James Clear on The Science of Building Habits That Last | From The Vault

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Finding Mastery is brought to you by our very own Finding Your Best Course. Okay, 2025, obviously it's officially begun. I hope you've set a clear intention for the year, and maybe you haven't, and you're still finding your rhythm. Totally cool. But whatever it is, right now is a great time to invest in yourself. Now, if you really want to set yourself up for success, to live towards your fullest capabilities, one of the best things that you can do is to deeply invest in training your mind. So that's why we designed the program. And to help kickstart your 2025, we're offering a special limited time offer on our flagship psychological training course, where we've pulled together the best practices to meet the unique intersection of high performance and well-being. It's called Finding Your Best, and in it, we take you through 16 essential principles and skills for you to train your mind in the same way that we train world-class athletes and executives so that you can consistently perform towards your unique edge to be your best in any environment. So right now, it's $75 off the Finding Your Best online course. To sign up for the course and receive that discount, just head to findingmastery.com/course and enter the code EPIC 2025 at checkout. This offer is only going to last through January 31st, so be sure to sign up as soon as possible. That's findingmastery.com/course and use the code EPIC 2025 at checkout for $75 off the Finding Your Best online course. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And today we're going to do something special. We are re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from the Finding Mastery vault. One of our earlier conversations with James Clear. So why this episode? Why now? As we near the end of January, it's a great time to check in on the intentions and goals and resolutions that you might have set for 2025 Resolutions are tricky. Research tells us that they usually don't work. And here's the opportunity. While resolutions don't often hold, we do know the science of creating lasting habits. This conversation is about how to make habits stick. Not just for January, but for life. James Clear is one of the world's leading experts on habit formation. He's the best-selling author of Atomic Habits, a book that has transformed the way millions of people think about personal growth and sustainable change. In this conversation, James shares the science of psychology behind building small, meaningful habits that create significant results over time. Whether you're revisiting this conversation or hearing it for the first time, this is a timely opportunity to rethink how you approach your goals and create systems that set you up for success in 2025 and beyond. So with that, let's enjoy this incredible conversation with the insightful James Clear.

James, how are you?

James Clear (3:17)

Hi, great to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

Michael Gervais (3:19)

Yeah, stoked to sit with you and have this conversation. So congrats on making a dent in the science and the psychology of habit formation through your book, Atomic Habits. And I just want to start with, why did you get interested in the behaviorism, the old behaviors of discipline of psychology? Why'd you go there?

James Clear (3:44)

Well, you know, I kind of came in to it two different ways. The first way was as like a practitioner. You know, I played a bunch of sports growing up and then ended up playing baseball through college. And, you know, any college athlete can tell you, like habits are a big part of what you do. You're practicing, you know, different drills, developing your skills, you know, even stuff like in the gym or showing up to practice at the same time every day. Like there's a lot of ritual and routine built in. And, you know, one great thing about working on a sport for, in my case, 17 years, is that you see your skills develop. You see consistency pay off. You see the benefit of building habits each day and like working on that. And I did not have a language at the time for that. Like I was just showing up and doing what my coaches told me and training in the gym and trying to do what I was supposed to do to be a better player. I never would have said like, oh, I'm just trying to get 1% better today. Or, you know, I'm building better habits or anything. I didn't think about it in that way, but I experienced it.

And a couple of years later, after I finished graduate school and started my own business and started working on some of that stuff, I had this document where I would just write down my thoughts on habits. Like nobody was reading it. It was just a word doc, but it got to be like 50 or 60 pages long. It was just kind of James's thoughts on habits. And I was like, I should like I should just at least publish something from this. And so I put it up on jamesclear.com and I decided to build like a little writing habit. I published a new article every Monday and Thursday for the first three years. And it was really that writing habit that gave me the language around how to describe habits. And they kind of developed my expertise. Like I felt, you know, everybody kind of has this imposter syndrome thing that shows up in various ways. And for me early on, I was like, you know, who am I to write about this stuff? And I had a friend who told me, well, the way you become an expert is by writing about it every week. And I kind of internalized that. And I think it's true, you know, like by the time I got three years in, he's right, it turns out there's actually not that many people who have written 150 articles about habits. And so you learn a lot along that way, along the way. And that led to the audience growing and me getting the book deal and ultimately writing Atomic Habits. So it was sort of first it was as a practitioner. And then later it was as a writer and researchers, maybe the wrong word is not like research in an academic way, but research in the sense of like reading broadly, synthesizing ideas and trying to explain them in a straightforward way.