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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And you just want to see things clearly.
And then once you see how you're actually behaving, well, then there are adjustments that you can make.
And I think at that point, you realize, all right, it's not my fault necessarily that I'm doing these things or that I learned this way to do it.
But now it is my responsibility to make the change.
The next level is you say, all right, I'm going to try to reduce the amount of time that I do this.
One way that I try to practice this, so I have a home office and I have this little rule where I try to keep my phone in another room until lunch each day.
Usually it ends up being like 9 to 11, 9 to noon, something like that.
And I can't do it all the time, but I can do it maybe 70% of the time.
And whenever I do it, I think it's interesting because it's like the phone is just down the hallway.
It's only 30 seconds away, but I never go get it.
And so I'm like, did I want it or not?
You know, on the one hand, I wanted it so bad that when it was next to me, I would check it every three minutes.
And on the other hand, I never wanted it badly enough that I would be willing to work 30 seconds and go down the hall and get it.
And a lot of your habits are like that.
They will curtail themselves to the desired degree if you just introduce a little bit of distance or a little bit of friction.
The more that you increase friction between you and the behavior, the more likely it is to reduce itself.
So there are a lot of environmental changes that could potentially work there.
There's a chapter in Atomic Habits that's called The Secret to Self-Control.
And there's a story that many of us tell ourselves, which is, oh, you know, if I was just more disciplined, if I just had more self-control, then I would be able to do these things.
But the big takeaway from the research in that chapter, the surprising insight, is that
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