The habit myth

The false promise of creative habits and why we need 'good friction' in our lives.

Hello and welcome to your midweek missive. It’s Chris here with a realisation and a little confession!

Writers often come to us to find a writing habit. No big surprise there as we’ve written a book which promises help you find ‘a writing habit that lasts’. But when people say they want a writing habit, I think they mean something else.

I think they mean that they want the writing to be less hard and to be made easier - effortless almost. But this might not always be possible - or in fact desirable. I’ve come to believe that a writing habit is a bit of a false promise. Let me explain.

The promise of habits

A habit is simply a learning mechanism according to the pioneering psychologist Wendy Wood who over thirty years, has transformed our understanding of how habits are formed. She says they are a mental shortcut to repeat something in the past that worked for us and got us a reward of some kind.

Habits work, according to Wood, because they make life easier and eliminate the kind of friction that can lead us to act in what she calls ‘counterproductive ways’. They stop us overthinking and they stop us procrastinating. We do the thing instead of getting stuck on the thing. And who wouldn’t want that?

Habits scientists like Wood are not wrong. That is how habits are formed. But the productivity advice industry (of which yes, hands in the air, we are part of) has taken her research and run with the assumption that all friction is bad for us and that it’s something we should banish from our lives.

But I don’t think all friction is bad. I think there’s a good kind too and you could argue that it’s essential to creativity.

Tiny habits

There is much to admire in James Clear’s mega-selling book, Atomic Habits - a work based in Wendy Wood’s research. Clear is a habits evangelist and credits good habits for helping him recover from a potentially life-changing accident and go on to become an athlete and successful author-entrepreneur. ‘There is no one right way to create better habits,’ he writes in the introduction, ‘but this book describes the best way I know - an approach that will be effective regardless of where you start or what you’re trying to change’. [Italics mine]

Habits, for Clear, are a panacea. Get a good one and it can help you do anything. But I’m not sure he’s right. Clear has written about how he used a ‘tiny habits’ approach to build his physique. ‘A habit’, he says ‘is a routine or behaviour that is performed regularly - and, in many cases, automatically.’ He explains how by starting small (and reducing friction) he managed to make weight lifting a habit and put on 40 pounds of bulk.

But bodybuilding isn’t like writing - or in fact any creative endeavour. To build muscle you proceed via a set of logical, scientifically-proven steps which if you follow correctly and in the right order will mean that you gain strength.¹

The Harvard psychologist Theresa Amabile calls these kinds of tasks algorithmic.² They are predictable and certain by their very nature. Lots can go wrong of course - you might drop a kettle bell on your big toe and have to go to hospital - but you will have a certain result if you follow a set path.

Heuristic tasks - as she calls them - aren’t like this. There is no predetermined, correct path to achieving a heuristic task. There’s a fogginess to them. When we engage in one we proceed by trial and error. We go round in circles, hit brick walls, make false starts. We get lost in the fog. Truly creative tasks - those that are seeking to invent something new of some kind - are always heuristic says Amabile.³

Good friction

Algorithmic tasks can be difficult but we always know where we are in the process and what to do to get back on track. We find heuristic tasks difficult in a different way. Their unpredictability challenges and unsettles us. We can feel unsure of where to go next. It causes friction in our lives but it’s this friction - which I believe is good for us in the end - that can also be so fulfilling once we’ve found a way through. When we’ve stuck at something, really grappled with something, solved a puzzle of some kind.

Let’s remember that many of history’s most successful writers, artists, creators and inventors have managed to do what they have done without a good habit. They didn’t produce without friction - they produced with it. They found a way to carry on. Their habits might have been ‘bad’ but they worked for them.

The habit myth

Many of us want the creative process to be easier and I get why that’s appealing. I’m not glamorising struggle and I’m not saying that it can’t be made less stressful – this is what our book is all about so please keep buying it.

But the promise of a high-performing, frictionless creative habit is a myth.

It’s a myth that can lead us to think that the creative process should be easy when in fact, by it’s very nature, it can never be.

It’s a myth that can cause us to judge ourselves harshly. It can lead us to conclude that getting stuck means that we’re not doing something right or not trying hard enough - that we’re failing if we don’t find what we’re doing effortless.

It’s normal to feel adrift in the fog of a writing project – in fact, it’s inescapably human. Perhaps a little good friction is what a creative life is all about.

See you soon, Chris

1. Clearly, there are many caveats here. Different people will increase their muscle mass at different speeds depending on their physiology, exercise plan, fitness, diet, age etc. But that’s not really the point. The point is that if you follow a plan that’s designed for you, your strength will improve. You might stop half way through because you get fed up of the whole thing and decide you don’t want to be a beef cake after all, but you won’t stop because you get blocked or feel doubts about what step to take next. There’s fog-free clarity and certainty to an algorithmic task in a way that there isn’t to a creative task.

2. See Amabile, Teresa M. Creativity in Context (an update to the The Social Psychology of Creativity), Westview Press, 1996.

3. I did initially balk at this as it feels too simplistic - the world isn’t that neat and tidy surely? But I don’t think Amabile is saying that everything we do is either algorithmic or heuristic. Rather, that some of the things we do in life are predictable and certain and others unpredictable and uncertain and that we find these things difficult in different ways. I think a task can have elements of both.