Once I’d identified these strategies, I wanted to experiment with them. The twin riddles of how to change ourselves and how to change our habits have vexed mankind throughout the ages. If I was going to try to figure out the answers, I’d have to fortify my analysis with my own experience as guinea pig. Only by putting my theories to the test would I understand what works.
But when I told a friend that I was studying habits, and planned to try out several new habits, he protested, “You should fight habits, not encourage them.”
“Are you kidding? I love my habits,” I said. “No willpower. No agonizing. Like brushing my teeth.”
“Not me,” my friend said. “Habits make me feel trapped.”
I remained firmly pro-habits, but this conversation was an important reminder: Habit is a good servant but a bad master. Although I wanted the benefits that habits offer, I didn’t want to become a bureaucrat of my own life, trapped in paperwork of my own making.
As I worked on my habits, I should pursue only those habits that would make me feel freer and stronger. I should keep asking myself, “To what end do I pursue this habit?” It was essential that my habits suit me, because I can build a happy life only on the foundation of my own nature. And if I wanted to try to help other people shape their habits—a notion that, I had to admit, appealed to me—their habits would have to suit them.
One night, as we were getting ready for bed, I was recounting highlights from my day’s habit research to Jamie. He’d had a tough day at work and looked weary and preoccupied, but suddenly he started laughing.
“What?” I asked.
“With your books about happiness, you were trying to answer the question ‘How do I become happier?’ And this habits book is ‘No, seriously, how do I become happier?’ ”
“You’re right!” I replied. It was really true. “So many people tell me, ‘I know what would make me happier, but I can’t make myself do what it takes.’ Habits are the solution.”
When we change our habits, we change our lives. We can use decision making to choose the habits we want to form, we can use willpower to get the habit started; then—and this is the best part—we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. We take our hands off the wheel of decision, our foot off the gas of willpower, and rely on the cruise control of habits.
That’s the promise of habit.
For a happy life, it’s important to cultivate an atmosphere of growth—the sense that we’re learning new things, getting stronger, forging new relationships, making things better, helping other people. Habits have a tremendous role to play in creating an atmosphere of growth, because they help us make consistent, reliable progress.
Perfection may be an impossible goal, but habits help us to do better. Making headway toward a good habit, doing better than before, saves us from facing the end of another year with the mournful wish, once again, that we’d done things differently.
Habit is notorious—and rightly so—for its ability to control our actions, even against our will. By mindfully choosing our habits, we harness the power of mindlessness as a sweeping force for serenity, energy, and growth.
Better than before! It’s what we all want.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
To shape our habits successfully, we must know ourselves. We can’t presume that if a habit-formation strategy works for one person, it will work just as well for anyone else, because people are very different from each other. This section covers two strategies that allow us to identify important aspects of our habit nature: the Four Tendencies and Distinctions. These observational strategies don’t require that we change what we’re doing, only that we learn to see ourselves accurately.
The Fateful Tendencies We Bring into the World
The Four Tendencies
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.
—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
I knew exactly where my extended investigation of habits would begin.
For years, I’ve kept a list of my “Secrets of Adulthood,” which are the lessons I’ve learned with time and experience. Some are serious, such as “Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for me,” and some are goofy, such as “Food tastes better when I eat with my hands.” One of my most important Secrets of Adulthood, however, is: “I’m more like other people, and less like other people, than I suppose.” While I’m not much different from other people, those differences are very important.
For this reason, the same habit strategies don’t work for everyone. If we know ourselves, we’re able to manage ourselves better, and if we’re trying to work with others, it helps to understand them.
So I would start with self-knowledge, by identifying how my nature affects my habits. Figuring that out, however, isn’t easy. As novelist John Updike observed, “Surprisingly few clues are ever offered us as to what kind of people we are.”
In my research, I’d looked for a good framework to explain differences in how people respond to habits, but to my surprise, none existed. Was I the only one who wondered why some people adopt habits much more, or less, readily than other people? Or why some people dread habits? Or why some people are able to keep certain habits, in certain situations, but not others?
I couldn’t figure out the pattern—then one afternoon, eureka. The answer didn’t emerge from my library research, but from my preoccupation with the question my friend had asked me. I’d been pondering, yet again, her simple observation: she’d never missed practice for her high school track team, but she can’t make herself go running now. Why?
As my idea hit, I felt the same excitement that Archimedes must have felt when he stepped into his bath. Suddenly I grasped it. The first and most important habits question is: “How does a person respond to an expectation?” When we try to form a new habit, we set an expectation for ourselves. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand how we respond to expectations.
We face two kinds of expectations: outer expectations (meet work deadlines, observe traffic regulations) and inner expectations (stop napping, keep a New Year’s resolution). From my observation, just about everyone falls into one of four distinct groups:
Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations.
Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified.
Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations (my friend on the track team).
Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.