"Progressive Extremism" (Nir Eyal): The Power of Mini-Habits

Note: A while ago, I sent a message to the doctoral students in our department, sharing some counsel on the importance of atomic or mini-habits for their academic progress. However, as I believe the principles to be universally applicable, I am copying the post here for the general reader as well. I personally consider them to be of life-changing significance. I trust that you too will find them helpful. - aj

Dear students,

A while back, I sent an email to PhD candidates in our department with the following suggestion: never lose touch with your project, even if it is just 15 minutes a day! However busy you are, however crazy your life is, check in with your writing,  5-6 times a week, even if ever so briefly. Don’t break the chain! (See, for example, the following piece.)

Two ideas from two authors that supplement that advice:

1. Clear, Atomic Habits – Focus on lead measures (habits, processes) rather than lag measures (results). In other words, focus on the systems and strategies (as in the paragraph above) rather than goals. Embrace an identity (e.g., writer, scholar) rather than some future outcome (e.g., finishing the dissertation).

2. Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable – Adopt the philosophy of “progressive extremism.” Forget about the ideal of becoming a scholar overnight who writes hours every day. Decide on one thing, however minimal, that you will do for the rest of your life. (Again, the example above is a good place to start). Once something has become second nature, move it up a notch. And so on, and so on.

Nir Eyal explains how to break a bad habit. Try it and you will see the results. ►Special thanks to Tom Bilyeu for providing these amazing interviews: https:...

In any case, learning about habits formation and processes of productivity is one aspect of approaching scholarship as a craft. (More about that in the future.)

I am praying for your well-being and that of your families.

Affectionately yours,

Dr. J.

Dostoevsky on the Vagaries of Self-knowledge

That Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist. For one, I applaud the robustness of his faith born in the face of human misery and suffering. As he noted towards the end of his life: “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” Most honest believers can relate to such sentiments - the need to nurture patience and praise in the absence of answers. (On this point, Tomáš Halik perceptively notes in his Patience with God that it is precisely patience that accounts for the major difference between faith and agnosticism).

And then there is grace! It is quite marvelous, actually, to see it shimmering in the most unlikeliest of places in Dostoevsky's novels. Be it the drunkard Marmeladov, or the prostitute Sonia, or the sensualist Dmitri—they all epitomize the power of God’s grace to make the “light shine out of darkness” (2 Cor. 4:6). For Dostoevsky, it is an unplanned intrusion, grace is, full of polyphonic severity and freshness. As U2's “Grace”puts it:

She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain

That's Dostoyevsky - our existence, in all of its idiosyncrasies, deluged in God’s incalculable beneficence!

But there is one more reason why I value him so much as a writer. I really appreciate the way he gets human nature, the way he gets us as human beings. He has this uncanny ability to probe the workings of the human psyche and is acutely aware of the complex and often contradictory impulses that drive us to action. Like Shakespeare writing in a different age and genre, Dostoevsky pokes fun at the idea that we are aware of the things that motivate us; that we are somehow completely transparent to ourselves. (René Girard refers to that illusion as the "romantic lie" of which Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a perfect illustration). The people that populate his novels are disoriented without being aware of it, and are confused while claiming to be in control. The contradictions of their convictions and the blindness concerning their choices are presented to us readers in a painful way. “Lying to ourselves,” he writes, “is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” That’s why he laughs at the superficial ways in which people “try to find themselves,” the way they attempt to mine for their true self, for their inner child. Dostoevsky is not into that; he definitely is not into inner children. (That needs to be qualified a bit, however, given that he intensely values the simplicity of goodness as portrayed in Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov).

Just think of his Crime and Punishment. In that soggy and rather depressing novel, Raskolnikov, an impoverished and radicalized student, commits a horrible crime by killing a greedy moneylender and her sister. Initially, we are tempted to buy into Raskolnikov’s explanation that he did all that for purely humanitarian reasons; to help the world rid itself, as it were, of evil and injustice. And as a reader, you find yourself dragged into that pulp of confused thinking. Dostoevsky brilliantly manipulates the plotline to trick us in that way. It is only gradually that we realize the true nature of Raskolnikov’s action. He is no paragon of humanitarianism; actually, he despises humanity and is contemptuous of people. He acts for purely egotistical reasons, out of belief that conventional morality does not apply to him. As his name implies, he is a schismatic (raskolnik), a moral horror hiding himself behind the story he is telling himself about himself.

I often think about Dostoevsky and his antihero, and I have to admit that I am quite disturbed about the whole thing. Not just because of the wrongdoing he commits, heinous as it is. No, it’s not that. The reason I find him so unsettling is that he mirrors us. In Raskolnikov we see an image of fallen humanity. We too continually tell fictional stories to ourselves about who we are and why we do the things we do and have the thoughts we have. We tell them when we write our journals, when we explain ourselves to others, and when we attempt to mobilize others for our cause. We construct them while selling ourselves during job interviews, when we whine about our victimhood, and sometimes even when we say that we are on fire for God and zealous about his name. Most of the time we don’t do it consciously, but we do it nonetheless. We polish, package, and present our motives in a Facebook way—all glitter, joy, innocence, and benevolence. Like Milton's Lucifer, Dante's Ulysses, Kierkegaard's aesthete, or Jesus' Judas, we get entangled in fabricated narratives. Indeed, as Saul Bellow puts it in To Jerusalem and Back, "a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep” (127). (Readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement will find a manifest exemplar of such a self-scrubbing in guilt-driven Briony, the main character of the book).

Horizons

Horizon as a concept—I am quite fascinated by its symbolic overlays. There is so much in there. Our horizons change all the time: in a particular place, at a certain elevation, turned this way rather than that, a yearly season and time of the day, subjected to weather conditions, moving objects in our perceptual field, as well as the positive or negative affect — beautiful or ugly, serene or dangerous, sublime or plain, etc. — it might invoke in us. To this we also then add subjective factors such as physical capacities, states of mind, the presence of others, experience, knowledge, kinds of activities we are engaged in, attentiveness, and a host of other variables. In that sense, what Heraclitus said about not being able to step into the same river twice—can we do it even once?—could be equally stated about horizons. I’m really intrigued by an intersection of the objective and subjective, the temporal and the static, the finite and the infinite, the known and the unknown, that the idea of horizon represents.

C. S. Lewis, the Romantic Rationalist

Some time ago I came across a paean to C. S. Lewis and was quite taken in by it. It wonderfully captures why Lewis has been such a constant companion in why life as well.

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the obvious.

He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively – even playful – imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.

Lewis gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world – things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. [J. Piper]

In that sense, Lewis has been more of an intellectual companion to me than most philosophers and theologians. The respect for language, the brilliant turn of phrase, the unsurpassable knack for vivid illustrations, the witty edge, the sparkling sense for irony—that and more characterize that epitome of proper intellectual style.

You Are (Often) Not Your Thoughts!

Some of the most profound life insights have the ring of trite prattle. Seize the day! Live in the present! Pay attention! Listen to others!… Here is another one: You are not your thoughts! Yeah, I know. The funny thing, though, is that it took me more than four decades to grasp the life-altering force of that particular maxim. By “grasp” I mean a moment or progressive growth into existential lucidity when instead of knowing something you begin to see through something; when something that borders on banality ends up transposing how you perceive self and others. For one, I became more attuned to how my mind concocts narratives, passes judgments, assesses situations and people, and nudges self-perceptions that mostly catch me unawares. Such automatic churning goes on all the time, and I often feel as if invited to a meeting where everything has already been decided, where my marching others are simply handed over to me. (Compared to the unconscious, Timothy Wilson in Strangers to Ourselves refers to consciousness as a snowball on the tip of an iceberg.)

Put simply, the possibility that I don’t have to be completely beholden to such automatized pattern recognitions is immensely relieving. Indeed, at any moment I can step away from the sewage-mind - that self-protective, condemning, censorious, worrying superego - and simply observe it without identifying myself with it. “You are garbage.” Whatever! “You will never succeed!” Blah, blah, blah. “You see how she hates you.” Here comes your typical, uninformed knee-jerk reaction. You do your stuff, go on, but that is not me. I cannot stop you, but I can step back from you and laugh at you. “Ghost,” you are pathetic. (How I came to name my Jungian shadow in reference to C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is for another time.)

Strengthening that “me” - the Observer, the alter ego, the higher self, the prefrontal cortex, or whatever else you want to call it - is, of course, a basic staple of cognitive behavioral therapies. It is also central to mindfulness practices found in various faith and wisdom traditions through the millennia, including the Judeo-Christian heritage. (Think of Psalm 42!) Some people do it automatically, others have to learn it. But the good life is difficult to be had without such practices of self-awareness that progressively give us a handle on self-destructive thought patterns.

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[Note: This is just a throat-clearing post for me. With time, I will plumb the depth of this theme from a variety of perspectives.]

Erich Fromm on Self-Discipline

I don’t know precisely when I encountered the writings of the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980). It must have been in my late teens or early twenties when they acquired a status of devotional literature of sorts for me. Two books, in particular, have left a mark on my thinking: To Have or To Be and The Art of Loving. One of the ideas I took from him is the importance of self-discipline for human self-realization. A self-evident thought, really, but one of immense significance for the practice of life. As he reminds us, we

shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if “I am in the mood” may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that of discipline in the practice of the particular art (say practicing every day a certain amount of hours) but it is that of discipline in one’s whole life. One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to “relax.” This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.

These words, written fifty-four years ago, have stood the test of time, and then some. In an age when focused attention and concentrated pursuits are hard to come by, when deliberate practice is often reserved for specialized endeavors such as sport or artistic competence, Fromm’s appeal takes on a prophetic tinge. For my life, anyway, littered as it is with its fair share of routine self-indulgences.

On Wiliderness, or, True American Existentialism

As Andrew Feenberg once noted, Henry Bugbee’s The Inward Mornings is “the only truly original American existentialism.” Here are two great quotes from the book:

“This theme of reality as wilderness is the theme that unifies my life. It enfolds and simplifies, comprehends and completes. Whenever I awaken, I awaken to it. It carries with it the gift of life.” (128)

“Philosophy is not a making of a home for the mind out of reality. It is more like learning to leave things to be: restoration in the wilderness, here and now.” (155)

The Centrality of Motion

“From the very beginning of our life, and evermore until we die, movement keeps us in touch with our world in the most intimate and profound way. In our experience of movement, there is no radical separation of self from world. We move in space through constant contact with the contours of our environment. We are in touch with our world at a visceral level, and it is the quality of our ‘being in touch’ that importantly defines what our world is like and who we are. What philosophers call ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ (persons and things) are abstractions from the interactive process of our experience of a meaningful self-in-a-world. It is one of the primary facts of our existence that we are not now and never were, either as infants or throughout human history, alienated from things, as subjects over against objects. There is no movement without the space we move in, the things we move, and the qualities of movement, which are at the same time both the qualities of the world we experience and the qualities of ourselves as doers and experiencers.”

Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, 20.