Atomic Habits and Art Are a Perfect Pairing
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades as an artist, it’s that consistency trumps pretty much everything else. You can have the best ideas, the most talent, and the biggest opportunities, but it can all come to nothing if you can’t stick with it.
When I read James Clear’s “Atomic Habits,” I knew I’d found the perfect sidekick for all my creative endeavors. When my daughter was born, I knew that I wouldn’t have time for my usual animations and short films. Those have always been a crucial creative outlet for me, and I mourned the loss.
Newborn. New Writer.
It was one thing to deal with hallucinations brought on by the lack of sleep that comes with newborns (and one-year-olds, and two-year-olds…) and to handle the endless diapers and spit-up messes. Those things I could manage. Losing all creative outlets? Not so much.
So I got the bright idea to try something I thought would pair well with an Atomic Habits-style approach to creativity and the tiny windows of time new parents are afforded. I decided to write. More specifically, I decided to write a science fiction novel called “Sol’s Ladder“.
What started as a sleepless dad writing a few sentences a day, or maybe paragraphs if he was lucky, snowballed into a four-hundred-page novel in just nine months. I spent the next couple of years writing more and learning everything I could about the ins and outs of self-publishing, blurb writing, cover design, front matter, back matter, print formatting, and on and on. All along the way, I continued applying an Atomic Habits approach.
Now, my newborn has turned into a three-year-old who ooohs and aaahs as she looks at the shiny cover of the first print copy of the book that began its life when she did. And now, on June 1, 2025, all that work in learning will pay off when Sol’s Ladder lands on bookshelves, real and digital. It worked.
You Reap What You Sow
I’ve learned so much in the last few years, both as a father and as a writer and artist. I consider myself blessed to have found such an important tool for my own success and my family’s while I still have (God willing) decades of creativity left in me. I’m as excited to get started on the next book as I was for the first.
If you feel like you just can’t make progress on projects, big and small, or just life in general, then maybe you need a new approach. Make it something you can do daily without fail, no matter how tiny that goal may seem. Be consistent, and you can’t help but make progress.
If you’d like to see how I applied these same principles to a year of daily drawing, check out the video below!