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Welcome to the Daily Stood Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at DailyStood.com.

Hey, it's Ryan Hall today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stood Podcast. My guest today is actually someone that I met. I can't even remember now.

It must have been six or seven years ago. I was at a conference and I was talking about the process of putting together books.

I got this question from a guy in the audience. He was saying, you know, why would I do a book? You know, I've got this big email list. I write directly to my audience. Why would I ever traditionally publish a book?

And we talked a little bit about it and I think I convinced him because he ended up publishing one of the best books of the last several years of book that I think about on a regular basis.

And even if you just think about the title, it should influence you, which is to me a sign of a great book. I'm talking about James Clear and his book, Atomic Habits.

Atomic having a double meaning, not just meaning explosive habits, but also the sort of the smallest possible size of a habit focusing on the little things that put in for the chain reaction that came in fact be explosive.

So I wanted to have James on the podcast and we're doing here at the beginning of the year, because this is a time when people start to think about making changes in their life, but then there are already struggling to actually execute those changes, which as you'll see in this episode is a big thing that James talks a lot about.

James is someone who has helped change my habits directly, one kind of a mastermind group with a bunch of different authors, which I look forward to attending every year because accountability is a big part of habits and changes.

And certainly that's something that's big in stoicism. Marcus, to really this would not be who he is without rusticist without his teacher, fronto, just as epictetus wouldn't have been who he was without Musoneus, Rufus, and on down the line.

I see James as someone is a bit of an accountability partner like that for me, plus someone was just doing high quality work out in the world that inspires me to try to up my game.

Check out his newsletter at James clear.com he sends out this sort of best of Thursday thing that's fantastic and of course, do read James's book, atomic habits, it's a monster seller for a reason, and I also suggest you check out our stoic take on habits, the daily stoic habits for success habits for happiness course, six weeks of awesome stoic inspired wisdom about how to have better habits and thus better life, you check that out at daily stoke.com slash habits.

I was I was thinking about it, you know, originally we were going to do this in early January, but it's actually I think more fitting that we're talking at the end of January because I would imagine a good chunk of people that have bought my books and your books and started out the year trying to think about New Year's resolutions have already quit on them.

And like we did this new year new challenge thing for daily stoic and and is 21 days and it's like you know the first the first email it's like a hundred percent open rate and the next one it's like 90 than 80 and by the end something that people paid for you know they're like 40% open rates after three weeks so it's it's amazing to me how we it's like we start out with really clear intentions, but we can't we can't follow through.

Yeah so common so true I also like you know i've had this happen to me many times you know it's not like I'm immune to the to the phenomenon like we all get excited and amped up about things early on and then it comes time to execute and life happens and things like you know taper off.

This is what you're kind of getting at the this whole discussion about New Year's resolutions is one of the central things I talk about in the time of cabits is idea of like starting with identity rather than results I do think there's something to that that like at the beginning of the year people are very excited about the results they can imagine for themselves losing weight or making more money or you know meditating every day or whatever.

But they still don't see themselves in that way they don't consider themselves to be a meditator or a writer or an athlete or whatever the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and so I usually encourage people start there like start with the the identity that you want to have or start with the lifestyle that you want to live.

And then start doing small habits that reinforce that identity rather than just being like all men lose 40 pounds and then when that doesn't happen in three weeks you inevitably feel you know demotivated.

Well that's something that they talk a lot about in sports so people have heard about it a thousand times and we pay lip service to it but then in our own lives we don't actually follow it which is.

And New Year's resolution the problem with that is that you are focusing you are starting with the result I want to lose 40 pounds I want to learn I want to know Spanish you know like you're picking a thing and you're saying I want to get that result.

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