Oh dear... A very inspiring article from Daily Good again but it would do the site credit if more care was used to avoid sloppiness (ironically, one of the very things James Clear comments on). First off, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit," is a quote not from Aristotle but a quote from a philosophical examination of Aristotle's work by Will Durant (it is one of the most widely mis-attributed quotations). Secondly the article as published is fine as pop-science, but emboldening "66 days to be exact" is not exact anything: the exact time taken to establish a habit, as the original study demonstrates, varies widely.
On Jul 16, 2014 chris docker wrote:
Oh dear... A very inspiring article from Daily Good again but it would do the site credit if more care was used to avoid sloppiness (ironically, one of the very things James Clear comments on). First off, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit," is a quote not from Aristotle but a quote from a philosophical examination of Aristotle's work by Will Durant (it is one of the most widely mis-attributed quotations). Secondly the article as published is fine as pop-science, but emboldening "66 days to be exact" is not exact anything: the exact time taken to establish a habit, as the original study demonstrates, varies widely.