The Exchanges

Q At what point in time did habits become a conscious effort?

A Probably high school was the first time that I started actually thinking about it, but not in the way that I, like, write about it in Atomic Habits. I remember in high school, I was playing a couple sports, I was involved in clubs and stuff, and I had a lot of things going on each day, and because I had so many things, I had to plan my day out the night before, and so I got into this little habit of doing that when I was a sophomore or junior or whatever. And that's such a basic little thing, but I look back on that as kind of the first time when I started taking it seriously and trying to think about, okay, what do I actually need to do tomorrow for it to be a successful day and stuff like that.

AI assessment note: “Probably high school was the first time that I started actually thinking about it”

Q I want to turn to the book. Habits is an interesting thing because it's one of those that we often have. It's part of who we are, but don't necessarily think about it. And I thought it might help to break down, like, what was your simple definition of what a habit is?

A There are a couple of different ways you can describe it. The technical definition of a habit is a behavior that's repeated enough times to be more or less automatic. So it's those things that you do kind of mindlessly. And like you said, we're building them all the time. And this is one of the things that makes habits so important, I think. You don't get to decide. Your brain is automating whatever it can to save energy and to conserve effort wherever possible, and so you're going to be building habits whether you want to or not, and if that's true, the next step, I think, is like, well, you might as well be a little more in control of the process, right? You might as well be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of people feel like they're the victim of their habits, like, oh, I just, I didn't even realize I was building these things, and now I bite my nails, or I snack too much, or I, like, watch so much TV, or I look at my phone all the time, or whatever it is. And they didn't even realize that habit was getting established. So that's one way to describe what a habit is. But there are a couple other definitions of a habit that I think are useful, too. Like, one way to define a habit is that it's the solution to recurring problems in your environment. I really like that definition. I think Jason Rea was the one who came up with that. And basically th…

AI assessment note: “The technical definition of a habit is a behavior that's repeated enough times to be”

Q You mentioned something in saying that really tied to identity. So Mitch is the kind of person that goes to the gym. Is that a mind trick compared to the actual habit and pattern of doing what you want to do to form the right habits?

A Well, I think in the, possibly in the short term, it could be a, you know, a little mindset shift, but in the long term, I think it's really the thing that we're trying to achieve. It's the result that we're really hoping for. So I refer to this in the book as identity based habits. And the idea is that ultimately true behavior change is really identity change. We think that what we're trying to shift is the results or the outcome. If I could just have more money in the bank account or a lower number on the scale, or More employees at the company or whatever it is, then I would be happier. Then I'd have the results I want. But actually the outcome is not really the thing that needs to change. It's the story that we're telling ourselves about who we are. It's the identity that we or our team or our culture or whatever that we have. And I think this links directly to our habits because every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so the more that you show up and perform a particular habit, the more you're casting votes for that type of identity. And I think this speaks to the power that small habits can have. Like, no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. And no, going to the gym for five minutes does not radically transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who…

AI assessment note: “in the short term, it could be a, you know, a little mindset shift”

Q why customers call it miraculous, game-changing, and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at ridgeline.ai. And now, back to the show. So in between the short term and the long term, I imagine anyone who's trying to form new habits, break bad habits, runs into obstacles. And I'm curious, kind of, what are the common obstacles people will run into?

A Yeah, you can define this in different ways. Sometimes broadly, I think there are really only two things that people struggle with habits. The first one is getting started, and the second one is sticking with it. So getting started, a lot of the strategies that we've talked about, like environment design or scaling it down using a two-minute rule and so on, that can be helpful for that. Sticking with it is interesting. I'll give two strategies that I think are helpful for this. The first is, it's very hard for behaviors to stick if you're not part, don't have some, like, social element working for it. And you don't have to do it in some really strategic way where you're like, oh, I have an accountability partner and they text me or whatever. Like, it doesn't have to be that formalized. But what you often see with any behavior that really lasts for years or decades, there's often a social component associated with it. So say, for example, You move into a new neighborhood, and you walk outside, and you see your neighbors mowing their lawn, and you're like, oh, I need to mow the lawn, and trim the hedges, and spruce up the yard, and people will stick with that habit of cutting their grass for decades. As long as they live in the house, they will do it. We wish we had that level of consistency with some of our other habits, but if you wonder why do they do it, partially it's becaus…

AI assessment note: “there are really only two things that people struggle with habits. The first one is getting started”

Q I'm going to ask you a couple of closing questions, but before that, I know this is going to come out just right at the turn of the new year. It's kind of everyone's favorite time to make their resolutions or call them desired habits. So how are you thinking about 20, 21 and both for yourself and any suggestions for other people looking to make new year's resolutions?

A Sure. So for me, I find that I'm coming back to the basics. There's sort of a cycle that goes early on. You're like, okay, I should just focus on the fundamentals. And then you're like, all right, I kind of got that handled. So now I should optimize and improve a little bit. And then you get too much in the weeds and too much in the details. Then you got to remind yourself to come back to the fundamentals. So I'm kind of on that part of the curve right now where I'm like, all right, really what I need to do is I've spent a lot of time optimizing the last couple of years. I just need to stay consistent on let's write articles. Let's work on the next book chapter. Let's publish the newsletter this week. So I'm really focused on just maintaining consistency. Consistency. I think that's going to be the thing that I'm trying to pull myself back to center on. Because there have been a lot of opportunities that have popped up in the last two years, and just those details can start to get you distracted from the stuff that really moves the needle. And if I have any encouragement for other people, or just maybe not even an encouragement as much as a different way to think about it, Most of the time when people talk about resolutions or when I hear from people talking about them, it's something like, oh, I want to lose weight or I want to, you know, whatever they pick like the, these res…

AI assessment note: “So for me, I find that I'm coming back to the basics.”

Q All right. What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?

A I will say I have been very fortunate to have two great parents. That's a huge bit of luck and randomness in my life that I think has served me really well. But I can think of like two things at least. One is throughout my childhood, whenever I had a big test or had a big, usually it was a big game. If I was talking to my dad about it beforehand, and if I was feeling nervous before I would go out and pitch or before a basketball game, he would always tell me, trust your preparation. And it did help a little bit to calm the nerves and remind yourself like, listen, you've been practicing for this. You've been training for this. It's not just today. You know what to do. You've shot a free throw a thousand times. You can do it when you go out there. But there's a second message baked into that, which is you better prepare. It teaches you that, yeah, listen, you'll be fine right now, but also the only reason you'll be fine is if you put the reps in ahead of time. So that has definitely stuck with me. I've thought about that a lot. I think about it with the launch of Atomic Habits. People are like, wow, I can't believe how well the book did this first week out, or, you know, it came out, exploded to this big success. And I look back on what we did and I'm like, man, you have no idea how many reps we put in over the two, three, four years before that. And I'm not talking just about th…

AI assessment note: “he would always tell me, trust your preparation.”

Q Now, I'm always curious when someone has really spent so much time about something like habits, what were you like as a kid?

A Hmm. So I guess I had a couple different elements that were a big part of my childhood. So first one was athletics. My dad played professional baseball. He played in the minor leagues for St. Louis Cardinals. And then, um, I wanted to be an athlete growing up too, and wanted to be like him. So baseball was a big part of it, but I did a bunch of other stuff too, swimming, basketball. I did one season of football and football. There are kids who are getting hit and kids who are giving hits. And I was always getting hit. So that didn't last that long in that one. But, uh, yeah, so a lot of sports, I also always liked school. I, you could probably just say I was a nerd to some degree. Like I, I really enjoyed that in both of those areas though, in sports and in academics, I was always hanging out with people who were better than me. Like I was never the smartest kid. All of my friends are smarter than I was, and I was never the most athletic. I was never the fastest on any team I was on or the best player or whatever. And I think that having a foot in both of those areas really helped me. Because I had friends who were all the jocks, and I was friends with all the nerds as well, and I kind of felt like I could play in both worlds, and it gave me a broad exposure to things. In fifth grade, some of my friends started a robotics club, which is like the most generous way to describe it…

AI assessment note: “I guess I had a couple different elements that were a big part of my childhood.”

Q What was your writing process like in those couple years leading up to writing the book?

A Well, I think you need to focus on volume before intensity. And what I mean by that is early on, it's kind of like in the gym. If you just roll into the gym the first day, and you try to squat 500 pounds, it's not going to go very well. But if instead, you just work your way up slowly, and you start with the bar, and then you show up the next day, and you put a little weight on it, and you do that for 10 years, well, then maybe you have a chance of squatting 500 pounds. But you have to do volume before you do intensity. And the same thing is true for creative work, especially early on in your career, because for me at least, I didn't know my voice, I didn't know what I wanted to say, I didn't know how I wanted to say it, or what my style was, and so by writing a new article every Monday and Thursday, I got a lot of reps in, and you start to gradually refine your approach, and eventually the style that I settled on, it goes by different, it's kind of a standard non-fiction style, which is Story study lesson. So you start with some kind of story to bring people in. You back it up with some piece of research, and then you have a practical lesson or takeaway. There's another one that I'll use occasionally, which is principle story action step. So you just state right up front, this is the main thing that I believe. This is my hypothesis or principle. Then you give a story to illust…

AI assessment note: “by writing a new article every Monday and Thursday, I got a lot of reps in”

Q So as you mentioned earlier, how do you take that from the what to the how?

A I think understanding that habits are important and understanding the crucial role they play in our lives is a good starting place, but at some point you have to operationalize it. And I like to use a framework for it in the book where I kind of have four different steps. And so from a real high level, if you want a good habit to stick, You roughly want four things to happen. The first thing is you want the good habit to be obvious, because the more obvious or available or visible a habit is, the more likely you are to take action on it. The second thing is that you want it to be attractive, so the more that you expect the outcome to be good or the more appealing something seems, the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it. The third thing is that you want it to be easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionless your habits are, the more likely you are to perform them. And the fourth thing is you want it to be satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is, the more you kind of have this positive emotional association with it, the more you want to come back to it and repeat it again next time. And so I call those the four laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. In the book, I break down those practical ways to do each of those, but that's kind of the high level framework on, okay, I know good habits are imp…

AI assessment note: “Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.”

Q How did you do research if there really weren't that many people out there writing about habits?

A I like to refer to myself as idea agnostic. For example, I don't only write about, like, psychology. You'll find ideas and atomic habits from biology, architecture, finance, history, philosophy. I think the upside of it outweighs the downside, which is that knowledge is not confined to one little academic silo, and the real world does not work that way. You have knowledge bleeding into different categories all the time. And so you need to have a broad set of skills and ideas in order to properly understand how reality works and what you should be doing. So that's a really high upside. But the downside, the trade-off, is that it's impossible for any one person to be an expert on all those topics. And so the challenge that I ran into was like, well, if I want to write about this in a scientific way, if I want to write about this in a credible way, I better figure out a way to make sure that all these broad, diverse ideas are accurate. And For me, the best strategy that I have so far is to essentially curate the curators. So I try to find people who are trusted sources in each domain, and then I use them as my proxy to say they're going to act as my experts, and if they say this is more or less the scientific consensus on a particular topic, I'll trust them, and I'll use that as the baseline for integrating it with all these other ideas, and I try to do that for each industry, and…

AI assessment note: “essentially curate the curators. So I try to find people who are trusted sources”

Q So as you first started writing and it wasn't at all clear necessarily what you were writing about at that time, as you look back, are there an article or two that you just chuckle that you actually wrote something about that and put it out?

A Oh yeah. I mean, there are some really terrible ones, but it's also like you simultaneously, this is good that I can look back on it and say it's bad. Cause you're like, okay, that means I'm better now, but also you, you still hate that they're out there and that you did that. So you're like, I clearly, I wish I had like learned faster, but I didn't know that I wanted to write about habits specifically early on. So I had a couple articles that were more health or fitness related. I wrote about medicine. I wrote about how to squat, but more weights, like things like that, that were in a little bit of a different vertical and they did fine. But whenever I would write about a more broad principle or my ideas around habits or decision-making and making better choices or strategy, these kind of more meta level things. Those articles did better and people resonated with them more. And so all the articles were about things that I was excited about. Like I did a huge 6008 thousand word breakdown of my travel strategy and everything that I had in my travel bag. So it's like fairly niche group of people that are going to be excited about that. But I thought it was cool. But I also thought writing about habits and strategy and decision making was cool. And so when I wrote about those and they did really well, I was like, all right, I'll just spend a little bit more time here. So I kind of…

AI assessment note: “I wrote about medicine. I wrote about how to squat, but more weights”

Q And do you have a process for kind of storing all these things that you read or hear in conversations?

A I don't really have a good process for storing what I read or what I hear in conversation. Honestly, the way I think about it is it's almost like a bunch of layers of Swiss cheese or something. And you've got like four or five layers and you try to get them all lined up. And eventually every now and then there's an idea that goes through the whole of every layer and makes it all the way through. It's just kind of like having filters. So the very first filter is choosing what you're going to consume. And I think that this is actually a much deeper, bigger, more important choice than most people realize. Almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. And so when you are choosing Who to follow on Twitter or Instagram or whatever. When you're choosing what books to read, what news station to watch, or what articles to read, you are choosing your future thoughts. And most people don't put that much weight on it. They don't think about it as being that important. But I think curating your information sources is one of the most important choices you can make. So that's the first layer. Then you've got this high quality, high signal source of information coming to you. So now you've got all this information you're consuming, Twitter feed, Instagram feed, books you're reading, et cetera. And for me, I'm like, well, a lot of this information is good. I've already…

AI assessment note: “I don't really have a good process for storing what I read”

Q In a lot of the investment work, there's a fair amount of evaluation of other people, and I'm curious, how do you think about evaluating or recognizing the habits in others, both good and bad?

A I don't really think about it that much. I guess I think about it in the sense that I try to observe it so that maybe I can learn something. I'm watching my own habits. I'm watching my family members or people around me or just someone on the street walking by and you're like, maybe you can learn something from that. You know, it's just trying to like keep your eyes open essentially and like see the world clearly. So I do that kind of thing, but I don't really think about evaluating the habits of others Because I don't really think it's my job to do that. There's this funny thing that happens where sometimes people will be talking to my wife and I and say something to her like, oh gosh, is he just like so annoying to like have around? Is he always like judging your habits or talking about stuff? And we always laugh because I don't think I've really ever said anything about it. And I don't even really think about it because I don't think it should be that like, that's not my job. You know, it's not my role and nobody wants to be around someone like that. And actually what I hope is that That feeling, um, comes through in Atomic Habits. Sometimes my favorite feedback on the book is that, oh, like, you know, I really liked it. Most self-help books are so judgmental or like finger waggy or feel like telling you how to live your life. And I've tried very hard to not make the book li…

AI assessment note: “I don't really think about it that much. I guess I think about it”

Q I want to turn a little bit and talk some about how both the book itself and what you've learned have applied in your own life. What habits have you formed that came out of publishing the book?

A Well, the one I mentioned earlier about leaving my phone in another room, that's one that I've started to do more consistently since writing the book. What I really like about Atomic Habits though, and what I try to do with all of the writing, any article that I make or tweet or I try to only write about things that I have to practice in real life because I think there is a potential danger in these kind of new age content creators becoming sort of new versions of academics in an ivory tower where you just share ideas all day but you don't actually have to implement them and there's that quote that in theory there's no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is and I think there's a lot of truth to that the fact that I Had to build a writing habit in order to write the book. That's good, because that forces me to see how hard it is to build a habit. The fact that I use the ideas in the gym when I do strength training each week, that's good, because that forces me to wrestle with, does this strategy actually work or not? And a lot of the environment design strategies that I mentioned earlier, those are all designed to encourage me to watch TV less, or encourage me to do productive things more. Just little things like that Individually, none of them make a radical difference, but collectively they all sort of make the good habit, the path of least resistance.…

AI assessment note: “leaving my phone in another room, that's one that I've started to do more consistently”

Q Any tips on what book number two is going to be about?

A Well, I already wrote my habits book, so I feel like that's basically everything useful I can say on that topic. I'm not just going to keep writing about habits, but I do think I want something that like plays nicely with habits or that works well with it, and so I've been thinking more about what are the main levers or pillars of living a good life or of like driving our results in life, and I think habits are certainly one of them. I think Luck and randomness is certainly another piece. And then I think if we put a third one in, we would probably say it's like your strategy and your choices. So by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, but if you can get the other two under your control and do a good job with your strategy and choices and your habits and actions, then often you put yourself in a pretty favorable position to get a few good bounces. And so I'm thinking more about that final category, that category of like strategy, choices, decision-making, and kind of how to Combine good strategy with good habits. Cause that's one of the questions you could have after you finish atomic habits. It's like, okay, great. I know how to build better habits. I know how to get them to stick and last, but which habits should I be building? Where should I be focusing? So it's kind of circling those topics of like focus, attention, strategy, decision-making, all that…

AI assessment note: “I'm thinking more about that final category, that category of like strategy, choices, decision-making”

Q Before you hit off, let me ask you two more for our premium subset. What's the biggest mistake you've made, and what did you learn from it?

A So there's, there are all kinds of mistakes that I've made that are small mistakes that seemed big at the time. So like, I think about the first big webinar that I ever got from my audience. I was just a small fish. I was just starting. And this guy had like an audience of 300,000 people. And he was like, yeah, I'll email him about it. And you can do a webinar with him and sell your product or whatever. And I screwed up a bunch of things. I screwed up the tech. I screwed the punchline of it is that people essentially couldn't log in until an hour later. Then when it was supposed to start. And I was expecting for this to be for me at the time is going to be some huge payday. I was going to make like 30,000 dollars or something. And instead, I think like eight people attended and it was just a total flop. And that felt like a huge mistake at the time, but it wasn't in retrospect. One thing like that rarely makes or breaks you, especially if you just keep showing up. So instead, what I think the honest answer is to the biggest mistake I've made is Is either in some of the, this is sort of the same thing, but just saying it in different ways. It's waiting too long to get started. And the main thing about that was waiting for someone to give me permission to work on the thing that I really wanted. I was always good at school and I liked school. And so I thought I needed to follow th…

AI assessment note: “the honest answer is to the biggest mistake I've made is... waiting too long”