I remember a poster that hung on the wall of my seventh grade classroom. It went like this:

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

It was as a competitive swimmer that these words were the most meaningful to me. Most sports are ultimately about the practice, about repeating an action over and over and over again, so that actions become habits and habits become character. The fleeting thought that I really hate getting up at 5:00 am for swim practice is just that: a fleeting thought. But if I justified it with words, speaking it aloud to my parents or siblings or friends, it became a fact that others knew about me, much realer than just a wispy thought. The action of forgetting-on-purpose to set my alarm, or faking sick, was a logical next step. And one missed practice might not be huge, in the long run, but it led easily to a habit of missing practice, say, once a week. A year of this, and I would start to think of myself as the kind of person who missed practice once a week, because after all, isn’t it silly of anyone to expect a twelve-year-old to get up at 5:00 three times a week? And that attitude could very easily have led, over a couple of years, to quitting the team.

As a matter of fact, none of this happened. As a child I had a large measure of Conscientiousness, and putting long-term goals, like getting best times and earning my coach’s approval, ahead of short-term goals like sleeping another three hours, came to me without too much difficulty. The cycle went the other way. My habitual response to the brief temptation to sleep in, namely screw sleep, this is how you’re going to get faster, my verbal statements to just about everyone that I loved swimming, and the action of getting up three times a week and trekking to the pool after school another three times all reinforced the habit of working hard...which, over the five or so years that I competed, did become a fairly permanent character trait that generalized to things like school and work.

Of course, the quote doesn’t only apply to hard work. It applies to being generous or to being thrifty, to kindness or anger. A thought that happens once leaves a small trail. If it happe...

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