Life Lessons and Wisdom From James Clear, the Expert on Building Habits
It felt like James Clear, author of the NY Times #1 best-selling Atomic Habits, burst onto the scene in 2018. One day, I heard about this book called Atomic Habits and read it wondering what the hype about this book was about. It turns out it was incredible and the many takeaways from Atomic Habits were the seeds of my book Essential Habits (though I can honestly say my book focuses on specific actions rather than how to build and keep habits).
James has been writing and speaking on habits for many, many years now, and when you are focused on a particular subject for that long, you can’t help but be an expert in that domain. He also shares a newsletter called 3–2–1 where he shares quotes and nuggets of wisdom (yes, it’s worth subscribing to). I thought I’d look at his top 10 tweets from 2020 and provide some additional thoughts and takeaways on the tweets.
Photo by Scott Evans on Unsplash
Entrepreneur’s mind.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) August 22, 2020
Athlete’s body.
Artist’s soul.
In a short tweet, James outlines how you should be thinking about your mind, body and soul. One of the connections I made was to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. Edward talks about the idea of putting on a specific ‘hat’ when going into a meeting because, in meetings, people are often in a circle looking and opposing one another, rather than looking all in the same direction to move ahead. Putting on a hat helps everyone to look in the same direction.
In the same way, have an entrepreneur’s mind (i.e., thinking about creative ways to solve problems, find customers, create products or services to address people’s needs), an athlete’s body (an athlete trains every day for years for what can sometimes be one or a few performances), and an artist’s soul (what kind of art are you creating and what message are you sharing with your art?).
When you choose who to follow on Twitter, you are choosing your future thoughts.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) October 3, 2020
I am like James Altucher — I don’t like to consume any news or media. Whatever social media you use (Twitter, Instagram, etc.), whoever you decide to follow will dictate what you take in daily, and whatever you take into your mind shapes the thoughts you have.
Working on a problem reduces the fear of it.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) August 30, 2020
It’s hard to fear a problem when you are making progress on it—even if progress is imperfect and slow.
Action relieves anxiety.
How many times have you had a problem in your life whereby taking action helped you relieve your anxiety? I would say in my life probably 100% of the time. I remember coworkers asking me what I do when I get stressed about work, and my answer was that I get down to the nitty-gritty of it and work on whatever is stressing me out. I didn’t articulate it as well as James did, but action relieves anxiety as he says.
We often avoid taking action because we think "I need to learn more," but the best way to learn is often by taking action.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) September 23, 2020
There are two types of ‘actions’ we could be doing. One is ‘being in motion’ and the other is ‘taking action’. When you are learning, you are reading books, watching videos, taking courses, and you are in motion, but you aren’t taking action. You will never know what it is really like until you experiment and take action. Are thousands or millions of reviews going to tell you what a restaurant is like better than trying out the restaurant in person?
It took me...
— James Clear (@JamesClear) November 11, 2020
200+ articles before I got a book deal.
250+ articles before I got major media coverage (NYT).
100+ interviews before my book hit the bestseller list.
You need a lot of shots on goal. Not everything will work, but some of it will.
Keep shooting.
What you see as ‘instant best-seller’ results from a lot of work behind the scenes. There’s no such thing these days as instant success.
Unfortunately, the shortcut to success is the long way: a lot of shots on goal.
Lack of confidence kills more dreams than lack of ability.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) July 9, 2020
Talent matters—especially at elite levels—but people talk themselves out of giving their best effort long before talent becomes the limiting factor.
You're capable of more than you know. Don't be your own bottleneck.
Lack of confidence might be the reason you are ‘in motion’ rather than ‘taking action’. When anybody starts in anything and becomes a success, they likely were in the same spot you were in: naive, didn’t know what they didn’t know, no real expertise. Think Elon Musk and Tesla or SpaceX. Think Warren Buffett and investing. Think Richard Branson and airplanes. The one thing they all have in common? They all took action and improved as they went along.
What looks like talent is often careful preparation.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) July 18, 2020
What looks like skill is often persistent revision.
My piano teacher said that one goal of practicing piano was to make playing look easy. The harder a song looks to play, the less practice that pianist had. Anytime I see anyone doing anything that looks ‘easy’, it means hundreds or even thousands of hours went into practicing (a beautiful drive in golf, a consistent three-pointer, a well-timed stand-up routine).
I don’t like to admit this, but I have some ‘skill’ in PowerPoint coming from a background in consulting. Except what people don’t know is I spent many hours refining and improving slides, even after they were long approved by my bosses or clients. I always look at each slide with a blank slate and think “how can I improve this slide?”
Be “selectively ignorant.”
— James Clear (@JamesClear) May 28, 2020
Ignore topics that drain your attention.
Unfollow people that drain your energy.
Abandon projects that drain your time.
Do not keep up with it all. The more selectively ignorant you become, the more broadly knowledgable you can be.
Similar to the news diet that James Altucher recommends, don’t consume anything (media, news, hanging out with negative people) that drains your energy, time or attention. I know it’s easy to say and harder to put into practice, but there are easy ways to reduce your consumption: unsubscribe from Netflix, don’t have news apps on your phone, unfollow people that don’t bring positivity to your life or that complain a lot, stop hanging out with friends that don’t have your best interests at heart.
Not taking things personally is a superpower.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) January 11, 2020
Although I never thought of it before, not taking things personally is certainly a superpower.
When I think about all the times I have taken things personally, my energy is always drained thinking about what the other person meant, what the consequences are, how I can get revenge, what I can do to prove them wrong, etc. When you take things personally, it’s because your ego is getting in the way, and as Ryan Holiday says, the ego is the enemy.
There are 3 primary drivers of results in life:
— James Clear (@JamesClear) January 16, 2020
1) Your luck (randomness).
2) Your strategy (choices).
3) Your actions (habits).
Only 2 of the 3 are under your control.
But if you master those 2, you can improve the odds that luck will work for you rather than against you.
A beautiful way of restating the philosophy of stoicism: control what you can, don’t focus on anything you can’t control.
A key skill to have is to recognize and focus on what you can control (your actions, your behaviour, your mindset, your habits) and do not focus on what you cannot control (other people’s behaviours, randomness, the weather, how people feel about you).