Top 200 James Clear Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “This a continuous process. There is no finish line. There is no permanent solution.”

— James Clear

52. “The score always takes care of itself.”

— James Clear

53. “Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. In a sense, a habit is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past.”

— James Clear

54. “What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?”

— James Clear

55. “Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”

— James Clear

56. “These are big questions, and many people aren’t sure where to begin – but they do know what kind of results they want: to get six-pack abs or to feel less anxious or to double their salary. That’s fine. Start there and work backward from the results you want to the type of person who could get those results. Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”

— James Clear

57. “Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.”

— James Clear

58. “The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.”

— James Clear

59. “Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.”

— James Clear

60. “The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.”

— James Clear

61. “Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.”

— James Clear

62. “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.”

— James Clear

63. “Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.”

— James Clear

64. “Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from 25 to 31 degrees. All the action happens at 32 degrees.”

— James Clear

65. “When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.”

— James Clear

66. “The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.”

— James Clear

67. “Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?”

— James Clear

68. “It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.”

— James Clear

69. “Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.”

— James Clear

70. “The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.”

— James Clear

71. “At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.”

— James Clear

72. “Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.”

— James Clear

73. “Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.”

— James Clear

74. “The effect of automating an old task or mastering a new skill can be even greater. The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.”

— James Clear

75. “Prime your environment to make future actions easier.”

— James Clear

76. “It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.”

— James Clear

77. “Periodic reflection and review are like viewing yourself in the mirror from a conversational distance. You can see the important changes you should make without losing sight of the bigger picture. You want to view the entire mountain range, not obsess over each peak and valley.”

— James Clear

78. “But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.”

— James Clear

79. “Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life.”

— James Clear

80. “As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

— James Clear

81. “Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments. The moment you decide between ordering takeout or cooking dinner. The moment you choose between driving your car or riding your bike. The moment you decide between starting your homework or grabbing the video game controller. These choices are a fork in the road.”

— James Clear

82. “It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

— James Clear

83. “I know of executives and investors who keep a “decision journal” in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.”

— James Clear

84. “True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.”

— James Clear

85. “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”

— James Clear

86. “Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide.”

— James Clear

87. “When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago – when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress – that makes the jump today possible.”

— James Clear

88. “Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.”

— James Clear

89. “The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.”

— James Clear

90. “This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.”

— James Clear

91. “One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.”

— James Clear

92. “When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.”

— James Clear

93. “When the consequences are severe, people learn quickly.”

— James Clear

94. “The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning. Focus on taking action, not being in motion. Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition.”

— James Clear

95. “The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.”

— James Clear

96. “It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.”

— James Clear

97. “WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones?”

— James Clear

98. “We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.”

— James Clear

99. “The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors.7 Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight. Some experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision.8 Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior.”

— James Clear

100. “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.”

— James Clear