It is seven o’clock on a September morning, on a small wooden jetty at the edge of the lake. The air is cool, the water cooler still: seventeen degrees, perhaps less. There are two people on the jetty. One is a woman of about seventy, in a white swimming cap, with a towel folded carefully on the bench. The other is a younger man, new to the village, who has lately got it into his head to start swimming in the mornings before work. He stands at the edge, bare feet on the wet boards, looking at the water the way one looks at a decision not yet taken. She goes down the ladder without pausing, lowers herself in up to the shoulders and sets off with a slow, even stroke towards the yellow buoy.
When she comes back, twenty minutes later, he is still there. He has wet his ankles, then his knees, then climbed back out. He asks her, half by way of apology: “Do you go swimming every morning?” She thinks for a moment as she takes off her cap. “I swim,” she replies. She does not say it with pride, nor to correct him. She says it the way one says one’s own name.
The difference between the two sentences is small, almost purely grammatical. Yet it contains thirty years. He is trying to do something. She, by doing it, has become someone.
We Become Builders by Building
More than two thousand years ago Aristotle devoted part of the Nicomachean Ethics to exactly this transition. The virtues, he wrote, do not arise in us by nature, nor against nature: we are made to receive them, and we receive them through habit. The examples he chooses are deliberately simple. We become builders by building houses, and lyre players by playing the lyre. In the same way we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Aristotle also noticed a linguistic detail that leaps out in Greek and that translations tend to hide. The word for character, êthos, is almost identical to the word for habit, éthos: only the length of a vowel separates them. For him this was no coincidence. A person’s character is, quite literally, what their habits have deposited in them.
There is something reassuring in this idea and something stern. Reassuring, because it means no one is condemned to stay as they are: one can become patient by practising patience, attentive by practising attention, even brave. Stern, because it also means the opposite. There are no neutral gestures. Everything we repeat is already turning us, whether we like it or not, into the person who repeats it.
In the same work, a few pages earlier, Aristotle had written one of his most quoted sentences: one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day. In the same way, he added, one day or a short time does not make a person happy. The line is usually repeated as a proverb about caution, a reminder that one sign is not proof. But in its context it speaks of something else: that what truly matters in a life is measured not in single moments, however intense, but in their duration. One swim does not make a swimmer, any more than one swallow makes a spring.
What Is Being Counted
Twenty-two centuries later, in 1890, the American psychologist William James took up the same idea in one of the most widely read chapters of his Principles of Psychology, the one devoted to habit. James described it in the physiological language of his day: the nervous system, he wrote, bends in the direction in which it is exercised, like a sheet of paper that, once folded, tends ever afterwards to fall along the same crease. But the conclusions he drew were moral, and surprisingly modern.
Could the young but realise, he observed, how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while it is still in a plastic state. And to make his point he used a stage character hugely popular at the time, Rip Van Winkle, a drunkard who excused each fresh lapse by saying: “I won’t count this time!” He may not count it, James commented, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among the nerve cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up, to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Read today, James’s sentence can sound like a stern warning. But its meaning is broader than that. The same mechanism that counts the lapses also counts the returns. Every morning the woman on the jetty went into the water, even those when she did not feel like it, even the rainy ones, was counted. None of those swims, taken alone, made her a swimmer. All of them together did. James ended the chapter with exactly this promise: whoever stays faithfully busy at their work each day may leave the final result to itself, for they can count on waking up some fine morning to find themselves one of the competent ones.
Sixty-Six Days
How long, then, does it take for a gesture to become a habit? For decades the most common answer was twenty-one days. The figure goes back to an American plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz, who noticed in the 1950s that his patients took about three weeks to get used to their new faces. In his best-known book he spoke of a minimum of twenty-one days. In the retelling, the minimum disappeared, and a rule remained.
In 2010 a group of researchers at University College London, led by the psychologist Phillippa Lally, decided to measure it properly. They published their results in the European Journal of Social Psychology. They asked ninety-six volunteers to choose a new behaviour to repeat every day in the same context, such as drinking a glass of water after breakfast or going for a short run before dinner, and to record for twelve weeks how automatic it had become. The typical time to reach the point where the behaviour more or less did itself was sixty-six days. But the differences were enormous: for some, eighteen days were enough; for others, by the researchers’ estimates, it would have taken more than two hundred and fifty.
The study also contained a result that is quoted less often and is perhaps more useful. Missing a day now and then did not derail the process. What mattered was not perfection but returning. Those who broke off once and then resumed still reached the same point, in time.
It is a finding that lifts a weight. One does not need flawless discipline to become someone. One needs to keep coming back, even after the mornings that were lost. In thirty years the woman on the jetty will have missed hundreds of swims: for flu, for travel, for the lake in a storm. That has not stopped her being someone who swims.
There is also something the numbers alone do not tell. Lally’s sixty-six days measure the moment when a gesture stops requiring a decision. But identity arrives later, and less visibly. It arrives when the gesture starts to shape the way one introduces oneself, arranges the week, chooses where to live or what to pack. Someone who has swum for years does not ask whether to bring a costume on holiday, and in every new city looks instinctively for the water. It is no longer one habit among others. It has become a point of view.
The Right Name for a Thing
In 2011 the psychologist Christopher Bryan and colleagues at Stanford published in the journal PNAS an experiment that seemed to confirm, almost spectacularly, the intuition on the jetty. On the eve of two American elections, the 2008 presidential vote and the 2009 race for governor of New Jersey, they asked groups of eligible voters to answer a short questionnaire. The only difference lay in a single word. Some were asked how important it was to them “to vote”. Others, how important it was “to be a voter”. Among those who had read the noun, actual turnout was more than ten percentage points higher.
The interpretation was seductive: a noun invokes identity, and what concerns who we are moves us more than what we do. But a few years later a team of political scientists led by Alan Gerber repeated the experiment on a much larger scale, in a real election, and found no appreciable difference between the two wordings. A word, on its own, is not enough to change behaviour.
Perhaps that is precisely the point. Identity cannot be borrowed from a phrase. The man on the jetty could say “I swim” tomorrow morning, but it would not be true, and he would know it. For the woman, by contrast, those two words are not a motivational formula: they are an accurate description. The noun works only once it has been earned by the verb. First one does a thing, many times, and only afterwards discovers one has become the person who does it.
There is a freedom in this. We do not have to decide in advance who we are. We do not even have to believe it. It is enough to choose what to repeat, and let time do the rest of the work.
What We Repeat
The other side of the coin is that the mechanism works even when we do not choose it. Habits do not form only around what we decide to cultivate. They form around whatever we do often enough in the same context. Reaching for the phone on waking, answering messages over dinner, checking email one last time before turning out the light: none of these gestures was chosen the way one chooses to learn to swim. Yet, repeated for years, they too build someone. Someone, for instance, who can no longer stay five minutes without looking at a screen.
That is why Aristotle’s question remains so current. Not so much “what do I want to achieve”, but “what am I returning to every day”. The first question looks at results, and results may or may not come. The second looks at the person being formed, and that person is formed regardless, every day, with or without our consent.
Those who look at their day with these eyes often discover that they are already many things they never decided to become. But they also discover that at any moment they can begin to become something else. Not with a grand decision, forgotten the next day, but with a small gesture, repeated tomorrow at the same hour, and then the day after that.
Never the Same Swimmer
Heraclitus, the philosopher of Ephesus, held that one cannot step into the same river twice: the water flowing around us is never the same, and neither is the one who enters it. The line is usually quoted to speak of impermanence, of how everything changes without pause. But read from the jetty it suggests something more precise. The river does not change the swimmer by chance. It changes him because he keeps going in.
Let us go back to the lake. A week has passed, and the younger man is on the jetty again at seven. This time he goes down the ladder. He swims a little, some twenty untidy strokes, halfway to the buoy, and comes back short of breath and with numb hands. The next morning he returns. The one after that he does not, because it is raining; but on Monday he is there again. October arrives, the water drops to fifteen degrees, and his swims lengthen a little at a time, without any single morning seeming to make the difference.
One day at the end of October, as they dry off on the bench, the woman asks whether he will carry on through the winter. He is about to say that he will try, that it depends on work, on the cold, on how he feels. Then he notices that the question no longer unsettles him the way it once did. He is no longer deciding, each morning, whether to go. He goes.
Neither of them says it, but in those weeks something has happened that no single plunge could have produced. The man who stood at the edge, looking at the water as a decision to be made, is no longer there. In his place is someone who swims. He did not suddenly become someone else, and he had no need to announce it to anyone. He became, one morning after another, the person who kept coming back.