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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy to think it has already been 4 years since he released this book. I read it when it first came out and thought it was life-changing. Then I started to read other habit books and realized the ideas are the same, just his writing was more practical than academics.

I then started to read old self-help from the 1800s/1900s and realized the format was pretty similar(think Orson Swett Marden) of chapters related around real-life stories of success to drive the points home.

I'm excited to see what he comes up with next. He's a great writer. I hope the dilemma of being a #1 NYT best seller doesn't prevent him from continuing to author books regardless of how good they are. In other words, I hope he breaks out of the "habits guy" persona as he has much more great material to write books about.

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James Clear is an incredible marketer. I blogged about the same stuff ten years ago and read books covering all the same material at the time as well. The only stuff I actually learned from James Clear was a few mnemonics, i.e., there were a few times he rephrased existing knowledge in a way that was easier to remember.

Mostly, though, he is just fantastic at marketing. He's a good writer, but that's not the thing to learn from him, in my opinion. He has email lists, a podcast strategy -- I forgot the rest but he gets deep into it.

+10 to this. I would actually recommend Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg (whose research is referenced to in Atomic Habits) as a more complete book with regards to this topic.

Seconded. The approach is very readable and also happens to be from an academic perspective, as BJ Fogg is a Stanford professor of psychology. I also liked the list of suggested potentially useful habits at the back of the book.

I was subscribed to his newsletter for a while but his style just didn't click for me, it felt kind of trite.

[EDIT: This comment is wrong, and can't be deleted; I misremembered James Clear as Scott Young, apologies.] On the one hand, most of Clear's writing is uncontroversial and easy-to-read (which is why Atomic Habits took off versus other habit books, as another commenter wrote). However, I think a lot of his success comes from his past moments of some controversy. The MIT challenge/the language learning challenges were a bit controversial due to sowing doubt, but earned [Scott Young] a lot of clout.

Are you talking about someone else like Scott Young?

Yes, thanks for the catch. I made a mistake, and will edit the comment to correct.

> chapters related around real-life stories of success to drive the points home

I’m so torn on this. Because this is the fluff of (American) business books. The endless stories, all suffering from survivorship bias, unnecessarily inflating the book. But sometimes, a good story helps.

One of my favorite books about running a small software company is "Rework" from the 37signals guys. I also read "Getting Real", which came before, is kinda the same book plus stories.

I enjoyed Rework without the stories a lot more.

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