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Show LET'S TALK ABOUT yoiL ' BY CHARLES B. ROTH The Set-ret of Good Habits Because you have been warned so many times against breaking habits, you may have Jumped to the conclusion con-clusion that al! habits are bad. But they aren't. I think the number of good habits is greater than the number of bad habits. You may be astonished when 1 tell you that being more effective and successful in your life is largely a matter of habit What I mean is that clever and successful people have formed helpful habits of thinking think-ing and doing, while neurotic and unsuccessful people have the wrong kind of habits. That is the chief difference between them. Look at a habit in this way and you will see what I mean. What Is habit except doing or thinking the same thing often enough until doing or thinking it becomes automatic, auto-matic, and you do every customary act in the same way. Such action is called "habitual action." When you think the same thoughts often enough until they have become thoughts that come and go without your bidding, really without your control, you are doing habitual or habituated thinking. Now, the secret of winning the right kind of personality and place In life Is simply to determine a pattern of thoughts that you want to have, and then to think those thoughts and keep on thinking them long enough until thinking them becomes s habit. Let's say that at the present time you are willy-nilly about everything every-thing you do. You can't make up your mind. You waver. You postpone. post-pone. You can't make decisions. Those things are a sign of faulty thought habits. Decide that for one week you will act decisively, even If wrongly, in little, things. During that week act, live, carry yourself like a person of resolute habits. Maybe one week's experiment Isn't going to be long enough to overthrow the faulty thought habits of a lifetime, but it will help. It will be long enough to put you on the road to right thinking and to right habits. Dig deeply enough into the way the person you admire the most lives, and you probably will find that he is controlled by a series of habits right habits. The sum total of those habits is what gives him his personality, his attractiveness. attractive-ness. The sum total of good habits in your life will do just as much for you. |