120917

The thing about habit is that… people make it seem like the easiest thing in the world. “Oh, he’s such a sports person.” “Oh, I can never do that.” “Oh, you’re so positive.” But we forget that people can get used to anything, even killing. Circumstances are what make us. To these circumstances there are a million ways to react, a million ways to go wrong.

Automation is what allows us to get most things right: Every time you scan an item in the supermarket, you lift the the scanner, you scan the barcode, you put it in your bag, you swipe your card. This is the right thing to do, and you do it and a lot of other things without thinking, you do it so many times you forget there are actually many ways for things to go wrong. The scanner is spoiled. The barcode label is missing. The bag is torn. You forget to bring your card. But the 99% of the time you get it right, or almost right, you take this small victory for granted and you let the 1% get into your head. There are less than a million ways to be slightly wrong, and to decide for some adjustments along the way.

People like to think of themselves as finished products, moulded decades ago, impossibly unmalleable. But we are capable of being moved. We do this fine-tuning every day, which seems like exactly the same thing hammered into our head, day in, day out. Days pass, then months, then years. Nothing happens. But when you look back, you almost can’t believe what sort of person you were back then. You realize that, you like to surprise yourself sometimes.