James Clear

They cling to that current identity and it's harder to grow.

And five years from now, they find themselves behind the curve.

Or you've got a teacher who they've been doing their lesson plan the same way for the last 10 years and they don't want to integrate YouTube or some new learning modality or whatever.

And five years from now, they find themselves behind the curve.

And so the tighter you cling to your current identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.

And it's kind of this endless cycle.

In the early stages, what you want is to foster the identity, to reinforce being that kind of person because it helps you show up.

But then eventually, a couple years from now,

The world changes and you need to adapt.

And so it's kind of like evolve or die.

And you need to continually be retouching or optimizing or refining that identity in your approach.

And so there are some various stages there, but those are kind of some of the big ones that stuck out to me.

Yeah, it's interesting because I would say there's kind of like two categories.

Their habits are like timeless that you and we call those the fundamentals of whatever your domain is.

You know, like in my case, reading and writing are probably always going to be habits that will serve me as an author, you know.

But then there's other stuff, you know, the way that I executed the book launch for Atomic Habits.

You know what?

Like if I launch another book in 10 years, a lot of those strategies would probably be outdated.

And so you need to upgrade and improve.

You need to evolve and change.