Best Ways to Build Better Habits & Break Bad Ones | James Clear

Habits are solutions to the recurring problems in our environment. Let's say you get done with a long day of work. You come back, you're kind of exhausted. That happens, you know, frequently. It's a recurring problem that you face. How do you solve that problem? One person might solve it by going for a run for 30 minutes. Another person might solve it by playing video games for 30 minutes. Another person might solve it by smoking a cigarette. They all are trying to solve that same core problem. What you find is that, you know, you get to be 20 or 25 or 28. And a lot of the solutions that you have to these recurring problems that you face are solutions that you inherited or that you saw modeled by your parents or your friends or just, you know, whatever you have interfaced with throughout your short life so far. As soon as you realize that your solutions may not be the best solution, it's now your responsibility to try to figure out a different way to do it. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is James Clear. James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits and one of the world's foremost experts on how to build rocksolid habits that better your physical and mental health, work, and relationships. Today we discuss how to build a habit and how to break bad habits as fast and durably as possible. You'll notice that today's conversation is a very realistic one and it's largely devoid of cliche acronyms such as make it specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. There is some of that discussion and acronyms are useful, but as you'll learn today from James, the real world examples of how to make and break habits are what really stick with you and that you can apply. No one has spent more time on the data related to habit formation and bad habit breaking than James Clear. Today you also get to know him as a person and how he implemented what he has learned so effectively even as the backdrop of his life has shifted to include more not fewer work and family responsibilities. Now we all have things that we know we can and should do more of and things that we should do less of. And we all know that behavioral change starts with a desire to change. But as James Clear explains, it requires a system, one that works for you and that you design in order for it to really stick. Thanks to James' incredible depth of knowledge, generosity, and clarity of communication, today's conversation about habit formation is filled with useful tools that you can apply to improve your life. So, if you have a habit, or perhaps many habits that you're hoping to form, or if you have bad habits that you want to break, not just for the new year, but at any point, today's conversation is absolutely for you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with James Clear. James Clear, welcome. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Your book is everywhere and now I get to actually meet the person uh behind it. So, I'm curious when people come to you or when they read your book looking for ways to develop habits or presumably also to end bad habits. Is there a common theme? For instance, um do most people have difficulty dropping bad habits, building new habits? Are there specific types of habits that people want to build? I mean, when you just sort of step back from everything you've heard and read about your book and in interactions with your audience. Sure. Uh yeah, I think there are some themes like there are definitely habits that are very common and broad that you know range across seems like everybody. The most common New Year's resolution for example is to do some form of exercise. So there's obviously a huge bucket of health and fitness habits that most people many people are very interested in. Um lots of things like productivity habits at work or creativity habits, writing, you know, music, painting, whatever things like that. So there there are these big categories. I think what's more interesting though is to look at what are the themes that help habits stick and help habits fail or cause habits to fail. And um there are definitely some patterns there which are interesting. For example, I was working out the other day and I was talking to my trainer and he said um yeah, I have this class this morning and uh there were eight people signed up but it was a pretty gross day. It was like wet and rainy. It was gray. It was just kind of like cold and gross and only two people came. And um the interesting thing about that to me is how little of an edge you need to like gain an advantage. You know, like really all we're talking about there is are you cool with being uncomfortable or inconvenienced for like 5 to 10 minutes while you're getting ready and getting in your car and it's raining and it's kind of gross. Once you get to the gym, the workout's the same as it's always been, right? It's like the same as it is in the middle of the summer. Um and so it's really about that little point of friction at the beginning and that I think if I could pick a single biggest lesson that has come out from all the readers. It is the magic and the importance of starting um mastering that five minute window or sometimes even like that 30 second window of choosing to start and making it easy to start. That I would say is the single biggest theme of habits. And in fact a lot of the time you can boil almost all problems that habits face into two categories. It's either making it easier to get started, so overcoming procrastination, or it's sticking with it. I'm not I did it once or twice, but I'm not consistent. But what does it mean to stick with something? It almost always just means that you get started each time you try to do it. And so, you could ultimately revert it all back to mastering the art of getting started. And the easier that you can make it to get started, whether it's scaling a habit down, optimizing the environment, coming up with a better strategy, looping other people in, there's all kinds of things you can do, the more that you can do that, the more likely you are to succeed. Looking back on, you know, now Atomic Habits sold 25 million copies. I'd say that's maybe the biggest lesson that I have is that uh the people who make it easy to get started and who master the art of getting started tend to stick with it and succeed. And the people who make it hard to get started, big up dream up a big ambitious plan in their head, you know, try to do too much at once, they set themselves up to fail. So in terms of getting started, I imagine trying to create, you know, a very thin edge of the wedge, so to speak, you know, so that the on-ramping to something is very very easy. And uh I suppose that could be done by a number of different approaches. you can um you know segment out whatever it is the the habit or task that you want to do like you're going to write one word or one sentence or one letter. There's that approach. There's also the approach of trying to find the times of day or the environments where the wedge becomes uh present as opposed to being a big step, right? Um I suppose there's no oneizefits-all, but what are some of the ways to quote unquote get started? Because I think there's something incredible and somewhat depressing about the human brain where we can know something. We can know it so well that we can just think about it and loop on it and loop on it and watch ourselves fail to do the thing that we're trying to do. It's kind of an incredible flaw [clears throat] of human nature. Yeah. Um and basically what you teach is how to overcome that flaw. So a simple question, what are easy ways to get started? Um in a way all of atomic habits is an answer to that question. It's like we could maybe this will be the next two hours is us kind of unpacking this in greater detail. But from a real high level, there are kind of four things that you want to do if you want to get a habit to stick. So I call it the four laws of behavior change, but you want to make your habit obvious. So this is about making it visual or easy to see, easy to notice. It doesn't have to be vision, but that's often the sensory perception that you use the most. Um, make it obvious. The second is to make it attractive. So the more fun or attractive or appealing a habit is, the more likely you are to perform it. The third thing is you want to make it easy. So the easier, more convenient, frictionless. This can be about scaling your habits down and simplifying, reducing the number of steps. And then the fourth thing is you want to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is, the more you have this like feeling of pleasure, reward, or positive emotion associated with it, the more you're going to want to repeat it in the future. So those are the four steps. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. There are many ways to do each of those things. And um my approach is not to prescribe, but to empower, you know, like I I don't really feel like there is one way to build better habits. There are many ways. And my job is to lay all the tools out on the table and say, "Here, here's a full toolkit." And then you can decide, do I use the screwdriver or do I use the wrench or do I use the hammer? Like what's best for this situation? Um, so to just to build on one of those, for example, let's take make it obvious, a lot of that's about priming your environment to make the action easy. You know, I think one interesting thing you can do, walk into most of the spaces where you spend your time each day, your office, your living room, your kitchen, and look around and ask yourself, what behaviors are obvious here? What behaviors are easy here? What is this space designed to encourage? And you'll often find that it's encouraging the thing that maybe you don't want to do or it's at least not encouraging the good habit that you say is a priority. And so there are all sorts of steps you can take. You know, if you want to make it easier to go for a run, set your running shoes and your running clothes out the night before. I have a couple readers who actually sleep in their running clothes and then just get up, put their shoes on, and get out the door. Right? They're trying to make it as obvious and as frictionless as possible. If you want to eat the good food or the healthy food, you know, place place the nuts on the counter rather than the chips or something like that, right? It's just like what is the obvious thing that's present? I had one guy who um he would go to his music lesson and practice with guitar with his instructor each week and then he would get a bunch of homework to do these chords and scales and things to practice and then he would come home and put his guitar in the guitar case and stuck it stick it in the closet and then he'd go back to you know uh practice the next week and they'd be like you aren't doing any of this. And so he bought a little stand and put it on the uh the guitar on the stand in the middle of the living room and now he passes it 30 times a day. And so he's much more likely to pick it up and play it for 5 minutes. And so there's just like this gradual progression of how can you make the things in your life that you want more of more obvious to you. Um and that is just one of many ways to make starting easier. Glucose is a key player in how our body functions, not just in the long term, but in every moment of our lives. 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More than 1 million people already trust Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth with confidence. If you'd like to try Wealthfront, go to wealthfront.com/huberman to receive the boosted APY offer and start earning 3.9% variable APY today. That's wealthfront.com/huberman to get started. This is a paid testimonial of Wealthfront. Client experiences will vary. Wealthfront brokerage is not a bank. The base APY is as of December 19th, 2025 and is subject to change. For more information, please see the episode description. Yeah, environment to me is so critical and so overlooked. You know, I heard online at one point from a a great writer, I won't mention who they are, that, you know, it's really important to have a very comfortable chair to write in because writing for long hours is hard on your body and this kind of thing. And then Steven Presfield, author of The War of Art, sat in the exact chair you're sitting in right now and he said, "Oh, no, you want kind of an uncomfortable chair." So, it's like kind of painful. Now, he's a former Marine uh and it's wrote a book called The War of Art after all. But I sort of veer towards Steven's approach. Like if if a room is too comfortable, if a couch is too comfortable, it favors, you know, lounging and it favors thinking about things that maybe are fun to think about or, you know, but not not really getting the work done. Not that you need to sit on a, you know, a rock or something like that, but some of my best writing and work was done on planes where I got stuck in the middle seat and was kind of pissed off about it. Yeah. And I could use that energy of being kind of pissed off. I'm like, I'm going to get this done, right? I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to lose lose by not getting work done. Whereas, I think had I been in first class and like stretched out and everything perfect, then sometimes that perfection lends itself to just kind of leaning into the the creature comforts of that. Well, first of all, it's a good mental shift by you, right? Like take a suboptimal situation. How do I channel this into something I can use? That's a that's a great skill for life. Um, people ask me something like this a lot. You know, what is your writing routine? What are your writing habits? What does it look like? And um the truth, if I'm being honest about it, is I've had tons of different writing routines. I wrote parts of Atomic Habits on my parents couch when I was visiting them for the holidays. I wrote parts of it in the passenger seat of a car while we were on a road trip. I wrote a lot of it at my desk, you know, but there's no one place where it happened. And um I think that it also reveals an important truth about habits which is that there's this kind of implicit assumption that we don't really say but a lot of people think when they think what would it look like to be successful with this habit. They think well I would just do it for the rest of my life is basically what they kind of assume and if it changes or they stop doing it then they kind of feel like that's a failure in some way. I I don't think it's like that at all. Um, habits can have a season, you know, and you you have different seasons in your life. And I think one really interesting question to ask is, what season am I in right now and you will find that as your seasons change, your habits often need to change as well? So, for example, uh, for the first three years that I wrote, I wrote jamesclear.com and I published a new article every Monday and Thursday and they were like 2,000word pieces, took me like about 20 hours each on average. So, you know, that's 40-hour work week. I'm putting in two two pieces a week for three years. And that was how I built my audience and got the book deal that eventually became Atomic Habits. Then I signed the book deal. Well, I don't have capacity now to write those articles. So, I had to change my strategy. Most of my writing was going into writing the book. I did that for like 3 years. The book came out and then now the last 5 years I've been writing a newsletter once a week that takes me about two hours instead of 20. Um, so it's a much different form, but you know, three million people read that newsletter every week. They get a lot of value out of it. And I guess my point is if you look at my writing habit and you say, "Well, you wrote two articles a week for three years. What happened in the fourth year?" If I would have felt like, "Oh, well, I don't do that anymore, so it's a failure." That seems kind of silly to me. You know, like I've been writing, it's just been changing shape based on the season that I've been in. And I found that with lots of other habits, too. You know, my fitness habits have changed a lot over the last 20 years. I had periods where I was going heavy, like powerlifting or Olympic lifting style, and I would train four or five days a week. I had periods and pockets where I was only lifting twice a week. Um, now it's four days. It just, you know, it shifts depending on the season that you're in. And so, I think people need to give themselves more permission for their habits to adjust rather than to feel like, well, if I don't stick to this, then I'm not sticking to my habit. I I feel like that uh flexibility is a big component in long-term success. There's this story that mental toughness is something that's like, I'm going to make it happen no matter what the circumstances, right? like I'm going to grind and make sure that this is, you know, I'm going to persevere. And there's a place for that type of thinking. But um I think really most of the time mental toughness looks more like adaptability. Consistency is adaptability. Don't have enough time, do the short version. Don't have enough energy, do the easy version. Find a way to show up and not put up a zero for that day because doing something is almost always infinitely better than doing nothing. And so eventually what you get to here is realizing that in a lot of ways the bad days are more important than the good days. You know, it's actually the bad workouts, the ones where I don't really feel like doing much or I don't have much time, but I get in there and I just do like a couple sets of squats and then I'm done in 20 minutes. That day counts for more because I showed up and I didn't put up a zero than the days when I got a ton of time and do a full workout. And so people get real excited and amped up about their habits. They, you know, they want to come up with this like perfect version. what could I do? You know, if I achieved peak performance, what would that look like? What could I do on my best day? But instead, I think it's often better to ask like, what could I stick to even on the bad days? And that becomes your baseline. That's where you start from. And then on the good days, great, you got capacity, go ahead and ramp it up. But what can you stick to even on the bad days, I think, is a good place to start. Yeah. I more and more think that one of the dangers of quoteunquote optimization which in my view is also a a poorly understood term. I think optimization is optimization for the moment in the day or the hour, not some perfect ideal. But one of the one of the downsides to the availability of like over-the-counter stimulants and energy drinks and um tutorials of how to focus, many of which I, you know, talk about online and elsewhere, is that most people who are in some sort of pursuit, writing or school or otherwise, experience the the the perfect flow, quote unquote, or groove of being really in the zone. and then they're always chasing that and anything that's below that feels like it wasn't worthwhile. But I really like the way that you frame that, you know, getting something in on the days when you're less than optimal or far less than optimal is actually where you change yourself in a way that makes those optimal days more available. That's what that's what I'm hearing that playing hurt teaches you how to play play well under great conditions or play even better under great conditions. Consistency enlarges ability, right? And so by being more consistent, you enlarge your capacity to handle more. You enlarge your ability and broaden your skill set. You build your base of strength to handle the harder thing later. To be consistent means you show up on the days when it's not perfect. Um, in many ways, I I feel like that's the only place that you gain an edge. You know, the easy days, everybody works out on the easy days. Everybody does it when they feel good. Everybody does it when they have time and energy and capacity. It's who is doing it when it's not optimal. That's the only place that you gain separation. And so figuring out ways to show up even when the circumstances aren't ideal, even if it is less than you ultimately hope to do, ends up being a real a real win. What you just said, I think, is so so critical that people hear that, you know, there's a perfect state that they're pursuing or that it takes 50 days to develop a habit or 29 days. We could explore that. uh that that whole thing uh has its own discussion, but I think it's so important for people to understand that the consistency piece raises the ceiling. I've actually never heard it stated that clearly. Um and it's great that that you presented it that way because that's something that anyone can do, right? Anyone can write one sentence per day. And that's not the suggestion, but the consistency piece really does seem to elevate the ceiling on on performance and what's possible. But I think people I think we've been exposed too much to these concepts of flow in my opinion. I don't want to knock on Steven Cutotler and the beautiful work that he's done in Cheeks Mahai who originated the term. I think Cutotler and Cheeks Mahai I think it's a a wonderful literature um and it certainly has its place but I think people in their pursuit of flow um look at the grind as failure and they don't really know what the grind is. Is it a hard day where you're like doing sets to failure in the gym? is that when you're you have quote unquote writer's block, you've simplified it down to it's just simply showing up over and over again. That raises the possibility for flow, raises the possibility for optimal performance and probably raises the the basement on what failure or poor performance is as well, which means you're getting better. I had this reader, his name is Mitch. I mentioned him in Atomic Habits and he um when he first started working out he had this strange little rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay at the gym for longer than five minutes. So he got in the car, drove to the gym, got out, did like half an exercise and then he get in the car, drive back and go home. And it sounds silly, you know, you're like clearly this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants. But if you take a step back, what you realize is he was mastering the art of showing up, right? He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. And it's like the inversion of what most people do, which is we sit down, we try to perfect it. You know, what's the perfect diet plan? What's the ideal workout strategy? What's the best sales strategy? You know, like we want to have everything lined up first and then we take the first step. But I'm reminded of that. There's that quote from Ed Latimore where he says, "The heaviest weight at the gym is the front door." And you know, there are a lot of things in life that are like that. you know, the hardest step is the first movement. And so, by mastering the art of showing up, well, now he's in the gym, now he's in the arena. There's all kinds of improvements that you can make. And so, he got six weeks in and he was like, well, I'm coming here all the time. I might as well start working out a little bit longer. And I feel like that is such a better place to be um than to trying to get it perfect from the start and then feeling like, well, if I can't run 4 days a week, why am I bothering? You know, if I can't work out for 45 minutes, then it doesn't matter. But the truth is, it matters every time you show up. We use the phrase building habits, but in a lot of ways, what we're actually describing is just the process of learning. Your your brain is just learning a new behavior. And you will get better at anything that you practice. Anything. Now, I'm not saying that if you practice basketball, you can go play in the NBA in 6 months, right? Like, or maybe ever. Um, but you individually will be a better basketball player 6 months from now than you are today if you practice it each day. And every skill that you have was once unknown to you. You know, when you were born, you did not know how to cut a tomato or, you know, play a musical instrument or even brush your teeth. But you know all those things now and many others. And so the way that you learn things is by practicing them. Um, and the way that you learn habits is also by practicing them, even if it's small. I think it's so important to view habits through the lens of learning and therefore neuroplasticity, right? which I think is a broad term that can be many. I mean having a stroke will induce neuroplasticity but not the kind one want. So I I guess the the precise definition would be you know so I call it self-directed adaptive plasticity. It's not a real term but it it works for what we're talking about. So I'll just say plasticity um for short but sorry not to cut you off but that is I feel like the self-directed piece is an important part there. You know your brain's learning habits all the time right? You will learn habits whether you are in control or not whether you care or not. I think that's a good reason to want to know what they are and how they work. The real question is not whether you will gain new habits, it's whether you can design them, right? Or be in control of them, whether it can be self-directed. Yeah. Yeah, I mean maybe it's worth exploring this a little bit because um so for neuroscientists who learn about plasticity, you learn about developmental plasticity which existed in all of us when we were kids and just it's just pass how passive experience shapes us and uh it's very robust up until they always say till age 25 but about that is when the window closes for like multi- language learning without accents you know becomes much much more difficult after 15 20 25 than it does say at 40 45 or 60 some people can do it but takes much more effort um so that's passive learning But the self-directed piece is interesting because there are sort of two forms of that. Uh one form is um where it's explorative like you're trying to I don't know um figure out how to paint or figure out how to uh um but you don't really know what the painting is going to be. Um the other is what is called instructional plasticity. And I guess the strict term would be self-directed adaptive instructional plasticity. This is why it gets to be you know kind of a mouthful but sounds sticky. Yeah. But the instructional piece means there's a correct answer. there's a correct answer and and neuroscientists are familiar with the fact that you know there's these certain forms of learning where where there's a correct answer that the nervous system needs to learn like how to shoot a free throw from a particular location on a court for instance um how to state a word uh with a proper annunciation a different language for instance and so there's a right and there's a wrong and the example of this guy Mitch who went to the gym um and then left after five minutes um I feel like there's a merge there where he through some unconscious genius realized that the right answer was getting in the door and had to teach himself that piece as opposed to the entire workout. So that's just chunking, right? But it requires that that there's a a prerequisite to getting in the gym and that's just going there in the first place. And if we and if we're trying to learn how to do an entire workout, it's too much. or if we're trying to learn how to perform really well. It's you're we're really trying to learn 50 or a thousand things, right? So this business of chunking, it's so simple on the face of it, but I feel like instructional plasticity says we need to learn the right answers and then stack those. And so I don't think he was crazy. I think he was really on to something and really in tune with what the neuroscience says. People often think they're keeping it simple or making it simple, but they don't realize how many steps are involved. Like let's take just getting to the gym. Forget about the workout, but just getting there. Which gym will you go to? What time are you going to go? Are you going before work or after work? Are you stopping by on your way or is it on your commute? Do you need to drive separately? Are you going to bring a water bottle or do they have water fountains at the gym? That alone sounds like a silly thing, but I heard from a reader one time who said, "I always forget my water bottle and they don't have water fountains there, so I don't feel like going." That's enough friction to prevent somebody from doing the workout. Right? Like there's so many little steps like that. Um, and what are you going to wear? Do you have the are the clothes clean or are they in the laundry right now? Like there's so many things that could prevent it from happening. So just mastering getting started forces you to cross all of those thresholds early on and figure out how do I get in here consistently week in and week out and then once you got that part licked then okay great we can move on to what the actual workout should be. These days I and many others hear about and talk about this idea that the effort becomes the reward. I mean that's sort of the the holy grail of all this right and um I think that can happen. I mean, it has sort of masochistic uh tones to it. Years ago, I was dating a woman. We're still good friends. And I I remember one time she just said to me, she said, "Flow, don't fight." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "Everything that you do is you're sort of like pushing yourself into doing it even though you really enjoy these activities." And we're talking about workrelated activities. And um I was like, "Oh, so you just like flow into everything that you do." And she's like, "Yeah." She was from Eastern Canada. And I was like, "Is is everyone up there like that?" And she's like, "No, actually, you know, my my dad or someone in her family was like a fisherman. Had to get up early in the morning, go out in the cold." So, she was a hearty person, a very hearty person, a hard worker. Just recently finished graduate degree, in fact. And I was like, this flow don't fight thing is interesting because I feel like across my day, I do wake up and I'm like, "All right, have to do this. Need to," and these are opportunities that I love. Sure. And I've thought to myself, do we only have so much, you know, time on the gas pedal? You know, may maybe she's right. Maybe maybe we need to flow through certain parts of our days where we're just kind of on inautomatic so that we can fight harder against the things that that are really barriers for us. I been wanting since I woke up this morning, I'm like, I I got to ask James this question. Do you think there's a way that we can kind of toggle flow and fight? That's an interesting question. I So, I have two thoughts. First thought is um for a long time I wrestled with this question of do I have to be dissatisfied to be driven? Is is that part of it? Is that is part of it that I have this vision for where I want to be or what I want to accomplish and then I look at my current state and I realize there's a gap between where I am and where I want to be. And that dissatisfaction with that gap is what drives you forward. It's the it's the drive to close the gap that gets you to show up and work hard or take the test or do the thing, you know. Um, and I think certainly there are many times in my life when that has been the driving force. But the healthiest response I think that I've come up with or the the counterpoint is you imagine that like an acorn falls from a tree and you know it manages to take root and starts to grow and you know at first it's just this little acorn and then it's a sapling and then it's you know grows into this eventually this large mature oak and um at no point in that process did was it like berating itself for only being an acorn or for only being a sapling, right? for not being enough yet, for not being big enough, for not having achieved that outcome. Um, nobody looks at it and thinks, "Oh, what a failure. You aren't a full oak tree yet." Um, and yet despite that, there isn't this dissatisfaction going on. It continues to grow. And I think the answer there is it grows simply because that is what an oak tree does. It grows because that is what is it is encoded to do. And so I feel like the the healthiest version of me like just flowing with it, you know, or just stepping into it is what do I feel like I'm encoded to do? You know, like it's almost like I was made for this, you know, this is my strength. This is what I like it lights me up. It makes me feel alive and then I can be quite driven um and not feel dissatisfied in the moment. So I think that was like kind of the first thing that I that came to mind. The second piece is I have had this experience where the effort has been the reward where the the the work is the win or you know however people want to phrase it. Doing the thing is the satisfaction but rarely do I have that experience right away. Um it has it has come with time. So like working out is a very good example for me. Um I've been training for you know 15 or 20 years now and yeah like I want all the same things everybody else does right. I want to be healthy. You want to look good. you you know you have all these like outcomes that you want from working out. But the last couple years I have started to train more and more just because of how I feel when I work out. I like how it makes me feel. And now I don't have to wait I don't have to wait two years to see how I look in the mirror. Like I feel good when I'm doing this set. Um and so it becomes more about the experience and I liking how I feel when I'm doing it. In my language in the atomic habits language it's what I call identity based habits. Um, every time that I show up and work out, I am casting a vote for being the type of person who works out, for being an athlete, for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And every time I cast a vote for being that type of person, I feel good about myself. I feel like I'm showing up and being the kind of person I want to be. I feel like I'm reinforcing my desired identity. And I think this is one of the it certainly is one of the concepts from atomic habits that has resonated with most with people which is rather than starting your habits and asking what do I wish to achieve? What do I wish to you know accomplish? You start by asking who do I wish to become and how are my habits reinforcing that desired identity? Am I casting votes for being that type of person? Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So if you sit down and you study for 20 minutes on Tuesday night, you are casting a vote for being studious. If you shoot a basketball for an hour outside, you cast a vote for being a basketball player. And individually, those are small things. They don't really mean a whole lot. You know, in in any given moment, but collectively, if you do it for 3 months or 6 months or a year, you cross this invisible threshold at some point where you say, "Yeah, being a basketball player must be a big part of who I am." And you start to take pride in being that kind of person. And if you take pride in it, if it becomes part of your story, then you'll fight to maintain the habit. And now all of a sudden the situation is flipped. Now you're trying to do it rather than trying not to do it. You know, rather than trying to motivate yourself to stick to it, you're just saying this is part of who I am. You know, like I get up and I go for a run because I'm a runner, not because I have a half marathon in three months. I'm I'm doing it because I like being this kind of person. So I think the the question of what are my actions reinforcing? How are my habits feeding my desired identity is an interesting thing to play with and I think an important question for all of us to ask ourselves. Yeah, I confess that um friction for me is a great motivator. You know, I I was in essentially a scientific competition in my posttock years also when I started my lab and I was like this is great like I I have something constantly to push against and I enjoyed the work. What kind of friction do you mean like having a a big lab that we were competing with and and it was a new area. A bunch of tools had arrived on the scene. We were developing tools. They were developing tools and it was very very competitive and uh I was like this is so great. Felt like a little arms race. Yeah. And it was and and they got their piece and we got our piece and it's it all worked out. But I think competition can bring that out and I think it was really healthy and um it raised the anxiety level certainly. So in science you can actually get scooped. You can work very very hard for a lot of years and someone can beat you to the punch and you have to tell the student or postto like we are resetting and when I was the posttock it was it was scary. So you try and find your corner where there's a bit more assurance that you're going to be okay no matter what but it's not always the case especially if you pick the problems that are like very timely like the tools just became available to answer questions that people have wanted to answer for a long time and it's just a cluster. Yeah. And so I used to think gosh is this unhealthy? Is this like really unhealthy? waking up at 4 in the morning and going to lab and like beating them. I'm like, "No, are you kidding me?" Like it it was part of building my career, but I wouldn't want to do that forever. And so this the flow piece sounds really really nice. Um and at the same time, I don't know. I I I agree completely with what you said that in the friction you get these sort of breakthroughs of like, oh, this this went well for five minutes. I really enjoy this. And you start to hold on to those those pockets. You said you really enjoy the workout, the set. I I feel a lot of resonance with that. I actually like exercising. But you're one of the few people I've ever met that doesn't say, "Oh, I like how I feel afterwards. I like how I feel afterwards, but I also like how it feels in the moment." It sounds like you do as well. Yeah. I like the act of it. I like the practice of it. Yeah. I mean, that's a gift that you had to work for. I think so. I, you know, well, to the point that you just made, it's hard for you to imagine always being in that flow or always feeling that way about it. And also, the competition can be very healthy. I agree. I think it's both and I almost I resist anybody who would say that they're always in one or the other. I think everybody's in both from time to time. And um your point about the competition between the labs, that's instructive for building habits, too. Sometimes it really helps if things have stakes. I find that it's actually quite hard for me to care if there are no stakes. I I want there to be something that matters. Ultimately, that's why I decided to start sharing my ideas online. I was working at a orthopedic practice uh just doing like an internship over the summer. This is many years ago. And uh I started writing about habits and eventually and nobody asked me to. I was just was doing it because I was interested in it. And I got this word doc that was like 60 pages long. It was just like James' thoughts on habits. And writing in the word doc is kind of boring. There are no stakes, you know. So I was like, well eventually I I need to put some of this up and just see is it any good or not? You know, do people like it or not? And um eventually that led to jamesclair.com. then eventually Atomic Habits. Um, but the fact that there were stakes forced me to up my game. You know, my my undergraduate degree is in biomechanics and I got a business degree as well. So, I I don't have a degree in psychology, you know, or neuroscience, which is kind of what I think you would expect somebody who writes about habits to have. And so, I was kind of lamenting that early on. And I said that to a friend and he said, "Well, the way you become an expert is by writing about it every week." And so, I just really internalized that. And so I wrote two articles a week for the next three years. And it turns out if you write 150 articles about habits, you learn a lot along the way. And because it was public, I could get criticized every time. And I think that made the work much better. Um, and ultimately, you know, I was able to triangulate my way to, you know, putting together some decent ideas about the topic and building habits and, uh, suppressing bad habits is synonymous with your name and vice versa. I think there are several cases. as I can think of you uh Derek um from More Plates More Dates um who does online fitness and health content. um neither of whom have formal training in that the information they share who are both superb like truly superb and I know Derek a bit and I think he also went out of his way to make sure that he was reading things with you know an extra attention to the detail making sure that the communication about it was was correct and and acknowledging that he didn't have formal training in that area formal academic training forgive me because all this stuff exercise and health as well as habits you can practice them too sure right I think the big question is just competence versus credentials you know if if the argument ument is well you don't have a degree in this well that doesn't really tell me anything but if the argument is this sentence is wrong okay well now we have something to talk about you know but if the sentences are right and I just don't have the degree you know too bad that's it doesn't matter right it's it's about are the ideas right that's that uh Midwest uh sensibility pra p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p practicality that I think really resonates with people because the problem with kind of ivory tower academic stuff that you know is associated with high levels of credibility is often times people feel like it's um that people are out of touch with the real world and obviously the merge of the two is is great but I think the scientists then come to you and now you can read a paper and and so I think that it can be both it doesn't need to be a competition either I think the point is just are the ideas right right and if the ideas are right then great and if the ideas are wrong then I have some learning to do so and do they work in the real world and clearly people have benefited from these yeah I think this uh attachment to making the effort the reward is something that um can happen I think that it's a a top- down training I'd like your thoughts on this you you know, we can tell ourselves um you know, this pain is good. This is me getting better. Like I think there there are two kind of parallel examples in the world of exercise where um it's very concrete and I think it maps to the cognitive space, but I think one of the incredible things about resistance training is uh this notion of the pump. I mean, not because I enjoy it, but because it gives you a little visual and like sensory window into what will happen if you do things correctly, like recover and and uh proper nutrition, etc. Like you get you literally get a visual and a and a sensory window into the future, have some kind of evidence that in the moment you're doing it right. Yeah. And um and in general, the what you end up with sort of parallels that that progress during the during the workout. Whereas with with running, like if I run up a steep hill with a weight vest on, my lungs are burning. I want to cough up a lung. Like I feel like I want to vomit. And and we can tell ourselves like, "This is good. This is me getting better. It will be easier the next time." But you don't feel faster in the moment. You're not like, "Oh, this is what it feels like to really be faster than I am in this on this current day." And so I think both are important. So I look at those as kind of um templates for the positive feedback I can give myself. Like if I have a good um stretch of writing or podcast prep where I'm like really finding papers, I'm like, "This is so cool. this is great. I'll say, "Okay, this is really good." Like, we're in the groove. That's sort of like the the pump in the gym thing, like it's heading someplace. But then when things are really like running up against a brick wall, and I'm like, "This is so painful." I I've had to teach myself to say, "Okay, this is this is good. This is me getting better. This is how the brain learns." The brain learns by experiencing friction. It doesn't learn by experiencing performance, right? I mean, we don't learn from performance. We only learn from failure, right? That the brain won't change unless it has to change. So, um, I'd love your thoughts on this as it relates to the space I think most people think of habits and learning like how to learn a new language or or a musical instrument or or just changing one's daily routine so that one is healthier or or kinder. You know, a lot of people just struggle with kind of being jerks, you know, and and I think they're trying to be kind and it's hard. It's hard to develop the the habit of being kind if that's not their nature. So, how do these things map for you? A lot of the time people will complain about writing habits. For example, writing is so hard. writing is so difficult. It feels so, you know, arduous in the moment. And I sometimes I try to remind myself, yeah, it does feel difficult and that's kind of why it works. Imagine going into the gym and complaining that like the weights are heavy. You're like, well, that's like, yes, the weights are heavy. That's why you're getting stronger. And the writing is hard and that's how you're getting smarter. Or at least, let's say, that's how you're clarifying your thoughts. Just as the weights feeling heavy is evidence that you are getting stronger, the writing feeling hard is evidence that you were thinking, that you were forcing yourself to think and clarify. So there is some friction, some tension that is necessary for growth. I think what you're referencing, telling yourself a better story in the moment is very helpful. You know, like this is, yeah, it is painful, it is hard, and this is part of what it means to grow. I also think it's helpful to do some things either beforehand or afterward that can help feed that process to get you to show up. So, for example, beforehand, previsualization can be really helpful. I practice this with my kids, just trying to help them imagine what a good day would look like. You know, like my one son, he um he started preschool recently. And the first day a drop off. He didn't have a good day. He kind of, you know, cried, fussed a little bit, didn't really want to stay. Second day, same sort of thing. Um so the third day, I said, "All right, it's, you know, it's preschool day today." And he was like, "Uh" And I was like, "Hold on, let's let's just, you know, we're getting breakfast in the morning." I said, "Um you know, you like preschool, right? Like you you really like your teachers." Um he was like, "Yeah." I said, "Uh what about um you guys did snack time yesterday? That was fun, right?" He's like, "Yeah." I said, "Uh, you got to play with glue sticks and the crayons. Like, that was a cool activity." And what do you do after, um, school gets done? He was like, "Oh, we go out on the playground and we play for, you know, 30 minutes or whatever." And that was it. I just stopped there. But the point is that I'm trying to get him to imagine what a good day would look like if it unfolds, right? Emphasize the positive parts of the experience that are about to happen. What are the things that you're about to do that you enjoy or that are good for you? And go into the day with that story in your mind. And I think that increases the odds that you're going to show up. And you know, maybe we just got lucky. Who knows? But he had a good drop off that day. Sounds like a great day. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds sounds awesome. I want to do it, too. I played baseball for a while. I played baseball through college. And when I was younger, like 10, 12, 14, um my dad and I would do this thing where at the end of each season, we go and sit down on the back deck and we would kind of like replay the good parts of the season. We'd talk about our best games, the best wins, talk about, you know, the best plays that I had had or things that went well or whatever. We're just trying to like emphasize the wins, you know? And uh so I finished each season even if it wasn't like the best season for me. I was never the best player on any team that I was on, but I finished it feeling good. And that gives you a little bit of momentum going into the next season. And so I I think the core question, whether you're visualizing it ahead of time or rehearsing it afterward, is what are you emphasizing? There's this interesting exercise I heard of one time and you take a piece of paper or two documents and the only rule of this game is that you can't write down anything that's false. So yeah, they it just has to be true if you write it down. The first page you're going to write down the story of your last year, but it's the negative version. All the bad things that happened, the stuff that didn't go your way, whatever. The second page, you're going to write down the story of your last year, but it's the positive version. All the wins you've had, the things that were worked out well, you know, your best days. And you look at those two pieces of paper, there are no lies on either one. And I think the question is, which one are you emphasizing each day? you know what story do you carry with you when you go into the next experience and as long as you are not ignoring reality you know as as long as you're not ignoring the truth of the situation and what you need to manage or what you need to face I think you always want to tell yourself the more empowering one you know you always want to carry that version with you that makes you feel inspired or empowered or positive and that I think will increase the odds that you show up I don't know that it'll necessarily make you a kinder person but certainly it puts you in a better position for things like that to happen. So, I think there is some mental rehearsal, let's say, that you can do to put yourself in a better position to not only just have a good day, but also be more likely to perform at a high level. By now, I'm sure that many of you have heard me say that I've been taking AG1 for more than a decade. 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JWV is offering an exclusive discount to all Hubberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off Chiev products. Again, that's JWV spelled J Ov.com/huberman to get up to $400 off. I think that it's very difficult to do what one wants to do without imagining it first. I think people get scared that the outcome won't be what they hope for. Like that that fear of failure pieces, I think is very real. The post activity reflection, just want to hover on that for a second. Um about a year ago we did an episode on how best to study and learn and this maps of course to neuroplasticity and the literature is very straightforward. Um but there's this interesting um [clears throat] shift in the literature in the last couple of years which clearly shows that anything that we reflect on later. We learn faster and we retain longer. And it's because most all of learning is anti-forgetting. And that sounds so obvious. It's like a giant duh. whenever I say that people duh it's just a play on words but no I mean there's all this sensory information coming in you know massive amounts and and we forget most of it it's either irrelevant or or it just you know it just goes through for whatever reason and doesn't stick when students for instance would read a passage once or twice or three times or four times and they did all the derivations of do they take notes do they highlight do they talk about with friends etc there are two things that really make things stick and one is self- testing just you know reflecting later like oh did I what have I remember that. No, I got that wrong. That that's incredible um for self-evaluation and low stakes is is incredibly powerful for retaining information. And the other one was just reflecting on like what happened, what went right, what went wrong, which is really what you're describing about uh about these exercises and and your kids' day, right? Um it reminds me a little bit of uh like the spaced repetition literature. In a way, the reflection is like another instance of spaced repetition. you you come back to it later and it resurfaces the material and that increases the odds that you retain it. Yeah. Having taught many undergraduate and graduate courses, medical students, I can tell you um well, graduate students and medical students are universally motivated because the stakes are very high. Classes are smaller. There's kind of more of a like community around. They've also passed a filter just to get in, right? There's a selection bias just to be there. Undergraduates, it varies by place and course and and and etc. and major, etc. But uh whether or not it's their major or not, I'm not saying different majors are more or less motivated. But what's interesting is that most students are exposed to information. They might study for the exam. Ideally, they do. And then the next time that they are evaluated on that material in any kind of concrete way is on the exam. And the students that actually test themselves or that ask for some the best students always ask for like a a pre-quiz quiz um inevitably best performing students. And I think this business of just being willing to feel the pain of being wrong when there's very low stakes, it still sucks. None of us like to be wrong. It's like, h, you know, and and you you decide to put it online. Like, is any of this wrong? We've done that. We we've now be having had a few painful experiences where I just said the wrong thing in passing or made a joke that was turned into a not joke. I'm a slow learner. I need a lot of feedback. I mean, there were jokes I made that then like were cut and sort like those kinds of experiences are painful enough that you you check everything with a fine tooth comb going forward. You know, you just that's the way it is. But I think most people will do anything to avoid that kind of scrutiny. And I think your willingness to lean into that scrutiny and just have that the general public kind of test you like where am I where are these ideas working? Where are they not working is so powerful because the the places where they don't work, you'll never forget. the places where they work, you'll never forget. I just heard from a friend who said that she she had kind of this like perfectionist streak and she can look back now on her life and see that if there was a moment when she saw somebody doing something and she thought, "Oh, well, I couldn't be as good at them as as good at that as they are or I I won't be the best at that." Then she would talk herself out of trying at all. Um because, you know, and it's like anti-growth mindset, right? Yeah. Well, and I and I thought about that cuz I I don't feel that way even though I feel like I did, especially early on, have some like I don't know if we call it perfectionist tendencies, but just like this very high desire to do it right, you know, or to get it right. But I I don't feel like I did that. Talk myself out of it. And I thought, why why was that? What what was different there? And the story that was in my head most of the time was I can learn this. So it wasn't it wasn't even about a comparison, right? It wasn't like, oh, I could do it better or worse. That wasn't the thing. it was, "Oh, I think I can figure that out and it'll be interesting to figure it out." I think if you can approach all of your habits and maybe a lot of life with this lens of curiosity where it's not really about failing or succeeding, it's about reaching, you know, it's about trying something new and then seeing what you can learn from it. that puts you in a good position too because it's a little bit less about you know competition has its place and I I consider myself to be a fairly competitive person but uh it's nice when you don't make everything about that you know about being the best from the start because you can talk yourself out of a lot. Oh I agree and I mean I have continually placed myself in venues uh you know academic and physical where there's no way I was going to be the best in that environment. Just no chance. It was just the fuel of of needing to compete in order to not with my colleagues but with people outside my institution like to where it's it's a great motivator for the the extra mile for doing that extra mile kind of thing. I mean I guess Joo talks about this like you know waking before the enemy where the the stakes there right before you became a writer the stakes were high-risisk high consequence like sure you don't get up earlier like more more of your people might die. Yeah that's pretty high stakes high consequence right? Um, and so I think that that additional friction can really bring out people's best, I also think at some point it can become um, painful to the point where people around us obviously can suffer. Joo, by the way, maintains because I know his family, beautiful family, in addition to doing all that forth, he legitimately gets up at 4:30 in the morning. I've done sauna with him. Like I was a guy down on the floor gasping for air. It was kind of a joke, a story for another time, but um he calls it the factory reset and he wanted to put me through the factory reset protocol and it was brutal. Yeah, it's just brutal. And uh you know, I think that he lives in a land where the friction is the reward, but also that um the rewards come from relaxation, too, which is what I wanted to bring up because after the sauna that night, the rest of us packed it in for the day and he went to see a show. I was like, "Oh, he also relaxes." I'm curious about how the habit of striving can be also mirrored by the habit of real true relaxation. Not thinking about the thing you need to do or trying to build, but allowing that maybe plasticity take place. Not just in sleep, but are are you an active relaxer? Like do you say now is time to just completely chill? Yeah, I think I'm pretty good at shutting off uh once when I decide to shut off. There was a I think it was on Tim Ferrris's podcast at one point. He had Josh Weightskin on there and Josh said something about how he was doing a he was in a martial arts competition and um he was actually asleep on the like bench on the side and they came over and woke him up and they said, "Hey, we got the time wrong for your for your event. Like you're actually up in like 2 minutes. Um and so you like woke up out of the sleep and they did his little like pre um uh pre-ompetition ritual and just like flipped the switch and was, you know, ready to go." And um he talked about this importance of being able to turn it on and turn it off. And I ever since I've heard that example from him, I've been thinking more about this idea of turning it on and turning it off. You know, you you sprint and then you rest. Um what does that look like in daily life? And I actually think first of all, I think it's kind of fractal. I think that you can say you could have like a 10-year sprint where you're like really career focused. That's the season of your life right now. and then maybe the next season is more family focused or more relaxation focused or whatever. Um, it also of course could be day or week or you know even hour. Um, so it can scale up and scale down. But I also think it maybe is a better version of what it means to be balanced. You know, we people talk a lot about work life balance or what balance might look like. I think balance might actually be turning it on and turning it off really well. It's not um doing everything at like 50%. you know, it's not just like staying at some steady state. It means that when you're sprinting, you're actually sprinting, and when you're resting, you're actually resting. And the ability to oscillate between those two states, um, in lots of ways, I think is very helpful. There's obviously the physical ways in which you could do it, whether it's working out or, you know, actually relaxing and resting. Um, I think there are mental ways to do it, too. I tried to practice this a couple months ago. we were hosting a party and you know anytime you're hosting an event there can be like this urgency that comes right the people are coming the guests are coming everybody's anxiety levels ratchet up like you know is everything ready and um the phrase that I was playing with was can I be outside and above this you know so can I can I mentally can I step outside and above the situation and almost like look down on it and if you are outside and above the situation really what you want is to feel larger than the situation that you are dealing with if you are smaller than the situation mentally then it is driving you right your anxieties are responding to this larger thing that you feel like you can't control but if you can step outside and above it now I can look down on what is facing me right now and I can make a wiser decision or a calmer decision or whatever um and so I'm trying to find ways to kind of turn the anxiety on and off right like turn the stress on and off and uh so I I think there are a number of things that you can that you can do there but I'm trying to get better at practicing it myself yeah I think the the word reset is not um in our like action pallet enough uh these days. I think um because it's so easy to bring information and work to wherever we happen to be. And even if it's not work, just communications. Uh I mean, I've made it a point in recent years to put social media on one phone, maybe even keep it in a lock box, but I'll try and take hikes where I'm just spending time with the person I'm with and the phone is back in the car. And I realize there's a danger to that. like there could be a fire. It is LA after all. It could be, you know, mountain lions, this kind of thing. But it's totally worth it. Totally worth the the uh the untethering percentage risk, too, you know. Yeah. I mean, there there people around. And I mean, it's not clear the phone would save you from a mountain line anyway. So, you're better off actually probably reduce your reaction time. Record your final moments. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that's interesting. I also think that there's an element to um if you're the type of person who has a very uh strong work ethic and you have worked your way out of problems throughout life that for me for a long time that was my solution to something. If it wasn't working well then I'll just work a little bit harder and I'll work my way out of it. Um and when that has worked for you for a while you end up using it as a crutch and so hard work becomes this thing that you just kind of like slide back into. But what are the odds mathematically speaking? What are the odds that the thing that you're doing today or this week is the highest and best use of your time? It's almost impossible that you are actually working on the thing that is the best use of your time. I think Sam Alman has some quote where he said something like uh you should have a very high bar for working on anything other than thinking about what to work on because choosing the right thing to focus on is going to get you 100 or a thousandx the results. Maybe you can work 10% harder, but if you want to 100x the output, you need to direct the attention and energy to something else. And I think that creating space to rest, to reflect and review allows that opportunity to arise. I a lot of the executives I talk to or companies that I speak at or work with, everybody's just kind of tapped out. They're very, you know, they they're working quite hard and so they keep their head down and try to knock out the things that are on their plate. But what they need to do is step back and relax and think for a moment to reflect and say, "Are we working on the right things?" I I think that's some of the most important time that I have carved out in my week. I I have like roughly 30 minutes every Friday where I just do a weekly review and there is nothing scheduled. It's just me thinking about the business. Um and that a lot of the best stuff comes out of that. Um, I think I it probably be better if it was three hours instead of 30 minutes. But, you know, you need to find at least some time to sit down and think, am I directing my precious energy and attention in the right way? And I think that rest and reflection and relaxation play directly into that. If you're just working, if you're just sprinting all the time, you don't have the space to see the larger picture. Yeah. I'm really intrigued by this concept of wordlessness, like getting your body and brain into states of while awake. uh wordlessness. So not a lot of information coming in about work or really anything. Um maybe it's the liinal state between awake and sleep some of these NSDR yoga nidra type practices but it's more um you know like hiking or running or swimming um where your brain goes through a period of chatter and you're thinking about the other thing but then at some point everything becomes discontinuous in a way and it or listening to music. Hiking is the one that does it for me. What you're describing right now is like how I get after like maybe an hour into a hike or something. Do you get good ideas either coming back from it or on the hike or or I I think the most interesting thing is I feel good. Um I feel so much better. You know, you hear these phrases like forest bathing or things like that. I feel so much better after that than I do after like the same amount of time looking at my screen or something like that. It's like a completely different state. Um, I I think that it almost feels like it taps into something deeply biological where you're like, "Oh, we are in fact animals, you know, like we were we were intended to live out in the forest and uh so yeah, it that state that you're describing to me feels how I feel when I hike." Yeah, it definitely taps into something and I think it's multivariable. I think it's, you know, the full spectrum light from sunlight. Turns out anytime you're near greenery, um you know, the the leaves stay relatively cool even on hot days. And so they'll reflect um surprisingly because it's not the way you would expect it based on the physics of the color of green leaves. But um there's a lot of infrared light essentially being reflected back on you. And that infrared light is not the type that damages your skin. It is the type that feeds your mitochondria. It actually penetrates your body's surface. It char it literally charges the mitochondria. So, there's some really interesting things about being in nature, greenery, forest bathing. Uh, the grounding folks get all excited about that. Most people are wearing shoes where they're not actually grounding to the ground. So, that's a little bit trickier, but standing in a stream just feels good with bare feet, obviously. Um, I I think it's a real true um kind of primordial reset, just trekking. The word reset resonates with me, too. That's that's how it feels. It feels like I I go on a hike every Wednesday and it feels like I get to reset by yourself or with usually by myself. And and you're sometimes I'll take a friend, but usually you're listening to something phone. Nothing. Yeah. Great. You know, it's just Yeah, it's just me in the woods. Um nice. that's awesome. Like gradually becoming more of a mountain man each year. That's great. I mean, I think there is this return to things that are more, you know, in in real life, as they say. Um I think that the ability to reset is such a huge part of being a great you know anything. Because if if you can't um yeah that just fight fight fight it eventually gives way which I makes me want to bring something up that you raised earlier and I should have asked then this notion of identity. I think one of the reasons that it's so hard for people to relax and reset or to shift their life to a different mode of of focus. Like for instance, you said you had this online blog and then you decided to focus on the book and then now you're doing a number of other things. It's kind of interesting um to explore how we how we catalog wins or how we carry our wins as well as our losses because I think a lot of people they'll publish a book um if they're lucky it has h half the success of atomic habits but then they feel like they either have to do it again or they have to do something to sort of maintain the buoyancy of that experience out there in the world as opposed to just being able to shove it in their mind like that was awesome. Listen, Atomic Habit is an super impressive book and it's done incredibly well for all the right reasons. And one could say like, okay, did that like next thing and some people can do that. You mentioned Weights can Josh is a friend and and he's just has this incredible ability to be like, I'm done playing chess. I'm doing the next thing. I'm done doing that. Like he really can cut ties with his previous self. I think most people find that difficult. We feel like we need to succeed where we succeeded before or else it no longer is real. Mhm. How often do you do you play with the idea of of habits and identity and kind of what you're on the precipice of now? It's an interesting question. I I saw this with a number of the things that I researched when I was writing the book um stories that came up and then I've also felt it personally. Some examples I heard from one guy when I was writing the book who was in the military then he leaves and he's like my identity for the last 20 years is I was a soldier. Now I'm not. So what like who am I basically? Um and then another common one that you hear is from athletes. you know, I I felt this way and I didn't even play professionally, but you know, I played all the way through college. You get to the end of your senior year, I've been doing this for 17 years now. Um, and then all of a sudden the next day, you're not an athlete anymore. So, what like who am I? You know, this is like a huge part of my identity. And so, you can also imagine, you know, founders when they sell their company or CEOs after having a long run and, you know, it's just like you have something that was a huge part of your life and now you're not. I I heard from a mother the other day who said, "I'm suddenly an empty neester. you know, 25 years I've been taking care of these kids and now all of them have moved out like, you know, what am I doing? What is my purpose? So, I think it's very common for people to have something like that, an identity that they um feel like they've lost. And for me, the thing that helped the most was trying to find through lines from that previous identity that can still serve me in the new season. So, you take the soldier example. Yeah, they're not a soldier anymore, but they could still be a good teammate. They could be the type of person who follows through on their mission. They can be somebody who's reliable and can be counted on, you know, and then you start to look at the parts of your past where you were that kind of person and then look at your current situation. Where can you express those traits again? Um, in my little case as an entrepreneur, I I always emphasize being an entrepreneur and a creator more than I did being an author. I I kind of have to admit that I'm an author now because I have the book, but I really what I see myself as is an entrepreneur. And so the shift from blog to book to co-founding companies or what like that to me that feels connected um because…

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