A longtime reader emails me every five years or so, to say that he still thinks of me every morning when he makes his bed. Back in 2009 I wrote a post about the psychological benefit of immediately making your bed when you wake up. (It’s an easy little mission that gets you shaping your day right away – a foolproof first move to carpe your diem.)
There’s a different reader I think of on a daily basis, one who invited me to visit him at his home in Norway. While I was there, he gave me an AeroPress coffeemaker and showed me his brewing method. After spilling hot coffee grounds all over his kitchen on my first attempt, I got the hang of it. I still think of him for a moment every single morning, when I stir the grounds with the bamboo stick he gave me.
When I’m at the car wash, I always think of my dad, because he once said, “Nothing gets clean without the foamy brush.” I always use the foamy brush and my car always comes out looking great. It’s a bit of my dad’s insight living on in me, among many other bits.
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On the wall of my office I put up a Tolstoy quote in 32-point text:
A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’
I find it much more instructive than the standard “big things happen gradually” clichés: Rome wasn’t built in a day, a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step, how do you eat an elephant (one bite at a time), and the rest.
Tolstoy’s twenty-five miles is like the serious version of those throwaway adages. It’s for the person who genuinely wants (or needs) to cover a thousand miles, rather than just have another way to say “Oh well” after a disappointment. When someone says, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it implies that Rome will get built eventually by the way you’re going about things now, but there’s no reason to believe it works like that. Romes don’t get built very often.
Covering twenty-five miles is a serious day’s effort, even though it’s only a tiny fraction of a thousand. It takes a real push, but it is doable, and days like that will add up to vast distances quickly. Note that Tolstoy was talking about hardened French soldiers crossing the Russian steppes; we can scale that twenty-five-mile march down to “A real effort you could achieve daily, but which you’ll only bother with if you’re serious about getting somewhere.”
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When I want a thrill, I walk to the corner store without my phone. Leaving the house like that, with only wallet and keys, feels physically strange and wrong, like I forgot to wear underwear.
Even though I didn’t have a mobile phone for the first half of my life, ten minutes without it somehow feels unsafe. If I need to call in an emergency or something – or, much more likely, if I want to ignore my surroundings and check email while I’m waiting in line – I will be utterly helpless.
This uneasy, lost-at-sea feeling isn’t caused by being without phone access for a few minutes. It’s just what it feels like to defy a powerful habit. After all, the more often I do the thing, the weaker that feeling gets.
The mind just doesn’t want you to deviate from habits, whether they’re good or bad ones. “You can’t do this to me!” it shouts, as you lock the door with your phone sitting on the kitchen table. “We had a deal!”
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
To me, viewing the Almighty as the sole possessor of “perfect knowledge” gives me great inner peace. It also makes research essential. By talking to people who hold different beliefs from me, or performing experiments attempting to disprove my own hypotheses, I as a mere human can strive asymptotically closer...