2009
It’s hard to change a little. It’s much easier to change a lot.
When you try to change a little, your old mindset still has its old values and attachments, and you inevitably slide back into your old groove. But when you change enough to create a new mindset, you can free yourself from your old way of looking at things and create a new groove.
Homer Simpson’s ass groove comes to mind. Moving over a few inches would be painful at best. Moving across the couch to a new cushion would be like starting fresh. The mind and habits work the same way.
This has happened to me a number of times.
Waking Up Earlier
For years I tried to wake up about 30 minutes earlier than my regular routine. It would work for a while, but then I’d inevitably start waking up later and later until I reached my regular schedule. However, when I got a new job that required me to wake up 2 hours earlier, sure it was tough at first, like adjusting to jet lag, but it became my new routine. And I’ve had no problems consistently waking up 2 hours earlier than my old routine.
CVS/Subversion -> Distributed Version Control
I used to use CVS for version control at work. For a small project, a co-worker and I tried using Mercurial. On the surface, Mercurial is very similar to CVS, and it was very easy as a CVS user to just pick up Mercurial and get started using it. It ended up being nice, but we perceived it as CVS + local commits and a few other “neat” features. Nothing game-changing. Months go by and I decide to give distributed version control another shot. This time I tried git. Git is so different from CVS that I was forced to literally stop what I was doing and learn git. This seemed bad, but it forced me to change how I thought about version control. I used to think of version control as something that was akin to writing in stone because it was expensive and could never be changed. However, now I see everything as patches, and patches are cheap, can be applied, rolled back, and re-ordered. A completely different mindset. Now I’m hooked on distributed version control and couldn’t live without it.
Imperative Programming -> Functional Programming
People I have known who tried learning functional programming using a language that supports functional features but allows falling back on imperative loops and statements… they end up never really getting it because they inevitably fall back on their old imperative ways. When I was taught functional programming at Carnegie Mellon, it was mandated that we use Standard ML without any assignment statements (i.e. no references). I was completely lost for the first couple weeks, but after a certain point, it clicked — and from then on, I have been thinking functionally ever since.
So if you want to change how you think about something, in the long-run it’s hard to change a little; it’s much easier to change a lot.
