FORMING GOOD HABITS

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.¹

—WILL DURANT

OVERVIEW OF HABITUATION

A habit is like a sled creating grooves in a hill. The more the sled slides down the same path, the deeper the grooves it cuts. Over time, the sled continues to get pulled into the same grooves. Inevitably, fresh snow fills the old grooves. We always get an opportunity to pay attention to a different route.²

Our habits are formed based on where we place our attention. Then, for good or for ill, we become what we practice. While we might think that habitual change is a matter of willpower, the evidence proves otherwise. The hard part isn’t understanding the benefits of habits such as a good night’s rest, a healthy diet, and regular exercise. The tricky part is defining and weakening the forces that restrain us from achieving healthy habits. This is why insights about restraining forces that inhibit change are so useful, as noted by Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. So, the backbone of habituation is paying attention, practicing, and eliminating restraints.

Here’s how that process played out when a group of production teammates at Parker Hannifin decided to pay attention to hope rather than despair after attending a virtue seminar. Parker teammates lived in a community where jobs had left, and the opioid crisis had entered. In response to the plight of their community, the Parker team wanted to replace their current groundless hope and depressing cynicism with realistic gratitude.

The Parker team produced a video that emphasized what they had, rather than what they didn’t have. One teammate expressed appreciation that he was still able to raise a family on a single paycheck. He hoped Parker would be just as strong at his exit as it was on his entry.

Another teammate reported being homeless after serving in the military. After being hired for her current job at Parker, she could provide for her family as a single mom. When her grandson passed away and her teammates attended the funeral, she found out, “Wow, I’m not alone.”

Another employee appreciated how Parker supported the community so she could give hope to her neighbors.

The video ends with the story of a teammate who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her physician suggested that she put her affairs in order. She feared losing her job. Instead, factory leaders helped her take a paid leave. She found a cancer center that offered promising treatment that she couldn’t afford. Parker teammates raised the money to pay for the treatment. Her new oncologist assured her that things were not as dire as she imagined and that there was room for realistic optimism. She concluded her story with appreciation for the leaders and teammates who gave her courage and hope when it was most needed.

The production team began intentionally to act differently to navigate their circumstances. They revised and weakened old habits that paid more attention to despair by creating space for realistic hope. Revisions like these are valuable, but that doesn’t mean that changing our life is easy. To make changes to the way we think and act requires the kind of discomfort and effort that many of us would rather avoid. Yet, learning to revise our habits is how we become a better spouse, partner, parent, friend, leader, teammate, and citizen. Not quickly. Not perfectly. Though progress is possible.

Each life revision is improved based on where we put our attention, what we practice, and how we define and weaken the forces that restrain us.

INTRODUCTION

Neuroscience backs up Aristotle’s insight that “we are what we repeatedly do.” Once upon a time, we thought that the brain stopped forming at some point. Now we know that from conception to death, neural pathways reorganize in response to our environment and experiences. This process is called neuroplasticity, and it enables us to learn and adapt to different experiences throughout life. We are not stuck with the brain we are born with. It is possible to convert dysfunctional ways of thinking and behaving to create productive mindsets, skills, and abilities.

Neuroplasticity comes down to this: we become what we practice. We are creatures of habit who follow predictable patterns that define who we become. So, what’s a habit? Habits are automatic behaviors requiring little or no thought. Habits reduce our cognitive load because they require limited energy. This is a big deal since our brain is an energy hog: our brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of our body’s energy use. Habits that reduce the body’s need for mental energy include showering, shaving, or brushing our teeth, actions that are 88 percent habitual.

We do these activities largely without effort and mostly automatically. Tasks at work are 55 percent habitual. Lifting weights, running, and athletics in general are 44 percent habitual. Resting, relaxing, and sitting on a couch are 48 percent habitual.³ These percentages may or may not reflect your habitual routines. The point is that more of our life is on cruise control—that is, it is more habitual—than we might realize.

There’s a catch to neuroplasticity. It is ethically neutral. Our neurons aren’t weighing carefully whether our behavior is just or unjust, wise or unwise. Instead, our brain wires itself based on where we put our attention, whom we spend time with, our experiences, and what we practice. If we practice spending hours on social media, then that’s who we become. If we practice virtue, then we move a step closer to this ideal.

Our risk is this: habits that are comfortable and convenient for us may not be that good for us or for others. While we need to look more deeply at our habits and ask whether we can do better, there’s a catch. Habits are easy to understand and maddeningly difficult to change. Simple solutions such as “Just do it” slogans don’t have the power to change habits. Every part of an adult brain is already occupied, so it doesn’t have vacant lots available for a new habit. An old habit must be pruned to create space for a new habit.⁴

Knowing what to prune requires that we understand the brain is designed to help us survive. It does this by triggering a warning whenever a menace is even perceived. It also evolved a scarcity mindset. Hunter-gatherers needed to be ever vigilant to get food, clothing, and shelter. Self-gratification didn’t pay off when all our attention was focused on whether we will eat today or not. But now, our hunter-gathering nature has been replaced by being shopper-gatherers, ordering food, clothes, and movies without budging off the couch. Today, we need self-control to avoid being addicted to binge-watching on-demand streaming services or polishing off a bag of chips. When it comes to our smartphone, we don’t need yet one more study to prove that these devices are brilliantly addictive. Smartphone addiction won’t kill us, but it surely will distract us and dictate where we put our attention.

Let’s say we want teenagers to reduce the attention they pay to their smartphones and social media. All you do is point out how overusing social media contributes to loneliness, depression, and poor sleep. Then make sure the teenagers understand that private posts can backfire when they go public. Just tell teenagers what they should do, and they will listen. Right? Good luck with that!

One way that teenagers aren’t much different from adults is that they desire being independent and they don’t want to be told what to do. A study leveraged this insight by informing teenagers how technology companies attract funding. They jack up their stock price based on engagement metrics that measure how much time people spend on their app. They hire PhDs with expertise in addictive behavior to guide thousands of engineers skilled at leveraging technology to exploit human weaknesses. Features such as infinite scrolling enable users to endlessly swipe through content without clicking, which takes away the brain’s ability to catch up to our impulses. As social animals, we compare ourselves to others. Sometimes, this can inspire us to be better people. But sometimes, comparisons lead to envy, shame, anxiety, arrogance, or anger. Algorithms learn our preferences and then put us in social bubbles with people who think like us.⁵ Exploiting human vulnerabilities for commercial success has been smashingly effective as these numbers make clear:

   Daily, people check their smartphones up to 63 times; heavy users as much as 86 times.

   Daily, people spend an average of 5.4 hours on their smartphones.

   Daily, 13 percent of millennials spend over 12 hours on their smartphones and 48 minutes texting.

   Daily, baby boomers spend 5 hours on their smartphones.⁶

So, technology companies are financially incentivized to suck as much time out of your life as possible. Your attention becomes their product that they sell to advertisers. Feeling lonely? Check your phone. Feeling insecure? Check your phone.⁷ While technology innovators want us hooked to their devices, they place limits on their own families’ uses. Apple CEO Tim Cook would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates banned his children from using smartphones until they were teenagers. Melinda Gates reported that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young kids use iPads.⁸

Back to leveraging teenager desire for independence. When teenagers were armed with information like this, they took more control of their social media use than the control group who was told to avoid social media because it wasn’t good for them.⁹ To break this bad habit, we need to build friction to reduce the app’s design to hijack our attention. In the moment when we reach for our phones, we can add friction by asking questions such as “What for? Why now? What else?” These questions are prompts to help interrupt the automatic reflex of looking at our phones.

AKRASIA: FAILURE OF THE WILL

Akrasia is a Greek word that means lacking command or self-control or acting against our better judgment. Sometimes, right at the moment when we want to be compassionate, just, or hopeful, we somehow aren’t. When our motivation is disordered for whatever reason, we experience akrasia, or “failure of the will.” Plato discussed akrasia as our tendency to do things against our better interest. So, since the days of Plato, people have not always done what would be good for them and for others.

This ancient problem takes us back to the scientific insight of homeostasis. The brain creates discomfort to effect healthful action. We get hunger pangs so we will eat. We feel cold and seek warmth. If we are bloated, the brain signals us to stop eating. These are physiologic responses to discomfort that in the moment are not focused on long-term healthy diets. When we are hungry, we eat what is available to us—could be a Big Mac or a Whopper instead of a salad. On a different level are the common psychological homeostatic triggers, including uncertainty, boredom, anxiety, and fatigue. Human response to these triggers varies. One person can respond to financial instability with crushing anxiety while another responds as if it is a nonevent.

Recall that stress is our response to an external event. It’s not caused by the event itself. This is also true when it comes to failure of the will. Habitual change is governed by internal, not external, events. In the case of why we don’t always practice virtue, the words distraction and traction are useful. Both words come from the Latin root trahere, which means “pull.” Both words end in tion, which means “action.”

So, distraction pulls us away from our intent to practice virtue, and traction pulls us toward our intent to practice virtue. Distraction is fed by self-defeating habits that rely on blame and shame. For example, we blame the external world for bad habits such as phone addiction being caused by technology companies. We feel shame for eating too much and exercising too little, so we view our failure as a character flaw. Both blame and shame become default habits that contribute to failure of the will.

In contrast, we gain traction to practice virtue by accepting responsibility for our conduct. While we can’t control feeling bored, anxious, fatigued, or lonely, we can control whether we respond in healthy or unhealthy ways. For example, we can respond to boredom by starting a conversation or by staring at our smartphone.¹⁰

Here is an important insight about failure of the will. Willpower is overrated. Like energy, willpower is a limited resource that gets depleted with use just as muscles fatigue with heavy use. So, if willpower is an overrated aspect of self-control, who are these strong-minded people who can stroll past a bowl of ice cream? A study of 205 adults examined how people exercise self-control. People were tracked intensively for three weeks by comparing their stated goals with what they did.

The findings concluded that effortful restraint was not the key to a life well lived.¹¹ Those who possessed high self-control were not gifted with supercharged willpower and moral superiority. The people who most readily agreed to statements such as “I am good at resisting temptations” reported fewer temptations throughout the study. They excelled at self-control by hardly using self-control at all. They had learned that the key was controlling their environment and choices as much as possible so that they didn’t have to rely on willpower that would wither as their energy was depleted.¹²

The counterintuitive insight is that it is easier to pursue healthy goals when it doesn’t require much effort. The most self-disciplined among us don’t view healthy habits as a chore. They have learned to enjoy healthy sleep, diet, and exercise habits.¹³

So, those who avoid gorging on the ice cream in the refrigerator don’t have more self-control than the rest of us. They just don’t buy ice cream in the first place.

When it comes to smartphone addiction, we don’t have to abstain completely from phone use. However, rather than rely on willpower, we can weaken the forces that cause us to be distracted by our phones by taking actions such as these:

1.   Turn off notifications. Apps use the color red to draw our attention.

2.   Remove toxic apps that profit from addiction, polarization, and misinformation.

3.   Track your screen time to reduce the attention that you give to screens.

4.   Delete Facebook, Instagram, and games, and cut back to the essentials of calendar, email, contacts, and perhaps a search engine.

5.   While you are at it, charge your phone someplace other than your bedroom.¹⁴

The purpose of pruning nonessential activities related to screens is to create space for the essentials of love, work, and play.

THE ESSENTIAL LIFE

What’s essential? One answer is leading a balanced life, though what that means may not be clear. Psychologist Erik Erikson suggested that we pay attention to the three great spheres of life: love, work, and play. Erikson’s research showed that people who led the fullest life managed to achieve a reasonable balance among these three spheres. At the end of life, people full of regret concluded that they had lived the wrong life or did not live life well. They paid attention to one of life’s three spheres at the expense of the others. Erikson said that paying attention to all three spheres with equal dedication led not just to success but also to serenity.¹⁵

Erikson’s love, work, and play ideal provides us with a way to audit how well we balance these three spheres of our life. For many, their audit might reveal that they work too much or play too little. This insight then slams into the immutable “168 wall.” One hundred sixty-eight is the number of hours in a week. Rich or poor, educated or not, married or single, we all get the same number of hours per week. Our use of time raises the question: “What are we living for?” It is interesting that most people use the phrase “work-life balance.” We flip the phrase to be “life-work balance.”

First we need a life, and then we work. Pre-COVID, life-work balance was certainly an issue. As the pandemic has eased, many have hit the gas pedal with a sense of urgency to live a more balanced life. Organizations struggling to attract and retain talent have become more responsive to helping people balance life and work. The best organizations strive to offer a reasonable life and work balance all the time, not just during pandemics and talent shortages.

At the individual level, it is not possible to always live a perfectly balanced life. In the Analects, Confucius argued that true humanity was impossible for most mortals, including himself. He recognized the difficulty of living simply, modestly, and in self-control. We are all a mix of healthy and unhealthy habits that support or inhibit paying attention to Erikson’s three great spheres of life. Benjamin Franklin had an impactful way to measure the quality of our habits. He defined net worth by what remains when we subtract our bad habits from our good ones. We are not going to eliminate bad habits. We just hope our good habits are greater than our bad habits.

We are not only creatures of habit in that we follow predictable patterns; we also are habit-creating creatures. We create new habits from intentionally acting in new ways. When we are ready to take on the immutable 168 wall, we define and weaken forces that restrain a balanced life.

The way to live a balanced life is often in plain sight, which takes us to our infinite capacity to delude ourselves. Our words make clear that meaningful relationships and character are more important than money and success. Our actions might suggest the opposite. Money and success are not inherently wrong. The question is, “Are we able to get the order right—meaning before money, relationships before success?”

Sometimes, our shortcomings are not due to disorder. We can also fail due to our blind spots, meaning we literally cannot see why our life is out of balance. A healthy nudge from people we know, like, and trust can reveal our behavior more clearly to us.

STRUGGLE AND SAFETY

The greatest danger of turbulent times is the temptation to deny reality. For example, turbulence requires that organizations accept the reality that command and control must be replaced by decentralization to increase agility and speed in decision-making. This is a good outcome since smaller teams enable people to make a difference rather than being a cog in a huge machine.

This also means that organizations must accept that learning is a lifelong process, so their people stay abreast of change. For this reason, an organization’s most pressing task is teaching people how to learn.

Today, organizations have come to accept these facts. Or have they? The insights in the paragraphs above were written by Peter Drucker, who arguably was the greatest management thinker of the last century. In 1946, Drucker wrote about decentralization. In 1959, Drucker wrote about the risk of turbulence and the need to teach people how to learn. Drucker’s insights make clear that there is nothing new about turbulence and uncertainty. The open question is whether organizations have heeded Drucker’s wisdom from over 60 years ago.

What we know is that if you want to learn, you need to embrace struggling. This is the key insight of a growth mindset.

The insight of a growth mindset aligns with neuroplasticity. When we struggle, we fire up neurons to make us smarter. So, how do we get people to struggle in order to learn and to normalize discomfort associated with uncertainty? The paradox is that we need stability to embrace change. We need some stability—some constant—to undergird our ability to navigate adversity. An effective way to build stability may surprise you: step into gratitude.

DELIBERATE PRACTICE AND GRATITUDE

How do people get good at something? In a word, practice. And the best don’t just practice. They practice deliberately. Anders Ericsson, known as the “expert on experts,” learned this insight by studying world-class performers in athletics, the arts, surgeons, and even chess. Ericsson found that the best among us practiced four mutually reinforcing steps—goal, effort, partner, and reflection.¹⁶ His findings showed that how we practice has as strong or stronger impact on our performance as ability. To illustrate how this works, we will apply deliberate practice to gratitude.

Why gratitude? Gratitude is a keystone habit that increases our ability to create other habits such as fitness, diet, sleep, or other virtues. When we strengthen healthy habits, we feel more hopeful. Gratitude primes our brain to notice when good things happen. A grateful person understands that our world cannot be held together with will and strength; we need other people. When we adopt this perspective by practicing gratitude, the benefits are impressive:

   Grateful people more readily block negative and toxic emotions such as envy, resentment, regret, or depression. We can’t be resentful and grateful at the same time. One counters the other.

   Grateful people handle adversity and stress better.

   Grateful people strengthen social ties. They become clearer that we can’t get through life without the support of others.

Gratitude, humility, and appreciation are like a muscle that we can exercise just as we can exercise being ungrateful, entitled, and cynical. We all know people who have everything to make them grateful and still they are miserable. We all know people who have had great tragedies and still they are grateful. So, it’s not our circumstances, but how we respond to our circumstances that makes some of us grateful and others ungrateful. This doesn’t mean that we are grateful for violence, exploitation, injustice, or the loss of a dear friend or family member. Sometimes, we are grateful for certain aspects of unwanted events: grateful that a loved one is no longer suffering or, grateful that an illness gave us a new perspective. We can learn something from a difficult experience. We can grow from adversity or learn how to take a stand against injustice.¹⁷

When we respond well with gratitude, we are more likely to give to others than to take. We become less fearful acting out of a sense of abundance rather than scarcity. At other times, we miss the value of gratitude because our habit is one of distraction rather than a habit of traction to reflect on its meaning. However, when, not if, we miss the opportunity to be grateful, we often get another chance.

So, let’s apply Ericsson’s model of deliberate practice with goal, effort, coaching or learning partner, and reflection to being more grateful.

Goal of Gratitude

In the case of gratitude, we choose to reduce resentment, regret, and depression. We choose to increase our ability to handle adversity and stress, and we choose to strengthen our connections with others. Gratitude is like other motivations: we move and change in the direction that we appreciate because we are more curious and open to learning. We are also more likely to create enduring habitual change when our goals are fulfilling and enjoyable.¹⁸

We are more likely to achieve a goal when we focus our efforts. Many people report that their awesome multitasking skills are the key to their performance. Instead, research has made it clear that the more we multitask, the less we accomplish and that those who think they are best at multitasking are often the least productive. Even briefly multitasking such as quickly checking our emails negatively affects performance. It’s the switch itself that hurts, not how long we switch.

The term attention residue reveals our brain’s struggle to switch between tasks. When we jump from task to task, our thoughts from the previous task interfere with giving the current task our full attention. It takes time for attention residue to clear out, and in the meantime, performance drops. A National Academy of Sciences study revealed that multitasking among youth correlated with poorer memory, increased impulsivity, and changes in brain function. Our brain multi-shifts rather than multitasks. For this reason, focused effort produces better results, especially when practicing a new complex habit such as gratitude. In addition, focused effort reduces errors.

To get the best performance out of our brain requires that we replace the habit of multitasking with the habit of focused effort.¹⁹

Still, deliberate practice involves more than goal setting. We need to define and weaken forces that restrain us from a goal like practicing gratitude.

Effort: How Can We Weaken Restraints?

People don’t come to work striving to be an ingrate, so the question is, what restrains someone from practicing gratitude? Perhaps the most ungrateful among us are driven by arrogance, vanity, and an insatiable appetite for admiration. For others, being an ingrate is a result of feeling entitled, so we have no reason to feel thankful. When we believe that life owes us, grievances outnumber gifts. While few people are always hopeless ingrates, none of us is immune from narcissistic tendencies that ignore the ties that bind people and that reject the need to pay back or pay forward.

Over time, most of us grow out of our self-absorption, though few of us kick this habit altogether. There is a good reason why this is hard. Thinking of our needs comes easily. Thinking about the needs of others takes effort. Doing so requires humility, which is closely related to gratitude. Humility promotes learning by cultivating curiosity, which turns us toward our need to rely on others and acknowledge our limitations.

An especially powerful act of humility is a gratitude visit. Think of a person who had a profound impact on you. They invested in you when they didn’t have to. They believed in you when you hadn’t earned anything. You are a better person because of them, and they changed the trajectory of your life. However, you haven’t thanked them properly, and they are still alive. Write a one-page testament to how this person changed your life for the better. In the spirit of humility, the focus of the letter is on them and their contribution, not you. Define in detail how they took an interest in you and how they helped you develop one or more of the virtues. Ideally, call the person, ask to meet with them, and read the letter out loud to them. If it is truly not possible to express your gratitude face-to-face (don’t be too easy on yourself), then send the letter. This effort isn’t yet a habit, but it is a good start to creating a habit of gratitude.

When it comes to restraints, consider why you are not already practicing gratitude. Perhaps restraints are the kinds of things that affect just about all habitual change—the pressure to perform, time limitations, effort needed to change, and fear of failure.

Coaching or Learning Partner

The best athletes know that to get better requires pushing through discomfort with the support of a coach who holds them accountable. Like athletes, our performance increases when we actively seek feedback and support.

Otherwise, our performance stagnates or even declines when we are afraid to ask for help. Ask someone you know, like, and trust to help your deliberate practice. The best partners are empathetic, ask good questions, and listen well. A good partner helps you determine how to reduce restraints. They are invested in helping you follow through to create a habit that you are motivated to strengthen.

Reflection

A team of Dutch researchers learned that reflection was a key factor in overcoming performance stagnation. When people assess what they have learned and integrate their insights into future actions, they push through what formerly limited their performance.²⁰

We can avoid a gratitude plateau by asking, “How did expressing gratitude affect us and the person we thanked?” At least in the moment, this reflection is a reminder of what we know but don’t always acknowledge—that we are not self-sufficient. Reflection can help us avoid suboptimal performance in all domains, not just gratitude.

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To recap, the four elements of deliberate practice are goal, effort, coaching or learning partner, and reflection. We used the example of gratitude to illustrate these four steps because gratitude is a keystone habit.

The key takeaway is that deliberate practice can be applied to any domain such as practicing virtue, improving our sleep, or becoming more fit. We become what we practice, and there is no better way to practice than to do so deliberately.