Timestamp:
00:00 Introduction to Atomic Habits
00:19 The Power of Compounding Habits
01:49 James Clear's Personal Story
03:43 The Importance of Environment
04:06 Practical Tips for Redesigning Your Environment
06:43 Conclusion and Call to Action
Ash Roy and James Clear's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
James Clear:
Hi, I'm James Clear from jamesclear.com and you're listening to Ash Roy on Productive Insights.
I like to think about habits through the lens of compounding because on any given day it doesn't feel like much but in the long run it becomes something very powerful.
Ash Roy:
We'll come back to that later but for now here's one life changing insight that James Clear shared with me in our conversation.
James Clear:
That time will magnify whatever you feed it.
If you have good habits, then time becomes your ally, and if you have bad habits, then time becomes your enemy. But it's really about carving out habits that give you that kind of small advantage, that 1 percent improvement each day. Then you just need to let time work for you rather than against you.
Ash Roy:
James has used the very principles he discusses in this video. His book has sold over 15 million copies as at the time of this recording. I've been using and implementing the ideas from this book over the last few years, and it has had a dramatic impact on my life. In my conversation with James, we discussed one particular element that impacts our habits and goal achievement more than most of us would like to admit.
And this one element lives outside of us. We'll come back to that in a moment, so stick around. But it all starts with making tiny changes. and improving one percent every day. The only question is, will these tiny incremental changes help you to improve your life and achieve huge goals over time? Let's find out.
I'm Ash Roy, an ex banker, a CPA, and an MBA, and I love using my skills to help knowledge workers and consultants grow their businesses and to be more productive.
Here's a story that James shares from his own life around how he was very goal oriented, but then realized that goal setting alone wasn't enough.
James Clear:
I was very goal oriented for a long time. You know, I would set goals for the grades that I wanted to get in school or the weight I wanted to lift in the gym or how well I wanted my business to do in the next quarter. I realized that sometimes I would achieve those goals, but a lot of times I would just flop around and fail.
If I set all these goals and I only achieve some of them, clearly setting a goal is not the thing that determines whether or not I make progress. Yeah. And you see that in a lot of areas, you know, like every candidate who applies for a job has a goal of getting the job, but only one of them actually does.
Every Olympian has the goal of winning the gold medal. The winners and losers, so to speak, have the same goals. And if the people at the top of the podium and the people who aren't even on the podium have the same thing that they want, then the goal cannot be the thing that's making the difference.
Ash Roy:
I love the analogy that James uses around planting a seed and nurturing it in the right environment.
James Clear:
The best story that I've found that I like is imagine that you're planting a seed and so you plant the seed and it grows and sprouts out and then it becomes like a small sapling and then it grows into a young tree and then eventually after many years it matures into an adult tree. At no point in that process Were you ever yelling at the tree for only being a seed, or for only being a sapling, or for, you know, being a young tree and not being mature yet?
At each stage, it was perfect where it was. And yet, despite that, despite the fact that you were satisfied with it at each stage, despite the fact that the tree was happy at each moment, it never stopped growing. It never stopped improving, because that's just what a tree does. And so I have tried to look at growth and ambition and improvement through that same lens from my own life that at each stage you can be perfectly happy where you are but you'll continue to improve and drive and be driven for improvement because that's just what humans do.
Ash Roy:
Now I did say earlier on that there was one thing that impacts our habits and our goal achievement more than most of us would like to admit. And that one thing lives outside of us. That's our environment. Creating the right environment has an unexpectedly big impact on goal achievement and ability to stick to habits or break bad ones.
Here's my conversation with James about environment.
James Clear:
One option is to redesign your environment. Essentially your environment is nudging you in the right direction. So let me give you a few examples. This happens often with the habits that we want to curtail or with our bad habits. So, you know, if you want to eat less or stick to a particular diet, don't follow a bunch of food blogs on Instagram because you're constantly being triggered by the environment to eat and be tempted.
If you want to spend less money on electronics or technology gear, don't follow the latest tech review blogs or watch unboxing videos on YouTube or things like that. Same thing, you're being constantly triggered by the environment to do those things. And on a more fundamental level, you know, a lot of people feel like they watch too much television.
But if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the TV. So it's like, what is this room designed to get you to do? And I think the overarching point here is that many of our behaviors and habits While they are non conscious or we do them like more or less automatically, they're often a response to the environment that we're surrounded by.
And so if you're seeing food all the time on Instagram, you feel like eating. If you walk into the living room and the couches and chairs all face the television, you feel like turning on the TV and you can take control of this process by redesigning your environment, both the physical environment and the digital one.
Yes. So, for example, with my phone, my phone currently, if you were to look at it, it has no apps on the home screen. It's just the, uh, phone, text message, and then two reading applications, audible and pocket. And so the idea there is I'm trying to make the cues of a reading habit more obvious. And then all the other social media applications, like Twitter and Instagram, those are on separate screens that I have to swipe over two or three times and press inside to get to them.
And it's not a perfect solution, but it just adds a little bit of friction and removes that cue, the environment, so that my automatic response, and of course you can do the same thing with your physical space, you know, you could redesign your living room so that the TV is behind a wall unit or a cabinet or something with doors so you don't see it as much or turn a chair so that it's not facing the television and so on.
But the point here is that if you live in an environment where the cues of your good habits are obvious and it's a frictionless and easy to do the good behavior. And the cues of your bad habits are hidden or invisible, and there's more friction associated with doing it. You'll find it much easier to slide into good habits than to have the bad ones fade away.
Ash Roy:
And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, which I highly recommend you do, this is the full conversation I had with James. So here's a question for you. What habit can you create that will enable you to improve incrementally and involves a tiny action, an action that you will take every day, and that will allow you to achieve a very significant goal in your life?
Let me know in the comments what that habit is going to be. I read all my comments and within the first 48 hours of this video going live, I promise to answer every single one of them. If you'd like to watch My full conversation with James Clear, check out this video here. I highly recommend watching it.
He's shared some great insights. It's a masterclass around habit creation and goal achievement using habits. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next video.