I received this book called Daily Rituals by Mason Currey as a gift from my wife and I just read a few pages. It’s a book with the daily habits (rituals) that people like Voltaire, Mozart, Benjamin Franklin and many others had. I knew that our habits are important, but how important?
Two or three years ago I went to a seminar about how to grow your business (I had a business back then) and I remember something the speaker said:
“Let’s say you have a big tree you want to cut but you don’t have enough time to do it. But if you go 30 seconds before work and pick up your ax and you give 5 hits to that tree, the question that rises is not if that tree will go down, but when it will go down.” – Lorand Soares Szasz (the speaker)
I took two lessons from here. The first one is that if you really want something, you’ll somehow find the time for it, and the second one is that whatever we do daily has a long term impact. It is similar to the things we consume each day. If we eat junk food every day, we’ll have health problems eventually. If we drink alcohol every day, it will come the time when our liver goes for a walk and dies before we do. This applies to what actions we do daily, too. If we go to the gym daily, we’ll probably have a healthy body. If we listen to positive things daily, we’ll have eventually a positive mindset. If we watch movies daily, we’ll eventually become movie experts and so on.
There is no need to do big things each day because it can get exhausting. Instead, we can do little things every day. For example, if you want to write a book, you can write one page per day and eventually the entire book will be written. If you want to learn to play the guitar, you need to learn the notes and practice every day.
It seems that whatever we do on a daily basis defines what we will have in our future. Of course, there is the unpredictable aspect which can interfere with everything, but it’s mostly based on our habits. This is why practicing gratitude daily is so powerful. We get a daily kick about how beautiful our life is.
How important do you think our habits are?