This is the seventh post from The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
New Tricks
There are lots of things that make starting new habits hard, but maybe the biggest one is the inertia of an entire life of NOT doing the thing.
Hence the old-dog-new-tricks cliché. The more life you’ve got behind you, the more inertia there is to keep doing things the way you’ve always been doing them.
So new habits are hard.
But not impossible.
To keep this newsletter slash podcast going, I need to firmly establish a new daily writing habit, which is a thing I’ve never been good at. The longest I’ve ever gone is a few weeks. My normal is death sprinting to get something done after long stretches of not writing at all.
Avoidance. Inconsistency. Ambient regret. There’s a whole lot of inertia to push against.
And as Sir Isaac Newton figured out more than 300 years ago, the only way to overcome the force of inertia is to somehow generate even more force in the opposite direction.
This is why I started The Nooner. I’m an old dog trying to learn a new trick.
New Habits Are Hard