Habit

Sure, people always fall prey to everyday habits and routines. Most of us (and I must confess I count myself among them) keep doing the same thing - like looking too much at the mobile phone. It's the first object I reach for in the morning and the last thing I look at before bed.

It all seems so natural. Thing is, if you've read Charles DuHigg's The Power of Habit, there's a good chance you'll understand how a habit - like a parasite, only much worse - enters our brain and lives there.

The basic rule of habit is straightforward. It's a habit loop with three stages: the cue, which is a trigger in the first place; the routine, which is the behaviour itself; the reward, at the end, to satisfy the brain and guarantee that the loop is worth replicating. Straightforward idea, really.

To show you how a habit kicks in, let's think about the urinal in public toilets. For more than a century, the urinal has been one of the dirtiest areas. What would you do if you happened to be given the task of latrine cleaning? I learned the trick from a story at Schiphol, Amsterdam's international airport. Imagine, for a moment, holding your breath in front of the urinals and getting mad about the spillage (which is a tactful term to describe the amount of urine that hits the walls and floors). Can we shape the behaviour and habit of those visitors of the toilet? Remember the habit loop? Not many do, except a smart guy Jos Van Bedoff. Van Bedoff managed to change the habit of thousands of men at Schiphol, because he exploited the habit loop. Guess what is the cue that he invented?

A fake but life-sized fly etched into the white porcelain wall of each urinal.

The rest is easy to understand. Et voilà! Spillage was cut by a whopping 80 percent.

Volcano

Everyone can get angry. Eight till eighty. Get along with anyone long enough and you will come across a volcanic moment. 

One of my exemplary colleagues never loses patience with his patients, and for heaven's sake, exploded few days ago at a wedding banquet. That's after the waitress poured the salad dish on his girlfriend's dress. You could cook a six-pack of eggs next to his burning face. Quite right so? 

However, many of his friends find it unbelievable as if that's the sight of a volcano in Hong Kong instead of Indonesia. This, I fear, is as unusual as a saint using obscene language in their minds. That raises a point worth clarifying: that showing anger is not a sin.

As I learn to teach my daughter to feel okay with anger, I get to appreciate that anger is indeed one toolkit of emotion - and an essential energy source. And just to stretch the mystery of anger a little bit further, it's a birthright. 

There's a line from Aristotle that's an old favourite of mine: "to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way."

Echoed

No argument: growing up in impoverished Afghanistan town is never easy.

Ten minutes in the desert and already the feet felt raw. How do the kids walk all day without shoes, I wondered as I read the novel And the Mountains Echoed by the acclaimed author Khaled Hosseini (whose novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns have sold a combined 38 million copies worldwide). The first few chapters of his latest novel drew me to the touching tale of a brother and sister.

The brother heard about another boy whose family owned a peacock. It would be hard to think of a better gift than a peacock feather with a beautiful large eye at the tip. The ten-year-old brother wished he could bring the gift to his sister. He negotiated. In a last-ditch effort, he traded his shoes for the iridescent green peacock feather.

By the time he made his way home shoeless, his heels had split open and left bloody smudges on the ground. If you'll let me, I'd like to tell you a little bit about his soles: thorns and splinters had burrowed into every cell of his skin. You could hear the brother's groan with every step, and possibly feel the barbs of pain shooting through his feet.

Imagine going to work or school barefoot and finding no path other than the bumpy road. You just keep looking at each step. Because if you don't learn to do this, you'll learn a painful lesson. Keep going. About an hour passes, and you're still only half way through. I had such chance to find out how it goes yesterday. Let me explain.

That's a charity walk to raise money for poor children in countries like Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. That's meaningful, right? And probably the most important thing is that we have to walk without socks or shoes. I brought my daughter to walk with us. She might laugh at the somewhat funny way of walking. And then it turns out that it isn't that funny. Of course, there will always be a flickering moment of insight, like learning to feel sorry for the poor children without shoes - which is, needless to say, how I wish my daughter could learn.