The Awesome Power of Habit

"The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ‘I won’t count this time!’ Well, he may not count it, and a kind of Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."—William James

You may have heard somewhere that your computer’s hard drive still contains, in some form, everything it ever contained. That is, nothing is ever truly erased. Technically, that may not be true for your computer’s hard drive, but for your brain, it may well be true that everything that’s ever happened to you and everything you’ve ever done is stored in there somewhere.

James (who is the father of modern psychology) argued that when we are behaving badly, we damange our ability to behave well. We create, in effect, a habit of weakness, a disruption of will. And like any other habit, copping out can get ingrained in us to the point that we don’t follow through on our aspirations.

A while back, I had the privilege of listening to an interview of Dean Acheson with David Allen of GTD fame. One thing Dean said that really stuck with me is that if you let all those little next-actions sit around long enough, and tell yourself over and over that you don’t have time for them, it has a weakening effect on your mind. It’s a form of telling yourself, over and over, this doesn’t count. But your brain is keeping score.

There is a growing mountain of evidence to back up what William James wrote over 100 years ago. Every time you tell yourself that what you’re doing doesn’t matter all that much, your brain takes your message very seriously and have profound effects on what you can and will do next. In the words of William James, "We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar."