James Clear

James Clear was born on January 22, 1986, and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. As a teenager, a freak accident during baseball practice, a bat that slipped from a teammate's hands, struck him in the face and put him in a medically induced coma. The long, patient recovery that followed, relearning basic motor skills one small step at a time, planted the seed for everything he would later write about small habits and steady progress. He rebuilt himself methodically enough to earn a spot on, and eventually captain, the baseball team at Denison University, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in biomechanics and receiving the university's President's Medal, its highest honor for a graduating senior. He later completed an MBA at The Ohio State University, and along the way won the St. Gallen Symposium's Global Essay Competition. In 2012, Clear began publishing articles about habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement at jamesclear.com, drawing on ideas from biology, psychology, and other disciplines and translating them into clear, actionable writing. The following years built a large enough following that Penguin Random House offered him a book deal, and in October 2018, Avery published Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. It became the #1 New York Times bestseller and one of the most successful nonfiction books of the decade: more than 25 million copies in print, translated into 65-plus languages, and over 300 weeks on the bestseller list. Clear has since built well beyond the book. He founded the Habits Academy, a training platform that has taught thousands of students and organizations around the world how to apply his framework. In 2024, he co-founded Authors Equity, an author-centered publishing company built around sharing profit with writers instead of the traditional advance model, and launched Atoms, the official Atomic Habits habit-building app, in partnership with the technology holding company Tiny. He also teaches a course on MasterClass. In December 2025, he published The Atomic Habits Workbook, the official companion guide to his original bestseller. Today, Clear delivers keynotes and fireside chats regularly to Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, ESPN, American Express, and many others, combining personal experimentation, academic research, and clear storytelling into presentations built for immediate, practical use. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.