Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit is one of the best and most practical books I’ve ever read. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways habits affect our lives, both for better and for worse. I’d like to explore some of that in this blog post.
We develop habits for simple things that we do regularly so we can save our energy and brainpower for things that require more thought and attention. Because practice makes permanent, we tend to fall into repeated, predictable behavior patterns in which we do the same things the same way over time. In this regard, good habits can be incredibly beneficial by letting us get things done quickly, effectively, and efficiently. However, bad habits can be destructive, especially when we accumulate a lot of them. One bad habit doesn’t necessarily spell immediate doom, but it can start us down a path that causes a lot of problems for us and those close to us. Having one bad habit makes it easier to develop more bad habits, and that’s where things can really take a turn for the worst.
Once an organization becomes set in its ways, it tends to continue in whatever direction it’s moving without any real deviations from its trajectory. If it’s going in a positive direction, it will grow and prosper over time. Good habits are essential for continual improvement, and one of the most important habits is recognizing bad habits and fixing them as soon as possible. It’s much easier to develop good habits initially than it is to change bad habits into good ones. Likewise, fixing bad habits before they’ve had much time to cause a lot of problems is better than waiting until they’ve become deeply ingrained and created a giant mess. Organizations that continually improve at things worth doing while also eliminating the bad stuff and the stuff that is no longer practical (a process economists call creative destruction) stand a much better chance of succeeding than those who allow bad habits to run rampant.
The negative consequences of bad habits can be temporarily avoided or hidden but will eventually reveal themselves and bring destruction with them. It doesn’t matter how long an organization has been around or how well it’s done financially. At some point, an organization with a lot of bad habits will find it impossible to change or or even identify everything it’s doing wrong; the time and money required to find and fix all of its problems will be seen as too large a cost to bear, although the cost of avoiding this is much greater even if those running the organization don’t recognize it at the time (which they usually don’t, especially if they’re in a position such that they benefit in the short run from those problems or can’t see the problems, or both). Incredible organizations, including game-changing businesses and nonprofit groups, have collapsed due to gradually accumulating an excessive amount of bad habits and never fixing them. They’re usually then surpassed by newer organizations that practice many of the same good habits that once took the old organizations to their former places of prominence. These newer organizations can avoid a similar fate if they learn from the mistakes of their predecessors and keep themselves in order from the start.
Unworkable systems eventually collapse, and with that collapse comes the opportunity to create a new, better system. This applies to both organizations and individuals, and I’d say it’s even more important for individuals to develop and practice good habits while simultaneously avoiding bad habits. An organization is composed of individuals, so if those individuals are in a good place, the organization will tend to reflect that; the same is true for organizations with individuals who are in a bad place. I know a lot about how this applies to individuals since I used to have a lot of bad habits in every area of my life. These bad habits either directly created trouble in my existing situations or moved me toward troublesome situations. Either way, they made many of my situations worse and cost me a lot of good things, including inner peace. However, it wasn’t until I went through the hardest times of my life that I saw how much I needed to change. After I had been through so much and felt so utterly defeated, I found the motivation I needed to wipe the slate clean and start over.
As painful as that season of my life was, there are few things about it for which I’m grateful: it could have been far more painful than it was, it started me on my current path, and remembering all the pain it caused me makes me continue practicing good habits and avoiding my past bad habits. I still have some bad habits that I’m working on correcting, but nowhere near as many as I once had. The changes I’ve made since last year have given me some astounding results. I often find myself marveling at how much better things are for me now than they were for most of my life. I think things are only going to get better from here, including my ability to share information about changing habits that I’ve found useful with other people and help them get to much better places in their own lives. That’s my biggest goal in life and I look forward to continue seeing it unfold in a number of ways.