The goal is to see yourself as a meditator. The goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat. The goal is to look at yourself and consider yourself to be a runner. And what I mean by that is that if you look at yourself in a certain way, you're not really trying to change your behavior anymore. I think true behavior change is really identity change. In a guest column for The Profile, you wrote: "Take whatever goal you are trying to accomplish and ask yourself, 'Who is the type of person that could achieve that goal?' Why is identity so important in making or breaking habits? That's how I think about optimizing my environment for having good ideas. Most of them aren't mine, but they're always there for me to build upon and soak up and think about and iterate on. I have books sitting next to me, I have some next to my bed, and I have some on the coffee table in the living room. For my physical environment, I try to sprinkle good sources of information all around. I'm not reading 17 books, but they're there. books. I have 17 books on my desk right now. I would say social media plays a much bigger role for my information consumption than it used to, but it only works because it's heavily curated. I'm constantly dumping things into my big pile of ideas to work upon. I can't go on Twitter now, and not come out with three, four, or five ideas. If you can do a good job of selecting the right people to follow, you essentially automate good thoughts coming into your mind every time you're scrolling through. Now, you don't know exactly what those people will share, but you have an idea of what their themes are and how they view the world. You're choosing what that information stream is, so you're already locking yourself into certain types of thoughts. What ends up happening is that when you choose who to follow on Twitter or Instagram, you're choosing your future thoughts. I have easily spent over 100 hours on it. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time figuring out who to follow on Twitter. The most effective things I've found are to try to automate the streams of information that are coming into you. You need both of those if you actually want to make the journey. You need to do both.įor me, reading is like filling up the tank, and writing is like going on an adventure and driving somewhere. But the point of having a car is not to just sit at the gas station and fill up all day. You have to go to the gas station to fill up. If you drive a car down the road and you run out of gas, then you're not going to get anywhere. The example I heard many years ago is that it's kind of like driving a car. Picking what to read and making sure I'm reading consistently is a really important part of my writing and idea-generating process. By having good starting material, I often can build something that's useful, interesting, and valuable, but it's largely because I started with reading something useful, interesting and valuable. So if I am going to be iterating upon previous stuff, then I want the best starting material possible. I don't have enough of these good ideas that just bubble up naturally without me building on top of something else. The other way I like to think about it is this: Everyone wants to be original I would love to be brilliant and original and a genius, but I'm not smart enough for that. If you have better inputs, you naturally get better outputs.
James clear author full#
I hope you enjoy.īelow is an excerpt of the interview, but I encourage you to watch the full interview here:ĬLEAR: I find that almost every thought I have is downstream from what I consume.
In this interview, Clear explains his process in detail and offers practical strategies to help us form better habits in the new year. I wanted to know: How did Clear build his brand? Why did he write a book? What mental frameworks does he use to generate ideas? And of course, what lessons can he share about how we can be more intentional about our day-to-day behavior?
The internet is in like the second inning. Someone is starting the next 1 million-person email list right now. "It seemed like blogs and newsletters had already peaked. "When I began writing in 2012, I thought I was too late," he says. He's one of the best and most interesting individual creators on the internet yet he had a moment of doubt that almost made him quit before he started. "The thing about getting to a million subscribers is that it took me eight years, so I knew it was coming, you know what I mean?"Ĭlear, the author of New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, has been writing on his website since 2012. The first thing he did? "I took a screenshot," he said in an interview with The Profile. 5, James Clear refreshed the page and watched his email list hit 1 million subscribers.
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