The Value of Habits or The Habits of Values.

The habits of our lives have a powerful momentum that propels us toward the moment of our death. The obvious question arises: What habits do we want to create? Our thoughts are not harmless. Thoughts manifest as actions, which in turn develop into habits, and our habits ultimately harden into character. Our unconscious relationship to thoughts can shape our perceptions, trigger reactions, and predetermine our relationship to the events of our lives.

Frank Ostaseki, from The Five Invitations

My son is in the Navy. He went to the Naval Academy. At first it was his idea to go there, but after he got in (proves the adage “be careful what you ask for”) he changed his mind and wanted to go to a regular college. I “convinced” him that he was going to go to the Naval Academy instead, since from my perspective (previous committed juvenile delinquent, high school dropout, then “made it” to become a thoracic surgeon, the American Dream) there was no way MY son was going to pass up a golden opportunity like that. So he went.

And he suffered, relentlessly, day after day, for the four years. As do most of the students. It is a demanding, stress filled four years. But, like his old man getting through the 10 year hellish surgical training, he got through it, for better or worse. But I think he may have suffered more than the average midshipman. His singular focus on how much he didn’t want to be there combined with the miserable reality drove his mental status into a ditch.

Next he was stationed in San Diego on a Marine transport ship. Until his deployment, he was finally living the good life, free at last of the Academy and now living in the hedonistic Shangri La of San Diego. He had a lot of fun. Drinking. Women. Late nights. I really didn’t hear from him too much. Then deployment to the Persian Gulf for 7 months and on return he is in great physical shape (worked out twice a day on ship, after all not much else to do) but he is not in great mental shape. He was even more remote after his return and distant, and the communication nearly non existent.

While overseas he bought a motorcycle. A Harley. This toy made him happy. Really happy. He rode all the time, took trips up into northern California on his own. But even though the bike brought some happiness and sense of independence to him, he was still, in our lives almost persona non grata. Until I got a phone call on Sept. 30, 2017 when I was at dinner with my daughter in Boston. He had been in an accident, but “only” had broken his leg. They put my son on the phone and told me I needed to come out.

What I thought was going to be a relatively short trip turned into 2.5 month stay. His lower left leg was crushed by an oncoming car and after one month in the hospital, 11 operations, and a bout of life threatening gram negative sepsis, his leg was amputated below the knee. The next 1.5 months were spent helping him in all aspects of his rehab and life until he could be on his own again. And it was time spent together, really together, in the thick reality of our humanity, and we really got to know each other, understand each other, and ultimately grow together. A remarkable, honest, vulnerable relationship was borne from the misery of that time.

Back to habits. When I was in San Diego I went to The World Gym (now called The Gym) with Sam, and the walls of this pumping iron mecca are adorned with posters of chisled men and women, and there is a poster of a Mr. Olympia type flexing away and this quote from Aristotle is printed on the top:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

I knew that my son had been sliding downhill, slowly, in a number of small ways — staying out too late, not working out as much, not eating well, drinking too much, not talking to us, isolation, fun seeking…The Downward Spiral as Jocko Willink calls it. But until that moment of seeing that picture, I instinctively understood that his behavior was the ultimate cause of the accident (lack of Free Will here), and in some recess of my mind I understood that poor habits were the root cause of it all, but I hadn’t REALLY thought about the power of habits in our lives. I lived more in the “get your shit together” frame of mind in general. But the poster made it clear to me. Excellence is the result of habit and commitment. My surgical career was all about that.

Next up in the story — I get my son to start yoga to help him deal with all the pain and physical struggle of crutches and no foot and one day while I am waiting for him to finish his session I see a copy of Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit, so, having been primed by the poster, I got it and read it. I am in bed one morning reading the book and there is a story of Glade, an air freshener, and how the company had spent a ton of time and money developing the product and they could not get women to buy it — until they created an ad that led to an association with the smell of Glade with having just finished cleaning. So you spray it all over after you clean and make the sheets. You look forward to the smell. Cue = cleaning time. Reward = the fresh smell, Ah, its Saturday and the house is going to smell fresh soon. Habit time. After reading about the Glade story, that very morning I am in the bathroom of our Airbnb shaving and there is a can of Glade on top of the toilet. Habits are speaking to me through the universe……..(pipe in Twilight Zone music here).

Hang in there, I am almost to the punch line. Next up on the universe speaking to me is another book, The Five Invitations (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1250074657/braipick-20). But it wasn’t the book itself that spoke to me. It was a weekly blog post from Brainpickings, the sensational work of Maria Popova (https://www.brainpickings.org). She reviewed the book and as part of the review reprinted this quote from the author, Frank Ostaseski, the previous director of the Zen Hospice Center in San Francisco, which, because I don’t want you scrolling up to see it is again printed below;

The habits of our lives have a powerful momentum that propels us toward the moment of our death. The obvious question arises: What habits do we want to create? Our thoughts are not harmless. Thoughts manifest as actions, which in turn develop into habits, and our habits ultimately harden into character. Our unconscious relationship to thoughts can shape our perceptions, trigger reactions, and predetermine our relationship to the events of our lives.

So I am blown away by this series of fortuitous concatenations. This was a construct for constructing our lives that I had not really seen before. Habits as the scaffolding or foundation for the kind of person you want to be, for what James Clear calls your Identity, or Ostaseski calls your Character. Of course, over the years I was generally aware of the power of habits in my life- I always worked out for example, and I always tried to do whatever I said I was going to do, to name a couple, but I had never Intentionally sat down and thought about “ok, now what kind of character or identity do I want to have or develop in my life and what habits will serve that evolution?”

7 years ago I spent three months in Hazelden Rehab Center for prescription opioid addiction after a five level lumbar fusion and destroyed hips from running and lifting weights. The three months was a period of deep reflection about my life and how I ended up in that predicament (the word predicament in this context is like calling hurricane Katrina a shower). I remember after I was discharged sitting down and trying to write out my values, an exercise the councelors recommended. I could only come up with kindness and staying in shape, that was it. So I turned to the internet to find some more and stuggled to pick out several that seemed to fit.

Last month I was at a weekend retreat with a group of close surgeon colleagues I had organized and one of the exercizes was to write out our values. While the other toiled away I spit mine out in less than a minute, a testimony to the work I had put into learning about myself. And the winners are:

kindness

compassion

understanding

honesty

excellence

physical health

humor

learning

radical open-mindedness (Ray Dalio here)

playful, lightheartedness

I realized that my values can be the scaffolding of the building of my character or identity (duh you might be saying) and that the real power of the merging of habits and values is that you can intentionally develop a plan to develop habits that foster the growth of each value. And if you want to put in a new value and make it one, you can and make a plan for it! And as James Clear makes it so clear, the compound effects over time are incredible.

So for example, lets take radical open-mindedness. This can be a tough one. We humans are laden with preconceptions, judgements, biases, and filters galore. So one habit might be to develop curiousity about everything, working to not take things at face value. And it could also be the habit of actively seeking the opinions of others who may not agree with you and to stay curious and open to their ideas or perceived criticisms, even if they come across harshly.

Final thought. I have decided that real success for me in life is doing the work to develop the habits that support my values and living by them to the best of my ability. It is a nice framework for living. Life is a serious struggle a lot of the time, and to paraphrase Jocko Willink, a navy seal, “some days I win, some I don’t, but I get up and reload and get after it again”, and I am gentle but as relentless as I can be about the process. Which brings me to the last point I would like to make — the number one habit of them all in my opinion: the discipline to develop the habits that support your values and the character you want to have.