*James Clear poses with his bestseller, Atomic Habits*

James Clear’s Atomic Habits is an absolutely monumental nonfiction bestseller. If you’ve only bought one nonfiction book in the last few years, there’s a good chance Atomic Habits is it.

The book is a remix of the work of countless others who’ve researched the psychology of habit formation. Clear is not sneaky about this at all and does a superb job of citing his sources.

Here are some of his biggest influences.

BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits

The premise of Atomic Habits is similar to BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits. Both are about how small habits can transform your life. Clear also writes about Fogg’s concept of habit stacking, which is when you link a new habit you’re trying to form to an established one.

Habits as compound interest

What good are little habits? Clear says these small actions create compound interest over time, just like small investments can reap huge rewards over decades. This concept is popular in lots of writing about habits, for instance, the long-running blog Zen Habits.

Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit

One of the most important sources for Atomic Habits is Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. Duhigg broke habit formation into three steps: cue, routine, and reward.

Clear took these elements and transformed them into cue, craving, response, and reward. He kept the name “habit loop.”

Clear then presented his new model using this graphic from Nir Eyal’s Hooked as a template.

Here’s James Clear's result. This concept is the foundation of Atomic Habits.

Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow State

One of the most influential concepts in self-improvement is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. This is when an activity is just slightly beyond your abilties, leading to immersion and improvement. Clear reframes this idea as The Goldilocks rule, which is the same thing as flow, but Clear probably wanted to frame it in a simpler way.

Anecdotes from other nonfiction books

Clear’s anecdotes in Atomic Habits are often drawn from other nonfiction books. For instance, he uses a story about how photography students who focused on quantity rather than quality ultimately took better photos. This story came from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

And Simon Sinek?

Again, Clear’s endnotes do a fantastic job of revealing how he wove his book together. But sometimes, he might go a bit far in his acknowledgments, as in the case of citing Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle concept from Start With Why.

Clear saw this.

Then created this.

In this case, I’d say that design falls squarely in the public domain and no citation is needed

Clear’s secret ingredient?

Many of the books Clear remixes were successful, but none to near the level of Atomic Habits. What’s Clear’s secret?

I think the key was how Clear integrated all this knowledge into his own life. He directly practiced everything he learned and modified it to make it work better. He lived it and wrote about the experience.

Another formative influence on Clear was this tweet from the entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant: “To write a great book, you must first become the book.”

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How James Clear Remixed a Blockbuster