The 1% Rule: A Poet’s Take on Atomic Habits

and five takeaways you can use in your writing life

Dear Friends,

Standing at a bus stop on a January morning, freshly fallen snow blanketing the park, I began listening to James Clear’s Atomic Habits—and almost immediately stopped.

What I didn’t know is that Atomic Habits opens with a story about baseball that turns unexpectedly gruesome.

Now, my interest in baseball is limited, and my tolerance for gore is virtually zero. I don’t mean to make James Clear sound like Truman Capote—Clear suffered a freak, catastrophic brain injury at a baseball practice in high school. But I kept listening through intense recollections of an unbelievably difficult moment in Clear’s life, a moment that would inspire his pivot from a career in baseball to a career in psychology.

Spoiler alert: Clear did play baseball again, making it into Denison University’s record books in eight different categories, as well as some ESPN thing I gather is important. But this isn’t a story about that at all. Clear wanted to be a professional baseball player, and he didn’t become one. Here is his insight—11 or so minutes in—that won me over:

“I never ended up playing professionally. However, looking back on those years, I believe I accomplished something just as rare. I fulfilled my potential.”

Clear tapped into a distinction I’d intuited but never thought to articulate: that fulfilled potential is extraordinary, because we stop short of meeting that potential out of fear that we will never be extraordinary.

Let that paradox sink in.

We stop practicing guitar because we don’t sound good. We don’t write the book because the writing isn’t coming naturally. We don’t feel gifted or equipped, so we never find out just how far we could go if we stuck it out longer. We leave a trail of unexpressed potential. And, of course, that’s completely fine if it’s in an area we were never particularly committed to. But what about where it matters? Can we suspend our discomfort at our lack of skill or ease long enough to know the difference?

Clear’s injury meant he had no choice but to start small—atomically small—in reclaiming the aspirations he’d once had in a mind and body transformed by injury. He began with establishing new habits, understanding that “The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our habits. With better habits, anything is possible.”

I’m a writer who likes to knock her brain off a pedestal. I don’t want my brain to be so exceptional that it is unlike anyone else’s, just as I don’t wish to believe that my worries are entirely unique, or for that matter, that my accomplishments are singular and isolated examples of greatness. I signed up for a human life, and that means a life in community.

I say that in case you’re wondering why a newsletter called Poetry Today focuses so much on the brain. The poet’s mind is in a relationship with this—and every other—precious organ. Each of us is a constellation, a finely tuned feedback system between the different layers of our human experience. I’m drawn to books that offer a narrative approach to the brain, telling the story of its idiosyncratic functions and revealing how we might better acquaint ourselves with its programming to live more consciously.

With that in mind, here are five useful lessons from Atomic Habits, and how I think that they might serve our writing lives:

Lesson 1: Consistency—only, the results won’t always look consistent. Here’s the thing: sitting down to write every day may mean you write 500 words on Day 1, erase 200 of them on Day 2, write another 50 words after scrapping an additional 100 on Day 3. That’s when defeat can set in—I said I was going to write, and I have less to show for it each day. This is what the process of writing looks like. It isn’t the miraculous final period in a novel or the moment a villanelle clicks into place. Those moments are for the highlight reel. Sitting down to write means all the messy fine-tuning on the road to clarity. Set aside notions of what the work should look like and focus instead on consistently showing up to the work. The compounding effect—the gradual improvement that is almost indiscernible in moments—is what matters. As Clear says: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Lesson 2: Harness the power of what Clear calls “Habit Stacking.” Link whatever your writing-related habit/goal is (to read, draft, revise, research, work on an application, submit) to a habit that you already have. If you always brew your coffee in the morning, spend 15 minutes with your notebook as you drink that first cup. If you always take a shower at night, start reading as soon as you’re done. The point is to leverage a familiar ritual to cement an unfamiliar ritual. Clear explains the brain science behind this. The expression “creatures of habit” exists for a reason.

Lesson 3: Behavior shifts require shifts in self-perception. I’ve worked with writers who lament that they are undisciplined, disorganized, etc. These declarations are not “true” in any useful or factual sense. They are entirely a matter of self-perception. You can, at any point, adopt the identity of a disciplined writer, whatever that means to you, by embodying the associated habits and qualities of one. As Clear articulates, “The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior.” This also works if you have great difficulty calling yourself a writer, because you associate the term with publication, success, or an audience that you don’t yet have. By embracing your identity as a writer, you will better align yourself with the actions that are needed to sustain your creative growth.

Lesson 4: Environment matters. As Clear states, “Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.” You have to figure out what works for you. Maya Angelou, for instance, kept a hotel room in her hometown that she used as a writing office. It could be the café you work in, a corner of your living room, the public library. If you’ve been looking for a push to de-clutter your work desk, this is it. Research shows that optimizing your space plays an important role in shaping habits and facilitating all kinds of creativity.

Lesson 5: Really come around to believing in the process and wisdom of continuous improvement. This is the basis of Clear's philosophy, that success—even overnight success—is usually the result of longterm, atomic progress. You can embrace this idea in your writing life by setting incremental goals, celebrating even seemingly small victories, and committing to refinement for its own sake. As Clear asserts, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” As long as you don’t stop, you will get there—and often much sooner than you think.

Atomic Habits is our Poetry Today book club title for February through April. During that time, I will regularly visit the comment section of this post to share other excerpts I found useful and to chat with all of you. Please share passages or ideas that stick out to you as you read, what you’re implementing, and any questions you have for us to contemplate together. (Posts archive after 2 weeks—that’s when this will, technically, become a conversation for Paid Subscribers.)

And, in the meantime, please share anything that resonated with you! I always love to hear.

To your 1% improvement,

xM