and supporting my channel.

So last week I did a video

summarizing three of the biggest ideas

in this book right here.

"Atomic Habits" by James Clear.

And that's the only Dr. Seuss's calamity in this video

but I just couldn't help it.

But like I said, in that video,

this is one of the better self development books

that I've ever read,

and when it comes to building habits,

I think this is the best habit building book

that I've ever read.

But while those three big ideas we discussed in that video

do kind of encapsulate the strategic component

of building habits,

they aren't the entire picture

because as anybody who's ever studied business

will tell you to run a successful business,

you need two things, strategy and tactics.

Strategy being the foundational sort of birds eye view,

huge ideas that really form the foundation

of everything you're trying to do.

And tactics being the more in the trenches plans

that allow you to carry out the strategy

on a day to day basis,

in addition to dealing with whatever crap

life happens to throw your way.

And while running a business and building habits

in your everyday life, aren't completely identical goals,

they do have one key component

in which they are very, very alike,

which is that you need both strategy and tactics.

And luckily "Atomic Habits"

also deals with this more tactical question.

In fact clear lays are four different rules

for making habits stick over the longterm

and making sure that you stick with them even when life

inevitably gets in your way.

So in today's video,

we are gonna summarize those four rules,

I'm gonna give you my thoughts on each of them.

So let's get started with rule number one,

which is to make it obvious.

Any habit that you're trying to build,

shouldn't come with question marks on it.

Where am I gonna do it?

How do I do it?

When do I do it?

If you're asking these questions,

you're already getting off on the wrong foot.

One of my favorite quotes from this book

is actually one of my favorite quotes in general

which is that, "You do not rise to the level of your goals,

"You fall to the level of your systems."

And if your system hasn't defined a clear picture

of what a habit is supposed to be,

then you're not really gonna know what to do.

For instance, I will eat more vegetables is unclear.

How do you know on any given day

that you've actually completed that goal?

Is a single baby carrot enough?

Well, if you've set your system in an unclear way

or if you set the bare minimum so low,

then on many days you're gonna find yourself

falling to that bare minimum,

eating a baby carrot and saying, "Hey, I ate vegetables."

And that's the thing, on really busy days,

or days when you're feeling just really, really tired

or unmotivated,

you can bet that you are going to just fall

to the bare minimum requirement that your system has set.

And over time, this can lead to self sabotage

because while you are technically fulfilling

your requirements of the system,

the results you get through that habit,

through that practice are so infinitesimally small

that you don't see real progress over time.

You're basically just kind of stalled out.

But you can easily fix this by making the goal obvious

by setting some specific requirements

that give you a very clear bare minimum,

that's actually gonna get you results.

So going back to our vegetables goal,

instead of saying, "I will eat more vegetables,"

just again, very unclear,

maybe say something like,

"I will eat one full serving of vegetables

"every day at lunch, except for on Sundays

"and fries don't count."

I don't know who thinks fries are a vegetable

but hey, we gotta be specific here, right?

But you can see it's very clear minimum requirement

makes it a lot harder to cheat yourself in the long term.

And it also makes it a lot more obvious

what you're supposed to be doing on a day to day basis.

And if you wanna make this even more obvious,

then it's a good idea to have a written record

of your past accomplishments,

of your past compliance with the habit that you're set out.

In other words, track your habits.

We, human beings have a very fallible memory.

Sometimes it's hard to remember what we did yesterday

let alone two weeks ago.

So if you have an actual concrete record of what you've done

you'll often find it motivating and you'll find it more easy

to keep doing this in the future.

Now when it comes to tracking your habits,

there are a ton of different methods out there.

If you're a fan of pen and paper,

I did a video earlier this year

about something called the Martin System,

which my friend Martin created,

and a lot of people seem to like,

so I'll have a link in description for that video,

but there are also tons of habit tracking apps out there,

Habitica being my favorite one,

because it brings in lots of video game design elements

and video games designers

have had probably about 40 years this point

to study psychology and figure out

what motivates players to keep playing their games.

So you can take those insights,

put them into a habit tracking app,

And at least in my experience,

it makes it a lot more motivating to use.

Of course you could also just mark things off

on the calendar,

mark each day as you do the habit,

which Jerry Seinfeld is very famous

for having done with writing jokes,

and that's why this is often called the Seinfeld Effect.

But whatever you do, calendar, app, Martin System,

whatever it is,

simply tracking your habits

is going to make it more obvious every single day

what you're supposed to be doing,

because you have a record.

Now, this isn't always going to be enough.

Just making a habit obvious

isn't going to ensure that you're going to do it.

So let's talk about the second rule on Claire's list

which is to make it attractive.

The idea here is to pair the habit

that you're trying to build, which is often difficult,

requires self-discipline, requires motivation and willpower

with something that you already like to do.

And this can be especially important

in the early stages of this habits

where again, it's taking mostly willpower for you to do it

because it hasn't yet worn a well-worn neural pathway

that makes it an automatic behavior.

Or I guess in definition, a habit.

Giving an example,

my friend Martin wrote this script for this video,

and like me he doesn't necessarily like writing

especially when it's nonfiction productivity scripts.

But there are two settings in which he can make himself

get into the writing habit and get started

by tweaking his environment

to make it a little bit more enjoyable.

The first one is at home, he'll clean off his desk,

he'll make a fresh cup of tea, since he's a tea drinker,

and he'll light a candle.

So he's making his home environment a bit more attractive

as a writing space.

Alternatively, sometimes he actually goes out in his car

and we'll park somewhere in nature

where he can look at trees

and writes a script on his iPad.

Personally at a knock at the allure of riding in my car,

I think it'll would be very uncomfortable,

but hey, whatever works for him works for him,

and whatever works for you will work for you.

So try to tweak your environment

in a way that makes it more enjoyable

to get into this habit.

You could also create what I like to call Jedi Councils,

which is just my nerdy term for a mastermind group.

I don't really like the term mastermind group

'cause a lot of those fake gurus love to use it.

So I'm gonna go at Jedi Council,

but essentially,

a Jedi Council is just a group of like-minded people

who have similar levels of ambition,

who agreed to get on a call every week or every two weeks

and support each other.

I was on the same Jedi Council call

with the same four people for about four years.

And every couple of weeks we'd get on a call,

and we talk about what we had done

over the past couple of weeks.

Every week, somebody would be in the hot seat,

they would kind of do a deep dive

on the struggles they were having,

what they were trying to do in their business

or in their goals.

We'd all just sort of provide support

and encouragement and accountability.

At the end of that call, everyone would say,

"Here's what I'm going to do in the next two weeks,

"keep me accountable."

One thing I've noticed with friends,

is that often friends are too close to you,

they like it too much to really hold your feet to the fire

with a goal.

Maybe some friends will actually do it,

but a lot of friends will sort of forgive you

when you fall off the horse,

which is not always what you need.

Sometimes you need to somebody who's kind of at arms length,

who cares about you,

but they care about you in a way

in which they're going to really hold your feet to the fire

and ask you,

"Why did you not do what you said you were gonna do?"

You know, they're not gonna take it can excuses from you.

So it can be very, very helpful to form a group like this.

The accountability these people provide you

might not always be enough to help you hurdle

the difficulties involved

in sticking with your habit longterm,

which is why sometimes you need to look for a way

to reduce that difficulty.

In other words, make it easy.

The main thing we're looking to do here

is to remove as much friction as possible

from whatever positive habit that you're trying to build.

So for an example, let's talk about guitar for a second.

It took me all of two seconds to go and grab this guitar

off the stand over there.

Now, when I bought this guitar,

when I bought my first guitar in Colorado,

they always tell me the same thing.

You live in Colorado, which is a very dry environment.

So you need to buy a case

and you need to keep the guitar in the case

as much as possible,

and you also need to buy this humidification device

which you have to fill with distilled water every two days,

Otherwise guitar is gonna crack over time

and become worthless.

And I understand what they're saying and they're not wrong,

but here's the thing,

I did that at first diligently when I bought my first guitar