introduction my story and the final day of my sophomore year of high school I was hit in the face with a baseball bat as my classmate took a full swing the bat slipped out of his hands and came flying toward me before striking me directly between the eyes I have no memory of the moment of impact the bat smashed into my face with such force that it crushed my nose into a distorted your shape the Collision sent the soft tissue of my brain slamming into the inside of my skull immediately a wave of swelling searched
throughout my head in a fraction of a second I had a broken nose multiple skull fractures and two shattered eye sockets when I opened my eyes I saw people staring at me and running over to help I looked down and noticed spots of red on my clothes one of my classmate took the shirt off his back and handed it to me I used used it to plug the stream of blood rushing from my broken nose shocked and confused I was unaware of how seriously I had been injured my teacher looped his arm around my shoulder
and we began the long walk to the nurse's office across the field down the hill and back into school random hands touched my sides holding me upright we took our time and walked slowly nobody realized that every minute mattered when we arrived at the nurse's office she asked me a series of questions what year is it 1998 I answered it was actually 2002 who is the president of the United States Bill Clinton I said the correct answer was George W bush what is your mom's name um I stalled 10 seconds past PTY I said casually
ignoring the fact that it had taken me 10 seconds to remember my own mother's name that is the last question I remember my body was unable to handle the rapid swelling in my brain and I lost Consciousness before the ambulance arrived minutes later I was carried out of school and taken to the local hospital shortly after arriving my body began shutting down I struggled with BAS functions like swallowing and breathing I had my first Cur of the day then I stopped breathing entirely as the doctors hurried to supply me with oxygen they also decided the
local hospital was unequipped to handle the situation and ordered a helicopter to fly me to a larger Hospital in Cincinnati I was rolled out of the emergency room doors and toward the helip pad across the street the stretcher rattled on a bumpy sidewalk as one nurse pushed me along while another pumped each breath into me by hand my mother who had arrived at the hospital a few moments before climbed into the helicopter beside me I remained unconscious and unable to breathe on my own as she held my hand during the flight while my mother rode
with me in the helicopter my father went home to check on my brother and sister and break the news to them he choked back tears as he explained to my sister that he would miss her eighth grade graduation ceremony that night after passing my siblings off to family and friends he drove to Cincinnati to meet my mother when my mom and I landed on the roof of the hospital a team of nearly 20 doctors and nurses sprinted onto the halip pad and wheeled me into the trauma unit by this time the swelling in my brain
had become so severe that I was having repeated post-traumatic seizures my broken bones needed to be fixed but I was in no condition to undergo surgery after yet another seizure my third of the day I was put into a medically induced coma and placed on a ventilator my parents were no strangers to this Hospital 10 years earlier they had entered the same building on the ground floor after my sister was diagnosed with leukemia at Age 3 I was five at the time my brother was just 6 months old after 2 and a half years of
chemotherapy treatments spinal taps and bone marrow biopsies my little sister finally walked out of the hospital happy healthy and cancer-free and now after 10 years of normal life my parents found themselves back in the same place with a different child while I slipped into a coma the hospital sent a priest and a social worker to comfort my parents it was the same priest who had met with them a decade earlier on the evening they found out my sister had cancer as they faded into night a series of machines kept me alive my par ands slept
restlessly on a hospital mattress one moment they would collapse from fatigue the next day would be wide awake with worry my mother would tell me later it was one of the worst nights I've ever had my recovery mercifully by the next morning my breathing had rebounded to the point where the doctors felt comfortable releasing me from the coma when I finally regained Consciousness I discovered that I had lost my ability to smell as a test a nurse asked me to blow my nose and sniff an apple juice box my sense of smell returned but to
everyone's surprise the act of blowing my nose forced air through the fractures in my eye socket and pushed my left eye outward my eyeball bulged out of the socket held precariously in place by my eyelid and the optic nve attaching my eye to my brain the opthalmologist said my eye would gradually slide back into place as the air seeped out but it was hard to tell how long this would take I was scheduled for surgery one week later which would allow me some additional time to heal I looked like I had been on the wrong
end of a boxing match but I was cleared to leave the hospital I returned hone with a broken nose half a dozen facial fractures and a bulging left eye the following months were hard it felt like everything in my life was on pause I had double vision for weeks I literally couldn't see straight it took more than a month but my eyeball did eventually R return to its normal location between the seizures and my vision problems it was 8 months before I could drive a car again at physical therapy I practiced basic motor patterns like
walking in a straight line I was determined not to let my injury get me down but there were more than a few moments when I felt depressed and overwhelmed I became painfully aware of how far I had to go when I returned to the baseball field one year later baseball had always been a major part of my life my dad had played minor league baseball for the Saint Louie Cardinals and I had a dream of playing professionally too after months of Rehabilitation what I wanted more than anything was to get back on the field but
my return to basball was not smooth when the season rolled around I was the only Junior to be cut from the vity baseball team I was sent down to play with the sofom malls on Junior vity I had been playing since Age 4 and for someone who had spent so much time and effort on the sport getting cut was humiliating I vividly remember the day it happened I sat in my car and cried as I flipped through the radio desperately searching for a song that would make me feel better after a year of self-doubt I
managed to make the vity team as a senior but I rarely made it on the field in total I played 11 Innings of high school vity baseball barely more than a single game despite my lackluster High School career I still believed I could become a great player and I knew that if things were going to improve I was the one responsible for making it happen the Turning Point came 2 years after my injury when I began college at Dennison University it was a new beginning and it was the place where I would discover the surprising
power of small habits for the first time how I learned about habits attending Dennison was one of the best decisions of my life I earned a spot on the baseball team and although I was at the bottom of the Rost stair as a freshman I was thrilled despite the chaos of my high school years I had managed to become a college athlete I wasn't going to be starting on the baseball team anytime soon so I focused on getting my life in order while my peers stayed up late and played video games I built good sleep
habits and went to bed early each night in the messy world of a college D I made a point to keep my room neat and tidy these improvements were minor but they gave me a sense of control over my life I started to feel confident again and this growing belief in myself rippled into the classroom as I improved my study habits and managed to earn straight is during my first year a habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly and in many cases automatically as each semester passed I accumulated small but consistent habits
that ultimately led to results that were unimaginable to me when I started for example for the first time in my life I made it a habit to lift weights multiple times per week and in the years that followed my 6'4 in frame bulked up from a feather weight 170 to a lean 200 lb when my sophomore season arrived I earned a starting role on the pitching staff by my junior year I was voted team captain and at the end of the season I was selected for the All Conference team but it was not until my
senior season that my sleep habits study habits and strength training habits really began to pay off 6 years after I had been hit in the face with a baseball bat flown to the hospital and placed into a coma I was selected as the top male athlete at Dennison University and named to the ESPN academic All America team and on honor given to just 33 players across the country by the time I graduated I was listed in the school record books in eight different categories that same year I was awarded the University's highest academic honor the
president's medal I hope you'll forgive me if this sounds boastful to be honest there was nothing legendary or historic about my athletic career I never ended up playing professionally however looking back on those years I believe I accomplished something just as rare I fulfilled my potential and I believe the concepts in this book can help you fulfill your potential as well we all face challenges in life this injury was one of mine and the experience taught me a critical lesson changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you're willing
to stick with them for years 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 maybe there are people who can achieve incredible success overnight I don't know any of them and I'm certainly not one of them there wasn't one defining Moment On my journey from medically induct coma to academic all American there were many it was a gradual Evolution a long series of small winds
and Tiny breakthroughs the only way I made progress the only choice I had was to start small and I employed this same strategy a few years later when I started my own business and began working on this book how and why I wrote this book in November 2012 I began publishing articles at James Clare Comm for years I had been keeping notes about my personal experiments with habits and I was finally ready to share some of them publicly I began by publishing a new article every Monday and Thursday within a few months this simple writing
habit led to my first 1,000 email subscribers and by the end of 2013 that number had grown to more than 30,000 people in 2014 my email list expanded to over 1 100,000 subscribers which made it one of the fastest growing newsletters on the internet I had felt like an imposter when I began writing 2 years earlier but now I was becoming known as an expert on habits a new label that excited me but also felt uncomfortable I had never considered myself a master of the topic but rather someone who was experimenting alongside my readers in
2015 I reached 200,000 email subscribers and signed a book deal with penguin Random House to begin writing the book you are reading now as my audience grew so did my business opportunities I was increasingly asked to speak at top companies about the science of habit formation Behavior change and continuous Improvement I found myself delivering keynote speeches at confer answers in the United States and Europe in 2016 my articles began to appear regularly in major Publications like time entrepreneur and fobs incredibly my writing was read by over 8 million people that year coaches in the NFL
MBA and MLB began reading my work and sharing it with their teams at the start of 2017 I launched the habits Academy which became the premier training platform for organizations and individuals interest in building better habits in life and work for Fortune 500 companies and growing startups began to enroll their leaders and train their staff in total over 10,000 leaders managers coaches and teachers have graduated from the habits Academy and my work with them has taught me an incredible amount about what it takes to make habits work in the real world as I put the
finishing touches on this book in 2018 James CA Comm is receiving millions of visitors per month and nearly 500,000 people subscribed to my weekly email newsletter a number that is so far beyond my expectations when I began that I'm not even sure what to think of it how this book will benefit you the entrepreneur and investor Naval revant has said to write a great book you must first become the book I originally learned about the ideas mentioned here because I had to live them I had to rely on small habits to rebound from my injury
to get stronger in the gym to perform at a high level on the field to become a writer to build a successful business and simply to develop into a responsible adult small habits helped me fulfill my potential and since you picked up this book I'm guessing you'd like to fulfill yours as well in the pages that follow I will share a step-by-step plan for building better habits not for days or weeks but for a lifetime while science supports everything I've written this book is not an academic research paper it's an operating manual you'll find wisdom
in Practical advice front and center as I explain the science of how to create and change your habits in a way that is easy to understand and apply the fields I draw on biology Neuroscience philosophy psych ogy and more have been around for many years what I offer you is a synthesis of the best ideas smart people figured out a long time ago go as well as the most compelling discoveries scientists have made recently my contribution I hope is to find the ideas that matter most and connect them in a way that is highly actionable
anything wise in these Pages you should credit to the many experts who preceded me anything foolish assume it is my error the backbone of this book is my four-step model of habit skew craving response and reward and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps readers with a psychology background May recognize some of these terms from operant conditioning which was first proposed as stimulus response reward by B F Skinner in the 1930s and has been popularized more recently as Q routine reward in The Power of Habit by Charles doig behavioral scientists
like Skinner realized that if you offer the right reward or punishment M you could get people to act in a certain way but while Skinner's model did an excellent job of explaining how external stimuli influenced our habits it lacked a good explanation for how our thoughts feelings and beliefs impact our Behavior internal states are moods and emotions matter too in recent decades scientists have begun to determine the connection between our thoughts feelings and behavior This research will also be covered in these pages in total the framework I offer is an integrated model of the cognitive
and Behavioral Sciences I believe it is one of the first models of human behavior to accurately account for both the influence of external stimuli and internal emotions on our habits while some of the language may be familiar I am confident that the details and the aplications of the four laws of behavior change will offer a new way to think about your habits human behavior is always changing situation to situation moment to moment second to second but this book is about what doesn't change it's about the fundamentals of human behavior the lasting principles you can rely
on year after year the ideas you can build a business around build a family around build a life around there is no one right way to create better habits but this book describes the best way I know an approach that will be effective regardless of where you start or what you are trying to change the strategies I cover will be relevant to anyone looking for a step-by-step system for improvement whether your goals Center on health money productivity relationships or all of the above as long as human behavior is involved this book will be your guide
