The Daily Stoic - Reminders From James Clear on How To Get 1% Better Every Day

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Kick off 2025 on the right note by revisiting James Clear’s first interview from 2021, one of the most popular episodes of The Daily Stoic Podcast. In this conversation, James and Ryan discuss the balance between identity and results, the importance of staying consistent with habits amid disruption, and how to craft a lifestyle that reflects your core values and priorities.James Clear is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Atomic Habits, as well as a world-renowned speaker. You can listen or watch James Clear’s first interview on The Daily Stoic Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube. Listen to James Clear’s most recent interview: Apple Podcasts & Spotify🎥 Watch this episode on YouTube Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge | 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day.Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.📚Pick up a copy of Atomic Habits by James Clear at The Painted PorchJoin the 3 million people who subscribe to James’ newsletter: The 3-2-1 NewsletterFollow James Clear on Instagram and X: @JamesClear🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. 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 lives. Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Happy New Year's Day, everyone. I celebrated my New Year's Day with a plunge into the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn't warm. Can't exactly call it a cold plunge. I'm not at my house. I don't have my cold plunge with me,

so I'm not doing what I normally do. But for the last couple of years, I've done this. I've run out there. Now I bring my kids with me and we all plunge in to the golf. It's, I don't know, probably 65, maybe. But it's wonderful. It wakes you up and it's the doing the hard thing that I get every time I do

an uncomfortable challenging thing. I'm building that muscle. That's how I think about it. I don't know if a cold punch has any benefits, but I get a benefit out of that. Doing the thing that I'm going to be glad I did after when I get out and get warm, but pushing myself to do it, that's the challenge. That's the good part. That's why Seneca did it. We've told this story a million times, but Seneca plunged himself into the Tiber River, the first of every year. And that's also how we start off the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. By the way, this is like your absolute last chance to sign up for it, dailystoic.com slash challenge. You've already basically

procrastinated too long, but we'll make an exception for you if you want to sign up. Illustratively, today is often the biggest day of signups because people wait until the last minute to do things. I get it, it's human, but I look at the stats and I go, hmm, how am I like this? Instead of judging, I'm going, how am I like this? Where are things where I'm like, I want to do this thing. I heard about it, I'm thinking about it, but I'll do it later. And then I tend not to get around to it later or I have to scramble at the very last minute. And that's always a shame.

So we're starting the year off with a challenge, at least in the holiday household. And then thousands of stoics all over the world are starting with the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year challenge, 21 days of stoic challenges, just like that. Live Q&As with me, a bunch of other awesome stuff, dailystoic.com slash challenge,

or click the link in the show notes. Now, for today's episode, I ran James Clear a couple of weeks back. He and I did a little quick chat on resolutions and New Year and all that kind of stuff. And the episode was a little short. And so I was gonna grab something from his episode that we recorded a couple of years back, remotely,

during the pandemic. And I was like, oh, I'll just add a little bit on there. So we were listening to it and we were like, you know what? I'd rather run one short episode and then just run this whole episode again, because it's so good. It's far and away the most popular episode of the Daily Stoke podcast we've ever done. It's James and away the most popular episode of the Daily Stoke podcast we've ever done

It's James and I back in 2021 talking about how you get 1% better each day Which is itself I think kind of a mindset breakthrough a way to think about who you're going to be in 2025 you can watch this episode on YouTube. It's been up for a long time. You can watch his new episode on YouTube I'll put that link in the show notes and listen to his other episode or just listen to this one right now because it's really good. And he's got a bunch of tips for starting the new year off right. And I hope to see you in the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. If you haven't read Atomic Habits, great book to start the year off with. Sign up for his newsletter, which goes out every Thursday.

I've been getting it since it started. And he's a great guy, great thinker, always happy to share his thoughts on the Daily Stoke podcast. Enjoy. 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 challenge thing for Daily Stoic and, and it's 21 days. And it's like, you know, the first, the first email, it's like a hundred percent open rate. And the next one, it's like 90, then 80. And by the end, something that people paid for, you know, they're at like 40% open rates after three weeks. So it's, it's amazing to me how we, it's like how we start out with really clear intentions, but we can't follow through. Yeah, it's so common, so true. I've had this happen to me many times. It's all kind of immune

to the phenomenon. We all get excited and amped up about things early on and then it comes time 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. This is one of the central things I talk about in Atomic Habits, this 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 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 wanna have or start with the lifestyle that you wanna live. And then start doing small habits that reinforce that identity rather than just being like, oh, I'm gonna lose 40 pounds. And then when that doesn't happen in three weeks, you inevitably feel 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 get that result. When really, when 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. It's doing the thing versus focusing on the outcome.

This is one of the 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, I'm a writer, you're not 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 hear Bill Belichick or someone talk about the process and you're like, but you've won the most games out of anyone or in Zen and the Art of Archery, he talks about put the target out of your mind. 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.

You know, like if you actually care about getting the result, which supposedly is what we all are doing this for the archers trying to hit the bullseye, the football players trying to win the championship and so on, supposedly results matter so much and 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,

or twice you're good. 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, 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 this process comes in Marks really talks about this because like sanity is tying your happiness to your own actions. You know, like if your goal on your book, it like you can't really have a system that guarantees you too much of the external results. Like you can't have a system that is going to make your book a number one New York Times of Seller. 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. If you're playing someone in tennis,

you can influence the outcome. You can't control how they play or where they should hit their shots or whatever. Then you have things that you're fully under your control, what you choose to wear today or whatever. Um, 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 of 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, you know, then we'll see what happens. And, you know, there's always something more you could have done, but I'm at peace with the effort I gave, you know?

And I feel like that's, that was probably the most important thing for me. And then the fact that it has worked out well, you know, just makes it all feel much better afterward. Yeah, that's that's the extra. But I mean, imagine if you'd gotten the results, but you knew that it wasn't as like, you know, like, that's, 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 because success is nice.

There's something about the struggle that makes the outcome more enjoyable. Like I think about, imagine if you had spent 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 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 winning field goal in 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 of your 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 going to 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. 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 these are these notoriously like insane interviews. He was like a really difficult guy to please.

And so he's asking Jimmy Carter about all his accomplishments. And he goes, you know, how did you do in your class at the Naval Academy? And he says, oh, I was 59th in my class of 400, which is extremely difficult. And he said, how did you do on this posting? And he goes through and he's like sort of beaming listing all his accomplishments. And Rick overlooks at him and he just goes, did you always do your best? And him and he just goes, did you always do your best? And he was like, he was going to be like, yes, you know, look at all my accomplishments. And then 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 he 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, fantastic. That'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 what is the number on the scale relative to the other people in 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. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announce they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger

along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondry+. You can join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. Well, it's funny cause both our mutual friend, Mark Manson, and I use this, the story of Dave Mustaine in our, I did an Ego's 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 not an accomplishment. And it's like, so many people would kill to have sold the amount of books that you've sold. But then you, so you can,

and if I had 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's sold one more than you. And that's like the shitty thing we do to ourselves. I don't know why we do that. You that's like the shitty thing we do to ourselves. I don't know why we do that. You know, like I've fallen into that

just as much as everybody else. You could get like, whatever your current level of output is or success is, that becomes your new baseline. And then you just look at whoever is slightly above that. And then you feel the way you did before. And it's like, you need to remind yourself when you wanted what you currently have. You know, like there are so many things about my current lifestyle that I've 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. 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- 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.

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 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 figure out what makes you happy is what make, if you're a goal-oriented writer, chances are you're only gonna 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 like 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 are to 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. There are all kinds of things that I like have to say no to now that would have been like the coolest thing

that had 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 to this cool conference. I get to speak at this thing. I get to 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 gonna be driven by signing the deal or are you gonna be driven by, I like the lifestyle of 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 do I want my days to look 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, that is a failure, not a success. No, I've written about this a bunch of times. It's a design your perfect day and reverse engineer your choices from there. And the other one is like, 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 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. It meant I leisurely read and ate lunch before I was talking to you.

I can leave the office whenever I want. I could 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 pair them together because they seem like these like all two sides of the same coin or whatever, but they're actually very different. Like no is a decision. You say no to to something 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

like already and also like no is sort of like a form of a credit, you know, like 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 is 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 in 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, I, 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

is 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. 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 manage to go to the bathroom during the day. I still seem to find time to watch television. It's like, who ends up cashing this check?

find time to watch television, it's like, who ends up cashing this check or, you know, 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, 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 30pm. Let's say now my whole fucking day from the beginning, it 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 wanna do to begin with.

Yeah, not only are you 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 like when you say yes to 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 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. So there's, yeah, I think the punchline here is 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 is it's you're saying yes with the and you're paying the highest price. So like, when you 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 Seneca talks 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 to 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, 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, you know, just a little bit of time. I'd rather like I'll use this time to, you know, 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 wanna 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 was 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 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 running so hard and to get back into a more patterned daily lifestyle. This is something my readers have talked about a lot and that I've talked about it, speeches and so on. It's 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, your living room at 7 a.m. is where you meditate or your, you know, kitchen at 3 p.m. is where you do the bills or whatever. Like things get any kind of habitual action tends to get tied to the context it 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. 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 and 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 felt like it's like, I write every day, but when I'm traveling, maybe I'm only 70% effective. This is something I realized 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, you're 70% as good as what you're, let's say, when you travel, you're not in your normal routine, you're 70% as 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 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 results. 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, 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, it just corresponding adjustments and you may actually end up in a better spot. Yeah. Workouts are a good example for me with that. Like if I'm at home, I train, you know, with weights and a gym and a squat rack and all that, you know, I am. Workouts are a good example for me with that. Like if I'm at home, I train, you know, with weights and a gym and 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 body weight workouts in hotel rooms and you know, like just doing things in a suboptimal way. And so, yeah, all those 70% days, you know, 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 and 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. 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 that, and I think about that as someone who's

who's into habits and into routines is, 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 your wildlife is crazy is actually really good practice. And you don't wanna 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 renting a house on the beach. Like, of course everyone can be good there.

Can you, 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 Daode Qing and 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 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, Daria Rose has a good concept that 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. 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 if it's suboptimal. Yeah, I talked about Russell Westbrook in Stillness. He's this guy who has insane habits, routines, rituals,

and then he gets traded twice in two years. He had a parking spot, he had a chapel, he had a trainer who made him the same thing every day. 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 curve balls. 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 detailed add to that. I always thought this was a good example. In the art of learning, Josh Wadeskin talks about how he took his, so he 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 pregame routine or whatever. And gradually over the course of a few years, he started paring it down and compressing it 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. 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 the state of flow and perform at a high level, even if things aren't optimal. And so it's nice to be able to not rely, you know,

I think about like the what Russell Westbrook example, I don't know what his routine is, but I'm like, man, 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? Like 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 as what's there's that 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 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 Atomic Habits, 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 like there was. It was just this 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 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 just 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 costs with any creative work, but short enough that I finished 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 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 it for I would point that out, because lots of people who are thinking about doing their first book or thinking about some project for like, I can't dedicate myself totally to do something. But it's like, it's, it's not impossible to carve out two hours, that's waking up an hour earlier, and, you know, 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, you know, what you think goes into being an NFL player. So it's not as insane as you think it is. Yeah. And, you know, that's just what works for me. Like people can find whatever is sustainable for them. But that was the frame I had was like, what can I actually sustain? And, you know, Atomic Habits was easily 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 or 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 upfront. You have to do the reading, the research, the writing,

prepare the marketing plan, record a bunch of interviews. 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 sent all the books out front. Before you single I've sold even a single copy. Everything is all that work is stacked up fronts, all delayed 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 can be a draining thing if you're not in the right mindset. And so 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 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 10 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 guess I'll recommend it just because it works for me. I don't know if it'll work for everybody, but find 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 there would, they found this like lost series of lectures, but I read and I loved it.

And he was talking about like, obviously he wanted to be like the greatest psychologist of his generation. He 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 bestselling author of your generation.

If you pick that, what's really tough about this, and this is particularly true for anyone who considers themselves to be an ambitious person or, you know, to be driven. We live in a world of seven billion plus people, and when there are 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, the people around you set them, they were inherited from something else. They were mimicked from society or copied from, you know, the celebrities or the people around you or whatever, people that seem

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 that I really want, then you can define your own game rather than getting trapped into some of these things where 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 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 Ruiz, 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 they're a sociopath or a psychopath who is not operating on, it's like you,

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 moored 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 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. Which 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 and are 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 there, cause 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 he, 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 can how do you walk away from a book failing or a president's presidency failing or, or a goal? Uh, you know, you wanted to lose 30 pounds by March and you know, you, you only lost 19 and, and, 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. You know, like did I have two good hours of writing now I'll 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. 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 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 have this a little more epicurean than stoic, but

sort of how do you get to a place where, uh, 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? Yep. 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, 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 if this is in the book, but in the William James thing on habits, he talks about like 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 new. Right? So it's like, you'd 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 it's manageable. There's, well, there's a scientific argument.

First of all, it's just impossible. Your brain is automating things, whether you know it or not. You're building habits either way. But let's set that aside and just talk about like 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 anew.

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 each choice anew. This is one of the like, I don't know, because it's 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 want to pigeonhole myself or, 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 what people were like, well, I don't know if I want to lift weights

because I don't want to get huge like a bodybuilder. 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- And cross 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 knowledge and reading and learning habits always feel like they're behind the curve. People 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 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 aren't quite 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. And like I said, last chance to sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. Should have signed up at the beginning of the episode. You waited even till the end. Dailystoic.com slash challenge. Join me and thousands of other stoics all over the world doing the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, Dailystoic.com slash challenge. I'll see you in there.

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