The Desert of Arizona
Rain 68 Degrees
So I slowly figured out that rather than fixating on goals (which connects me emotionally with an outcome, which I ultimately don’t control), I’d focus on doing the actions that seem to get my boat into nice waters.
Take this letter, for example.
Sending out value every day into the world seems to create nice things. Things I could never plan, things I would never expect.
So I do it, over and over again.
Eventually, I don’t have to try so hard. The reason is that there seems to be this mysterious source of energy that pushes me through.
What is this energy source?
Well, the simple word for it is the energy of habit.
Now as a people, habits are rather indifferent little beings. They really don’t care where they go, they’re just as happy to go here as there.
And so you have to be awake when you’re dealing with them. They’re powerful little suckers.
Hop on the back of a good habit and you will be jetted off to faraway and exotic places.
Hop on the back of a bad habit and… well, the scenery might not be so pleasant after a while.
Habits are basically a human propulsion system. Once you strap one on, off you go!
This power has been understood for a very long time. And it’s clear that this power can be used for good just as easily as it can be used for evil.
Take this short passage from William James (THE William James) about the power of habit. He wrote this in 1887, in his treatise called Habit:
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop,’ in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
Kind of makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you read that doesn’t it?
Well, now you know. And now you can choose the way forward for YOU.
The habits don’t care. Pick the ones that serve you. Just do it with your eyes wide open.