Most Replayed Moment: The Mid-Year Reset - Atomic Habits Author On How To Get Back On Track

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
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Early on when you said that you're ambitious people, they have lots of aspirations, lots of habits they want to start. I was thinking about myself and thinking, there's probably 30 habits that I would like to acquire. I'd want to be better at writing, I want to be a runner, I want to be better at speaking, I want to be a better friend and be more attentive with my friends and make sure I text them on their birthdays and all of these new habits that I want to pursue. How does one know which one to aim for first? Is there a framework for knowing?

**James Clear** (1:30)
Yeah, there's some things that you can do. I don't think, to your point earlier about sometimes the riskiest things just take a long time making a decision.
Maybe you should just pick one and work on it and then you can get on to the next one. But I do think there's some level of strategy, which is a good place to start is by asking yourself which habits are upstream from other good things happening. So, for example, I know that if you were, maybe the question to start with is, when you live a good day, when you feel dialed in, when things are rolling along well for you, what tends to be part of that day? Sleep. Okay, so that's, I would say for me, sleep is definitely one. I would say getting my workout in. And usually reading and writing are a part of it, but I think I could just boil it down to reading. If I just read 10 pages, that often sparks the writing. So reading is like the fuel for writing for me. So I could say get a workout in and read for five minutes or 10 minutes. Those are the two things that are part of a good day. And what happens is they're upstream from a lot of other good things happening. For example, if I get the workout in, yeah, I feel good. I get the benefits of the workout. But I also have a post-workout high for like an hour or two. So my focus and concentration is better. I sleep better at night because I got the workout in. Now I'm tired. I tend to eat better when I work out. It's when I'm not working out that I eat terribly. I don't know. It's kind of like I don't want to waste it or something. So at no point was I trying to build better focus habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits. Those just came kind of as a natural consequence of getting the workout in. So what are those things that you do that are upstream from other good things happening? I think those are good like anchor habits to start and focus on.
If I could add another one for myself, I would say it's a little bit of time. It's really just time to think, but it's time to reflect and review. There's this interesting thing that happens. If you have a really good work ethic, if you have a strong work ethic, and working hard has gotten you far in life, it kind of becomes a crutch.
For a long time, I was like, if I ever had a problem, I was like, well, I'll just work my way out of it. I'll just work harder on it until I figure it out.
That's great. That's really powerful for a lot of things. But at some point, it breaks. You can maybe, if you really try, maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder, but there's some limit. But if you work on the right thing, well, you can get 100x the result or 1000x the result. If you just keep your head down and work hard, it's very unlikely that you'll be spending your time in the highest and best way.