Habit is very useful for 99% of our lives. It helps us not have to
think about every detail and every decision. Unfortunately, it also can
blinker us to great ideas, including those we may have had
ourselves, as
well as those offered to us on a plate by less habitual souls.
See also
certainty, conservatism*, ignorance, people, rationality, resistance
Quotes
‘Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.’
— Henry Brooks Adams
‘Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of
making excuses.’
— George Washington Carver
‘People get caught up in formulaic answers. When one doesn’t work, they just
go on to the next.’
— James Champy
‘Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative
pursuits. Any man who read too much and uses his own brain too little falls into
lazy habits of thinking.’
— Albert Einstein
‘Wise living consists perhaps less
in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.’
— Eric Hoffer
‘Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an
unhabitual way.’
— William James
‘The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be
broken.’
— Samuel Johnson
‘Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a
self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.’
— Arthur Koestler
‘Creativity is the defeat of habit by imposing originality and change.’
— Andy Law
‘The creative habit is like a drug.’
— Henry Moore
‘It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with
them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on
them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on,
we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used
to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses.’
— Kenichi Ohmae
|