Building Atomic Habits

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with James Clear. James is an amazing guy who has an amazing story. He's an author and speaker focused on habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, and on CBS This Morning.

His website receives millions of visitors each month, James clear.com and he's the author of Atomic Habits, based on the accident that nearly took his life. Clear is a regular speaker at fortune 500 companies, and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball. James, thank you so much for doing this.

James Clear: First of all, thank you, and it's nice to be talking with you. We all have challenges that we face in life here. It was the time when I was forced to put into practice many of the ideas that I write about in the book. It was at the time when I had to learn through experience, what it takes to build better habits, and how those small habits can add up and lead to something remarkable in the long run. I was hit in the face with the baseball which led to me having an accident. Shards of glass in my eye socket, multiple burns to my skull and face. I was rushed to the hospital where I couldn’t breath on my own. I had to be placed into a coma overnight. The process of recovering from it was just as long and traumatic as the incident, so I couldn’t drive for eight of the next nine months.

My first physical therapy session, I was just practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line. There was a long fallout from it. Because of facing that injury, I didn’t really have many choices. Like I didn’t have an option to just flip a switch and get better the next day. I couldn’t do some kind of a radical transformation. It wasn’t possible. I had to focus on the small ways to get better each day. Sounds silly now, but I just focused on small habits, like making my bed every day or getting to bed at a reasonable hour each night, or going to the gym consistently. You know, making sure I carved out an hour or two to study and like, be on top of my homework. All of those things were small by themselves. No single thing like, made some radical difference.

As I continued to layer those small improvements on top of each other, I was able to recover from the injury and then ultimately have a career as a college athlete and get back onto the baseball field and up as an academic American. The way that I would summarize it is that it wasn't a legendary story, but I did something perhaps just as important because I fulfilled my potential. And I think that that's really all most of us are hoping for. Whatever the challenges or difficulties that life throws at us, that we’re willing and able to respond to those in a way that at least makes us feel like we made the most of the time we have.

James Clear: That's a period of my life I look back on and think it wasn't ideal, but I was able to make the most of it, largely thanks to these small habits.

Anita Brick: Thanks for that. I’m a big believer of this as well. What is the difference between an action and an atomic habit?

James Clear: An action or behavior could be anything. Be something you do once. Something you do ten times, 100 times. You know the actual definition, the technical definition of a habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to be more or less automatic, so you can do it pretty much without thinking. These are things like tying your shoes, or unplugging the toaster after each use, or brushing your teeth each day. You know, we have all kinds of habits that we form. The distinction that I make, and the reason I chose the phrase atomic habits is for three reasons.

So the first is the meaning of the word. Atomic is tiny or small, like an atom. That is a core piece of my philosophy. Those habits should be small and easy to do. The second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system, atoms built into molecules, molecules built into compounds, and so on. This, I think, is an overlooked piece of building better habits and making positive change. It's really not a single 1% improvement that you're looking for. You're really looking for like a thousand, a million total changes on top of each other.

And then the third and final meaning is the source of immense energy or power. If you combine all three of those meanings, you understand the narrative arc of the book. Which is if you make changes that are small and easy to do and you layer them on top of each other like units in a larger system, then you can end up with some powerful or remarkable results in the long run.

Anita Brick: There were a number of questions. One person said, I love the idea and am a big proponent of incremental action, but it doesn't align with my current situation to find a new job right now. Because of my visa situation, how can I make them work together?

James Clear: It's a good question. So first of all, while habits form a large portion of our life, they aren't everything in life. And so I certainly don't think the answer to every problem that you're facing is to have it make some small improvement. Occasionally, we have big moments in our lives that require a large shift. Having a child or getting married or moving to a new city, or in this case, searching for a job. For those changes you really need strategic decision making. And so the way that I like to think about it, and perhaps this is the answer to this question. Habits are one of the two primary levers that give us good results in life.

The second one is decision making. You can sort of think of it as your decisions create the amount of leverage, or the trajectory that you have. So at any point in time the decision you make is a dotted line extending out in front of you. Imagine, for example, that you're an entrepreneur and you’re thinking about starting a business. You could start a pizza parlor, which might have a certain trajectory, or you could start, say, a software company, which might have another trajectory. Let's say that the software company in this example is just steeper or a higher growth curve than the pizza parlor. So the decision of which business to start sets the amount of leverage, the initial trajectory.

Your habits determine how far you walk along that dotted line along that potential path.

And so it's possible that if you have really killer habits, you could start a pizza parlor and end up with a more successful business than someone who decides to start a software company but doesn't have the habits to execute on that. For any situation, what we're really looking for is a combination of great decisions, great leverage, and great habits to circumstance perhaps are more of a decision making reason or a strategic decision moment, rather than thinking about, okay how do I just keep my head down and focus on getting 1% better each day?

Anita Brick: Well, and it's a good point, because there's no one thing in my opinion, that is an answer to everything, but having really strong habits I believe is super important. In the book you talk about the plateau of latent potential, and I'm asked the question, I feel like I've been living in that plateau in my career since 2008. Any tips or strategies on getting past the plateau sooner rather than later?

James Clear: Great question. So first of all, let's get everybody to speed on this plateau idea. So I like to use the metaphor of an ice cube. So imagine you walk into a room, it's cold. You can see your breath. It's like say 25 degrees. There's an ice cube sitting on the table, and you start to heat the room up 26 degrees, 27, 28 ice cubes still sitting there. 29, 30, 31 then you get to 32 degrees and it is a one degree shift no different than all the other shifts that came before it and suddenly you hit the phase transition. The ice cube starts to melt, yielding better habits and making positive changes and improvements.

It's not exactly like that, but man, it feels like that a lot. You're in there. You're kind of thankful for your work. You're putting your reps in, you're working hard each day and you don't have much to show for it. The key idea here is often we quit at that moment because it feels like, oh, I've been working so hard, like I don't have anything to show for this, but your work was not being wasted. It's just being stored. It's latent potential. And that's why I call it the plateau lean potential. You're putting this effort and you're waiting for it to be released. It's not wasted effort, it’s stored effort. And this is how this particular person feels because they've been putting in all this work and the same job, same career and roll for years now, but they haven't had it released yet.

Whether it's a promotion or higher pay or some kind of breakthrough in the workplace. Of course, the challenge is that we have to ask ourselves, am I dealing with a situation where I'm stuck on this plateau and I'm building up potential or is this something where I gave it a go and I need to, like, give up and move on? The honest answer to that question is that nobody's going to know for sure. And that's part of what makes life challenging. Nobody knows exactly. Should you stick with this business idea? And maybe if you just got down another three months, then you'll cross this threshold and figure it out.

Or should you give up on that business idea and start a new company that takes, of course, a thousand different forms? The best solution that we've found so far is something that's called the explore exploit. Trade off is the basic idea here early on in any process. So say early in your career or so, you have a project and the deadline is six months from now. So maybe like the first month or two of that project, early on in any process you want to explore widely, maybe you try out 3 or 4 different roles over the first five years of your career.

Or maybe you try to attack this project from 5 or 6 different angles, or the first month or two as you get closer to the deadline or deeper into your career, you need to gradually shift from exploring most of the time to exploiting whatever the best solution as you found thus far, and just get some results. You know, maybe you haven't found your ideal career yet after 5 or 10 years, but you've got one that you're pretty good at, and you should probably spend a good amount of your time there. You can start earning good money and moving out of sorts. Maybe you haven't found the perfect way to manage this project that you're dealing with, but we're three months in and it's been three months, so I need to start getting to work with the best idea we've found so far.

So we can get this done on the deadline. The key distinction here, though, and the caveat is that most of the time, top performers never stop exploring entirely. So you see this actually with a lot of really innovative companies, Google, for example, famously has their 20% time rule.They hire people, they come in, they work 80% of their hours on their designated job, and then they have 20% of their time to work on a project of their choice or interest and there have been some really fascinating products that have come out of that, like Gmail and Google AdWords, things that are like the backbone of Google now. But there have also been some spectacular failures that have come out of that, like Google Buzz and Google Waves. It's really only by having that period of exploration that you're able to continue to toy with ideas and find a better solution.

My recommendation to this particular person who you've been in your career for a decade, either you need to be exploring more than you were over the last decade, because if you just kind of like, played it straight and didn't try a bunch of things, didn't expose yourself to a lot of ideas, it's possible that you're stuck simply because you're not exploring enough. Or if you did explore, and this still isn’t the best solution we've found thus far then focus on exporting it. Maybe, say, somewhere between 70 to 90% of your time, getting the advantages and the rewards of that best option you found while still remaining committed to exploring that 10 to 30% of the remainder, so that you can continue to come across new ideas and maybe discover something useful.

Anita Brick: It's a really good point. And there was another alum who wanted to know what is your number one suggestion for improving motivation when you're stuck?

James Clear: So if you're stuck, which way do you go? Do you explore more? Do you exploit more? I think I have a clear answer, but we need to find a stuck in two different ways. The first type of stuck is I don't know what to do. You know, like I'm stuck on what path to take for that. I think the answer is pretty clear: to explore more, because when you're born, you don't come preloaded with any knowledge of the external world. In a sense, the process of living your life as a human is the process of continually exploring more and more widely, or experiencing the world more and more widely.

As your knowledge of the world broadens. As you explore more, you come across new answers. You come across people who do things differently, ideas that you hadn't been exposed to before. And so the key point here is that all knowledge comes from the unknown that comes from exploring. Now, sometimes exploring something you didn't know before, and the results in that reward in something that was useful and valuable. Sometimes exploring the unknown results in danger, which is why we have some resistance to uncertainty, why we feel like, oh, I don't know if I should step into that room, that I don't know anybody or I don't know if I should try this new job where I don't have any skills because we feel uncertain and there's a potential risk and danger associated with that too.

My point is, if you feel stuck. And you don't know what to do next, then exploring is probably the answer. The second kind of stuck though, is not I don't know what to do, it's I don't feel like doing what I know I should do. You feel stuck because you're like, Oh, I know I need to write this report, but I feel like procrastinating, or you feel stuck because you're like, oh,I know exercise is important, but I've been going to the gym for a month and I don't have the results that I want you out. My body doesn't look different in the mirror. So I don't feel like taking action. And that's a different kind of stuck because you don't necessarily. Need more information in those circumstances or you need better habits.

This gets more essentially to some of the concepts that are in the book about how to design an environment where motivation is not needed, where willpower and self-control are redundant. In a sense, I think there are two different types of stuck and they require different strategies to manage them.

Anita Brick: That's a very good point. Self-Identity comes in here too. There was a student. Here's the question. You talk about changing one's identity by changing one's habits. This seems really overwhelming to me. Where do you suggest that a person start?

James Clear: That's a great question. So one way to think about this concept, this link between habits and identity. Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. For example, every morning that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who's clean and organized. The key point here is every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so as you cast those votes, as you take these little actions that support or reinforce being a particular type of person, you are reinforcing, establishing that identity.

Doing it once is not going to transform the way you look at yourself or change your self-image. But as you keep showing up and do it each day, then eventually you turn around and you start to look at yourself a little differently. You start to think, oh, maybe I am that type of person. You don't need to do something radical, something massive for it to be meaningful.

And so I think if you're feeling overwhelmed, like the student is, oh, this idea of changing my identity seems big, we're not talking about, like, ripping your identity in half and becoming a whole new person. Really. It's like retouching a painting. How can I cast a vote for this new portion of myself? And you can do that in a very small way. You know, one pushup, writing one sentence, meditating for 60 seconds, reading one page. All of those are ways to fashion the identity of being a writer, or an exercise, or a mediator or a reader. Once you adopt that identity, then it's going to be more likely that you want to upgrade and expand from there. So you can really start small if you like.

Anita Brick: It's a good point, and it makes me think of another question that another student had, and it seems like her identity is about motion, but not necessarily directed action. And so she's someone who does tons of things. She does get stuck in motion. The word stuck seems to be prevalent here. I’ve been applying to 20 jobs each week, but so far I've had few interviews and no offers. What advice would you have for breaking the habit of motion and making it more directed action?

James Clear: That's a good question. So first of all, just to define motion versus action, I would define motion as doing something that will not by itself get a result, whereas action is something that could deliver the result you're looking for. So for example, going to the gym and talking to a personal trainer is motion. It might be necessary. And sometimes motion, which is often like planning and preparation, is necessary. But it doesn't matter how many times you go to the gym and talk to a personal trainer, it's not going to get you in shape.

Whereas getting under the bar and doing ten squats or doing a bit of exercise, that is action because they could deliver the result you look for. Again, motion sometimes can be useful, but am I spending too much time on motion? And not a ton of action is to simply say that planning is useful until it becomes a form of procrastination. The reason that we slide into motion so easily where we're like, oh, maybe I'll research some more jobs to apply to, or maybe I'll think about my brand, my logo for this business idea that I have, rather than making a sales call, which I would define as action because it could actually lead to a sale and revenue for your company.

It seems intimidating because there's a risk of calling and getting turned down planning, like thinking about our brand first strategy or our logo or something like that. That doesn't really carry any risk with it. And so it's really easy to say, well, I'll do that coming together and making progress. At some point, you'll probably notice I'm sliding into working on this logo as a form of procrastination and avoiding making the sales call, doing the difficult thing.

To the student I would say that applying to jobs is a form of action. Researching jobs I would say, is motion. If you're sending in an application, that's an action that could actually result in getting an interview, it's possible that you're leaning too far toward one side of the scale. And maybe we need to spend a little time revamping the resume, or thinking about which companies you're applying to, or trying to figure out, like a tighter filter for that. That's the way that I'd distinguish between motion and action, is when planning becomes a form of procrastination, you're spending too much time on motion.

Anita Brick: What would seem to me in this situation is the return on the time invested, if you're just applying without having people support you inside the company or other things, you're going into a bit of a rabbit hole. Applying could go either way. It could be action, but for many it's motion is well, I applied for 50 jobs and gotten nothing back. It would seem to me that there'd be a utility factor that would need to be worked in, something that has the potential to yield results.

James Clear: I would say that's a good point. And this comes back a little bit more to what we talked about earlier with exploring exploit trade offs, where okay, we've explored fairly widely now at applying to a lot of jobs. That's probably time to explore another strategy and see if that delivers better results, and then continue that until we come across something that seems to be working well.

Anita Brick: I would agree taking action can be very comforting, but if the utility of the return isn't there, obviously you need to shift. And Allen said, how is it possible to get to a goal if you only work until it doesn't feel like a chore? I really want to understand. I think it would help me a lot, but I'm not sure I quite get it.

James Clear: That's a good question. So, and this is the point I want to distinguish in the book as well. One of the things you need to do to make habits more likely to form is to make them as easy as possible. Convenience is a huge driver of our behavior, and so the more convenient an action is, the more likely you are to format. The convenience leads to the behavior. You can apply this to your good habits by making them easier to do, but the natural response from anybody who's type-A or high achiever, someone like myself, would be, well, what about all this stuff?

In life, when people do really difficult things like climbing Mount Everest or running a marathon, what about important work? It's actually effortful. How do you get to do that? How do you explain people doing that? So our behaviors are a result of convenience. The point is not to only do easy things. The point is to make it as easy as possible to do the thing that pays off in the long run. For example, this year I've taken to a new habit where I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day.

I have a home office, so if I leave it in another room, it's about 45 seconds away. I just got to walk down the stairs. If my phone is right next to me. If I don't take it out of the room, I'm like everybody else. I'll check my phone every 15 seconds. I check it just because it's there. If I put it in another room, I never go down and get it. Even though it's only 45 seconds away. And I think that so many of our habits and behaviors, our routines, are like that. And it sheds a little light on the answer to this question, which is that if you increase the friction of your distractions.

If you make it a little bit less convenient to do those things that soak up your time and a little bit more convenient to do the good thing, like for example, opening up Evernote and writing another article for me rather than checking my phone because it's right next to me on the desk, it becomes evident that I actually did want to write the article, or read a book, or do whatever it was that I had to do that day, but I just needed to, like, remove the mental candy from my environment because it was so easy to do this other thing that was more convenient. Then I find that I respond to every whim and desire that I have, and don't make space for the deeper work.

The answer to this person's question of how or when does it make sense to make something so easy that it doesn't feel like a chore is you want to make the initial action for the thing that pays off in the long term so easy that it doesn't feel like a chore, and you want to make all those distractions and interruptions and things that you slide into your bad or negative or unproductive habits. You want to add friction to those and increase the amount of steps that it takes to get to them, so that when those little desires and cravings arise, there's enough friction to let them pass and you can get back into the deep and important work that you primed and tried to make it easy to start.

Anita Brick: I like that I've done that in different areas of my own life, and sometimes people would laugh because the action that I wanted to take seemed too small, and they thought it would be a waste of time. There wasn't an immediate change, but it was something I could do consistently. I do it to this day and the impact over time has been significant.

You're absolutely right. If you make the thing you want to do as frictionless as possible and make the other stuff hard to do, we're going to gravitate toward that and get. As you put on the cover of your book, remarkable results.

James Clear: I mean, this is why I like to refer to habits as the compound interest, self-improvement, the same way that money multiplies through compound interest. The effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them over time. When you're saving for retirement and putting money away like saving ten bucks or 100 bucks doesn't seem like anything on that day. It's like, well, I can't retire on that and so it's really easy to dismiss it as not being important. It's only ten or 20 or 30 years later that you get them aligned and you start to hit that hockey stick portion of the curve, and the growth really takes off.

I think in the same way that money can surprise you by not feeling like much early on, but turned out to be a lot. As you get down the line, your habits are very similar. If you can make it just a little bit easier to do the right thing and a little bit harder to do the wrong thing each day, whether that's environment, design, or some of the other strategies that we've talked about today. It may not feel like much on any given day, but it can really add up in the long run.

Anita Brick: Okay, so switching gears really just a little bit, a student said, I like the idea of temptation bundling, and yet I haven't been able to apply it to networking to help me make a career change. Where do you think I could start?

James Clear: The idea behind temptation bundling is that you take something you want to do, and you pair it with something you need to do. One good example from a woman. She always had these over to work emails that she did not want to process, but she knew that she needed to. But then she really enjoyed getting a pedicure. And so her rule was, I only get a pedicure if I am processing over two working emails. She bundled her temptation to get a pedicure with the need to process those emails.

So applying it to networking. This is a little bit of an atypical answer because it's not going to be related to anything specific like networking actions like going to this event or going to this conference, or whatever. I have found that the single best networking tactic is to share your ideas publicly. That could be on Twitter, be on a blog, you could start an email newsletter, or whatever, if you share ideas that are important to you and it could be literally for whatever you're trying to do, trying to start a nonprofit. You're trying to create a company. You're trying to network for your particular industry and get a job at marketing or sales or whatever.

You know, let's say that you're trying to get a job doing online marketing. Start an email newsletter about online marketing practices and advertising campaigns and all the stuff that you're going to be spending your day job talking and thinking about as you write that and share it and promote it and spread the word about it, people who are interested in that are naturally going to gravitate toward you. It's like a self-selection mechanism where the people who are in that industry are naturally going to read it. And if your ideas are good, then it's going to become much easier to get to know people in that industry.

And then hopefully, if you start poking around finding jobs and opportunities there, when, once you do that, say for like six months and let's say you have, I don't know, 200 subscribers at that point, people who are just getting this like one free message you sent each week about media and advertising, you could just email each of the 200 people that are on your list who are interested in those topics, and ask if they know anybody in that industry. And that is probably more effective than trying to meet 200 people, Kolbe at a conference or a networking event or something like that, because those 200 people are now in Destiny, or they have some contacts, they get your ideas each week.

They know that you know what you're talking about. To apply temptation by doing something like that, it could be like, I will only get a pedicure if I'm writing my email newsletter for the week, or I will only listen to my favorite podcast. After I have written my email newsletter for the week. What to choose as your temptation. Bundle differs significantly based on the particular behavior you're trying to perform. Because you know not everything will make sense to do while you're getting a pedicure or while you're on the treadmill, at the gym, and so on. The first step is to identify what is the specific behavior that's useful for you to do, and then figure out what pairs nicely with that.

Anita Brick: I like that kind of a little bit of reward going into the thing that may not be as much fun to do. For most people. It works very, very well. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

James Clear: Yeah, absolutely.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. You talk about talent and the right context, and I want to ask the question. You said you talk about having talent or genes and the right context. How do you advise others to choose a field that matches their talent and is the right context?

James Clear: Yeah, that's the million dollar question. I don't think that we have good answers to it right now. This question is in reference to the chapter that I wrote about genes and behavior, genes and personality influence, the habits we build and the success that we have with them. This is a topic that I think is fairly new, and I haven't seen other books explore it yet, partially because the science is kind of on the cusp right now. We definitely have some indication that there is a biological underpinning to our personality, and that those personality traits influence the type of habits we can build, but we don't know quite enough to be able to predict it or be super precise about it. That's a challenge that we're facing.

I do think that there is a lot of truth to this idea that your level of success is contingent upon how well your traits, your strengths, your talents match the particular context that you're in. So, for example, people often don't like to talk about genes because it feels like, oh, it's text. You know, like, why bother if it's all just predetermined or whatever? But I think that's actually the wrong lesson to take away from genetics. Take, for example, someone who is seven foot tall on a basketball court. That is a really valuable set of genes to have that gives you this huge fixed advantage, but if you're trying to be a gymnast and you're on the balance beam, that’s a very bad set of genes to have.

Very unproductive. Whether or not your genes are useful or valuable is highly dependent on the context and the key is to get that environmental matching problem right, to find the right context for your particular traits. It's more obvious for physical characteristics like being seven feet tall because we can see them. It's less obvious for psychological characteristics. We know that those psychological traits have a genetic underpinning as well, but we're not quite as sure how to apply them or how to link that up with your environment. I think that the best solution I can offer, until we have deeper insight into how this works, and which psychological traits do have genetic underpinning, and which are factors that are you know, of the environment, is that you can try to layer your skills.

Scott Adams, who's the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic, he gives the example of. He worked in management for a long time, so he had a business context, business background. He was like, I'm not the best draw, but I can draw better than most people. And I'm not as funny as the stand up comedian, but I'm funnier than most people and so if you layer those three things together, that I can draw fairly well. I'm fairly funny. And I have a background in management and business. There's the origin of Dilbert. That's the layering of those three skills.

He would probably say he wasn't in the top 10% for any of those. He probably was in the top like 20%, 25%. So he's above average but not great. And usually people feel like, oh, well, this is a reason to give up. I haven't found my ideal context yet, but if you can combine a couple areas where you're above average, all of a sudden you make yourself look elite because it's very hard to replicate the layering of those different skills until we have a deeper and more precise scientific answer. The best strategy to follow is what are the 2 or 3 things I'm good at that kind of overlap on that Venn diagram and what's something that you know is in the center of those 2 or 3 that I can apply?

Anita Brick: I like that, you know, there is a bit of experimentation around this too.

James Clear: Certainly. I think my favorite example recently has been the Broadway musical Hamilton, which is this amazing combination of this historical story that very easily could have been a Broadway play, but a traditional one, and hip hop and rap music, which doesn't seem like it matches with Broadway at all. By experimenting enough, Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to find this perfect overlap and create something even more remarkable than the traditional stuff in either field. Often you'll find that you need to experiment a little bit to find the right areas of overlap. So when you get a really mutually beneficial overlap, the results can be even better than what you'd expected.

Anita Brick: Good point. He's given us a lot to think about. The book is fantastic. I highly, highly recommend it. Very very practical. It looks at the big picture, but it really gets down to the nitty gritty, which I like a lot. If you think about it, what are three things that a person could do today to build powerful and effective atomic habits?

James Clear: Good question. So I think if I had to pick one place to start, I would suggest people use the two minute rule. The two minute rule basically says take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to just the first two minutes. So read 30 books here becomes one page, or do yoga four days a week becomes take out your yoga mat. You scale it down to something you can do in two minutes or less. The reason that's a key place to start is that a habit must be established before it can be improved.

So often we're focused on coming up with the best business idea, or the perfect workout program, or the ideal strength training program, and we get all wrapped up in this idea of perfection and ambition and what we want to achieve we don't do the most fundamental thing, which is master the art of showing up. Become the type of person who shows up each day. And so by scaling down to just the first two minutes, you can make sure that you foster that identity and become that type of person who shows up.

And once you do that, then you can expand and improve from there. So that's my first suggestion is two minute rule and then two other real quick ones. The second one doesn't work for everybody, and I don't recommend it in every circumstance. But for a habit that's important to you, have a tracking can be really valuable. The simplest form is just to put an X on the calendar for each day that you do. The habit measurement does a couple of things, like one, it's going to remind you to do it because you wake up and see that calendar each day. Secondly, there's this adverse effect of motivation. And, you know, it feels good to see, oh, I've done this four days in a row now I, you know, I need to keep the streak going.

And then finally it adds a little bit of satisfaction to your habit. It just feels good to track something and write down, you know, cross off another day of notating or writing 500 words or going to the gym or whatever it is. That can be a useful strategy as well. The third and final strategy is to make the cues, the triggers of your good habits, as obvious as possible. When I wanted to build the habit of flossing, I realized that one reason I didn't floss is because it was tucked away in the bathroom door, and so I just wouldn't see it half the time. And so I got a little bowl, and I put it on the counter right next to the toothbrush for the floss in the bowl, and then brush my teeth, put the toothbrush down, pick the floss up, do it right there. And all I really needed to do was to change the environment, to make that cue really obvious and available and visible.

Many of your habits, if you make those cues obvious if you scale it down to be just two minutes, and then if you need help staying on track, if you start to track your habits on a calendar or writing them down, you'll find that those three strategies are a good way to keep it simple. Prime the environment for you to be successful and give yourself a reason to stay on track in the long run.

Anita Brick: I like it. Even your ideas are easy and simple to start. And then once you start and create some momentum around it, then you can always tweak it. Thank you. Very, very helpful. Especially you mentioned eight personalities. Are overachievers. Want to do everything all at once and that can be a source of defeat before you even start. So I like that this is so progressive and thank you for sharing this with us.

James Clear: Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with me. I appreciate it.

Anita Brick: Of course, again you can go to James' site which is Jamesclear.com. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.