Talks to Teachers on Psychology: The Laws of Habit

William James was an American doctor who became one of the founders of modern psychology, and in 1899 he gave a famous set of talks to schoolteachers.His chapter on habit is still one of the most quoted things ever written on the subject.

“When people use the word ‘habit’, they usually mean a bad habit, like smoking or swearing; but in fact our virtues are habits just as much as our vices.All our life, so far as it has a definite form, is but a mass of habits.The first time we do something, it is difficult; but soon we do it more and more easily, and in the end we do it almost without thinking at all.Our nervous system grows to the way it has been used, just as a sheet of paper, once folded, tends to fall forever afterwards into the same fold.

The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.The more of the details of daily life we can hand over to habit, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.There is no more miserable person than one for whom nothing is habitual except indecision, who must decide afresh every day when to get up, when to go to bed and when to begin each piece of work.

When we start a new habit or drop an old one, we must launch ourselves with as strong and decided a start as possible: make a public promise, if you can, and surround your decision with every help you know.I once read in an Austrian newspaper an advertisement by a man named Rudolph, who promised a reward to anyone who found him at a certain wine shop, ‘because of a promise which I have made my wife’.Second, never allow an exception until the new habit is firmly rooted in your life.Each slip is like dropping a ball of string that you are carefully winding up: a single slip undoes more than many turns can wind again.”