WATCH THIS EVERY DAY – Motivational Speech By James Clear

your outcomes in life are often a lagging measure of your habits we think the thing that needs to change is the bank account or the test score or the number on the scale but actually the thing that needs to change are the habits that precede those outcomes rather than making the goal the default the thing that you focus on almost exclusively let's make the system the default and then only check in on the goal occasionally to see if we're moving in the right direction achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment it's actually not the thing that you're looking for we think the results are the thing that needs to change but it's actually the process behind the results like if you have a messy room let's say your bedroom is a mess and you set a goal to clean that room you can get motivated and do it for two or three hours and then you turn around you have a clean room for now if you don't change the messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place then you turn around two weeks later and you have a messy room again and so actually you don't need a clean room you need better cleaning habits and then your room will always be clean you don't need to lose weight you need better eating habits and then your weight will always be around where you want it to be you don't need more money you just need better financial habits and then you'll always have enough money to manage the thing that comes up and um i think that's one of the reasons why small habits matter so much they don't necessarily transform your life overnight right right away like doing one push-up does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or meditating for one minute might not give you an immediate sense of calm in your life but it does cast a vote for being a meditator the real goal is not to run a marathon the goal is to become a runner the goal is not to write a book the goal is to become a writer because once you've adopted that identity you're really not even pursuing behavior change anymore you're just kind of acting in alignment with the type of person you already see yourself to be it's kind of like true behavior changes really identity change because once you've changed that internal story it's way easier to show up each day you're not even really motivating yourself that much to do it you're just like this is who i am now the technical definition of a habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to be more or less automatic so things that you can do pretty much without thinking about them unplugging your toaster after each use or tying your shoes or um brushing your teeth things that you pretty much just go on autopilot when you do them now we often use the word habit to mean different things than that and we can get into this more like you might say things like i want to get in the habit of working out or i want to get in the habit of writing every day i know what you mean when you say that right you mean i want to make it a regular practice i want to make it this daily ritual that i follow but you're never going to go like on autopilot and forget what you write for an hour right like it's it's a more effortful conscious thing and so we can talk about some of that distinction particularly with making habits easy what you really want to do is make the beginning easy and automatic and then the rest of the routine can follow naturally even if you're consciously thinking about it so that's what a habit is it's this automatic response now why does the brain build them what role does it play well as you go through life you need energy to survive and this is true not just for humans but for all organisms needing some kind of energy to survive and getting energy uh requires energy you need to eat food to be able to walk around and find the next meal and using energy is expensive because the more energy you use the less you have available for the other things that life throws at you and so your brain is looking for ways to conserve energy to conserve energy whenever possible and habits are a great method for doing that and it makes that whole process of finding energy solving the problems of life and getting through things easier it requires less energy and attention and effort than it did before i started to realize similar to what i hinted at a moment or two ago that both luck and habits play a role in life but that you have control over your habits and the funny thing is we're building them all the time but a lot of people don't feel like they have control over their habits they feel like their habits are taking control of them that they're like a victim of these bad routines and once you start to dive in a little bit and like uncover the layers uh and realize what a habit is and how it works then you start to develop a little more control over it and i think if we're going to be building habits anyway then it makes more sense to be able to understand how they work and how to structure them so that you can be the architect of your habits rather than the victim of them it's not that luck and randomness and uncertainty don't play a role in life they do you know luck luck is a part of all of our lives to a certain degree both good fortune and bad but by definition you don't have control over luck and your habits also matter and i think that the reason they're so worthwhile to focus on and understand is that they are the portion of your life that you can influence that also determines your outcomes it's not just luck it's not just habits but one of those you have control over and so it makes sense the only reasonable strategy is to focus on what you can control if you spend all of your time focusing on things you can't control then you're just going to end up frustrated talent and genes they play a role and it's important you know people have natural predispositions to things that make them better but what you find is that nearly always when someone is a great performer in a particular domain they are both well suited so naturally talented or have some kind of predisposition to that area and well trained and so even if you are talented you can't succeed without having great habits to execute and to fully realize the potential that you have a lot of the time people talk about you know i want to have more money or i want to lose weight or i want some kind of result but the truth is your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning and reading habits and so it's actually we think the thing that needs to change is the bank account or the test score or the number on the scale but actually the thing that needs to change are the habits that precede those outcomes how do we come to believe things about ourselves because when you come into the world as a baby you don't have any preset beliefs or notions um that'