The Right Way to Form New Habits

An interview with James Clear by Alison Beard

EDITOR’S NOTE: We spoke with James Clear, entrepreneur and author of the book Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, about why success requires discipline. It’s something we’ve seen time and time again in the stories of great leaders. They might get up at 4 a.m. every day, read a book a week, or have a tried-and-true system for client outreach or interviewing.

Many of these people seem to have superhuman ambitions and work ethics. But there’s another way of looking at their achievements: They’ve developed great habits. While most of us are slipping into bad habits—doing the easiest work first, making impulsive decisions, watching TV instead of studying a new idea, or even not getting enough sleep—high achievers are sticking to a plan and getting more out of their careers and lives as a result.

Whether your goal is to learn a new skill, finish a big project, or attend more networking events, Clear says there are simple and easy ways of developing better habits to help you get where you want to go.

Idea in Brief

• The Problem

If you’re struggling to learn a new skill or finish a large and complicated project, you may be focusing your effort in the wrong places. Success doesn’t come from superhuman ambition and unrelenting work ethic. Success requires discipline and great habits.

• The Solution

Instead of aiming for large, ambitious nebulous accomplishments, break down your goals into smaller, manageable actions. Focus on your desired identity rather than just the outcome you’re looking for. Ask yourself: Who is the type of person that could achieve these outcomes?

• The Benefits

Gradually building and reinforcing positive habits can shift your internal narrative and change your self-image. Small, consistent actions accumulate over time, leading to significant personal growth and sustainable long-term success.

Alison Beard: At the taping of this interview, we’re about to start a new year. For those of us who make New Year’s resolutions and then quickly fail at sticking to them, how can we do better?

James Clear: There are a lot of entry points to discussing habits through resolutions. So, I’ll give you two. The first idea is that a lot of the time we start with goals or ambitions or resolutions that are really big, and simply scaling your habits down—or scaling those behaviors down—to something that’s simple and easy to do is certainly a way to be more effective in the New Year, to increase the likelihood that you stick with your goal.

I refer to this as “the two-minute rule.” You basically 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 next year” becomes “Read one page a day.” Or “Do yoga four days a week” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.”

And sometimes people resist that a little, because they think, “OK, I know the real goal isn’t just to take my yoga mat out each day. I know I actually want to do the workout.” However, I think this is a deep truth about habits and certainly applies to New Year’s resolutions too: The habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can worry about optimizing or scaling it up from there.

And then the second thing is to focus more on your identity than on the outcome. A lot of the discussion on New Year’s resolutions is about how many books we want to read, or how much weight we want to lose, or how much more money we’d like to earn next year, or whatever it is. But I think it’s a useful question to ask yourself: “Who is the type of person that could achieve those outcomes?”

Who is the type of person who could lose 20 pounds, let’s say? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. And then your focus becomes building habits that reinforce that identity rather than achieving a particular outcome. And you can trust that the outcome will come naturally if you show up as a specific type of person each day.

It’s funny you mention the identity piece of this. In the book, you write that we limit ourselves by saying things such as, “I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.”

And I almost laughed out loud when I read that because I say all of these things about myself even though I know that waking up earlier, remembering names, being on time, or getting better at math and technology would make me much better at my job as a business journalist. So how do I change that mindset about myself?

I think that perhaps the real reason that habits matter is that they can shift your internal narrative. They can change your self-image. And the first time you do something, or the 10th time, or maybe even the 100th time, you may not think differently about yourself yet or have adopted a new identity fully.

But at some point, when you keep showing up, you cross this invisible threshold and you start to think, “Hey, maybe I am a studious person,” or “Maybe I am a clean and organized person after all.”

Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so, the more you show up and perform habits, the more you cast votes for being a certain type of person, the more you build up this body of evidence—the likelier you are to realize that, “Hey, this is who I actually am.”

And I think this is what makes my approach a little bit different than what you often hear about behavior change, which is something like, “Fake it till you make it.” “Fake it till you make it” is asking you to believe something positive about yourself without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence: We call them delusions.

At some point your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you keep saying you are and what your behavior is. Behavior and beliefs are a two-way street, and my argument is that you should let the behavior lead the way. Start with one push-up. Start with writing one sentence. Start with meditating for one minute. Whatever it is.

Because, at least in that moment, you cannot deny that you were a writer, or you were the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts, or you were a meditator. And in the long run that’s the real objective. The goal’s not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. And once you start assigning those new identities to yourself, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself being. And so I think, in that way, true behavior change is really identity change.

How can we bring this into a work context? How have you seen bad habits derail people and the development of good habits really propel them forward?

So, specifically with work, I think we can broadly lump habits into two categories. The first category is what you might call habits of energy. For example, building good sleep habits. That’s sort of a meta-habit; if you get that dialed in, you’re in a better position to perform almost any other habit. And if you’re not well rested, then you’re kind of hindering yourself in your performance each day.

Pretty much any health-related habit falls in that bucket. Exercise, stress reduction, good nutrition habits, they’re all in that habits-of-energy bucket. But the second category, and the one that is maybe more directly related to knowledge work, is what I would call habits of attention.

For almost all of us—and certainly for people who spend their time doing knowledge work or who are paid for the value of their creativity—the ideas you come up with are often a product of where you allocate your attention. So, what you read and what you consume often are the precursors to the thoughts you have, or to the creative or innovative ideas you come up with.

By improving your consumption habits, or your attention habits, you can dramatically improve the output you have at work. And we all live in this world with a fire hose of information. And so the ability to curate, to edit, to refine, to filter your information feed—whether that be the people you follow on [social media], the articles you read each day, the news sources you select, or the books you read—those are very important decisions that determine the downstream output. This is about what you’re bringing in.

But there are also other habits you can build, the purpose of which is not to bring things in but to cut things out. It’s to reduce the distractions. For example, one habit I’ve been following for the last year or so, which I probably do about 90% of days, is to leave my phone in another room until lunch each day.

I have a home office and if I bring my phone in with me and it’s on the desk, I’m like everybody else: I’ll check it every three minutes just because it’s there. But if I leave it in another room, then it’s only 30 seconds away, but I never go get it. And what’s always so interesting to me is the question, Did I want it or not? In one sense, I did want it badly enough to check it every three minutes when it was next to me, but in another sense I never wanted it badly enough to walk the 30 seconds to go get it when I put it in another room.

And I think we see this so much with habits of technology and convenience and modern society—and particularly with smartphones or apps. Actions are so frictionless, so convenient, so simple, so easy that we find ourselves being pulled into them at the slightest whim. Just the faintest hint of desire is enough to pull us off course.

So if you can redesign your environment, whether it’s your desk at work or your office at home or the kitchen counter, to make the actions of least resistance the good and productive ones, and increase the friction of the things that take your attention away, I think you will often find those habits of attention start to be allocated to more-productive areas. To recap, I would say that habits of energy and habits of attention are the two places to focus if you want to increase your work output.

What about habits of proactivity? Forcing yourself to do more sales calls or go to more networking events, that sort of thing?

Certainly being proactive is a really important part of life. I think it’s a great quality to have. The language that you used about “forcing yourself” to do sales calls, or “forcing yourself” to go to networking events or whatever …

Motivating. Let’s say “motivating.”

Sure, OK. I do think that phrasing—“motivating”—is probably a better way to look at it. There are many ways to do this, or to accomplish the same outcome. And so, ask yourself questions like: What is the real goal here? What would this look like if it was easy? What is a way to achieve this that doesn’t add friction to my life?

Those are important questions to ask and revisit, no matter what task you’re trying to achieve. Because I think what most of us find, what is implicitly known, is that there are many behaviors that naturally pull us in, whether that’s because they’re attractive and convenient or because they just kind of naturally align with our personality or our strengths. There can be a variety of reasons. But focusing on those things that naturally pull you in, rather than things you have to push upon yourself, I think is generally the right approach to take.

As an example, you mentioned networking. Certainly having a strong network is a very powerful and important thing in the modern work environment. But for some people, if you feel more introverted, or you just don’t gravitate toward chitchat or whatever, going to a networking event kind of sounds like a nightmare.

The good news is that we live in a time when there are actually many ways to network. The most effective networking strategy is to do great work and then share it publicly. And that could mean writing an interesting article; it could be recording a podcast or a video. Whatever it is, just do something interesting and then put that out into the world. It kind of becomes a magnet for people who are like-minded and interested in the same things. It becomes a much more powerful form of networking than going to a cocktail hour.

My point here is that by asking those questions (What is the real goal? What would this look like if it was easy? Is there a way to add this or do this or achieve this that would not bring friction into my life?), you often find that there are interesting alternative pathways for achieving a particular outcome.

Speaking of buckling down to write something or working on your most important project, what are some ways that you can encourage yourself to do that work first, to spend the most time on it?

There is a story in Atomic Habits about Twyla Tharp, a famous dance choreographer and instructor. She’s a huge fan of habits and has had all these great routines throughout her career. For instance, she has this exercise routine that she does each morning, where she works out for two hours at the gym. But she always says the habit is not the training in the gym. The habit is hailing the cab outside her apartment.

And I think that’s actually very instructive for anybody who’s looking to do this kind of important work that you mention. How can I focus on the area of highest importance or the highest use of my time? And the answer is to make the habit the entry point, not the end point. View your habits as an entrance ramp to a highway.

What are the productive things that I should be spending time on? What are the highest-value tasks? Walk back the behavioral chain and try to find the tip of the spear. What is that entry point? And then if you can figure out what that first minute or two minutes look like, if you can automate that—the hailing of the cab for instance—then you find that the next chunk of time kind of falls into place automatically.

You write about how Victor Hugo developed a novel way of encouraging himself to sit down and work.

Hugo, a famous author, wrote a variety of books, and the story goes that when he signed the deal to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he got his advance and signed the contract and then did what a lot of us would do: He spent the next year procrastinating. He had friends over for dinner. He traveled. He went out to eat. He basically did everything except work on the book.

And this was before technology was there to distract him.

Right. I think maybe we just gravitate toward more fun and satisfying and entertaining uses of time, regardless of the time period.

Eventually, his publisher got wind of this and told him, “Dude, something has to change. Either you finish the book in six months or we’re going to ask for the money back.” Now he’s facing this ultimatum, so Hugo brought his assistant into his chambers and they gathered up all his clothes and put them in this large chest, locked it up, and took it out of the house. And so all he was left with was this large shawl, this robe.

And suddenly, he had no clothes that were suitable for entertaining guests. No clothes that were suitable for traveling. No clothes that were suitable for going out to eat. He basically put himself on house arrest, and it worked. He wrote the book in five and a half months, and he handed it in two weeks early.

Now, in modern society, researchers would refer to that as a “commitment device.” And I think commitment devices are powerful, because they can be methods for making habits more attractive. As another example, say that you go to bed tonight and you’re thinking to yourself, “All right. Tomorrow’s going to be the day. I’m going to wake up and I’m going to go for a run at six.” And 6 a.m. rolls around and your bed is warm, it’s cold outside and you think, “Maybe I’ll just snooze instead.”

But if you rewind the clock and go back a day and you text a friend and say, “Hey, let’s meet at the park at 6:15 and go for a run,” well, now 6 a.m. rolls around, and your bed is still warm, and it’s 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. So, suddenly you have simultaneously made the habit of sleeping in less attractive and the habit of getting up and going for a run more attractive.

OK, so you’ve taken that first step. You’re doing the easy entry point, ideally every morning. How do you build from there to more significant, visible progress?

At some point you want to graduate. This is what I call habit graduation. You want to step up to the next level. And my general rule of thumb is to try to get 1% better each day. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them over time. I like to say habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

Take reading, for example. Reading one book will not make you a genius. But if you build a habit of reading every day, then not only do you finish one book after another, but with each book you complete, you also have a new frame or a new way to view all the previous books you’ve read.

And the more connection points you have, the more perspectives you collect … that knowledge starts to compound on top of itself. A lot of habits are like that. Take doing an extra 10 minutes of work each day. Maybe that’s one more sales call. Maybe it’s one more email. Maybe it’s just an extra 10 minutes to review the things you’ve written or revised, or to tweak or improve something.

Doing an extra 10 minutes on one day isn’t much. But the difference between someone who doesn’t do that and someone who does an extra 10 minutes every day over a 30-year career, that extra time can actually compound to a very surprising degree. That one extra sales call a day can mean a lot over the course of years and decades.

If you have good habits, time becomes your ally. You just need to be patient. You just need to let that compounding process work for you. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And each day that clicks by, you dig the hole a little bit deeper, put yourself a little bit farther behind the eight ball.

That does make it sound, though, like it’s just linear progression, and you argue very vehemently that it’s not. There are going to be times when you stall, times when you regress. You talk about valleys and plateaus. So how do you navigate that emotionally and keep pressing on?

That’s a really good point. The emotional part is a really true thing. You hear this a lot. I hear this from my readers a lot. They’ll say something like, “I’ve been running for a month, why can’t I see a change in my body?” Or “I’ve been working on this novel for five and a half months now, the outline’s still a mess. Is this thing ever going to be finished?”

When you’re in the middle, when you’re in the thick of the work, it’s really easy to feel that way. And so sometimes I like to equate the process of building your habits to the process of heating up an ice cube. Let’s say you walk into a room, and it’s cold, like 25 degrees. You can see your breath and there’s this ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. And you start to slowly heat the room up, 26, 27, 28 degrees. The ice cube is still sitting there. Then 29, 30, 31, and then you go from 31 to 32 degrees, and it’s this one-degree shift that’s no different from all the other one-degree shifts that came before it. But suddenly you hit this transition, and the ice cube melts.

The process of building better habits and getting better results is often like that. You’re showing up each day, and the degrees are increasing a little bit. You’re making these small improvements. You’re getting 1% better. But you don’t have the outcome that you’re trying to achieve. Those delayed rewards haven’t showed up yet.

So you feel like giving up, but giving up after doing a habit for a month or three months or six months is kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube from 25 to 31 degrees and it’s not melting yet. The work is not being wasted, it’s just being stored. And the willingness to stick with it is important.

I really like the San Antonio Spurs. They’ve won five NBA championships. They’ve got this quote hanging in their locker room that I think encapsulates this kind of philosophy well. It says something to the effect of, “Whenever I feel like giving up, I think about the stonecutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the rock 100 times without showing a crack. And then at the 101st blow it splits in two. And I know that it wasn’t the 101st that did it, but all the 100 that came before.”

I think that’s exactly the kind of approach to take with your habits. It’s not the last sentence that finishes the novel, it’s all the ones that came before. It’s not the last workout that gives you a fit body, it’s all the ones that came before. And if you can be willing to keep showing up and keep hammering on the rock, to keep building up that potential energy, to know that it’s not wasted, it’s just being stored, then maybe you can start to fight that emotional battle of building better habits and ultimately get to the rewards you’re waiting to accumulate.

I know you were an athlete, not a basketball player but a baseball player. Sports is obviously a place where people have to develop good habits and routines. You lift weights every day. You do get stronger over the long term. You hit 100 serves every day, you become more accurate. Even if you plateau or regress, you do sort of see that progress. But it seems much harder in a work context, where the correlation between the effort that you’re putting in and then the achievement or reward is less clear.

The key insight here is that you want feedback to be visible and rapid. I think this is so important that in Atomic Habits I call it “the cardinal rule of behavior change.” Which is this: Behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided.

In sports, for example, as soon as you hit the serve, you immediately know if it was accurate or not. Is it in or is it out? That rapid feedback allows you to make an adjustment, hopefully a slight one, for the next time. And then you keep repeating that serve. You get this feedback almost instantly.

But in the modern work environment, particularly in large corporations, feedback is very delayed. It’s kind of opaque. It’s very difficult to see what your contribution is delivering to the bottom line or producing in terms of output.

I think one of the lessons to take away from this is that one of the most motivating feelings for the human brain is a feeling of progress. In the case of your own individual life you can decide what you want to track. This can take multiple forms. For my business, I do a weekly review where each Friday I track key metrics, revenue, expenses, profit, and so on.

My dad likes to swim, for example. Well, any day that he gets out of the pool, his body looks the same when he gets out of the water as it did when he got in. There’s no visual feedback. So what he does is take out a little pocket calendar and put an “X” on that day. It’s a very minor thing, but it is a signal of progress. It is a signal that he showed up and did the right thing that day.

I think it also reveals a lesson that probably a lot of managers or entrepreneurs can use as well, which is that you want the pace of feedback, the pace of measurement, to match the frequency of the habit.

And what if I have a big goal, like become a better manager? How do I distill that into smaller steps? The kind that you’re talking about.

I would start by saying, “OK, I want to be a better manager. Great. That’s a good vision. What does a better manager do? What do those daily behaviors look like? What sort of habits does a better manager have? Who is the type of person that could be a better manager?”

Then you start to elicit answers from yourself, such as, “Oh, a better manager gives praise each day.” So maybe you build a habit of saying something positive to start off each team meeting. Or, “Oh, a better manager is a role model and models the behavior of the culture. We often talk about transparency, so now I need to build a habit of doing something transparent each day or each week, or in one-on-ones, or whatever. Maybe I start each one-on-one by sharing something about my personal life so that I’m vulnerable first and then my employees follow my lead.” You get my point. You start to see which behaviors the identity [of a better manager] is associated with, and then you have something more concrete that you can focus on. You can focus on building those habits rather than being stuck in this high-level meta-mode where you think, “Well, I just really want to be a better manager” but that’s very hard to translate into something practical.

So, why is it that good habits seem so hard to form yet easy to break and bad habits seem so easy to form and hard to break?

I thought about this a lot when I was working on Atomic Habits because I think, actually, asking that question can reveal a lot about what we want to do to build a good habit or to break a bad one.

Let’s say we want to build good habits. Well, how come bad habits stick so readily? What you find is that they have a variety of qualities. The first quality that bad habits often have is that they’re very obvious. For example, let’s say that eating at fast-food restaurants is a bad habit or a habit that you don’t want to perform as much.

Well, in America it’s hard to drive down the street for more than 15 minutes without passing at least a few, if not a dozen, fast-food restaurants. They’re very obvious. They’re very prevalent in the environment. So that’s a lesson that we can take and apply to our good habits. If you want a good habit to stick, then you should make it a big part of your environment.

Another quality that bad habits often have is that they’re incredibly convenient. They’re very frictionless. The incredible convenience of many bad habits is a big reason why we stick to them so much. So if you want your good habits to stick, they need to be as easy and convenient as possible.

Another quality of bad habits is that the benefit is usually immediate and the cost is usually delayed. And with good habits it’s often the reverse. So the benefit of going to the gym for a week is not a whole lot. If anything, your body’s sore. You haven’t really changed. You look the same in the mirror. The scale is roughly the same. It’s only if you stick to that habit for a year or two or three that you get the outcome you want.

So there’s this gap. There’s sort of this valley of death in the beginning with a lot of good habits. You start doing them, but you don’t have the immediate rewards that you’re showing up and hoping you get. Whereas with bad habits there’s this mismatch between the immediate outcome that you get (“Hey this feels great in the moment, I should do this”) and then it turns out that it ultimately hurts you in the long run.

The cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. A lot of the reason why bad habits form so readily and good habits are so unlikely, or resistant to form, has to do with that gap in time and reward.