Why four days in a row is working

You have now done something four days running. Today I want to tell you why it is working, because William James explained it in 1890 and nobody has improved on him since.

James was Harvard's first psychology professor, and he spent his twenties nearly paralyzed by indecision, and he got out of it with one line written in his diary: his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Twenty years later he wrote the chapter every habit book since has been rewriting. He called habit "the enormous fly-wheel of society." He said your nervous system can be made your ally instead of your enemy, but only by method, and he gave three rules.

Start strong. Pile up every condition that supports the new habit, tell people, make the first days loud.

Never suffer an exception until the habit is rooted. He compared a lapse to dropping a ball of string you have been winding. One drop undoes more than many turns wind up.

Act on every resolution the first chance you get. A resolution you feel and don't act on, he said, is worse than useless, because it teaches you that feeling something and doing nothing go together.

Then the rule the habit industry forgot. Keep the muscle of effort alive by a little gratuitous exercise every day. Do one small thing you don't want to do, so that when the day comes that you must, the muscle is there.

That is the whole reason every morning letter asks for one small action inside twenty-four hours. He said it in 1890. We just built the house around it.