My favourite quote of all time is a misattribution.

When I was a young scholar, my life changed when I read this quote:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

I thought that Aristotle said this.

For years, I ended my newsletters with this marvellous line, attributing it to the Ancient Greek philosopher and scientist. For a time, I even titled my newsletter ‘Habits of Excellence.’ I’ve been championing this quote because I admire both the content, and the poetic cadence, of the words.

It was this very cadence that should have been my clue. Greek doesn’t often translate so poetically into English, and never uniformly.

With most Greek quotes, they are always phrased a little differently in another tongue, depending on the translator, and what liberties they took with the source text. There is always some friction in bringing ideas from one language to another, and ancient quotes typically have different wordings, when they are shared around the internet; but this favourite quote of mine, it has always been worded exactly the same.

Because it was originally written in English, in 1926.

I was midway through this great essay about Habits of Excellence, exploring the idea of collecting some of my existing content into a…