Disclosure
Clear: Social media's short half-life disqualifies it as a core business focus
“Social media, you Has a very short half-life and that's fine. It can serve a role in the business, but I'm never going to make it my central thing because something like a blog post has a little bit longer half-life, but a book really has a long half-life.”
Insight
Clear: Default early-life habits are mathematically unlikely to be optimal
“And what you find is that like early in your life, a lot of the solutions that you come up with are just things that you either inherited from your parents or saw modeled and started to repeat. And you get to be about 22 or 25 or something like that. And what …”
Insight
Clear: Four laws of behavior change are obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying
“Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit... So roughly speaking, what you want is your habit to be obvious... You want it to be attractive... You want it to be easy, simple, frictionless... And you want it…”
Insight
Clear: Changing desires is too hard; don't try making bad habits unattractive
“Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. That one is the most difficult of the four and probably the place that I would recommend focusing on the least because it's hard to change your desires.”
Insight
James Clear: Standardize a Habit Before Attempting to Optimize It
“A habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize and turning into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize.”
Insight
Clear: Procrastination is often a signal you do not actually want your goal
“Procrastination is not always a bad thing. If you're procrastinating on something, something, sometimes it's a signal that you don't actually want that thing which is fine.”
Insight
James Clear: Letting Go of Professional Labels Unlocks More Career Options
“If you need that label, then you are beholden to doing it that way. But if you can release yourself from the label and instead ask yourself, what type of lifestyle do I want? Or what type of impact do I want to make? Regardless of what the actual label is now,…”
Insight
Clear: A book is an obstacle between readers and their desired results
“Every word that you write is actually an obstacle that the reader does not want to have to go through. Your book is an obstacle between them and the result that they want.”
Insight
Clear: Executing two or three obvious basics delivers 80% of initial results
“Especially in the beginning, the primary bottleneck to results are you doing the obvious things? You know, do, do the obvious stuff first. There's probably only two or three pieces that you just need to do. Like, are you showing up consistently? Are you doing,…”
Insight
James Clear: Intensity Makes Good Stories, but Consistency Drives Progress
“Intensity makes for a good story, but consistency makes progress.”
Insight
James Clear: The Desire to Belong Often Overpowers the Desire to Understand
“A lot of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand.”
Insight
Clear: 'Broad Funnel, Tight Filter' Method Produces High-Quality Work
“So you just do these really broad data sets and then you have a really tight funnel for what for what gets through and you end up with some really high quality stuff that way.”
Insight
Clear: Key life priorities are endless battles with no rollover credit
“One of the, there are a lot of things in life that are like this, but one of the challenging things about the really important stuff in life is that they're endless battles. You know, if you do a good job focusing today and prioritizing today, you pick the rig…”
Insight
Clear: Visualizing progress sustains habits through delayed compounding returns
“Finding ways to visualize your progress as you go through your habits is important because a hallmark of almost any compounding process is that the greatest returns are delayed.”
Insight
Clear: Every action taken is a vote for your future identity
“So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
Insight
Clear: Pride in an identity drives people to maintain habits
“When you start to take pride in being that type of person, you will fight to maintain the habit.”
Disclosure
Clear: Unbroken momentum of Atomic Habits delayed my next book
“This is part of the reason why I have not published another book yet. Atomic habits is working really well. And so I'm trying to take my own advice and don't stop until it stops working.”
Disclosure
Clear keeps his phone in another room until noon to avoid distractions
“Another little rule that I follow is I'd take my phone and I try to leave it in another room until lunch each day. So that just gives me from like nine to noon ish where I can work on my own agenda and not respond to everybody else's agenda.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clear: Atomic Habits launch planning began 15 months in advance
“We started planning that launch 15 months ahead of time.”
Disclosure
Clear: Let the world say no first instead of being your own bottleneck
“I try to not be my own bottleneck. You know, I don't want to have, I don't want to be the first person to tell myself, no, I want the world to tell me no first, and then I'll adjust based on the feedback that I get, but I don't want to talk myself out of it.”
Disclosure
Clear: I currently have two book manuscripts of 500 and 600 pages
“I have two manuscripts right now. One is 500 pages. One is 600 pages. That is just that is just a bunch of stuff that I've read that is organized around the book concept.”
Disclosure
Clear: Co-founded publishing venture Authors Equity to cross-pollinate his brand
“Like I have my business as a writer, you know, I'm an author and I have my platforms, but I also co-founded a publishing company authors equity. And so now the brand that I have as an author helps me meet other authors and talk to them. And if it's a good fit,…”
Insight
Clear: Life friction often occurs when force-fitting old habits into new seasons
“I found that a lot of the time when I'm struggling or I'm facing some sort of I feel like I'm facing a lot of friction. It's because I'm trying to force fit old habits into a new season.”
Insight
Clear: Good Habits Cost in the Present While Bad Habits Cost in the Future
“The cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future.”
