let's time to build our habits

Part 2 untold story which help to build your habits

HOW I LEARNED ABOUT HABITS

Attending Denison was one of the best decisions of my life. I earned a spot on

the baseball team and, although I was at the bottom of the roster as a freshman, I

was thrilled. Despite the chaos of my high school years, I had managed to

become a college athlete.

I wasn’t going to be starting on the baseball team anytime soon, so I focused

on getting my life in order. While my peers stayed up late and played video

games, I built good sleep habits and went to bed early each night. In the messy

world of a college dorm, I made a point to keep my room neat and tidy. These

improvements were minor, but they gave me a sense of control over my life. I

started to feel confident again. And this growing belief in myself rippled into the

classroom as I improved my study habits and managed to earn straight A’s

during my first year.

A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many

cases, automatically. As each semester passed, I accumulated small but

consistent habits that ultimately led to results that were unimaginable to me

when I started. For example, for the first time in my life, I made it a habit to lift

weights multiple times per week, and in the years that followed, my six-foot-

four-inch frame bulked up from a featherweight 170 to a lean 200 pounds.

When my sophomore season arrived, I earned a starting role on the pitching

staff. By my junior year, I was voted team captain and at the end of the season, I

was selected for the all-conference team. But it was not until my senior season

that my sleep habits, study habits, and strength-training habits really began to

pay off.

Six years after I had been hit in the face with a baseball bat, flown to the

hospital, and placed into a coma, I was selected as the top male athlete at

Denison University and named to the ESPN Academic All-America Team—an

honor given to just thirty-three players across the country. By the time I

graduated, I was listed in the school record books in eight different categories.

That same year, I was awarded the university’s highest academic honor, the

President’s Medal.

I hope you’ll forgive me if this sounds boastful. To be honest, there was

nothing legendary or historic about my athletic career. I never ended up playingprofessionally. However, looking back on those years, I believe I accomplished

something just as rare: I fulfilled my potential. And I believe the concepts in this

book can help you fulfill your potential as well.

We all face challenges in life. This injury was one of mine, and the experience

taught me a critical lesson: changes that seem small and unimportant at first will

compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.

We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often

depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with

the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.

Maybe there are people who can achieve incredible success overnight. I don’t

know any of them, and I’m certainly not one of them. There wasn’t one defining

moment on my journey from medically induced coma to Academic All-

American; there were many. It was a gradual evolution, a long series of small

wins and tiny breakthroughs. The only way I made progress—the only choice I

had—was to start small. And I employed this same strategy a few years later

when I started my own business and began working on this book.

HOW AND WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

In November 2012, I began publishing articles at jamesclear.com. For years, I

had been keeping notes about my personal experiments with habits and I was

finally ready to share some of them publicly. I began by publishing a new article

every Monday and Thursday. Within a few months, this simple writing habit led

to my first one thousand email subscribers, and by the end of 2013 that number

had grown to more than thirty thousand people.

In 2014, my email list expanded to over one hundred thousand subscribers,

which made it one of the fastest-growing newsletters on the internet. I had felt

like an impostor when I began writing two years earlier, but now I was

becoming known as an expert on habits—a new label that excited me but also

felt uncomfortable. I had never considered myself a master of the topic, but

rather someone who was experimenting alongside my readers.

In 2015, I reached two hundred thousand email subscribers and signed a book

deal with Penguin Random House to begin writing the book you are reading

now. As my audience grew, so did my business opportunities. I was increasingly

asked to speak at top companies about the science of habit formation, behavior

change, and continuous improvement. I found myself delivering keynote

speeches at conferences in the United States and Europe.

In 2016, my articles began to appear regularly in major publications like Time,Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Incredibly, my writing was read by over eight million

people that year. Coaches in the NFL, NBA, and MLB began reading my work

and sharing it with their teams.

At the start of 2017, I launched the Habits Academy, which became the

premier training platform for organizations and individuals interested in building

better habits in life and work.* Fortune 500 companies and growing start-ups

began to enroll their leaders and train their staff. In total, over ten thousand

leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers have graduated from the Habits

Academy, and my work with them has taught me an incredible amount about

what it takes to make habits work in the real world.

As I put the finishing touches on this book in 2018, jamesclear.com is

receiving millions of visitors per month and nearly five hundred thousand people

subscribe to my weekly email newsletter—a number that is so far beyond my

expectations when I began that I’m not even sure what to think of it.

HOW THIS BOOK WILL BENEFIT YOU

The entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has said, “To write a great book,

you must first become the book.” I originally learned about the ideas mentioned

here because I had to live them. I had to rely on small habits to rebound from my

injury, to get stronger in the gym, to perform at a high level on the field, to

become a writer, to build a successful business, and simply to develop into a

responsible adult. Small habits helped me fulfill my potential, and since you

picked up this book, I’m guessing you’d like to fulfill yours as well.

In the pages that follow, I will share a step-by-step plan for building better

habits—not for days or weeks, but for a lifetime. While science supports

everything I’ve written, this book is not an academic research paper; it’s an

operating manual. You’ll find wisdom and practical advice front and center as I

explain the science of how to create and change your habits in a way that is easy

to understand and apply.

The fields I draw on—biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and

more—have been around for many years. What I offer you is a synthesis of the

best ideas smart people figured out a long time ago as well as the most

compelling discoveries scientists have made recently. My contribution, I hope, is

to find the ideas that matter most and connect them in a way that is highly

actionable. Anything wise in these pages you should credit to the many experts

who preceded me. Anything foolish, assume it is my error.

The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits—cue, craving,response, and reward—and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of

these steps. Readers with a psychology background may recognize some of these

terms from operant conditioning, which was first proposed as “stimulus,

response, reward” by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s and has been popularized more

recently as “cue, routine, reward” in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

Behavioral scientists like Skinner realized that if you offered the right reward

or punishment, you could get people to act in a certain way. But while Skinner’s

model did an excellent job of explaining how external stimuli influenced our

habits, it lacked a good explanation for how our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs

impact our behavior. Internal states—our moods and emotions—matter, too. In

recent decades, scientists have begun to determine the connection between our

thoughts, feelings, and behavior. This research will also be covered in these

pages.

In total, the framework I offer is an integrated model of the cognitive and

behavioral sciences. I believe it is one of the first models of human behavior to

accurately account for both the influence of external stimuli and internal

emotions on our habits. While some of the language may be familiar, I am

confident that the details—and the applications of the Four Laws of Behavior

Change—will offer a new way to think about your habits.

Human behavior is always changing: situation to situation, moment to

moment, second to second. But this book is about what doesn’t change. It’s

about the fundamentals of human behavior. The lasting principles you can rely

on year after year. The ideas you can build a business around, build a family

around, build a life around.

There is no one right way to create better habits, but this book describes the

best way I know—an approach that will be effective regardless of where you

start or what you’re trying to change. The strategies I cover will be relevant to

anyone looking for a step-by-step system for improvement, whether your goals

center on health, money, productivity, relationships, or all of the above. As long

as human behavior is involved, this book will be your guide.

THE

FUNDAMENTALS

Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

THE FATE OFBritish Cycling changed one day in 2003. The organization, which was

the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired

Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time, professional

cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity.

Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic

Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de

France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.

In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that one

of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because

they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using

their gear.

Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What

made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a

strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the

philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.

Brailsford said, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down

everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by

1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might

expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike seats to make

them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They

asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle

temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each

athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a

wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which

proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.

But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percentimprovements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types

of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a

surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the

chances of catching a cold. They determined the type of pillow and mattress that

led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the

team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally

slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.

As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results

came faster than anyone could have imagined.

Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated

the road and track cycling events at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where

they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available. Four years

later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the Brits raised the bar as they

set nine Olympic records and seven world records.

That same year, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the

Tour de France. The next year, his teammate Chris Froome won the race, and he

would go on to win again in 2015, 2016, and 2017, giving the British team five

Tour de France victories in six years.

During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world

championships and sixty-six Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured

five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful

run in cycling history.*

How does this happen? How does a team of previously ordinary athletes

transform into world champions with tiny changes that, at first glance, would

seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements

accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this

approach in your own life?

To be continued in part 3