What's up everyone? This is Cortland from EndiHackers.com, and you're listening to the

IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,

and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make their decisions at their companies, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with James Clear. James is an entrepreneur. He's the creator of James Clear.com, and he's the author of a brand new book called

Atomic Habits. James, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely.

Thank you for having me out. It's exciting to talk to you. Yeah, same. I have a ton I want to talk to you

about, actually. You are many things in addition to what I just listed earlier. You're also a public

speaker, an educator, a weightlifter, a photographer.

But this show is about building companies, so I really want to hone in on your career as an

entrepreneur. And I also want to talk about your new book, Atomic Habits, and how we can apply

the principles found there to form habits that can help us build more successful businesses.

So let's start with you. How did you become interested in entrepreneurship?

Well, I didn't really have anybody in my family who was an entrepreneur. So I didn't really

have much to go on early on. And I'm not sure if it's this way for other entrepreneurs, but

looking back, there were a variety of things that I did early on that were fairly entrepreneurial, but I didn't

know that at the time or I didn't have the language to describe it. So when I was in college,

Amazon was getting started and had been around for a little while. And they had their marketplace

feature and you could like resell your textbooks on there. So I started reselling my own textbooks,

but then I also like started doing it for everybody that was like on my floor and then in my dorm and we just keep like five bucks from each one or whatever. And that wasn't really a business, but it was kind of entrepreneurial. As a student, I found out that you could design your own major. And so I looked at all the options as like, I don't really like any of these. So I just

like came up with a collection of classes that I thought sounded interesting and then like slapped a label on it and called it biomechanics. And it ended up being like a combination of science classes that I was excited about. Academic Affairs Council approved it and that ended up being my major. So that's also fairly entrepreneurial. to like look at the set of options and be like well I kind of want to create my own thing instead.

So I had little decisions like that. And then when I was in graduate school, I worked in the Center for Entrepreneurship. And my job was to analyze venture capital investment in the region. And so I saw all these people starting companies. And that was where I kind of got the itch to really start my own thing.

I was like, well, all these other people are doing it. Like, maybe I should try it too. So rather than get a job out of grad school, I just tried to launch my own company and kind of floundered around for about two years, which now I refer to the period as the period where I incubated my skill set. But that was really the time when I kind of

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