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Habits rule our lives. We couldn’t do without them. In her new book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, Gretchen Rubin writes that habits form the architecture of our lives.
Many actions are taken without reflection, as we follow routines that allow us to move throughout much of the day with little thought. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out, our minds are really lazy organs, so the path of least resistance is the route that is most appealing. Something has worked once before, so we do it again and again and again. Rubin estimates that 40 percent of our daily behavior is governed by habits.
These habits are the routines we follow, from whether you put on your shoes or socks first, how you brush your teeth, and the order in which you adjust the car mirror and seat before you drive off.
We follow these grooves of behavior throughout the day, from the moment we get out of bed to the time we get back in, because they make life easier; we don’t need to think about what we do. And we continue to follow the routines because, as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
There is another kind of habit that doesn’t make life more efficient but to make ourselves more proficient. These are the habits that develop skills. We become good at a task by doing it repeatedly. This is why a musician practices scales and a golfer goes to a driving range. A person builds upon native talents, develops new skills and thereby overcomes some of the limitations of chance and nature. A musician is good because he has practiced and no longer needs to think about how to make 10 fingers go precisely where they need to go on a keyboard of 88 keys, and a golfer is good because she hit the golf ball over and over before getting onto the first tee.
A complex task is mastered because practice has developed the habits of mastering.
Aristotle recognized the importance of habits for character. A good person is one who over time acquires the habits of being virtuous. A person is good because he or she has practiced being good. Confucius also recognized the link between habits and virtue when he said, “People’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.”
A moral person is the one who has made virtue a habit, a person who acts justly and with compassion on a regular basis and who can, when needed, make moral choices using good judgment in unique circumstances.
With few exceptions, the person whose word you can trust, whose loyalty is unquestionable, who you can depend upon to treat you and others with respect, is the person who demonstrates these same qualities in small measure on a daily basis.
Being good isn’t a one-off; it is a way of being that has been acquired through the proper habits.
Habits, however, are double-edged. Habits can make you lazy. You go about life without giving any thought to what you are doing. Habits can replace vigilance. You no longer are paying attention, and without attention you find yourself in places where habits no longer suffice. If your habits are those of thoughtlessness or disregard, then the habits need to be altered or abandoned all together.
As Kahneman points out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, there are times when the habits lead us to wrong conclusions. We need the slower, harder work of breaking out of the complacent groove that routines provide in order to see things afresh.
Habits work so well because they don’t require thinking. But going through life without thought is to lead less than a full life. What lays behind and beneath the 40% percent of our daily lives that Rubin points to as habits? Plato famously said that an unexamined life isn’t worth living. Nearly half our daily behaviors go without thought. That may make life easier but it certainly doesn’t make it full.
