YouSaid · the spoken record

James Clear

lines on the record: 150
first: 2025-12-11
most recent: 2025-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“These steps are basically what every habitual behavior is going through, even really automatic stuff. Let's say you walk into a room and the lights are off. So Q, it's dark. Craving, I want to be able to see. Response, I flip on the light switch, reward the lights come on. Now it's visible out there. So even really fast stuff like turning on a light switch is going through those four steps. So pretty much every habit follows that cycle. And you can see that, you know, this paperclip strategy does kind of play into this a little bit. Q, you have the paperclips on the desk, right? So like not only do you want to make the sales calls for a business standpoint, but you also have these staring at you every morning when you come into your desk. And so it's a little bit of a visual reminder. Reminds you, prompts you to think, okay, all right, I do want to make these calls and try to drive more business or, you know, build up another successful sales call. That craving gets you to pick up the phone, which is the actual response, and then the reward is I get to move the paperclip over. And now I feel like.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The craving is the prediction that your brain makes about what that cue means. So you see the plated cookies, your brain predicts, oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. So that favorable prediction motivates you to take the response. That's the third step you walk over, pick it up, and take a bite. And then finally, the fourth step is the reward. Oh, it is in fact sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. So Q craving response reward.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, this is interesting. We haven't talked about this yet. So let me just break it down real quick. If you're building a habit, there are roughly four different stages that every habit goes through. So I call them in atomic habits, I call them Q, craving, response, and reward. So the Q is just something that you notice. So let's say, for example, you see the plate of cookies on the counter in the kitchen. That's a visual cue.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the other thing that I think is interesting about it is he boiled it down to just what was the one thing that really moved the needle and he just focused on that. And there are so many things in life that it's really easy to get focused on the optimization. It's so focused on finding the perfect sales strategy, the best business plan, the ideal diet to follow. You're so focused on optimizing you're like, okay, how about sometimes people will come to me and they say they want to build an audience and they like ask about all the tactics and the strategies? And I say just write an article every week for the next two years and then get back to me. Let's not skip that part. Can we start? Let's start there. Or like, let's not miss a workout for two years and then we can talk about whether the program's working or not. And it's like that. So I think this helps you focus on what is the big thing that's really moving the needle.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I'm going to make another sales call. I'm going to take another paperclip and move it over. And he had 100 paperclips in the jar. And his goal every day was to move a hundred from one jar to the next. And that was all he did. And with that one simple habit, he ended up building this huge book of business. Two things about this. One, obviously, he has a visual marker of the progress that he's making, right? So moving paperclips to the other jar is a way to see that he's progressing throughout the day. It also makes it a little bit into like a little game. You know, it's like, okay, how quickly can I move the paperclips over? How much progress am I making? Do I have 50 over by the time lunch rolls around? You can start to see how you have a little bit of these progressive markers throughout the day.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I was working on atomic habits, I came across this guy named Trent Dursmid, and he had an interesting story. He's an entrepreneur now, but early in his career, he had this job where he was a stockbroker in Abbotsford, Canada. And Abbotsford, this is like in the nineties times like pretty small town. It wasn't some big city. And he was supposed to just drive more business, but they didn't have a lot of advantages. It wasn't like he was in New York or whatever. He had this one simple habit that he used to end up becoming the top performer in the firm and building the biggest book of business there over like the next couple years. And it was this simple strategy of paperclips. So all he did, a lot of his stockbroker friends who were like also working in this job, they would read analyst reports, they would look at the news.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simply because you set the bar lower to start. You know, if the bar is perfect at the beginning, it's really hard to maintain that for very long. But if the bar is getting you in, now you build momentum and you get the feeling of progress, and you get a month or two months or three months in, and you still have a street going, and you feel pretty good about yourself. And at some point, you start doing it enough that you realize, okay, there will probably be a day in here where I miss, but I still feel good about who I am and how much I've shown up here. And like you've proven a lot to yourself. And so I think sometimes scaling it down and making it easy gives yourself a better opportunity to feel progress.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, if the activation energy is high, you have to put a lot of heat or a lot of energy into the reaction to make it occur. I think habits kind of have an activation energy too. So let's say that your habit is to do 100 push-ups a day. The activation energy for that's kind of high. On the first day, when you're really pumped about it, maybe you're doing sets of 10 all throughout the day and you get to 100 and you feel really good. Maybe you can do that for a couple days or a week or whatever. But at some point you get to a day where you're tired or you had a lot to do at work or whatever and then you turn around it's 9.30 and you're like, I need to go to bed soon. Do I feel like doing 100 push-ups? And then you skip it. But if you're something much smaller, like your goal is to do one pushup or 10 pushups, well, that is a lot easier and the activation energy is much lower. And so then you get to that day, eight or nine or ten days in, when it's 9.30, you can still do ten pushups for you go to bed, right? And so you still get the feeling of progress. You still get the feeling that you're moving forward.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You put yourself in a position to experience the feeling of progress if you scale your habits down. So let's say sometimes they're in chemistry, there's this concept of activation energy, how much energy it takes to activate a reaction.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the progress that we get there through our screens to the physical world and the habits that we're trying to build and foster in our lives and businesses. And I think that's one reason why it is nice to be more intentional about it, to try to think about what are the 1% improvements or the small gains that we can make today and then celebrating those wins so that you have some feeling of progress there, because in the real world, progress is often delayed. You know, my parents like to swim. Well, if they were swimming for the change that they're going to see in their body, it takes two years. You know, like the problem is they jump into the water and their body looks exactly the same when they get out, right? And so you need something in the moment that gives you some signal of progress. They use a habit tracker, so they have like a little template where they just put a little X on that day, but you need something that visualizes your progress, that gives you some signal that you're moving forward.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's great. I think you do need to be a little bit more intentional about it in the real world. So if you look at some of the most habit forming technologies or some of the most habit-forming things, like let's take video games, for example, in a video game, there are continual constant forms of progress. So your score is increasing in like the top corner of the screen. Whenever you pick up a weapon or a ruby or gem or whatever is like a little jingle or chime or some musical note, even the pitter patter of footsteps as you like run through the level is a signal that you're making progress, that you're moving forward, that you're going somewhere. And so if you compare all of that immediate feedback, that you're getting like all in the same moment when you're playing this level, and then you walk outside and you think about most of the things you're working on in real life, you're like, this committee's been meeting every Friday for six months. We still haven't shipped this feature. I've been running every day for the last month and I still don't see a change in my body. And so it's very hard to compare the digital world.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To emphasize the winds, to sit down and reflect on what you've done and think about what the wins were and how that feeds into your momentum going forward, and to visualize the next step and how it's going to go well.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“their mind as the thing they were shooting for. And he had two guys that he was training. One of them got a 96, one of them got a hundred. Anyway, the point is that In life, there are always things that go well and things that go poorly. There will always be days that things are stacked against you and days when things seem to go your way. And the question is which story are you telling yourself? You know, which version of the events are you emphasizing? Now, I'm not suggesting that you should like ignore reality. You know, if there's a problem that needs to be addressed, then you still need to address it. But as long as you're not ignoring reality, I feel like the only thing that makes sense is to emphasize the empowering version.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was talking recently, so I have this publishing company that I co-founded, Authors Equity, and were publishing this book from this guy named Brandon Webb, who is a former Navy SEAL. He trained the Navy SEAL sniper unit in mental performance. And so he would teach them all kinds of things. I was talking to him about the book and some of the strategies. I was trying to learn what they would do. And two things stood out to me. The first thing he said is a positive outlook no matter the scenario. So the first thing we train them on is positive outlook no matter what situation or scenario they're in. The second thing is visualizing things going well. Okay, so one time a sniper came up to him and said, what's a good score on this course? Like they would give them these little courses to test like, you know, they have to make eight or ten or 12 different shots or whatever. And he said a good score is 100%. He was like, now in reality, almost nobody gets 100%. But I wanted to set that standard, right? To set that out.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of emphasizing your winds. And so I think that's an interesting thing that more people should try is when you look back on your last year, what are some of the wins that you've had and try to use that, you know, tell yourself that story, emphasize that story and use it.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second thing, though, and this might even be the more important piece, you mentioned this idea of someone who interprets things in a negative frame. They get caught in this downward spiral, they see like evidence of things working against them or the world is tilted against them, or like they're emphasizing the pieces of the story that aren't serving them that well. I had, so I played baseball for a long time. I played through college. And when I was younger, I was 10, 12, 14. After each season, we would do this thing. My dad and I would go out and sit on the back deck, and we would talk about like the wins, the good parts of the, you know, the biggest games that our team won or like my best plays from the year or just like things that I got better at from the season before. And I was never the best player on any team that I was on. But you finish each season with a sense of positivity, a sense of confidence, this feeling of like momentum going into the next year. And I think I played for a long time, partially because of that, you know, like we were, it was a practice.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perform the repetitions, you start to build up some confidence because you know that you have some evidence that you can do it. So confidence is displayed ability. Let's try to scale it down, make it easy, start to display our ability, and then the confidence comes as a side effect.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First is I had a high school basketball coach that told me confidence is just displayed ability. And what he meant was if you want to feel more confident about your ability to make a free throw, go out there and shoot for an hour, and once you knock down ten in a row, you're going to feel a lot better about it. And so what you realize, this is true for everything, which is once you have started to display your ability in any given area, you know, give a successful speech or, you know, make a nice presentation for work or whatever it is, you feel better about it. And so what you realize is you need reps. You need practice. Whatever the thing is, you need enough repetition to start to learn how to do the thing. And so this is why sometimes I'll say like motivation comes after starting, not before. We think we need motivation to get started, but in fact you should try to scale it down and make it so easy that you'll do it even if you don't feel that motivated about it and start get some reps in. And then once you've got...”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no such thing as an opportunity that is not tied to a person, right? Like opportunities come through people. And so when you say, oh, I wish I could just have some good luck, or I wish I could catch my lucky break, what you're probably talking about is there's a person who carries that opportunity with them that you need to interface with or get to know. And so in all of these ways, relationships dramatically shape our lives. And yeah, people are probably the most important thing in that sense.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relationships in general are probably it's obvious to everybody that they matter and yet they still are probably perpetually undervalued. So it's true in a business sense, which is what you're talking about here, like almost every business problem at some level could be a people problem, or there's a person who could unlock it and solve that problem. It's true in a personal sense. The most important decision you probably will make is like whether or who you get married to, you know, that will dramatically shape your life. It's also true in just a luck business life sense, which is that”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 years is just shorthand for what's the big, meaningful stuff you're working toward you think about most of the stuff that people really care, the meaningful movements in life, most of them are multi-year things. Build a business that you're proud of, raising a successful family, having a happy marriage, getting in the best shape of your life, whatever it is, contributing some cause that you care about. They're usually big, multi-year, sometimes multi-decade things. So 10 years is shorthand for that. But if you can do one thing each day that's going to serve you well in ten years, if you can find one hour sometime today to do something that's going to pay off in a decade, you usually don't even need to wait ten years for it to really start to show up. Usually you get two or three or four years into that and you're like, wow, I can't believe how this stuff's accumulating already.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is something tricky about this that I think is important. So we all have made this mistake before, which is you can make 1% improvements that accumulate and you can make 1% improvements that evaporate. You can spend your time on trivial stuff meaningful. It can be meaningful small changes or it can be meaningless small changes. And so how do you decide the difference between the two? And that's kind of tricky. And I don't know that you can always get it perfectly right, but to me the dividing line is does this action accumulate into something larger or not? You know, you can spend your time doing all small stuff, whatever, day in and day out. But are you building towards something bigger? And so in a lot of ways, I think the two time frames that matter most in life are 10 years and one hour.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Multiple readers who got tattoos of it, which I was not expecting. I drew this on an index card and now it's on somebody's body. Yeah, that was definitely a surprising.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or whatever. It's not about that. It's an attitude. It's an approach. It's a focus, an emphasis on trajectory rather than position. There's a lot of discussion about position in life. How much money is in my bank account? What's the number on the scale? What's the stock price? What are the quarterly earnings? We have all these measurements and metrics for assessing our current position. And then if the position isn't what we want it to be, we get frustrated or we feel guilty or we judge ourselves or we get annoyed or whatever. And what I'm encouraging is to say, listen, just for a minute, let's stop worrying so much about our current position. And instead, focus a little bit more on our current trajectory. Am I getting one percent better or one percent worse? Is the arrow pointed up and to the right or have we flatlined? So if you're on a good trajectory, all you need is time.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, nothing. Reading for 10 minutes does not make you a genius, but the person who always goes to bed a little bit smarter than they were when they woke up, the person who always takes a little bit of time each day to learn something new, yeah, two or five or ten years later, like that's a meaningful difference in wisdom and insight. And so you see this same pattern again and again throughout life, which is what starts out small and is pretty insignificant, easy to dismiss on a daily basis. It compounds, it multiplies, and improves over time. And so the effects of your habits are delayed. Time will magnify whatever you feed it. So if you have good habits, time becomes your ally, and every day that goes by you put yourself in a stronger position. If you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy, and every day that goes by you dig the whole little bit deeper. And so the real lesson of a chart like this, the real lesson of getting 1% better every day, is not to get wrapped up in the number. It's not like, oh, is it a 1% improvement or 1%?”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better, 1% worse is very minor. So on any given day, it's very easy to dismiss. What is the difference between eating something healthy for lunch or eating something unhealthy? Today, basically nothing. Your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night. The scale hasn't changed. There's no evidence. What is the difference between the person who reads for 10 minutes today and the person who doesn't?”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things stand out. All right. So, first is this chart's showing, what this is showing is if you get 1% better each day for a year. Okay, so 1.01 to 365th power. Get 37 times better by the end of the year, right? So that's this curve. You get 1% worse 0.99 to the 365th power. You drive yourself almost all the way down zero. Now, a chart like this is just compound interest, right? This is just a compounding curve. And real life is not exactly like compound interest. You know, your habits are not exactly like this mathematical formula. But I think this chart does a good job of encapsulating what the process of behavior change feels like. You know what it's like to try to get a little bit better each day because two things are true. These are the two things that stand out. First, any compounding curve, the hallmark of any compounding process is all the greatest returns are delayed, right? You are 80% of the way through this curve before it really starts to take off. So all the greatest returns are delayed. The early stuff doesn't feel that impressive. The second is on day one, the separation between 0.99 and 1.01 is very small, right?”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talked about this for about 20 seconds. That was about seven years of my life. The span of all that, right? It goes slower than what you want. But it's kind of just that endless game.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is, I don't think it serves you in any way to just like kind of wallow in how hard it is or to talk about how tough complaining about how hard it is just makes it harder. So the act of complaining makes a bad situation worse. The act of emphasizing the things that are going well or trying to take, it's kind of this endless game of trying to take your current advantages and gain new advantages. So like early on, most people don't have many advantages. Like I didn't know anybody in the industry. I didn't have any money. I didn't have any experience. The one advantage that I did have was I had time. And so I could use that time to try to gain new advantages. So in my case, I used the time to write two articles a week and I did that for two years. I did like kind of freelance gigs on the side to pay the bills and stuff. And eventually that's how I built the audience. And then once I had the audience two years later, then I had a new advantage, right? I not only had time, I also had an email list. Now I can go from there and I could get a book deal and then I have a new advantage. I have a book deal. And then, you know, you can just kind of like continually use your current advantages to gain new advantages. And I just.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's kind of like going to a yoga studio for yoga, but you had to create the space. I was always worried that I was going to look like some dork, you know, and invite everybody and they would all say no or whatever. But everybody wants the same thing. You know, they're all waiting for somebody to create the space for like-minded people to get together. So sometimes you need enough courage to create the space yourself, but the punchline is the same, which is you're trying to surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now it feels like, okay, at least I know a couple people who've done this thing, and I started hosting these retreats. Once or twice a year, I get six or eight authors together, and I'd say, let's just rent an Airbnb. We'll split the cost, and we can talk about how to build an audience and how to grow your email list and how to write a book and launch it and all the stuff that we were kind of focused on. It was almost always like the best weekend of my year because I would have six months worth of stuff that I need to execute on after that was done.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes the environment is ready made like that. Other times it's not. So for me, one of the most useful things that I did in my entrepreneurial career, I had no entrepreneurs in my family, no authors. So I had this thing that I kind of wanted to do, but I didn't have anybody close to me that I could like look to. First six months I was entrepreneur, I sent like three hundred cold emails just to other people that were like a year or two ahead of me, someone who seemed like you're actually doing this thing where, you know, you've got this online audience and you're writing about stuff you like. Maybe thirty people got back to me. I did like a little Zoom call or whatever, and we chatted and connected. And then I met some of them at a conference like six months later. So I was six months in. I knew like maybe.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Able to create a space that is a safe place for that habit to live or for that habit to thrive, let's say. Sometimes those spaces are ready-made. Like, let's say you want to do yoga four days a week, but you look around your family or your friends in your apartment that you're living in, nobody else is interested. They don't want to do it too. You do it in the living room, you kind of get made fun of, or you're stepping on other people's space. They're like, I'm trying to do stuff in here too. You know, it's just kind of inconvenient. Well, you can go to a yoga studio, and that's a place where for that hour, you can be surrounded by a group where your desired behavior is normal, you don't have to fire any of your friends, and you can just go to the place where that habit can thrive. And I think each habit likes to have that. It likes to have somewhere where it can exist in a way that it's going to be supported or in a way where the environment makes it easy.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the context of your couch at 7 p.m. And whenever you walk into your living room and you're by your couch and it's in the evening, you're kind of naturally being pulled toward picking up the remote and doing that because that's the context the habit happens in. So if you want to build a new habit, and again these studies have found that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment, well, let's say you want to start a habit of journaling. Well, you walk into your living room in the evening and you sit down on the couch and you're like, I'm going to start journaling, but you're naturally, you know, your brain is kind of like, well, it's time to pick up the remote and turn on the TV. That doesn't always mean that you need a brand new space, like a new building or a new room to do every habit in. But you could do something like you could get a chair and put it in the corner of the room, and that becomes the journaling chair. And the only thing that you do when you sit in that chair is you journal for five minutes. So now you have a new context that is tied to the behavior that you want to perform. And in the social sense, so this is what we were talking about previously, you want to be.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm a little sometimes you hear people say things like fire your friends or whatever. And I'm not all the way there. I think that, yes, it is true. Sometimes you have an extreme circumstance where it's a particularly toxic person or something like that. Yeah, like, you know, you probably maybe should not be around them. And those can lead to very hard decisions. But I would say for the majority of life and the majority of your relationships, what we're really talking about here is not getting rid of relationships. We're talking about finding specific places where that habit can thrive. So here's some examples. There's a number of studies that have shown that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. So, for example, if you, well, first let me back up. There's an interesting way to define what a habit is, which is that it is a behavior that is tied to a particular context. So for example, your habit of watching Netflix might be tied”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ceiling or whatever, but I'm going to go through the door because that's where the environment is naturally nudging me toward. It's where that behavior happens easily. All of our spaces are like that. You're always being kind of pulled toward what is natural and easy and consistent in that environment. So how can you prime your environment to make those the things you want to do? That's for physical environment. Social environment is the same. You're always kind of being pulled toward what the behaviors are that are natural there. What are the social norms? What are the things that people get praised and rewarded for? What is the culture typically calling you to do? And that's where I think the answer is you want to surround yourself with groups who have the behaviors you want to have. Join groups where your desired behavior is normal. If it's normal in that group, then you can rise together.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Tung State. That's great. I think that punchline of the more different your environment is from the habits that you want to build or from whatever equilibrium you're trying to achieve, the harder you will have to fight to maintain. And that is a fight that you can do for, I don't know, a day, a week, a month, but it's some limited amount of time. At some point, it just is draining to try to grind against the environment all the time. Sometimes I view environment, both physical and social, almost like a form of gravity. You know, like the physical environment that we're in right now, okay, that's always nudging you in certain directions. Like, I'm sitting in this chair right now talking to you. I could be sitting anywhere else, but I would have to sit on the floor, right? The environment of the chair is ushering me to this spot. It's almost like a form of gravity pulling me here rather than giving me to go somewhere else. When we leave this room, if I want it, I could try to do something crazy and break through a wall or climb through the”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized. Or I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong a part of something. Most of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to improve. And so you want to do something different, but you also know you're going to be heavily criticized for it. You're going to at least add friction to your relationships. And we don't want to live with that dissonance, that dissonance of I could have this, but I also create friction here. One of the lessons, I think, one of the big takeaways if you want to build better habits and get habits to stick, particularly for the long run, is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Join groups where you can rise together, where the people that you're surrounded by have the type of habits that you want to have.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there's something incredibly powerful about this that also ties into habits, which is that a lot of our identity, not the whole thing, but large portions of our identity, are tied to our relationships. You know, I'm a father, I'm a husband, and so it's the connection that we have with others, our social bonds influence the picture that we have of ourselves. This is something that widely influences our habits. So we are all part of multiple groups. Sometimes that group is large like what it means to be American or what it means to be British. Sometimes that group is small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of this family or a member at the local CrossFit gym. But all of the groups that you belong to, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's another study that did it for voting, so people were more likely to go and vote if you said, I am a voter, you got them to identify as I'm a voter, rather than are you voting today? And so same thing. There's an example in Atomic Habits I talk about. Imagine two people who are trying to quit smoking. And so the first person gets offered a cigarette and they say, oh no, thanks, I'm trying not to smoke. And the second person gets offered and they say, oh no, thanks, I'm not a smoker. And so the first person is trying to resist something that they still see themselves as. But the second person no longer sees themselves as the type of person who smokes. And yeah, some of the evidence and research suggests that once you adopt those identities, it's easier for you to stick to the behavior.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do this because this is part of who I am. Then you'll fight to maintain the habit. Then it becomes easier for it to stick. And so the connection between habits and identity, I think, is ultimately how you really get habits to stick for the longer run.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fagoty make it. Like it's asking you to believe something positive about yourself. But behavior and beliefs are a two-way street. And so what you believe influences the actions you will take and the actions you take also influences what you will believe. And my encouragement, my suggestion is to start with the action, to let the behavior lead the way, to make one sales call or meditate for one minute or do one push up and let that in that moment be evidence that you were that type of person. If you go outside today and you shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don't instantly think, oh, I'm a basketball player. But if you do it every day for next three months or six months or year, at some point you cross this invisible threshold where you have to admit, I guess playing basketball is like kind of an important part of who I am. You know, I guess it's part of my identity. And once you adopt a habit as part of your story, once it becomes part of how you see yourself, it's not just like I need to go for a run. It's like I am a runner.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for on the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence does not finish a novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. And no, setting one bit of positive feedback does not make you like the world's best leader, but it does cast a vote for on the type of leader who cares about their teammates. And individually, those are small things, but collectively you build up this body of evidence for being that kind of person. Little bit different than what you often hear. Like, you'll often hear people say something like fake it till you make it.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To write the first chapter of the book, and you kind of feel uncomfortable. It feels like it's not you yet. You go to the gym on the first day, you feel like people are judging you. Do I look stupid? I don't know how to do this. But after a while, it becomes your territory. It's just like the wolf. It starts to feel like you're home court. And so that familiarity, I think, also makes it much easier to stick to the habits, you know, once you start to feel comfortable there. And that takes a little bit of time. And then the last piece is identity. The more that you start to follow this habit, the more you repeat a habit, the more you reinforce being that type of person, the more you start to have that element of your story. I think this is one of the most important things for building habits and getting habits to stick, which is how your habits reinforce your desired identity. We often start by asking, what do I wish to achieve? But I think what we really should start with is who do I wish to become? What are my actions reinforcing? What are my actions taking me closer toward? In a sense, every action you take is like.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do I take? How do I pack my bag? Do I need to bring a water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym? Like all those sorts of things are little one time costs that you got to figure out early on that once you're into a pattern you already know them. You know, the water bottle thing sounds like a small thing. I heard from someone who said, I always forget to bring my water bottle and they don't have water fountains at this gym. Sometimes I skip the workout because of that. It's like it's remarkable how little friction it takes to pull us off course. And so figuring out all of those things is something that once you're a month or two in, you've crossed all you've, you know, you've fought all those battles and now you know how to do it. So that makes it easier. The other thing is you start to build friendships. Start to build connections. You start to know the people there. You feel comfortable there. There's this concept Stephen Pressfield talks about where if you have a wolf and it's roaming around, eventually it starts to feel like it has its territory. And early on in the process of creative process writing a book or whatever, you go into the office of the first time.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are some habits you're trying to build? You would say, I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week, or I'm trying to write every morning, or I'm trying to meditate, you know, five days a week or whatever. And I know what you mean when you say that. You mean I want it to be this routine, this practice that I do consistently. But writing every day is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth is. You know, going to the gym is not going to be automatic the way the tying your shoes might be. And so the things that we, there's a little bit of sloppiness in the word habits and how we use it in life. It's not they're not automatic mindless routines most of the time. Most of the things that we want to be habits are not like reflexes. They're routines and rituals that we do consistently. So having said that, it is true that after you've gone to the gym for a month or two, it does start to get easier. And I think there's a number of forces that kind of work in your favor there. One is you figured a lot out about what it takes to get into the gym. What time am I going?”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a tricky question because if you were to talk to an academic and they would tell you like a habit is this automatic non-conscious behavior. Really quick, simple things like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongues you got to tap them together twice, you know, like stuff you don't even really think about, okay?”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“30 day cleanse and then I'll be healthy. Let me do this 90 day sprint and then the product will be shipped. I won't have to worry about it anymore. And it's like most things in life, especially the big important things, they're endless. They're endless battles. So just because you went to the gym yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. Like you still have to show up tomorrow. Just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. You still have to be loving and caring again. And so all the things that really matter are endless battles. And it's not about crossing a finish line. It's about living that kind of lifestyle. And so yes, it is true that repetition matters. And yes, it is true that the habits will become more seamless and automatic and maybe a little less effortful as you repeat them more. But that doesn't mean that you'll never have to think about them or worry about them again.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It definitely does. I mean, repetition is how habits form. The 66 days number comes from one study that came out that found that on average it took about 66 days to build a habit. If you look at the study, the range is pretty wide. So if you pick something really simple like Trahin glass of water at lunch each day, that might only take two or three weeks to form. If you look at something more complicated like going for a run after work every day, that might take seven or eight or nine months to form. And so I don't know that 66 days really tells you anything. It doesn't tell you that this is how long it's going to take for your habit to stick. I mean, the range is wide. Sometimes when people ask me how long does it take to form a habit, my answer is forever. Because if you stop doing it, then it's no longer a habit. And what I'm kind of getting at with that is that habits are not a finish line to be crossed. They're a lifestyle to be lived. And so we approach our habits as if it's a finish line. Oh, let me do this third.”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here. There's also some things like, you know, both of us are fairly young entrepreneurs. I'm so glad that I started a business in my twenties, rather than my fifties. Doesn't mean you can't do it in your 50s. Nobody's saying you can't. It's just that it makes things a lot easier for the next decade. You know, it's easier for me to be there for my kids now because I have control of my time because I did the business part in the previous decade. Yeah. And that doesn't mean it's always going to work out or whatever. It doesn't mean that you're going to be able to perfectly plan it all, but you just see how the sequences can stack up in that way”
2025-12-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT