Another excerpt from my latest book, Simple Realities (The pathway to happiness and success), which is now available at Amazon.com and on Kindle.
It’s interesting how habits are formed and what sometimes is read into them. Athletes are particularly notorious for habits, usually based on superstition. Coaches are no better. When I started playing junior hockey in Toronto, my coach noticed that I always put a towel inside the knee of my right goalie pad. After getting a new pair of pads, without even thinking I put a towel inside the right pad for a couple of games. Then I stopped using the towel and, coincidentally, the team hit a bit of a slump, the main cause of which the coach figured was me. He told me to put the towel back in my pad. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only reason I did it in the first place was because a cat had urinated on the inside of the old pad.
Actions become habits when you perform them without thinking.
Habits can sometimes be more reliable than memory.
Act the way you’d like to be and you’ll become the way you act.
Form the habit of doing the right things and you will do just fine even when you’re not at your best, because what we do when we don’t have to will determine what we’ll do when we can’t help ourselves.
A good habit is to do at least one thing every day that you don’t want to do, and do it as early in the day as possible.
You can’t carry on an old habit and expect new results; keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting what you’re getting;
The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything like a nail.
To break a habit you have to convince yourself that what you want later is more important than what you want now.
Winners have winning habits and losers have losing habits.
The more bad habits you have the more good luck you need
Just about everybody I know has a habit that annoys me, so I probably have a habit that annoys just about everybody I know.