554: 52.02 James Clear - Building habits in the right areas

NUGGET CONTEXT
James speaks about the criticality of us understanding our genes and personality (the deck of cards we are dealt with) and ensuring that we play a game that is conducive to our natural wiring rather than get to a canvas which requires us to deviate significantly from what comes to us as second nature. He also speaks about the explore-exploit trade-off in the way we could think about going broad versus going narrow in a certain area.
GUEST
James Clear is the Author of the book - Atomic Habits that has sold more than 1 Million Copies globally. He is the creator of The Habits Academy and runs the website jamesclear.com where he writes about habits and human potential. The central question he is trying to answer through his work is “How can we live better”. He has a weekly newsletter where he shares some of his ideas and this goes out to more than Half a Million subscribers who benefit from his thinking. To subscribe to his newsletter, you could just got to Jamesclear.com.
In our conversation we spoke about several elements that he has covered in the book. We first spoke about his journey and how he came to studying and researching habits. We then spoke about how we should think about building habits in the right areas. James says that we need to work hard on the things that come easily to us! We explore that in the context of transitions and relate that to the notion of keeping the identity small. We then dive into the notion of the plateau of latent potential which we all are likely to encounter when we get into a new domain. We also discuss how we can ensure that we don’t become slaves of habits and try to cultivate habits with awareness (something that we can learn from the Japanese train conductors!). We then go on to speak about the role of the environment in building habits and wrap up by talking about the notion of the gateway habit.
These ideas might help you convert your 2020 resolutions into habits that create the system for you to achieve your goals. Best wishes for the year ahead.
Published in Jan 2020.
HOST
Deepak is a Leadership Advisor and an Executive Coach. He works with leaders to improve their effectiveness and in helping them make better decisions specifically around organizational and career transitions. He currently runs Transition Insight (www.transitioninsight.com) and works with leaders to handle phases of transition thoughtfully. He has worked as an Operations Consultant with KPMG in UK, Strategy Consultant with McKinsey in the US and as a Leadership Consultant with EgonZehnder (a Swiss Leadership Advisory firm) where he helped companies recruit CEOs, CXOs and Board Members and worked on Leadership Development. Deepak is a certified CEO Coach and is an alumnus of IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad and London Business School. His detailed profile can be found at https://in.linkedin.com/in/djayaraman
OTHER GUESTS
1.Vijay Amritraj 2.Amish Tripathi 3.Raghu Raman 4.Papa CJ 5.Kartik Hosanagar 6.Ravi Venkatesan 7.Abhijit Bhaduri 8.Viren Rasquinha 9.Prakash Iyer 10.Avnish Bajaj 11.Nandan Nilekani 12.Atul Kasbekar 13.Karthik Reddy 14.Pramath Sinha 15.Vedika Bhandarkar 16.Vinita Bali 17.Zia Mody 18.Rama Bijapurkar 19.Dheeraj Pandey 20.Anu Madgavkar 21.Vishy Anand 22. Meher Pudumjee 23.KV Shridhar (Pops) 24.Suresh Naraynan 25.Devdutt Pattanaik 26.Jay Panda 27.Amit Chandra 28.Chandramouli Venkatesan 29.Roopa Kudva 30.Vinay Sitapati 31.Neera Nundy. 32.Deepa Malik 33.Bombay Jayashri. 34.Arun Maira 35.Ambi Parameswaran 36.OP Bhaat 37.Indranil Chakraborty 38.Tarun Khanna 39. Ramachandra Guha 40. Stewart Friedman 41. Rich Fernandez 42. Falguni Nayar 43. Rajat Gupta 44. Kartik Hosanagar 45. Michael Watkins 46. Matt Dixon 47. Herminia Ibarra 48. Paddy Upton 49. Tasha Eurich 50. Alan Eagle 51 Sudhir Sitapati.
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