Your Job Makes Your Habits

You, your synapses, and your work

A lot of people frame their career goals in terms of what they want the end benefit to be. A published writer. A successful entrepreneur. Rich. We all too often forget to look at it in a simpler, starker light:

At a deeper level, what habits do you want to instill in yourself, through the daily activities you perform through your work?

A more biological way to think about it is that our brains prune the number of synapses (connections between neurons) over time as we age, so that the most common actions your brain takes are strengthened, while other actions are slowly phased out (a phenomenon called synaptic pruning). At age 3, we have 15,000 synapses per neuron, but as we grow into adulthood, that drops by half. Neurons that are used frequently have their connections strengthened, and those that are unused die out. Apply this to our daily lives and what we use our brains to do, and we find out fundamentally -at a biological level- who we are.

What are the actions you love doing, that are worth it for your brain to internalize? What are the ones you’d love to let go of? If you’re working at a job you dislike, you’re sacrificing a lot more than just your time and energy. At the end of the day, it’s not your capstone accomplishment that you should fixate on, it’s all the tiny activities along the way that shape who you become.

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