Status Updates From Daily Rituals: How Great Mi...

Day 50: Immanuel Kant. One of the most important philosophers. Kant adopted what he called "a certain uniformity in the way of living and in
the matters about which I employ my mind". At the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims: a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life. But alas, we do not have a written list of Kant’s personal maxims.

Day 49: James Boswell. A moody biographer. On a good day, his "affairs are conducted with the greatest regularity and exactness". On a bad day, he woke in a foul mood, "dreary as a dromedary", convinced that "everything is insipid or everything is dark". There was little he could do to control these moods. He concludes: “Life has much uneasiness; that is certain. Always remember that, and it will never surprise you.”

Day 48: Samuel Johnson. Apparently, Johnson was a night dweller. He would be out until 2AM, and only thereafter would he start working (while the rest of London slept). "My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness" Yet, he added, he was temperamentally ill-equipped for the battle: "I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together."

Day 47: Jonathan Edwards. “For each insight he wished to remember, he would pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with the thought. When he returned home he would unpin these and write down each idea. At the ends of trips of several days, his clothes might be covered by quite a few of these slips of paper.”

Day 46: Margaret Mead. Once, Mead got news that a certain morning session had been postponed. She was furious. “How dare they? Do they realize what use I could have made of this time? Do they know I get up at five o’clock every morning to write a thousand words before breakfast? Why did nobody have the politeness to tell me this meeting had been rescheduled?” A sentiment some of us can very well relate to.

Day 45: BF Skinner. The founder of behavioral psychology treated his daily writing sessions much like a laboratory experiment, conditioning himself to write every morning with a pair of self-reinforcing behaviors: he started and stopped by the buzz of a timer, and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph.