Tommy's Blog

I was thinking today about habits. Those things we do all the time. We usually think of bad ones, like someone biting his fingernails or tossing her clothes on the floor. But habits can be good, too: flossing your teeth, keeping your desk clean, or riding your bike to work every day. And its definition (a regular, recurring behavior) tells you how to acquire a new one. Once you have found the habit you want, do it regularly–act like you already have the habit, in other words–and it will be yours.

How long does it take? 21 seems to be a magic number–three weeks to own it.

Why would you want a new habit? Shouldn’t we spend our time trying to be better people? Think for a moment about what it means to be some type of person. How do you identify a funny person? Or someone who is honest? A responsible person? Or a productive one? There is no sign around our necks or a registry where we can look each other up. We are what we do. Aristotle said:

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way… you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions. Aristotle

We can develop the habit of kindness, or patience, or integrity. But we can’t become gracious simply by thinking about it and giving ourselves a Picardesque command to make it so. If we want to be compassionate, we must do the things that a compassionate person does. And we must do them consistently.

I was thinking about ways to save water today. I grew up in East Tennessee and they have had a severe drought this year. Steven Vore shows how bad it is in Atlanta at Lake Lanier. I can’t save water just by deciding it’s something I want to do. That is the place I have to start: like good old Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “the ancestor of every action is a thought.” But saving water–or using less water, in fact–is a behavior and that behavior must be established by doing things that use less water. It might sound like a tautology, but it’s not.

I already do a lot of little things that reduce the amount I waste: I take short showers, I don’t run the faucet while I brush my teeth or shave, and I don’t have any leaks or dripping taps. But I noticed the other day that I let the water run the whole time I wash my hands, even though much of that time is spent rubbing soap on them rather than holding them under the running water. So now I turn the water off while I lather up. That’s a specific act I can choose to do, and one that I intend to adopt as a habit, so that I may become a person who uses less water.

Habits take time to develop and they can’t be acquired in big clumps. That’s been a failure of mine in the past: when I get on a self-improvement kick, I identify a thousand ways that I could be better and I try to do them all at once. It never works. My behaviors–good and bad–have developed slowly, through patient repetition.

Maybe it’s like exercise. Even the infomercials tell you to give them six weeks for results.

So think about acquiring a good habit as exercise for your mind. Focus on specific actions you can perform regularly so that, by doing them, you become what you want to be.