Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads to do this. Our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return we offer exclusive member only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com subscribe welcome to a special New Year's episode of the Drive. For this week's episode, as we are nearing a new year and a lot of you are probably going to be thinking about your New Year's resolutions, we wanted to rerelease one of our most popular episodes, my discussion with James Clear from November of 2021.

James is an entrepreneur, photographer, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. I wanted to interview James after reading his book for the second time, and I realized that it was such an important part of what we try to do in our practice and of course, what most of us try to do in our own lives, which is change behaviors and behaviors can easily be distilled into habits. In this conversation, James and I really focus on the four components of what go into forming behavioral habits. We break those apart and we focus on how you can learn new habits or unlearn bad habits. I think you'll enjoy this episode if you've ever wanted to change a behavior or create a behavior, which basically, I think is all of us. So without further delay, please enjoy or re enjoy my conversation with James Clear, and we hope you all have a wonderful new year. Hey James, thanks so much for making time to sit down today. It's been a while. I've wanted to sit down and chat with you.

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm excited to talk more.

I'm trying to think when I first read your book, because I read it twice and like all good books, you get more out of it. I think the second time, in part because I think the deeper you get down the rabbit hole of trying to create habits, whether it's in yourself or helping others form habits, the more you realize how challenging it can be. But maybe for folks who haven't read it, because I suspect there's going to be a bunch of people listening to this who have read it, and I want to be able to go deeper for them and think there's going to be some people who haven't read it. Give us a bit of the history as to why this even appealed to you.

Well, first, thank you for saying that. I feel like that's the ultimate measure of whether a book is good or out. Is it worth rereading? That's a high bar. There are many books I've reread, but yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to do it twice. So what excited me about habits, I think there are a few things. The first is you're building habits all the time, whether you're thinking about them or not. So depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 40 and 50% of our behaviors seem to be automatic and habitual. But most of the time those studies are looking at things that are like more or less automatic, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, unplugging the toaster after each use. But I think the true influence of your habits is even greater than that, because a lot of the time, the behaviors that you're taking are shaped or influenced by the habits that preceded them. So you can imagine standing in line at the grocery store or having three or four minutes free in your kitchen, and you habitually pull your phone out of your pocket. The next five or ten minutes might be spent thinking carefully about what email you're responding to, or the video game you're playing or scrolling social media.

But that conscious, maybe non habitual, behavior was shaped or set by the habit of pulling your phone out. So the reach of our habits is very wide, and it's influencing our behavior all the time. So that's one reason why it's important. And I think that if you're going to be building habits anyway, you might as well understand what they are and how they work and how to shape them so that you can be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of people feel like their habits are happening to them, like they don't get a whole lot of influence on it. And partially I think it's just because it's this process your brain is going through all the time to try to automate and make behaviors more efficient. But if you don't really know what's happening or where to adjust it, then it kind of feels like it's happening to you rather than happening for you. And then I would say the second thing that kind of really got me diving in deeper and thinking about it more carefully is just the realization that most of us in life want some kind of results.

We want to get better at a skill, or we want to lose weight, or to make more money, or reduce stress and gain peace of mind. And whatever the results are that you're looking for, most of the time, your results are a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your nutrition and training habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits, even like the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so habits are not the only thing that influence outcomes in life. You have luck and randomness, you've got misfortune. But by definition, randomness is not under your control. And I think the only reasonable approach is to focus on what's in your control. And over long time horizons, your results tend to bend in the direction of your habits. So I think because your brain is building habits all the time anyway, and because your results are heavily influenced by the habits that you repeat. Those are two primary reasons that I feel like got me interested in the topic, but also just good reasons for anybody to be fascinated with habits.

I'm guessing there's a lot of probably evolutionary rationale for why we're creatures of habit. Presumably, the less energy we had to devote to things that would help us survive and procreate, the better. And obviously that's why we have an autonomic nervous system that allows us to function. Things like breathing and having your heart go from beating fast or beating slow to be completely out of your voluntary control. I'm curious as to whether or not we have a sense of, ancestrally, what types of habits were people ever trying to deliberately change? Maybe it's not an answerable question, but I don't know if you've ever contemplated that. When did this idea of being proactive in either breaking a habit or creating a new habit? Do you get the sense that that is a recent luxury of our species?

So I don't know the answer to the question, but I do have some thoughts on it, and I feel like it probably does skew somewhat recent for one particular reason. Which is, generally speaking, our ancestors lived in what was primarily an immediate return environment. The majority of the decisions that you would make that meaningfully impacted your survival were ones that were relatively immediate in nature. So taking shelter from a storm or avoiding a lion on the savannah or foraging for the next meal in a berry bush, these are things that had a pretty quick payoff in your life. If you fast forward to modern society, though, and we could define that however you want, but probably, say, the last 500 years or something like that. Certainly the last hundred years, modern society seems to have created quite a few structures that favor not an immediate return environment, but a delayed return environment. So you go to work today so that you can get a paycheck in two weeks, or you study at school today so that you can graduate in four years, save for retirement today so that you can not have to work a couple of decades from now.

And there are a lot of structures that are like that in modern society that tend to reward delayed gratification. So I think, in a sense, we're kind of walking through this modern society that rewards ourselves for patience, and we still have this, like, paleolithic hardware where we prioritize instant gratification and immediate returns in a lot of ways in some kind of evolutionary sense. And you can see how there's a little bit of a mismatch there. I wonder if it's that modern mismatch that has led to the desire to change our behavior and to adjust habits. And perhaps it wasn't something that we thought about as carefully or cared about as much 1000 years ago or 5000 years ago or longer. It is interesting, though, to say that some aspects of modern society are mismatched with that ancestral wiring, but some of them are not. Why do we care about delaying gratification to get a PhD or delaying gratification to save more money? Primarily because it affords some form of status which is very hierarchical and very, we think, evolutionarily wired in. So there's still connections there. It's just that not all of it is aligned.

Yeah, it seems that the vehicles that we would have used to attain status earlier were much, quote unquote, simpler, and today we're looking at other ways to do it. Hearing you talk about habits that way makes me compare two activities I like very much and contrast the challenges of learning each of them. So one is riding a bike and the other is learning to swim. So if you took a 20 year old who had never done both, and admittedly, it's easy to find a 20 year old that's never swum, it's probably hard to find a 20 year old that's never ridden a bike. But I would posit that it's really easy to teach a 20 year old to ride a bike if they haven't done it. And let's assume for a moment this isn't someone who had never been able to do it before, but found somebody who'd never ridden a bike at 20. And the reason, I would argue that is, in a bike, the object is balance. It's really about balance, and you get your feedback immediately. So, you know, the second you're out of balance on a bike, because you're in the environment of the air, and the air has a density such that it's not forgiving, you basically are out of balance.

You're going to fall. Conversely, although most people don't think of it this way, swimming is also about balance in the water. You're trying to balance yourself this way versus this way. Most people would naturally sink feet first, and you're trying to balance yourself this way so that you can breathe. And those things are not easy to do because the feedback loop is very long, and it's very hard to make the connection that you're out of balance. It also doesn't hurt as much when you fail. So when you fall off your bike, it's very uncomfortable. But when you're out of balance in swimming, you just have to work harder, but you don't realize why you're working harder anyway. That's why I think it's very hard to learn how to swim, and it's not very hard to learn how to ride a bike. And therefore, it requires much more deliberate practice to learn to swim than it does to ride a bike, at least at some basic level.

I'll kind of give a roundabout answer here, but I'll come back to your question. So what is it that determines whether a habit is good or bad? We use these phrases a lot of the time in conversation. We say, oh, it's a bad habit. It's a good habit. And sometimes people will ask me like, well, why do I repeat this habit? If it's bad for me? If it's so terrible, then how come I keep coming back to it? And I think we can divide in a sense, if you want to get really pedantic about or really academic about it. Some researchers don't even like to use the word good or bad because they're habits and they all serve you in some way.

So we could just say basically adaptive or maladaptive, right?

Yeah, I think we could make a meaningful division in the sense of how we use it in most conversation and say that pretty much all behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time. Broadly speaking, we could lump it into an immediate bucket, an immediate outcome, and an ultimate outcome. And what you find is that for most bad habits, the immediate outcome is actually pretty favorable. The classic example is smoking a cigarette. But if you smoke a cigarette outside the office at 10:00 a.m. With a friend, well, then immediately you get some socialization. Maybe it curbs your nicotine craving, or just lets you destress for a couple of minutes or get a break from work. There are all kinds of things that you might be benefiting from. It's only two or five or ten years later that the ultimate outcome is negative. With the good habits, especially the first time you perform them, it's often the reverse. The first week of training in the gym, your body looks the same in the mirror. You're sore. You don't really have much to show for the effort that you're putting in. You feel kind of stupid in there. You're wondering if people judge you or if you're doing it the wrong way.

There are a lot of upfront costs, and it's only two or five or ten years later that you get the outcome that you're looking for. In a sense, the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And that misalignment between when you feel rewarded and when you feel punished helps to explain why. We tend to fall pretty easily into a lot of things that we would categorize as bad, like eating donuts or smoking a cigarette or whatever, and fall less easily into things that we would categorize as good or feels like I have to force myself to write or whatever. Now, that's very similar to what you just mentioned about the immediacy of the feedback. Bad habits are giving you pretty immediate feedback, kind of like riding a bike. Good habits are giving you pretty delayed feedback, maybe a little bit analogous to swimming. I think that example of the medium that you're in, air versus water, is fascinating to think about water as being a feedback dampener. But there is another element to it, which you also mentioned, which is the strength of the feedback.

Falling on the ground off a bike and skinning your knee is pretty painful. You learn quite quickly, technically, making a bad stroke in the water. You don't really pay too much of a cost. If you're being sloppy with your form, it's unlikely that you rectify that quickly. And this is a phenomenon that I think is so critical or so important to behavior change. I called it the cardinal rule of behavior change in atomic habits, which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that get immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed and the intensity of that feedback. And generally speaking, the quicker you can get feedback too intense is maybe a bit much, but at some point it needs to be high enough to move the needle. Can't be so low that it doesn't register. So you need both meaningful feedback and quick feedback if you want behavior to change.

Actually, I want to come back to that topic because I think therein lies one of the themes of your book, right. Which is that willpower is not a great long term strategy. But before I get to that, I want to kind of talk a little bit about you personally, at least before you came to these realizations. I know you were an athlete. In your book, you write about this horrible accident you had when you were playing baseball. I believe that was high school, or was it in college?

Yep, sophomore year, high school.

During that period of your life, were you someone that others and your peers would have looked at you and said, oh God, that James. That guy is so disciplined. I mean, he just has what it takes to always get the job done and he never indulges in the wrong things and always does the right things. Were you one of those guys that was just a beacon of quote unquote discipline? Or were you a normal guy, or were you someone who had a hard time doing what was right?

Well, I wasn't someone who had a hard time, but it depends on the context.

Keep it simple, like homework, sports, those things.

So with school, definitely, I always liked school. I was like the nerdy kid on the sports teams I was on, but in the science lab or something, I was like the jock, which is kind of funny how you change based on the room that you're in. And so I always felt like I kind of played that middle ground between those two. I think it helped me learn how to get along with both groups and was helpful socially and all that. But earlier in my life, I think I thrived more in school than I did in sports. I barely got to play in high school. That's one of the punchlines of that early story in the book, is I ended up playing a total of eleven innings in high school. Now, I kind of blossomed once I got to college and ended up being an academic all american by the time I graduated, but that came much later. So it really sort of depended on the context. But generally speaking, I would say, yeah, people probably thought that I was disciplined, but I do think it depended on where we were. If it was just looking at school, then I think people would say that if you were looking somewhere else, then maybe not.

Was there an area that you struggled with from a behavior standpoint?

To be honest, there were areas that I avoided because I thought I would struggle. So I think it was more about me being fearful and avoiding anything I thought I would be bad at than it was about watching him and being like, oh, look at him floundering around. I think I had to overcome that wiring over the course of a decade or two. It took me a long time to start to take more risks and take on things that I didn't think I would be good at, rather than just trying to stack the deck and just do what I thought I would do.

Well, I don't know how much you've paid attention to the discussion debate around free will. I have always assumed we have free will. This is one of those things that is kind of an anthem to me to imagine a world under which I'm not completely under control of my own will, my behavior. But my good friend Sam Harris, who I don't know if you're familiar with Sam's work.

Yeah, I did an episode on his podcast as well.

You're familiar with the fact that he's written extensively and spoken extensively about the idea that we actually don't have free will, that this is an illusion. There are examples that I can conjure up to make that case. For example, he uses a very clever thought experiment, which is, if I tell you to think of a movie, the first movie, that pops into your head, you have no control over what that's going to be. Conversely, there's a part of me that thinks, okay, but there were lots of things. I have free will over my ability to go and do something, take an action, go and exercise, or something like that. But the deeper I get into this thinking, the more I start to realize, well, wait a minute, that may still be innate. This ability that I have using myself as an example to really have an easy time exercising. It requires virtually no effort to exercise. In fact, it usually requires a lot of effort to sometimes not exercise, but requiring a lot of effort to mind what I eat. And I know people for whom that's not the case. Right. I know people for whom they just have an easy time eating what's healthy, but maybe they don't like to exercise that much.

Before I go any deeper into my question, let me just pause and ask you for your reaction to that overall line of inquiry. And how do you think about free will as it pertains to what we're going to talk about today?

Well, first, I think I'm probably similar to you in the sense like exercise has always been on the easier side for me, nutrition has always been on the harder side, which is kind of interesting there. I don't know exactly what that reveals, but it's just interesting to think about where you have certain inclinations and maybe not others. With respect to free will, I understand the argument. Once you start to walk through, it's like, okay, yeah, there's this very long chain of atoms that are essentially colliding and leading us inevitably to the next action or the next thought or whatever. And if we could map them all out, then perhaps we could just predict everything that's about to happen. I get that as a thought experiment. I tend to, when I'm living my daily life, fall in the same space that it sounds like you fall in, which is, well, I'm going to continue to act as if I have free will. And ultimately, the more that I think about it, I usually come down on that side where it's like, listen, the truth is, nobody knows the answer one way or another. We have good arguments, perhaps for each, but nobody knows for sure.

If it is all predetermined, then it kind of doesn't really matter. I'm going to do this anyway, and if it isn't predetermined, I might as well choose the thing that I think best serves me. So whether I'm making that choice that best serves me, or whether it was predetermined that I'm going to make the good choice, it kind of doesn't really matter to me. Like, I might as well choose to act that way. So I don't know. I would be very curious to hear what Sam's thought on that is. But from a practical standpoint, I don't see a reason to not choose the best option that you can. In the event that you do have free will, you'll be glad that you chose it. In the event that you don't have free will, you didn't get a say anyway, so who cares?

I guess I would add to that is it might be that free will or the absence of free will is what determines a person's maybe call it genetic propensity to change habits or form habits. There may be some people for whom that is easier than others, but that's probably a spectrum. And it doesn't imply that a person who struggles with a given behavior can't learn to master it. Again, using an example, I'll never be a Michael Phelps, ever. There was no scenario under which I was going to be as good a swimmer as Michael Phelps. So even if he hadn't started swimming till he was 15 and my parents threw me in the water at two, I was never going to be that good. But it doesn't mean I couldn't learn to swim. And similarly, had he never been thrown in the pool, we would never have heard his name. So I guess that's how I kind of rationalize it, which is there are going to be people for whom it is easier to go through the exercises that we're going to talk about, and there are people for whom that's just going to be more difficult.

And you can't change that part of it. That's the part, I guess, that is set. Yeah.

A couple of thoughts to add on to that. I thought of this when you first brought this up a few minutes ago. I don't know if you're familiar with David Epstein, his work on sports gene and range and so on. David's great and a good friend of mine, a really nice guy, and just very thoughtful with the way he puts arguments together, which I always appreciate. And I was having a conversation with him about some of this stuff, and he said one of the things that surprised him when he was researching the sports gene is that characteristics that he thought would be mostly genetic strength and speed and things like that, turned out to be heavily influenced by training and choice and a lot of other stuff and qualities that he thought would be a choice, like grit and perseverance and desire to train, turned out to have a much higher genetic component than he realized. I always love the example. I think this is in sports gene he talks about. Steffi Graff just happened to be in a tennis study when she was young. She was like 14 or something, and she was part of this cohort of young Germans that were being studied.

And she not only tested the highest for physical abilities like strength and speed and quickness and so on, but also tested the highest for competitiveness and desire to train and all these other things. I just love when combinations like that come together. Like think about how pointless this is to compete against her. Not only is she better than you, she also wants it more. So I do think that there's a heavy genetic component to some of the mental characteristics that would make you more likely to train. Some of these aspects or more interested in some things than others. To your point about Phelps, whether he had ever been dropped in the pool or not, on the surface it seems like something that would make you less motivated. You would say, oh, well, why even try? I'm never going to be Michael Phelps. Or if genes play such a large role, what's the point? But I actually think that's the wrong lesson to take away. The primary lesson, I think, is that genes don't tell you not to work hard. They tell you where to work hard. Or they don't tell you not to have a strategy.

They just inform your strategy. This is another line that David told me in a conversation once where he said, a lot of people talk about grit and perseverance and discipline, but what if that is just your natural propensity based on the thing that you're working on? What if I just happen to look kind of gritty in my terms of weight training or working at writing a book compared to the average person, but I just look that way because I happen to like those things. And he said, yeah, there's this whole line of thinking that, like, grit is fit. And so actually, the way to increase your perseverance and discipline is to find areas or categories or skills where you're highly interested in them. It's very hard to beat the person who's having fun because they're going to want to keep working longer than the person who's suffering. So grit is fit, I think, is one way in which you can maybe try to stack the deck or stack the ods in your favor and get your genes aligned with the things that you're working on. And then there are going to be things like Michael Phelps in a pool where you're like, listen, this body was just designed to do this thing.

It's very hard to find somebody who's more optimally designed to move through the water than him. Not all of us are going to have the good fortune of discovering whatever that thing is for us in our lives at age four or six or whatever. I don't think that that means you should stop searching. This is one of the benefits of trial and error. The person who is curious and willing to explore a lot of things is more likely to come across an area where they are fascinated or they are interested. And it also is a really good fit for their natural abilities or propensities. That's kind of the primary lesson that I take away from the genetic side of things. Is similar to what you said. Anybody can improve doesn't mean anybody can be Michael Phelps, but you can always improve your ability. And let's try to find that thing that I'm fascinated with, that I'm interested in, so where it doesn't feel like I'm suffering in the same way that other people are when they're trying this thing. You'll often be surprised how far you can go, how willing you are to build habits and improve skills if you find some of those things that you're truly fascinated by.

Two comments I'd add to that one. Completely trite, but amusing. Which is not only does Phelps have the perfect chassis and engine for what he does, but just as you described Steffigraph, I've seen Phelps race at meets that meant nothing. So total throwaway meets. He's not shaved, he's not tapered, he couldn't care less to be there. He's swimming like a 200 im. It doesn't look like he's going to win at all. And yet somehow in the last 15 meters, he out touches everybody. I've seen this on enough occasions that I just think like, this is a guy who hates losing. So even though he's not necessarily in shape at this moment, even though this meat means nothing for him, he's training through it, and half the people he's competing against, this is their pinnacle. He hates losing so much. So it's really the perfect combination.

I have that same takeaway watching the last dance. There was that one summer where he was recording space jam and they set up like a tent for him outside the movie studio and all the NBA players came in like each night to play pickup games. Just got done filming like 12 hours a day, but he just could not handle losing a pickup game. It would just bother him so much to not get it right, to not win. I got to think that that is maybe not exclusively, but at least largely just he can't turn it off. He doesn't know any other way to be personality or genes or whatever you want to call it. That's just how he's wired. And I actually love it when I see that characteristic in any domain. Maggie Rogers, who's a musician, she had this post she put on instagram. It was all of her notes on a particular song that they were working on and know, hey, I think we need to bring the symbol in a second earlier here and a bunch of other stuff. And then she shared a little clip of her listening to it with her producer and so on, and you could just tell that she cared so much about the details.

It would bother her if the song was not as good as it could possibly be, and maybe that's the musician's version of hates to lose. I love it when I see that characteristic. It kind of lights me up and makes me want to be that way about whatever thing I'm working on. If you can find that area where it would bother you for it to not be right, I got to think you're going to get much better results there than most people, because most people get bored or move on or get tired or frustrated, and the person who just will not stop unless it's right is going to end up with better results. It sounds simple to say, the way to have great results is to not lower your standards. But in a lot of ways, it turns out to be more true than you would expect.

I love watching this in the best of the best. Formula One is one of my favorite sports, and historically, my hero is this guy named Mayartan Senna. And to hear him, I watched Senna.

That documentary, I'd never heard of him. I know very little about Formula One. It was awesome. After watching that, I was, like, completely hooked. It was a fascinating sport.

And you gather from that documentary, I mean, he was a perfectionist, even amongst his peers. He took it to a level that exceeded that. It actually cost him his life. I don't think the documentary fully explains how much that need to win killed him. Because the day he died, he was trying to do something in a car that shouldn't have been done at a time when it shouldn't have been done. But it's amazing when in a sport like that, where the stakes are so high for trying to do something at the expense of maybe a mechanical limit or a limit of the car, but yet all drivers will tell you they're going to go for it. If there's a gap, they're going to go for the gap. And there was a debate in the 90s in Formula One. So Senna's death changed the sport forever, because that's really what changed the imposed safety in the sport. But the debate prior to that was, look, we'll just tell the drivers to drive slower. They don't have to drive this fast. They can choose to drive 10% slower, which, of course, was nonsense. The head of the FIA at the time, who has just recently passed away, made a point which was, that's the dumbest thing you could ever say.

They will all choose to have a less safe car if it goes faster, because you're talking about the 20 most competitive drivers on the planet. Now, there was another point I was going to make that was for most of us, we will never know what it's like to be the top thousand in the world of anything. If I think about all the things that I love, driving a race car, shooting my bow and arrow, exercising, blah, blah, I mean, I'm multiple orders of magnitude beneath even the most lowly ranked professional of those things. And this gets into something else, which is, for me at least, the joy is not in the absolute comparison of myself to others, but the relative comparison of where I was before. Do you think that's a universal thing? Is it universal that people are mostly engaged by how much they are making progress relative to their own performance? Or do you think that there are some people who are only capable of finding pleasure when being compared to others in an absolute basis?

The second half of that question I'm not sure of. Generally, I think both of those things are universal. I think, one. It's universal that one of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is the feeling of progress. And I think it's fairly universal that progress feels good, in a sense, at the most base level. We are goal directed organisms in the sense that we have a goal to get food or water, or to procreate, or to be safe, and we want to move toward those things and resolve the tension, the gap between that goal and our current state as much as possible. Now, with our complex brains in modern society, we come up with many other goals that are outside of just our basic needs, like food and water. We have goals like getting a promotion at work, or losing ten pounds or whatever it is. But that same tension between where you are currently and where you want to be, we want to have that resolved. The more progress that you feel like you're making toward one of those things, I think that generally feels good. I feel like that's pretty universal. I also do think it seems to be fairly universal that we have some bias toward status, some bias toward prestige and rank and hierarchy.

And it feels good for pretty much anybody to win the game, or to have the best score on the scoreboard, or to climb the leaderboard. And the more that you see yourself occupying a higher rung relative to those around you, whether it's with wealth or money or fame, the better that feels, too. And it probably is a spectrum, or maybe each of those is a spectrum. And some people have the dial turned up real high on the status part and maybe lower on the internal measures, and other people have it the reverse. But I generally think we all have them. To some degree, and you probably will find yourself feeling good if you happen to succeed on either of those metrics.

And how much of it do you think is, for lack of a better term, journey versus destination focused? Because if you talk about your example of weight loss, that is generally a very destination based metric. I want to lose ten pounds. Not going to be happy until I lose ten pounds. The process of how I go about doing it, changing the way I'm eating, changing my exercise, accepting the fact that you're not going to lose ten pounds linearly, it's going to look like this. Those are details that I'm willing to tolerate, but I want to lose those ten pounds or I want to fit into this piece of clothing that I used to fit into. Contrast that with I want to learn to speak Italian. I'm enjoying this process of learning a few new words every day and learning how the structure of this grammar works relative to my native tongue. And I'm never going to be perfectly fluent in Italian, but I know that in some point I'm going to be completely functional. This journey of learning this new language or learning how to play this instrument, that's what's giving me the pleasure. And I don't know if that distinction makes sense.

First, I should say this is coming from someone who's been very goal oriented for most of their life. I would set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weight I wanted to lift in the gym, for the numbers I wanted my business to hit. And at some point I actually found this sheet that I made my sophomore year of college for the goals that I wanted to hit by the time I graduated. It was funny looking back on it, like ten or eleven years later, because about half of them I hit, the other half I didn't. And I was like, obviously setting the goal was not the thing that made the difference. If it did, I would have hit them all. So something else was going on here. It was like a little remedial training session for myself or something, realizing that goals are not the primary thing that drives results. And in fact, if you look at the performance in most domains, the winners and the losers have the same goal. Presumably every Formula One driver has the goal of winning the race when they take off from the starting line.

If you have a job opening and 100 candidates apply for the job, presumably every candidate has the goal of getting the job. The goal is not the thing that makes the difference in the performance. And if the winners and the losers have the same goal, it cannot be the distinguishing factor maybe it's necessary. Perhaps there's an argument it's necessary for success, but it's not sufficient for it. So that got me thinking more like, well, what is it then that drives it? And in the book, the way that I describe is the difference between systems and goals. Your goal is your desired outcome or your target. The thing you're shooting for your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow, all these little gears in this overall machine. And if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, if there's ever a gap between your goal and your system, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed for your current results. So whatever system you've been running for the last six months or year or whatever, you talked about shooting a bow and arrow, presumably whatever system of movements you have going on there, preshot routine, how you draw it back, everything, it kind of is inevitably carrying you toward the result of where the arrow ends up.

The irony of all this is we also badly want better results in life. We also badly want to make more money, or to reduce stress or lose weight or whatever. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It's kind of like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. There are some areas, like shooting a bow, where the connection is quite obvious, but there are other areas where, for whatever reason, we don't see it as clearly. But I think the pattern is still there, which is, let's adjust the habits, let's get this machine running in a more fluid fashion, and you'll find that the results kind of come naturally. I think just appreciating that helped rewire mindset a little bit. I was so focused on outcomes and goals for a long time, and now realizing that actually the way this is driven is with the system. That helped me shift from what I would say now is like, goals are for people who care about winning. One time you set a goal to run a half marathon, and you train for three months and you do it and you complete the race, but then maybe you stop training after that.

But systems are for people who care about winning again and again. And if you care about sustaining that success, then you're like, I'm a runner. I care about the system that I'm building for how I train and how many miles I'm getting in all kinds of other stuff. And whether I have a half marathon, three months in the distance or not, it doesn't really matter because I'm going to be running my system. Either way, making that mental shift, I think, can be useful for sustaining results.

So let's talk about habits now, because I think that's the thing that, as you said, basically shapes the nature, nature of what we're going to do. There's a saying that many people have said, and I won't even try to paraphrase it, because at the moment it's escaping me. But the gist of it is like, you don't rise to level of your training. You fall to the level, or you fall to level of your training.

The original quote, I think, is from archolocus, I believe, a greek philosopher, and said, you don't rise to the level of your expectations. You fall to the level of your training. And in atomic habits, I tweaked that or adjusted that to say, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And so it's actually your habits that kind of create that baseline.

Why is it called atomic habits? I remember when I first saw the title, my assumption was atomic. Must be huge explosion like big habits, which, of course, is exactly not what it means.

It's interesting which meanings people pull out when they see it. So I chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons. The first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small, like an atom. And I do think habits should be small and fairly easy to do, especially in the beginning. The second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system, and that's the one that people often overlook. Atom is built into molecules, molecules built into compounds, and so on. And your habits are kind of like that. Each little habit is like atom in the overall routine of your day, you put them all together and you end up with your lifestyle or your daily routine. And then the third and final meaning is the one that you mentioned, the source of immense energy or power. And I think if you put all three meanings together, you sort of understand the narrative arc of the book, which is make changes that are small and easy to do, layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system or atoms in a molecule. Collectively, you can get some really powerful or remarkable results.

And so I feel like the phrase atomic habits not only encapsulates that kind of small change in the system that you're looking to build, but also the powerful results that can emanate from that.

So you talk about three different types of change, outcome change, the process change. We've touched on a little bit of those, but the one we haven't really touched on is this identity change. That was something that, when I read your book, really resonated, because it provided, I think, a very decent explanation, at least, for why exercise comes naturally to me, which is it's so hardwired into my identity and why maybe certain other habits I've tried to create over time don't come easily to me because I haven't fully identified with them yet. So expand on that, but also how you came to realize that two things.

Before I unpack the idea a little more fully. First is, of all the ideas in the book, this is probably the least scientific. There are actually some studies which I cite in that chapter, and it's not like there's no science behind it, but the majority of the book, I try to be very robust in the way that I was thinking about how do we build habits and what actually gets them to stick. And there also are just a bazillion social psychology and cognitive psychology studies that illustrate a lot of the examples that I talk about. But this is more of a mindset, I would say, or a philosophy on how behavior change works. Second thing is, it's maybe the only unique idea that I have. Pretty much everything else that I share is stuff that's been widely covered by other people or things that we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But I felt like this was something that maybe I could contribute to the conversation. Part of the reason I started thinking about it is I started asking, why do habits really matter? We seem to care about them a lot as a society.

It's something a lot of books get written about, something we talk about a lot. There's clearly some kind of deeper importance to them. So what is it? The surface level answer is that we care about habits because they get us these external things. They make us more productive and more fit, and so on. Habits can help you do all of that stuff, which is great. But I think the real reason, the deeper reason that habits matter, is that they are a signal internally to ourselves about who we are and what we care about. And they're kind of a signal of like the story that we're telling ourselves. So, in a sense, every time that you perform a habit, you are embodying a particular identity. When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. When you shoot a basketball for 30 minutes, you embody the identity of someone who is a basketball player. You do those things once or twice. It doesn't radically transform the story you have about yourself. But if you keep showing up and shooting a basketball every day for six months or two years, or at some point, you cross this sort of invisible threshold where you're like, yeah, being a basketball player is like part of who I am, some aspect of my identity.

And so your habits provide evidence. They provide proof of the story that you're telling yourself. And that, I think, is a very powerful thing, a very deep, personal thing that habits can provide and perhaps the real reason why they matter. So to come back to your question about process versus outcome versus identity, where how we change, usually when people set out to make some kind of change, they start by thinking about the results or the outcome that they want. So they say, I want to lose 40 pounds in the next six months. And then from that outcome, they back into a process or a plan. So they say, all right, if I want to lose 40 pounds, then I need to follow this nutrition plan. I'm going to need to work out four days a week. And maybe there are details to those plans and everything, but that's usually kind of roughly where it stops. And then the assumption is, if I do those things and I lose that weight, then I'll be the kind of person that I want to be. The argument that I try to unpack in that chapter is, what if we worked backwards from this?

What if instead we said, who is the type of person I wish to be? What is the identity that I'd like to have? And in fact, we could even ask the person who has that identity, what kind of habits would they have? And then we use that identity to inform the process, the habits, and we let the outcomes come naturally. There are a variety of examples of this. One reader of mine, she lost a bunch of weight. I think it was 110 pounds in total. And she's kept it off for over a decade. And the question that she sort of carried around with her as she was starting her weight loss journey is, what would a healthy person do? And that's very much aligned or oriented with that identity piece. It's like, okay, would a healthy person take a cab, or would they walk four blocks the next meeting? Would they order a salad and chicken at lunch, or would they have a hamburger and fries? And she could just kind of carry that question around with her to every context she was in and make a choice that she felt like aligned with the identity that she wanted to have, rather than worrying necessarily about something specific, like the number of macros she's getting or whatever.

Now, I should say, I think it can work both ways. Like, I count my macros and it works really well for me. But I think that's partially because it aligns with the identity that I already have. And if you don't have that shift in internal story yet, it's hard for the behavior to follow suit. Imagine you went up to two people. You said, hey, would you like a cigarette? And the first person says, oh, no thanks, I'm trying to quit. And the second person says, oh, no thanks, I'm not a smoker. Technically, they've done the same thing. They've both turned down the cigarette. But the second person kind of has signaled a shift in identity change. The first person is trying to be something they're not. No thanks, I'm trying to quit. And the second person is saying, I'm not a smoker. It's just not something that I do. I think once you get to that stage, that shift in identity, you're in a much more powerful place from a behavior change standpoint, because you're not even really trying to change anymore. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be.

So we can talk about ways to do that, but that's kind of the quick version on identity versus outcome.

Tell me what you think the difference is in identity between the woman you gave the example of and say yourself. So you're both striving to the same objective, which is a healthy weight, but she accomplished it by focusing on what would a healthy person do in this situation. You accomplish it again, just pertaining to nutrition at the moment, presumably by saying, I don't know what your macro goals are, but these are the aspirations that I have, and I'm going to stick to these. So tell me a little bit about the difference between those approaches and how can a person know which will be better for them outside of just empirically trying them both?

Well, I think in this particular case, the primary difference is I had an internal story, or have an internal story that I am a healthy person already. And so just doing things that are aligned with that, like counting macros, feels totally fine, whereas for her at that early stage, she did not feel that way and did not genuinely believe that about herself. It's possible to have an epiphany and to change cold turkey, or to just flip a switch and suddenly start acting in a different way. I do think it's possible. I think sometimes people have experiences like that. Ironically, I think it rarely happens for some kind of bolts of lightning inside. I think one of the most common ways it happens is by reading books. I think people will sometimes read a book that really changes their worldview, and they start to do things completely differently after that. You can imagine a bunch of nutrition examples like, somebody reads a book that convinces them that carbs are the devil and the grain is terrible. All of a sudden, the next day they want to throw out all the bread in the house, and it's very quick.

A switch has been flipped. So I do think it's possible. However, I don't think that changing through an epiphany is a very reliable way to change. And I don't know that it's something you can bank on or can plan around or strategize for might happen to you a couple of times in your life. I don't think that it's an efficient way to try to build a new habit. So if you can't change or hope to change through an epiphany, then what are your options if you want to change your identity? And I think the best avenue that you have is to cast votes with your actions. So, in a sense, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, doing one pushup does not radically transform your body, but it does cast a vote for. I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence may not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. I think this is, like, a meaningful difference between my approach or what I recommend and what you often hear. Like, you'll often hear something like, fake it till you make it.

I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. It's asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence. We call that delusion. Like, at some point, your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you're saying and what you're actually doing. And so to bring it back to your question about my friend who lost all this weight, I think you have to genuinely believe that story about yourself in order for the actions to start to feel aligned. And what do you do if you don't genuinely believe you're a healthy person, or don't genuinely believe that I'm the kind of person who would track my macros or whatever? Well, I think you have to start with these very small habits. You have to start by proving it to yourself in some little way. Maybe it's just that you did walk the three blocks to the meeting and didn't take the taxi. Or maybe it's just that you did order a salad for lunch and not a burger and fries. And none of those things individually are going to change your body or even the story right away.

But if you keep casting votes for that behavior and keep casting votes for that identity, then eventually you get to the point where it's like the basketball example, you kind of have to admit that you're a basketball player because you've been shooting hoops for the last two years, and this is just part of who you are now. So I think that's the primary difference between the two of us, is that I already kind of had that story, and early on she didn't. Now she does. So who knows? Maybe now she could just track her macros just as easily or even easier than I can. I don't know. But I think that that shift there.

Yeah, I was kind of curious to ask about that because I wonder how that process changes in this person after ten years. I mean, most people understand that losing weight is actually not that hard, but keeping weight off is exceptionally hard. So what your friend did, yes, losing 110 pounds is remarkable, but the fact that she's kept it off for a decade is actually what's remarkable. And I'm curious as to what the temporal sequence of events is where, hey, for the first year, it was a daily struggle of what would the healthy person do? What would the healthy person do? What would the healthy person do? And at some point, that transitions into, I'm a healthy person, this is what I do. I'm a healthy person. This is what I do. And then it becomes so autonomic that you can slip up for a day and it feels wrong, like, oh, God, that cotton candy is horrible. I don't ever want to eat that again.

Yeah, well, you said something similar to that a few minutes ago about how it bothers you to not work out. Sometimes near a y'all, who also has written about habits, has kind of a little measure for that. Where he's like, his measure for whether it's a habit or not is. Does it bother you when you don't do it? I think that's a signal that it's kind of aligned with your identity. It's like, oh, I kind of feel like I'm not being me if I don't do this. To your point about it taking a long time, it can take much longer than you would think. I mean, my friend told me she had to lose 60 pounds before the first person noticed, before she ever heard anything from somebody else. That's a lot of weight in a long time to be working in essentially what feels like a vacuum. Feels like you're just doing it for yourself. No external feedback from the world. So this comes back to a lot of the things we've already talked about, about process and falling in love with the system and a lot of things that go into it, but it definitely is an internal journey, and it definitely will take longer than you would imagine in a lot of cases.

One of the most common examples that I hear of in my practice for the epiphany, behavior change that sticks is the person who quits smoking the day their child is born. And I've always found this interesting, right, because the day before their child is born, they clearly know how bad smoking is. There's nobody who's smoking who doesn't understand the risks of it, and by the same token, who doesn't, as you pointed out earlier, enjoy the benefits of it. In the short run, very rewarding in the short run, very damaging in the long run. That's completely understood intellectually. On day x, they have a child and they decide, I'm done with this. I'm not going to have smoke in my household, because I also know the benefits of secondhand smoke, or the harm, rather, of secondhand smoke, and I'm not going to expose my child to this. And yet, amazingly, I mean, over and over and over again, I hear these stories from patients saying, yes, I grew up in a household where my parents were incredible smokers, and the second I was born, they stopped. And that was 40 years ago, and they've never had a cigarette since.

Is there a transference process here where because it involves the life of another person, it's easier to make this change stick?

Possibly. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of variables that go into it, but it does align with, there's like this whole category of behaviors that I feel like if you wanted to hack a radical change in your life, if you want to figure out a way to get, like you said, this epiphany to stick, massive environment changes or lifestyle changes are a good way to do that. Perhaps one of the strongest ways to do that. So having a kid, getting married, changing jobs, moving to a different city, even something small like getting a dog, can lead to rapid behavior change. And I think one of the things that is really crucial about it is that most of those decisions tend to be irreversible, or at least very hard to reverse. I had one that I struggled with for a long time. Sometimes people ask me, what habits have you struggled with?

Or whatever?

And I tend to be pretty good about getting enough sleep. I almost always get 8 hours or even nine if I'm training hard, but would fall into this pattern where it'd be like nine or 10:00 at night and I would kind of get a second wind and I'd be like, well, maybe I'll just send a few emails or something. And of course it's never just a few. You turn around and it's midnight or one and you're like, okay, am I going to sleep for 8 hours? Because if so, that means I'm not getting up till nine. And I know that I prefer to get up early. I know that I feel better throughout the rest of the next day. 10:00 p.m. James is kind of ruining things for tomorrow. James, by staying up late. And I tried a bunch of different things. There's a little device called an outlet timer. You can buy it for like $10 on Amazon. You plug it into an outlet and you can set the time for when it kills the power from that outlet. And so if you plug your Internet into it, then the Internet shuts off at 10:00 p.m. Or whatever you set it for.

So I tried different things like that, but then you could just pick your phone up and get around it. But the thing that finally made it stick was a dog. Because the dog is going to get up at 07:00 a.m. Whenever I go to sleep, it doesn't matter and I need to go take it for a walk. And you can only do that for a few days before you're like, all right, I'm not going to play this game anymore. I'm going to bed at ten. It's because it was fairly hard to reverse that got it to stick. And I think in the case of having a kid, they're going to be there every day. Now, maybe you could rationalize it a bunch of times before that, but that's not going to change. They're going to be around. And weirdly, because presumably this person's wife was pregnant, so they obviously saw that throughout the whole pregnancy, but that didn't get them to change. But once the child is there, man, it's really immediate. You're taking a puff and you have those little eyes looking back at you. The feedback loop is even tighter than before. So I would imagine both of those things probably play a role.

But more generally, speaking those kind of irreversible or hard to reverse lifestyle changes also tend to be big drivers of quick behavior change.

I can only think of one dramatic habit I changed that has stuck, and it is the silliest thing. But I always bit my nails growing up. Bite them nonstop. Invariably what happens is you'd get a little infection because you bite too close. And it was like, my mom was always like, God, that is such a disgusting habit. It just looked horrible. The day I decided to change, it was the day I got my first interview for med school. You apply to medical school and then all of a sudden the envelopes start coming in and you've got these interviews. Just as I got that first envelope and I realized, oh, I'm actually going to go and be interviewing. At least for me, I didn't interview to go to college. This was the first time I had to do an interview. And I don't know, just something came over me. I was like, wait a second, dude. You can't be the guy that's showing up to an interview with these horrible looking nails. You have to cut this out. You are going to get a nail clipper, and you are going to start clipping your nails like a civilized human being.

And that was, I don't know, 25 years ago. And today, like, when my nails get long, I'm a guy who likes short nails, so I'm always sort of trimming them. I can't imagine that I once bit them. It just seems so strange to me. It's a silly example.

I don't think it is, actually. We all have habits that are like that. There's two things that made me think. The first is it connects to our conversation about identity from a few minutes ago, which is you started to take pride in it. You cared about how you presented. And the more that we take pride in certain elements of our identity or aspects of who we are, certain parts of our story, the more strongly that behavior starts to stick. You can imagine a woman who takes pride in how her hair looks. She probably has all kinds of hair care habits and products and things that she does, and she probably doesn't have to convince herself to do them. The same way that we talk about convincing ourselves with a lot of other habits. Oh, I wish I could write or I wish I would work out or whatever. It's just an element of her identity she takes pride in and shows she does it fairly consistently. Or the guy who gets complimented on the size of his biceps and so he just never skips arm day in the gym because it's an aspect of his identity that he takes pride in.

What I'm kind of getting at is like, what parts of your story do you take pride in? And once you start to take pride in it, man, you'll fight for it pretty hard to keep it. And in many cases, you'll find yourself doing it somewhat naturally, or at least internally motivated to continue doing it. So that was the first piece, the second piece. And this is something that, since atomic habits has come out, I think is even more important than I realized when I was writing the book, which is the influence of the social environment on your habits. So in your case, the med school interviews, it was actually the image in your mind, the expectation about what other people might think and how you would present in that interview and so on. The judgment of others, essentially, that helped drive that change. And if you look at behaviors that really stick, the ones that tend to stick for ten or 20 or 30 years, a long time, there's often a strong social component involved. So, for example, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be american, or some of those tribes are small, like being a member of your crossfit gym or being a neighbor on your street.

Take the neighborhood example. You might walk outside and see your neighbor mowing their grass on Wednesday night or something and think, oh, I need to cut my lawn. And you'll stick with that habit of mowing your grass for 20 or 30 years or however long you live in that house. Like, we wish we had that level of consistency with most of our other habits. And why do you do it? Partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn. But mostly you do it because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And so it's actually that social norm, that expectation for what it means to be part of this neighborhood and how you act in this group or this tribe, that helps get the habit to stick. I think the practical takeaway there, if you really want a behavior change to last, is to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that group, it's going to seem much more normal and typical for you to do it. I mean, Peter, I'm sure you're part of multiple groups that do what most people would determine are, like, weird habits.

Like, I'm sure there's a group of friends who are really into driving cars, and there's probably another group who's really into bow hunting and archery. And there are all kinds of habits that these little tribes do. And it might seem strange to the normal person, but it's probably very casual or typical or easy, relatively, for you to stick to those habits, especially when you're part of those groups or talking with those guys, because it's just part of something that it's part of what they do. And I think maybe the deeper lesson here is that we don't just do habits because of the results they get us. We also take behaviors because they are a signal to the people around us that, hey, I get it. I fit in. I understand how to act in this group. Most people, if they have to choose between having the habits they want to have, but they kind of go against the grain of the group. They don't really fit in well. They get ostracized or having habits that they don't really love, but they get to go along with the crowd. They fit in. They get praised for being part of the group.

Most people will choose belonging over loneliness. Like the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve. And so you want to make sure you get those two things aligned to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

I wonder if part of the cue for me was buying a suit, and it was the first suit I had that was sort of a, wait a minute, you're wearing a suit. Think of the trouble you're going to to get this thing and then this tie that you're going to wear, and blah, blah, blah, this sort of stuff. But it's interesting. And then clearly, it just became a part of my identity, which is, I'm a person who has nice fingernails. I present well, from the fingernail standpoint, at least, hasn't translated to all of my habits. But let's talk about the four laws, because these four laws are kind of the central tenets to what we speak about, and they can be inverted as well, which I think is important as we think about creating, call it adaptive habits versus breaking maladaptive habits. So what's the first law?

Real quick, before we get into these four, I just want to explain the framework a little bit in particular for this episode or this show, because I feel like your audience will appreciate it more than most audiences. So I like to divide a habit into four stages. And as you said, those four stages kind of have what I call the four laws of behavior change that come out of it. But when I was working on atomic habits and researching this framework and trying to understand why do behaviors happen? And how do they happen? How do habits form? I had a couple questions that I felt like previous frameworks did not answer that well. While researching the book, I was able to find 40 different models of human behavior that biologists and neuroscientists and psychologists, a bunch of different industries, had come up with over the last, say, about 150 years. Broadly speaking, those models of human behavior tended to fall into one of two categories. The first category are what I would call, like, motivation models. So they explain things like internal drives and motivations and cravings, and kind of like what compels us to act.

And then the second category were what I would call reinforcement models. And so they described the rewards that we get from behaviors and how those things kind of reinforce our behavior. And essentially what happens, like, after an action. And what I wanted to do was try to come up with a model that I felt like accurately described both the motivation that may come before and the reinforcement that may come after, and how those things influence the actions that we take. And there were a variety of what I thought were fairly simple questions about human behavior that weren't totally answered by the previous model. So things like, what causes somebody to try a habit in the first place? You haven't experienced the reward at that point, so why would you take the first bite of a pancake or the first smoke of a cigarette? What would motivate you to do that? Started with B. F. Skinner, stimulus, response, reward. Charles Duhiggin, power of habit, kind of popularized as q routine, reward. But we say, okay, habits are a cue, and then there's the action, there's some kind of outcome. Well, how come two people respond differently to the same thing?

Like, why would one person see a cigarette and feel like, oh, I have to smoke, and another person's like, I've never smoked a day in my life. I'm not interested at all, because if it's just the cue that leads to the action, you would think they would do the same thing. Why would the same person respond differently to the same queue? How come when I walk in my kitchen at 07:00 a.m. I see a loaf of bread and I think, oh, I'm going to make some toast for breakfast, but then I walk in at 04:00 p.m. And I see that same queue, and I don't think anything of it, I just move on. So, to summarize all of this, I think one of the meaning full distinctions about the four stages that I put together and why I feel like it accurately describes human behavior. And sort of the insight that I came across as I was researching, a neuroscientist named Lisa Feldman Barrett. She has a bunch of studies and a couple books on this topic. One book in particular that was useful for me while I was researching is called how emotions are made.

The key insight is that we often think that human behavior is reactive in the sense that somebody does something and I respond or somebody says something and I feel a certain way. But in fact, human behavior is mostly predictive. You are kind of endlessly going through your experience in life, predicting about what to do next. It's actually this prediction that I think was the key thing that was missing from a lot of the previous models of habits and behavior. So with that as a primer, before.

We do that, I think you wrote about this in the book, which was that the dopaminergic surge comes more from the anticipation of the reward than the actual behavior that gives the reward. Did I remember that correctly?

There's a bazillion studies on dopamine. Of course. Also, I should say, I think if you only talk about dopamine, it's not the full story about habits. Like, there's many neurochemicals that are involved in the process. And dopamine is just one part of the overall picture. But it does play a very important role. For a long time, we thought it was about reward and satisfaction and enjoyment. But in fact, it seems that the crucial role dopamine plays is about prediction and anticipation. And so the first time that you take a bite of a pancake, you don't know what to expect. And so you take that bite, and then afterwards, you get a surge of dopamine, almost as if to mark the experience or to teach you, hey, that was favorable. You should do that again next time. Like, if you happen to see a pancake again, that was a really great outcome. So then the next time around, you know what to expect. And, in fact, what we find is that dopamine tends to spike before you take a bite, not after. And there are a bunch of studies that show this. Gamblers get a spike before they roll the dice, not after.

Drug addicts get a spike before they take a hit of cocaine, not after dopamine. I think probably the more accurate way to describe it in this context is it's a teaching molecule, it's a learning molecule, and it helps you mark experiences that are favorable so that you'll remember them next time. And then when you come across a similar situation, it spikes in anticipation. So after you see the queue, you get this craving, and it's actually that craving or anticipation or prediction that motivates you to act drives the response. And then there's an outcome, presumably.

Again, using your example, there are lots of diversity between individuals, right? So you take ten people who have never smoked a cigarette. Let's just to make the math easy, say, well, seven of them have no desire to, so they walk away. Three of them are like, yeah, I'll give it a try. They take a puff, one of them starts hacking and says, that is the most disgusting thing I've ever done. I never want to do that again, and they never do. One of them says, I kind of like that I'm going to do this socially. Anytime I'm going to have a drink, I'm going to have a cigarette. And one of them goes on to become a chain smoker. Now, what explains that distinction? How much of that is neurochemical?

There are examples like that for alcohol and drugs and all kinds of things. And I'm not an expert on addiction, and I didn't write the book about addiction, so I don't want to speak out of turn or step out of my lane or anything, but I don't know that I have a good answer to it. But from what I understand and from what I've seen as I was researching the book, it does seem to have a strong, basically genetic or neurochemical component. It seems like, in a sense, drugs kind of hack the system. This is, I think, one way to define an addiction, which is the process of learning is actually broken. Addicts know that the behavior does not benefit their lives in a lot of ways, but they still can't get themselves to stop doing it, even though they know it doesn't benefit them. And I think part of the reason that happens, or perhaps the primary reason, is the drug kind of hacks the system. It gives you this spike of dopamine, even though you shouldn't be getting it. Usually your brain would not be doing that, it would not be trying to teach you to repeat that, but you're artificially spiking it by taking the substance.

And so then process of learning breaks.

I also find it interesting that different people will get that pleasure from different things. When I'm not in a good place, when I'm unhappy about something, it's never my tendency to have a drink. So alcohol would only be associated with something I want to do when I feel good to begin with. I would never want to have a drink when I don't feel good. But when I don't feel good. I would happily binge on junk food. That would be the thing that provides comfort. And, of course, there are people, when they're unhappy, they would never want to eat, even let alone have junk food. I find it interesting to at least contemplate how much of that is genetic, how much of that is learned and what else is going on in sort of understanding that, because that does sort of factor into falling to the level of our habits, because we fall to these levels when things are not going well.

Typically, I do think there's a genetic component. Some people are more sensitive to certain substances than others, or at least it appears to be so. However, it does strike me as very possible that a good chunk of it is learned and that now you have a story that junk food is the way that I cope or the way that I soothe myself when I need that. And in a sense, your habits are these solutions to recurring problems that you face. So, say you have somebody who comes home from work and they feel exhausted. And one person, that's a recurring problem that they feel often. And so one person comes home and they play video games for 30 minutes, and another person comes home and they go for a run, and a third person smokes a cigarette. And all of them are solving the same underlying recurring problem, but they're choosing different methods through which to do that. And I wonder about how the grooves kind of get formed. Once we learn that a certain method is effective in solving that problem, we tend to default to it, even if it's not the only way to solve that.

Even if. Yeah, going for a run would make me feel better, but I'm just used to smoking cigarettes now. Then we start to develop a story around it. It starts to become a little bit of our identity. We start to use it as a crutch. I do think there's definitely a learned component to that as well.

All right, I interrupted you before. You were just about to launch into the four laws.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the four stages are cue craving, response, and reward. The cue is something that you notice. So, for example, you see a plate of cookies on the counter. That's a visual cue, starts the habit of eating a cookie. The craving is the prediction, or the meaning that you assign to that cue often happens relatively automatically or quickly. So you see the plate of cookies, and you think, oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. It's that favorable meaning that leads to that dopamine spike that we talked about. That motivates you to take the third step, which is the response. You walk over, you pick the cookie up, you take a bite, and then finally there's the reward. Oh, it is in fact, sweet, sugary, tasty, satisfying. Now, not every behavior in life is rewarding. Sometimes things have a cost or a consequence. Sometimes they're just kind of neutral and don't really mean a whole lot. If a behavior is not rewarding, then it's unlikely to become a habit because you don't have any reason to repeat it again in the future. You need some kind of positive emotional signal associated with the behavior for you to stick with it, at least as we've already talked about, an immediate signal that says, hey, that was enjoyable.

Is there some evidence to suggest, if I remember back to my psych 101 class, which is obviously pretty elementary, that some of the most addictive behaviors are variably reinforcing? I sort of remember this example of why slot machines are particularly addictive, because the pattern with which they produce a win is actually random, and therefore, you really don't know when it's going to come. You know it's going to come. You have to have belief that you'll see other people win and you've won in the past, but that's somehow even more addictive. Whereas the cookie, in theory, is not variably reinforcing, it's pretty much reinforcing the same way every time, presumably only subject to the tastiness of the cookie.

It's even more. There have been tons of studies done on variable rewards. The basic answer is, yes, you're right. Variable rewards tend to accelerate or intensify behavior. It can get even more twisted than that in the slot machines example, because what they have found is that the sweet spot tends to be right around 50 50. You can imagine getting a reward at very different schedules. Like, you could get it 95% of the time, or you could get it 5% of the time. Well, if you only get it 5% of the time, then you've learned pretty quickly, like, hey, this isn't a very fruitful action. Maybe I should stop doing this. But if you get it around 50 50, tends to work out for you a lot, but not every time. And it still is coming at, like a roughly a random pattern. Even if over 10,000 trials, it works out to be about 50% of the time. Man, you will just keep pressing that slot machine button over and over and over again. There have been studies done on mice where they would get a squirt of sugar water when they poke their nose in a box, and if they did it at a variable reward schedule, they would do it.

I can't remember the exact number. I want to say it was like 6000 times in an hour. Many, many times we laugh at it thinking about mice, but we're not that different. The average slot machine player will press the button like 800 times in an hour. And so we're just basically doing the same thing, getting the reward, but not knowing exactly when it's going to happen. It gets you to do it more frequently. And you can think about examples like this in everyday life. Imagine a remote control where the battery is dying and you press the power button, but it doesn't turn on right away. And you're like, did that work? And then you press it again a little harder and then maybe you pressed again a third time. Now, if you do it eight or nine or ten times, you're like, okay, the batteries are dead. But if on the second try, it turns on the variable reward, got you to do it again or got you to try the behavior more. So that variable reward schedule is definitely something that can intensify behavior.

You remember anchorman?

Yeah.

I assume you've seen. Yeah. This might actually mean that there is truth to the statement that 50% of the time it works every time.

Incredible reference. Yes. Fantastic. Little did we know that Will Ferrell was a cognitive psychology fan.

Wait, I think that was Paul Rudd's line, wasn't it?

Was it?

Yeah. When he used black panther, the cologne.

Yeah. Amazing.

50% of the time it works every.

Time, I'm going to be honest with you. That smells like pure gasoline.

It's got bits of real panther in it. It's made by Odion.

So those are the four stages. What I like to do and what I consider to be the hallmark of my work. I'm just interpreting the research. Like pretending to be an academic. I'm not actually an academic. I think the value that I try to provide is to make these ideas actionable and to turn them into something that we can operationalize or apply to daily life. And the four laws of behavior change are how I have attempted to do that. So if we understand that a habit has those four steps and how do we actually change our behaviors, we can follow these four laws, and there's one for each stage. The first law of behavior change is to make it obvious. You want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier it is to see or get your attention, the easier it is to notice, the more likely you are to act on it. The second law is to make it attractive. So the more attractive or appealing or exciting a habit is, the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it. So again, this is about anticipating it or something you anticipate more, feel more motivated.

The third law is to make it easy. The more easy, convenient, frictionless, simple a habit is, the more likely the behavior is to be performed. And then the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable, pleasurable a habit is, the more likely you are to repeat it in the future. So those four laws give you like a high level overview of how to build a good habit. So make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. You don't need all four every single time, but the more that you have those four things working for you, I think the more likely it is that the good behavior will stick or that you'll find a way to start on it. If you want to break a bad habit, then you just invert those four. So rather than making it obvious, you want to make the queue invisible. Unsubscribe from emails. Reduce exposure to the queue. If you're trying to be on a diet, don't follow food bloggers on Instagram. Reducing exposure to the thing that starts the process. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. Rather than making it easy, make it difficult.

So increase friction. Put more steps between you and the behavior. And rather than making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying. Layer on some kind of immediate consequence or a cost to the behavior. Those four make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. Give you a high level framework for how to break a bad habit.

Now, how often is a certain behavior the combination of breaking a habit and creating a habit? Again, it seems like a lot of the ones we default into talking about are the hard ones, like nutrition. We all eat. We're all going to eat all the time. It's not something you can opt out of or into. We all eat. So presumably, if a person says, again, I hate coming back to weight because it's such a stupid example relative to, say, overall health, but let's say health, actually, I want to be a much healthier person, so I need to change the way I eat. That's two things, right? You have to start eating better and stop eating poorer.

It is two things, but I view them as two sides of the same coin. In many cases, we can come up with edge cases or examples where the behaviors start to get more specific. But generally speaking, I think there are three ways to break a bad habit. You can eliminate it entirely, so you can just go cold turkey, cut it out, never do it again. You could curtail the behavior to the desired degree, so you can reduce it a little bit. You still do it sometimes. Instead of drinking a beer at dinner every night, you just have it maybe once a week. You could also replace it. So rather than drinking a beer, you replace it with water. When I'm thinking about myself personally, when I actually am changing behavior, I don't usually think about breaking bad habits that often. In fact, most of the time, I'm focused on building or establishing new good.

Behaviors which necessarily displace the old ones. For example, with eating, it is a bit of a zero sum game. I mean, not entirely. I guess you could just keep eating more and more and more. But generally, if you say, I'm going to eat more good things, it kind of drives down the bad things. Is that the way it normally works, then?

I think a lot of the time it does. And that's why I tend to focus on that for my personal life, is that it's kind of like two plants. One plant, if it grows a little bit more and spreads its leaves a little further, it starts to crowd out. The other plant just soaks up more energy and resources and sunlight. And your good habits are kind of like that. I mean, we all, in some sense, it is zero sum in the sense that we only have 24 hours in each day. And so if you have somebody who says, even if they're unrelated habits, they say, hey, I want to start doing something healthy, I'd like to start working out for an hour each day. And I also want to watch less tv. I just feel like I watch Netflix too much. Well, if you usually watch Netflix for 3 hours each evening and you decide to insert your workout from six to 07:00 p.m. By definition, you're not watching Netflix. While you're doing that, you start to crowd out the bad behavior just by focusing on building workout habit, even if you don't think about the tv thing at all.

So my sort of general approach is, look, I'm trying to spend my 24 hours in the highest leverage way possible, the best way possible, the way that is moving me toward whatever I'm optimizing for. Let me just try to continually think about how to upgrade those behaviors. I also like that mindset more than the breaking the bad habits one, because it gives me a reason to improve. Even once I have good habits, I'm continually looking for the higher leverage action, even if what I'm doing is already good. Okay, fine. How can I make it great now? I tend to focus on that style rather than thinking about breaking bad ones, but they definitely are related. To answer your question, the example that.

We come back to is smoking, because smoking doesn't really take that much time. So it's hard to say. I'm just going to introduce a new habit that will force smoking out. Are there other examples, though, of habits where you really do focus on how to break the bad one?

Yeah. So to take the smoking example, I think it's helpful to divide it into the specific instances in which it happens. So we kind of lump smoking into a single habit. But the truth is, it actually might be a collection of like a dozen habits throughout the day. It might be that you have a habit of smoking when you get in your car for the morning commute, and then you also have a habit of smoking around 1030 when you take a break with your coworker. And then you also have a habit of smoking after dinner on your porch. And all three of those are going to have their own cue craving response and reward. In a sense, you kind of have to intervene in like twelve different places to try to come up with a solution for each one of those. So you might find that for the morning commute, maybe instead of having a cigarette, you come up with something else that you can do on the morning commute that fulfills that desire. Maybe even just a cup of coffee is what wakes you up. Instead of a cigarette that may not work for the 1030 session with your friend, maybe there you actually need like an ecigarette to start want to have the socialization of feeling like you're smoking with a friend.

You may need to take it in different stages and break it down degree where it's easier to have a line of attack.

The environment seems to be so know. Again. David Foster Wallace writes about his commencement speech. This is water. He talks about the ubiquity of water and also the fact that you don't even realize it's there. And that's what makes it so profound, right? Is referring to certain thoughts. But I think the same is true of these cues. For most of us, we're not actually that aware of what it is. It can be pointed out to you and you can say, oh yeah, I come to think of it, I am a fish swimming in water. Or yeah, I come to think of it every time I get in the car. It's the act of getting in the car and driving to work. That signals a change in where I'm going, and that's what forces me to light up. But the example of having the cigarette at 1030 with your coworker is a very powerful one because of the connection in the environment. I remember in my residency when people would come into the hospital with abscesses from iv drug use. So very Baltimore, which is where I did my residency, there was just rampant iv drug use.

You'd be amazed at how much that habit and that addiction could cause a person to do something that at the surface, doesn't seem that logical. Use dirty needles, and needles would break in their abscesses, and you'd be down there and you'd be sort of draining a huge baseball size, pus filled abscess that's got broken needles in it. And this person is very sick. I mean, this is a person who's now risking their life due to this. And they would be back in a month with the same thing in a month and a month later with the same thing over and over again. And tragically, eventually a lot of these people would die. But I remember at some point saying to these folks, this was the best advice I could offer, which was not very helpful, was, I don't think you can go back to the same place you live. I think you need new friends. Now, that's not a very helpful thing to offer somebody who probably doesn't have many choices. But the point was, like, how could you expect this person to go back to the same place that they were living in the same environment with all of the same people doing the same things and say, well, you just got to resist it?

It doesn't make sense. Presumably, someone who decides they want to stop drinking alcohol really ought not go into a bar that much anymore.

Environment is like a form of gravity, pulls on you, and you can resist it for a little bit, but maybe a day or a week or a month, but at some point, it just starts to drain on you, sucks you back in. And to your point about going back to the environment that prompted the behavior in the first place, I mean, this is one of the stories I share in atomic habits. But it was this surprise that we saw from the Vietnam war, which is so many soldiers were getting addicted to heroin and drugs when they were over there. And then they came back and we were like, what are we going to do with all these addicted soldiers? And it turns out that 90% of them or more ended up being fine because they didn't go back to the place where they got addicted they went home to their friends and family, and they didn't have all the same signals that were prompting them to pick up the habit. And so they were able to drop it much more easily than we thought they would. And compare that to the typical drug addict who does the reverse.

They go into rehab, and that's where they leave all of their cues and influences behind. And then once they get clean and they detox, we send them back to the same place where they got addicted before. That is much, much harder. Uphill battle. So, environment, I think it's kind of like the invisible hand that drives our behavior. As you said, it's kind of like water. Efficient water. We don't realize it, but we all have these things that we say are important to us. Oh, I would like to lose weight, or I'd like to build a business, or I want to finish a book. But then you look around the spaces where we live and work. The cues of those habits are not a big part of the environment. We all are busy, strapped for time, minimal energy. We have kids to take care of or parents to do chores for or friends to see. And whenever we have limited capacity or limited time, or we're low on energy or exhausted, what choice do we make? We often choose the thing that is most obvious in the environment. We choose the thing that is the easy choice or the path of least resistance.

And so if I'm recommending a place to start for changing behavior, it's usually either the first law or the third law. It's making it obvious and making it easy, because we can talk about making it easy, but scaling habits down obviously makes it more likely that you're able to complete the task. And making it obvious essentially creates an environment where the good choices are right in front of you, where they're the path of least resistance. Individually, I think it's easy to overlook the importance of this, because individually, one change to the environment does not usually meaningfully move the needle or change your behavior, but collectively, making a dozen or two dozen or 50 little choices to how your office is laid out and how your living room is laid out and how your kitchen is laid out. Yeah. Now all of a sudden, you're working and thriving in a space that is stacking the ods in your favor. That's making it more likely that you will just choose the good thing, because the healthy food is on the counter and the tv is behind a wall unit in a cabinet where you're less likely to see it.

And the remote controller is inside a drawer, and there's a book in its place, and you have a couple of books that are scattered around in your desk waiting for you to pick them up and open them. You can do it with digital spaces, too. When I wanted to start reading more, I took audible for audiobooks and I moved it to the home screen on my phone and took all the other apps and moved them to the second screen. That's a very small thing, and it doesn't guarantee the behavior, but it's another way to stack the ods in my favor that whenever I open up my phone, I'm reminded to listen to an audiobook for a few minutes rather than browse instagram. And the more that you do those kind of things, the more likely good behaviors are to arise.

So one thing I want to park for later, once we get through the laws, is a very specific question around the challenges that some people face in that they don't control their environment. And again, I come back to food because I think for most of my patients and for myself, food is such a struggle because again, it's always around us, you have to do it. It's not a behavior you can just opt out of. And I think those of us that have kids, not to throw our kids under the bus, but I haven't met too many people whose eating habits get better once they have kids, if they're generally inclined to be healthy people. Because at some point you sort of start losing the battle of how much non crap you can have in the house due to time constraints and the other constraints, which is, look, kids are going to eat things that are probably not so bad for them that I shouldn't be eating wheat thins. My kids love wheat thins. I love wheat thins. I think the difference is they can get away with eating a lot more wheat thins than I can.

So I've lost the wheat thin battle. We have a pantry that is full of wheat thins, and I'm never, at least for the foreseeable future, going to get those wheat thins out of there. So now every time I walk in the pantry, I'm staring down the barrel of wheat thins, and I would love to get those wheat thins in the trash. But every time I do, my wife says, understandably, hey, if you want to be in charge of feeding the kids every meal, knock yourself out, chef. But if you're not, let me handle food. And our kids eat well, but they're going to eat wheat thins and a few other things that you don't want to eat.

Isn't it kind of fascinating? Like, you're someone that I think most people are described as disciplined and high performing and talented and skilled, and you look at yourself with that and you're like, wheat thins beat me every time I think about myself. I was doing an interview with somebody else a couple of weeks ago, and he was joking about how the number of cookies he can eat is either zero or 30, because if they're there, then he's going to eat them all. And I'm exactly that way. One of the best hacks that we've come up with is I love chocolate chip cookies and my wife will make them, but she'll make the balls of dough and then freeze them and put them in the freezer. And at night after dinner, we'll take them out and just take out two and put them on the pan and warm up the oven and put them in. And it's actually a better experience because you get to eat like, fresh baked warm chocolate chip cookies, but you'll only eat two because all the rest of them are frozen. It's just enough friction to know that this is going to take another 15 minutes.

If I want to take two more out and heat them up, I don't actually need another cookie. Like, I just wanted to eat it.

What limits you from putting five on the tray?

We just haven't gotten in the habit of doing that, so hopefully that question won't wreck my psyche and now we'll be doing that every night.

Is part of that. The accountability, though, between you that probably you say, I want five, at least.

She'S going to say, she'd be like, come on. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting the ways in which there's a whole discussion we could have about habits and marriage and relationships and how that influences things, because you soak up, each person soaks up a little bit of the other partner. But we've seen it work in a very positive way for training, which is there are going to be some days where I just don't feel like working out after a full day at work. But she's like, all right, are we going to go to the gym? And then I'm like, okay, I'll change. And then other days I'm like, okay, I'm ready. And she's like, all right. And she didn't feel like it. That's really helpful for the long term consistency. But I've talked to other couples who have said my nutrition habits actually got worse because one day I won't feel like cooking and I'll be like, hey, can we just order out? And she'll be like, okay, fine. And then the other day, she won't feel like cooking. Be like, hey, why don't we pick up something from? And you're like, okay, fine. And so you can see how it goes in both directions.

And I don't have a good way to describe these upward and downward spirals that we often get into where the momentum, once it's moving in that direction, you just kind of, like, it becomes your default behavior, and you just sort of keep rolling with it. But there's something very powerful about that in life that if you get on a nice trajectory and you got a good spiral working for you, then that momentum just kind of carries you. If you start to get in a downward spiral, you really got to find a way to just reverse course and gain a foothold, even if it's a really small thing, just to get the momentum moving in the other direction. But anyway, there are a lot of potentials there.

And that's actually something I feel like I've also noticed with my patients and myself, which is, it seems that the people who are able to be more self forgiving when they slip up and get back on course have an easier time than people who approach it through a very perfectionistic lens. And once they make a mistake, they get into the cycle of self judgment and beating themselves up. And I say them like, it's me, too, right? We all do this, and all of a sudden a blown meal turns into, well, forget if the day is over. I mean, I've screwed this day up, so I'm just going to eat whatever I want. And then you wake up the next day and you probably feel like crap, both physically and emotionally. And that reduces your drive to continue to do what you set out to do. And you have the spirals, and you make a point about that in the book, which is if you're going to miss a workout, miss a workout, but don't miss two.

Yeah, never miss twice is the idea that I try to. The little mantra I try to tell myself. Stuck to the diet for nine days, binge ate a pizza on the 10th day. Well, wish that hadn't happened, but never missed twice. So let's make sure the next meal is a healthy one. And I think we all know this implicitly from going through life, but it's easy to forget in the moment, which is, it's rarely the first mistake that ruins you. It's like, usually the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. That's the real problem. It's like letting slipping up become a new habit. That's the real issue. If you can cut that off of the source, if you can never miss twice, get to the end of the year, and those mistakes are just like a little blip on the radar. It's really about getting back on track quickly. I think, actually, you see this with top performers in many different industries. Think about any athlete. I mean, this is something that, like Nick Saban's teams at Alabama pride themselves on the screw up a play or have a bad drive, throw an interception for a touchdown or something.

But the focus is on the very next play and on making sure that you don't let that mistake become another mistake. And the teams and the athletes that are really good at doing that, at having a short memory and getting right back on track, they end up having really successful careers, and you can scale that down to your own life. Gretchen Rubin actually has this. I thought it was a clever little idea, which is divide the day into four quarters. So you got like morning, afternoon, dinner, and night, evening and night. If you make a mistake, keep it contained to that quarter so you don't lose the day, you just lose the quarter, and then the next one you get back on track. If you can keep your failures small like that, if you can contain the damage, then I just think it's easier to get back on track quickly and to maintain the momentum, build consistency, all the other positive benefits that we've talked about, and to your point about judging yourself or feeling guilty or turning this into like, some kind of self berating session, playing the victim never makes it better. It doesn't make any of it easier.

I think generally in life we all have things that happen to us. Some of them are terrible things, and you can be the victim, but I don't know that it ever benefits you to play the victim, to accept that role. Bad things can happen to you, but that doesn't mean you have to start to identify as someone who is worthy of them or someone who is. It's inevitable for that to be part of your story. And so the more that you can cut the judgment out of it, cut the guilt out of it, the story, the narrative piece, and take that away and just accept the event for what it is and move on to the next instance. I think probably the better off you'll be.

Yeah. This is probably an area where a habit that is probably desirable for many people also becomes a tool to help. And that's mindfulness meditation, which I think is one of the more powerful tools to help people observe the judgment without judging it, which sounds od to someone who hasn't practiced that, but that becomes very powerful, made a difference as I've kind of released the need to be perfect. It's really a continuum, and there's a spectrum of efficacy here, which is like, on Monday, we traveled the whole day. We got back, and I really wanted to work out. I just hate ever missing a workout. But the reality is, once we got home and the kids were exhausted and my wife was tired, and it just felt like sort of a schmucky thing to do, to go and work out and leave her with decompensating kids and a whole bunch of stuff that needed to be unpacked. Actually, part of the judgment was letting go of that. Letting go of the fact that I wasn't going to work out that day and that was okay. Now you can do that on anything. I think if you can come to be flexible and say you're stuck in the airport with your kids, the food sucks, it is what it is today, and you're not horrible because of it.

But I think this idea of get back on the horse as quickly as possible is really powerful. Again, anecdotally, I always bring everything back to driving a race car. It is so rare that you make a mistake and crash in a car because of what you did at that moment and not because of what happened earlier. If you spin at corner four, the mistake usually started at corner two, and sometimes you don't realize it, and sometimes you do realize it, but you arrogantly think that you don't have to make any adjustment going forward because of it. At least for me, that's been an incredibly humbling experience with how mistakes compound.

Rapid course correction is probably a deeply applicable lesson for many areas of life. The world is complex and situations evolve. Life is dynamic. It's not static. Your preferences also evolve. What you optimize for or want is different today than it was ten years ago and probably will be different five years from now or ten years from now. And given that many changing dynamics, it's not possible for someone to predict the optimal course of action. And even if you could, it is very unlikely that it will remain the optimal course of action. Given that things are going to be changing, you're going to be off course at some point, and the ability to correct for that and to correct for that quickly, I mean, it might be one of the optimal life skills. The ability to assess where you are in the moment, see what the next step is going to be keep in mind where you ultimately want to go. And then correct as needed is possibly the path to living a great life. I heard recently, I thought it was a great little framework, which is abz came from Sean Purie. He's an entrepreneur and basically said, you need to know your abzs.

A is where you are right now. It's like the truth of the situation. The reality b is your next step, and z is where you want to go. Ultimately, it's where you want to end up. And I think the key, this is me talking now, not him. For me, the key is working backwards. It's knowing Z first, knowing what you're optimizing for, and then jumping back to a and being honest about the situation. What is the truth of the situation? What are the resources I have, the skills I have, what are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What's reality say? And then knowing that I want to head towards z, and knowing honestly where I am today. What's the next step? I actually don't need to know c through y right now. I don't need to have the whole thing planned out perfectly, but I do need to make sure that my next step is directionally correct. If it is, then you can just keep running that abz process over and over again until you finally get there.

Yeah. Annie Duke talks about this in a slightly different way, and she refers to it as backcasting. And I find it to be an incredibly powerful tool. Again, to be contrasted with forecasting. Right. Forecasting is, I'm just going to stand here and I'm going to tell you, I got to do b and then c and then as opposed to saying, no, this is where I am. That's the desired outcome. Let's start working the steps backwards. What you've described is slightly different, but I think it preserves this idea of taking stock of where you are and most importantly, understanding where you need to be and not trying to do what I think stochastically is really hard, but predict every step going forward.

The only thing I'll add to that, which I like, annie's framework, and I think working backwards is a really powerful thing, particularly if you can not be your own bottleneck in the process. The phrase I like is work backwards from magic. What would the magical outcome be? What would the ideal outcome be? And then let me work backwards from that. And a lot of people have trouble with that brainstorming part of the process, because they think, well, if it's unrealistic, why would I even try? And the point is, like, listen, it's way too early for that. Most people become their own bottleneck long before reality prevents them from doing it, which is kind of this great irony. We're like, oh, why would I attempt this super impossible thing? And it's like, well, the world hasn't even told you it's impossible yet. You have, I think, work backwards from the magical outcome. But my key is I want to be very clear about where I'm going, but very flexible about how I get there. I don't need it to happen if I work backwards. I don't need it to happen only through that chain of that potential path.

Because if you can only have one way to get there, you're actually kind of brittle. You become hostage to things working exactly in that way. But if I know where I want to get to with a very clear vision, I'm flexible on how I get there. Well, now I can start to spring on opportunities as they arise and just take whatever the most fruitful path seems to be. But I do think that that whole process starts with working backwards. So it's, I think, a more fruitful way to think about where you want to go than just trying to predict.

Before we leave the first law, what advice do you offer for people if they aren't quite clear what the cues are? Again, in the spirit of trying to even displace a habit that's maladaptive and create new ones. Again, is this something that's just empirical, or is it, I hate to use the word, but other tricks for identifying what the cues are.

I think there are exercises or strategies you can use. So you sort of hinted at this a few minutes ago, and I meant to say it, but I forgot, which is the process of behavior change, strategically changing your behavior. We need to make a separation here, a distinction between the types of behavior change, because people change their behavior all the time. We're always responding to the situation we're in or the circumstance or the conversation we're having. This is like one of the great myths about behavior change, which is behavior change is hard. Actually, it's one of the easiest things that you do. Like, your brain is designed to change your behavior to match the situation that you're in. So you're making adjustments all the time. The question is, can you reliably change your behavior? Can you design your behavior in a fashion that you want? And if you want to design it, if you want to be in control of it more, I think it almost always starts with the process of self awareness, and that's kind of what this question is getting at. I don't even know what the cues are. I don't even know what my habits are.

So the two exercises I recommend, the first one I call the habit scorecard. And you just go through your day and you list out every habit that you already do. Try to get as detail as possible. So usually there's a big lump in the beginning. Like, I wake up, I take a shower, I step on the scale, I brush my teeth, I go to the bathroom, I get dressed. Like, there's all this stuff that you do to start your day, and then there's things for breakfast and starting your workday and on and on and on. And the more that you have that list, again, the goal is not to judge yourself. It's almost like you're at the zoo looking at animals and you're one of the animals. It's like, oh, how interesting that they would do that. You're just trying to get a lay of the land and see how do I actually spend my time? What habits am I actually doing, if I'm being honest about it? So that's just to understand what habits you have to figure out. The queue is basically you're just asking like five questions, who, what, when, where, why?

You're essentially just trying to get a lay of what's going on. So let's say that you're like, man, I eat a lot of candy bars, but I don't know why I do it or I don't know what the queue is. Well, each time that you find yourself eating a candy bar, just pull up a note on your phone or have an index card or a notebook or whatever somewhere to record it. Write down what time is it? Where are you at right now? What's the context? What's the environment? Who are you around? Are you near the. Do you eat these by the same kind of people? What were you doing just before this? Was it a break from writing emails or doing something else? And the more that you start to answer those questions about the context, the better you'll start to understand. Hey, maybe that was the cue. And I bet if you do that exercise for whatever the particular habit is that you're working on, just do that for. You may not even need to do it for a week, but if you do it for five days or seven days or something, you're going to start to develop a good sense for what it is that's prompting the behavior.

Yeah, that's a great exercise. Is there any concern that when a person does that, the hawthorne effect kicks in and they basically start deviating from the natural behavior because of the observation. In other words, is the act of going through this exercise potentially making it harder for them to transparently see what's happening?

Maybe. I'm not going to say it's not a risk. I'm sure it's a possible risk. But I think what's more likely to happen is rather than not being able to see what's going on, assuming you're being honest with yourself, it can be hard to honestly observe your own behavior. You have a lot of biases and stories for why we do what we do. So assuming you're doing that to the best degree possible, I think you're probably still going to get a good idea of what the cue is. What I think is more likely to happen if there is some influence on your behavior, is you may find yourself changing the behavior anyway just because you're tracking it. And there are quite a few studies that show this. Like with nutrition, for example, there are some studies about food journaling. People who just keep a food journal, they're not even trying to stick to a certain calorie level or a certain macro profile or anything. They just are tracking what they're eating, tend to change their eating habits and eat less just because they're tracking it, even if they don't have a specific program they're trying to follow.

So the mere act of observing something or of measuring something often changes the behavior associated with it. You may find that to be the case here. You're like, well, I keep writing down when I have candy bars, so I'm like, maybe I'll skip this one. I think that's probably the more likely outcome. But who knows? There could be other biases as well.

These devices here, these continuous glucose monitors, they are a remarkable tool for both insight. When you first put them on, you're sort of learning, oh, my God, I didn't realize eating that thing would have this response in my glucose. But once you sort of saturate the insight, part of that equation can be three months, six months, depending on the complexity of your life, it becomes forever a behavioral tool. You don't want to eat a certain thing if it's going to raise your glucose because you've at least bought into thesis that you don't want to have your glucose skyrocket the way it does when you eat m and Ms. So it's interesting, it becomes kind of an accountability partner. And I find some of the most interesting and sticky devices do that. The wearables that offer an insight that's not obvious but is objective, tend to be the things that we really like coming back to, whereas the ones that are kind of obvious, like how many steps you take, that's not very sticky because we sort of have an intuitive sense for what that is. Once they've spent enough time walking 10,000 steps a day, they don't really need a device to tell them that anymore.

It becomes easier to do on their own.

This is a side comment, but I have this theory about technology and innovation, and that the technologies that most radically change the world or change our behavior are all just kind of different forms of vision. You have obvious examples like x rays, which allow you to see the broken bone or mris or whatever, that allow you to see some tissue in a way that you couldn't see before. And so that gives you information that then you can act on and make a diagnosis and make some kind of change. But the glucose monitor is like another example. It's just like now you can see the spike. And because you can see it, you change your behavior. Even stuff like the number of email subscribers to my website, because my email platform tracks that, and I can see how many people are signing up each day I make a change to the form and conversion and so on. And I do think there's some deeper lesson there about behavior change and about what drives human behavior, which is if you can visualize your progress in some way, maybe it's a chart on a screen, maybe it's an actual printout, maybe it's something that you actually see looking through lenses or something.

But if you can actually visualize it, then the behavior often follows suit. And that's why even simple strategies, like a habit tracker, where you just put an x on each day, seems very rudimentary, very basic, but it can still be meaningful because it gives you a way of visualizing your progress. So anyway, the glucose monitor is an interesting one.

Yeah, this idea of what gets measured, gets managed, is a great tool. About six months ago, I started going to the water meter of our house every Tuesday and recording it, and then I've got a little spreadsheet that says, okay, this is how many gallons we've used this week. This is what it would project to for a monthly usage, et cetera, et cetera. And you just can't believe how much our water usage has come down in six months, because in Texas, water is not that expensive, actually, compared to California. But it became something I was obsessed with, which is like, we're not going to waste any water. I just don't want to waste any water. It's now become a game for me. It drives my family nuts, but it is a game. Like, we are going to have the lowest water bill ever in Austin. No one is going to use less water than us. I'm obsessed with that spreadsheet.

It's kind of like an adult version of ispy walk in. You're like, I spy the red thing, and then all the red stuff in the room lights up. Right now you're like, I spy water. And everywhere I go, that's what I see. And you find opportunities, and you find ways to change it.

Oh, yeah. When I'm giving my kids a shower once I'm lathering them up the water, I got to turn the water off. And they're like, daddy, why are you turning the water off? I'm like, because we're just putting soap on right now. You don't need the water. It drives everybody nuts. Okay, so let's talk about the second law.

Yeah. So the second law is making it attractive, and I think there's a simple example I could give here, which is, let's imagine that you wake up tomorrow and you're like, all right, I listened to this guy talk about habits all day today. So tomorrow is going to be the day I'm going to wake up, and I'm going to go for a run. So you set your alarm for 06:00 a.m. And 06:00 a.m. Rolls around, but your bed is warm and it's cold outside, and you're like, well, I'll just press snooze and sleep in, like, maybe I'll do it tomorrow. But if you rewind the clock and come back to today, and you text a friend and you say, hey, you want to meet at the park at 615 and go for a run? Well, now, 06:00 a.m. Rolls around, your bed is still warm and still cold outside, but if you don't get up and go for a run, you're a jerk because you leave your friend at the park all alone. And so you've kind of simultaneously made it more attractive to get up and go for a run and less attractive to press, snooze, and sleep in.

Now, you haven't made the run itself any easier. That's still going to be as difficult as it was before. So the difficulty is kind of the same, but you have changed the calculus that's going on in your mind about whether you should do this or not or how attractive it seems. So there are a bunch of examples, strategies like that and stuff I talk about in the book and that you could use to kind of make habits seem more attractive than they otherwise are. But that's sort of what it comes down to on a short term basis for making habits attractive on a long term basis. I think it's about what we've already discussed about the social environment and being part of a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior because those behaviors become very attractive even a year or two or five from now if they help signal that you're part of the tribe.

Yeah, you brought up Crossfit earlier, but I always thought that Crossfit was one of the best examples of this. I never did Crossfit myself. There's lots of criticisms of it, et cetera, but the reality of it is certainly it was and is something that really creates a community of people who have a certain belief about who they are and what they do. For all the people who knock Crossfit, I've seen it take a lot of very inactive people and turn them into some pretty impressive people.

Yeah, I think the social side, the community side of it is the strongest piece of the whole thing. It's the part that's hardest for any other exercise program to replicate. That's for sure. It does. It gets people to stick to it. I mean, it becomes, it sounds extreme to call it a form of a religion in, but it becomes kind of like that for them. I mean, the box is like their church in a lot of ways. They go six days a week instead of one day a week. There are a lot of strong community elements there. You also see Crossfitters pick up a bunch of habits they didn't even expect, like they thought they were going to start working out, but then six months later, they all are buying the same brand of knee sleeves and they have a certain type of weightlifting shoe, and they're all eating paleo. And it was like we didn't even plan on doing that stuff. I just was going to go to a gym to work out. But all of those are behaviors that signal what it means to be part of that group. And again, once you start to build friends in that group and start to become ingrained in that society or in that tribe, you start to soak up some of those other behaviors as well.

It's really a great example. I guess we'll go to the third and fourth law, but I want to take a step back and ask you where you put nudging into this. So Richard Thaler's book Nudge, which was probably the first book I ever read on this subject matter. I mean, it seems so obvious, which is what makes it so interesting and insightful, right? Sometimes the most brilliant things in retrospect seem so entirely obvious. But it was, I think, reading Richard's book circa, I don't know, call it maybe 2012, probably nearly ten years ago, this idea of the default food environment sort of came to me, and I use that term with our patients as the more you can control your default food environment, the more healthy you can be. So if your default food environment sucks, you're going to be relying on willpower a lot, and that's really, really hard. If your default food environment is one extreme end of the spectrum, you can have a perfect default food environment. You could be the healthiest person in the world, even if it's not enjoyable. If you were locked in a room and all you had were the best foods to eat, you're going to end up being health and you're going to be kind of like, oh, if I eat one more macadamia nut and have one more avocado and salad.

But nudging obviously refers to a cue, but it also refers to this environmental change. It doesn't seem to really capture the idea of making it attractive. Or does it?

I think it's more about making it obvious. I would lump it more in the first law. Design the environment to make the good habit, the obvious one, to make the good habit the path of least resistance. Some other nudges that are very popular people talk about is like default choices on forms, the very famous example being the organ donor study. Default opting in every employee to a making them opt out is a nudge. I think that's also another example of making it obvious. Or we could also say making it easy. Nothing's easier than letting it ride. All of those are examples to your point about default food environment. Daria Rose, who writes a nutrition blog, she's got a great concept. I just like it. It's kind of sticky. Home court habits and away court habits. The argument is like, try to optimize your home court habits first. What's the environment where it's your kitchen, it's your apartment, you get to set the tone. And let's just try to prime all of that. Whatever happens at a restaurant or when you're at a hotel, traveling or whatever, don't worry about that as much right now. Let's just optimize the home court.

I like that. If you can build a home court advantage for yourself. Then you get in a good situation, you start to build some momentum. You handle the thing that you're probably going to be doing 70% of the time or 80% of the time, and then after that, you can move on to the way court stuff.

So one of the other things you talk about is the idea of accountability. It's come up now several times, and I think everybody would agree that the moment you have somebody else in this thing with you, the better it gets. Is there any evidence about the type of accountability partner? So an example you gave, was your wife great accountability partner for you guys to work out? Would that be more or less effective than if you were matched with a person who you didn't know, but who had similar aspirations, where you'd be less comfortable and perhaps more inclined to hold yourself to a higher standard? Again, it kind of comes back to this idea of how we're wired to be seeking the approval of others and all those sorts of other things. Is there any research to support this idea?

I don't know of any studies that distinguish clearly between those two. It's quite possible there are plenty out there. I just may not know of them, but I can see it working well on both sides. And I also see complexities on both sides. So a lot of the time when people talk about accountability partners, they join a Facebook group or they join a course or a program or something, and they get matched up the way that you described. But I can actually see that form of accountability kind of falling apart fairly quickly for a simple reason, which is it's a stranger and you don't really bear much cost for them thinking you did a bad job, or you may not really value or care that much about their opinion. Compare that to the example I gave earlier, which is you walk outside and your neighbor sees that your lawn is very sloppy and you haven't mowed the grass in three weeks, that actually you may care pretty deeply about because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood and you don't want to have friction with your neighbor and so on.

And so there's much more of a cost there. And that form of accountability is a lot stronger because there's some reason why you really want to fall through on it. Now, you could say that that same thing is true for, for example, a marriage, a relationship. I don't want to let my partner down. I don't want them to think poorly of me and so on. But you have to remember in that particular case, you're so close that there are actually a lot of additional complexities there. Like you want to be fairly forgiving of your partner because you're living with them all the time. Or even if it's not someone you're married to, say it's your brother or your parents or whoever, there's just a lot going on in those relationships. And so is the other person really going to become like an enemy just over you skipping your workout routine on Tuesday because you guys got to get dinner together on Wednesday night and you have to babysit their kids over the weekend, and there's a lot of other stuff that's involved there. And so in those cases, I think the relationships are so tight or so complex that that person may not actually want to be a strict accountability partner because of the other costs may need to bear.

You're kind of in this weird situation where you don't want there to be other things on the line that would influence their ability to hold you accountable, but you do actually want to care about their opinion and to bear some cost if you don't follow through. Perhaps this is the reason why having like a coach is a good example, because that's somebody that presumably you want to do a good job because you're going to see them repeatedly. Even if it's not as dicey as the neighbor situation where you do bear some social cost for it. You probably bear a financial cost because you may be paying your nutrition coach $500 or $1,000 or whatever. And the more that there's some kind of painful cost associated with it, probably the more that you're going to be willing to fall through on that accountability.

And speaking of a coach, just more broadly, how does a coach, or how do the best coaches, if you have insight into this thread the needle of creating accountability but also creating encouragement when you fall short?

Boy, that's a big question. I'm not a coach. I've been fortunate to have some good ones, and I've also had a bunch of mediocre ones, too. And thinking about the difference between them. We could have a whole conversation about coaching and about the art of that because there is a really fine balance there. And I think there also is a big difference in the I'm going to use athlete, but of course you can have a coach for many things, but there's a big difference also in the intensity that the athlete might have can imagine. I was into Olympic weightlifting for a time and it was kind of the main way I was training. I had the fortune of training with a really great team. I was very average, but Holly Mangold was on that team, and she competed at the Olympic Games in London in 2012. Just watching the interactions between the coaches and her and what was required for her to make it to the Olympics was interesting to see. There is every element of a tight relationship there. I mean, there's tough love and there's actual love, and there are some days where you have to be really harsh and some days where you have to be really soft, and there's all the dynamics of the athlete's internal mindset.

There are days when you go out and you feel like you're a world killer and nobody can touch you. And then there are other days where you just feel completely broken and you're like, can I keep this training up for another six months? The more intense the objective is that you're trying to achieve, I think the more detailed and balanced and nuanced all of that becomes. And then you have just your standard crossfit coach who's coaching a 35 year old dad of two who just wants to get in better shape. And that, I think, may be totally different relationship. I don't know that I have a good answer there, but I do think it's a really important thing. Great coaches are incredibly valuable. They're rare by definition. That's why they're great. It's probably much more complicated than a lot of us realize.

So you said rule number one and rule number three were probably the most important. Rule number three is now. Make it easy.

Yeah. So if I could only recommend one thing. If you forced me to say, hey, where's the one place I would start? I would say, start with this.

Start with make do you hate being asked that question, by the way, if you could just do one thing.

You know how it is. Like, if somebody said, what was the one thing I would do to get healthy? You'd be like, okay, come on, this is, like, very big picture. There's a lot of stuff here. Same story here. I do think this is a good place to start, though. And so if I had to pick, I would say follow the two minute rule, which says, take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes people hate that because they're like, okay, bud, me. I know. I'm not actually just trying to take my yoga mat out. I know. I'm actually trying to do the workout. So if this is some kind of mental trick, and I know it's a trick, then why would I fall for it, basically? And I get where people are coming from, but I have this reader, his name's Mitch, and I mentioned him in atomic habits. He lost a ton of weight. Another guy, I think he lost definitely over 80 pounds.

I think it was probably over 100. Kept it off for a long time. He had this interesting rule for himself, though. When he went to the gym for the first six weeks that he started working out, he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly. You're like, obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants, but if you take a step back, what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. 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 I think this is like a deep truth about habits. Something that we often overlook, which is a habit, must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up into something more. If you want, you can come up with a better theory. Like, you could come up with a perfect plan, but unless you're acting on it, it doesn't do you any good.

It's just a really good idea. For whatever reason, we get, like, really all or nothing about our habits, we tend to have this tendency to be like, well, if I can't do the full marathon training program, then why go for a run at all? Or if I can't follow through on the perfect lean startup business framework, then why bother starting a company? The two minute rule kind of helps you get over that tendency of perfectionism and just start to master the art of showing up. Find a small way to establish the habit, make it part of your new normal, and then you can gain a little foothold and start to scale up and expand from there. There's that great quote from Ed Latimore where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. That's true for a lot of things in life. The hardest part is getting started. So let's master that and make it part of your lifestyle. And then once you're the kind of person who's showing up consistently, we have all kinds of options for how we can improve and optimize and so on.

I think meditation is another great place where that two minute rule really helps. I think it can be really daunting the first time you decide for the first time, let's say you buy the idea that, hey, you know what? There's probably real value in this. I'd be better served to go on a silent retreat for seven days or meditate 40 minutes every day. It's like, that's a real big step for someone who's never done it. How about two minutes every single day you meditate, and maybe in a few weeks it's three minutes a day. But, yeah, you have to sort of lay down that track to say, a, I'm a person who meditates and b, this is the actual muscle memory of what it looks like to sit down.

It's also surprising how few people actually have two minutes in their day where they stop and do nothing except breathe. That alone would deliver more value than you might expect. And there are a whole host of other behaviors that go along with this. You think meditating for two minutes sounds very small, but if you start to back out of it, you realize you got to pick a space. Where is it going to happen? What time of day is it going to occur? Is this something that you're going to do before work or after work? Do you do it on your lunch break? Try to do it with somebody so you have a little bit of social accountability? Or is this just like a private thing that you're going to do in the corner? Do you need a pillow to sit on, or are you fine to sit on the floor? Like, what's your flexibility? Like, are you going to get interrupted by your kids? If you do this at 07:00 a.m. It might be nice to get it done in the morning, but is that when you're getting them ready for school and getting them dressed?

A lot of little questions like that that people don't think about. And so finding a very small version of the habit allows you to get all of that other stuff kind of handled, figure out the logistics of it, and just to do it for a minute or two. And then once you get all that stuff handled and you don't have to decide anymore, you have a little bit more mental capacity and energy to actually focus into. Okay, let me scale this up a bit and do it maybe in the way that I was hoping I would.

So how do you make them satisfying? Because that's the fourth law.

Yeah. So this is the final piece it's really about just making a habit that's pleasurable enough that you want to return to it, giving you some reason, some emotional signal that, hey, this is worth it. And there are a bunch of different ways you can do this. Some of them are short term, some of them are long term. The short term stuff is mostly about reinforcement. So classic examples are things like, oh, you can reward yourself with a bubble bath or with ice cream or buying something that you wanted or whatever. I think the key with those short term reinforcements is you want to make sure that the reinforcement also aligns with the long term identity that you're trying to build.

Right. Ice cream wouldn't be great reward for getting in better shape.

You go to the gym and you do a workout, and then you eat a bowl of ice cream. It's like, okay, you're casting votes for two different identities. Or let's say that you're trying to get your finances in order, and so you're like, okay, I want to budget consistently and save money for retirement. Well, if you reward yourself with that, buying a leather jacket, then it's kind of like, okay, on the one hand, you're trying to be a saver. On the other hand, you're being a spender. So I like to pick things that we feel like are aligned. So, like, in the fitness example, you could say, well, if I don't miss any workouts this week, then I'm going to reward myself with a bubble bath and kind of like an hour alone of peace and quiet on the weekend. And that's like a vote for taking care of your body that seems pretty aligned. Or if I save consistently for retirement this month and I make a contribution each week, then at the end of the month, I'm going to reward myself with a hike in the woods. And that's, like, another example of a lifestyle of freedom and of controlling your time.

So anything that's aligned or reinforces that story you're trying to build, I think that can make a great immediate reinforcement in the long run. The way to feel rewarded, the kind of ideal form of making it satisfying is when the behavior starts to feel like it reinforces your desired identity. So if you're the kind of person who feels like, yeah, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, then in the middle of doing a set of squats, you can feel satisfied because you're being the kind of person you want to be. And so this comes back to kind of the point you made a little bit ago about, I just don't want to miss a workout. Like, I kind of feel off. I feel like I'm not being myself if I miss. And so just getting the reps in that alone is satisfying in the moment. And that's sort of the ultimate version of making it satisfying, because you don't even need to wait for the reward. It's just happening as you're in the middle of performing the behavior. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Those four laws and the various ways to intervene and do that increase the ods that you're going to fall through on a good habit.

Let's take a step back from all this. When someone picks up your book, presumably there's a selection bias that exists, which is this is a person who, either through luck or through some recommendation or friend or whatever, has made a decision that they at least want to examine the habits in their lives and or potentially change them. What do we know? Or what can we extract from this about a scenario that's different, which is, I'll use my example. You have a patient who you're trying to help, and helping that patient requires some intervention. They're going to have to make a change. Now, that change can be, at one level, really simple. I think the simplest change medicine has to offer is take a pill. There's a time and a place for pills. I think it's a bit silly when people assume that everything modern medicine has to offer is bad. Pills are bad. Obviously, that's not the case. Taking your medicine for your blood pressure, your cholesterol, these things, if it's warranted, that's a really important thing to do. And we also know, by the way, that even something as quote unquote simple as taking your medicine is actually really hard for a lot of people.

Most people are, I think studies demonstrate, sort of in the neighborhood, is 60% to 70% compliant with something as simple as take a pill. But it only gets harder from there. Getting someone who's not sleeping well to sleep well, that's a real big set of behavior changes. Getting someone who's not eating well to eat well, getting someone who's not exercising to exercise, getting someone who's not taking care of their mental health to take care of their mental health, all of these things require enormous change. If a person says, on the surface, yes, I want to be better, I accept that, I want this outcome of being healthier. But they haven't specifically had the need or desire to change the way they eat or exercise or sleep or whatever it adds a layer of challenge or friction to this process. What advice would you offer to me in a situation like that for trying to implement your insights into that scenario to a person who hasn't fully selected into wanting to change habits?

The point about people self selecting by picking up the book is interesting. Sometimes it's like you're sort of only helping the people who already want to be helped. In that sense, it's interesting to think that most of the time, the people who most need to read the book are not the people who pick up to read it. The people who read about habits are usually the ones who have fairly decent habits and are pretty interested in it. The people who need it the most, they've never read a book on habits, and they don't want to read it. They're not interested. Something interesting about that, but I think the points you bring up are very true and challenging. Changing your own behavior is hard enough. Changing other people's behavior is like a whole nother level of difficulty, a whole nother order of magnitude of difficulty. I'll offer maybe three ideas that could apply. The first one, and we've already talked about this in various ways, but I do think you have to make it really small. So you said taking a pill is the smallest version, but it doesn't always have to be that. It could be, if you're trying to get them to exercise, it could literally be doing one push up, walking around the block one time or something.

And this is that version of like, can I just go to the gym for five minutes? Sort of thing. Let's just scale it down, make it super simple along with that. It's very hard for it to be simple if people are being pulled in multiple directions. And so I think if you're giving people a plan that has five things on there for them to do, can we eliminate four of those for now? Stay at phase two, and can we just do one right now? Let's take one thing and scale it down and stay focused and just try to get a little bit of momentum going on that. And then once we have established that and started to gain a foothold there and get a little bit more consistency with that one thing, we can take that momentum and transfer it into the next one. So, yeah, ideally, probably a lot of patients will be doing these five things or these 15 things, but it doesn't mean you need to do all of them right now. Let's pick one and stay focused. So that's the first thing, is try to keep it as simple as possible.

Pretty obvious answer, but I still think a useful one. The second thing, again, fairly obvious, and we've talked about it a bit, but still I think useful is the environment design piece. Even the laziest person, even the person who has zero interest naturally in these topics, is a product of the environment that they're in. Imagine this lab experiment where you're locked in a room that only has healthy food options. Even the laziest person is going to eat healthy there. They have no other choice. And that doesn't mean that they need to change everything in their home, so that it's that control lab experiment feel. But look, there's a lot of low hanging fruit that can be done here that you don't actually need someone. And this, I think is one of the reasons why I like environment changes. You don't actually need someone to be motivated every day to do this. You really just need them to be motivated for like one afternoon so that they change the environment a bit and that can actually serve them. In some cases it can serve them for months, but in most cases, even food related cases, it could serve them for the next three days or five days or seven days just by getting junk food out of the house that serves them for the next couple of days.

You only need little pockets of motivation. And if you can direct that pocket of motivation toward a high leverage action, like redesigning the environment, then it can continue to serve even a lazy person for a good chunk of time. So that's probably the second thing. So make it small. Optimize the environment. And then the third thing, and this is maybe more of like a coaching thing. As someone who deals with patients or has clients or whatever, the general strategy is easy to say but very hard to follow, which is praise the good, ignore the bad. It goes against the grain of what we want to do, because they're like, you're telling me. I just want to ignore the mistakes that they're making. And certainly there's a place for rectifying mistakes. And I don't mean that every problem should just go unresolved, but especially early on, the thing that you really want to build is momentum, and you want to reinforce the good behaviors. And as we talked about a good plant crowding out another, a way to encourage that is by praising the good and ignoring the bad. There was a hilarious op ed that was written, I think it was, in the New York Times, this wife who her husband would never throw his dirty clothes in the laundry hamper and it was driving her nuts.

Occasionally he would do it, but it was like pulling teeth all the time to get him to do this consistently. She tried nagging him. She tried, know, whatever. Just all kinds of different. Put the laundry hamper in a different place. Don't even have it in the closet. Just have it out on the floor in the bedroom. And he still wouldn't do it. Sometimes he'd throw the clothes next to the hamper. She's like, you're already throwing it over there. Just put in. Eventually, what she settled on doing was that every time that he happened to put it in the hamper, she would make a huge deal about it. She'd run over, give him a kiss, give him a hug, say thank you. Be like, oh, you're making my life so much easier. Thank you so much. Over the course of about a year, she effectively trained him to always put the clothes in the hamper, because every time that happened, something good happened. He got praised. It felt good, almost like training a dog in a sense, which is all kinds of organisms, dogs and humans, love feeling praised. We like feeling good. We like being rewarded.

And so if you praise the good actions and ignore the bad actions, it's, again, almost like a form of gravity. People naturally gravitate toward the things that they get rewarded for, the things they get praised for. And you'd be surprised how often people don't do something like this or, in fact, do the opposite. You can imagine the quiet kid in the household who comes down for dinner with the rest of the family, and it's like, oh, look who showed up. They decide to share something about their day, and it's like, oh, a fact about your life, and you can imagine a parent or somebody saying something sarcastic like that, and all of a sudden, you're punishing the very behavior that you wanted to see. So praise the good, ignore the bad. I think it applies in a lot of situations and can be more powerful than you realized. The tricky part is it requires a lot of patience. You got to do it for six months or a year or three years. It's hard to stick with that in the long run. Last example of this is a weightlifting one. I was at the gym on a Friday night one time, and I was there with a friend, and we were doing a quick workout.

It's probably, like, 2025 minutes. We got done, and we were putting our shoes on, and this guy who's just, I don't know, kind of a jerk, went over and was talking to her and was like, quick workout for a Friday night? She just kind of moved on. But that's like exactly the opposite of the type of feedback you want to be getting, especially if you're someone who's like new coming into the gym or feeling kind of uncomfortable there. What people should be saying is, oh, it's great that you got in here, even though it's the weekend. And a little cutting comment like that is all that people need to not show up again the next day. The more that you can be lavish with praise is maybe sitting it even too strongly, but it doesn't really cost you very much to be kind, and you may not even remember it, but it's the kind of thing that might be enough to get that person to show up again the next time. So in the long run, praising the good and ignoring the bad can count for a lot.

So, James, you're working on another book, right?

I am, yeah. And working is the correct term currently kind of slogging and battling against the manuscript. I seem to find whatever way requires the most suffering to write books. Atomic habits. The first draft was like 720 pages, and then I cut it down to 250 eventually, which for the finished version, this manuscript is like 600 and something right now. So I'm in the trimming phase.

What's this book about?

It's a book about strategy and choices and decision making and how we direct our attention. I'm still kind of finding it and discovering it in a lot of ways. But one question that you could have after finishing atomic habits is, okay, that's great. I know how to build better habits, but which habits should I be focusing on? What's the high leverage action? How do I figure out where to direct my energy and attention? And so those are a lot of the questions that I'm exploring now.

Well, I can't wait to have you back to discuss that after I read it twice, which I will do, I'm sure. Thanks very much, James. This has been great to sit down with you. And this is almost like reading the book a third time. And I picked up a lot of things that I hope readers or listeners have also, and I look forward to implementing it both personally and professionally.

That's great. Thanks, Peter. Appreciate the opportunity.

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