The Freedom to Do What You Want

Why are habits important, and why should you try to acquire habits?

It’s easy to get seduced by articles offering shortcuts for success. “The 5 things successful (whatever success means) millionaires do every day”, if you are into money. Or how to [put your favorite aspiration here] without [put the thing you find more difficult here, usually involving long-term effort]… If we continue to see these kind of articles popping up on our Facebook timelines as “sponsored articles” is for one reason: they work. I mean, they work as a click-bait. We find it difficult to resist the urge to click and discover and effortless way to achieve something that, clearly and cold-headed, we know takes time and effort to accomplish.

We like to believe that we are rational beings. Maybe for important decisions, when we have the luxury to take out a piece of paper and lay out the motives for the different action courses in front of us, and dig into our real motivations before making a decision, our decisions rank high in the rational scale. Let’s concede that in those privileged moments we are not biassed by our emotions and make mostly rational decisions.

For the rest of situations, research shows that for our day-to-day behavior and actions, what we actually end doing is strongly influenced by the environment and by our habits.

The Environment

When I first read in Marshall Goldsmith’s book Triggers about how the environment influences our behavior, my first reaction was one of denial. Something inside myself —probably my ego— rebelled against the notion that something outside of me, and mostly without myself being aware of it, could condition my behavior.

The argument is inescapable. Why is that we can be highly productive in some environments, and fail miserably in others? Why is that the presence of some people affect our mood, for good or worst? How do you react to traffic? (See the photo below, which I took one morning on my way to work.)