James Clear is an American author, speaker, and entrepreneur best known for Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones (Avery, 2018), one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the past decade. Atomic Habits has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide and has been a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list for years. The book has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Atomic Habits frames behavior change not as a willpower problem but as a systems problem. Its central argument is that small habits, repeated daily and compounded over time, produce outsized results, and that the right approach is to design systems and environments that make good habits easier and bad habits harder. The book builds out the Four Laws of Behavior Change: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. It also introduces the idea of identity-based habits, where the durable shift is not in what a person does but in who they believe themselves to be.
Clear's jamesclear.com newsletter, 3-2-1 Thursday, reaches more than three million subscribers and is one of the most widely read self-improvement newsletters in the world. He has spoken to leadership teams at Fortune 500 companies, professional sports franchises including NFL, NBA, and MLB teams, and U.S. government agencies. His writing has appeared in Time, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and on TED.com.
Before Atomic Habits he built an audience through long-form essays on jamesclear.com covering behavioral science, habits, decision making, and continuous improvement, drawing on research from psychology, neuroscience, and complex systems. He continues to publish through the site and the newsletter and runs the Habits Academy, an online program for individuals and organizations applying his framework.
