If you have 3,000,000 newsletter subscribers and sell more than 20,000,000 books, you know something about writing.

Yes, I am talking about everyone’s favorite habit daddy, James Clear.

You know him as the habits guy, but did you know that in 2010, he was making a living from creating niche sites and apps? You can see him talk about it in the 2010 version of his blog on Archive.org.

What I want to know is, how the hell do you go from making niche sites to writing a book so popular that YouTubers can make viral videos explaining what’s inside the book? Ali Abdaal’s video,Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results — Atomic Habits by James Clear, has over 3,000,000 views.

Then I found James Clear laying out his process for better writing in the forward he wrote for Scott Young’s book Ultralearning.

Inside, James Clear lays out the process he followed to transform his writing over a two-year period from 2013 to 2015. Oh yeah, and 2015 is the year he signed his book. Coincidence? Unlikely.

Here’s the 5 step process James Clear used to master writing used

1. Follow in the footsteps of giants

He begins this process by learning from those who came before him. James Clear did this by examining other popular bloggers and authors so he could make a map of what he needed to do to become a successful writer.

If you’re going to walk up Everest, don’t attempt a new route. You’re going to follow the well-trodden path laid by countless others before you and see if you can go the distance yourself.

2. Go all in

He went full-time as a writer almost immediately, saying, “aside from a few freelance projects to pay the bills, the vast majority of my time was spent reading and writing.” We can assume he was also able to support himself from the niche sites and apps that he’d created.

Author Cal Newport recently talked on his podcast about excellence taking 10 years for any endeavor, but especially creative ones. But when people achieve greatness sooner than that, it’s typically because they condense ten years of effort into a shorter time frame. This seems to be the path that James Clear has taken.

If we look at his whole process from 2013 to the publication of Atomic Habits in 2018, it’s five years of dedicated singular effort. That’s only possible because he went all in as soon as he could.

3. Practice. Practice. Practice.

2 essays per week written on a Monday and a Thursday. That was Clear’s schedule, and it led to 150 essays written over the next two years. If you’re going to get better at something, you have to do the thing. Reading books about writing only helps if you then take that information and apply it in practice. Simply reading but never putting your fingers on the keyboard doesn’t count.

I also love that this shows the benefit of long-term progress rather than fulfilling short-term goals. For the maths whizzes among us, you’ll know two articles a week for two years should be 208 essays. But at 150, that’s either taking 14 weeks of a year from his schedule or missing a week here and there.

It’s likely a mixture of both but the key is, long term progress is what matters, not punishing yourself with a weekly schedule.

4. Break down the skill

This is where the man known for his systems comes in. I’ll quote it to you:

“I systematically broke down each aspect of writing articles — the headline, the introductory sentence, the storytelling, and more — and put together a spreadsheet filled with examples of each segment. Then I set about testing and refining my ability to perform each small aspect of the larger task.”

You need to get your reps in if you want to improve. But if you aren’t also focussing on improving your quality with each rep, you might find you start moving sideways. This actually happened to me when I wrote every day for 270 days but wasn’t focused on improving. More often than not, I was showing up and phoning it in. Commit to quality.

5. Hungrly pursue feedback

For the first 10,000 subscribers, he emailed every single subscriber, asking for feedback on his writing. That’s… a lot. I wish he would have said how many people replied, but even if it’s 1 in 10 who sent a reply, that’s 1,000 pieces of feedback from your target audience on what’s working for them and what isn’t.

Without feedback, you’re in the dark. You’re guessing. You’re trying to read someone’s facial expression by looking at the back of their head. With feedback, you can get a clear sense of what you need to do next to get where you want to go.

Takeaways

James Clear commits. That’s the biggest takeaway from this. He commits to becoming a better writer and then spends years systematically improving.

Commit to craft. Commit to quality. Commit to the long term.

P.S. This is why I’m building the Slow Writers Club — a paid community for writers, podcasters, and solopreneurs dedicated to craft, quality, and long-term projects.

Also published this week:

​How I Used Reddit To Sneak On to Page 1 of Google​

​7 Regrets From 7 Years as a Solopreneur​

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Much love from Scotland,