The Parallel Lives

Universities opened their doors a week or two ago. Freshman students moved into their dorm rooms, met their roommates, hung pictures on the walls, and completed their class schedules.

     Most students want to do well, even just ok, at college, but not everyone does.  

     How well any student completes his or her mastery of course work at a college depends upon that student’s preparation, his or her readiness, his or her skill at reading and writing, plus his or her ambition, hustle, and drive.

     Yet, above all those variables, a person’s success at college depends upon his or her habits.

    Without steady, unswerving habits—studying for several hours everyday of the week—a very intelligent person with great reading and writing skills and sufficient preparation will fare poorly.

     Because success at college is often geared around examinations, a student should begin to prepare for each examination several days before, perhaps the day the class begins.

     A student, who builds that habit of preparing for an examination days before, will do ok.

     Still, few students ever feel great about their examination grade. Most are disappointed, believing that they should have performed better or should have received a better grade.

     In recent days, I have been re-reading William James’s fourth chapter, “Habit,” in his 1890 book, “The Principles of Psychology.”

     William James taught anatomy, psychology, and philosophy at Harvard College for thirty-four years, from 1872 until 1907, which means he gave a lot of examinations to a lot of students.

     At the chapter’s beginning, he writes,

     “When we look at [animals], the first thing that strikes us is that they are bundles of habits.

     “In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems to a great extent, to be the result of education.”

     James is saying that parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and adults must teach boys and girls the best, most civilized, of the habits, if the young are ever to learn them.

     James then quotes from a doctor named Dr. Carpenter, who said, “Our nervous system grows to the modes in which it has been exercised.”

     In other words, our minds in coordination with our bodies build habits by exercising our free will, forcing ourselves to do something again and again, until the habit is set, fixed. 

     James writes that “a habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes fatigue.” In other words, once a person memorizes a sequence of actions—a, b, c, d, e, f, g, etc.—the outcome is superior and requires less effort.

     When I read James’s words here, I am reminded of the handful of hours I devoted to solving a Rubik’s cube the first time. The same is true of any procedure on the computer.

     Further into his chapter, he writes,

     “Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter.

     “It holds the miner in his darkness.”

     In James’s final paragraph of the chapter, he cautions young people.

     “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic [or malleable] state.

     “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smaller stroke or virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.”

     I say to each college-bound student, “build the best habits you can now, today, at college.”