Sometime in the 1990s I was walking in Portland, Oregon with a friend when he saw a computer store and said, \u201cDo you mind if we stop here for a moment?\u201d<\/p>\n
We walked in. The young man behind the counter looked at me and said, \u201cMr. MacKnight!\u201d I had no idea who he was.<\/p>\n
\u201cGuilty as charged,\u201d I replied. \u201cWho are you?\u201d<\/p>\n
He told me his name, and it rang a bell\u2014one of my students from several years before. We began chatting, and I began remembering more about him. He had been my student for just one year, in Grade 12. Finally I asked him what he had learned in that class. He paused, looked puzzled, and then brightened.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA lot<\/i> is two words!\u201d he cried triumphantly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That may seem very little to remember from a high school English class, but if someone asked me what I remember learning in high school, I would be hard-pressed to recall anything at all.<\/p>\n So what\u00a0does<\/i> stay with us after all those books and facts and lessons are forgotten?<\/p>\n Skills and habits. They remain for years. Both of them are formed by repetition over a long period of time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In one sense, repetition is easy. No genius or special aptitude is required. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and sooner or later your skills improve. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and eventually you will have formed a fixed habit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Do you want to improve your reading skills? Read every day!<\/p>\n Do you want to improve your writing skills? Write every day!<\/p>\n Do you want to form the good habit of checking for assignments and deadlines every day? Then set a reminder, and check every day!<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy.<\/p>\n Except that it\u2019s not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If you love playing basketball, then you enjoy the daily repetition of shooting and dribbling. If you love reading, then reading every day is a pleasure, not a chore.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When the skills and habits you desire involve activities that are not immediately enjoyable, however, repeating them every day is something you dread. You make excuses. You develop, through repetition, the habit of procrastinating.<\/p>\n To practice those \u201cunpleasant\u201d skills and habits, therefore, you need help. Maybe an electronic reminder will be enough. Maybe teaming up with a friend will do it. Maybe asking a parent for daily reminders will work for you. When you don\u2019t enjoy what you know is good for you, when motivation is too often overcome by laziness, you will need to find support of some kind.<\/p>\n The good news? Once you do that, it\u2019s a simple matter of repetition. And that\u2019s easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometime in the 1990s I was walking in Portland, Oregon with a friend when he saw a computer store and said, \u201cDo you mind if we stop here for a moment?\u201d We walked in. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-getting-support"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":389,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions\/389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericmacknight.com\/goodhabits\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}