On practice and habits

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

~ Aristotle

I’ve been thinking about nature vs. nurture quite a bit. It’s always been interesting to me, as someone who has been striving—to various degrees of success—my whole adult life to learn more, challenge myself, and become a better person in almost every aspect of life. With some things, it’s come easily. With others, it can be so damn difficult. Why is that? This is something I explore a lot. Sometimes it just feels like we’re wired a certain way, and the resistance in changing that wiring can feel insurmountable.

But. BUT. Practice, especially daily or regular, has worked well for me despite the difficulty. We can, it turns out, go against what is naturally challenging and break through resistance a little bit at a time.

In addition to improvement, I’ve found other benefits to daily practice. For one, practice itself becomes easier if a regular habit is involved. Habit stacking—a method described by James Clear in his excellent book Atomic Habits by which you link habits together for better effect—works well to smooth out the bumps of resistance. But the most significant benefit I’m hoping to cultivate more in my life is leveraging practice to get into a flow state.

I’ll be journaling more about flow in the future, as it’s a big part of why I started this experiment in the first place. In a nutshell, flow is the delightful state you achieve when you’re so immersed in doing something that the rest of the world seems to fade into the background. And it’s key to doing great things.

So I hope to use practice and daily habit-building as an on-ramp toward a more productive and creative mindset. This has worked well for me in the past, and I suspect it will be one of the best tools I can use to find more focus and flow in 2023.