Joel Wade

My client Frank was having a very hard time with his money. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway’s bankrupt character Mike in “The Sun Also Rises,” money problems tend to happen gradually, then suddenly.

Frank was, fortunately, still in the “gradually” stage, feeling anxious and a bit untethered. The frustrating thing was that he knew exactly what he needed to do… he just didn’t do it.

Well, to be more precise, he usually didn’t do it.

When he saw that his credit card balances were creeping up, and he’d lost track of what was happening with his investments, and he started worrying about bills that he hadn’t prepared for, then he would pay attention to his spending and check diligently on his investments… for maybe a week, maybe a month.

But when the anxiety subsided a bit as he adjusted his behavior, he would begin to feel less urgency, and eventually the old habits would reassert themselves, slowly re-creating the same problems that had been troubling him.

And the cycle would repeat itself.

We can know the right things to do. We can know how to do them. But until and unless these behaviors become automatic habits, we will never actually do them reliably over time. It just takes too much energy, focus, and willpower to consciously think of everything all the time.

As the great American psychologist William James said about a hundred years ago:

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

This is one of the enduring truths of human nature. If we want to establish a behavior over time, we need to make it automatic.

Unfortunately for James, it turns out that the “miserable human being” he was describing, was himself. As his biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote, James’s was “…a man who really had no habits – or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits – and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”

Sometimes we can teach best what we most need to learn. In that sense James was a fantastic teacher regarding habits.

So how do we establish strong, positive, and consistent habits?

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An essential ingredient for success at anything – beyond the most mundane of rote tasks – is curiosity.

Curiosity is about exploration and discovery; it creates energy, possibilities, and movement. It also allows us to create relationships, and to grow more deeply and delightfully connected with one another. It allows us to play – and excellence in work can be like play for adults.

In my work as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Life Coach, and Business Consultant, I would be utterly useless without curiosity as a central deliberate practice. I need to get to know, before I do anything else, who this other person is – or who these people are if it’s a couple or a work team. I need to be keenly interested in knowing and understanding them, their circumstances, and what their goals and challenges and strengths are. That’s all about curiosity.

You might think, “Well, that sounds like you start with empathy…” But empathy, in my experience, follows from curiosity. If we’re curious about the other person, that’s the portal through which our empathy and care for other people enters.

Think of your own work, your own family, your own friendships. With those with whom you enjoy a good relationship, I would bet that you also are curious about who they are as people. On the other hand, if there are people from whom you feel more distant or critical, you might find that bringing more curiosity about their internal worlds can bring fresh energy and interest – and perhaps greater compassion as well.

In our work, our success and prospects grow with curiosity. The antithesis of curiosity is a sense of or desire for certainty.

Curiosity is a quality that allows us to deliberately expand our awareness, to explore and search for possibilities.

In contrast, when we look for certainty, we’re looking to end the search, and bring the exploration to a close.

The need for certainty can reinforce the need for more certainty, as we narrow our possibilities. We become more defensive in the pursuit of being right; we’ll tend to replay events as we interpreted them, rather than wondering what we may have missed. We’ll tend to look for and hold on to stereotypes, avoiding too much empathy or self-reflection in favor of what we think we know.

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When we see someone who truly excels at what they do, one quality often jumps out: they make it look easy.

But what is it that gives us the impression of ease?

They seem to take their time. Even when you’re seeing an elite athlete making lightning quick moves, it seems to be moving more slowly than the actual elapsed time. They’re not panicked, they’re not forcing things; the moves look fluid.

When someone has reached a state of mastery, with all the deliberate practice that requires, they’ve accumulated a vast store of knowledge and experience in their working memory. So when they get to work, they don’t need to take time to look things up; or when it’s a physical skill like athletics or music, they don’t have to think about the movements themselves.

Because of this, they also don’t feel rushed to act. They have time to orient to the problem or the task, and before they take action, they will have scanned their working memory for the information they need – the facts, the experience, the causes and effects they know – and then when they do act, they do so magnificently.

In my college astronomy course, our professor brought in a guest speaker one day who had once shared an office with Albert Einstein. He told us how Einstein had been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and during this time this (then very young) professor was working on a complex formula on the board in their office. He was stumped by one section of the formula, and had not made any headway on it for most of those two weeks.

When Einstein returned, he was curious about the formula, and he began asking what seemed, to this professor, to be some very simple – and kind of dumb – questions. This went on for about twenty minutes, during which time this professor was beginning to seriously question the great genius of Albert Einstein.

But then, all of a sudden, Einstein said, “Oh, well then…” and he promptly completed the formula, easily solving the problem that had flummoxed the professor for two weeks.

When approaching a problem, a true expert will approach it with curiosity, take their time, orient to the situation, and get to know the problem first, before they act.

Novices, on the other hand, will tend to jump in quickly, getting to work on the problem before they really understand what they’re dealing with.

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