The Real Reasons "Atomic Habits" Has Sold 20 million copies

Dissecting a Motivational Classic

Hello,

You may have read my books - 50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Success Classics - covering the landmark titles in these genres over the past 200 years.

So when ChatGPT was launched, I was interested to find out what it and similar LLMs (Claude, Bard, Gemini etc) considered the great titles.

My prompt was:

“What are the top 10 bestselling motivational, personal development, and popular psychology books of all time, with sales figures please?”

The responses were interesting.

Not surprisingly, titles like Think & Grow Rich (100 million copies), How To Win Friends and Influence People (30 million), and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (40 million) are on any kind of generative AI list. There’s also The Alchemist (65 million), The Power of Positive Thinking (20 million), The Secret (30 million) and You Can Heal Your Life (50 million).

An interesting one to appear is Pastor Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life, which sold 34 million copies even though it’s essentially a Christian book.

Who Moved My Cheese (1998), the cute fable about adapting to change, makes the lists because it was bought en masse by companies trying to help their staffs deal with reorganizations, mergers, and retrenchments. For years, a commentary I wrote on this book was the most viewed page on my website.

You have to be wary of the veracity of the LLM figures, particularly for the older books by authors like Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent People. After all, their titles have been around for 50-90 years, in multiple editions and often from different publishers. There is no single inventory to count every unit sale in every territory, and in all languages - although Nielsen BookScan comes close. Sales figures for the more recent titles are more likely to be exact, but even here publishers might be inflating figures.

All that said, one title that’s included on many of these AI lists took me by surprise.

Claude.ai

At no. 9, James Clear’s Atomic Habits edges out megasellers such as The Four Agreements, The Road Less Traveled, The Power of Now, and The 5 Love Languages. Those famous titles appear only on “11-20” lists of the top selling motivational/self-help books of all time. Yet they have been around a lot longer than Atomic Habits, which was only published in 2018.

But the mark of a classic is staying power, and when I looked a few days ago Atomic Habits was No. 1 on the Amazon Book Chart, despite being six years old.

What about Mark Manson’s huge The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***, you ask? That only comes in at no. 19 on my Claude list. Indeed, I’d wager that Atomic Habits will have a longer shelf-life than The Subtle Art, which seemed very much of a zeitgeist of books having swearwords in their titles, and may not transcend its times.

Atomic Habits Breakdown

But why, exactly, has James Clear’s book been more successful than every other personal growth/success book of the last few years?

Clear did have a successful blog and social following to build on, with over 200,000 subscribers at the time his book was published. But that doesn’t explain the people who’d never heard of him and still bought the book.

You could argue that Atomic Habits fitted in perfectly with the “productivity” obsession we’ve seen pre- and post-pandemic. But again, that alone is surely not enough to explain the Atomic Habits phenomenon. If it was, Cal Newport’s Deep Work or Digital Minimalism would be up there in the league tables - and they’re not.

Atomic Habits is well-written, engaging, and covers recent research into habits. Then again, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (2012) were these things too. Yet it has sold a fraction of Clear’s book.

I believe something else is at play which explains the success of Atomic Habits. It involves something old and archetypal.

Why so popular?

Consider Heraclitus’s famous statement (from Fragment 119):

Ethos anthropoi daimon

Ethos – character or habit

Anthropoi – man or person

Daimon – guiding spirit within

The customary translation is “Man’s character is his fate”.

What is “character” but the bundle of habits that make us who we are?

The ancients knew this, but the renaissance that “habits” has enjoyed in the modern personal development field arguably began with Stephen Covey’s classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). It continued at a lesser level in habit-focused motivational bestsellers such as The Slight Edge (Jeff Olson, 2005) and The Compound Effect (Darren Hardy, 2010).

With Atomic Habits James Clear identified the problem with the modern self-development field – that it is focused on goals and goal-setting.

Of course we need goals to motivate us. But we are setting ourselves up for failure by relying merely on the pull of a big goal. It can lead to overconfidence, unrealistic expectations, and unpreparedness all at the same time.

It is in fact the minutiae of daily actions and thoughts that are the real unit or currency of success. As Heraclitus suggested, look at a person’s habits and you see where they will go.

A Clear Method

James Clear’s method for success is simple but powerful. It begins with brutal honesty.

Admit who and what you are right now and be forensic about it, making a “habit scorecard” of every little action you take in the course of a day.

At the same time, develop an idea of your “ideal self”. You become what you are via the stories you tell yourself. Maybe you have talked yourself up too much, and don’t have the habits to support your rosy vision of the future. Maybe it’s the opposite: you set your bar too low given the quality habits you possess.

You don’t have to get too “moral” about your habit inventory. Just score your habits according to whether they are serving your ideal self, or not serving it. It’s a matter of skilful/not skilful action, not sin.

Clear draws on the science of habit formation involving cue, craving, response, and reward, as part of one feedback loop. But his basic process involves getting rid of the “bad” habits that don’t serve you and putting in place new habits that do.

Which brings us to one of the reasons Atomic Habits is so popular. It is not because it says anything new; rather, it taps into something as old as the hills.

The book exhibits the classic two-stage personal growth process that has been seen in virtually every religion and personal development program:

1)    A brutal assessment of where your life is right now, the disgust of which leads to…

2)    Building of a “new self” that’s in alignment with Truth or “who you really are”

Consider some parallels between the two-stage process of Atomic Habits and older philosophies and traditions:

Christianity:

Start by admitting you’re a sinner. At the same time, you’re a child of God and can walk in His light. You deserve more, and can even demand it. An example is the Prayer of Jabez from the Old Testament (1 Chronicles 4: 9-10): “Oh, that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory. That Your hand would be upon me, and keep me from evil so I won’t cause pain.”

Buddhism:

You are full of illusions and disturbing emotions based on a belief that you are a separate thing to the universe. Your belief in separateness has led to your current suboptimal existence and suffering. Through meditation and dharma practices you can gain a realization of oneness and the essential emptiness of phenomena. This realization is inherently joyful and results in spontaneous, positive actions that benefit others. You become inherently “successful” because you are not thinking about your “self”.

Stoicism:

You may think yourself a success, when in fact you’ve wasted your life on things which have no real meaning: climbing the greasy career pole to gain recognition, power, or money. Or you spend too much effort on the quest for pleasure, beauty, romance, nice objects, games etc. The result is that you, “only live a small part of your life.” (Seneca). Genuine success only happens when you start to trust what is timeless and immutable. What matters is knowing truth and living in accord with it, which automatically leads to appropriate action. Even your death can be “successful” in that you can face it without flinching.

And a modern example…

Alcoholics Anonymous:

Admit you’re a hopeless alcoholic, with all the pain that has caused you and others. Only by relying on AA friends and sponsors, and offering yourself to a Higher Power, can you transcend your addiction to become healthy, happy, and productive.

***

These approaches have been tested by time and by millions of people.

Great systems are: 1) simple to follow; and 2) they work - even if the practice or implementation is hard.

There is a over a century of research around habits going back to William James, but with Atomic Habits Clear distilled it to the point of joyous, well, clarity.

It is more direct and shorter than The Power of Habit, but has more scientific grounding than The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The Slight Edge or The Compound Effect.

Atomic Habits offers not just tips or strategies, but a “system”. Once you have a system, the results almost take care of themselves - which makes change seem easier and more attractive.

Its subtitle is An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, yet in the great tradition of the motivational genre, Atomic Habits offers an easier, quicker way to success. The blurb/promise on the cover is “Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results”.

Zeitgeist

There is another, deeper reason for the popularity of Atomic Habits: it evokes the digital age. “Atomic” triggers thoughts of Oppenheimer and Hiroshima, but the word also means billions of discrete entities which put together in a certain way makes something powerful. The major tech platforms and every kind of software that drives our world come down to millions of zeros and ones. Arrange them well and you get magic. Arrange a bunch of habits well, and you get a successful person.

The real reason Atomic Habits became massive is that it brought a technological edge to an ancient topic. It became the “self-technology” (Foucault’s term) manual for our time, capturing the pro-technology zeitgeist of the late 2010s.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was successful because it, too, captured the spirit of its times. The 90s were all about “effectiveness” and “efficiency” stemming from that decade’s fixation on management fads. It was the Harvard Business School approach to self-development.

Atomic Habits, in contrast, is about the minutiae of moments. You can become great by fitting in lots of positive little actions across the day while still allowing yourself to be online. Cal Newport’s Deep Work or Digital Minimalism, although arguably better books, ask too much of us. Restricting social media and doing 3-hour “deep work” sessions is just too hard for most people.

Of course, the “spirit of the times” (which most classic books express) is always a bit elusive and undefinable, at least while it’s happening. It’s the reason no-one can ever predict what cultural product will be a hit, and what will not. The success of any book is always a bit of a mystery.

At any rate, we don’t only want to read “hits”. We educate and entertain ourselves as much by the obscure tomes as the bestseller, and this mining for the underrated can be very satisfying.

On a recent trip to Paris I visited the Petit Palais, a beautiful art museum in the building constructed for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. I wish I’d noted down the artist of this installation/sculpture, but it certainly expresses the way books take us higher - to where, who knows - but it does feel like an elevation.

Thank you for reading.

Have you read Atomic Habits? Please add your thoughts on it in the Comments section below. If you’ve received this via email, click into the post on my Substack page to comment.

You can read all my previous posts here at Success on Earth.

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Thank you and best wishes,

Tom Butler-Bowdon

Author of the 50 Classics series (click to find out more)

Editor of the Capstone Classics (click on image for more info)

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