How James Clear is writing his next book (2021) | Hacker News Reader

How James Clear is writing his next book (2021)

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60 pointsnyc11129 comments

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.

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.

I wrote a Python script (it's so shoddy and easy to recreate I won't even share) that will (1) look for definitions as words/expressions between asterisks (2) look for dependencies (words that should be defined beforehand) and (3) produce paragraph-paragraph graph -> minimum spanning tree -> toposort.

The plan is to take five-ish years of blog material that's nearly unreadable to people who haven't followed it from the beginning and produce ordered text.

This is a great idea. On similar lines, I want to extract “routines” out of advice books. Every time they mention, “each day [say your goal out loud, drink lemon water, journal]”, it would add that to the book’s dedicated knowledge base under “daily.txt”. And to your point of, the habits could be sorted and ordered by when they were introduced, what pre-reqs, etc. The goal would to “digest” a book into an actionable operations guide - scheduled in your life..

One of his articles helped me in a debate about a codebase once. There were two camps at the company. One camp believed that we should be looking to optimise the code we wrote by choosing faster options such as for loops over slower chain functions such as forEach (application was written in Typescript, I don't know if this is the case for all languages). The other camp classified these kinds of changes as micro optimisations. I belonged to the former. The code base was huge and the application was slow bordering on unusable.

I used the Dave Brailsford British Cycling analogy from Atomic Habits that the aggregation of marginal gains can result in big changes on the macro level. Or put in other words, one non-optimised function might not make much of a difference but lots of them in a massive code base with millions of lines most certainly does. My co-worker's response was that he was not sure that the analogy from cycling transferred over to coding but I could tell that it was at least giving him pause for thought.

In reality, there were many reasons for how slow that codebase was. There were most certainly bigger fish, but I still believe that choosing more optimal language options where possible would have helped.

>When you have a big concept in the back of your mind, it becomes a filter that everything you experience runs through

This is so true, to the point where sometimes you feel possessed by the concept and not the other way around. The concept harvests your human experience to make its way into the real world. It defines your notion of signal and noise, it restlessly samples patterns in the real world that might help its incarnation. Sometimes due to predisposition, part of the concept is hardware implemented which means you never really get to experience what it's like to live without this concept driving your life.

The concept carefully arranges your dreams, strikes you with overwhelming visions that feel more real that your clearest memories and skilfully crafts your personality.

For those who feel as though they are concept integrators, do not allow concepts to mistreat you. They don't belong to our world, they don't care about the totality of human experience, they operate on timescales far greater than that of our precious lives and our civilisation as a whole is still far too primitive to bear their throughput.

There must be a better tool for professional writers than Google Docs?!

I am not a professional writer, but among the paid tools I have used in the past, I find Scrivener to be pretty nice in helping me organize views. I however find its LaTeX support not very satisfactory, but probably that is not their main target market.

For me, it's vim editing latex files, with git for version control. Others might choose emacs as an editor, but the other decisions are pretty common in my field (physical science).

You haven't switched to Overleaf for collaborative editing yet?

Overleaf is not really suited for non-technical people, it's not even suited for technical people that are unfamiliar with latex. They could make it much better if you could annotate on the pdf instead for non-technical people and that these annotations (and or changes) get translated to the latex files so the author sees them in the right place as well.

Grandparent is a scientist who's familiar with latex.

Oh! Then he should give Overleaf a try. Be sure to split up the files so you're not working in the same document at the exact same time, this is sometimes problematic when pressing compile.

I don't think the final edition is going to be made by going to Export To PDF in Google Docs. He seems to be mostly using it as a paste dump, then refining it into chapters, dumping it down, formatting slowly. For that, Google Docs really seems as good as any, no?

I don't know. Google Docs is a linear tool for linear text, mostly. But the process you describe is anything but linear - it resembles a slow conversion from an unstructured mess to a final text. Intuitively, there seems to be a mismatch between that process and a classic word processor.

Working on this over at pagespace.app, looking for cofounders if anyone is interested! Notion-like writing experience is the goal with the ability to sell via subscription or per unit.

I’m not a professional, but I find Scrivener [1] invaluable. Having 600 pages of unstructured, unorganized text would be a nightmare for me.

[1] https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

I used Scrivener to write my two books:

https://jondouglas.dev/enough & https://jondouglas.dev/ptp

Scrivener is not so great for collaborating though. Nobody on Reedsy seemed to know about the tool from the editor perspective and all asked for Word/Google Docs/Pdf.

Just finished publishing a 600+ page book for a writer.

The collaboration features of Google Docs streamline work with a proofreader and editor better than anything else I’ve seen.

Author writes, editor / proofreader suggest changes, author approves.

All updates tracked and fairly easy to revert.

After editing, docs are exported to rtf and placed in indesign.

Google docs are intuitive and easier to use than ms word. No more sending files back and forth.

Haven’t seen a better process yet. Some editors still request a printed manuscript for them to put hand-written notes on ;)

That makes sense, however, that's already the final stages of the product. I have my doubts that Google Docs is the best choice for the creation of the first draft, though. Once you have that, everything that comes after that is surely in good hands with a traditional word processor, and as you point out, the strength of Google Docs over Word etc. lies in its collaborative abilities.

I’m using Github to write mine.. It’s acessible from all devices and has markdown rendering out of the box.

Working on an academic paper in LaTeX at the moment. I've got this feeling in the back of my head that just trying to produce a work fully from my own head seems inefficient. Why not just throw it up on github, then post it here? In the very least all my little grammatical errors would be quickly highlighted.

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