One Victory is Not a Habit you Gold Plated Fart
“You gold-plated fart,” said Dink cheerfully. “We’re all trying to decide whether your scores up there are a miracle or a mistake.” “A habit,” said Ender. “One Victory is not a habit,” Dink said.

This is a borrowed quote from Ender’s Game. In this exchange, Ender and Dink are discussing why Ender was able to handle the battle without even a smidge of effort. Ender’s response was that his performance is the summation of his series of habits and that his habits are what allow him to continually win victory after victory after victory.
I believe that our lives are largely shaped by the summation of our habits.
Let’s take a simple habit to start with — our body weight and our physical health. Our health and current weight is a function of (1) exercise, (2) diet, (3) sleep, and (4) genetics. If one maintains all the variables in proper amounts then there is a strong statistical chance that individual is going to get the result that is expected given the inputs. If we put garbage into our bodies we generally will gain weight and become unhealthy. If we continually allow ourselves to be emotionally abused by our spouse we will then slowly adapt into an emotionally beaten spouse — the same goes for long term employees at large corporations, but that’s a topic for a night of wine and strong hand gestures. If we spend lots of time on Facebook then we tend to become less productive. More generally:
Every habit has a consequence, and the totality of those consequences are our lives. If you design your day, aggregate that, then you can design your life.
In mathematics this relates to the concept of ergodicity. It means, rather, that habits over time will eventually (in the absence of a ruinous black swan event) deliver certain deserved outcomes. If we take a random snapshot of our lives on just about any given day then we can infer that our lives are generally going to be representative of the totality of our habits.
This means that if we design our day and optimize it, we can live the life we desire rather than the lives other desire for us. What you do every day is representative of your life. The maxim is as follows:
Optimize the potential of the normal and maximize the continual exposure to the positive random events of the extreme.
For more information on the latter part of the statement feel free to read my last article — Gaining skill in a World We Don’t Understand for a Future We Can’t Predict. But that isn’t the purpose of this article. I’d like to explore a different question.
What should our daily routine look like and what should we base our choices on? Simply put: those we wish to emulate. Your 122 year old grandmother will be able to tell you from experience and empiric knowledge what habits you should follow if you wish to live to be her age and what habits you should avoid — avoid sitting is some advice my grandmother has passed along to me. In this case, her knowledge is empiric and tested by time. So generally speaking, her knowledge is superior.
Unfortunately all of us are young and stupid at some point in our lives, which means we can have a hard time differentiating the good from the bad habits — personally, I used to religiously skateboard and box behind the skate park. It was a habit, but a poor one.
So how can we identify what habits are positive from those that are negative? For example, there are grandmothers that drink two Manhattans an evening. Does that mean we should do that? Generally speaking we should avoid the habits of those that we do not find successful in the field of our analysis (ie. we should not ask an obese alcoholic how to diet and exercise properly). In other words, seek the habits from individuals that you deem as experts in that particular field of study. Don’t ask bankers how to develop the daily habit of novel writing.
Instead, look for those that you admire in a particular realm and investigate their daily routines. Always as the question: What individual (s) can I benchmark my daily routine to, why am I benchmarking this particular aspect to it, and what part of their daily routines can I use to achieve the life I desire?
By the benefits of bench-marking our daily routines against those we admire and wish to emulate are as follows (not exhaustive):
(i) It provides a metric in which we can measure our daily habits
(ii) It provides a framework in which we can actually build a daily schedule with direction and purpose.
This is the conclusion that I’ve come to in order to live the life I wish to live.
I could be wrong, and there could be a better way.
What I do know is that habits tend to stick the larger the number of days you follow them . If your day is purposeless, you life will be too. If design your day to reflect the life you wish to live, your life will reflect it.
