Shakespeare Was Wrong
We accept the names society gives us. A small personal vehicle running on four tires is called a car. A thing that we do without using much of our brain is called a habit. And so on.
We never try to rethink and change names because:
What kind of jobless person does that?
Shakespeare said what’s in a name and we agreed.
But names matter. A change in a thing’s name can change our outlook towards it.
I just saw a video by Ali Abdaal in which he said that he doesn’t like the name ‘habit’. Because building a habit feels like work. So he replaced habits with defaults.
Habit Vs Defaults
No matter what you name it— habit or default—the idea behind it is the same. It’s a thing that we keep turning to. Yet the two names do not feel the same because they come with different baggage.
When we hear the word habit, we associate it with things like waking up early in the morning, stopping smoking cigarettes, eating healthy, and a lot of other things that are really hard to do.
On the other hand, ‘default’ reminds us of a setting. We change the default to ‘Flashlight On’ and the camera flashes the light every time we click a picture. We make Firefox our default browser, and our phone opens the Firefox browser every time we click a link.
Setting a default is easy. You click a button and an action will be done only in a particular manner.
I am changing my default outside eating to healthy food. I am not building a habit. I am just changing my default setting.
Every time I will go outside to eat with a friend, I will have healthy food. Yes, I can make exceptions. But healthy food will be my default.