Top 200 James Clear Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.”

— James Clear

152. “The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.”

— James Clear

153. “Once we realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy. We know which types of opportunities to look for and which types of challenges to avoid. The better we understand our nature, the better our strategy can be.”

— James Clear

154. “You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.”

— James Clear

155. “Each book you read not only teaches you something new, but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. As Warren Buffet says ‘That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest’.”

— James Clear

156. “Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.”

— James Clear

157. “The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits – cue, craving, response, and reward – and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps.”

— James Clear

158. “At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.”

— James Clear

159. “Doing the right thing is easy. After all, when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.”

— James Clear

160. “Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.”

— James Clear

161. “Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.”

— James Clear

162. “It’s better to start as a fool and learn from your mistakes than to fake being a genius and ignore your errors.”

— James Clear

163. “I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, “What would a healthy person do?” All day long, she would use this question as a guide. Would a healthy person walk or take a cab? Would a healthy person order a burrito or a salad? She figured if she acted like a healthy person long enough, eventually she would become that person. She was right.”

— James Clear

164. “And I knew that if things were going to improve, I was the one responsible for making it happen.”

— James Clear

165. “In our data-driven world, we tend to overvalue numbers and undervalue anything ephemeral, soft, and difficult to quantify. We mistakenly think the factors we can measure are the only factors that exist. But just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing. And just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.”

— James Clear

166. “Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level. Whatever your logical reasons are for taking action, you only feel compelled to act on them because of emotion. In fact, people with damage to emotional centers of the brain can list many reasons for taking action but still will not act because they do not have emotions to drive them. This is why craving comes before response. The feeling comes first, and then the behavior.”

— James Clear

167. “Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.”

— James Clear

168. “Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one.”

— James Clear

169. “In this way, the process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.”

— James Clear

170. “Biological differences matter. Even so, it’s more productive to focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential than comparing yourself to someone else. The fact that you have a natural limit to any specific ability has nothing to do with whether you are reaching the ceiling of your capabilities. People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.”

— James Clear

171. “Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.”

— James Clear

172. “No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off. Unlike an implementation intention, which specifically states the time and location for a given behavior, habit stacking implicitly has the time and location built into it.”

— James Clear

173. “People think I work hard but I’m actually really lazy. I’m just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back.”

— James Clear

174. “Extroversion, for instance, can be tracked from birth. If scientists play a loud noise in the nursing ward, some babies turn toward it while others turn away. When the researchers tracked these children through life, they found that the babies who turned toward the noise were more likely to grow up to be extroverts. Those who turned away were more likely to become introverts.”

— James Clear

175. “Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past.”

— James Clear

176. “If you show up at the gym five days in a row – even if it’s just for two minutes – you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re not worried about getting in shape. You’re focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.”

— James Clear

177. “If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed what James calls, “Plateau of Latent Potential.” When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success.”

— James Clear

178. “Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.”

— James Clear

179. “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. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in.”

— James Clear

180. “Furthermore, it’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. It’s easy to train when you feel good, but it’s crucial to show up when you don’t feel like it – even if you do less than you hope. Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.”

— James Clear

181. “This process, known as Pointing-and-Calling, is a safety system designed to reduce mistakes. It seems silly, but it works incredibly well. Pointing-and-Calling reduces errors by up to 85 percent and cuts accidents by 30 percent. The MTA subway system in New York City adopted a modified version that is “point-only,” and “within two years of implementation, incidents of incorrectly berthed subways fell 57 percent.”

— James Clear

182. “Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time.”

— James Clear

183. “Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere.”

— James Clear

184. “Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.”

— James Clear

185. “Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire.”

— James Clear

186. “Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.”

— James Clear

187. “We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe.”

— James Clear

188. “The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards.”

— James Clear

189. “If someone has the courage to admit they were wrong, you should have the grace to give them credit for admitting it. Rubbing it in encourages them to never admit being wrong again.”

— James Clear

190. “There wasn’t one defining moment on my journey from medically induced coma to Academic All-American; there were many. It was a gradual evolution, a long series of small wins and tiny breakthroughs. The only way I made progress – the only choice I had – was to start small.”

— James Clear

191. “You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.”

— James Clear

192. “Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.”

— James Clear

193. “Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”

— James Clear

194. “Sometimes a habit will be hard to remember and you’ll need to make it obvious. Other times you won’t feel like starting and you’ll need to make it attractive. In many cases, you may find that a habit will be too difficult and you’ll need to make it easy. And sometimes, you won’t feel like sticking with it and you’ll need to make it satisfying.”

— James Clear

195. “Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results? I think you would.”

— James Clear

196. “One of my readers and his wife used a similar setup. They wanted to stop eating out so much and start cooking together more. They labeled their savings account “Trip to Europe.” Whenever they skipped going out to eat, they transferred $50 into the account. At the end of the year, they put the money toward the vacation.”

— James Clear

197. “Whenever you’re looking to improve, you can rotate through the Four Laws of Behavior Change until you find the next bottleneck. Make it obvious. Make it attractive. Make it easy. Make it satisfying. Round and round. Always looking for the next way to get 1 percent better.”

— James Clear

198. “In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.”

— James Clear

199. “The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.”

— James Clear

200. “If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.”

— James Clear