James Clear wrote 120-150 blog posts on habits over three years before landing a book deal. Only 10% of Atomic Habits came directly from those posts; the rest required substantial reworking and expansion. Prolific, iterative writing served as a testing ground for which ideas actually worked.
I wrote 120, 150 articles about habits on my blog for 3 years before I got a book deal. You know, it turns out not many people write 100 articles about habits, and you'll learn a lot along the way. And if you try your best 100 times, not every time you're going to hit the mark, but you're going to have 10 or 15 pieces of content where you say, "This is my best stuff." And I was able to take those 10 or 15 or 20 things and help make them the backbone of the book. At the time, I thought I had written about half the book. It turns out I had only written about 10%, and a lot of it needed to be reworked and massaged and extended, and holes needed to be filled in. But it was a very starting point because I knew what ideas resonated.
