❇️ routines
Routines work because people don’t like expending effort. It’s not that people are lazy or don’t like to do difficult things, but that they like to do easy things more and will do easy things when they don’t think about it.
The secret is that routines make the difficult easy.
Rich Cohen, author of great books like The Fish That Ate the Whale said he has “a very impoverished social life” because of his daily routine. “What seems like my being prolific is just day after day after day after day after day.”
There’s an expression that writers hate writing but love having written. I’m not sure that’s the case if the writer has a routine. Stephen King says he only takes off three days from writing each year, July 4th, Christmas, and his birthday and he doesn’t really take them off if he’s in the middle of a project. Tyler Cowen says much the same thing.
While they appear to be doing something difficult - Cowen, King, and Cohen have oodles of best-sellers between them - they’ve made it easy through a routine.
It’s the discipline that makes the thing easy.