10 years and 1 hour

"The two timeframes that matter most in life are 10 years and 1 hour."​ - James Clear

For three years, James Clear published two articles per week. One came out on a Monday, the other on a Thursday. Each took him 20 hours to write.

Those articles generated $0 in revenue.

He wasn't measuring impact by immediate financial results. He had a 10 year vision:

To become a published author and entrepreneur selling products related to that writing.

He cared about the craft, too. He wanted to make beautiful work, in many senses of the word.

He secures a book deal three years into writing these weekly articles.

James figured it's fine to do an 'okay' job in most areas of your life, but there are a handful of activities across your life where 'good enough' is not 'good enough.'

The articles were one of those things. His book, Atomic Habits, was another.

His goal was to write the best book on habits ever written, an outcome that he couldn't simply stumble upon. He'd strive for it in the hope he'd achieve it.

James signed the book deal in November 2015.

He didn't have the capacity to spend 40 hours per week writing articles whilst writing a book, so he stops writing those articles and reverts to a short, weekly newsletter.

The first draft was due in November 2016, but he missed that deadline.

November 2017, two years later, the draft is still not complete.

The book comes out in October 2018, two years behind schedule.

It's an instant bestseller and goes on to become one of the most successful non-fiction books of all time. As James says, "It was six years of potential energy that was built up from trying to be useful every week."

I'm not reverse engineering a bestseller here. There's no guarantee that, if I list out James' process, you'd replicate his success. He caught lightning in a bottle and he worked damned hard at his craft to increase his surface area of luck.

But I would say that if he didn't go through the process he did, he wouldn't have written Atomic Habits.

Is he spending 40 hours per week writing, generating $0 revenue from that writing, for three years, if it isn't serving a bigger vision?

Does he publicly withdraw from the articles (that earned him the book deal in the first place) to write a book in private?

Does he miss the first book deadline, then the second, if he doesn't have this vision of creating the greatest book ever written on habits?

Up until the point he publishes the book, there'd be countless opportunities for an outside observer to question what James was doing.

They wouldn't question him now.

They wouldn't question him now.

Don't think about moving the needle until you've decided where it should point

the distinction. Even fewer think about where they want the needle to point.

As we enter 2026, now might be a good time to ask yourself, what do you want to achieve in the next season of your life?

Most meaningful outcomes take years to achieve.

What do you want this season to be about?

10 years is the vision – where do you want to go?

1 hour is the execution – what will you do today that will take you one step towards that goal.

Without clarity on each of these, we get lost. We jump from tactic to tactic, looking for short-term measures of success, never feeling like we're getting anywhere. Because we don't know what we actually want, we measure progress in months when the things worth achieving take years.

James Clear wouldn't have written Atomic Habits if he'd thought that way. He'd have stopped writing articles after a few months when they weren't making money. He'd have written a good book in one year, not a great book in three.

He was ambitious in his vision and humble in his daily work. He focused on the few things that mattered, not the many things that didn't. He didn't see that work pay off daily, but his instinct told him that it would.

He bet on himself.