more results, you have to like upgrade your ability to say no. You know, there are all kinds of things that I like have to say no to now that would have been

like the coolest thing that could come across my desk, you know, like two or three years ago. And that's a very fortunate position to be in, but it's been a very hard lesson for me to learn. I seem to be very dumb and slow at learning it. Like I keep saying yes to things that I should not be saying yes to. And what you end up finding yourself in is like you get all these commitments that are they sound cool on the surface in the moment. So if you're goal oriented, you're like, oh man, I got invited this cool conference.

I could just speak of this thing. I could just sign this new deal, whatever. But then you find yourself living a lifestyle that's different than the one that makes you happy, you know, that day. So to your point about like, are you going to be driven by signing the deal or are you going to be driven by I like the lifestyle writing each day or whatever it is for you. And so I think we need to spend more time like the first question to answer is what what do I want my days to look like? You know, like what do I want my normal lifestyle to look like? And optimize for that. And then within that, how can I do the coolest stuff possible or the biggest stuff possible

or whatever? And you can let your ambitious side live there. But you don't want to, it sounds so obvious when stated plainly, but you cannot consider yourself to be winning or living a successful life if you hate the lifestyle. Like if it's only about these successful results, but you hate the lifestyle. Like if it's only about these successful results, but you hate the lifestyle, that is a failure, not a success. No, I've written about this a bunch of times,

it's a, what, design your perfect day and reverse engineer your choices from there. And the other one is like, I've, it's like, what is your definition of success? Is your definition of success? Money, is it fame? For me, I came to realize that the definition of success for me, I think it was a very stoic idea. The definition of success. Money is it fame. For me, I came to realize that the definition of success for me, I think this is a very stoic idea. The definition of success is autonomy. How much control do you have

over your life? So it's weird. You end up saying yes to things that you think that's autonomy, you're choosing, but then you're actually choosing to have less control day to day by agreeing to do these things. So like I've talked about this before, like when I look at my calendar, like today, I'm talking to you and one other person, and those are the only two things in my calendar. And so that meant that I had a free morning to write. And then I leisurely read and ate lunch before I was talking to you. I can leave the office whenever I want.

I can spend as much time as I want with my kids. Like, that is, so success is on the one hand, being able to write and do the thing that I like doing. And that's what keeps it all going. But it's also not being controlled by anyone or any other thing, even if those are lucrative or fun opportunities. Yeah, there's this, yes and no, or like,

we kind of conflate them and prepare them together because they seem like these two sides the same coin or whatever, but they're actually very different. Like no is a decision. You say no to something and you move on to the next choice. Yes is a responsibility. As soon as you've committed to something,

you now have to, you've already, and also no is sort of like a form of a credit. By saying no to something you have retained this block of time in the future that you can redeem for whatever you want to spend it on. And yes, it's like some form of a debt, you know? And so like by saying yes to like, you know, this, this talk is a good example. Like by saying yes to this, I put myself on the hook for how I was going to spend this hour. And once I committed to that one way of spending it, I had to do it that way. I couldn't spend it any other way.

I can't be writing the book right now or playing with my kids or walk around the forest or whatever. And so, I like to, again, I'm terrible at doing this and figuring out how to say no better. So I keep coming up with these ways of trying to remind myself that like, yes, as a commitment, no is a choice. And as much as possible, you want to kind of accumulate those credits that you can just spend your future time however you want, rather than accumulating debts that you're on the hook to spend in a certain way. The Bahamas.

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You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Well, I think about yes and no as also the opposites of each other. So each time you say no to something, you're saying yes to something else. And each time you're saying yes to something, you're saying no to something else. And if you can sit down and do some analysis, like where does this bill come due? So I found like, okay, if I say yes to stuff, who is that taking time away from? Right? It's not taking away time from eating.

I still managed to go to the bathroom during the day. I still seem to find time to watch television. It's like, who ends up caching this check? And what account does it come out of? And I think, unfortunately, it almost always comes out of the spouse account or the children account. And then you have to ask yourself, are you really getting that return? So I think, for instance, I'm glad you did this with me,

but I've said, I've scaled almost to zero the amount of podcasts that I agree to be on because an hour is an hour, and you can't do anything else, as you said. And also, and you talk a lot about this in Atomic Habits, which I love, is the way that different habits and decisions ripple out into other things. So I find, because I don't schedule stuff, now, like, let's say I agreed to do this conference call that could have been an email that honestly I shouldn't have been involved with the beginning.

Now it now is a 30 minute conference call at 2.30 p.m. let's say. Now my whole fucking day from the beginning begins with the recognition and the acknowledgement that I have to do a thing at 230 and now the entire center of gravity of what should be a day that's mine is pivoting around this thing that I don't want to do to begin with. Yeah, not only you're spending the 30 minutes on it, you're also planning the rest of your day around it. Yeah, right. I think it's even deeper than what you said too, about like the opposite, where, you know, like when you say yes something, you're saying no to something else. Even more so, when you say yes to something, you're saying no to everything else for that

time slot. And when you say no to something, you are saying yes to the option for pretty much anything else. So like, one is retaining multiple pathways and the other one is closing every other pathway. Right. And so there's, yeah, I think the punchline here is the more the value of saying no is higher

than probably we appreciate. And hopefully I can get better at it. Well, because what you're saying yes to is also the least, what's the word? It's, you're saying yes and you're paying the highest price. So like, when you do buy something or you don't buy something with money, it's one thing. But when you say yes, and then you pay with time,

you never get that time back. And it's interesting. Sena could talk about how intensely protective we are of money and property. And then time, which is the most rare of all the things, we're willing to be like, well, I don't want, like if someone's like, can I have $10, you'd be like, can I give you $10?

I don't know, yes or no. But if someone's like, can I have 10 minutes of your time, you're like, it's only 10 minutes. And which is such a, I don't, it's so insane that it almost defies explanation that we would be so casual with the one thing that we'll never get back. It is crazy.

And like I said, I'm still learning this lesson myself, but the other wild thing is that by, the way you choose to invest your time determines all the other resources anyway. So you can, if you're like, oh, it's just a little bit time, I'd rather like, I'll use this time to get some money or whatever, like you can just figure out how to get

all that stuff that you protect so dearly just by spending your time in a better way. So it's the one thing that you have to optimize above all the others. Well, that leads me to something I was going to ask you. So obviously, you think a lot about systems. You think a lot about process, a lot about habits. And then the pandemic comes along.

And it's the largest, I've called it this before, like the largest forced lifestyle experiment in human history. It just blows up everything. We thought about how you have to do this job or that job, how you have to wake up and live this life or that life, how have your habits and systems changed with, first I want to know about the pandemic, then I have another version of this question, but how has your life changed in the last 12 months given what's happened? Well, atomic habits came out in October of 2018. So for the like year and a half after that, I was running it pretty hard.

I had been traveling more than I ever had before. And I think the year after the book came out, I spent like, I added it up. It was something like 42% of nights in a bed that wasn't my own. You know, it's like just, it was just way too much time on the road. And I love travel, but that was like definitely my ceiling. And so I still had all these cool opportunities and things coming my way. And you know, a bunch of, you know,

whatever, speaking requests and different things like booked when the pandemic hit. And so all that stuff of course got canceled and moved virtual and so on. And I was planning on slowing down or tapering it back, but I never would have slowed down to the degree that I was forced to. And I never would have done it for as long as I've been forced to. And it has been a really great thing. It's been exactly what I needed was to stop like running so hard and to get back into like a more patterned daily lifestyle.

This is something my readers have talked about a lot and that I've talked about it, you know, speeches and so on, is like, how do you build habits when travel is a big part of your lifestyle or when you're always switching context? And there are things you can do, but the punchline is, yeah, it is harder. You know, habits are behaviors that are tied to a particular context. You know, you living room at 7am is where you meditate or your, you know, kitchen at 3pm is where you do the bills or whatever. Like, things get any kind of habitual action tends to get tied to the context that happens in. So if you're always switching contexts, you're always changing habits. So I guess the answer to your question is, for the year prior to the

pandemic, my habits were basically in maintenance mode. Like ideally, I work out four times a week. The that year, I was working out about two times per week on average, because I was just, I wasn't home as much, and it was like, it was enough for me to tread water. And so in the year since the pandemic, things have been better for me on the habit front because my day in lifestyle has been so scheduled and I've been in the same place every time. So in that sense, it's been easier. Yeah, it's sort of if when you travel or you're busy or you have sort of the unpredictability of life, you always have an excuse, right? So I feel like it's like I write every day, but when I'm traveling, maybe I'm only 70% effective. This is something I realize when I'm traveling, it's like, if

you're, let's say, you know, when you travel or you're not in your normal routine, your 70% is good as what you're doing. That means that basically every three days, it's the equivalent of taking a day off, right? And so it was occurring to me. I was writing every day, but I was, I was like, gutting it out. I was doing my habits, like, white knuckling it. And then I did think there was, I knew there was some cost, but I was massively underestimating the cost of creativity, happiness, exercise, diet, et cetera, that as soon as I was in one place, I was getting the full result. So I was like, you probably, you're like, well, what happens to this income?

What happens to all these things if you're suddenly in one place? And the answer is it's like, if you lose your sense of taste, your sense of smell gets better. Like it actually just corresponding adjustments and you may actually end up in a better spot. Yeah, I um, workouts are a good example for me with that. Like if I'm at home, I train, you know, with weights in a gym, a squat rack and all that, you know, I got this equipment. If I'm on the road, then I'm doing a lot of bodyweight workouts in hotel rooms and, you know, like just doing things in a suboptimal way.

And so, yeah, all those 70% days, I think simultaneously two things are true here. One is that I'm still glad that I did those workouts because like we were talking about earlier, it cast a devote for being the kind of person who didn't miss workouts and reinforce the identity and all that stuff. And so in that sense, sometimes the bad days are even more important than the good days,

because you proved to yourself that you can show up even when it's not ideal. And yet, the other side is also simultaneously true, which is, if the bad days become your normal day and you just keep throwing up 70% over and over again, then that actually is a very high cost over the course of six months or a year or so on something needs to change. Right. No, that's a good point. It's a very stoic concept too, where, look, it's easy to be disciplined and this is the point. It's easy to be disciplined. It's easy to be on top of it. It's easy to be consistent when you are living in what we're currently living in, which is a literal bubble. Like, you can't go anywhere, no one can come over, you're not supposed to do anything.

Every day is exactly the same, and the unpredictability has gone way, way, way, way down. And I think about that as someone who's into habits and into routines, is these things can almost, they almost become like a level of OCD-ness where you almost become fragile and you're not able to deal with life.

So, to be able to have good habits and good systems while you travel while life is crazy is actually really good practice. And you don't want to be someone who can only, like, you can only eat well, work out when you have a personal chef and a trainer and you're, you know, renting a house on the beach. Like, of course, everyone can be good there. You can stay sober in prison because you can't get access to stuff what happens when you're in the real world. Now you need some resiliency, too.

Yeah, I actually have a passage from the Dow Day Ching in an atomic habits that says something of like, the way of life is to be supple and flexible. The way of death is to be brittle and hard. And so the flexible prevail. And you know flexible, the way of death is to be brittle and hard, and so like the flexible prevail, and you need to have some element of that in your both your mindset and just your ability to adapt to different situations. But then when you're I kind of a Daria Rose has a good concept, which she calls home court habits and away court habits. When you're at home, you're

on your own court, you can design it and optimize it for you. Like, let's make that as optimal as possible. Reduce distractions, give you exactly what you need to perform at the highest level possible. When you're on the away court, when you're traveling around or whatever, you need to be flexible and able to make something happen even with suboptimal.

Yeah, I talked about Russell Westbrook and stillness. Like, he's this guy as insane habits, routines, rituals, and then he gets traded twice in two years. You know, how do you, you know, he had like a parking spot. He had a chapel. He had like a trainer who made him the same thing every day. And, and that was great when he spent the vast majority of his career on one team where he was the top guy. And then life throws you a couple of curveballs. That's where you backslide and not that he did. But you know what I mean? You have to be able to absorb the uncertainty and the changes or you're just very

fragile. A little detail to add to that. I always thought this was a good example. In the art of learning, Josh Wade Skin talks about how he took his competitive chess player, also competitive martial artist, and for his martial arts performances and competitions, before he would go out, he had like a little ritual that he did. You know, a lot of athletes have this kind of pre-game routine or whatever. And gradually, over the course of a few years, he started pairing it down and compressing it, making it smaller and smaller until he got it down to where it was just like 30 seconds or so. And it ended up serving him really well because he was at an international competition and he either was given the wrong information or misread the schedule or whatever.

And he was taking a nap on one of the benches and they were like, Hey, you're supposed to wrestle in like three minutes. And he woke up like groggy and kind of like goes through his 30 second routine and he was ready to compete. And I've tried to develop something kind of like that with writing, where, you know, if I'm at home, I face a wall that doesn't have any windows. I put on my headphones, I listen to the same playlist every time, I grab a glass of water, like I try to set up the environment in the optimal way. But the one thing that I have to do is I have to put my headphones on and I have to play

the same playlist every time in the same order. And I can do that basically anywhere. I do it when I'm on a plane, I do it in a hotel room. And by compressing it down to something that's really short like that, I make it easier for myself to like get into this state of flow and perform at a high level, even if things are not optimal. And so it's nice to be able to not rely, you know, I think about like the White Russell Westberg example. I don't know what his routine is, but I'm like, maybe if you have to go to the same chapel and park in the same parking lot and do all, you've got to do all that stuff. It's actually kind of brittle.

And so you need to be able to have like something that you can carry with you and utilize that to get into your flow state or get ready to go. And that leads me to my next question, which is, I know you became a father and that sort of blows up your whole life, right? It just blows up your life in ways you can't possibly imagine. And so I'm curious how have you kept those systems or routines or what have you learned about habits and routines that maybe you weren't thinking about when you're writing this book as what's there's that expression. There's like an acronym that's like a dual income, no kids, a dinks, I think is what it is where you're just like you're just living the fucking life, you know, and it's easy to be an artist or creative person or have good systems when you're only responsible for yourself.

Yeah, I just didn't try. I took I took three months off and that was a huge huge benefit, you know, just to be able to spend that time. There have been a lot of lessons, but I would say probably the two that come to mind immediately, the first is for me, I've had to change the way that I write books. When I wrote a time of cabits, I did it, you know, I didn't have kids, it was kind of like this all-consuming project, I did it at all hours, it was like the thing that I thought about all day,

I went to bed, I dreamt about it, I woke up, I worked on it more, it was just kind of all-consuming project. And it's not possible for me to operate that way right now as a parent. And so I've changed to, I just make sure that I have two sacred hours every morning where I do my writing. And so first, it's the first thing I do in the morning, like I wake up, take a shower, get a glass of water, and then I do my writing. And so first is the first thing I do in the morning, like I wake up, take a shower, get a glass of water, and then I do that. So I try to fit it in before everybody else's agenda, like creeps into my agenda. Secondly, I do that whole ritual that I just mentioned a minute ago

about like putting on my headphones, listening to music, et cetera. And the idea is by not facing windows, I reduce like visual distractions. By putting on headphones, I reduce auditory distractions, and I want to just like live in the document, basically, for those two hours. And finally, I picked a length of time, two hours, which is long enough for me to actually get into the work

and actually get something done because you kind of have this startup cost with any creative work. But short enough that I finish the session and I feel energized, good, and I can go to sleep and wake up again, and I know that I can do it tomorrow. So in other words, I'm not trying to do like six hours of writing because then like I don't know if I could actually do that again the next day. It's also a reasonable amount of time to ask for, right?

So I would point that out because lots of people who are thinking about doing their first book or thinking about some projects are like, I can't dedicate myself totally to do something, but it's not impossible to carve out two hours. That's waking up an hour earlier and staying up an hour later, let's say, or that's hiring a help for two hours, or that's

just asking your spouse or your partner to take over for two hours. It's not what you think goes into being an NFL player. It's not as insane as you think it is. That's just what works for me. People can find whatever is sustainable for them, but that was the frame I had. It was like, what can I actually sustain? And, you know, atomic habits was easy. The longest project I had ever worked on. And when you get on the other side of a really big project like that, you realize that

you can do these big things, but you do have to show up every day. And so I knew that that was something that I could sustain and would actually show up, and that I just need to be patient and like, but I know that the project will finish itself at some point. And I will say that is probably there are many things, you know, people like to criticize books as not being a great business model, whatever. I actually love books and think they're an amazing business model. But all of the great things that books can provide, there is one massive trade-off, which is that all of the work is up front. You have to do the reading, the research, the writing, prepare the marketing plan, record a bunch of interviews. You have to do all of that before you've even sold a single copy. Before you've sold even a single copy copy everything is all that work is stack

to front all delay gratification. But if you can do all of that then the outcome can be really really great. But many people most people possibly don't have the patience for that and the other really challenging part of it is that like today I showed up and I worked for two hours and I have this huge manuscript and it was a mess when I started and it's still a mess right now And then you need to wake up again tomorrow and do the same thing again and this process of showing up every day for two or three or four years and Working on something that feels like a mess 96% of the time that is a that can be a draining thing if you're not in the right mindset.

And so you just, I think you really have to scale down and focus on the process and just getting a couple of good hours in each day. No, that strikes me as something that's sort of very endemic to your mindset. There's this quote from Epictetus where he says, first, decide who you want to be and then do what you need to do. But I would say the James, the James Clear tweak on that formula is decide who you want to be, do what you want to do. And then it's like, start with the absolute smallest unit of measurement on that thing, which is obviously the double meaning of atomic habits, but your point of like, okay, this two year or six year or ten year project, I'm going to measure in two hour increments on a daily basis, and

that's how you get to the final product. You know, I've actually been thinking more about this, which is, I feel like my style and something that I, I guess I'll recommend it just because it works for me. I don't know if it'll work for everybody, but I don't want to limit myself. I want to think as big and as ambitiously as possible. And so, like the phrase that I like is, I want to work backwards from magic. What is the magical outcome? And then let's work backwards from that. But the key is that you have to, as you, you, you, you, again, you simultaneously have to do two things that kind of seem it in opposition.

The first thing is you have to not limit yourself when you're thinking about the magical outcome. So the objective is to actually think about what the ideal thing is and to not let self-limiting beliefs creep in where you're like, well, we couldn't do that because of X. Or I'm not sure if that will work because of so-and-so. And it's like, no, this is not the time for that. Right now, this is the time for what is the magical, ambitious outcome. Then, after you've determined what that thing is, and you start working backwards, then you have to wrestle with reality. And if you cannot find a path that goes all the way from the magical outcome back to the chair that you're sitting in right now, then it's actually not a good idea because what determines whether something is a good idea is whether you can execute on it. And so if you have an idea that you cannot execute on, it's just a

dream. But if you have an idea that you can actually draw a path from where you are right now, all the way to the magical outcome, then it's a great idea and all you need is patience and consistency. And I think you need both of those. In a way that's actually the problem with goals too, right? Which is that goals are artificially constraining. So when authors tell me that they have a very specific number of copies they wanna sell,

or whatever, that always throws me for a loop because honestly, you should be, I think one aiming higher and you should probably be aiming at something that's not so easily quantifiable. Again, it's like if I told you, James actually, Atomic Habits will sell 5 million copies, but it will be a garbage book that becomes very forgettable.

You know, or James, At topic of it's going to sell twice as many copies, but it will be based on garbage science that doesn't actually work. You wouldn't take that trade at all, right? Like, but, but if I said, James, I don't know how many copies it's going to sell, but it's going to be a classic and it's going to actually work and it's going to actually have impact on people. So in a way, and this obviously the whole point of a goal is it has to be measurable or it's not really a goal. So you almost sidestep that and you focus on magic, as you said, which is nonsense. It's not you can't possibly you can't possibly quantify or explain what

that is, but it's actually a better thing to shoot for because it transcends like I want to win the most, like the person who's like, I want to win three super balls. That's such a, that you just pulled that number out of your ass for no reason. Yeah, why not four? Yeah. There's, there's something, again, there's something like simultaneously, there's this tension between it, but I think both of these things are true, which is you want to work backward from that

magical outcome, but you also, like we're saying a few minutes ago, you need to be flexible about how you get there. And there's, I view this like working backwards from magic as much closer to like vision than it is to goals, which is that setting a goal, you do this weird thing where you try to predict the future, which we all, if you're having an honest conversation, be like, no, that's ridiculous. Nobody can predict the future. But people write down goals like I'm going to lose 30 pounds in six months by working

out four times a week. They try to, you know, make them very specific. And it's like, you have no idea what's going to happen over the next six months. But if you say the magical outcome is, I don't know, I'm in the best shape of my life or I have six pack abs or whatever it is for you, then there are actually many, many ways of getting there. And you just work backwards from that and try to follow a path. And this is getting into more detail on it now. But I also think there should be multiple, multiple pathways to the successful outcome, right? Ideally, you'll be able to draw many paths back from the magical

outcome. And you can start working towards those and whatever one proves most fruitful or whatever one you happen to catch a lucky break on. That's the one that you end up following. Yeah, like for me, I want to be great at being a writer, a husband, and a father. And so those three things are intention with each other in some ways. And I'm not to find like, imagine if I said, I want to be the best-selling author of my generation. Now by making that one very tangible and specific, it's almost certainly going to come at the cost of those other two things. Whereas if you define it a bit more ineffably, it gives you the flexibility

if you actually care about those things, which I think goes to your point earlier. You have to truly love the thing or else you're gonna end up making compromises to make it easier. You wanna be able to find out what is the best combination of your things given the constraints and the reality of what you're talking about.

I recommended this book a couple of times, but there's a new Victor Frankel book. You wouldn't think they found this like last series of lectures, but I read it and I loved it and he was talking about like, obviously he wanted to be like the greatest psychologist of his generation and wanted to be great at it. He didn't think that that would have, you know,

detours through the Holocaust, right? And losing his entire family and all the horror that he went through in his life. But that's what life does. It blows up your plans. And then so he's talking about how you have to, you have to find out what you were meant to do within the guardrails of the stuff that's happened to you? This is circling, or we're kind of like hinting or dancing around what I feel like is a really important point, which is that if you pick any specific domain, so let's take your example of become the best-selling author of your generation. If you pick that, what's really tough about this is, and this is particularly true for anyone who considers themselves to be an ambitious person or to be driven,

we live in a world of seven billion plus people. And when there's seven billion people, you're going to find a few who are willing to sacrifice every other area of their life to work on that one thing, whatever that particular thing is in your domain. And so this is challenging because if you're the type of person who is like, I'm really ambitious, actually, it doesn't excite me to be like, well, I'll just operate

at the 80th percentile. Like I'll just dial it back a little bit. Actually, you're like shooting for, you know, the 98th percentile or whatever. Well, what you end up realizing or coming to discover is that you have to end up playing your own game, you know, like you have to end up defining your own rules. Sort of the way that you did a minute ago where you said, oh, you know, I want to be a great author and a great husband and you know, like you have multiple aspects that end up defining what success is for you.

And you can be all of those things, but you just need to define it in a way that aligns with your particular values. And I think this starts to come back to a lot of goals and status metrics and things that we end up spending our lives shooting for are actually not your goals, even though you set them. They were inherited from something else. They were mimicked from society or copied from, you know, the celebrities of the people

around you or whatever, people that seem to have what you want. But the real work is to become self-aware and to ask yourself questions and revisit those questions again and again around what is important to me, what are my values, what does my ideal day look like, what do I actually care about, who am I when I'm my best self? And when you start to answer those questions and have a more clear answer to what is it do I, that I really want, then you can define your own game rather than getting trapped

into some of these things where, you know, you end up competing with people who are actually playing a different game than you, but you just didn't realize it. Well, the game, the game is rigged, right? Let's say you want to hit the most home runs in the history of baseball, and you find out, oh, certain people are willing to cheat

to accomplish that same goal. And so now your ethics and the goal are in conflict with each other. And this is why I think meditations is such a fascinating book. You have Marcus Ruehl's most, he gets there. He becomes the most powerful man in the world, the thing that a handful of people have ever done,

and he just sort of immediately realizes that it's not that great and it's just a job like anything else. And that it actually wasn't that fun to be Alexander the great or Julius Caesar or any of these things. And so that's the problem is, yeah, you're in competition with people who, for whatever reason, maybe they had a crappy childhood, maybe something in their brain broke, maybe their sociopath or psychopath, who is not operating on, it's like you're you as a somewhat healthy person are subject to gravity and the realities of happiness and meaning. And you're in competition with someone who's not mored by those things. And you're now going to deprive yourself of happiness because they have one more or

10 million more than you. You're never, you're selling out the happiness and contentment and peace you could have now to get this thing that's actually an illusion that the other person's not even enjoying even if it exists. It's kind of circles back to a point you made early on, which is how can we have these internal measures of success rather than external? Because all of the stuff that we're kind of mentioning here is related to measuring yourself relative to someone else. And if instead we can shift back to am I at peace with the effort I gave? Do I

feel like I'm exerting myself or influencing the situation in the way that is satisfying to me, then you don't have to worry about the other stuff. Yeah, like did you do your best? And I think, and because the reality is you'll fail. So that's what I think is interesting to pull this back to Jimmy Carter. Most people think Jimmy Carter wasn't a good president. And I'm still reading a lot about him, so I don't want to make a judgment. But let's say universally we all agree he's not a good president. Well, it's a really hard job. And maybe he, like, the only way you can walk away from failing at that level, not just failing, but failing in public. Many people think he just sucks.

And how do you walk away from a book failing or a presidency failing or a goal? You wanted to lose 30 pounds by March and you only lost 19 and you're mad at yourself. How do you carry on? You have to know that you gave your best. That's the only way. What if your book had come out the day of a terrorist attack

or my book had come out the day of a hurricane and it just all got wiped away and you lost that moment and you just didn't get it. I mean, that happens too. That's why I mean, there can be, it's harder to do it than what I'm about to say, but I do think there can be a simple philosophy that you can carry around, which is just have one good day.

Just have one good day and then repeat it. Like that's all I really was trying to do today, like did I have two good hours of writing, now go get a workout in, I'll play with my kids, and that's a good day. You know, and then like, I can show up again and I can do it tomorrow. And what happens to the project whenever it comes out,

like, I will try to influence that as best I can, but I can't control it. And so instead, if it flops, I'm just gonna wake up tomorrow, I'm gonna try to have a good day again. Did you, I've talked about this too, did you see the movie Palm Springs? No, I haven't seen it. So it's so good. It's the perfect movie to watch during quarantine. But yeah, it's realizing like, oh, I think that's what I've found during the pandemic. It sort of

radically shrinks life as well. So yeah, you're like a good day, followed by a good day, followed by a good day, and they all just blur together. And that's really all life is. Life isn't this place that you have to get or these numbers of things that you have to do. It's really like day to day, is it enjoyable? And how do you, how, it's a little more epicorian than stoke, but sort of how do you get to a place where your day to day is good because the truth is life is made up of days. So why and to go to the James Clear philosophy, why not go to the smallest unit of measurement and try to optimize it? Yeah. I mean, this is the value that habits have, I think, you know, like if you can

figure out good habits for yourself, whether it's writing for two hours or meditating for one minute or doing a push up or whatever, um, then you can start building those into your days and they are likely to become better days because of that. And just by mastering your habits, you can end up reaping a lot of long-term benefits. Not only in results and outcomes and success and all of that, but also just in happiness or feeling like you fulfilled your potential or that you gave your best effort and so on. And I don't remember this if this is in the book, but in the William James thing on habits,

he talks about like no, the, the, the converse of what you just said is also true, which is that no one, he says no one is less happy than the person who doesn't have habits who has to make every choice a new, right? So it's like it, you think that it would be wonderful to be able to do whatever you want every day. But the truth is, it's actually miserable because you're exhausted by all the

choices and all the uncertainty. And you make the wrong choice a bunch of times. And so if you know what you want your data is, then you're like, this is all that I have to do today. And I think it's manageable. There's the, well, there's a scientific argument. First of all, it's just impossible. Your brain is automating things whether you know it or not. Your building habits, either way. But let's set that aside and just talk about the choices that you could make and kind of William James point about, you know, like you don't want to have to make each choice

a new. This is one of the, like, I don't know, sort of a common criticism. But also, I think people are just kind of trying to poke holes or be snarky sometimes that are like, well, I don't want, sort of a common criticism, but also I think people are just kind of trying to poke holes or be snarky sometimes. They're like, well, I don't want to be a robot. I don't want to pigeonhole myself for, you know, like, have every hour of the day planned or do the same thing every single time or whatever.

And like, first of all, just separate from that. I don't know anybody who actually is like that. Like, I don't know anyone who actually can live life that way because life doesn't work that way. Every day, like, introduces other emergencies and things. Like, the idea that you would, it kind of reminds me of a people were like, well, I don't know if I want to lift weights because I don't want to get huge like a body builder. And I'm like, it does not happen that fast. Trust me, I've been trying to make

it happen that fast for like 10 years. And it still doesn't work that quickly. So across that bridge when you come to it. Yeah. Yeah. But the truth is, what you're kind of similar to what you're mentioning, habits don't restrict freedom, they create it. You know, it's usually the people who have the worst habits that actually have the least amount of freedom, right? It's like the people who have the worst like knowledge and reading and learning habits always feel like they're behind the curve.

People who have the worst financial habits always feel like they don't have enough money or they're wondering where the next dollar is going to come from. People will have the worst health and fitness habits, always feel like they don't have enough energy or they aren't quite sure how they can, they feel exhausted, they don't encourage sure how to get it all done. So it's actually by optimizing your habits that you create capacity and space to have that additional autonomy and freedom. You know, like the fact that I wrote for two hours a day makes me feel really good about my productivity

and I can move on with the rest of my day. I don't have to be working every hour because I know that I already got some good stuff done. Now I can, you know, spend the rest of the day the way I want it. And so that's true for many things. You win early and then the rest is extra. Right. Yeah.

I love it. Well, thanks, man. I don't want to take up more of your time. I know we both scheduled an hour, so we'll give it. And then we'll follow our own rules and move on to the next thing. All right, I love it. Thanks Ryan. Appreciate it.

Dude, I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The app goes away. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon

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