Complex Numbers

Habit Your Way

Here's a book ad disguised as a self-help article from GQ for me to snark on.

    How to Kick Your Bad Habits (And Why That's More Important Than You Think)  
Plus: Why goals don’t work, and why your to-do list is wrecking your ability to do anything.

Hey. HEY! You're doing it wrong. Send me money and I'll tell you how to do it right! Until the next guru comes along to tell you that you're still doing it wrong.

A few years ago, we reached peak you're-doing-it-wrong with a video on how you're opening a banana from the wrong end. Since that, I've felt free to ignore any attempts to convince me I'm doing anything the wrong way.

You might not spend much time thinking about your habits. They are, after all, mindless.

No, they're really not. They may be comfortable, but they're not mindless.

James Clear, on the other hand, has made something of a living on it.

Lots of people make their living preaching that "you're wrong and the only way to be right is to follow me and give me money." Some of them are literally called preachers. It doesn't mean they're right.

One of his big takeaways is a bit unsettling when you consider all the habits you’ve sworn to kick (but haven’t), and all the habits you’ve really been meaning to start (but haven’t): habits, multiplied by time, equal the person you eventually become.

I get around that by not swearing to kick or start habits. Do this, combined with accepting yourself as you are, and your life becomes simpler and happier. You won't even be tempted to give what little money you have to people who are trying to convince you that there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.

That advice, by the way, is 100% free.

In a year, the difference between a person who does 10 push ups a day and a person who eats one bag of Doritos a day is that one person has done 3650 push ups and one person is sad.

No, the difference is that one person has sore arms and pecs, and the other person is following their bliss.

Besides, this creates the illusion of a dichotomy: while it might be difficult to eat a bag of Doritos while doing push-ups, there's absolutely nothing that says you can't do both in one day.

The rest of the articlead is in interview format, and I won't quote most of it. But at one point, the interviewer poses:

But if you think about it, I feel like we're so often controlled by sort of nudges that we aren't even conscious of.

Yes, and one of those nudges is ads.

The way I see it, if you think you want to do something (or refrain from doing something), and you continue to do (or not do) it anyway, then you don't actually want to do it, and you should respect that.

Now... this may seem hypocritical of me, since I've been on a 4+ year daily streak in both blogging and language learning. Those are habits I picked up, and sometimes I go out of my way to practice them. I'm not saying we shouldn't try new things, or improve ourselves. It's the pressure that we're somehow lacking, and we should feel bad about ourselves, that I object to.

So I make it a habit to identify that pressure when it presents itself.