#648: James Clear, Atomic Habits Mastering Habits, Growing an Email List to 2M+ People, Selling 10M+ Books, Cultivating Self-Awareness, and Much More

You want to join groups, to join tribes, where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

Anytime you create an asset that can compound—a blog post, a podcast episode, even simple stuff like Twitter posts and Instagram posts... you're creating a large surface area for good things to kind of break your way if you spend time doing that.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

If you want to break a bad habit, there are kind of 3 potential paths you could take. So, the first is you can eliminate it entirely, so elimination. Second option is you can reduce it ... And the third option is you could substitute it; you could replace it with a different habit.

If you want to build a good habit, you want to make your habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. And if you want to break a bad habit, you just do the opposite of those four. So, you want to make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, and make it unsatisfying.

Almost all the results that you want are a lagging measure of your habits.

The first question I ask is rather than optimizing for money, let's optimize for time. So, how do I want to spend my days? And then I try to make as few choices as possible that violate that answer.

If you want to build a good habit, roughly speaking, there are 4 things that you can do: You want to make it obvious, you want to make it attractive, you want to make it easy, and you want to make it satisfying.

Time will magnify whatever you feed it. If you have good habits, time becomes your ally, and all you need is patience. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy, and every day that goes by, you kind of dig the hole a little bit deeper.

How can I create an environment that will naturally bring about my desired change? ... How can I look around and structure my physical environment, my social environment, the tribes I'm apart of, and my strategy for what I'm trying to achieve so that it's almost natural that I'm moving in that direction?

The person who creates better information flows gets better thoughts.

If you can do one or two things a day that are going to keep working for you in the long run, man, you end up like two or three or five years later, and you just have this tidal wave of previous effort that is working for you.

Every habit that you have, we build habits to solve the repeated problems that we face in life.

One of the things I recommend in the book is called the 2-minute rule, and it says just take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less to do.

What am I optimizing for? ... That answer probably changes over time. What I'm optimizing for today is different than what I was optimizing for 5 years ago or 10 years ago, so I think it's a helpful question to keep revisiting.

A question that I love and I keep coming back to for increasing leverage... is what is the work that keeps working for us once it's done?

I think it's worth asking yourself what habits are upstream from other things that I want to do or other things that set me up to have a good day ... A workout habit... is upstream from a lot of other good things that happen.

I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day. Now, it gives me a chance, it gives me space, to just work on my agenda rather than responding to everybody else's agenda.

I don't think the tool matters that much. I think what does matter is crafting great information flows and capturing the good ideas that you come across, and then... using that raw material that you collected to create something great.

Decide the type of person you want to be, and then you prove it to yourself with small wins. And the more small wins, the more small habits, that you perform, the more votes that you cast for that identity.

If you want word of mouth, you have to create something remarkable, and that means that it's worthy of remark.

This is one of the things that I love about writing, which is competence matters more than credentials.

The more that your habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group, the more attractive they feel ... The more that they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, the harder they are to stick to.

One of the kind of meta-habits that's really helpful is some kind of habit of reflection & review, because it allows you to course-correct.

If you find a book that's good, go to the back of the book and see what the references are. And then go through those, and just scan those books on Amazon, and a lot of the time, you'll find a couple other ones that are useful.