I was in a good rhythm of publishing blog posts in two languages for the last few weeks. Then, life happened, as I expected to be at some point. My bachelor’s thesis proved to be more time-consuming than I’d admit, and some other issues required my attention and time. Today, I’d like to mention two quotes I think regularly in weeks like this. In the end, it will be a shorter post than usual due to some upcoming deadlines.

Quote #1: Return to flow

Couple of weeks ago, when I started this blog, I said that I’d keep writing regardless of the word count, inspired by the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius:

“When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it. “

This week, I thought about Marcus’s journal entry where he reminds himself to get back to the thing that matters, even though some flakes are unavoidable. As I mentioned in the disadvantages of thinking like an engineer, I had the flaw of binary thinking (i.e., only considering the two extremes without thinking about middle ground). Whenever I decided to start a habit, I dreamed of doing it every day or every other day like a scene from Rocky movies. Otherwise, it was simply not worth it. It’s a case of binary thinking where something either succeeds or fails.

However, almost everything lies in a continuum regarding habit formation. Unlike the popular 21-day rule, most habits can take 18 to 254 days, depending on personal differences, the complexity of the habits, and so on. This research also showed that occasionally failures did not affect the results. On average, most habits were formed in 66 days, corresponding to 2 months of consistent work. It’s no easy task, considering the everyday life where unavoidable obstacles are as common as the sun rising and going down. I would love to get into more detail about habit formation (backed by science), but I don’t have the time for it this week. Still, I recommend Atomic Habits and Don’t Shoot the Dog , as both authors utilized scientific research using everyday language to teach how to create or inhibit habits. Especially in the Atomic Habits, James Clear makes it clear that process-oriented thinking (e.g., “I am going to exercise 2 days a week, minimum of 10 minutes”) is more valuable than result-oriented thinking (e.g., “I am going to be fit by the next summer”). My point is that it might be unrealistic to assume that we will succeed all the time, and it might be wise to strategize a good process so that you can fall back to it when things go bad.

By setting process-oriented goals, I’ve read more books in a year than in the last 9 years. My process was simple, yet effective: reading 10 minutes a day. Some days, or even up to a week, I didn’t read a single page of anything. Only school, work, YouTube, Instagram, and Netflix. On other days, I over read it. I often just tried to reach the 10 minute mark to throw that book away. Although I loved reading books ever since I was a child, when the habit is gone, it can be gone for many years. The only thing that helped me reclaim my love was a simple mobile app widget on my main screen that showed whether I reached my daily habit. I just tried to keep returning to my rhythm whenever I got side-tracked. First year, I tried to read 10 minutes daily, accomplishing reading 54% of the 365 days. In the following year, it was 82%. When you accumulate the minutes and the page number, it adds up to more books than I’ve ever imagined reading.

Although I still have habits that I try to build or get rid of, simple rules like this seems to be working for some time. Perhaps if we want to do something regularly, we need to let go of the notion of “every day”, “every week”, “every month” and so on. Similar to our development of character, it’s not a lineer process where we constantly progress on whatever it is that we are trying to do. Perhaps the only thing that matters is to return to our flow, and be gentle to ourselves in such hurdles.

Quote #2: Every obstacle along the journey becomes journey itself

The second quote of Marcus’s that occupied my mind a lot this week was his most popular quote:

“In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Marcus had to become a politician to rule the biggest empire then. It came with a cost. Contrary to his interests (to become a scholarly philosopher), he had to deal with people and their ego daily. Although he talks about the people in his journal here, it is fair to extend it to many obstacles in our lives, based on his stoic philosophy.

He says that whenever there is an obstacle, it is not just a barrier to be jumped over; overcoming the obstacle becomes our way. Whenever someone or something blocks our action, it just yields further action to be taken. So, whenever we get stuck, we can think of it as an obstacle and think about what we did wrong and how we can decrease the chances of it happening again. This thinking process becomes an action where we might develop strategies that benefit us in the long run. For instance, if I don’t read 10 minutes a day while I spend time on Instagram for 88 minutes straight, then I think about strategies to at least allocate 10 minutes in a day to read in the upcoming days. If something comes up, great: another obstacle. With each iteration of mistakes and corrections, my reading habit seemed to be more consolidated, like a drying cement.

I want to emphasize a point: I didn’t say to eliminate the chances of it happening altogether, but to decrease it. Otherwise, do we really want to keep hoping for everything is going to be turn out just fine all the time? Such hope seems like a recipe for constant frustration. Although I could say nothing bad for realistic optimism (as it was shown to be an important factor for success), don’t we need to focus on what matters, without the never-ending disappointment of never-ending obstacles?

In the end, if one thing that is certain in this life is that change is unavoidable. It’s a force of nature, whether it’s coming internally or externally. Let’s finish it with a bonus quote from Bruce Lee, who summarized the entire point in 30 seconds:

Best regards,
Bugra