The Silent Cost of Bad Habits - James Clear

Positioning and packaging drive a product's success

• Positioning is critical and powerful, even if Clear says he hasn't fully figured it out. How a product is positioned and packaged is probably 50% of its success.
• A product has to sell itself in 7 seconds. You're not at the store to explain it, so the cover has to do the work.
• Atomic Habits could have been a book about deliberate practice that mentions habits. Instead it's a book about habits that mentions deliberate practice, and that choice changes sales enormously.
• Deliberate practice takes 30 seconds to explain, and you don't get 30 seconds from a buyer. Everyone already knows good habits are good, so there's no concept to sell.
• The only pitch needed was: if you read one book about habits, read this one. That's a much easier sell than explaining a new idea.
• The Overthinker's Guide to Making Decisions is just a book about choices, but the frame makes it land. People hear the title and say "I need that," which is the signal the packaging is right.

What makes a great book title

• Good positioning borrows from direct response copywriting. The core principle is to address a timeless, enduring desire people already have.
• Most products are adjacent to a desire, not the desire itself. That forces an uphill battle to make people care about something they don't.
• Good titles usually have four qualities.
  • First, they hit a timeless or enduring desire.
  • Second, they tell you what the book is actually about. People often keyword-stuff titles like "how to make millions, be happy, and live the dream" that don't describe the book.
  • Third, they're an unmistakable, ownable phrase, usually a little weird the first time you hear it. Man's Search for Meaning and How to Win Friends and Influence People are phrases you never hear in daily life, so they own space in your mind. Before the book, nobody called a habit "atomic."
  • Fourth, there's an element of contrast or surprise. Rich Dad Poor Dad; The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (tidying is small, now it's life-changing); Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (you thought it needed a PhD, now it's a 90-minute read).
• Contrast is often small-to-big, or the easy thing that accomplishes the hard thing. Hit all four elements and you usually get good packaging.

How to position your life so good things happen

• Life positioning means putting yourself in spots where good things can find you. Every blog post, episode, or social post is surface area someone could discover.
• Margin of safety is positioning for the unexpected, especially in money. If your expenses run well below your income, you can absorb whatever comes.

Reading and writing both matter

• Reading is filling the car up with gas. Writing is driving and going somewhere. You need both.
• Sit at the gas station all day and you never go anywhere — the tank is already full.
• Just keep driving without refilling and you end up stranded on the side of the road.
• Reading is his primary way of generating inspiration and ideas.

Your inputs choose your thoughts

• Almost every thought you have is downstream from what you consume.
• Truly spontaneous thought may not even exist. Thoughts are sparked by inputs: a question someone asks, getting cut off in traffic.
• Your day is an endless string of responses to the situations and inputs coming at you.
• When you pick who you follow, what podcasts you hear, what books you read, you're choosing your future thoughts.
• Want better, more creative thoughts? You need better, more creative inputs.
• That makes choosing what to read, listen to, and subscribe to a weighty, important decision.

Getting more output from each unit of work: leverage

• Leverage is getting more output out of each unit of effort. Some things are far higher leverage than others.
• A key question: what is the work that keeps working for me once it's done?

Work on things with a long half-life

• A long half-life means the work keeps paying off long after you make it. Clear deliberately picks ideas and formats that persist.
• Formats differ in how long they last. Social media is short, a blog post is longer, a book is very long.
• Putting durable elements together gets you something evergreen.

One interesting question to play with is what do you do when there's nothing to do? A lot of people when they are standing in line at the grocery store or they're waiting for the gas to fill up in the car or something like that, what do they do? You need something frictionless to fill that gap. And I don't know what it should be for each person, but I think it's good to have an answer to that question because otherwise you're going to have to just sit with, you know, there's nothing to do.

It is so unlikely that whatever you are working on now is the best use of your time — it's almost impossible. And so I think Sam Altman has some line where he says you should have a very high bar for working on anything other than thinking about what to work on. Because that's going to be the biggest point of leverage is choosing a better thing to focus your attention on.

If you're the type of person who has a very good work ethic and hard work has benefited you a lot in your life, you get to a point where you start to use it as a crutch because you're like, well, I'll just work my way out of it. I'll just work harder and that's a way to solve this problem. But you cannot outwork the person who's working on a better thing. And so it is possible if you really grind maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder than you are now. But if you work on the right thing you get 100x of the results or thousandx the results.

"having fun" makes you hard to beat

• For any habit you want to build, ask "What would this look like if it was fun?" and brainstorm 10, 20, or 50 different solutions.
• There aren't always a thousand ways to do something, but there's almost always more than one.
• If you're having fun, you're dangerous. You're hard to compete with.
• The person who treats it as a hassle or chore is the one who quits when it gets hard. The person having a great time keeps going.
• The goal is just to make it more engaging than the default. Ask "How can I make this more enjoyable?" rather than "How do I make this the highlight of my day?"

The two-minute rule

• Take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less.
• Read 30 books a year becomes read one page. Do yoga 4 days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.
• People resist this because they know the real goal is bigger. That's the point.

You have to standardize before you optimize

• A habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you scale it up.
• Standardize before you optimize.
• We get all-or-nothing about habits. We hunt for the perfect sales strategy, business idea, or diet plan and stay in research mode.

• Every action you take is casting a vote towards being the type of person you want to be
• Act of doing it is proof you are that type of person
• Behavior and belief is a two-way street. What you believe will influence the actions that you take, but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. Every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. So my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way. To start with some small action and then prove to yourself in that moment that you were that kind of person. As you start to foster and build that identity, sticking with the habit becomes easier.

Change in the environment such that the behaviour that you want is obvious.

You want to be able to walk into your rooms each day and the good habit is the path of least resistance

Good questions:

• am i creating the conditions for success
• how can I make this behaviour more obvious
• What is this space designed to do
• What is obvious? Are you creating conditions where the change that you want or the behavior that you want is obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying? The more that you can do that, the more likely it is that you'll follow through

So many of your behaviors will curtail themselves possibly to the desired degree if it is less obvious, if it's not as accessible.

In a lot of ways, I actually think the most powerful form of mental toughness, the most powerful or resilient form of preparation is a mindset that can handle uncertainty. We all try to resist this. We try to control reality. We try to predict scenarios and outcomes. We try to figure out what's going to happen ahead of time. But really all you need is not to predict the future. What you need is the confidence that you can handle uncertainty. That whatever happens, I will be able to figure it out. I think if I was going to encapsulate entrepreneurship in a nutshell, I would say it is the trust and the willingness that you can figure it out.

No amount of information is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.' It's just a fundamental reality of life. Knowledge is purely about the past and what has been learned and decisions are purely about the future and what cannot be predicted. And so you have to become okay with that reality.

People talk themselves out of things long before the world actually shuts the door.

Work backwards from magic

"One of my little sayings internally is I try to work backwards from magic. So what would the magical outcome be? And then let me try to figure out a couple different paths that could potentially get me there and I'll start to take steps forward and then I'll get feedback from the world. I don't tell myself no. Maybe the world will tell me no and I need to adjust the course. But I start with the magical outcome and then go from there."

Reputation

"I guess the main way that I think about it is I want to be known as someone who is useful. Useful is a word that I come back to a lot. Josh Kaufman has a good framework. It's like three things. I think it's true, useful, and clear. Ultimately, your reputation will be the work, the quality of the work that you do. So, it is, I think Brent Beshore said at one point, it's like the range of outcomes that you can expect from a brand. And so the more that you do things that are high quality and useful and valuable and actionable, the more that you will become known for that."