The thermostat

Ten days in. Something new may still feel like someone else is doing it. Maxwell Maltz can explain that.

Maltz was a plastic surgeon in New York. He would fix a nose or a scar, and some patients walked out new people while others walked out exactly as unhappy as they came in, looking at the same mirror. In 1960 he wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, and his conclusion was that the surgery that mattered was on the self-image: the picture of yourself you carry around, which works like a thermostat. Whatever it is set to, you drift back toward, no matter what you achieve.

That is why a person who sees himself as a fifty-thousand-dollar man finds a way to lose the extra after a hundred-thousand-dollar year. And why the one who sees herself as the person who always quits will quit on the good thing too, so the picture stays true. The thermostat doesn't care which direction it corrects in. It only cares about matching the setting.

The fix is not willpower. Willpower fights the setting and the setting wins. The fix is to change the setting, and Maltz said the way to do it is to practice the new picture in imagination with as much detail as a real experience, because the nervous system is remarkably bad at telling the two apart.

Here is the part I want you to keep. You are not your mistakes. Maltz said a guided missile corrects its course a thousand times on the way to the target, and nobody calls that failure. Errors are information. Ten days in, you have missed something. Good. Correct, and keep flying.

One correction of my own: Maltz noticed it took his patients about twenty-one days to get used to a new face, and that one sentence became the twenty-one-day myth of the whole habit world. The real number in the research since is closer to sixty-six, and it varies by person and by habit. So don't be discouraged at twenty-two. You're a third of the way to the new setting.