James Clear

A lot of the time when someone sits down and they want to build a new habit, they don't say this, but what they kind of assume is what it would mean to be successful with this habit is that I do it for the rest of my life.

You know, and that if at some point I'm not doing it, then that must mean that I failed or I quit on it.

But that's not how it is at all.

Like things have a season, you know, and so habits have to change shape over time.

Hey, thanks for having me on.

Great to talk to you.

Sure.

So first of all, I think there's no reason that you can't be really ambitious, right?

Like I consider myself to be a very ambitious person.

I think it's just that you're oscillating or switching between these two modes, you know, like when you're in planning mode, when you're in strategy mode, sure.

You can be very ambitious and be very aggressive and you know, stretching yourself and reaching.

But when it comes time to take action and execute you have to scale it down to something that you can achieve that day.

You know, like the, in one sense, the biggest unit of time you could ever do something is about a single day.

Cause then you got to go to sleep, you know, and then you have to wake up again and do it the next day.

So it's,

Unless you're playing, you know, at some point there's a limit.

You can only stay up for 48 hours or 72 hours, like, you know, and then you break.

So that's the largest possible unit that you could ever do a single thing in.

And I think more realistically, most of the time, the truth is, you know, you got about an hour, maybe you got two hours to work on this and then got to go move on to something else.

So we don't have big chunks of chunks of time available to us.