Day 2: Best intentions do not good habits make

The purpose of 100 Naked Words is to cultivate the habit of writing every single day. Writing 100 words isn’t overly demanding or time-consuming. Everyone has 10 minutes a day to write 100 words and probably learns at least one new concept or idea that can serve as writing material.

But why is it that good habits are so hard to form and bad habits are so hard to break?

What allows humans to form habits is that which separates us from animals —self-awareness. We see our reality, and we know that we see it; as a result, we have the capacity to manipulate both our reality and our response it.

While humans are highly advanced, we aren’t too far removed from our animal selves, meaning we are creatures of habit, even the habits we form accidentally or unwillingly.

Animals and humans survive based on habits which have kept them alive thus far. In order to form and solidify new habits, we must access the deepest recesses of our self-awareness in order to discover why our habits exist and dissect their root cause—the triggers and responses. In doing so, we can begin to methodically deconstruct our bad habits brick by brick and consciously (as opposed to accidentally or subconsciously) design new habits.

All this to say that I sincerely want to write every day, but (and this is a big but), I am undisciplined and seem to have myriad excuses for why my best efforts to create new habits fail so rapidly. My hope is that such a public commitment to forming this habit will give me the push I need to follow through.