Habits and Feedback
Habits are awesome, predictions not so much
Beyond a certain threshold even subject matter experts don’t predict the future any better than a dart throwing chimp, but I’ll come back to that. Even the ancients recognized the power of habits. Aristotle famously said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” I have some really good habits; going to the gym regularly, sticking to my diet, brushing my teeth before going to bed. Some really bad habits; Waking up late, slouching, procrastinating. Those habits all came from somewhere. I wasn’t born with them (maybe procrastination). I’ve even managed to break some really nasty habits in my life; smoking and eating a whole pizza in one sitting weekly. I’ve similarly failed (so far) to create habits that I want to acquire like writing daily. If excellence is a habit then figuring out how I’ve been successful at forming habits and how I’ve failed is basically the keys to the kingdom.
A positive example
I’m often in the gym 5 or 6 times a week and haven’t had a week where I’ve gone less than 3 times in months. Like all habits this started as a single trip to the gym. Like all positive habits this started as a thing that I would rather not do. No one has a hard time starting a daily Haagen Das habit. The work that I actually did on that day was not much. I did one heavy set on a few different machines and called it a week. I wrote what I had done down in a little notepad that I was given for free at some conference. I came back the next week (actually 8 days later) added a little weight, wrote things down, and called it a week again. I did that for a while until I started thinking that going twice a week sounded like a good plan.
A negative example
I’ve had the Headspace app loaded on my phone for literally years. At various times I’ve tried to do the basic program, meditate for 10 minutes for 10 days straight. There’s a helpful audio guide and fun animations and everything. Usually, I would get a few days in, miss a day, and start over at day one again. I’ve repeated this process more times than I care to count.
What does this have to do with being bad at prediction
What allows us get better at predicting things in the short term is the speed of the feedback loop. If you make a prediction and it works out you learn something. If you make a prediction and it turns out to be false you learn something. But if you make a prediction and you’ve completely forgotten what the prediction was by time it comes around to test it…. you get nothing.
Trigger, Action, Reward
The three parts of habit formation. Trigger, the thing that reminds you to perform the habit (seeing the pint of ice cream in the freezer). Action, the performance of the habit itself (eating the ice cream), Reward, the payoff (the flood of tasty brain chemicals that enjoying ice cream brings). Now obviously the reward of my first session at the gym was not bulging muscles. There was obviously a reward though because the habit stuck. While the feeling of mental clarity after meditation is awesome that habit didn’t stick (yet).