By Kevin Roberts
Published May 20, 2008
I remember reading somewhere that Roald Dahl, the brilliant children's writer who created Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, used to sit down and sharpen about thirty pencils every morning before he began writing. It always sounded to me like he was putting off the evil moment when he would have to stop thinking and actually do something, but what it was, of course, was a habit. Maybe a habit dressed up as a good luck charm, but a habit nonetheless. The truth is that habits get bad press. The label 'creature of habit' doesn't exactly bring to mind the most active or entrepreneurial human being. Yet it is often habit that saves us from danger – checking the traffic before we step out onto the road, for instance. Habits often work under the radar so we don't get driven crazy by having to make hundreds of routine decisions.
In The Open Mind and at Professional Thinking Partners, Dawna Markova looks at the processes we use in decision making and how we form habits. Anyone who makes decisions as a job knows that what you are really doing is casting aside possibilities, as well as settling on a way forward. I expect that is why some creative people are such terrible decision makers. They just don't want to give up the potential of different possibilities and make a choice. Nice work if you can get it.