the power of habit

The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ ”

 the writer David Foster Wallace told a class of graduating college students in 2005.

“And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ ”

 The water is habits, the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day—and which, just by looking at them, become visible again.

 Water, he said, is the most apt analogy for how a habit works. Water “hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before.”

 You now know how to redirect that path. You now have the power to swim.

 I hoped to deliver something else: a framework for understanding how habits work and a guide to experimenting with how they might change.

THE FRAMEWORK:
 • Identify the routine
 • Experiment with rewards
 • Isolate the cue
 • Have a plan