FIGURE 12: This graph shows someone who built the habit of walking for ten minutes after breakfast each day. Notice that as the repetitions increase, so does
automaticity, until the behavior is as easy and automatic as it can be.
One of the most common questions I hear is, “How
long does it take to
build a new habit?” But what people really should be asking is, “How
many
does it take to form a new habit?” That is, how many repetitions are
required to make a habit automatic?
There is nothing magical about time
passing with regard to habit
formation. It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days or thirty days or
three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the
behavior. You could do something twice in thirty days, or two hundred
times. It’s the frequency that makes the difference. Your current habits have
been internalized
over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of
repetitions. New habits require the same level of frequency. You need to
string together enough successful attempts until the behavior is firmly
embedded in your mind and you cross the Habit Line.
In
practice, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes for a habit to
become automatic. What matters is that you take the actions you need to
take to make progress. Whether an action is fully automatic is of less
importance.
To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to
make practice happen is to adhere to the 3rd Law of Behavior Change:
make it easy. The chapters that follow will show you how to do exactly that.
Chapter Summary
The 3rd
Law of Behavior Change is make it easy.
The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
Focus on taking action, not being in motion.
Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes
progressively more automatic through repetition.
The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as
important as the number of times you have performed it.
12
The Law of Least Effort
I
N
HIS AWARD
-
WINNING BOOK,
Guns, Germs, and Steel, anthropologist and biologist
Jared Diamond points out a simple fact: different continents have different
shapes. At first glance, this statement
seems rather obvious and
unimportant, but it turns out to have a profound impact on human behavior.
The primary axis of the Americas runs from north to south. That is, the
landmass of North and South America tends to be tall and thin rather than
wide and fat. The same is generally true for Africa. Meanwhile, the
landmass that makes up Europe, Asia, and the Middle East is the opposite.
This massive stretch of land tends to be more east-west in shape. According
to Diamond, this difference in shape played a significant role in the spread
of agriculture over the centuries.
When agriculture began to spread around the globe, farmers had an easier
time expanding along east-west routes than along north-south ones. This is
because locations along the same latitude generally share similar climates,
amounts of sunlight and rainfall, and changes in season.
These factors
allowed farmers in Europe and Asia to domesticate a few crops and grow
them along the entire stretch of land from France to China.
