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Create The Habits You Need To Succeed with James Clear

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we show you exactly how to build the habits and routines you need to succeed, break down what makes powerful habits, and share how to stay motivated and productive no matter what happens with our guest James Clear.

James is an American author, entrepreneur, and photographer. His personal blog, jamesclear.com has over 400,000 email subscribers. Since his last visit to the show, his first book Atomic Habits has gone on to sell over 1 million copies worldwide. James’s work focuses primarily on habits and human potential looking to answer the question “How can we live better?” by focusing on science-backed methods. James’s work has been featured in The New York Times, CBS, Forbes, and more. 

  • 3 Pillars influence your outcomes in life

    • Luck

    • Decisions/Choices

    • Habits

  • Only 2 of those are under your control

  • The two big levers you have to control your life are your STRATEGY (your decisions) and your ACTIONS (your habits)

  • Your choices and decisions are like potential energy.. the create the options available to you.. and your habits allow you to capture that energy or potential.

  • Killer habits may create better outcomes than someone with a better strategy. 

  • Combining amazing decisions with killer habits creates a compounded effect of positive outcomes 

  • Your efforts set your floor of the results and your strategy sets your ceiling.

  • You need both decision making (strategy) and great habits. Without one or the other, you don’t go anywhere. 

  • The world is evolving.. and the world is uncertain. It’s impossible to map all the potential outcomes or options ahead of time. 

  • Strategy is something that emerges over time, not something set in stone ahead of time. 

  • There is a certain wisdom that comes from experimentation.

  • The way to get to the best plan is to iterate a lot… get information.. and craft a better strategy.

  • Mental models like second-order thinking.. inversion.. etc are valuable tools. 

  • Mental models are simply a way of looking at the world or viewing the world. 

    • The best mental models are predictive, not explanatory.

    • Close to the truth

    • Widely applicable

  • If you want to make a decision about the future, data is not enough, you also need a theory to guide your actions and your behavior.

    • Those THEORIES are mental models.

  • There is no full resolution perspective on reality.. everything has to be explained to some degree.. and by definition, it's simplified. 

  • Mental models are like different pairs of glasses.. that show you different aspects of reality. 

  • Once you’ve learned an idea.. you use it automatically when it becomes relevant. 

  • Find the best most useful ideas that the world has to offer. Then learn them so completely that you can use them automatically when you need them.. so that they become part of your worldview.

  • The one thing that’s left to do is to find and integrate the best mental models.. the best habit around mental models is just to READ a TON.

    • Finding

    • Filtering

    • Reflection & Reviewing

  • You have to make contact with ideas repeatedly is the best way to internalize them 

  • Motivation is a fluctuating resource. 

  • The more that your habits rely on motivation, the more you become beholden to how you feel at any given moment, rather than building stable habits. 

  • Don’t make motivation the bottleneck. It’s like building your habits on quicksand. 

  • Simple habits to avoid needing motivation:

    • Design your environment to make good habits easier. Make it easy for your attention to slide into what you want to do. 

    • If you want a habit to be a big part of your life, make it a big part of your environment. 

    • You don’t need motivation.. you need CLARITY. Have extreme clarity around when and where the behavior lives in your life. 

    • Implementation Intentions are a cornerstone of this

      • I will perform X in this place at this time. 

    • Over 100 studies have shown that implementation intentions can make your 2-3x more likely to perform the habits you want to perform. 

  • Focus on systems/processes rather than goals. 

    • Build a system that makes that habit more likely. 

    • Design an environment that makes it more conductive. 

    • Develop a clear plan to execute on it. 

    • You want 10-15 things all nudging you in the right direction. 

  • Process over outcome, system over goal. 

  • Your goal is your desired outcome, your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. 

  • Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. 

  • Where you are right now is a PRODUCT of the system you’ve been running recently. Your outcomes are a LAGGING MEASURE of your habits. Everything in your life is a lagging measure of your habits. 

  • We so badly want the results to change, but the outcomes aren’t the problem. If you fix the inputs then the outcomes will fix themselves. 

  • Focus on the trajectory you’re on, not the current position you’re on. 

    • Try to get 1% better every day.

  • Every outcome is just a point on a spectrum of repetitions. Outcomes become a natural point on the journey, not an endpoint. 

  • If you see someone crushing some heavy reps at the weight.. ask yourself.. how many reps have they done in their personal workout history?

  • Most people refer to these things as “Goals” or “Milestones” but you should view them as a natural byproduct of putting the reps in. Putting the work in.

  • This concept is really powerful because it simultaneously creates a bias towards action, and creates the patience to realize that the result won’t happen right away. 

  • “You’re not good enough to be disappointed yet."

    • You haven’t put enough reps int to be unhappy yet. 

    • The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. 

  • You have to give your GOALS a space to live in your calendar. 

  • There’s no way to perfectly know that you’re going to stick to a habit every day or not. 

  • Make as many moves as possible to stack the odds in your favor. It’s not absolute, it’s a game of probabilities. You’re aiming for 1000 strategies each giving you a 1% probability of moving towards your goal. “Probability stacking."

  • Habit trackers and checking in on your goals every day is a great way to increase the probability of hitting your goals. 

  • Having a streak is really motivating.. but sometimes a streak ends. The process of breaking a streak is demotivating. 

  • It’s never the first mistake that ruins you, it’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows that. 

  • You don’t need to be perfect, but you have to be perfect to self-correct and recover. 

  • The people who interrupt the compounding of their habits the least are the ones who end up with the biggest gains. 

  • Build a lifestyle of consistency.

  • How do you think about figuring out WHAT The right REPS ARE? 

  • How do you know where to focus? What habits should you start with?

    • Reverse engineering

    • Imitation

    • Best Practices

    • Look at people who’ve achieved what you want or done similar things, and use that as a starting place and try to emulate what you can

    • Or you can also use the Elon Musk “first principles” thinking methodology

    • It’s much easier to figure out if something is working after you’ve tried it than it is to predict if it will work ahead of time. 

      • Experiment with different things and double down on what’s working. 

      • Use a range of experiments to try and figure out what you should use. Run a cheap, quick, and thoughtful test to find the optimal strategy. 

      • When a winning strategy bubbles up, do more of that. 

      • This strategy risks spreading yourself too thin. 

      • “Don’t keep your eggs in too many baskets."

  • Use first principles / reverse engineering for 80% of your time, then experiment with 20% of your time.. then integrate the experiments that have worked well and been fruitful.

  • You have to stay focused if you want great results.. but no one knows what will work ahead of time, so you need at least some experiments to find and integrate new ideas. 

  • Homework: Start with the two-minute rule. What should the next action be? Take whatever habit you’re trying to build and scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less to do.

  • "Mastering the art of SHOWING UP”

    • A habit must be established before it can be IMPROVED. 

    • Mitch going to the gym 3-4x a week for 6 weeks.. and spending MAX 5 minutes at the gym. 

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This week's episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by Best Fiends.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we show you exactly how to build the habits and routines you need to succeed. We break down what makes powerful habits and share how to stay motivated and productive no matter what happens with our guest, James Clear.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we told the truth about self-awareness. 95% of people think they’re self-aware, but only 10% to 15% actually are. Where do you think you stand and what can you do to improve what our previous guest called the superpower of the 21st century? All that and more with our previous guest, Dr. Tasha Eurich.

Now for our interview with James.

[0:01:43.4] MB: James Clear is an American author, entrepreneur and photographer. His personal blog, jamesclear.com, has over 400,000 e-mail subscribers. Since his last visit to the show, his first book, Atomic Habits, has gone on to sell over a million copies worldwide and been featured on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year straight. James's work focuses primarily on habits and human potential, looking to answer the question how can we live better by focusing on science-backed methods. He has been featured in The New York Times, CBS, Forbes and many more media outlets.

James, welcome back to the Science of Success.

[0:02:21.1] JC: Hey, good to talk to you again. Thanks for having me.

[0:02:23.0] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you back on the show. I've been a huge fan of your blog and your work for many, many years, and so we wanted to have you back on here to really dig into many of the topics that we may have touched on in our previous conversation, or even things that have changed, or become more interesting, or relevant for you since we last chatted.

[0:02:41.7] JC: Perfect.

[0:02:42.6] MB: I'd love to start out with something – we're going to jump right into the deep in here. One of the topics that we talk a lot about on Science of Success is decision-making and really digging into how do we make better decisions using tools like mental models and so forth. You in our previous conversation actually, you said one of the most interesting things that I've ever really conceptualized around decision-making, which is how decisions and habits intersect with each other and what their relationship is. I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

[0:03:11.3] JC: Well, broadly speaking, I think there are probably – well, we could say there are three pillars that influence your outcomes in life. You've got, one is your luck, randomness, misfortune, uncertainty, just things happen. Second one are your choices and decisions. Then the third are your habits and behaviors. Only two of those three things are under your control. Broadly speaking or generally speaking, the two big pillars, the two big levers that you have to pull on for your outcomes in life are the choices that you make, so your strategy and the habits that you build, so your behavior and your actions.

I like to think of it as if you can get those two things under control, then you actually can – the third bucket of luck and randomness, you by definition, you don't have control over that, but you can increase your exposure to good things, or increase the odds that something fortunate will come your way by showing up more frequently, or making more strategic decisions and so on.

Those two pieces that are under your control, your strategy and choices and your habits and behaviors, the way that I think about them is that your choices set your trajectory, or they're like potential energy. They create the amount of energy available to you, the amount of outcomes or results that are available to you. Your habits are how you capitalize on that.

One example of this is you can imagine two entrepreneurs. One person, they start a local shop, a pizza shop, or a candle shop or something and you can imagine this dotted line, this trajectory extending out from that decision, that choice of what the upside is of that business. Somebody else, another person, another entrepreneur might start a software company and you can imagine another dotted line extending out from there.

The software entrepreneur may have the higher upside in theory. That choice, that decision may have created more potential energy that could be capitalized. If the person who starts the local pizza shop has really killer habits and they execute really well, then they may capitalize on more of the potential energy and they may actually end up with a better outcome. Now of course, what we really want is we want both of those, right? We want to be able to make great decisions and to have great habits.

I think if you can put those two together, then you end up with much greater odds of getting remarkable results. The way that I think about those is working in concert and the summary that I would have is your effort, the hard work you put in, your habits, your effort sets your floor. Hard work will determine what the floor is for you. You can always work yourself to a certain level, but your strategy sets your ceiling. If you don't make good choices and you don't make wise decisions, then you cap the upside for yourself.

Ideally, you're making choices that have unbounded upside, or a lot of potential to them that are like, they're ripe with potential energy and you're executing with great habits to make sure that you're making the most of those opportunities.

[0:06:13.9] MB: I love the example of decision-making, creating the potential, or the available outcomes, in some sense creating the ceiling and then the habits allowing you to capture either some, or all or none depending on really the quality of the habits that you choose.

[0:06:30.8] JC: Right. You need both. It's like, if you stop working, having great strategy is important, very important, because it sets that upside, sets that ceiling. If you stop working, or you skip your habits for a month or two or whatever, then no matter how much potential energy is there, it goes to zero. You really do need both. Atomic Habits, hopefully is the manual or one manual field, guide one way for thinking about how to capitalize on your actions and building better habits. Then now I'm exploring more the decision-making and strategy side of things.

[0:07:04.5] MB: It's interesting, because my perspective is probably the opposite in a sense that I've spent a tremendous amount of time on the decision-making side. Probably, if I really take an honest assessment to some degree, almost to the detriment of the habit side in the sense if I focus way too much, maybe time and energy on making sure the strategy is perfect, making sure there's as high a ceiling as possible. I've almost in the last year or two really had to say, “Okay, I need –” Actually, I would say 98% of people's problem is they have not enough contemplative time, strategic thinking time. I needed to cut down and be like, I need more execution time, because I'm doing too much strategizing.

[0:07:40.1] JC: What’s tough about it is that we often discuss strategy as being something that is predetermined, that's planned ahead of time. We're going to sit down, we're going to think about this for a day or week, or month, or whatever it is and we're going to come up with our strategy, our plan. Then we're going to go spend the next year and execute on it. In reality, one, the world is dynamic, it’s evolving. Whenever you make a plan for now is not necessarily what things would be like in a month or a year, or two years or whatever. Two, the world is uncertain, which means that it's not possible, it's physically impossible for someone to map all of the potential interactions, outcomes, etc., ahead of time. Nobody can think through all the different variables before they begin.

In a lot of ways, I think it's more useful to consider strategy as something that emerges over time, rather than something that's premeditated beforehand. Now, that doesn't mean that that premeditation, or that planning ahead of time isn't necessary or isn't useful, I do think it's really good to start things with a solid plan and you can put yourself in a much better position by doing that. It's more the idea of yes, you want to do that and it remains like this open set as you continue to work. It's going to continue to evolve and grow as you go through things. There's not a thinking time and a working time and they're completely separate.

As you start to try things, the other thing that I think is useful about looking at it this way is that because the world is uncertain and you need to be trying things, there's a certain wisdom that comes from experimentation. Trial and error is how most humans throughout most of human history have discovered things. Nobody really has the answers to start. We stumble into them.

Once you realize that, you realize that yes, I do want to have a good plan to start, but also the way to get to the best plan is to iterate a lot, is to try a bunch of experiments, to expose myself to some new ideas, to try to execute on this plan that I've already laid out and then get some feedback to see if that's effective or not. It's really all of those inputs, that additional information that you get from trying things, from executing on things that allows the ideal strategy to emerge over time.

Once you start to look at it that way, you start to realize, “Oh, actually I needed to think through this and be thoughtful about it. But one of the first things I need to do is get started, so I can start getting some feedback and iterate.” In that way, I see habits and decisions, or action and strategy as being mutually reinforcing. They're not totally separate phases. One of them feeds on the other.

[0:10:19.0] MB: Yeah. I totally agree about them being mutually reinforcing. In some senses, that perspective really reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about strategy, which is that strategy is not about seeing 10 moves ahead, it's about having 10 times the amount of potential tools, or options, or mental models to handle whatever comes next.

[0:10:39.8] JC: Yeah. Yeah. Well actually, I would say one of those tools is that I like the mental model of you can call it different things, but second order thinking. Most people make a choice and they think what's going to happen because of that choice. But then you want to go to the second, or the third, the fourth order. What happens because of that and then what happens because of that? It's like a chess player thinking through five or six moves.

That is just one of those tools. It's almost like your description of strategies not thinking ahead, it's having this toolbox. Well, thinking ahead is just one of the tools in the toolbox. You need to do that, but then you also need to have six, or eight, or, 10, or 12 other things that are also powerful and useful.

I like mental models like inversion, thinking about the opposite, or margin of safety, always making sure you have a buffer for the unknown. If you have a toolbox filled with those tools, then yeah, sometimes thinking ahead will get you what you want, but you also need other things, so that when uncertainty or unexpected things happen, you can adapt.

[0:11:36.1] MB: Taking a small step back, just for people who may not know what mental models are, how do you think about mental models and the importance of integrating those into your strategy and decision-making?

[0:11:48.7] JC: Yeah. It's interesting. Our sphere of the Internet or whatever has been talking about mental models for a while now. They've taken on this air as if they're something new, or different, or whatever. Honestly, the more I think about them, the more I just consider, it's like an idea or a concept. Like all of education, literally your entire life is you've been going through school, or learning different things. Each new idea or concept that comes to you is the mental model of some sort. It's just a way of viewing the world, a way of looking at the world. It's a way of explaining things, explaining certain phenomena.

Each mental model, it has limitations, like it only extends to a certain sphere, but it also has sort applications. Broadly speaking, you want to hold the ideas in your head that one, are the closest to truth that are closest to how the world actually works. Two, that they have broad applicability, so they can be used in a wide range of circumstances, not very narrow. Then maybe the third part is that whatever possible are predictive and not just explanatory.

There are a lot of things that are explanatory in life. People come up with rationalizations, or stories, or reasons. Some of them are scientifically grounded, or sound really good, but when you break them down a little bit more, you realize, “Oh, this is actually just a way of explaining what has already happened. It doesn't really help me predict what to do next.” It's not very much of a theory for the future.

I think the best mental models fill all three of those categories. They're very close to the truth, they're widely applicable and they're predictive and not just explanatory. If you have that, if you have those three qualities, that idea or concept, it becomes like a theory for how to approach the future. I was watching a great interview with Clayton Christensen, the HBS professor a couple weeks ago and he said something interesting, which is if you have data and people like to make database decisions, and data is great, but it only applies to the past. It only applies to what has already been measured, that's why we have the data.

If you want to make any decision going into the future, you can't only have data, you also need a theory to guide your actions and behavior. This is something that all of us, we just experience this in life, because this is what it's like to live, this is what it's like to go through the world and have a life, which is that you are constantly forced to spend the next moment. Sometimes, people will talk about time and money and they're like, “Oh, you can make more money, but you can't make more time.”

That is true, but I think the quality about time that is most unique is that you are forced to spend it. You don't get to decide. The next moment has to be lived no matter what. Because we are constantly on this path where going into the future, constantly spending the next moment, it's really important to have good theories for how to spend that moment. You don't just need data. You need a good approach for what to do in the next moment, even though you don't know what it's going to bring. I think that mental models that have those three qualities of truth, applicability and predictiveness, allow you to have a good theory for going through life and figuring out how to spend the next moment.

[0:15:06.8] MB: Those are great criterion for evaluating quality mental models. You're totally right. Your point at the very beginning of this conversation is this idea that mental models can seem esoteric and confusing. Really, it's just concepts, or theories, or ideas that in some way try to explain reality. Even that sounds too academic, too confusing, it's not as confusing as it sounds, but it's hard to explain in a way that doesn't confuse people and I thought you did a really good job of doing that.

[0:15:33.9] JC: Yeah. Literally, every little fact that you know about the world, that's in some way is just an explanation of it. There's no way to get to a fully coherent, full resolution version of reality. The only thing that is that is actual reality. Everything has to be explained, or simplified to at least some degree. When I described a flower to you and the color of it, I'm not describing the location of every atom and the interactions between all the cells. Something as simplified.

All of these mental models are just – they're simplifications of the world. Why do plants grow? Oh, well. We have a mental model called photosynthesis and that explains why plants grow and that's one idea that you can carry around that explains how the world works. Then why do animals look the way we do? Oh, we have another mental model. It's called evolution. We can explain that and that gives you another little lens to look at the world.

In a lot of ways, I view these concepts regardless of what discipline they come from. They're like a set of glasses. It's like a different lens and you can just, “Okay. Sometimes I'm going to put on this lens and that lets me see the world through the color yellow and then this one lets me see the world through the color red and so on.” By switching out the lenses, or by having more sets of glasses, you can sometimes see things that you would otherwise miss.

Mental models give you the more concepts. The more ideas you have that are close to truth and widely applicable, the more clearly you can see the world, because you have all these different lenses that you can put on.

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[0:18:33.3] MB: Do you have any habits around mental models, whether it's learning, organizing, applying them, etc., that you found to be really helpful?

[0:18:42.6] JC: I do have a couple, but the last part of your question I think is important to get to, which is organizing and applying them. This is again, something that I feel the mental model’s area of the Internet that we hang out and talks about like, “Oh, making checklists, or coming up with a latticework of models and so on.” I'm not totally criticizing that. It can be useful. I don't think that that's how people actually think in practice.

I don't believe that's how the brain actually works. What I mean is you're constantly making decisions throughout the day and your brain is doing this fluently, implicitly, automatically. Just it's very rapid. You're not sitting down and thinking each time you have to make a choice, “Oh, let me go through this checklist of 10 things, or 20 things, or whatever these concepts and mental models are.” We don't actually make choices like that. You're in the middle of a meeting debating with your co-workers and then something gets decided, but nobody paused the meeting to go through this checklist of 20 things.

I think actually, the way to really apply mental models – again, it's very similar to what basic education is, like addition and subtraction are mental models, but you don't sit and go through a checklist of mathematical models to determine when to apply addition and when to apply subtraction. Once you've learned the idea, you just use it automatically whenever it's relevant. I think that is the best way to think about how to use mental models in practical fashion. What you're looking to do is to find the best, biggest, most applicable and useful ideas that the world has to offer and then you're looking to learn them so deeply and so clearly that you can use them automatically whenever you need, just like addition and subtraction.

I don't think there needs to be a formal process for applying them. I think it's just literally, you need to know it front to back, learn it deeply and then it becomes part of your worldview. The best way to apply them is to know them so well that they just influence the way that you look at world.

Now that doesn't mean that maybe there are times when it would be useful to have a checklist. Maybe you want to have a running list of the top 30 mental models that you use. When you make really big choices, like maybe once a year, we're thinking about buying a new business, or we're thinking about going to a different school, or moving to a new neighborhood or whatever, some big life choice, then sure, maybe you should run through those and that would be the useful thing to do.

Generally speaking for most of daily life, I think it's just know it really deeply. That said, that means the one thing that's left to do is to find and integrate really great mental models. My main habit around it is just to read a ton. I guess, I should say there are two; it’s inputs and it's finding and it's filtering, so reading a ton, exposing myself to a lot of ideas, curating my Twitter feed, watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts, just a lot of information inputs. As much as possible, you try to make those high quality.

Then once all that information is coming in, then there needs to be some period of reflection review, some period of filtering. The summarized version might be broad funnel type filter. We're trying to get exposure to a lot of ideas and then we're trying to narrow down to the very best ones. For me, I have an additional advantage, which is my job is to write about things and that's a great filter. I'm only going to write about a topic if I find it really interesting, or really useful. The act of taking notes on it, turning it into an article, maybe using it as a book chapter, there's a lot of filtering going on in that process where I'm trying to get to the highest signal and the lowest amount of noise.

You could of course do that in a journal, or whatever your own process is, even if you're not a writer or an author, but that's the main thing that helps me narrow down once I had that broad funnel.

[0:22:32.4] MB: Yeah, I completely agree about both of those key ideas around mental models. I mean, my own experience has definitely been the more you can study and ultimately, subconsciously internalize those models into essentially, Kahneman's System 1, the more you just start to naturally apply them in the situations that they come up.

The second thing that you touched on just a second ago, this idea of reflection and review, to me that's a key piece of if you find models that you think are really important, reviewing them using whether it's a forgetting curve methodology, or whatever, some spaced repetition, which essentially is another mental model. As a side note, those are some really effective ways to start to almost seep those ideas into your subconscious, so that you're naturally applying them and not having to go back and reference a decision-making checklist when you're in real-time.

[0:23:22.6] JC: Right. That's a good distinction. It's repetition, writing about it, whatever it is. There needs to be some revisiting of the ideas, particularly the very best ones. Because once you've found a really great mental model, you want to be able to use it a lot. You want that idea to become part of your worldview, part of your life style. I think we need to make contact with ideas repeatedly for us to really internalize them.

Yeah, space repetition, or writing or whatever, those are just different ways of doing that. Having conversations with friends, a discussion group, a book club, whatever it is that's surfacing the idea consistently, any of that will definitely help.

[0:23:56.7] MB: Yeah. I totally agree with the broader idea that it's really about deeply internalizing these models whatever methodologies you use, so that they naturally become part of your subconscious decision-making and thinking process, as opposed to trying to consciously apply them in any given situation.

[0:24:13.8] JC: Right.

[0:24:14.8] MB: I want to change gears a little bit and come to another topic that you talk a lot about that I hear constantly from whether it's friends, podcast listeners, family members, etc. This is the idea of not feeling like you're motivated, especially we're in some rather unique times these days and it's easy to not have motivation to do something, or to implement good habits or whatever. How do you think about the puzzle of motivation and why people struggle and wait around until they feel like doing something?

[0:24:45.1] JC: Well, so there's a little bit of a challenge, which is and anybody knows this as soon as I explain it, right? Motivation rises and falls, so we've all had that experience. Sometimes we feel motivated, sometimes we don't. What that means is motivation is a fluctuating resource. Whenever we discuss habits or behaviors, we are again by definition, this is obvious once you've stated, we're talking about a reliable behavior, something that is fairly stable, you're able to do consistently again and again.

Well, if you're trying to build something reliable, something stable, then you don't want it to rely on something that is fluctuating, right? Those two things don't match up, or they don't align well. The more that your habits rely on motivation, the more that you become beholden to how you feel in any particular moment, rather than to the stability and reliability that you're hoping to build.

For that reason, I think that it's often more effective to focus on some other aspects of habit building than motivation. I feel it's better to not make that the bottleneck. A couple different strategies that you can use; one is what I call environment design and I talk about this a lot in Atomic Habits, this idea of trying to optimize the environment to make the good habit the path of least resistance. That means whatever the queue is, or the signal is that gets your habit started, you want that to be obvious and available and visible, whatever the action is itself, you want that to be as easy as possible, as simple as possible to do.

As an example, I was talking to another interview about they were asking me about how to build a reading habit. I started to look around and I realized, actually – Right now next, I have five or six books that are sitting next to me on my desk. I also have books sprinkled around my home, so there's some in the living room, there's a couple by my bed. They're prevalent in the physical environment. If you open up my phone, the very first app that I see is Audible and then I also have Pocket on there, so which allows you to save articles and read them for later.

Now in the digital environment, reading is pretty obvious. Then finally, I spend most of my time when I'm on the computer in the web browser. Usually, I have anywhere between 10 and 20 tabs that are open at any given time. About three or four of those are related to business, Gmail, Asana, whatever, other stuff like that. The majority of them, like 10 or so, are usually articles that I either am in the middle of reading, or I want to get to read soon.

What I started to realize is if you look at that, my digital environment, my phone, my desktop and my physical environment, my desk, might be next to my bed and living room, etc., books are very prevalent in all of those spaces. it becomes very easy if I get – It's almost like I make it easy to, for lack of a better term, to procrastinate productively. If I get distracted, ah, I just pick this book up and read a page. Or if I don't feel like looking at this list of e-mails anymore, then I'll just click on a different tab and oh, that's an article that I want to write. You make it easy for your attention to slide into the things that you want to do.

That's the first strategy for rather than relying on motivation, shape the environment so that the good habits, the path with least resistance. Or another way that I like to phrase it is if you want a habit to be a big part of your life, make it a big part of your environment. That's the first strategy.

The second strategy is a lot of people feel like what they need is motivation, but what they really need is clarity. What I mean is that we wake up and we think, “Oh, I hope today will be the day I feel motivated to write, or I hope I feel motivated to go to the gym today, or whatever it is.” If you look at people who actually stick the habits consistently, or have had behaviors for quite a while, they don't wake up feeling like that. It's more like, “Oh, going to the gym is just what happens on Mondays at 5 p.m., or I write every weekday at 9:30 a.m. in my office. It's just what I do.” They have extreme clarity around when and where the behavior lives in their life.

There are a variety of strategies you can use to do this. One of the ones that I discuss in Atomic Habits is what's called an implementation intention. There are well over a hundred studies on implementation intentions, but the core idea is the same, which is you basically fill out a sentence that says, “I will perform this action in this place at this time.” It's very specific. They actually write that sentence out.

There was one study, again, I'm pretty sure I mentioned in the book where they were trying to get people to exercise more frequently. The one sentence that they had this group fill out was I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day, at this time, in this place. Everybody had to fill out that sentence. Anybody in the cohort that filled out that sentence, about nine out of 10 of them worked out. Whereas in the control group, it was like three out of 10. It’s two to three acts more likely that they were going to actually follow through just by filling out that sentence.

There have been a bunch of studies that have shown that same thing for your odds of going to the polls and voting for your odds of getting a flu shot, or showing up for a colonoscopy appointment for your odds of sticking to recycling habits, or even stuff like quitting smoking, all kinds of behaviors. The more clear the plan is, the more likely you are to stick with it and not become a victim of whether you feel motivated or not that particular day.

I tend to view of those actions as building a system. It's a system of behaviors that move you in a direction toward your desired outcome. I talk about that a lot in the book as well, like focusing on systems rather than goals, rather than this goal of I want to work out for 45 minutes a day and I just need to get amped up and motivated and hyped and then I'll follow through on it. You say, instead of that, instead of relying on motivation, I'm going to focus on building a system that makes that habit more likely. I'm going to design an environment that is conducive to it. I'm going to come up with a clear plan for when and where I'm going to execute on that. By doing that and a variety of other strategies that I discussed in the book, you can have 10 or 15 things all nudging you in the right direction. It becomes much easier to make a good habit, likely to make a good habit something that you follow through on consistently when it is the path of least resistance. That's how I think about that difference between motivation and habit.

[0:31:18.7] MB: I really like the point about the mismatch between the unpredictability of motivation and relying on that is almost like building your life and your habits on quicksand, if that's what you're using as the fuel for your habits.

[0:31:32.4] JC: Right. Yeah. BJ Fogg, who’s a professor at Stanford writes about habits as well. He’s got a lot of great stuff. I think he has a talk where he talks about concept he calls motivation waves and these crystal of thoughts, it's like, you could think about motivation it's this wave that rises and falls throughout the day. Yeah, you don't want to rely on that. You want to design a system that serves you instead.

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[0:33:23.4] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that idea of designing systems and focusing on systems, rather than goals.

[0:33:29.4] JC: Well, the thought of it in this terminology systems of goals, something I first read about from Scott Adams and it got me thinking and interested in this. We've been talking about this. Humans have been talking about this since the dawn of time, it seems like, this process over outcome, system over goal, focus on showing up each day, rather than waiting for the result.

There's a lot of truth to it, because particularly with habits and to put a little finer point on what I mean, your goal is your desired outcome; losing 30 pounds, making more money, getting a raise, reducing stress, whatever it is. Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. If there is ever a gap between your system and your goal, if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, the daily habits will always win. In fact, you could almost say your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results.

Maybe even a little more accurate, like whatever habits you've been following for the last six months are perfectly designed to deliver your current results, right? It's like, whatever system you've been running recently, where you're at right now is just a natural byproduct of that. I think this is maybe more true than we even realize in most areas of life. In most areas, your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits, or your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your eating and training habits, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits, even something as simple as the amount of clutter on your desk or in your garage or whatever, is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.

We also badly want the results to change. We also badly want more money, or to look sexier, or to have less stress, or we want different outcomes, but the outcomes aren't usually the problem. If you fix the inputs, the outputs will fix themselves. This idea of focusing on systems rather than goals, on focusing on your daily habits, rather than your desired outcome is really about that. It's about putting your attention toward the trajectory that you're on, rather than on your current position. We all think a lot about current position. What is the number in the bank account? What is the number on the scale?

My argument is and another phrase I'd like to use is try to get 1% better every day. The idea of getting 1% better each day is all about trajectory, not position. It helps you realize that if you can build a system that has you going up into the right, that has you moving in this positive direction, even if it's just 1% a day, then you can end up in a really remarkable fruitful place at the end of a year, or two years, or five years, or whatever. Systems over goals is much more about focusing on that trajectory rather than that position.

[0:36:20.7] MB: One of my favorite ideas that I've heard you talk about around, this is this notion that an outcome is just a point on a spectrum of reps. To me, that was such a fascinating idea. Can you explain that a little bit more and talk about how that ties into this whole concept?

[0:36:34.9] JC: Yeah. Well, first of all and this is another thing with systems and goals, that achieving a goal really only changes your life for the moment. Let's say you set a goal to have a clean room. You look at your bedroom, it's all cluttered up or whatever. Well, if you go in there and work for an hour or two, you might have a clean room for now, but if you don't change the sloppy, messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place, they ensure around two or three weeks later and you've got a messy room again. Again, it's fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Change the habits and the outcomes come as a natural byproduct of that.

That's what this question that you're asking, this idea, this concept that every outcome is just a point on a spectrum of repetitions, that's what that's getting at. If you build a habit of cleanliness, of tidying up, of organizing a room each night, then the more reps that you put in, the more that you organize your room for five minutes each night, you get five days in and 20 days in and 50 days in and then you get to the 90th, or the 100th, or the 200th day or whatever and that outcome, that point on the spectrum of a completely pristine room, it's just a natural byproduct of all those reps.

The place that I first really learned this or conceptualized this was with weight training. When I was in the gym, I had all these goals that I wanted to hit for how much I squat, or how much I bench-pressed or whatever. One day, I just twisted around a little bit and thought about, “All right, what would it take to squat that amount of weight? How many reps would I have have to have done previously in order to be able to do that now?” You could probably do that with whoever you're looking at in the gym that's working out around you. You’re like, “Oh, man. I wish I was as strong as that guy, or as strong as that girl.” Just think back, how many reps do you think they've done in their personal history?

It's like, well maybe squatting 200 pounds is something that takes a 1,000 reps in your personal history. Then once you get to 5,000 reps, then maybe you've got the ability to squat 300 pounds, then maybe you get to 50,000 reps and you got the ability to squat 500 pounds, or whatever it is. You're moving along this spectrum of reps. The more that you've put that work in, the more that you build up that capacity, you start crossing these little points on the spectrum that most people refer to as goals or milestones, but you could look at it as just a natural byproduct of putting the reps in.

If you buy into that idea, if you buy into that philosophy, then the very next question you think, or the very next thing you get to is, “Well, I need to start putting my reps in as soon as possible.” Maybe in my case for writing, I was like, well, I'd love to have a 100,000 e-mail subscribers. All right, how many reps does that require? Do I have to write 50 articles? Do I have to write 200 articles? You need to start putting your reps in.

The other reason I like that is not just because it helps you be patient, but also because it gives you a bias toward action. You're simultaneously feeling, “I need to go put my work in, because I got to get through these reps if I want to get to that outcome. And I need to be patient, because all of those outcomes are a natural byproduct of putting in a certain amount of work.”

[0:39:44.7] MB: Yeah. When I originally encountered that concept in your workout, it really blew my mind. I thought it's such a powerful framework. Even just what you said, that notion that it simultaneously creates a bias for action, but then also almost frees you from the need to immediately hit that goal and it's just like, hey, if I put in the work, if I the reps, keep doing it, that goal will become a byproduct of having the right architecture and execution of habits.

[0:40:11.0] JC: I remember, there’s this weightlifting coach. His name is Dan John. He's a strength coach and does a variety of different things in that sphere. He has this one concept that stuck with me, which is you're not good enough to be disappointed. It's related to this. All these beginners whenever we're starting out and trying something new, you do it for a week, or two, or whatever and you're not seeing the results, you get disappointed. His point is, “Listen, you're not good enough to be disappointed. You don't get to be disappointed yet. You haven't put in enough reps to be disappointed with the outcome.”

The thing that you're upset about not having yet, that doesn't happen until you're two years into this. You don't get to be disappointed yet. I like that idea. I like the concept of the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. The more that you can see that, those outcomes is that point on that spectrum more repetitions, the more you can check your emotion for a little while and get back to putting in the reps.

[0:41:10.5] MB: This comes back and makes me think of something you touched on a minute ago with the idea of implementation intentions and the broader concept of actually creating space and creating time for your goals in your calendar, right? It's easy to have these goals, these aspirations, things you want to do. Until you do the reverse engineering of mapping that into what do I want to achieve? Okay, what are the reps actually look like on a day to day basis? You have to make sure that those end up being scheduled at some point in your day for them to actually happen.

[0:41:41.5] JC: Yeah. You want to have a time and a space for your behaviors to live. It's similar to what I mentioned a few moments ago, this idea of a lot of people wake up and feel like, “Oh, I hope I feel motivated to do it.” Well it's like, no. Give it a space to live. Give it some sacred space that belongs to that behavior and that'll help increase the odds that it happens. It doesn't make it perfect, but there's no way to perfectly know if you're going to be able to stick to a habit every day or not. They're just, sometimes things come up, sometimes emergencies happen or whatever.

What you're trying to do is make as many moves as possible that put the odds in your favor. We're playing with probabilities, not with certainties. Nothing is certain about the future, but we can try to design a system where good behavior is more likely. That's one of the core messages of Atomic Habits is – and I think I say this in the conclusion, which is the holy grail of behavior change is not a single 1% improvement. It's a 1,000 of them. You're trying to take all these little strategies, all these to borrow one of your phrases from earlier, all these tools in your toolbox, and use them to design this system, design an environment that puts the odds in your favor. Those are just a couple ways to do that.

[0:42:50.0] MB: Yeah. The idea of stacking all of these strategies and combining together is such an important understanding and comes to another concept that I thought was just a great perspective on any habit, which is the notion of never missing twice. Tell me a little bit about that.

[0:43:05.0] JC: There are two explanations here. Let me explain a little bit by way of a story. One of the things that you really want and this is in the book, I refer to this as the fourth law of behavior change, this idea that you want to make it satisfying. You want your behaviors to be rewarding, enjoyable, pleasurable. They need to have some positive emotion associated with them, because that gives your brain a signal of, “Oh, hey. I should do this again in the future. That felt good.”

One of the challenges with good habits is that they're often – all the rewards, all that rewarding thing, all that pleasure and emotion and positive emotion is all delayed a lot of the time. We all have felt this. You sit down and you start writing your book for an hour. You've worked really hard and the manuscript is still a mess, it feels like you're still light years away from having it finished. Or you go to the gym and you work out and you get done and your body looks exactly the same. If anything, you feel sore, the scale hasn't changed. It's like, was that even worth it? It doesn't feel like it.

All the returns are delayed. What you need is something in the moment to make you feel like that was worth it, to make you feel like this is a positive experience. My parents have a good example, they like to swim. Whenever they get out of the water, their body looks exactly the same as when they got in, right? Same story as what I'm just saying. There's no evidence that that workout was worth it.

My dad has this little pocket calendar and he pulls it out and he puts an X on that day when they swim. This is just commonly called a habit tracker, or this form of tracking your habit in the moment and whenever you do it, whenever you write one sentence, or read one page, or do one push up, you put an X on that day and it's a visual signal that you showed up and that you're making progress. It's a small thing, but doing it each time like that, it helps give you a signal that you're moving forward and it adds a little bit of pleasure, a little bit of enjoyment to the process. Those habit streaks, there are a bunch of apps that help you do it. You can do with any calendar. I have a journal, a habit journal that I designed and created and it's got habit tracker templates in the back.

There are a bunch of ways to do it, but the point is as that streak builds up, it becomes motivating, it becomes enjoyable and you're – you have a reason to keep showing up and going to the pool or doing whatever, even though you're waiting for those long-term rewards to show up still.

Having, the process of having a streak is very motivating. As it builds, it feels great. At some point, every streak ends and your kids get sick, or you have to travel for work, or whatever it is, and the process of breaking a streak is very demotivating. It feels like you lost your progress. It feels like, “Oh, I got to start from scratch all over again.” As you're building a streak, the idea that I like to keep in mind is don't break the chain. It doesn't matter how good or how bad it felt that day, just don't break the chain. Just keep building that up.

Once the streak breaks, once you slip up or something, the mantra that I like to pair with that is never miss twice. Never missed twice, I think it's particularly useful for – it's useful for a lot of habits. Diets in particular, we seem to act this way about. You'd stick to a diet for seven or eight days and then on the ninth day, you binge eat a pizza or something and you're like, “Uh, why bother? I'll just go back to this old way of eating. I knew I wasn't going to be able to stick with that. Blah, blah, blah.”

Never miss twice tells you, “Okay. I wish I hadn't binge eat the pizza.” But never miss twice, so we make sure the next meal is a healthy one. “Or, I wish I hadn't missed my journaling habit last Friday, but never miss twice, let me make sure the next day I get right back into it.” Never miss twice as a way to cut the problem off at the source. Again, I think we all implicitly know this from our experience that it's almost never the first mistake that ruins you, it's the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. It's letting messing up, or missing a habit become a new habit. It's letting that slip-up become a new habit, that's the real problem.

Never miss twice helps you stop that and start a new streak as quickly as possible. A little bit of a long-winded explanation, but the point is habit should be as enjoyable as possible in the moment. Building a habit streak, or using a habit tracker helps you do that. Then never miss twice is a good buffer against the uncertainty of life and the fact that streaks break from time to time and it gets you refocused on what matters, which is starting a new streak as quickly as possible.

[0:47:35.0] MB: I think that concept paired with what we talked about a minute ago, this idea of as I would call it probability stacking. Basically, just getting as many tools as you possibly can, as many levers as you possibly can, pushing you towards the behavior, the habits that you want to create, both of those and viewing habits as a probabilistic thing, right? It's not necessarily a black or white thing. It's a probability. Both of those to me really help create a sense of almost self-compassion that it's okay sometimes to mess up and you're not going to be perfect. In many ways, the expectation of perfection can sabotage your trajectory and set you back in some ways.

[0:48:12.3] JC: I think that's definitely true. You don't need to be perfect. You do need to be quick to recover. That's what never miss twice and designing a system and all this probabilistic ideas, that's what that's getting at is we're trying to increase the odds that you show up and perform well day in and day out. Occasionally, life is going to throw something at you that prevents that. As much as possible, you want to be quick to recover, because the people who interrupt the compounding of their habits, the improvement of their habits, the people who interrupt that less are the ones who end up gaining.

It's like this, so when you get this yo-yo effect where you're like, “Oh, I did that habit for three months and then I had four months off. Then now I'm feeling like, oh, I really need to get back on track,” and just the pendulum swings back and forth, the yo-yo goes up and down from on and off. Never miss twice is trying to get over that and to build a lifestyle of consistency with just occasional blips where you miss. Recovering quickly is the name of the game in that sense.

[0:49:10.7] MB: I love that phrase, lifestyle of consistency. A lot of the things we've talked about today have really all centered around that concept of how do you consistently execute on the habits that are important to achieving your goals.

[0:49:23.0] JC: Right.

[0:49:24.0] MB: I'm curious, coming back to what we're talking about a minute ago, how do you think about and I don't know if you'll have an answer for this or not, but how do you think about figuring out what the right reps are? Some things, it's obvious. Weightlifting, maybe reading, etc., but if you're talking about a complex business goal or something that's not – it's not as easily discernible, are there any tools, or strategies that you found to be really effective to determine which reps, or which habits are going to be the most impactful, or have the highest probability of helping you be successful?

[0:49:56.1] JC: Yeah, that's a great question, because it's really getting to strategy about how do you know where to focus? There are a couple different ways to answer this. One way to answer it is people, you can call it different things, reverse engineering, imitation, best practices, blah, blah, blah. You look at people who've achieved something that is either similar to what you've done or adjacent to what you're trying to achieve and then you see what bits and pieces you can learn from their strategy, or imitate from their strategy and maybe that'll help you. That will maybe give you a starting place.

There are criticisms of that approach, which is like the Elon Musk first principle thinking idea, where you say, okay, just because people have done it that way in the past, doesn't mean you should blindly imitate things. You should think clearly and carefully about what you're actually trying to achieve, distill it down to the absolute fundamental level, first principles, where you say, what do we know for sure? Then build back up from there. Those are two common approaches.

I almost think and I think those are good places to start if you're trying to figure out what do I do first, or where do I begin at all? I think, now my preferred answer to this is that it's much easier to figure out if something is working after you've tried it, than it is to predict if it will work before it's tried. It's much easier to see when you're starting to make progress, or when you're winning, so to speak, and double down on that, rather than it is to try to figure it all out ahead of time.

What that means is that you should use a range of experiments to try to figure out what you're doing. You're trying to figure out, how can I run a cheap, quick, thoughtful, but cheap and quick test to see if this strategy is worth pursuing further? You want to do that as much as possible. Then when occasionally, a winning strategy bubbles up, then you want to double down on that. The more that you're winning, the more you want to repeat that. The more that you're losing, the more that you want to experiment more and try to get exposure to new ideas.

There is one caveat to that strategy, which is if you spread yourself too thin, that's risky too. One thing people say is like, don't keep all your eggs in one basket. If you lose that basket, then you lose the whole thing, so you want to diversify. You could also say, don't keep your eggs in too many baskets, because then you have to keep watch and manage each basket. The more that you divide your attention, the more you're doing things halfway. Doing things halfway is actually risky in itself, because you're competing against people who are focused and who are putting great energy into each of those baskets. It's very hard to win, or to stand out when you're dividing your attention in all this way.

I think rather the answer is maybe you use first principles and reverse engineering, or imitation, or whatever you want to call it for your 80% plan, this is where I'm focus and this is what I'm going to spend the majority of my time on. We're going to attack this strategy. Then you run all these experiments with the other 20% of your time and resources and energy. Occasionally, when one of those baskets shows something fruitful, you start to integrate it into your 80% time and double down on it more.

There is this balance that's constantly going on which is you got to stay focused if you want to get great results. If you're competing against other people, it's very hard to win if you spread yourself too thin. Yet, nobody knows what's going to work ahead of time. Nobody can predict the future, so you need to have at least some exposure to experiments, so that you can find new ideas and then integrate those when they seem to take off.

[0:53:24.6] MB: That's a great perspective and you shared a number of really helpful mental models to address that and figure out how to solve that challenge. I'm curious, for somebody who's been listening to this who wants to start to take action and implement something that we've talked about today, what would one piece of homework or action step be that you would give them to start concretely taking action to build better habits?

[0:53:47.8] JC: Usually, I think the best place to start is with what I call the two-minute rule. Again, I'm just trying to keep this really simple, which should the next action be? The two-minute rule says, take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. Read 30 books a year, becomes read one page. Or do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat.

Sometimes people resist that a little bit. They're like, “Okay. I get what you're saying, but I also know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out. I know I actually want to do the workout. If this is some mental trick or something, why would I fall for it basically?” I get where people are coming from, but there's a story that I tell in the book of this guy named Mitch. He ended up losing over a 100 pounds. He had this rule where for the first six weeks that he went to the gym, he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. He get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home.

It sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds silly. You're like, obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants. What you realize if you step back is he was mastering the art of showing up, knowing I think this is a deeper truth about habits that people often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved, right? It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up into anything more.

If you don't make it the standard, if you don't master the art of showing up, there's no raw material to work with. There's nothing to optimize. It's just a theory. I think the best place to start is to use the two-minute rule to get over that hump, to say, “All right, look. I'm going to try to master the art of showing up. I'm going to integrate this new habit, even if it's very small into my life. Then once it becomes a part of my new normal, once it becomes a lifestyle, then I've got plenty of options for scaling and proving or expanding it from there.” In that way, I would say the two-minute rule is a great place to start.

[0:55:41.5] MB: Great suggestion and I love the story of Mitch. It's such a powerful way to really break down the difference between showing up for the habit and then ultimately, building on the habit. If you don't master showing up, then there may be no habit to build on at all.

[0:55:54.3] JC: Right.

[0:55:54.9] MB: James, where can listeners find you and the book and all of your work online?

[0:56:00.0] JC: Yeah. Well, if you want to check out Atomic Habits directly, you can just go to atomichabits.com. Obviously, we didn't have time to get into most of it, so it breaks down a lot of the stuff that we discussed and expands on that. If you're curious just about more of my work, or want to read more of my writing, you can go to jamesclear.com. You can also find the book there, of course. Probably the one thing I'm known for outside of Atomic Habits would be my weekly newsletter. That's called 3-2-1 and every Thursday, I send out three short ideas from me, two quotes from other people and then one question to think about during the week. If you're interested, feel free to poke around, check out some of the articles, or sign up for the newsletter and you can do all that at jamesclear.com.

[0:56:41.5] MB: Well, James. Thank you so much for coming back on the show; another fascinating conversation, so many great lessons and I personally really learned a tremendous amount from our discussion.

[0:56:50.4] JC: Wonderful. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

[0:56:52.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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