#1 Habit Expert: Here's how you become dramatically better

alright charles i wanna show you something so in two thousand and fourteen i wrote about how i lost weight but previously i used your book a year before because i had a little bit of a drinking issue and it was frankly it was kinda ruining my life and i read your book and the idea of the habit loop change my life and that's why i'm so excited to talk to you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel your book changed my life probably more than any book i've ever read and i've read probably thousands of books so i'll tell you the story so basically yeah i had like an issue with with alcohol and i read your book and you you can correct me if i'm wrong but the way that i distinctly remember it is that a habit doesn't go away you just have to change part of the routine and replace it that's exactly right one of the ways that people continue being stuck on this treadmill and this sounds very overs but it's true in my case like you start like craving carbohydrates the day after you drink like you still crave because i was drinking like twenty beers a day and i still crave like the sugar and so i actually just made a small habit every time i wanted to drink alcohol a beer i ate a pack of m and m's and that like sugar replacement actually helped to me like kick booze then i replaced that with non alcoholic beer and i got fat along the way but i was like i'll get fat and then i'll write i'll kick that habit later i love this i look because you're exactly right so so for folks who aren't familiar with it the the habit loops is what research tells us is that every habit in our life and about forty percent to forty five percent of what we do every day as a habit every habit has these three components there's a queue which is like a trigger for the automatic behavior and then the routine right picking up the beer and drinking it or going for a run if you're if you have an exercise habit it and when we do that it delivers a rewards to us every habit in your life delivers a reward whether you're aware of it or not and over time our brain begins to associate this queue this routine in this reward into a little package that happens almost automatically inside our brain and at the core of it you're exactly right is this craving and what there's a woman named doctor anne gray at at mit who's done research on habits and what she's found is that if you create a habit and say a rat brain for running a maze and then you remove it from the maze for literally years and then bring it back and drop it in the maze again it that habit re emerges instantaneously and it's because this q routine and reward the neural pathways associated with those three things have gotten thicker and thicker and thicker and so when you start trying and ex a habit it when you just say i'm gonna stop drinking just you know i'm gonna i'm gonna white knuckle it and give up cigarettes because that neural pathway still exists you still have that craving you still have that urge so you're exactly right the key is don't try and ex the habit rather try and change it find a new behavior like eating m and m's that corresponds to the old queue and they deliver something similar to the old reward and in doing so you're kind of overriding that neural pathway inside your brain and i did this with the help of a doctor and i was like look the doctor was like just get fat for a little while we'll we'll figure that out later so i got fat and then that's when i wrote this blog post of how i lost weight and the way that i lost weight it was very simple you had this idea called the keystone habit which i don't know if you invented that term but that's crazy because like it's like a turn that everyone uses now but basically my keys have it was that i would put my running shoes next to my bed and then i would sleep in my workout gear that morning so when i woke up i was in my running gear or in my you know what workout gear and then i i when i when of my feet touched the floor they went into the shoes yeah that's a really smart a really smart cue and yeah i actually did come up with a phrase keystone habit it it really that's awesome my my wife is a biologist and there's this concept of key keystone species and so i was talking through this idea which exists in the scientific litter but had never been kinda called this and and we're like it's kinda like a keystone habit but what i'd love about what you just said is that so there's a there's a right named david epstein who he's written a bunch of books he will also sleep in his workout clothes and it's because that queue when you wake up and you throw your feet out of bed and you're already in your clothes that queue it just makes it so easy to like take the next step and like go out the door right like you probably at this point when you are running you're not even thinking about running in as you start you're just kind of on autopilot you're doing what feels natural yeah and this is the power of habits is that we can choose these behaviors that we want to encourage and we can make them not a product of willpower or of you know sort of white n it but rather something that happens automatically because there's just part of our brain the basal ganglia that exists just to make habits and that's what ultimately makes us successful is choosing the habits that we want figuring out how to design them by paying attention to the cues and rewards around them and then making those behaviors so automatic that you don't have to decide to go for run in the morning you don't have to decide to skip that that beer you don't have to decide to sit down and you know pound out all those emails you've been thinking about it just happens automatically and as a result it feels much easier i my my last company i think we had t ish employees when i sold and then my current company now we are at around that and both of those stages are when systems and processes start to really matter yeah and there's just like phrase in the ceo world something like you don't rise to like your willpower you fall to your systems or something like that where it's like the system is what like dictates whether you're gonna be successful or not not like you know willpower or not like how you feel and the point being at a company you have to have systems because that's what you fall that's what's what's what you default to that's and that's what you rely on yeah and and can i ask you okay so when you've thought about the systems you've created now that you guys were thirty people and the systems really matter what's a system that you've developed that you're really proud of like an institutional organizational habit i'll give you one really simple example but i will say like people like me like entrepreneurial people we the the skill set that re that is required to start stuff is the exact opposite typically of a process creating skill set oh interesting i work my ass off at creating and sticking to processes but it does not come natural but i'll tell you one that has made a huge difference every day at three pm the company stops for ten minutes and we clean we clean the office because i cannot stand clutter at our office and the the what i'm trying to convince my staff and it's actually working they're doing this at their homes and everything which is we're just trying to like sweat the small stuff and do the small things really nicely and it starts with like cleaning your bed or making your bed yeah and so i'm really proud of that it's and i'm sure you're giving everyone this sense of accomplishment right like click cleaning up the clutter is not that big an accomplishment but to come together and have someone say like this is who we are this is how we prove to ourselves what what we stand for that's enormously rewarding yeah and it and it actually gets to this other thing really interesting about psychology which is was what's known as revealed versus stated preferences that oftentimes when you ask people do you do you wanna exercise every day they'll say yes i wanna exercise every day it's really important to me but when we look at their behavior they exercise like twice a week right so the revealed preference is actually different from the stated preference and our brain pays attention to that our brain actually is kind of skeptical of our stated preferences but it pays attention to how we behave to figure out who we really are and so this act of cleaning up every day at three o'clock and i'm sure look you could go a day without cleaning at three and the company is not gonna fall apart right but it's not about organizing the clutter it's about revealing to ourselves proving to ourselves that we are the kinds of people who do this we are the kinds of people who we we say we are that's really powerful alright so this episode is all about excellence a while back i shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at hubspot turned it into a thirty day operating system that you can check out right now it breaks down the systems that have took me ten years to figure out and shows how exactly i use them day to day these are systems that genuinely changed my life so if you wanna build a good life scan the qr code or click the link in the description now let's get back to the show how many copies did the power of habit it sell gosh a worldwide it's sold over ten million now so it's crazy it's been great yeah and the best part is just getting emails from folks like like with stories like yours that say you know i struggled with drinking for years and then i finally figured out how to how to think about the queues and rewards to make this easier to overcome that's what's really meaningful that's crazy man that's a lot of copies did you and where were you before you a reporter yeah so i i was a reporter with the new times i was and in fact i i continued being a reporter for the new york times for a number of years after the book came out it weirdly i actually the same year that the power of havoc came out i wanna pulitzer it prize for for a a series i had done at the new york times and so twenty thirteen was like kind of a crazy year was that the apple the apple that was the apple series yeah yeah exactly the apple series and one of the things i learned i i was talking to jim collins like the guy who were get good to great last night on sage because he's a new book out and he talked about the the be belinda fog of success and that year twenty thirteen was exactly that for me it like on paper it was the best year of my life i had a best selling book i wanna pulitzer surprise in reality it was like the hardest year of my life because and and you know this when when success comes it can kind of catch you off guard with all of its demands and and emotions and so that was that was like a big year but also in retrospect to tough here and and since then i've written a couple more books including super communicators which which you'd had mentioned and now i write for the for the new yorker or magazine i remember i felt a defensive of you when atomic habits came out because you were my guy and i'm friends with james and i i'm sure you are too when i saw atomic habits come out i was like but i already read the original this is just like it's very nice you the truth is as whatever it takes to get it into people's hands like it feels so good to be able to be the master of your own habits it feels so good to be the person you wanna be and so whatever it takes to like to get that to get that empowerment into people's lives i am all for that so like a lot of our listeners are like type a go get who are probably a little neuro neurologist at times and maybe they're like me where like i'm pretty like emotional and rack re i i react to things fast which is kind of silly is there a way that you have seen a lot of these like type a people use the power of habit at work or in their career to be more productive yeah abs you you know would i hear a lot from from executives is is is i'm saying look i was in this bad pattern that i didn't even recognize was a pattern which is i knew i had to write an email right it was a tough email i didn't i didn't wanna like i didn't wanna deal with a question that the email was asking i knew i might disappoint someone and and so i would put it off i would basically you would be in my inbox i say i'm gonna deal with this later and hours would go by days would go by and what's happening during that period is that there is a cognitive load a cognitive burden associated with that email going answer right there's some part of your brain that says like look you've got this task you need to get done and it's an unpleasant task you don't like thinking about it you look like shy away from it but the more you shy away from it the more it becomes like this monster in your head and sometimes it's the smallest stuff totally and what we know is that if you build this habit that your immediate response is to hit reply and just deal with it right away the benefits of that are huge great now you might not write the most polished email on the face of planet right you might not have all the time to think it through so you have to you have to question is this something i can respond to right away but when we get it off our plate what we're doing is we're freeing up our brain to think about other things our brain is constantly keeping track of the thousands of things that might be threats or might be opportunities or might be crises and the more that we clear our brain and give it space to think about the good stuff the opportunities the ways to move forward the new ideas the more we're empowering ourselves to actually get things done so i have as we speak i have three hundred and forty nine unread text messages okay and i have a shit load of voice mails tons of twitter and instagram dms the amount of inbound and notifications and partially because i'm on a podcast as a lot of listeners but even if you're not that the amount of inbound notifications that people get it's unsustainable so it so just because you get an email like like that we have this instinct to hit reply does not mean you have to reply right because another habit that's equally important is just to ignore like the fact that somebody sends me an email that does not create an obligation on my to do lists to respond to them what it does is it gives me the option to kinda choose do i wanna respond and so one of the things that i do because very similarly there's just an overwhelming amount of stuff that comes in i try and be really disciplined in my my first habit my first instinct is just to hit delete like when something and oftentimes someone will send me a really interesting article or there'll be something i'm like oh man i should really go back and read that that's really i wanna save that for later and instead what i do is i hit delete because i know i'm never gonna go back and read it right and i don't think that we have to get to inbox zero i don't think we have to interact with every single thing that's sent to us i think what we should have is a habit to g over it and to forgive ourselves for hitting delete because ultimately the most important choice that we make is where to spend our attention and if we're making that choice based on the whim of other people because they send us an email or dm then we're not actually making a choice we're ab advocating that responsibility it's sort of like i think we had tim ferris on and people make fun of tim ferris because they're like dude you're working more than four hours a week you you know what i mean and so he sort of like kinda created his own little trap when you have bad habits in your life i have to imagine that people like your buddy's messing with you they're like oh no my wife is is mer what bad habits do you have still that you have been unable to break so here's the thing about habits is in our brain there's no such thing as a bad habit or good habit right the basal ganglia is this part of a our brain that creates habits and it actually evolve just to do that and every animal on earth actually has a basal ganglia if we couldn't form habits we would not evolve because it we would have to spend too much time thinking about whether we pick up the rock or the apple and take a bite out of it so habits really really important but to our brain our brain just says look if there's a pattern of a queue a routine and a reward i'm gonna make that easier and easier to do it doesn't say this is a good habit this is a bad habit it's up to us to decide which habits are good at which are bad which ones we wanna encourage and discourage and so i would say i have lots of bad habits right things that but there bad habits that i choose like i like to have once or twice a week i like to have a cocktail when i come home from work right and that in some people's eyes could be a bad habit but for me it's just a nice way of signaling to myself that i can relax some people might see that as a bad habit but for me it speaks to like how i like what i like about life i would say the thing that's happened to me as a as a product of my research is that i've recognized that you get to choose your habits and just because other people think they're good or bad that does not mean that they have to be good or bad for you the key is to have agency to have control over your life and the way we do that is by not just focusing on the behavior but by looking for these queues and these rewards looking for these leverage points that we can use to change and become the person we want to be and frankly it's challenging it's challenging to decide which is the thing yeah i think that i i i call myself like a high functioning person like i i think i have a a lot of horsepower and the strength of that is that i can run through a wall and the weakness of that is that i can run through a wall because yeah i have this thing called the five year diary where every year on the same day every day on a on a page i write how i feel that day and then yeah the the next year i see the same page so i can like see how i'm feeling a year prior i i was joking with sean but i my c hosts on this podcast i was like dude i've been i wrote about this thing in my journal this day last year and i complained about the same problem i'm like if i'm supposed to be this high functioning person that like changes or adapts and grows i'm sure not doing it what the hell why can't i change and so it is sort of interesting that you become like a prisoner of habits and what you said was cool because you do wanna become this person who can change their life but the fact is my opinion is most people don't change and i think it's really because i think it's like almost impossible to change well and what what i hear in that that diary that you you mentioned is what's known as a cognitive routine so what's what are you really doing when you write that one line because writing one line is not like it's not like life changing right to like sit down and write like a one line or about how you feel about your day but what you are doing is you're creating a mental habit for yourself and the most important habits tend to be mental habits in psychology they're known as cognitive routines and their job is to allow us to think more deeply when thinking deeply is hardest right when we're feeling stressed out or when we're feeling overwhelmed or when we don't have that much time we only have time to write one line in a little diary what that cognitive routine does that mental habit is it causes you to pause and look at the previous year and the fact that you say to yourself okay look i'm stuck in the same rut that i was a year ago and actually i didn't even really recognize that or if i did recognize it it's just i wasn't paying attention to it but this is something that's forcing me to think about this rut to ask myself like why am i in this rut how do i get out of this route do i really care about this route that much those cognitive routines these mental habits that we build for ourselves are really really powerful because they allow us to do the thing that you just mentioned which is make decisions without being exhausted and one of the most powerful is when i come home from work i describe my day in like excruciating detail to my wife and she does not really care about my day like she doesn't wanna know like all the specifics of the meeting i was sitting through but i'm not really doing it for her i'm doing it for me this is my cognitive routine to help me review my day and figure out what i did well and what i did poorly and building those cognitive routines those mental habits that is how we end up becoming successful because it's it's those small little habits that determine if we're using our attention wisely or not you know what that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written and everyone is aligned and you realize someone still has a sit down and actually create the content that someone is you and it's due tomorrow breeze assistant can help it works right inside of hubspot drafting campaign copy blog post emails all in your brand voice all grounded in your actual customer data so don't just create content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses you have this book called super communicators so i haven't read it yet but i read a great article on it and when i was younger i read this book called how to win friends and influence people yeah dale carnegie yeah it changed my life i'm not naturally like a very good conversational or a good people person i my my family calls me a little neuro spicy you know i had a i i kinda had to learn a little bit like i had read a few playbook on how to like have like normal interactions and so dale carnegie kinda changed my life and there was a handful of takeaways from that book and one of the books was basically if you have a conversation with someone if you let them do most all of the talking and you asked them all about their lives and their themselves they're gonna think that it's the greatest conversation they've ever had yeah and your job your book super communicators it did a good i i believe the premise of the book is like if you ask not only if but you you took a step further if you ask more questions but also ask these i don't know you give some questions but you you give like a framework if you ask different types of questions that fall a bucket that i'm i i want you to tell me you will get people to open up more is that right yeah yeah that's exactly right so so one of the things that we know is first of all we are all super communicators at one time or another right we we all know like the right thing to say to our friends to make them feel better or or sometimes you walk into a meeting and you just like you know exactly what to say to get everyone on your side but there are some people who are consistent super communicators people who can seem to connect with anyone anytime and the difference between them and everyone else is not this in born like capacity the it's not that they like are born with a gift of ga it's that they think about communication a little bit more and they recognize that communication is just a set of very simple skills that if you practice them they become habits and when when you start practicing them and using them you can kind of treat everyone like your best friend and they all they'll all respond the same way and one of those skills is asking questions consistent super communicators ask ten to twenty times as many questions as the average person and some of those questions are like just invitations like oh what you think about that or did you see that movie like it's invitations into the conversation but some of them are what are known it within psychology as deep questions and a deep question is something that asks me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences and that can sound a little bit intimidating but it's as simple as like if you meet someone who who's a doctor instead of saying oh what hospital do you work at asking them oh what major you decide to go to medical school right that second question that second question is something that invites them to tell you who they really are they gotta tell you about like their dad getting sick and seeing seeing the doctors help him or that they they wanna be a healer they wanna help their community deep questions are the things that allow us to really connect with other people because they invite others to tell us who they are and then the best part is it's very natural to answer our own deep question herself say oh oh you became a doctor because you saw your uncle gets sick really interesting i became a lawyer because i had a brother law who got who got arrested when i a kid i thought that that was really like really wrong now we're having a conversation about who we are we're connecting with each other and that means that we're gonna trust each other we're gonna like each other more and more importantly gonna be able to hear each other much more accurately this sounds like a such a dumb question but why do i care like why do i want someone to think that i'm a super connector like why do i want them to open up to me yeah absolutely so okay so there's a couple of ways and first of all you don't have to communicate with everyone right sometimes you're gonna get in the uber and you just wanna check your phone in the back of uber you don't wanna have a conversation with the driver that's okay you don't you don't have to have any conversation you don't wanna have but there are times that we do wanna connect with other people and the reasons why is because we are a pros social species the way that our brains have evolved is to push us to connect with other people because connecting with other people over time has been the most successful strategy in building things building communities building families building products and when we connect with someone else when we communicate with them even if we disagree with them about some pretty fundamental things there is this almost this almost subconscious thing that happens within our brain that we're powerless against which is if i feel connected to you if i feel like you're listening to me and i'm listening to you and that we're actually connected somehow and and with neuroscience and known as neuro ent in that moment we trust each other more and if you think about it trust is at the core of pro i can't i can't police you all the time to see if you're if you're a threat or if you're being genuine all i can do is try and figure out whether i can trust you enough to let you live in the in the hut next to me without without fear that you're gonna come and kill me and the way i figure out whether i should trust you or not and like you and want to work with you is by connecting with you because if that connection feels genuine then it doesn't mean i'm gonna give you my life savings but it means that for the time being i've said this person is at least trustworthy enough that i know who they are they know who i am i have a hard time seeing them betray me and so as a result we can live side by side peacefully and if you think about it in business trust is everything right mh the reason you're successful in business the reason you're successful life the reason you're successful in romantic relationships is because you figure out ways to connect with other people that are not just transactional but are real that's that's fascinating so i can ask questions that get like i think you said value based what else can i do okay so so the first thing is ask more questions right ask these deep questions the second thing is that you need to be having the same kind of conversation as the person you're talking to and explain this i'll to give you an example when i started writing super communicators one of the reasons why was because i'd had fallen into this bad pattern where i come home from work and i started complaining about my day and tell my wife you know like my coworkers don't appreciate me and my boss doesn't realize what a genius i am and she would give me some good advice she would say something like why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better but instead of being able to hear her advice i would get even more upset and i would start like saying you should be outraged on my behalf you should be like you should be on my side and i couldn't figure out why there was this tension between us and so i went to these researchers and they said well the the main thing that's happening here is when you're having a discussion you think you know what that discussion is about right you're talking about your day or next year's budget but actually if we look inside your brain what we see is there's a bunch of different kinds of conversations all happening at the same time and in general these conversations tend to fall into one or three buckets there's these practical conversations where we're making plans together or we're solving problems but then there's emotional conversations where i tell you what i'm feeling and i don't want you to solve my feelings i want you to empathize and then there's social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to other people the identities are important to us and they said what we've discovered is all three of these conversations are equally important and all three of them will probably happen during a discussion but if you and the person you are talking to are not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment you cannot fully hear each other you definitely won't feel connected to each other your trust in each other will not go up so the key is this is the second big skill in addition to asking more questions that super communicators consistent super communicators have is pay attention to what kind of conversations happening does this feel practical does it feel emotional does it feel social what kind of words is the other person using and then match them what's known within psychology is the matching principle if you're talking about next year's budget and you say something like look i'm really anxious that we get this right because i don't wanna lay people off as a super communicator in my head i should be hearing oh you're actually having an emotional conversation right now when we're not talking about the budget we're talking about how you feel and i need to empathize with that before we can start talking about practical things i need to say to you i understand exactly what you're feeling i feel exactly the same way i want you to know my number one goal here is that we don't have any layoffs that we get to protect our people so with that in mind can we talk about the budget like how to how to how to actually get that done in other words with your permission can we move from an emotional to a practical conversation together when i do that what i'm doing is i'm signaling to you that i'm listening to i understand your mindset and we are getting aligned we are getting ne and trained we are getting in sync which means that we're gonna hear each other much much better and we're gonna trust each other more i'm obsessed with like i i love history and i've read biographies on a huge a lot of the presidents and three presidents that are very very different and are very effective communicators are george washington mh bill clinton and donald trump yeah they communicate drastically differently but i would argue they're all very effective i i absolutely agree george washington was significantly more stoic and mysterious and spoke seldom and when he did spoke you listen no matter what and he had this like regal status bill clinton was very charming and then donald trump his s is more like way more crude like r with you like we're it we're boys y absolutely in fact as a reporter i've been to a lot of trump rallies and and whether you you like donald trump or whether you intensely dislike donald with trump going to a rally is well worth the time because what you see is he is a super communicator and he uses the this exact same thing thing that i just talked about he leans he proves he's listening to the crowd by leaning into the type of conversation they wanna have so on a stage donald trump will say something and and if the crowd starts applaud and over and and reacting to it he'll say it again and then he'll just start r on that that's why that's why from a stage he often says like things that in retrospect look a little crazy is because he's kind of feeding off the crowd the crowd is telling him if he gets up on stage and he says you know something emotional like i worry about the future of the nation because we're being overrun by immigrants and the crowd just kinda goes nuts he'll lean into that and he recognizes this is an emotional conversation right this is this is not about the practical of immigration reform this is people feeling like they're lost at home like they're losing ground and he'll lean into that now i've also met with donald trump a one on one in in like you know settings where he's meeting with reporters the dude asked questions constantly right and a lot of the questions are like about him he's like what do you think why do you think these people hate me so much or what do you think about this thing that i did but the fact the fact the matter is instead of giving little speeches he's asking questions he's drawing you into the conversation the truth of the matter is that we are all really good at communication right are because we're a pros social species our brain has evolved to be really good at communication and the people who are best at communication it is not because they were born that way it's because they think about communication right bill clinton's is a great example if clinton were you always a good communicator he says no he says that when he was a kid he actually had trouble making friends with other kids he didn't know how to talk to them but he said that in high school he really studied how kids talked to each other like he felt like this something and that because his parents got divorced he had to be the peace maker between them he trained himself to think just a little bit more about communication and that's what makes him a great communicator and all of us can do that i'm not a donald trump supporter but i am intoxicated but like i think he's hilarious like if i i have to remove the fact that like i don't agree with what he just said but i can also acknowledge i'm like that's so funny like were you intoxicated when you met them no i was i was not intoxicated when when i met and i i would also say i'm not a donald trump fan i i like i as a particularly as a reporter i try and not be a fan of anyone but this running for office because you have to be skeptical but i i will say this about trump is that he comes off as being very authentic and this is another thing that super communicators do really well right you believe that you're seeing the real version of them and the way that we actually create a sense of authenticity this has been studied a lot is that we'll often do something that's a little bit vulnerable yeah and we tend to misunderstand what this word vulnerability means we think it's like crying on each their shoulders something like that actually vulnerability is a very specific thing that happens inside of brain vulnerabilities is a neural cascade that occurs when i say something to you that you could judge and if in that moment you withhold judgment and more importantly if you share something about yourself that i could judge in return then we will feel closer to each other so think about when donald trump's on that stage you know that like weird dance he does right that like it's not it's not an attractive dance right he's not a he's not a graceful man on on on his two feet and yet it's incredibly end enduring because it's vulnerable now it's not vulnerable in a way that like makes him open to attack it's vulnerable in that he's sharing something that you could judge you could say that's the dumbest dance i've ever seen in my entire life but when you withhold that judgment you actually feel closer to him and so one of the things that he does that all great leaders do is that they reveal things about themselves they they allow these moments of vulnerability wherein i'm gonna say something that i know you could judge i'm gonna make it available to you for your judgment because in that moment you will believe i am authentic you will believe you're seeing the real me and that's really really powerful i think that word i hate i hate the word authenticity i hate that word yes and i'll explain why i i think it's bullshit i actually don't think you should be authentic because the fact is is that we're all performing and i wanna convince this girl to go on date with me i wanna convince this employee to work at my company i wanna convince someone to do everything saying to be authentic that's like saying someone just be yourself and they'll like you no don't be yourself change yourself so you are a better person and that people then will like you so i'm gonna push back a little bit because i actually think i think what you just said is authenticity i don't think authenticity means it's all in means what i i think but i think authenticity is choosing not only which act choosing which part of myself i want to expose right now right like the truth of the matter is i could look in this conversation you could have spent this conversation just telling me how impressive you are like all of your successes but instead you the the act that you choose the aspect of yourself you choose to to share with me is like a really curious guy who like doesn't have all the answers and and recognizes that luck is part of it and hard work is part of it and wants to understand how to get better i don't think that's an ina display of who you are i think it's you authentically choosing which part of yourself to share with the world and i think that i i i understand the skepticism towards authenticity the word has come like such a bug boo of meaning like meaning so many different things but what i think for me it means is genuinely wanting to connect with another person and wanting to connect with them on both their terms and my terms and saying like look like this is who i am i i want you to know who i am the real meat at least to some degree and i might that doesn't mean i'm gonna necessarily tell you all about my childhood trauma or my drinking problems but i want you to be able to know who i am on some level the real me and i want to know the real you and it's that act of actually saying i want to be authentic or i want to be vulnerable that creates the connection it's not the authenticity itself it's the act of saying i'm willing to be vulnerable with you because i want i wanna connect with you that is the first and most important step for us actually feeling connected to each other who's a super communicator that's a famous person that i should go and study oh gosh that's a really good question i mean there's so many of them i mean honestly one of them is steve jobs and we don't think of steve jobs as a super communicator right everything about steve jobs is like he was such a jerk to his employees and he would create this reality distortion field but if you go and you watch interviews with steve jobs what you see is you see him constantly authentically sharing who he is and then asking questions and proving to the other person that he's listening to them right so there's there's a number of speeches he gave it like graduate stanford graduate school of business where the clips that get put on social media are the clips of steve jobs talking about like doing lsd or like his vision but if you watch the entire time that he was in that classroom what you see is that he steve jobs one of the most famous guys on earth he spends like about a third of the time asking the students questions like what do you think about that why did you make that decision what was your experience when you picked up this device he is a guy who genuinely not only wants you to understand him he wants to understand you and you get that feeling right that's the bill clinton thing like i i've met bill clinton also and like the truth of matter is bill clinton genuinely wants to charm and know the people he is talking to what did he say to you that was an example of charming yeah i'd written this article and and it's clear that like one of his aides had briefed him that i'd written the article but he comes up and he goes man an article you wrote it was just great it was just great and i'm wondering what was the thing you carried away from it because that you must know so much about this it must have been so powerful for you what did you carry away and of course the former president of the united states is asking me about my work i'm like i'm like oh mister president let me tell you like i'm so glad you read that right it i was bold over by it but like what he did is he asked me a question and he seemed genuinely curious in in the response and to be honest and maybe i'm just a sucker i believed him i believed that he actually wanted to know because he's a curious guy he wanted to know what i'd learned and i felt wonderful as a result this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but just do a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by getting a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find and if you can find them it's hard to have this explicit time this explicit place where you sit down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors the biggest risk is not failing you have a company in it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew and business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works whether you work with hampton or you get your own group on your own but having a group like this of group of people you meet with in real life once a month it can change your life the change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com what's a good famous example of a speech or a moment in time that you point to or or multiple examples where that you point to over be you're like that's a textbook example of super communicating oh so i'm so one of the my favorites is ronald reagan so if you remember this was a long time ago so you might have been too young and i was actually too young myself but when ronald reagan was running for this second term there were all these questions about his mental acuity right like people there were all these articles about the fact that his memory was failing and and he gets up on this on the state on the stage to to debate walter mon this is the second debate and was was younger than him yeah you well mon was younger than him and mon was like seen as like like his reputation he had never lost an election before and he was seen as this like wonder right like the that like his brain was so smart and ronald reagan gets up on the stage and one of the first things he says is he makes a joke he says i want you to know that during this debate i will at no time make fun of my opponent's youth and inexperienced yeah right and everyone kinda laughs because they all realize what he's talking about there's he's saying like look like i i'm not gonna i i'm not gonna make fun of the fact that like he's younger than me because he's gonna say i'm too old and that my memory is going and what it did is first of all it's was kind of vulnerable right like it's him admitting that there's this criticism of him that he's aware of it's exposing something that other people could judge but then by making a joke of it he completely disarm the issue like in that moment it stopped his mental acuity stopped being an issue now if you'll remember actually later in his second administration this becomes an issue because it turns out that he's suffering from from what people think are early early signs of of alzheimer's dementia so it was totally a legitimate issue to bring up during the election but he just did this j by being a little bit vulnerable about about it and making a joke of it that all of a sudden it became an attack that didn't have any teeth that's an example of super communication and he just connected with people in that moment in a way that that surprised everyone so asking value based questions yep getting tactical vulnerability yep what what else so figuring out what kind of mindset what kind of conversation is happening are you in an emotional mindset are you in a practical mindset and then the last one is super communicator succeed because they not only listen but they prove that they're listening so there's this kind of like myth that like the key to listening is like close your mouth and open your ears and that's the first step to listening but it turns out study after study shows that is not enough on its own the key to listening is to make listening an active process it's to prove to you that i am paying attention to what you're saying and you actually just did this really well you repeated what i said right you were like okay here's the three things i've heard from you you're proving that you're paying attention to it so if i'm in a conversation with someone particularly if i'm in a conflict conversation where we're disagreeing about something what i should do is i should use this technique called looping for understanding which is step one is i'm gonna ask you a question preferably a deep question tell me why this issue is important to to you tell me what you really think about this question like why it's why why this matters i'm gonna listen to your answer and then step two is i'm gonna repeat back in my own words what i heard you say and the key here is not mimic if i just mimic you it doesn't work the key here is to prove to you that i've actually been thinking about what you've been saying i've been paying attention so what i heard you say is i heard you say that like you know you wait you wear your your workout clothes and i think that what i'm really hearing you say is working out as a keystone habit for you it's a way that you tell yourself who you are you you prove your discipline in the morning that's step two is i'm repeating back what i'm hearing i'm adding something to it and most people kind of do this intuitively step one and step two as they get older step three is the one that i always forget is that when i say that i ask you if i got it right did i hear you i in i understanding of the role or exercise place in your your life correctly did did i get it because what i'm doing in that moment is i'm asking you for permission to acknowledge that i was listening and if you acknowledge that i'm listening to you you become something like ten times more likely to listen to me in response mh it's this in born instinct known as social reciprocity yeah that that when we think someone's listening to us we want to listen to them and so super communicators prove they listening they don't just sit there you know that they don't do the dale carnegie they don't just ask question after question after question they layer on top of that proving that they're paying attention by saying things like oh it's so interesting you mentioned that because something similar happened to me or i wanna ask you about this thing that you said before because it reminds me of this question i've been thinking about they prove that they're paying attention and in doing so we believe that they're are listening to us because in fact they are listening to us dude this is so interesting and it becomes like meta because as you're like telling me things i'm like alright i have to make sure that i do a loop when he's like yeah yeah no but then the nice thing is first of all you do a lot of this stuff intuitively because you are good it's not intuitive i'm telling you i had to learn all this i was really uncomfortable fourteen year old and do you know what changed my life and what's i don't i don't mind admitting this because i'm happily married but reading books and how to meet women when i was fourteen and fifteen i looked like napoleon dynamite i was really goofy looking i was uncomfortable i didn't have lot of guy friends like people didn't particularly like me and i read all of these books on how to pick up girls it wasn't like a matter of like hooking up although that would been awesome which should happened but it was like i just wanna like be accepted and so i read pretty much every book you could ever find about how to pick up a girl and what you learn is that those like it's it starts like where you just learn the tactics of how to have a conversation but then you realize that like the secret in all of this is to becoming a good person who's worthy of love and who's worthy of other people's attention and that is like the true secret and that is a good one okay so i'm gonna point something out that i think it's really interesting it's you as an authenticity skeptic what you just told me was really authentic right like you told me that you read books about picking up girls which is something that like in in your head you know i could judge i could be like oh this guy's a dirt bag you're the kind of guy who like reads books on picking up girls but by sharing that with me by saying something that you know i could judge by being a little bit vulnerable it actually brings us closer together you're exactly right authenticity is not having a trick in my back pocket that i can use because if it's not genuine it's not real and people are gonna feel that authenticity is actually sharing with you who i really am with full knowledge that you could hold it against me but trusting that you're not going to because we're gonna because we're gonna learn things about each other that make us feel closer you're not like i wouldn't say that you're the most prolific author like you know well in terms of books like it seems like you find a topic and you like go super deep so so i i have this basic this basic desire with everything i write which is to write something that i genuinely believe twenty years for now someone can pick it up and just love it and and actually i do this myself like i buy old copies of magazines i just bought in cold blood by truman capo right which kind of created the true crime genre one of my favorites i yeah it's a wonderful i found a copy of the original new yorker magazine that it was printed in and i bought it online from ebay and so as a result if that's your goal is to write something really big it does take time in part it takes time because you don't know what the big idea is when you start the process speaking of old magazines i collect old magazines here really there's a wow how for good the first the issue of george that's not going for like ten thousand dollars online right now i've had this for three years my friend really i'm a kennedy historian and i and i i owned a publishing company so i had these i still get my t magazine by smith magazine oh it's amazing i read that you cole call i think i read this that you cold call nine hundred people to get a source for a book is that is yeah yeah yeah you it's actually so it was the apple series so the series is about like looking at the global economy through the lens of apple and getting people inside apple is to talk is really really hard it's a very secretive company and so what i did is i was like the only way i can do this is through like mass pitches and so i'd go on linkedin look for people who are former apple employees and i would email them and say look my name is charles duh on a reporter this is what i'm working can you please talk to me and the yield was really low the yield was like three or four percent of people even bothering to respond but all you need is two or three great sources to introduce you to other sources and so this has always been my reporting technique is if you want to write something great if you wanna create anything that's great you just have to waste a lot of time because you don't know what's gonna pay off you don't know which person you're gonna email and they're gonna say yeah i have all these files i can share them with you and so i think a big part of making important big things is being okay with spending an entire week and saying nothing productive happened during this week i tried again and again and again and none of it paid off because that is the process of finding something amazing and it's so it's interesting to say that like a lot of your productive time feels unproductive well and i think that that's a key so the idea that that book is called smarter for better and the idea behind it is sort of what i mentioned before that throughout history the killer productivity app has been thinking more deeply particularly when thinking deeply is hardest so tell me about your routine then so let's say you had a deadline for an article or you had a deadline for a book what is your daily routine in order to think deeply so oftentimes oftentimes i won't have a deadline like i'll try and basically not have a deadline so i have all the time i need but my my my process for thinking deeply is that i do to do this in a very specific way my to do list at no time has more than three things on it and hopefully it only has one for the day for the day right so so i have a memory list all the things i wanna get done go on my memory list and that's very long but the night before every night i look at the memory list and i choose what is the number one thing on my to do list for the next day and i'll write that down and this is actually a routine the cognitive routine that forces me to think about priorities right and what i what i'll do is periodically during the day i force myself to take a break and to just take a step back and ask myself like the way i spent the last hour is it getting me closer to that one thing on my to do list or is it actually me distracting myself so you only do one like you would to consider a successful day just doing one thing yeah i mean it it's gonna be a big thing right like like my my to do list for instance for tomorrow because it's saturday but i'm gonna i'm gonna i i a two list for tomorrow my to do list for tomorrow is to come up with the outline of my next book now i'm not gonna be able to do that in a day right and that's a huge task but i intend to sit down at nine o'clock in the morning with a pad of paper and i'm just gonna start outlining and those outlines are gonna be terrible and then i'm gonna get up at ten thirty or eleven and go get a snack and i'm gonna ask myself am i writing stuff down just to write stuff down or is this actually getting me closer and closer and closer to understanding what the outline is there is so much in life that can distract us from what's important and the people who are most successful are the ones who empower themselves to be masters of their time and their attention i think you if i had to guess you read a lot and you've written like three or four different books on like drastically different topics yeah so you're like an onion you got layers of like interesting knowledge what have you read in the last year whether it's a book or an article or podcast podcasts or a youtube video that you just suggest that i consume so okay so there's a couple of them on there's this book named void star it's actually a novel and it it came out like seven or eight years ago and it's written by a computer scientist it's about ai and first of all it's just a great novel it's like it's just fun to read particularly because we're living through this age of ai he is the first writer i've encountered who tries to actually get inside an ai head right and sort of say like if if people actually were interacting with ai what would that look like because an ai isn't gonna be like a human it's gonna be some something significantly different so i found that book to be really really profound and then in addition let me think what else so david asking epstein as i mentioned he has a new book coming out called inside the box which is about how constraints actually make us better that like when we have constraints around us when we have fewer resources than we need when we create artificial limits for ourselves it actually pushes us to be more creative to be more productive and i think that's been really really important because we live in an age of surplus and excess right if you're starting an ai company the first thing you do is you raise billions and billions of dollars but what david saying is actually avail yourself of those surplus of resources if you can get them but when you're thinking about how to make decisions give yourself constraints because it's the constraints that show you the right path forward did you're really fascinating to talk to did you you make me wanna become an author right you should and author you're fascinating name to talk you too you you have you have the natural disposition for it the curiosity i don't know if i've got the grip for it it seems really hard did you for any of their your best works so like the power of habit as well as some of your articles did you at any point where you like something's here something's here this is gonna to hit yeah so i think what happens is very similarly i'll say that oftentimes the chapters to get the most attention are the chapters where i was like oh that wasn't my best chapter like i i couldn't i should have done better and i cannot reread my stuff if i reread my stuff it's like oh this is so painful like it's it's so bad there's so i could have done so much better but i will say that there is usually a point where i'm like you know i would actually read this like there's something going on in this that if i encountered it in the wild i would read it and that doesn't mean it's poetic that doesn't mean it's perfect but there's just something there that i find personally captivating the trust i'm having the beta making is that if i find it captivating there's gonna be at least some other people like me who also find it captivating so i wrote this on this article for new yorker about a guy named sham pal yeah this spa the thing yeah i it was i like that stuff yeah like i it was about cha and about and about on specs and it was kind of like it cha is kind of like a i connor that's not fair but jam jamal is an operator right he's a guy who like sells a dream pretty actively and so i wrote an article about him selling the dream and why actually sometimes in in economic cycles like the salesman the the the the bullshit artist is actually the most important figure because he helps everyone else believe in what the economy can be and it was an article it didn't do that well like not that many people read it but i i loved it because i would have read the hell out of that if i had come across that article in the magazine i would have just read it like two or three times that's ultimately what i'm trying to do i'm trying to write something that like so muse and delight me that i i would read it and so hopefully other people will too what yeah man i i'm leaving this conversation in what i'm good me too what age did you become successful financially oh actually after power of habit so i would let's see so i was probably late thirties were you like broke no i wasn't broke i wasn't broke i was right working in the new york times but one of the reasons i wrote the power of habit was because i really happy being a reporter and my wife was pregnant with our first kid and i i and we were living new york and i was like i don't know that we can afford to live in new york with kids on my salary right i'm a reporter right i i don't earn that much money the only way that i can make this work is to go write books like i i need a secondary line of income to be able to continue living in new york to continue our the lifestyle that we have and so and and and i will say i'm curious if this is true of you as well like once i started making money the the scarcity mindset was with me for a long time and actually still kind it's still there it's still there still there so if you grow up with scarcity don't go away it's traumatic and and it also teaches you that like money does not solve your problems i think it i think it removes so many problems it removes so many problems and like i've talked about this sudden in the podcast and this is a very douche thing to say but i say it all the time the people who say it doesn't make you happier i think are doing it wrong it definitely makes you happier because it rules removes so much uncertainty but we have quite similar tendencies i've noticed this about you is that you're quite paranoid like we've agreed that you're one of the best selling authors of all time and yet you say you're a horrible author and like there's just like i think there's this commonality not with all successful people i know a lot of successful people that were like i felt like i was great and i knew i was gonna be great and and i was confident the whole time but then those whole other subset of people which i think i fall into and it sounds like you fall into which is i'm shit i have to prove myself i suck i suck so much i have to do this it's all gonna go away and frankly it's exhausting but i do find it very useful i totally agree and and i think of it as a cultivated anxiety and i think you're right i think it's actually a blend of those because if you asked me objectively am i a good writer i'd i'd say look i've been writing for twenty years man like i spend all my time thinking about how to how to write in ways that make people desperate to finish the chapter their writing so like objectively i am a good writer but it's also this cultivated anxiety of like well my previous books were okay but i wanna try something new for my next book and that could fall on its face i need to work really hard to make sure it doesn't i think both of us probably do that right like success is a combination of feeding the insecurities that push you to be better and then also taking comfort in the insecurities that you you can be better you know what you're doing if you push yourself hard enough the thing that i love about capitalism and business and it's like i'm not even into business that much i just think that capitalism there there's some of the more practical ways to kinda bend the earth to your will and so like what i loved about my journey of going from fat to skinny is like check this out i'm manipulated myself like and then awesome i i changed my tiny world that just being my body i set a goal and i did it yeah and i i that's what i like about entrepreneurship is even if it's just a small business it doesn't matter if it's what it is it's just a really cool it's a very practical way to to to kick your dent into the world and say this is my world that i've created even if it's just my my bedroom absolutely and that is that mastery right mastery is envisioning something in the world then making it real and it is so satisfying well thanks for doing this i thank you thanks for having me on this is super fun i hope you realize how much of an impact you've had on me thank you i really appreciate you saying that and i love the show i like i i love this and show and by the way when you come out to california let me know we'll we'll go away i do you surf poorly okay poorly i i surf from poorly every single day so yeah so we we we'll go surfing together in santa cruz would be fun alright let's do it alright that's it that's a pod i feel like got can rude to work to know why i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor it is a podcast that we want you to check out called d pod it's hosted by ramon barr and blame bolus and this is a podcast about all things direct to consumer d it's e commerce stores it's how you optimize your brand and they're talking with founders marketers and the platform creators called about all kinds of things that you need to know for d you know website conversion pay ads facebook ads consumer trans email marketing if you wanna know the stories behind your favorite brands this podcast is for you so check it out listen to d pod wherever you get your podcast