James Clear
American author and habits writer, born 1986
90 quotes.
Quotes by James Clear
- Life gets easier when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control.
- Life is short. And if life is short, then moving quickly matters. Launch the product. Write the book. Ask the question. Take the chance. Be thoughtful, but get moving.
- Make it easy to do what matters and hard to do what doesn’t.
- Maturity is learning how to start when you feel like procrastinating and learning how to listen when you feel like talking.
- Never ignore an important truth merely because of the amount of work it would take to accept it.
- New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.
- Procrastinating on something important is choosing to delay a better future.
- Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
- Recovery is not negotiable. Make time to rest, rejuvenate, and recover now or make time to be sick, injured, and exhausted later.
- Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour. You don’t have to do it all today. Just lay a brick. That’s how you build an empire.
- Simplicity before understanding complexity is ignorance. Simplicity after understanding complexity is genius.
- Study as if you know nothing. Work as if you can solve anything.
- Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
- The anxiety of worry is almost always worse than the actual consequences. Stop worrying and start doing.
- The days can be easy if the years are consistent. You can write a book or get in shape or code a piece of software in 30 minutes per day. But the key is you can’t miss a bunch of days.
- The desire to belong often overpowers the desire to improve.
- The events of your past are fixed. The meaning of your past is not.
- The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
- The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged. The growth mindset makes you concerned with improving.
- The more things you have, the more things you have to manage. Simplicity isn’t merely cheaper, it’s easier.
- The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
- The most useful form of patience is persistence. Patience implies waiting for things to improve on their own. Persistence implies keeping your head down and continuing to work when things take longer than you expect.
- The pain of inaction stings longer than the pain of incorrect action.
- The people who stick with things for years and never stop almost always win the race.
- The quality of your life depends on the quality of your habits.
- The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading.
- The secret is not to find the meaning of life, but to use your life to make things that are meaningful.
- The secret to winning is learning how to lose. That is, learning to bounce back from failure and disappointment — undeterred — and continuing to steadily march toward your potential. Your response to failure determines your capacity for success.
- The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.
- Top performers make mistakes just like everyone else. The difference is that they get back on track faster than most.
- Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.
- We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
- What looks like skill is often persistent revision.
- When a situation is within your control, take action. When a situation is outside your control, make preparations.
- Working hard is important, but working on the right thing is more important. A great strategy can deliver exponential results.
- You can create a lot of meaning in your own life by helping someone else do something that is meaningful to them.
- You can win a lot in life just by being the last one to give up.
- You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
- You don't have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.
- You don’t need an easier life, but rather an attitude of perseverance. Attitude precedes outcome.