Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

  What people are able to do is look back and believe that they made the best choice. People who know that make their decisions more quickly.

  Habits are being made this very moment

  William James used the example of water hollowing out a channel for itself to describe the process of habit-making. Even if water tries to flow where there’s no path yet, the flow will only spread out, since there are no good passages at the beginning.

  But when water continues to flow again and again in the same direction, a channel is formed, and it gets deeper and wider. The flow of that water is exactly like the neural circuit. Electrical signs are sent to the neurons receiving stimulation, and the connection will become stronger with more flow.

  There’s a saying that goes, “A person will become exactly the type of person that he continues to think about all day.” Each of the seventy thousand thoughts that a person has over the course of a day will be reflected inside him, and they will gradually make an impact.

  God may be too busy to watch what you’re doing. But your brain is being impacted this very moment by the things you’re thinking and seeing, and it continues to create habits.

  The pain of slacking off, the pain of being active

  You do not use your brain to keep the stuff out. You use your brain to take it in.

  —Next Stop, Greenwich Village

  During the six months I spent slacking off, there were certainly things that I enjoyed, but I experienced no joy of development or satisfaction, and it was painful.

  You may see those who are unable to move or work and blame them, saying, “They’re lazy.” And when those people are pushed into a corner, you may think, “It’s their responsibility.” But I know that a state where you’re being lazy or only having fun isn’t truly joyful. It’s a truly tough situation, in which there’s no sense of self-approval or self-efficacy.

  On the other hand, people who are active also go through pain. The rewards that they receive, like income and people’s praise, may appear large. But there is pain behind the effort that they make, and they also feel a lot of pressure from their communities.

  When asked if he would choose the same road if he were born again, Ichiro has said, “Never.” From here on, this is my imagination at work: Even if you continue to produce results, people gradually start to take those results for granted when you’re at the Ichiro level. It seems impossible that you’d ever become weak, even if you get older. This is Ichiro; he should be able to handle it. If the expectations grow large enough to themselves enter the Hall of Fame, then perhaps the rewards that someone like Ichiro can obtain will decrease.

  Happiness from an emotional standpoint

  Willpower can’t be fully trained, because it’s linked with your emotions—and they’re never totally under your control, no matter how far you go. You can see the proof of that when you look at how “first-rate” people act.

  Professional athletes fall under the influence of drugs, become addicted to sex, or can’t overcome the temptation of doping. It doesn’t matter if they’re politicians, film producers, or whatever; we should all keep in mind the scandals of successful people. Even Eric Clapton and Brad Pitt became dependent on alcohol, and Zinedine Zidane’s retirement match ended with head-butting.

  Bruno Mars, who won seven Grammy awards in 2018, came to Japan for the first time in four years and gave a live performance at Saitama Super Arena. And he got angry at audience members sitting in the front row who took pictures of themselves with their smartphones during the performance, and threw towels at them. No matter how successful he may have been, he was more unhappy at that moment than the people sitting in the area and laughing.

  In this way, people are people, no matter how far they get. But we expect people who are outstanding and people who are in positions of responsibility to exercise their willpower 24/7. There’s no one anywhere in the world who can do that. Willpower is linked with emotions, and there’s no one who doesn’t have emotions.

  So we should see those outstanding people more as individual human beings, just like us. At minimum, it would be wrong to deny everything else that a person has achieved when he or she makes a mistake. Because no matter how successful someone becomes, there’s still a foolish side to them that makes them that much more lovable.

  Everyone is happy to a fair degree and unhappy to a fair degree

  It’s only when we are otherwise engaged—you know, focused, absorbed, inspired, communicating, discovering, learning—dancing, for heaven’s sake!—that we experience happiness as a by-product, a side effect. Oh, no, we should concern ourselves not so much with the pursuit of happiness, but with the happiness of pursuit.

  —Hector and the Search for Happiness

  A person can’t continue to feed off the same joy from something they’ve already acquired. The evolutionary psychologist Daniel Nettle explains this human tendency like so: you may like a strawberry field fine, but there might also be some good salmon in the river over there.

  A strawberry field is plenty to live off of, and it should be easy to maintain as long as you don’t encounter unexpected challenges, but for some reason, people aren’t satisfied with that. Here’s the biological explanation: When you overestimate something that you already have (the strawberry field), you won’t be able to survive when your environment changes. On the other hand, if you can find a replacement, you’ll be able to survive, even if the original strawberry field becomes useless. So people are always looking for the next new thing.

  People would be happier if they could be satisfied with what they have now, without becoming bored. But people are instinctively inclined to get bored of what they have now, and pursue new things. So no matter how successful they become, they will worry, and find reasons to feel uncertain—because people are geniuses at finding those. They will get used to any environment, and they’ll get bored with it. Biologically, people prospered because of that instinct.

  Worries, concerns: it’s better to think of them not as personal issues but as a structure that people are born with. One of the musician Kenta Maeno’s song titles goes like this: “Worries, concerns, fantastic!!” If we need to carry them with us forever, we might as well make them our friends.

  When I wrote my previous book, I gained deep insights. I achieved fantastic success. But I had my next objective right away, and I can’t help wanting to do well again. It’ll be the same next time, and I guess the only way to keep going is to accumulate new successes. And I no longer think much about what happiness is.

  Being able to sleep with peace of mind, having no shortage of food, and having friends and loved ones that you get along with: once a person fulfills those needs, they’re fairly happy and fairly unhappy no matter how far they go.

  A partner called suffering

  Suffering will not disappear. Things disappear when you suffer.

  —Sochoku Nagai

  When I first began to acquire habits, I thought about joy and suffering like this:

  •First, you suffer, then you have fun = effort

  •First, you have fun, and then you suffer = negligence

  I used to wonder if the only difference between joy and suffering was the order, and if effort and negligence were mostly made up of the same actions.

  And as I further continued to practice my habits, pleasure and pain became even harder to understand. Naturally, effort includes suffering. You get out of breath when you run, and your muscles will scream when you lift barbells. But once those actions are over, you gain a sense of satisfaction. As you continue to repeat those actions over and over, you begin to understand that it’s because of the suffering that you now feel that sense of satisfaction.

  When you continue to repeat those actions enough times, you’ll become unable to tell whether it’s suffering that you’re feeling or if it’s joy. Over time, you’ll find that joy and suffering are like two sides of the same coin, or maybe they even overlap. You start to feel like the joy is apparent within the su
ffering, and you experience pleasure and pain simultaneously.

  It isn’t as if the suffering goes away after actions like running and weightlifting become habits. But you get used to the fact that suffering exists, and—how can I put it—the suffering starts to seem like a regular person who’s always around.

  I used to think that reducing the suffering as much as possible was a good thing, but it seems that that isn’t the case. The Buddhist monk Sochoku Nagai says about training in Buddhism: When cleaning is part of the training, you’re taught to thoroughly eliminate rationalizations such as, “This is already clean, so it doesn’t have to be cleaned.”

  “As you’re made to do things so much that it’s ‘Do this, do that,’ and ‘Yes, yes,’ and you have no room to think, you eventually become able to concentrate, in each situation, on the thing you’re supposed to do. Then, whether it’s a gain or a loss, pleasure or pain, you start to make fewer decisions on your own. Eliminating the difference between loss and gain and between pleasure and pain is what is called ‘attaining enlightenment.’”

  I used to believe that you could compete with pain, win, and gain joy that exceeded it. But I’m starting to consider the pain in front of me from a different perspective. The English word “compete” comes from a Latin word the original meaning of which is said to be “to fight together.” Like I’m in a gunfight in a crime film, I now have a feeling that I am relying on my partner by the name of pain, and I’m trusting that it has my back.

  Suffering isn’t the enemy. It’s a partner with whom you fight.

  Running as I think, thinking as I run

  I’m now dreaming of a scene.

  I’ve always dreamed of running in a marathon, but for a long time, I’d simply been a spectator, thinking that all I could do was cheer after having seen the runners performing at a completely different level. I didn’t try to run, either. All I did was read how-to books with titles like How to Finish a Marathon. I was scared to make a fool out of myself.

  One day, I worked up the courage to take part in a marathon. But, yet again, I got caught up trying to get myself prepared. I should have heard the starting gun. But I was way too nervous to do that and kept tying my shoelaces over and over, and continued to engage in an extensive stretching routine.

  Meanwhile, the other athletes had already started running. They were about to cross the finish line—and here I was, just having started my run.

  I was pretty far behind. They could just as well start to pack up and leave by the time I reached the finish line. But this was where I finally realized that it didn’t matter. No matter how far behind I may have been, whether or not I was able to finish the race within the designated time, it was okay. All was well, as long as I felt a sense of satisfaction. I wasn’t in the spectator area, and I wasn’t sitting at home in front of my TV. I was running right there on the marathon course just like the athletes.

  Suffering: “It looks like things are gonna get tough now. Wanna quit?”

  Me: “Hey, who do you think you’re talking to?”

  I’m going to tie my shoelaces, start to run, and see how things go.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Writing this book was a major challenge. A challenge? God, I felt like I was stranded every day. Because it wasn’t a habit for me to write my manuscript every day; that was the last habit that I acquired.

  It says in my diary that on January 7, 2016, as I wrote while riding the train heading for Ochanomizu, I received a sign from heaven: “I’ll write about habits as the theme for my next book!” Two and a half years passed before publication. Why did it take so long? I understand the reason now.

  As John Updike put it—words I introduce in Step 32, “You can actually spend your whole life being a writer and totally do away with the writing.” I had indeed gotten used to not writing, and “not writing” had become a habit. So I couldn’t have written this book about habits without the knowledge about habits that I gained in the process. It’s kind of weird: being taught by the content that I’m writing about as I became able to write about it.

  Given that that was how the writing was going, I asked for an extension on the launch date on numerous occasions, and I did a super maneuver that only a former editor could do when I was way beyond the timing just before the final deadline. This was at the same time as the wedding and honeymoon of my editor Mai Yashiro, and I thought, “I have to get this done promptly before that and have her go on her trip feeling good!”—but it wasn’t on time at all. Even under these conditions, her heartwarming personality helped me. Apologies from the bottom of my heart. And congratulations on your wedding.

  Katsuya Uchida in the book publishing department read my manuscript and gave me sound advice when he wasn’t even responsible for the project. I realized again how necessary it was for my writing to have as an editor someone who reads and offers his impressions. Thank you.

  I was glad for the thoughtfulness of Yuki Aoyagi, chief editor of the book publishing department, shown to a rookie like me. Yes, this was published by Wani Books, where I previously worked. So I’m glad that I can see the faces of the people involved with this book. Toshiyuki Otsuka in the production department, Tokimasa Sakurai in the sales department, and everyone else, here I am causing trouble for you again.

  I also extend my gratitude to Seiko Yamaguchi, for making illustrations that exceeded my expectations (“It would be nice if it came out like this …”), the designer Atsushi Nishitarumi for creating so many ideas for cover of the Japanese edition that it was tough to say which was best and for addressing my detailed requests.

  I kept being a nuisance to the people in DTP, proofreading, and printing. I have to do things properly first, really. Serious reflection here. Thank you in advance to the people in distribution and handling, and at bookstores.

  Everyone I touched on in this book: the researchers, creators, and athletes. Rather than saying that I wrote this book, it’s like I went ahead and digested in my own way what you all said, edited it, and rearranged it. I earnestly admire your efforts.

  Now, as I did in my last work, I want to thank my parents. This is what Walter Mischel of the marshmallow test, an integral theme in this book, has said about raising children: it wasn’t children controlled excessively by their parents, but children whose choices and independence had been respected that obtained the skills necessary to be the most successful in the marshmallow test. Though I used to think that I was a person who had weak willpower, I think the fact that I was indeed raised by my parents in that way has somehow tied in to the habits that I’ve now acquired.

  I began exercising when I was twenty-nine. I recently recalled that it was because of the influence of my father, who died that year, when he still had a long way to go. It seemed like he said to me, “Make sure you exercise properly and do things in moderation,” and that was why I started exercising then. Oh, I was also influenced by my mother, who was a marathon runner! Thank you very much.

  Now, one of the secrets to making something a habit is, as I said in Chapter 3, to advertise. That way, you put pressure on yourself. I think I, too, will reveal the topic of my next work. One, I’d like to write in more detail about quitting drinking, which I also touched on in this book. The working title is Quit Alcohol in a Fun Way. It’s fun to drink alcohol, but it’s also fun to quit drinking. (Don’t worry, I won’t recommend it to people who don’t want to quit.) I also want to write about the important topic of emotions, mixing it together with money and writing about something like “emotion-money theory.” And that cognitive trick where people think of marshmallows as clouds. The title here would be Go Ahead and Rewrite Reality as You Wish.

  Next time, I’d like to try various things, like running several projects at the same time. I’ll get working on the next book as soon as I finish this manuscript, in the way of Anthony Trollope, the god of habits whom I love and respect (I haven’t read his works though).

  But jeez, my previous book, Goodbye, Things was translated a lot, so pub
lishers abroad said things like, “We would love to translate a new work if it’s by Fumio Sasaki!” The manuscript wasn’t ready at all, and I thought it was just because of the pressure. But if I didn’t want to answer to the expectations of people like that and readers who say, “I’ve ordered your book!” even before it goes on sale, I probably wouldn’t be able to write books.

  I’m clearly single, and I’ve retired to the countryside where I now live. I’ll probably continue to live like this in the time to come. Even a guy like me couldn’t write if it weren’t for other people. I was able to affirm again that people live for people after all.

  Fumio Sasaki

  May 27, 2018

  RECAP

  THE 50 STEPS FOR ACQUIRING HABITS

  1.Sever ties with vicious circles.

  2.First, decide that you’re going to quit.

  3.Leverage turning points.

  4.Quit completely—it’s easier.

  5.Know that you always have to pay the price.

  6.Examine the triggers and rewards for your habits.

  7.Become a detective who looks for the real criminal.

  8.Don’t make identity an excuse.

  9.Start with keystone habits.

  10.Keep a diary to record observations about yourself.

  11.Meditate to enhance your cognitive ability.

  12.Realize that enthusiasm won’t occur before you do something.

  13.Whatever you do, lower your hurdles.

  14.Realize that hurdles are more powerful than rewards.