James Clear
34 statements across 1 episodes · 17 bullish · 0 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jan 4, 2021 by James Clear · said 25 times in 8 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: James Clear's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Morgan Housel (13), Ted Seides (6), Sahil Bloom (4), Chad Hutchinson (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 13 mentions in 1 episode
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about James Clear, oldest first
Jan 4, 2021
Jan 4, 2021 positive
James Clear: Side business funded initial year-long audience growth focus
“One of the other business ideas that I was working on never made a lot of money, but it made enough that I could pay my bills. And so that was running on the side as I started JamesClear.com. And so I didn't need to make any money for the first year from it. A…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Clear: Commitment devices work by imposing an immediate cost on inaction
“What you've done is you haven't made the habit easier. It's still just as hard to go for a run, but you have made it more attractive. You have simultaneously made it more attractive to get up and go for a run. And less attractive to press snooze and sleep in. …”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Jan 4, 2021 neutral
Jan 4, 2021
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Clear: A habit must be established before it can be improved
“And I think that this is like a deep truth about habits that people often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize it into something more.”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Clear: Working out preserved his business through early entrepreneurial volatility
“And so much so that I almost feel like if I didn't work out, I don't even know that I would have a business anymore because I think the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship, especially those early years, it just would have got to me too much.”
Jan 4, 2021
Clear adapts sentence formats from books to generate new ideas
“Whenever I'm reading, or even just in daily life conversation, it's usually books or conversation in the two places that most of the ideas come out of, and I'll read a sentence that I'm like, oh, that's a good point. I kind of like that, and then I'll try to e…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Jan 4, 2021
James Clear aims to post one tweet daily to test newsletter ideas
“My only objective with Twitter is I try to share one tweet a day. I don't always do it. I try to send one a day and it's a way for me to get feedback and see like, oh, what resonates with people or, you know, what doesn't. So that's like one way to potentially…”
Jan 4, 2021
Clear: Controlling strategy and habits maximizes outcomes against uncontrollable luck
“What are the main levers or pillars of living a good life or of like driving our results in life, and I think habits are certainly one of them. I think Luck and randomness is certainly another piece. And then I think if we put a third one in, we would probably…”
Jan 4, 2021
James Clear: Choosing what to consume directly shapes your future thoughts
“Almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume. And so when you are choosing Who to follow on Twitter or Instagram or whatever. When you're choosing what books to read, what news station to watch, or what articles to read, you are choos…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Clear: Creators should never hoard ideas and lead with their best
“Every interaction, you should always lead with the best idea that you have at the time... Never save your best idea for the next week. And I think that idea of like never save your best thing, always send it out to the audience. That kind of serves you well. L…”
Jan 4, 2021
Publishing twice weekly for three years yielded Clear's book deal
“And then for the next three years, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday. And that was really the habit that led to the growth of the site, that led to the growth of the business, that ultimately led to the book deal that became Atomic Habits.”
Jan 4, 2021
Clear: Working backward from ideal outcomes succeeds far more than conventional planning
“Most people do not work backwards from magic. They work forwards from the status quo. They work forwards from the desires of other people. They work forwards from the expectations of society. But if you really know what you want, and you think about the most m…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Clear: Writing weekly on a topic for years makes one an expert
“You can become an expert by writing about something every week, because once you get two or three years in, It's like, yeah, actually, it turns out there are very few people who've written a hundred articles on habits, and so you learn a lot along the way”
Jan 4, 2021
James Clear: Grew subscriber base from 2,000 to 200,000 in two years
“When I started, there was a guy who had a popular fitness website and his audience, when I first came across him, he had like 20,000 subscribers and I had like 2000. So his audience, 10 times the size of mine. Two years later, his audience is about 20,000 subs…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
James Clear: Atomic Habits worked because low price points scale infinitely
“Atomic habits was the first thing that I ever sold that felt like this is in my wheelhouse. I'm good at doing it. I like doing it. I like that. It's a low price point and it's really accessible. It can scale essentially infinitely.”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
James Clear: Public writing offers far higher leverage than email communication
“Every time you spend a keystroke on an email, that's a keystroke that is only being sent to one person that if you had chosen to use that keystroke, writing a book or writing a tweet or writing an article, you could have reached 10,000 or a 100,000 or a millio…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
James Clear: Visualizing progress via habit tracking drives consistency
“You need ways to visualize your progress because one of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is the feeling of progress. And if you keep making it, you have every reason to continue. And so a habit tracker is a good way to encourage yourself to do th…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Clear: Atomic Habits offers a toolkit rather than life prescriptions
“I've tried very hard to not make the book like that. It's not my job to tell you how to live your life. And it would be ridiculous to think that I could do that well, because I don't know your circumstances, don't know your priorities and all kinds of other st…”
Jan 4, 2021
James Clear: Core research method is 'curating the curators' for consensus
“For me, the best strategy that I have so far is to essentially curate the curators. So I try to find people who are trusted sources in each domain, and then I use them as my proxy to say they're going to act as my experts, and if they say this is more or less …”
Jan 4, 2021
Jan 4, 2021
Clear lived on $10,000 in savings for six months post-MBA
“Well, I had saved up 10,000 dollars. And so I lived on that for the first six months. And I was like, I'll just see if I can figure out a way to make this work. I had to take freelance jobs and stuff to get by for the first like year and a half. It really wasn…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Jan 4, 2021
Jan 4, 2021 positive
Jan 4, 2021
James Clear: Success rarely stems from one factor, but failure can
“Success is rarely the result of one thing, but failure can be. So Sleeping eight hours a night is not going to make you successful on its own, but not sleeping at all can make the next day a failure. And so to say that it's the most important habit in my life …”
Jan 4, 2021
Clear: Major life choices are recurring processes, not one-time decisions
“I used to view those more as like a before and after choice. You make it once and then you're done. But actually all of those things are processes, not decisions. They're cycles that you go through. And so to know what you want also means to continually revisi…”
Jan 4, 2021 positive
James Clear: Creators must prioritize volume before intensity early on
“Well, I think you need to focus on volume before intensity. And what I mean by that is early on, it's kind of like in the gym. If you just roll into the gym the first day, and you try to squat 500 pounds, it's not going to go very well. But if instead, you jus…”
Jan 4, 2021
James Clear: Meta-level habit and strategy articles resonated most with early readers
“Whenever I would write about a more broad principle or my ideas around habits or decision-making and making better choices or strategy, these kind of more meta level things. Those articles did better and people resonated with them more.”