To Harness the Transformative Power of Habit

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil… Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar,” William James wrote in his seminal 1887 treatise on habit, the bundle of behavior he called the “enormous fly-wheel of society.” In the century since, our civilizational love affair with habit has only intensified — we’ve become besotted with the daily routines of luminaries and transfixed by the psychology of the perfect daily routine, as if replicating the way successful people structure their time would somehow sprinkle the pixie dust of success over our own lives. But as much as we lust after these shiny routines and beneficial behaviors, we still have an enormously hard time changing our habits. And yet, as Mary Oliver memorably wrote, “The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”