Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
You've written one of the best-selling books in history about habits.

**James Clear** (0:04)
Because people always need more practical help with implementing their habits. And I have different strategies and different tools to help us stick, including one principle that is probably the single most important for building habits. But so much of it is about mastering the art of getting started.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:20)
Let's get started then. James Clear is one of the world's leading habit experts.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
Is educating millions to build lasting habits, master goal setting, and ultimately redesign their lives.

**James Clear** (0:31)
There are four different stages that every habit goes through. Cue, Craving, Response and Reward. So first, we want to make it obvious. Easier it is to see or get your attention, the more likely you are to act on it. The second is about the craving. It's all about making it attractive. And the more engaging or exciting it is, the more likely you are to stick with it. The third is to make it easy. The easier a habit is to perform, the more likely it is to happen. And then the fourth and final one is to make it satisfying. And that's about increasing the odds that you do it next time. And there's some tools that we can go through. But one of the big takeaways from the Atomic Habits is it's easier to build a new habit if you stack it on top of the habit you're already doing. So let's say that your current habit is you make a cup of coffee. And the new habit that you want to build is you want to start meditating. So then you could say, all right, after I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds. And you can do it for anything. There's also a framework that I call hats, haircuts and tattoos. The secret to winning, habit shaping and real lesson of getting 1% better every day. And we can talk about all of them.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:25)
But is there any frameworks, any tactics? If you're trying to break a habit.

**James Clear** (1:28)
If you want to break a bad habit, there's some things that you can do.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:32)
James, the book has shaped tens and tens and tens of millions of lives. Is there anything you look back on that you regret?

**James Clear** (1:37)
If I could add something, I would add this. Because you really want to make progress again and again. If you want to get to the top and stay at the top, you need to be able to.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:47)
Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
James, you've written thousands and thousands of things, but one particular thing you wrote called Atomic Habits is one of the best-selling books in history. It is rumored to be potentially in the top 100 books that have sold in history of all time, but also rumored to be potentially the youngest book to make the top 100 books in history. My question is, what has the success of Atomic Habits taught you about the nature of humanity and humans?

**James Clear** (3:06)
We all have habits. We all need habits.
It's an interesting concept because it is both universal, in the sense that we all have them, we all need them, but it's also highly individual. Your habits feel like your habits, not mine. So it's both universal and specific. That's an interesting contrast. I think it leads to one of the reasons why people are so interested in the topic. We all have them, we all need them, we all feel like they're our own, and we want to come up with our little version of them. But the habit also is like an entrance ramp to how you spend your time in other ways, like the habit of pulling out your phone. That habit might only take two seconds to do, but then it might dictate what you do for the next hour. You know, you're answering emails or browsing social media or playing a video game or whatever, and it was really the initial habit of pulling out the phone that shaped what that hour did. So the influence of our habits is enormous. You know, in a lot of ways, your results in life are kind of a lagging measure of the habits that precede them. You know, like your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Even silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is the lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so we all so badly want our outcomes to change. You know, we also badly want our results to change, but the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It's like fix the habits and the results will fix themselves. Change the inputs and the outputs will shift automatically.