Hi Ted Talks, Daily listeners.
I'm Elise Hugh. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the Ted Audio Collective, Handpicked by Us for You.
It's easy to want to be a better person, but hard to know where to begin.
Each week, how to be a better human brings you conversations with experts about realistic things you can do to live a happier life.
This episode features an interview with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits about our good and bad habits, and how making small habit changes can lead to big life improvements.
If you want to hear more great insights, you can find them each week on how to be a better human, available wherever you get your podcasts.
And learn more about the Ted Audio Collective at audiocollective.
Ted.com. Now onto the episode.
I'm going to read a book a week or work out every day or get into woodworking or whatever.
I'm looking around and I'm not seeing a big pile of books that I've read and I'm not seeing literally any handmade furniture.
So why is that? Well today's guest wrote the book about it.
If you're trying to figure out how to change your habits, how to shift your behavior or simply to understand what is going on in your brain when it comes to motivation.
James Clear is the guy you want to talk to.
And today we're going to be talking to him all about his book Atomic Habits, what he's learned in years of hearing from readers about it, and how to change what we do.
Here's a clip. We could probably say that I have a pretty good writing habit.
Certainly I've gotten good results from my writing habit.
But for the first three years that I had the business, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday.
So I did that for three years.
Those were like longer form pieces that were like two or three thousand words.
Then I signed the book deal.
So for the next three years, my writing habit was totally different.
I was like fully focused on writing the book.
And then for the last four years, I've been running this newsletter.
It's called 321, but it's just three short ideas from me, two quotes from other people and one question to think about that week.
And I published that once a week.
So was my original writing habit like, is that a failure now?
Because I only did it for three years and I haven't done it in seven years since then.
The habit changes shape is my point.
And you need to be totally fine with that.
That's a very normal part of the process.
We're going to hear a ton more from James in just a minute.
But first a very normal part of the podcast process.
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Today we're talking with James Clear about habits and behavior change.
Hi, I'm James Clear. I'm the author of Potomac Abuts.
So this show we almost always end with these two questions, but actually thought because of you and your experience and your work, it might be really interesting to start with them instead.
So the show is called How to Be a Better Human.
What is one thing? It can be a book, a movie, a piece of music, an idea.
What's something that has helped you to be a better human?
Hmm. There are two things to come to mind.
So the first thing is it's impossible to be a human that's outside of a body.
And if you want to be functioning well, your body needs to be functioning well.
And so I would say that in a lot of ways my workout habit is actually the thing that has allowed me to be an entrepreneur.
The particularly the early years of entrepreneurship are such a rollercoaster ride of emotions.
And there have been so many days when I feel like that day was a total waste, but at least I got a good workout in.
And so my workout habit has rescued me a lot.
And it can take many different shapes.
It could just be going for a walk or a run.
It could be yoga. It could be strength training, but having something like that to reset your biology so that you can think a little more clearly.
And then the second thing that comes to mind is some form of reflection and review.
In my case, I kind of have two things that I do most frequently.
I have a weekly review that I do, which is more business related.
That's on Fridays. I kind of sit down for it really only takes like 20 minutes.
But I look at some of the key metrics in my business.
But then I also have an annual review that I do at the end of each year.
And that one's more values focused.
It's more like who is the type of person I hope to become?
Sometimes I'll write out my actual core values.
You know, so I'll list out five or seven things that I say are really important to me.
And then I'll look back on the how I spent time the previous year.
I'll check my calendar, see how many times I traveled, how many nights I spent away from home.
I'll look at my workout journal, how many workouts did I get in?
I'll look at how many articles I published, how many things did I write, how long were they, how many words that I published, and a variety of other things like that.
And the point is to see if my actual behavior over the last year has matched up with what I say my values are pretty much everyone.
If you went up to them and asked, do you have integrity?
Are you living by your values?
Do you know, most people are probably going to say, yeah, I'm a person of integrity.
Like nobody's really walking around saying, oh, no, I don't really have any.
But you sort of find yourself sliding without realizing it sometimes.
And it's easy for three months or six months or even a year or two to pass and find yourself in a different position than maybe what you thought you were doing.
And so I really feel like those periods of reflection review, whether it's a more daily or weekly cadence or an annual one are really critical.
It's so unlikely that you'll be stumbling into the optimal way to live.
You have to take time to sit and think about it so that you can come across a better strategy or realize when you're a little bit off course and course correct over time.
I love those answers. It also ties into two of the big themes.
I know you've been talking about in the book and since the book and in all of the interviews that you've done about how really we have like a often a very misguided focus on a goal like an outcome rather than changing the kind of person that we are changing our identity.
Who am I and who do I want to be and what's the gap between those and how do I close that gap.
And then another thing that I think was really what struck me the most when I when I first read your book is the idea that a habit becomes more and more powerful with time that the more that you do it cumulatively the more builds on itself almost like compound interest.
But for your life they're important reminders I try to give myself I mean at some level pretty much everything that I wrote at atomic habits as a reminder to me do I procrastinate on things yeah sure all the time you know am I too focused on the goal and not enough on the system and my two focused on the result not enough on the process yeah I've caught myself in that trap
you know more times than I can count.
And so I'm trying to as someone who is pretty results oriented and goal oriented course correct or like just pull myself back to center.
And as you mentioned a big part of that I think is a focus on systems and process and habits and not on the outcome so you know the line that I like to share from the book is we don't rise to level of our goals we fall to level of our systems and so often in life you know we're told hey you need to be more ambitious 10 extra vision think bigger or want it more.
And the truth is sending the goals like kind of the easy part you know like I'm an author right so I can set a goal to sell 100 million books goal took me like three seconds you know the goal is not the hard part yeah it's building this collection of habits this system of behaviors that will carry you toward that outcome.
And I think if I was going to put like a little finer point on the language what do I mean by goal and system your goal is your desired outcome the thing you're optimizing for or shooting for what is your system it's the collection of daily habits that you follow.
And if there's ever a gap between your goal and your system if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits your daily habits will always win almost by definition your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results.
So whatever system you've been running whatever collection of habits you've been following for the last six months or year or two years it's carried you almost inevitably to the outcomes that you have right now.
And it's not that goals don't matter you know they can be helpful for setting a sense of direction they can be helpful for getting you started they can be helpful for having clarity around what you're going to focus on.
But goals are good for people who care about winning once systems are best for people who care about winning repeatedly.
And if you really want to make long-term progress you're going to need some collection of habits some system to get you there and to keep things moving forward.
It's interesting like the hearing you talk about it in that way I had a moment of several years ago where I was dealing with like a lot of professional jealousy right like especially in comedy people's successes are so public right like I'll drive down the street and I'll see someone who I started at Open Mikes with and they have a billboard and I was really struggling
with that like oh that person has a netflix special and I don't and then what I started to do is instead of thinking like they've gotten that thing and I didn't get it I started to kind of think well what are they doing differently than me like for example someone who is getting a lot of late night sets is outperforming many many more times each week than I am and when I looked
at it that way I started to see oh that's a sacrifice that I'm not willing to make right like I care about spending time with my family and friends more than I care about doing three or four stand-up sets every night so once I started to see it as like a choice that I was making and that was leading to a different outcome it helped me to accept that maybe that outcome isn't
as important to me because it would require changing all these systems in my life that I actually care about there's so much done pack there and I feel like we all have some kind of conversation like that with ourselves that we need to have about what we're truly optimizing for I always feel like especially with you know a lot of the examples from me are like entrepreneurial
related or business related and it's kind of like the natural cultural discussion about what you should want as an entrepreneur is that the biggest business possible to keep growing to keep driving revenue to keep building the business but I always think the first place we should start is by asking yourself how do I want to spend my days and then inside of that answer
you can figure out how to build a great business but it shouldn't be outside of that and it is shocking is surprising how often people will choose to do something that they already are living a decent life but they choose to live a worse life and have some to optimize for some other metric they take the promotion in the job because they're like well of course I want to
get promoted and have a higher status role and to make more money but it leads to a worse daily life and I'm always like I kind of feel like that's a bad trade I mean there's there's a certain amount of money that you need to make just to get through life and to function well and to have you know the lifestyle that you want but if you already have that why make a trade to live
a worse life just so that you can have more status or more money and yet you see people do that sort of thing all the time that's all similar versions of the same kind of root questioning which is what kind of days do I want to live what type of person do I want to be how do I want to be spending my time and showing up in the world and you need to have an honest conversation with yourself
about that and then once you figure that out there's a couple things that kind of naturally cascade from that that are interesting to wrestle with I feel like in your example that you gave where you've got some friends who are a comedian suit now they have a billboard and you guys started out together it'd be easy for you to kind of get defensive in that moment and be
like you know like I'm doing my best you know like I'm trying and often that phrase or you know like look I'm trying my best is kind of used in a defensive way and I think instead you could ask did I do what is required and that's kind of what you're getting at with like well look they did three or four sets of night and so maybe that's what was required to get that outcome and so the first
is just this honest question that I do is required the second part is once you say that's not what I want to do I want to spend time with family or friends I want to have a different type of lifestyle balance you need to be okay with making that trade off what's a natural recipe for disaster is to make that choice but then to not be okay with the trade off to be at home with your
family but then to be regretting that you don't have the billboard and you're not doing three or four stand-up sessions tonight we often do that kind of thing to ourselves where we'll like choose one thing but then our mind is somewhere else and you know if you're gonna make that choice you need to actually be there and to be cool with the fact that that's that's not a likely
outcome given the path that you're on and ultimately I think this all comes back to the trajectory that your habits are putting you on and this is a big emphasis that I have in atomic habits which is there's so much discussion in life about position and I think not enough discussion about trajectory or path you know we're so focused on analyzing our current position do
I have the face in the billboard how much money's in the bank account what's the current stock price what are the quarterly earnings what's the number on the scale we have all these ways of measuring our current position and then if the position's not what we wanted it to be if it if we haven't achieved what we set out to achieve we start judging ourselves or feeling
guilty or feeling bad about it and what I'm encouraging is to say listen just for a minute like let's set the measurements to the side and not worry so much about our current position and instead focus a little bit more on our current trajectory am I getting 1% better or 1% worse is the arrow pointed up until the right or have we flatlined and if you're on a good trajectory
if you're improving all you need is time but if you're on a bad trajectory even if you're in a good position right now it's not gonna end well and so I think the concepts I talk about in the book like getting 1% better or focusing on the system rather than the goal it's more about trying to get you to shift this from being an external comparison what did my peers have that I
don't have and make it an internal comparison am I on a good path am I improving a little bit and if so maybe all I need is patience you know something that I think is so special about you and your work is that you do think about it in this holistic sense that accounts for all the pieces of your life I think there's often in like the space of how to improve your habits or how
you spend your time these almost like monomoniacal visions of every single second should be rung out for like productivity and for economic value rather than as you put it right like the type of person you want to be the type of trajectory you want to be that is part of a big part of why this book is connected with so many people right the realistic practical ways that you
can put these into place but also the broader philosophical understanding that like maximizing the amount of income you can make isn't actually the best outcome for a life here's a question that I have for you and I swear that the intention of this question is not in any way confrontational I can't think of a way to word it so that it doesn't seem a little confrontational
but that's not how I mean it I mean it in the most complimentary admiring way possible which is you have sold so many copies of this book you have built a economic success for yourself and for your family so why do you still do this like why are you doing this interview why do you still take interview requests why do you still talk about habits even though it's so many years
after the book came out yeah it's a good question well I think first of all it's very rare in life that you do one do something for only one reason certainly one of the reasons that I build a business and wrote the book and so on is because it gives a way to make a living and we all have to figure out how to make a living in the world but it's definitely not the only reason and it
might not even be the primary reason I mean I think the primary reason I got started as an entrepreneur was so that I could have control my time and spend my days focused on projects that were interesting to me and it just so happened that one of those projects over the last decade of being an entrepreneur was writing this book and the book did really well and I think sometimes
I think about atomic habits in that way where I'm like look it can just be a project that went well you know it doesn't have to be more than that a lot of the time people ask me follow up questions now like oh you know what if your second book doesn't do as well or whatever and it's like I don't even think that needs to be a problem you know like you're going to have a range of projects
you produce throughout your creative career and one of them is going to be your best seller so all of the others are not going to be as good as that and that's fine that doesn't mean I want to stop creating the other part of it is I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers that the ideas have been really useful for them to whatever degree that atomic habits and this work
is making a meaningful difference in people's lives it is happening and people are saying that and I think ultimately all humans want to feel useful you know you want to feel like you're contributing you're a little bit to society you're a little you know corner of the universe that you're making an impact there and so that feels good you know to do that I also think
there is an element of inertia that's involved when this you know for the first that's called at least seven years of the business I didn't have kids and the work burner was cranked on high and I was just trying to like figure out a way to make it all work I was saying yes to every opportunity I could I was trying to capitalize on every opportunity I had I was trying to make
the best thing I could and grow as big as possible and when the switch has been flipped on in that position for that long it's kind of hard to learn how to flip it off and that has been a big part of my personal growth over the last couple years is now I do have kids and I have about 40% of the working hours that I had before and I kept trying to force fit a lot of my old habits into
my new life and it probably took me I'm pretty slow learner probably took like 18 months to two years before I figured out hey you need to like stop being a dummy about this and change your habits a little bit I think all of those things are part of the answer partially it feels good to be useful and contribute something partially it helps make money and provide for my
family partially it's how I want to be spending my days and partially it's inertia and I'm just used to doing it for seven years or 10 years and I haven't quite fully learned hey maybe your lifestyle needs to look a little bit different now we're gonna take a quick break for some ads and then we will be right back and we are back we've had a really fascinating discussion all
starting with that one question that we normally ask and I didn't even ask the second typical question that we end with which is what is one thing that you personally are working on in your own life to be a better human right now there's this strange thing that happens when people pick a habit to follow in this case I'm using exercises as an example but it can be anything
you start to do the habit and maybe stick with it for a month or three months or some period of time where you're kind of energized about it and you do a good job with it and then something happens and you fall of course and I've noticed that there's a certain group of people that the narrative in their mind at that point is oh well of course I fell off track I always feel with exercise
habits or oh you know like I knew I wasn't going to be able to stick with it why I think it was going to be different this time and I don't think it has to be like that at all like we don't need to turn it into this bigger thing where we're assigning ourselves worth to this or whatever and I also think that it's a little bit strange that we do this to ourselves nobody says this explicitly
but the assumption when you pick a habit to build is kind of like well would it would be to be successful with this is if I just did it forever for the rest of my life but yeah but that obviously that doesn't make sense because you go through many different stages of life habits need to change shape so these check-ins these reflections and review it's a chance to notice
like when something falls off course and is it working and maybe the habit needs to change shape and that's totally fine you don't need to like berate yourself for it uh the other big thing that I'm struggling with or dealing with right now is the fact that a lot of things are going really well in the business there's a lot of opportunity because the book is selling so well
but I suddenly have like half the time that I had before as a new parent and so my kids are young they're toddlers but I like spending time with them I want to spend time with them but I'm dealing with that problem that issue that I just mentioned to you a couple minutes ago where it's like what's not okay is to be spending time with them but then in your head wishing that you
were working on something else or regretting that you like can't finish the next creative project like you either need to be all in or not on those things and I find that that's a difficult space for me to be to occupy is like I need to be with them when I'm with them and not like feeling bad about the fact that I'm behind on work whatever that might mean or that I'm not producing
as much as I did before it resonates so much with me I'm in this moment just personally where I have a book deal I have my first book it's like I'm working on it it seems so exciting it feels like this really moment of like extreme possibility where like my career could take a shift in a way that I'm really excited about and also by the time this episode comes out my wife will have given
birth to our first kid so like both of these things are happening simultaneously and it's really clear to me that I've built a bunch of habits that have worked up till now and that I kind of have no idea what will work in four weeks and much less in four months congratulations by the way that's awesome you're kind of birthing to babies and a sense you've got these like
two big things growing but that's great who knows what will what your lifestyle will require over the next year and in the years to follow but sometimes I feel like the ultimate form of mental toughness is the ability to handle uncertainty it's not it's not like preparing for every event you're never going to be able to predict what exactly you're going to need but if you
have a mindset where you're comfortable with the fact that hey I'll be able to handle that whenever it looks like then you know you're going to be pretty mentally tough when dealing with it as we were talking before about the idea that like habits can change over time they actually think that you know some habits are light easier for us to accept that in because there's
not really like a moral judgment around them for example like I'm thinking specifically of learning a language I think that if you got like for I'm trying to learn Spanish whereas especially when it comes to you know body diet exercise you get to a place and then you fall off a little bit people really put some some harsh self judgments on themselves around that and obviously
part of that is a big part of that is the culture and society but I think some of it too is that mental framing that you said of like it's only a success if I do this forever and if the results stay exactly the same for the entire time that I'm doing it.
Yeah I agree with you and it is interesting to see how different the societal expectations are for certain habits and which ones are high status which ones are low status and like learning a language is just kind of a net positive it's like the expectation at least in the US maybe in other places the world's different where people are more multilingual but you're
not expected to have another language anyway so if you did it was just a bonus and that and maybe that's easier to feel good about that.
Sometimes I think these big picture questions about habits who kind of get ahead of ourselves a little bit we're so focused on like the overall thing and how we feel and like we turn it into this bigger judgment and I'm kind of like maybe we can just scale it down and try to have five good minutes can we do that you know and you can do a lot with five good minutes like five
good minutes of pushups will be a good workout and reset your mood for the day five good minutes of conversation can restore relationship five good minutes of writing can make you feel like the manuscripts back on track I think that's one of the lessons of my work is that it doesn't actually take that much to feel good about yourself again and if you can just make it
about that about trying to have one good day then maybe you can worry a little bit less about the overall judgments about what it means and about what other people think about you and all that kind of stuff it can just be can I just be here in this moment and try to make good use of it and then you go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and try to do the same thing and trust that if you
keep accumulating and stacking good days on top of each other you're gonna end up in a pretty good place you know we've been talking a lot about good habits forming good habits but something that I was pleasantly surprised by is the level of empathy and lack of judgment that you have when you talk about people breaking bad habits you say that people with great self
control are not all that different from people who are struggling it's mostly that they just have an environment that lets them spend less time being tempted and you know you give the example of people who are struggling with addiction whether it is to cigarettes to alcohol to drugs and and how much the system actually plays a part rather than this like individual
moral strength which I think sometimes there's this cultural understanding of it of that that can be really damaging that that's the idea yeah thanks for saying that I don't know if this isn't something I talk about on the surface or like say explicitly in the book but it might be kind of surprising to once you realize I actually never say in atomic habits like I never
tell you what habits you should build and I'm not actually that interested in that like I don't even really think it's my role you know like you would know for your personal life better than I would what what you want to focus on I just view it as like there is no one way to build better habits there are many ways and I'm just sharing the best way that I've come across so far
and I kind of view it as my job to like lay all the tools out on the table and give you a more full tool belt and your job is say you know what I think for my situation I need a wrench or I need the hammer or I need the screwdriver that feels like that's what's going to work best for me here and I feel like if I can give you a more fully equipped tool belt you'll be in a better position to
make the changes you want to make specifically with breaking bad habits a lot of it does have to it a lot of it involves the environment if you were to go to an academic or researcher and ask them to define what a habit is to you they're probably going to say something like oh have you know habits are automatic behaviors that are done more or less mindlessly like brushing
your teeth or tying your shoes or you know something like that but another way to define what a habit is is that it is a behavior that's tied to a particular context so your habit of watching Netflix is tied to the context of your couch at 8 p.m.
or your habit of meditating is tied to your kitchen table at 7 a.m.
or you know wherever you do these kind of things and what you find is that many of your bad habits and your good habits are a product of those spaces of those contexts those environments that they're in and when you change the environment in a meaningful way the behavior often changes in a meaningful way now I hesitate you know I didn't write atomic habits as a book about addiction and I
don't claim to be an expert on addiction so I do think for true addictions there's kind of some other factors that are played but just leaving that aside for a second and just talking about just general bad habits that we all have you would be surprised how often a change in the environment can reduce or curtail the habit to the desired degree so for example a lot of people
feel like they look at their phones too much or that they spent you know their phone is a distraction and they're always checking their screen so on I have this thing I don't do it every day but I do it probably 75 or 80% of days where I leave my phone in another room until lunch each day whenever I do that I almost always have a better day I have a home office so my phone is only
30 seconds down the hallway but I never go get it and I'm like well did I want it or not you know like in one sense I wanted it so bad that I would check it every three minutes when it was next to me but in another sense I never wanted it badly enough that I would walk 30 seconds down the hall and get it and a lot of habits are like that for many of your bad habits they're just a response
to the things that are around you and they're available and obvious I talk about this in the book but they're basically if you want to build a good habit they're basically four things that you won't working for you and I call them the four laws of behavior change and the first one is what we just talked about the first law is to make it obvious you want the cues of your good
habits to be obvious available visible easy to see easier it is to see your get your attention the more likely are to act on it the second law is to make it attractive the more attractive or appealing a habit is more likely are to feel motivated to do it the third law is to make it easy the easier more convenient frictionless simple a habit is the more likely you are to feel
compelled to take action and the fourth and final laws to make it satisfying more enjoyable a habit is the more fun or engaging or rewarding it is the more likely are to repeat it in the future I would say just go through these four laws and ask yourself how can I make the behavior more obvious how can I make it more attractive how can I make it easier how can I make it more
satisfying and the answers to those questions will naturally call forth some simple adjustments you can make that increase the odds of the behaviors going to occur a thing that we have touched on as well is the fact that often really powerful behavior change doesn't happen in isolation that it happens with the power of the group whether that's you know the most
intimate level of the group friends and family or whether it's kind of like a broader community that you're part of or even societal level and I think that's something that you talk about in the book but that we don't often think about when we think about success is the way in which it's part of a social and collaborative scene it is so pervasive the social environment
and the social impact on your habits that we almost don't even think about it or realize it like if I walk outside my house and I look across the street and I see my neighbor mowing their lawn I might think oh I need to cut the grass and you'll stick to that habit of mowing your lawn for five or 10 or 20 like however long you live in that house you know to do it for 30 years and we
wish that we had that level of consistency with a lot of our other habits and it's kind of like well why do you do it partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn 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 scene that what it means
to be a neighbor on this street and the social pressure and environment that you're in that drives that behavior and that is true in so many other ways in life and so I think the punchline is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is normal because if you're your desired behavior is normal there and you're hanging out with people you're building friendships
and relationships with people who have that behavior as part of their life it's going to become so much easier for you to soak it up too ultimately this ties back into one of the deepest human needs that we all have every human had we're very social creatures we all have this desire to bond and connect even if it's just part of like your little family unit we all want to
be part of something and so when people have to choose between you know I have habits that I don't really love but I fit in I belong a part of something or I have the habits that I want to have but I'm cast out I'm ostracized I'm criticized a lot of the time the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve and you want to try as best you can to get those two things aligned
I wonder how does humor and laughter and having fun how do those play a role in habits oh great question I think they have they play a huge role I mean one of my little rules for life is the person who has the most fun wins and I feel like you should apply that to your to your habits as well there's this little again one of these kind of unspoken things that happens when people
choose their habits a lot of the time which is I think they choose the habits they feel like they're supposed to have or that society expects them to have or that somehow their peers or others want them to have but not the habits that they actually want in most common examples like the single most popular New Year's resolution is some form of exercise go to the gym whatever
get in shape and I kind of feel like a lot of people are going to the gym and lifting weights in January just because they think they should be going to the gym and my reply is always like look most things in life there may not be a thousand ways to do it but there is almost always more than one way and if that's true then you should step back and think about what would this look
like if it was fun now what would it look like if meditating was fun for me what would it look like if an exercise have it was enjoyable what would it look like if I was excited to sit down and write each day whatever habit that you're trying to build you should try to find the most fun version of that for you if you're genuinely interested or excited or curious about it there'll
be almost endless opportunities to improve and optimize it but if you're not actually excited about it if you just kind of forcing it you're not even really curious about how to make it work even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a hassle you get asked non-stop about habits right and your your book atomic habits I'm curious if over the course of all the discussions
that you've had about this book if you've also ended up learning more about atoms I've learned quite a bit I I don't feel like my knowledge of chemistry is any better but my knowledge of the chemistry metaphors is better so I talk about like habits have an activation energy just like a chemical reaction or that one of the reasons I chose atomic is that small habits can add
into accumulate into something more like atoms building into molecules and molecules building into compounds so I've got my own I got my own like kind of chemistry lingo now even if I'm not much wiser about the science itself I love that well James it has been like such a pleasure talking to you I love the book I love the way you think about these things but also just
hearing it in person has been an absolute pleasure talking to you thank you so much for making the time to be on the show yeah thank you for the opportunity pleasure chat and glad you enjoyed the book thank you so much to today's guest James Clear his book is called atomic habits I am your host Chris Duffy and you can find more for me including my weekly newsletter and other
projects at chrisduffycomedy.com how to be a better human is brought to you on the Ted side by atomic particles named in yellow baller as a band band Chiang Chloe Shasha Brooks and Joseph Debrine this episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salis whose habits include making a list and checking it twice that's right they are the Santa Claus of facts
on the PRX side our show is put together by a team who habitually make this show possible Morgan Flannery Norgill Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez as you know podcasts can be habit-forming so you've got to be careful about which ones you ingest thank you for choosing our show if you are listening on apple please leave us a five star rating and review that is huge
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