The Practice Ground | A Self-Improvement Podcast with Ken Li and Kari Watterson
Sep 4, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min · 11 segments
What if struggling to stick with a habit isn't only about willpower or discipline — but how well the habit has been designed? In this episode of *The Practice Ground*, Ken and Kari explore James…
Kari WattersonHost
Ken LiHost
Do you have any sense of why, Carrie? Do you think, you know, for you, what kind of impact did it make? And I'm curious why you might think it's such a, everyone wants to read this book.
I think the fact that it's one of the top selling, 100 top selling books of all time is really fascinating because I think it says, it speaks deeply to what we are all seeking.
And I think it's because when we recognize that we're struggling with some aspect of our lives or multiple aspect of our lives, And we recognize that there's behaviors that we're either doing that we'd like to stop doing or do less of, or we recognize there's behaviors that we'd like to start doing and we're just having a hard time either starting or sticking with it or following through with something.
It feels almost like for many of us, we have this awareness that building better habits and breaking habits that aren't serving us will actually help us lead a more satisfying life, more of the life that we actually wanted to be living.
But there is maybe for many of us a disconnect of A, how to start it or how to keep going, and then actually learning to design habits in a way that help us move our life in the direction, overall direction that we'd like to go.
So I think that that's probably one of the reasons why I guess that it would be one of the top bestsellers and translated in multiple languages throughout the world, because I think it maybe is a human quest, not just an American quest or a European, right? I think we're all trying to figure out how we can somehow have a little bit more control over our behavior so that we can start living more in alignment with what our mind desires.
What are your thoughts? I mean, James Clear called this a universal quest, right? Like habits are universal and they're very specific to each one of us, even though habits are we all want to either create great habits or break bad habits.
And so in his own words, he thinks this is a best seller because he says there's a lot of how to books that are really what he calls them, what to books.
And James Clear spent years at least two years writing and about habits and taking his time crafting what he thought was the best book on the topic and making it a how-to so it's very accessible and now he actually has a workbook to go along with it but i think this is one of those books where on the practice ground You're going to love this book because it just lends itself to putting into practice the principles we're going to learn about today, but that he has in his book.
If I can say and admit to some, everybody else in the audience would carry secretly admitted to me.
When we started the podcast, there was a goal that if we got to be so big, we really don't need to be so big, but who her guest she would want to interview.
Carrie, you know who that guest is you'd want to interview, right? Once we became famous, who is that guest you'd want to interview? Oh, absolutely.
Do you have any sense of why, Carrie? Do you think, you know, for you, what kind of impact did it make? And I'm curious why you might think it's such a, everyone wants to read this book.
I think the fact that it's one of the top selling, 100 top selling books of all time is really fascinating because I think it says, it speaks deeply to what we are all seeking.
And I think it's because when we recognize that we're struggling with some aspect of our lives or multiple aspect of our lives, And we recognize that there's behaviors that we're either doing that we'd like to stop doing or do less of, or we recognize there's behaviors that we'd like to start doing and we're just having a hard time either starting or sticking with it or following through with something.
It feels almost like for many of us, we have this awareness that building better habits and breaking habits that aren't serving us will actually help us lead a more satisfying life, more of the life that we actually wanted to be living.
But there is maybe for many of us a disconnect of A, how to start it or how to keep going, and then actually learning to design habits in a way that help us move our life in the direction, overall direction that we'd like to go.
So I think that that's probably one of the reasons why I guess that it would be one of the top bestsellers and translated in multiple languages throughout the world, because I think it maybe is a human quest, not just an American quest or a European, right? I think we're all trying to figure out how we can somehow have a little bit more control over our behavior so that we can start living more in alignment with what our mind desires.
What are your thoughts? I mean, James Clear called this a universal quest, right? Like habits are universal and they're very specific to each one of us, even though habits are we all want to either create great habits or break bad habits.
And so in his own words, he thinks this is a best seller because he says there's a lot of how to books that are really what he calls them, what to books.
And James Clear spent years at least two years writing and about habits and taking his time crafting what he thought was the best book on the topic and making it a how-to so it's very accessible and now he actually has a workbook to go along with it but i think this is one of those books where on the practice ground You're going to love this book because it just lends itself to putting into practice the principles we're going to learn about today, but that he has in his book.
If I can say and admit to some, everybody else in the audience would carry secretly admitted to me.
When we started the podcast, there was a goal that if we got to be so big, we really don't need to be so big, but who her guest she would want to interview.
Carrie, you know who that guest is you'd want to interview, right? Once we became famous, who is that guest you'd want to interview? Oh, absolutely.
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