The Two Strategies of Dealing with Resistance
Photo by Radu Florin on Unsplash
When asked by Sam Harris what the difference is between a good habit and a bad habit, James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says it lies in the short-term and long-term outcomes of the habit. Eating chips while lazing on the couch is very satisfying in the moment but bad in the long run. But going to the gym is immediately uncomfortable but ultimately beneficial. And this misalignment is why it’s so much easier to pick up bad habits than good ones.
As to why this is the case, he says this¹:
I think this comes back to some sort of evolutionary wiring. For the vast majority of human history, humans have lived in what scientists would call an immediate return environment — almost all of your choices had some kind of immediate or near term impact on your life. Do I take shelter from the storm, do I run away from the lion, do I forage for berries in that bush for my next meal? And now — just the last 500 years or so — we live in this modern society where a lot of the greatest returns that we get now are actually a delayed return environment. You go to work today to get a pay-check in two weeks, or you go to class today to get a college degree in four years, you save for retirement today so that you can be retired and free in a decade or two. And so we have this weird shift where, increasingly, the payoff of delaying gratification, or making long term choices is greater and greater because of the institutions and society and culture we’ve set up. And yet our palaeolithic minds seem to be wired to prioritise the immediate outcome.
James Clear’s way of dealing with this misalignment is to shape his environment so that it becomes easier to cultivate good habits and harder to continue bad ones. In his book, he suggests that we build ourselves a path of lesser resistance for good habits and throw in some speed bumps onto the path to bad habits.
While this seems like good advice, it didn’t go down easy for me because I’ve been reading this other book: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. In it, Pressfield has a unique way of handling the term “Resistance”:
Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.
In the book, Pressfield continues to talk about Resistance in this way, where it is as the name suggests, a force that resists artistic endeavour but also at the same time points us in the right direction. His advice is to move towards the Resistance.
Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.
While Clear says that the point of cultivating good habits is to make beneficial actions easier and easier every day², Pressfield claims that the artist should never expect it to get easier:
The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
Pressfield’s romantic take on the artistic life and Clear’s more pragmatic approach to habit-forming may seem at odds with one another. But I have the feeling that they are the yin and yang of art and productivity. The romance is what gets you going but the pragmatism is what pulls you through.
Edited for brevity.
Atomic Habits is definitely one of the most popular books on the topic, but I haven’t read it fully yet. But I read a lot of the things that he talks about in Scott Adams’ book How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big. (Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert.) He recommends “focusing on systems instead of goals” a few years before James Clear’s book came out, so I think he deserves credit for that.
