James Clear is widely known as the New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits which has sold nearly 20 million copies in five years since publication. In other words â itâs caught fire.
Quotes from his book have broken the internet. Clear said he recently heard from another reader who has inked a tattoo about the book.
âYou do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.â
That would be inked on my left forearm if I only had the courage.
When you have a book that has sold at a faster run-rate than The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, youâve impacted many lives and collected a trove of success stories.
Whatâs the difference between the person who managed to lose 180 lbs doing P90X and the other that wonât make a dietary shift if Armageddon struck? I probed Clear during our interview.
âI think itâs natural to wonder what the difference is, but in reality the only question that really matters is determining the best next choice for that person and what strategies make the most sense for them,â Clear explained.
Whether through his book or newsletter (The 3-2-1 Newsletter) â the goal has always been to give people the tools they need to make the choices they think are best for them. By design, his writing has never been prescriptive. Heâs made his best attempt to lay out how most habits and behaviors work with simple ways to address making progress against them.
One of the foundations of Clearâs work focuses on the deepest layer of behavior change â in order to change your identity.
âThe goal isnât to run a marathon, itâs to become a runner.â
To achieve this level, Clear says that you need to decide who you want to be and to prove it to yourself with small wins.
âBut how do you do that effectively and stay the course?â As I leaned in, I could sense Clear understood I was asking this question to address my own struggles with diet and achieving my target weight goal.
Rather than answering the question for me, he prompted me with a series of questions.
âWhat am I optimizing for? Itâs easy to say youâre optimizing for losing weight, but maybe itâs more than that. Maybe youâre optimizing for living a healthy lifestyle or feeling good each day. Whatever the answer is, itâs probably something personal and worth leaning it to answer that question.
Secondly, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? Once you know what youâre optimizing for, are you on a path to get there? Youâll often find that your current habits and this future you desire are on two different trajectories â and clearly something needs to change.â
The next steps is to prove it to yourself with small wins and Clear prompted me to think about what the habit would look like if it were fun. Society often tells us that being healthy is going to the gym, and he challenged me to list out all of the things that would mean living a healthy lifestyle including activities like hiking and biking â and choosing from those.
Clear has recently launched an app called Atoms to serve as a digital extension of his book.
âWe created Atoms as a companion on the journey towards positive change, distilling the principles of Atomic Habits into a simple and easy-to-use app. After seeing how the book has helped millions of people establish new habits, Iâm incredibly excited by the idea of leveraging technology to help even more people make small, meaningful improvements.â
One of my favorite parts about the app has been the Daily Lessons because they are short nuggets of content that are great reminders. Unlike a book that you read once and put down, these are always in sight and top of mind.
Clear sought out the best app designer in the world, the same team who helped build apps like Slack and Uber. Combined with his expertise on habit formation he hopes to nail two things.
âThere are two questions at the center of the app experience. Can we help people take action? And how can we make this more delightful?â
I questioned how Clear plans to standout between the sea of self-help and meditation apps, ultimately earning the real estate on someoneâs home screen. He knew that if he could deliver on those two promises and combine that with content his readers have valued for years through Atomic Habits and his newsletter â the rest would work itself out.
âIt puts a lot of pressure on me to perform at a high level, but if the ideas are good enough for the book and 3 million newsletter subscribers, maybe theyâll be good for the app. Useful ideas will get people to open the app each following day.â
Click below to watch a preview of our interview:
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