‘I don’t really know how to start. I’m not used to this.’

This is something we’ve all thought at least once in our life. Maybe a lot more than once. It’s like we know how the puzzle should be, we perfectly know some of the pieces and how to match them but at the end, under a certain scenario, the pieces don’t perfectly match.

Maybe we should have a different approach to the puzzle. Maybe we need to get new pieces. Maybe we just need to find a way to get used to this situation.

People rely on habits. Our brain is ‘programmed’ to give instinctive reactions to a known situation, that we usually follow without thinking because that’s what a habit is about. As Charles Duhigg said in ‘The Power of Habit’, habits are ‘invisible choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day’ and they follow a loop.

The Habit Loop — Cue, Routine, Reward, Repeat.

When facing a certain situation and detect our cue, we’ll do the routine in order to collect our reward. If a reward is collected, when detecting the same cue, the loop will repeat itself over and over again. And when this happens, we start craving the reward — we start anticipating the reward soon after the cue appears.

Then, this process becomes unnoticeable once our brain already knows how it should perform. Routines turn into small knowledge pieces, stored and waiting for a trigger to show up.

Habits are hard to change if we don’t have a deep knowledge of what triggers it and why we crave the reward as Judson Brewer said in his TED Talk.

And what happens when we find ourselves in a new situation? We’ll most probably save a new small piece representing how we faced, thought and acted. If the circumstances don’t repeat, new pieces will be ‘forgotten’, otherwise we start building a pattern. A habit.

Our outcome will be as good as the balance between knowledge and habits under certain circumstances.

Approaches are not correct if circumstances are not known. Knowledge will not look solid under incorrect approaches. We‘ll not be productive if we feel lost taking the wrong approach based on unknown circumstances.

From my point of view, there are no perfect routes to achieve our objectives. The path to get there is built under certain circumstances, where we need to apply our knowledge and create habits to make the whole process clearer, faster, better.

That being said, the most powerful knowledge is having the capability of recognizing our surroundings, taking the correct mindset and creating the needed habits to achieve the objectives. This is going from knowledge to wisdom.

Habits create effortless actions and leeway to adapt sometimes instead of create all the time.

The way we built our habits matters. Workdays are full of repeatable actions that can turn effortless when gathered into habits. As a developer, to start my workday I take several actions:

Turn on time tracking software (company induced habit);

Clean my workspace and organize my browser windows and applications under different screens (self induced habit);

Organize my tasks, having a clear vision of what I need to do (company & self induced habit);

This processes became effortless after some time. At first, I would forget to turn on my time tracking software. I would have some struggles getting higher productivity on my workspace, or even trying to learn new stuff. Everything looked overwhelming. Now, I don’t really think about them. It just happens with almost zero effort.

Not all the tasks can be patterned into habits, but having a solid foundation of the basic behavior under most circumstances is important:

Project planning gives a short and long term view of our objectives — under delays (no matter what, this will happen) it can be adapted;

Communication — A great manager probably communicates slightly different with person A and B. Because person A is different from person B and it takes a different approach to make A and B achieve the best productivity possible.

Environment setup — From choosing the correct music (Phelps had the habit to listen the same playlist before going into the pool and compete — his brain was used to focus on that objective under that playlist) to the place where you work, changing environment ‘pieces’ to match the circumstances (keeping the habit cue and changing the routine to increase the reward effect) will give you a boost;

Adaptation turns into a natural action of changing something that is included in a process already introduced into our minds as a habit. This is a lot less heavy than creating a whole new process which let us quickly adapt our action, mindset, and re-focus on the objective.

Conclusion

Going for a walk is like having an open mind to understand multiple opinions and will to collect knowledge.

Going for a jog is like looking around to understand our surroundings and making the correct calls when it comes to apply an approach and our knowledge when facing an issue or objective.

Going for a marathon is to pattern our approaches into habits, that can adapt to different circumstances in order to complete an objective with as much quality and less effort as possible.

Copying Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates habits will not turn me into a billionaire or not even a successful person. Starting to care about my surroundings to create my habits will help a lot more.