Gretchen Rubin
What you do daily
Gretchen Rubin.
Rubin is a writer on subjects of habits, happiness, and human nature. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Better Than Before, Happier at Home, and The Happiness Project. Rubin's books have sold more than two million print and online copies worldwide in over thirty languages. On her daily blog, GretchenRubin.com, she reports on her adventures in pursuit of habits and happiness. On August 10, 2003, Brian Lamb interviewed her on the television show, Booknotes.
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Some of you may know her and some may not.
Honestly, I didn't know who she was. After looking her up it seems she is quite a person. Beautiful, knowledgeable and inspiring! I was originally drawn to her because of a quote of hers:
you do once in a while.”
What a powerful sentence indeed!
This reminds me of a story I learned from one of my mentors. I will be brief:
He tells a story of when the first Shaolin monk left the monastery to publicly share their Kung Fu with the world. Which of course was frowned on by the temple, at the time these were secrets held within only the Shoalin Temple and its monks and was not for show.
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As the story goes this monk(not the one in the picture) stayed with him for a little while. In teaching him the meaning of a punch, he said something quite similar to what Gretchen is expressing here.
He said, "I am not afraid of the 10,000 strikes you have practiced only once. I am deathly afraid of the one strike you have practiced 10,000 times.".
You see, it is spaced repetition that gives us a skill with something that we do. Doing the same thing over and over until we know it so well it is a part of us.
Think about riding a bike or tying your shoe or writing your own name. When we do these things we don't even think about them, we just do them.
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They were practiced so many times that it is completely natural.
This is another key factor in succeeding or accomplishing anything.
You must do it over and over and over until it is completely a part of you.
If you want to change habits you must develop new ones and then repeat them every day until they are as powerful a habit as the one you are trying to change or get rid of.
If you want to learn something you need to do it daily. You can't effectively learn or become good at something if you only do it once in a while.
Each time you practice something that you have done before, it reinforces all of the other times you have done it. Each time making it much easier to do it again.
It also builds neural pathways in your brain. These pathways become deeper and wider each time you do them.
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This is actually one of the biggest reasons I am writing this series.
Each time I do this I get better at writing effective posts. Each time you read these posts it becomes part of your habit to intentionally do something positive for yourself.
I want myself and anyone else reading this to be building positive neural pathways that will bring joy and prosperity to them.
When something is left unpracticed for sometime the neural pathway is still there but it's smaller or weaker. You will think of it less often because you are not doing it anymore, it will become that much more difficult to do or fall back into.
So, if you want to be good or even great at something you need to do it habitually.
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You need to do it daily. If not daily it needs to be regular. As close to regular habitual intervals as possible.
This is why it's so effective to do something daily when you wake up and/or before bed. Or, before or after a meal.
The duration or space between the repetition is what determines how quickly you are learning something.
If there is a lot of time between repetitions you will learn much slower. If there is little time between repetitions you will learn exponentially faster.
So if you want to be good at something, change bad habits for good ones or simply learn something quickly, remember what Gretchen Rubin says about it:
you do once in a while.”
Thanks for reading.
Michael David