Everyday Systems

"A habit is defined as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. You may know you need change, you may even know how to change, but, without desire, change may elude you." Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)

Good quote. Thanks for posting it.

That is a great quote from Stephen Covey.

This is one of my favorite passages from the No-S book...I've read it over and over...I have even read it out loud to two other people. It really applies to so many areas of life...

A few years ago I established a daily habit of each morning, getting up, drinking a big glass of water...I do not feel right about anything until I've had my water...I want the no-S way of eating to become just that regular and routine in my life...

P.114 The No S Diet

"Habit is a funny thing. It's basically the way our minds optimize frequently repeated thought processes. Conscious thought is expensive; it's slow; you can consciously think about only one thing at a time. The mind is parsimonious with conscious thought. It wants to economize, to save conscious thought for novel situations that really require it. So if you make the same decision a few times your mind starts to build a habitual shortcut to bypass some of that premium-level thought next time. It saves the result of the decision in a version of what computer scientists call a "lookup table": For this stimulus, return that response; you don't even have to think about it. Why waste precious conscious thought reworking out a decision that's already been made? Just look up what you did last time. The more you repeat an action, the more conscious thought your mind sees it can save, and the more efficient and automatic the looking up becomes. When you have good responses stored in this table, habit is fantastic; you do the right thing automatically. When you have the wrong responses stored, it's a disaster."