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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Motivation, we all know, sometimes you're motivated, sometimes you're not.
Motivation rises and falls throughout the day.
So why would you want a behavior that you want to do consistently to rely on something that fluctuates?
It doesn't make sense.
And so this is a good reason why you want to scale habits down to a level where they're so easy to do.
Getting into it is so simple that you'll do it even when motivation is low.
And so this is another reason for the phrase atomic habits, right?
It's about making it tiny and small so that you stick to it even when motivation isn't there.
I'll give you two examples.
So there's this concept in chemistry called activation energy.
It's how much energy is required to activate a reaction.
So you can think about like striking a match.
There's a certain amount of effort that you have to put in to strike the match and for the flame to start, okay?
Your habits are kind of like that.
Some habits have really big activation energy.
If you want to do 100 push-ups a day, that requires a certain amount of motivation.
You got to keep doing sets of five and 10 throughout the day or whatever.
And if it gets to nine o'clock one day and it's time to go to bed and you haven't done your 100 push-ups yet,
I got to kind of motivate yourself quite a bit to get that in before you go to sleep.
So if your objective instead is to do 10 push-ups a day, well, then it's nine o'clock and you still haven't got them in yet, but you're like, I can probably do 10 before I go to sleep.
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