You Can't Buy Good Habits
This is no grand contribution to the literature of habits, but a simple connection I’ve made, one related to shopping.
Every year I would purchase a sketchbook and hope that its mere presence would seduce me into finally, finally learning how to draw. Many of my friends are successful artists, commissioned to make art, but my shakey hand-eye coordination stopped me from ever pursuing it when I was young. If I made a purchase it would be a physical commitment, I reasoned, and commitments habits make.
But this expenditure never translated into learning the craft. Pencils and pens never touched the page. I would move, or I would lose the sketchbook on vacation, and so I would have an excuse the next year to indulge in this annual ritual and buy another one.
A pattern for me—and a pattern for many, if the cyclical attendance at gyms attests to anything—is putting my purse and purchase first when pursuing a new habit or lifestyle, with these purchases rarely translating into actual achievement of these goals. In fact, I think buying often dissuades me from pursuing a habit. I was committed to learning Android application development until I purchased a 10 dollar course on the subject, and something similar happened when I bought RPG Maker and told myself I’d finally make a video game, and of course, there’s those sketchbooks.
It’s the habits I start for free, instead, that end up sticking. I am passable at Python and web dev, both hobbies I learned without spending a pretty cent. I dicked around more in Twine, a free game-making tool, than I ever did in RPG Maker. And when I finally committed myself to drawing, it was through a free course called Drawabox.
It’s hard to reconcile at first, but I think I can connect it to something well known in behavioral sciences. Telling people about your goals can give you a “premature sense of completion,” letting you visualize and vicariously savor the fruits of victory long before you’ve taken the first step. And if you can savor those fruits your brain feels less inclined to put in the effort. You know the saying “don’t rest on your laurels,” well, even imaging what those laurels must feel like puts you in a soporific state long before they line your bed.
I think that buying things can play a similar role. I have the sketchbook—I can already see my first masterpiece. I have RPG Maker installed—already, I can feel my thumbs hugging the controller, playing my first game. Money makes these inevitable victories real in a way that doing things free doesn’t, at least for me. Oh, actual commitment, the actual act and art of getting good at something, I could delay with peace of mind knowing that I have such a real and lovely sketchbook, that through purchase I have already won half, maybe eighty percent of the battle.
Again, I don’t think this is a grand revelation. Just a connection I thought explicative.