William James, believed that the creation of habits was essential to productivity and efficiency. Habits are, in a sense, nothing more than standard work that has become automatic and reflexive. If you’ll bear with me (and his turgid, 19th-century prose) for just a bit, you’ll see he was actually quite eloquent on the subject: Habit is the flywheel of society, its most precious conserving agent. The great thing, then, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against
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