James Clear

speaker

1,852 appearances 7 recordings 7 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 12 May

James Clear’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.

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The School of Greatness · 9 Things You Rarely Do for Yourself But Should | Lewis Howes · 21 Jan 2026 podcast

So very popular question.

How long does it take to build a habit?

Um, it does depend on the habit you're building.

So there are a variety of studies that show, you know, if you pick an easy habit, um, you know, might only take a couple of weeks.

If you pick something really difficult, maybe it takes six or seven or eight months.

Like, you know, who knows?

Um,

But it also depends like the same habit can take very different amounts of time depending on the context.

Imagine one person who's trying to build the habit of doing yoga every day and they live with a bunch of athletes or people who go to yoga studios or whatever.

And then the other person is trying to build a habit of doing yoga every day and they live with nobody who works out and they kind of get criticized or poked fun at if they do it in front of them.

Well, same habit, but very different situations.

And so the environment's going to influence how much friction you're feeling associated with that, and obviously that will influence how easy or difficult it is.

So I don't really know that the timing tells you anything.

You know, there's all these kind of popular myths, 21 days or 30 days or whatever, and there's not really anything to back that up.

But there's also a couple studies that say on average it's like 66 days or something like that.

But again, the range can be quite wide depending on the habit.

I think the true answer, the honest answer to how long does it take to build a habit is forever.

Because if you stop doing it, it's no longer a habit.

And what I'm trying to get at with that is habits are not a finish line to be crossed.

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