Talks to Teachers on Psychology: Ten Minutes a Day

In the second half of his talk on habit, James turns from rules to a warning: what we do not use, we lose.

“Act on every good decision at the very first chance you get; it is not when a decision is made, but when it turns into action, that it changes the brain.No matter how many wise sayings you know, and no matter how good your feelings are, your character will not change for the better unless you take every real chance to act.When a fine feeling is allowed to fade away without doing anything, it is worse than a lost chance: it makes it harder for future feelings to turn into action.

Charles Darwin wrote that until the age of thirty he loved poetry, music and pictures, and took great delight in Shakespeare.But later he could not bear to read a line of poetry, and found Shakespeare so dull that it made him feel sick; his mind had become a machine for finding general laws in large collections of facts.‘If I had my life to live again,’ he wrote, ‘I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.’

When we are young, we all mean to keep loving poetry, music and great ideas, but in how many middle-aged people does this hope come true?An interest that is not fed every day does not grow into a habit; it dies, choked by the other interests that we do feed.Ten minutes a day of poetry or quiet reading, and an hour or two a week of music, pictures or philosophy, if we begin now and never stop, will surely give us in time all that we wish for.

Finally, keep your power of effort alive by a little unnecessary exercise every day: every day or two, do something for no other reason than that it is difficult.This is like the insurance a man pays on his house: it does him no good at the time, but if the fire comes, it will save him from ruin.The person who has trained himself in this way will stand like a tower when everything around him shakes.”