At the annoyingly young age of 33, James Clear is already putting together a pretty impressive resume. His book Atomic Habits (the most highlighted book on my Kindle by an order of magnitude) is tracking towards selling over a million copies in its first year. He has almost half a million news letter readers. The audio book (yep, just the audio book) has nearly 10,000 reviews.

We were lucky enough to have James as our guest speaker at our Thought Leaders Business School immersion last week, and I then had the pleasure of interviewing him.

We got to look under the hood of his practice so to speak, and get some very specific advice for running a successful practice.

Here were my biggest insights from the conversation:

1. Adopt the identity of a black belt. “True behavior change is identity change . You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.”

2. Surround yourself by a community. “… there's something really powerful about being surrounded by people who are working toward the same thing … you want to join a tribe where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour.”

3. What you don’t do is as important as what you do. Talking about how he spent 18 months on marketing his book “Just as important as the things to do …(your own email list, big podcast push, and a couple major media interviews on TV) … just as useful was cutting out all of those things [that other authors had told me didn’t work] saved us a bunch of time so that I could spend it on other stuff.”