“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
The title is a quote from Aristotle (pictured).
These words — and many words like them from Thoreau and others — have been weighing on my mind in recent weeks and months whilst I have slowly been figuring out just not how to walk again, but how I want my life to just work in general.
I am getting a little fatigued by talking of hospitals and physiotherapy, but it’s undeniable that the time I had to reflect fundamentally shifted how I saw my own life, the future, and what I wanted to achieve.
Many of the lessons I learned were reflective of the therapy I received: end goals are unknowable, so let’s just try and see what we can do today and stay positive, ‘k?
Since I was a teenager I’ve had goals. I achieved some of them, missed many of them, but throughout all my hits and misses there was a common feeling of empty hollowness that accompanied them. Successes were not as vibrant as I had imagined, failures were not quite as painful.
It’s only in recent months I’ve started to realise that goals are actually relatively useless and serve no fundamental purpose in my life. Habits are who I am and how people perceive me, though.
If you try and act with an end goal in mind, you might get there, but you might also create a lot of anxiety on the way and not get anywhere near it.
But if you decide who you want to be and start behaving in that way, if you start forming your habits and day-to-day processes around those ideas, you will start to build a little momentum and then good things happen as a side-effect.
You can still have a vague idea of direction — more like a “shadow” of an end goal if you want, necessary to know which habits to accept and which to reject, I guess — and you might get to reach them, but the fulfilling thing to do seems to be to just do the work at dealing with habits and changing them towards becoming the person you want to be.
The first habit I had to change was that I was a light (5–10/day) smoker. Being hospitalised, that wasn’t an option, so I remembered something about how habits actually work: you have a cue — often environmental, temporal or contextual in some other form — which prompts a response, which lead to a small reward. That cycle is underpinned by a belief system. If you want to change a habit, the only bit of willpower you need is in that response to the cue, which needs informing by a new belief system.
In the past I’d get a pang for a cigarette and think “Oh, I’m a smoker, I need to have a cigarette”, and the reward would be the nagging for nicotine would go away. Now I think “Oh, that’s my body tricking me, I’m not a smoker any more. If I still really want one in ten minutes, fine rethink that, but otherwise no I don’t respond to that any more”. Ten minutes later I’ve forgotten all about it. At first I did this every few hours. Then every few days. Then every time I was in a beer garden — not as often, see below — and then every time I was waiting for a test run to finish at work, and now I think I’ve had that thought process twice in the last week.
My doctors still don’t know what caused the problems I’ve had but assure me that repairing nerves and walking on crutches does not get better with alcohol intake, I’m too heavy and my immune system was in a pretty awful state thanks to stress. In addition, my cholestoral is high, they consider me borderline Type 2 diabetic, and I have hypertension. All I have to do to fix it is change my lifestyle. “All I have to do”, huh? The only way to deal with that is to choose to do it and I have started to, one habit at a time.
I’ve changed my tastes in how I want to spend my time. Not that long ago I’d happily enjoy spending 5+ hours a night in a pub 3+ nights a week, drinking. Now after 2–3 pints a couple of times a week I’m thinking “time to do something else”. As I imagine our new home (we move next week), I am not interested in local pubs as much as I am the larger office/studio/study area we’re getting. That’s entirely conscious, and I believe it’s good for me long-term.
My tastes in food have also changed. This was less conscious, but the other week whilst eating a slice of pizza I caught myself thinking “I really wish I could have a salad right now”. I did not plan to start enjoying salads, I did not plan to start disliking carby foods a little more. I just changed some habits and now my cue/response/reward wiring is different and so I naturally yearn for salads more than I used to.
Whilst on the subject of health, my phone tracks my steps and it tells me I’m walking more now than I have done in months. That’s good — the crutches might go once the balance and proprioception is a bit better — but walking without crutches is not actually in my head a real goal right now.
Sure, I want to safely leave them to one side soon, but I’m not thinking of that as an end goal because whenever I get frustrated that it seems so distant all the time.
Instead I am now glad I have the habit of constantly trying to improve my own physical fitness and performance: this habit is common to many, many people, but has been alien to me until now. I can see this continuing beyond rehabilitation and into wanting to actively get involved in sports, which is almost laughable given I’m 39 next month.
It’s not just the diet and physical stuff either. Once you realise you want to just start fixing habits, it can become a little addictive in other areas, and it’s here where things get a little more tricky.
I reflected on my attitudes to my work and career and realised I was being cynical, dismissive and frustrated all too often. I work in a pretty good work environment compared to many, but we are too quick to criticise ourselves and each other, and too pessimistic — it can quickly become disheartening to even turn up in the morning and “Sunday night dread” started to become a thing. We have a lot of problems to fix, but I’ve worked at much worse places, so how come this place feels beyond salvation? Because I got in the habit of thinking about it in those terms.
I might want to move on some day, I’m keen on starting my own business again in the next year or two, but in the meantime I decided to try and make things better here and now.
I started trying to change my work-orientated habits, but there is an obvious challenge here: you can tell I’ve changed my diet by looking at what I’m eating, but some colleagues have not quite spotted (or believe) that my work attitude is changing, and I’ve been pushed back into old habits a couple of times by them reacting in their old habits towards me.
When people around you are re-enforcing old habits, they’re not always doing it because they want or prefer those old ways of behaving, but because they have yet to learn and adjust to the new behaviour.
That can then lead to them reacting the way they always did, and before you know it your own old cue/response/reward wiring is kicking in and you’re way off target for the new stuff you’re trying to get going, and that just confirms you haven’t changed a bit to your subconscious, and theirs too. Self-defeating.
In many ways, the way we react to each other is a habit in its own right, and I need to try and encourage others to change their habits towards me in order to succeed here. This is much harder. I’m finding it very easy to revert to older behaviours because others make that path easier in some respects, but I’m trying to slowly figure out how to resist it.
The other slightly weird thing about thinking like this is that I’m becoming a little bit quick to judge others.
I am becoming judgemental of them for not seeing that habits and process are their own undoing. I am biting my tongue because I realise that talking about it in those terms would just make me sound like a jerk. I’m two or three months into this process and basically so far know virtually nothing other than that it is working for me. I think I need two or three years more evidence before I can feel justified in judging people on this, minimum.
But I am going to start talking about it more, and I’m going to try and do it from a position of support and encouragement rather than judgement. However it is an interesting question for me to pose and for you to consider and perhaps even reply to in the comments:
Is it possible that you’re not as happy as you could be because you’re too focused on end goals, and not reconsidering your habits and how you choose to act?
