I want to be straight with you before we get into this.
I’m not writing this from a place of having my habits dialed in. I don’t have a perfect morning routine. I still make choices I’m not proud of. I still have days where I know exactly what I should be doing and choose the couch instead.
What I do have is a story — and enough distance from the worst of it to share what I’ve learned along the way.
Here’s what a typical day looked like for me at the peak of my restaurant years.
Wake up around one in the afternoon. Take an Adderall — not prescribed, bought the same way I bought everything else back then — and chase it with a shot or two of Jim Beam just to level out and get moving. Go to work. Drink through the shift. Some nights cocaine showed up, and that would fold into the evening too. Get off around eleven or midnight, head downtown to the bars where we knew the bartenders and half the room. Keep drinking. Keep going. Bars close at two-thirty. Somebody’s house. More of everything until four in the morning. Sleep. Wake up at one. Do it again.
That wasn’t every single night. But it was more the rule than the exception.
I share that not to shock you and not because I’m proud of it. I share it because if you’ve ever felt like your habits were so deep and so tangled that change felt genuinely impossible — I want you to know I’ve been there. Not in a motivational poster kind of way. In a real, lived, woke-up-and-took-a-shot-before-noon kind of way.
And I want you to know that change is possible. Not easy. Not linear. But possible.
Here’s what I’ve learned — from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, from Nir Eyal’s work, and from living it — about how habits actually work.
1. Your Habits Aren’t a Character Flaw — They’re a System That Made Sense Once
For a long time I thought my inability to build good habits was a me problem. Like there was something broken in my wiring that made me incapable of doing the things I knew I should be doing.
What I’ve come to understand — and what James Clear puts into words better than I can — is that habits aren’t random. They’re systems. And the system I had built during the restaurant years made a certain kind of sense for the life I was living. Late schedule, high stress, a culture where everyone around you was doing the same thing. The habits fit the environment.
The problem isn’t that I had bad habits. The problem is that habits don’t automatically update when your life changes. You have to deliberately dismantle them and build new ones — and nobody tells you that. You think leaving the environment is enough. It isn’t.
Clear writes that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. That hit me hard the first time I read it because I’d spent years setting goals and wondering why nothing was changing. The goals were fine. The system was still built for a different life.
If you’re struggling to build better habits right now, I’d ask you to stop blaming yourself for a minute. Look at your system instead. What is your current environment optimized for? Because whatever it’s optimized for — that’s what you’re going to keep producing.
2. Willpower Is a Dead End — Your Environment Is the Lever
I tried to white-knuckle my way out of bad habits for years. Decided I was going to be different. Powered through for a few days on motivation and determination. Then life happened, motivation ran out, and I was right back where I started — except now I felt worse about myself on top of it.
Here’s what I’ve learned: willpower depletes. It’s not a character trait, it’s a resource — and it runs out, especially when you’re tired, stressed, or emotionally worn down. Trying to build lasting habits on a foundation of willpower alone is like trying to drive cross-country on a quarter tank of gas. You might get somewhere. You won’t get there.
What actually works is changing your environment so that the right choice becomes the easier choice.
Nir Eyal talks about this in terms of friction. Every habit has friction — the effort it takes to start it. Bad habits usually have low friction. Good habits usually have high friction. The move is to deliberately flip that. Make the thing you want to do easier to start. Make the thing you’re trying to stop harder to access.
I’m not going to tell you I’ve mastered this. I haven’t. There are things in my environment right now that are working against the habits I’m trying to build, and I know it. But knowing it is different from where I was — which was just blaming myself over and over without ever looking at what the environment was doing to me.
Look at your environment honestly. What’s making the wrong thing easy? What’s making the right thing hard? Start there. Not with motivation. With design.
3. You Need a Cue — Or the Habit Has Nothing to Hold Onto
One of the things that surprised me most when I finally left the restaurant world behind is how lost I felt without a schedule — even a destructive one.
That cycle I described earlier was chaotic and unhealthy, but it had a rhythm. Wake at one, Adderall, shot, work, bars, after-hours, sleep. Repeat. Every step cued the next one. The structure was built in, even if the structure was killing me.
When that structure disappeared, I didn’t automatically fill it with better habits. I filled it with drift. And drift is where old patterns come back in through the side door.
Clear breaks every habit down into a loop: cue, craving, response, reward. The cue triggers everything else. Without a reliable cue, the habit never gets started — and most people trying to build new habits skip right over this and wonder why nothing sticks.
The practical version of this is what Clear calls habit stacking — attaching a new behavior to something that already happens consistently in your day. After I do this thing I already do, I will do the new thing. You’re borrowing an existing cue and using it to carry something new.
I’ve used this. It works. Not perfectly, not every time, but it works better than just deciding you’re going to do something and hoping the motivation shows up.
If a new habit keeps falling off — ask yourself what it’s attached to. If the answer is nothing, that’s probably your problem.
4. Missing Days Is Part of It — What Matters Is Coming Back
Here’s the one I needed to hear most, and maybe you do too.
I used to have an all-or-nothing relationship with habits. If I missed a day, the streak was broken, the attempt was a failure, and I’d spiral into the gap between who I was trying to be and who I actually was. That spiral usually ended with me doing the thing I was trying not to do — because what was the point anyway?
Clear calls this the “never miss twice” rule. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit going in the wrong direction. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is return.
That framing quietly changed something for me. Because I’m going to miss days. I know that about myself. The question isn’t whether I’ll miss — it’s whether I’ll let missing become the story.
Eleven years without a drink hasn’t been eleven years of perfect days. It’s been thousands of individual choices, a lot of them hard, some of them closer than I’d like to admit. What’s kept it going isn’t some superhuman discipline I found somewhere. It’s the return. Every time I’ve wanted to drift, the return.
The same principle applies to every habit I’m trying to build now. Soulstice. The gym. The money stuff. I miss days. I come back. I miss again. I come back again.
That’s not failure. That’s the process.
5. You’re Not Building Habits — You’re Building a Person
This is the thing I think about most when I think about why any of this matters.
The habits themselves — the workout, the writing, the routine — they’re not really the point. They’re votes. Every time you do the thing you said you’d do, you cast a vote for a version of yourself. Over time those votes accumulate into something that starts to feel like identity.
Clear puts it this way: every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
I’m casting different votes than I used to. Not always the right ones — I won’t sit here and pretend otherwise. I still make choices I’m not proud of. I still have days where I vote for the wrong version. But the direction is different than it used to be. And the awareness — knowing that each small choice is a vote — that awareness makes the choice feel like it matters even when nothing dramatic is happening.
You might be in the middle of a pattern right now that feels like it has too much momentum to stop. I’ve been in patterns that made mine look manageable by comparison. I’m not telling you it’s easy. I’m telling you it’s possible.
Start somewhere. Start small. Miss days and come back. Cast enough votes for the person you’re trying to become — and eventually, that person starts to show up.
I’m still building him.
Still climbing.
Built on the Climb.
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