You don’t become truly happy when a Duolingo owl, notifications, or leaderboards guilted them into spending hours on their phone – even if they learn something.
Could we create learning environments that build self-trust (you showed up because it’s important for you to show up)?
Discipline (I stuck to my plan and I feel good about it)?
Agency (I chose to do this today)?
It’s easy to be non-violent when you’re in a flower garden
Josh Waitzkin – The art of learning
It’s easy to be kind to others when the world has always been kind to you.
It’s easy to say you want to be a writer when you never really put yourself out there to prove it.
To learn writing, I must confront the uncomfortable parts of writing – and learn not to respond by running away from it.
To learn non-violence, I must confront violence – and learn not to respond with violence in return.
To learn kindness, I must confront being hurt – and learn not to use that as an excuse to perpetuate the cycle of hurt.
To build trust in myself, I must stay true to my values under difficult conditions.
I’m not writing because I can’t write?
I’m not playing the guitar because I’m bad at music?
I’m not learning a language because I’m bad at learning languages?
That’s the world on its head.
The truth is: you can’t write because you’re not writing.
You can’t play the guitar because you’re not playing the guitar.
You can’t speak the language because you’re not learning the language.
If you would write every day, cognitive dissonance starts doing its work. Your actions will overrule your thoughts and beliefs.
And every day you write, you’re becoming a writer.
Every day you play the guitar, you’re becoming a guitar player.
Every day you learn a language, you’re becoming a language learner.
The only reason you can’t do it because you’re not doing it.
Don’t get it backwards.
If writing and creating every day were as vital to my survival as drinking water, ingesting food, and bonding… What would life look like?
Biologically, all behavior is driven by pain, pleasure, and the triggers and habits that come from repeated reaction to those stimuli.
So I eat because I want to escape the pain of hunger – or heartbreak, sadness, and frustration.
I connect with others because I’m neurologically hardwired to feel pleasure when bonding… and pain and deprivation when I’m abandoned.
Similarly, I write because I want to escape the frustration of not being able to put into words an insight.
I also write because I enjoy the rush resulting from finding the words that convey what I want to say.
I write because I love the tingling in my back and neck when I combine those words into sentences with just the right rhythm, just the right cadence capturing the meaning, context, emotion of what I want to say…
I write because writing wrests the essence from the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions racing through my mind and body.
I write because when when I write, I feel that at last, I can make sense of life.
And the more meaning I find, the more likely I am to write.
The easiest path is to miss all days – you never get going in the first place so you don’t know what you’re missing.
The second easiest is to never miss a day – you’ll get where you want to go with little detours, even if you pay the cost of discipline.
The hardest (and most common) path is to miss a couple of days here and there – now you run the risk of getting lost.
We all miss a day sometimes – so we all get a little lost once in a while.
So what do we do?
We remind ourselves why we got started.
We remind ourselves where we’re going.
We remind ourselves that we’ve been lost before – and that we can always get back on track.
When you write every day, you’ll start believing you can write every day.
When you run every day, you’ll start believing you can run every day.
Therefore, you don’t need to believe in your capabilities before taking action.
First, you act. Then your beliefs react.
The trick to successful habit-building: make daily practice easy.
We often do the opposite: we make weekly practice hard.
If I tell myself I’m going to post one long blog post every week, I’ll find a million reasons not to write for the first six days until I have no choice but to write.
But if I tell myself I will post daily, the longest I can procrastinate is… 12 hours?
And after a week, I’ve practiced my publishing habit 7 times.
So it goes for meditation, yoga, running, and any skill or habit.
Make the daily practice easy.
