 I've just got a few things I'm going to lob your way and I'll just let you kind of do your talking, you know, I obviously follow you incredibly closely on social, get your newsletter, read your book and listen to your book. And I've heard you make a few different statements. I'm going to read them to make sure they're technically correct and then I would love for you just to kind of expand on them. The first was professionals are the architects of their habits amateurs are the victims of their habits. I think, well, people are building habits all the time. So that's the baseline, right, whether you're thinking about it or not, it's already happening. So because it's already happening. I think it makes sense for us to shape our habits carefully to think to be thoughtful about it. And so when I say that, you know, amateurs or people, you know, many people are not are the victim of their habits. I think that's often how it sort of feels to us like you're building these habits you're going through life you're just kind of trying to solve what you face on a day to day basis. And you stumble into certain solutions. And before you know it, those solutions sort of become a pattern, you know, you get stuck in a rut or you start to like build a groove and if that groove is not favorable, then you feel like oh, my habits are happening to me like I have this thing that I do all the time I never even set out to do it. Meanwhile, you all you have a second option, which is you can start to be the architect of your habits you can shape your environment you can design the options that are presented to you you can be more thoughtful and careful about who you can follow on social media or what the items are on your desk or on your kitchen counter at home or the way that your office is laid out or making sure that you know a home gym is a more visible option your home or whatever like there's just tons and tons of almost infinite number of options that you can do to try to design an environment where the good action is the path of least resistance with a more obvious thing. That's a practical takeaway. If you buy into that idea that it's possible to shape your environment so that it's more favorable. Then I think the practical action step is probably two things one is you want to make anything that's the queue of your good habits anything that's visible or available you want to make that obvious. You want to just put it in front of you have it be the first thing that you see when you sit down at your desk or when you're walking to the kitchen or whatever. One thing is you want to be easy you want to be the path of least resistance so you know as much as possible you're going to try to prime the environment so that it's ready for the next use or that it's you know set up for you to succeed. So a couple examples like if you write out what you at the end of each workday you can just write out like the top three things that you want to achieve for the next day or whatever number you want to be. And then you take that little piece of paper and put it on top of your laptop or put it on the keyboard at your desktop or whatever, so that when you walk into your office tomorrow, the very first thing you see is something that reminds you of what your highest value actions are. And, you know, not everybody has to do that but it just illustrates the point which is you're trying to prime the environments that the next action is easy so the next action is obvious. So the more that you can do that with health work wealth, all kinds of things. The more it starts to pay off and you are less of a victim of what happens and more the architect of it. Love that. So it's all about environment. Yeah, and creating the environments that you want. Now, with that being said, you know, coming up is is New Year's where everyone makes their New Year's resolutions and for the most part, when people say they have a New Year's resolutions. They're usually tied directly to a behavior. I either want to start doing more of this thing in the new year, or I want to stop doing this thing or less of this thing. Moving forward. What do you say to someone that feels like their life is kind of in disarray and they know they don't have the physical fitness they wish they had they're not financially where they want to be their relationships are very mediocre. They've kind of got a lot to cover. What would you recommend? Would you recommend them focusing in on one of those things and get great clarity and focus or trying to change the environment for all of them? What would be your approach to someone that's just unhappy with a lot of areas of their life? There are a couple of different things I'll say here. So the first is building off of what you were mentioning at the beginning of the question, this idea that most people try to change a behavior. I think one useful question to ask yourself is rather than focusing on the behavior, let's talk about the identity. And so, who is the type of person that could achieve that thing that I want to achieve. The very common New Year's resolution is lose weight. So instead of say lose 30 pounds, you can ask yourself, who is the type of person that could lose 30 pounds? And you realize, oh, well, maybe it's the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, or maybe it's the type of person who tracks their calories at each meal. And so now suddenly you have something very specific. You have like a very specific habit that you can try to build. Maybe I can try to build the habit of not missing workouts. Doesn't matter what I do during the workout, doesn't matter how long it is, doesn't matter how I feel, I'm just trying to not miss. That's the first step toward building that identity. Or, okay, now I need to track my calories. Doesn't matter what I eat, doesn't matter how much I eat or how often I just need to build the habit of tracking it. And you can also see this leads me to my second answer to the question, which is, in both of those examples, I tried to scale it down. And I think that's a big part of getting started is there are a lot of the time people think they are being simple or keeping things simple, when in fact it's much more complicated. So for example, let's say you, you're like, okay, I'm going to keep it simple. I'm just going to pick one goal. I'm just going to try to eat healthy this year. But actually, if you break it down, there are a bunch of sub habits associated with that, like, if you're not currently cooking your own meals, then now you got to start building a habit of meal planning grocery shopping. So once you get the food at home, now you need to start, maybe you need to learn some knife skills or you just need to get better at cooking. Having all those recipes ready to go after the meal. If you're eating out a lot right now, you don't have many dishes now suddenly have dirty dishes to clean. So there's, you know, three, four, five different things that are associated with that one habit of eating healthy. As much as possible, I encourage people to scale it down because it's always a little more complicated than it seems on the surface. So let's start with a very small habit, a very easy habit, something that's, I like the line from Leo Babalto where he says make it so easy, you can't say no. And so I like to use like the two minute rule as a guide, just scale it down something takes two minutes or less to do. And so, you know, if you are trying to work out four days a week, all you have to do is put on your running shoes and step out the door. That'll take you two minutes, you're done. Now, if you run, that's a bonus, but like in the beginning, we're just trying to build a habit of showing up. If you can't master that, then, you know, there's nothing else to optimize, but a lot of the time, for some reason with habits, people get very all or nothing. They think if I can't, if I can't run three miles four days a week, why am I even bothering? And what I'm encouraging you to do is just scale it down to the smallest part possible, master the art of showing up, start building up evidence of that new identity. And then once you've done that, well, okay, now we're in a position where we can talk about scaling it up a little bit, but let's take it one step at a time. And building the consistency, I heard during one of your live keynotes when you came here and spoke at Cadre, kind of the Jerry Seinfeld mantra of, you know, don't break the chain or don't break the streak. And you kind of adopted that to don't miss twice in a row, that there's going to be times where you're going to fall off, you're going to mess up, you're going to miss something. But to immediately start, you know, building that consistency muscle again. You've talked a lot about physical environment, which I love. Talk to me about emotional environment and the people that are in your life and that, you know, if the five people you spend the most time with, tend to eat healthy and exercise regularly, it'll make it easier for you to do those things, whereas obviously the opposite would also be true. Yeah, I think I do generally agree with that Jim Rohn quote that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you know, we have different pockets of five that you spend time with at, you know, work or friends or family or whatever. But we do tend to soak up the habits of the people who are around us. And it's sort of like there's like a, I heard it described well the other day is kind of like the temperature in the room. And if you, if you walk into a room and you bring an ice cube in, it will melt until it reaches the temperature at the average temperature of the room if you bring in, you know, something. If you bring in like a hot plate that just came out of the microwave or the oven, it'll cool down until it reaches the temperature of the room. And your habits are kind of like that a lot of the time they reach the temperature of the room that you're in they reach the, the, the average of the people that you're around. So, you as best as possible want to be thoughtful about designing that environment too, you know, we like you said we talked about physical environment, but who you spend time with is largely a choice as well. And sometimes people resist this a little bit because they start to think oh I need to cut people out of my life or, you know, I need to start, you know, not hanging out with them or does that mean I need to get rid of family members or whatever. But I would say don't even worry about that part of it for now, instead just ask like who are the people that I aspire to be like or who is someone that when I'm around them, my best self tends to show up, and just focus on spending more time with them. You don't even have to think about spending less time with the other people it's kind of like plants, you know, like one plant that grows a little faster it crowds the others out. So, by spending more and more time with people who bring out your best self you kind of crowd out that other time naturally. And I think that you can look at this in a couple different ways like I said you've got your work bucket you've got your friends and family bucket. Maybe some other areas too. But you don't need a lot to start to feel a real benefit from this. But you do need some sense of community, I think you need some sense of like friendship, that's what really gets it to stick. If you're just trying to spend time around people, and you don't really care what they think, I don't know that it will have that big of an impact on your habits. So for example, if you join a gym, but you don't really care what the other people the gym think of you, then I don't know that that you're like oh I'm around people that work out all the time maybe that'll help me to be sort of need to build friendships with them. Like you need to say hi you need to like introduce yourself you need to get to know them, and then actually you care a little bit more about their opinion or you start to get to know them and soak up those habits a little more deeply. So, I think, yes the social environment really matters, but the reason it matters is because the expectations that people have of us, and we generally only care about the expectations of people that we respect or like and so on. So friendship plays a big role as well. I love that and I would guess that's probably why right before the pandemic hit the smaller kind of boutique. You know, orange theory and soul cycle and groups that instead of going to a big box gym where you're just one person kind of meandering around working out on your own. And instead you're actually joining a class where you've built a community. I'm sure that's one of the reasons those groups have been so successful and people getting results. I think that's one of the big secrets that CrossFit has going for it as well is that you know people will join a CrossFit gym and they start working out there and they thought they were just going to work out and you talk to him six months later and they're eating paleo and they bought a certain type of knee sleeves and weightlifting shoes like it's almost like a you know a religion or something like bring you in you pick up all these other things along the way. So that effect happens all over in life, you know like say you move into a new neighborhood, you walk outside on like Tuesday night and you see your neighbor like cutting their grass and you're like oh I need to mow the lawn I need to trim the hedges. Partially, you do that because it feels nice to have a clean lawn, but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you don't want to be the neighbor who's judged by everybody else, you know so it's the, it's the social expectation that gets you to stick to it. And I think the final point that I'll just add on this is that that social drive that sense of community that sense of social norms and the expectations of others. That's one of the strongest forces for getting a habit to stick for the long run. There are a lot of these other strategies that we talked about scaling it down two minute rule etc. Those are really good for getting a habit to start just let me make it easy for me to get off square one. But if you want to have it to last for a year or five years or 10 years or more. It's really, you almost never see that happening in isolation there's almost always if somebody sticking to something for a decade. They've got friends who are doing it to they get to know people in that industry or in that environment or in that area like there's there's a social connection that's a part of that, and that social fabric helps sustain habits for the long term. I love that. I think a lot of people put an over emphasis on on goals and half the Facebook memes out there and this next couple weeks leading up to New Year's will be about setting new goals and big giant goals. And I've heard you say something to the effect of, you know, focusing too much on goals. It can be a little bit misleading and oftentimes unhelpful. Can you clarify that because I agree 100%. Yeah, I mean, first of all, this is coming from someone who was very goal oriented, you know, like I got goals for all kinds of things and for many years set goals for, you know, for all types of stuff. But at some point I realized that it didn't a lot of those things I didn't achieve some of them I did, but many I didn't and so I'm like well obviously setting the goal is not the thing that's making the difference here because I set them for stuff that worked and stuff that didn't. And what I realized is that the ones that I achieved were things that I had a system for that I had a process for that had a collection of habits built around. And, you know, if you want to take like an athletics or a sports example. The goal for any team is to have the best score on the scoreboard at the end of the game. But if you spent the whole game looking at the scoreboard, you would never win. Meanwhile, you can actually imagine a team that doesn't look at the scoreboard at all, and just pull the focus is on what's going on in the court or on the field. And yeah, they, they actually might win. And so, in a sense, you always need the system, you don't necessarily need the goal. In fact, I would say that if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. The system will always deliver the outcome that it's designed for. And so, you can have whatever ambitions whatever lofty goals you want, if you're not running a system that is organized toward that is aligned with that outcome, you're not going to get the outcome. And so, I don't think goals are useless. I think they're good for setting a sense of direction. I think they're good for clarity. I think they're good as a filtering mechanism, you know, one of the most important things to succeed in any areas to say no to the distractions. And if you understand what your goal is clearly, it's easier to say no, it's easier to run that run new opportunities through that filter and say does this help me achieve my goal or not. And I can ignore it. And so, goals are helpful for all that stuff. But the system is what determines whether the outcome happens or not. And so, my argument is just that we tend to spend too much time talking about goals. We tend to spend too much time talking about outcomes, and not enough time talking about the process and the habits and the daily system that you need to be running to inevitably take yourself toward that outcome. I love that. And I love the way you just kind of described this binary filter of, hey, is this going to take me closer to reaching my goal or further away and if the answer is closer, then you do it. If the answer is further away, then you have to have the discernment and the discipline to be able to say no. I know that's something I've often struggled with I'm a self diagnosed people pleaser, and I like saying yes and I often over commit myself. I love that idea of getting great focus. Last question for you so if we're going to kind of tie everything together. So you kind of have this north star and you're saying more often than not you want to say, who is the person that I want to become. So not just saying I want to do this thing but who's the type of person that does this thing regularly. And as you slowly work back from that you create the processes in the systems and the environment that will allow yourself to do that most fluidly. Is there anything else you'd like to say just to kind of put a bow tie on and summarize all the wealth in atomic habits. So, I guess, yes I agree with that I like the idea of letting identity drive lead the way or kind of drive the car. It's really a little tricky like you may require a little experimentation to figure out what that identity should be your for you, because what you find is for some people their identity at some point the tighter you cling to one identity the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. So this is like a it's a cycle, it's a feedback loop you have to go through this you know, and so, you know a couple different examples, let's say, like a military example, a lot of people. In their service, they're like, man, my identity is I'm a soldier. That's like what I've built myself around that's who I am. And now suddenly I'm no longer serving and so like what am I, they feel like they lost their themselves. I had something that I felt similarly when my athletic career ended, you know for 17 years I was a baseball player. Now suddenly I'm not what am I you know this is what I spent every week working toward now what do I do. You know athletes feel some you know version of that. And so what I would say is you need to experiment a little bit with trying to find the principles or the values or the qualities of that role or position that you can carry with you for your whole life. To take the military example. No, technically you're not a soldier anymore, but there are a lot of things about being a soldier that you can still make part of your identity. I'm a good teammate I finish what I start I always you know prepare for my mission and so on. And those qualities preparation, you know, finishing what you start being responsible being a good teammate, you can apply those to anything you can play that to work you play that to family play that to friendship. And so if you take that and make that your core identity, then you start to see all kinds of ways that you can continue to build habits that foster that. And I think that the people who really become elite at their craft. They must have some version of that I don't know how they would describe it but like, if you take Tom Brady. It obviously obviously the identity is not to be a Super Bowl winning quarterback because if that was it. He could have stopped two decades ago, right it obviously is something more than that maybe that's part of it, but it must be something that needs to be about fulfilling his potential, or something he's got to have something there that's driving him that is an identity that he can keep returning to even after he wins the Super Bowl. And if you have something like that that can drive you it can become much more of a lifelong mission, or much more you can sustain that effort for a much longer period of time. And the results happen along the way, which is great, but it's not just about that thing. And so I think there needs to be a little experimentation with that but if you get that right. And you come across an identity that feels authentic to you that feels like it matches with your values and principles that feels like it's something you can transfer from position to position role to role industry to industry. Then you really have something special because you can just start building lifelong habits around it and it'll continue to carry you forward. And when you do that then everything's an alignment and everything swimming in the same direction so you eliminate a tremendous amount of friction when you create systems and processes and have habits that are in alignment with who you want to become so man that's terrific. It also makes things much it actually makes decision making easier. Like a lot of the time I think making people struggle to make important choices or hard choices, because they're torn they're like I see the benefit in this or I see the benefit in that like it's you know it's not that tough to wrestle with these trade offs, but people who have great clarity around the identity that they're trying to build around the type of person they want to be who are very. Yeah, who people who are very clear about what it means to be them they're self aware they're authentic. It's kind of easy for them to make those choices because like look that's not who I'm trying to be. There's nothing good about option B, but I don't care about that trade off as much, because that's not the identity I'm trying to build. So, in a sense, they kind of ultimately comes back to self awareness. In that sense like you need to be, you need to know what you want. And if you know what you want, then it becomes much easier to choose. Most people in life don't really know what they want they sort of know what they want. Like we know in a big picture of you I know that I would like to not have to worry about money or I want to be healthy or I'd like to have a family or whatever. But like they don't specifically know. And the more specific you can be about that. And the more you feel like it aligns with you authentically what you really want. The easier all those other decisions become the easier it becomes to choose which habits to build and how to design your system and all the other stuff that we talked about. I think that's the perfect exclamation point on this man. Thank you so much I can't thank you enough you know for your leadership your mentorship your friendship. If you're putting out if you ever have a formal fan club I'd like to nominate myself. I really appreciate your great work and always rooting for you and your continued success man so thank you so much for your time. That's awesome thanks Alan always pleasure to talk man. You got it brother have a great day. That was awesome. All right cool. Yeah, that's all I needed that was perfect. So you're working on a new book. I am. Yeah. And this this will this is kind of the research for it so you know where raise your game was how do you reach peak performance and now it's how do you sustain peak performance for long periods of time with without getting stagnant or burnt out so nice. Having a blast doing tons of these types of interviews and really digging in manuscripts do May 1 books should come out end of 2021 maybe early 2022. Boom look at you actually hitting deadlines and getting it out I got I'm supposed to get my second book in next fall and I'm like hey already don't feel great about it and we're a year away so. Keep keep riding the wave of this first one man because it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and it's so so exciting to see. I mean yeah thank you it's been fun I'm excited for the second one to it just takes me forever to write these so we'll we'll we'll keep keep hammering away on it it'll get done eventually. Most certainly well well if I can ever help you in any way you let me know. All right cool good luck with the book Alan thanks man appreciate it.