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At my gym, every trainer has a small bio on the wall with a photo of themselves. And each trainer has picked a favorite quote to put on that wall.
One really spoke to me the other day: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” That quote came from Aristotle.
As I worked out, I kept thinking about the meaning of that quote. What am I? What do I repeatedly do? Are those the same things?
Then it got very meta because I started to think about the difference between who I am and who I want to be, and how my actions don’t always add up to what I am or what I want to be.
I’ll give you one example from sobriety. I remember a coworker goofing on me a bit because he always saw me with fast food and soda, and I bristled at that idea. I said something along the lines of, “Nah, I’m not that guy. You just happen to see me with a Taco Bell cup in my hand a few times.”
The truth is, I bristled because I didn’t want to be tagged as a 40-year-old dad who is a fast food guy. It felt embarrassing to me, and not quite accurate.
Except: It was. I ate fast food a few times a week. I crushed soda every day. I was a fast food and soda guy not because I wanted to be, but because those were my actions.
I can take it back even further with drugs and alcohol. I didn’t want to be a drug addict and an alcoholic. But I drank all day and took drugs constantly. I was actually a drug addict and alcoholic. I only overcame that tag by owning it.
I got sober, of course, but there are so many other things that I don’t want to be but I repeatedly do. Do I want to be a whiner and a complainer? No. Do I sometimes complain and whine a lot? Yes, I do.
Do I want to be a vengeful resentment machine? Nope. Do I want to be a cesspool of self-pity? No. Do I want to procrastinate? Be a slob? No and no.
But if I repeatedly do them, I become them.
So what am I based on what I repeatedly do? First of all, I am a recovering alcoholic and addict because I do sober stuff almost every single day. I do a lot of family stuff that requires selflessness, so I think I repeatedly am unselfish as a husband and father. I think I work hard to do a good job professionally, so I think I repeatedly fulfill my responsibilities as an employee. I go to the gym pretty much every day and I see my doctor, my dentist and my therapist on a regular basis, so I think I can say that I repeatedly consider my health and wellbeing.
There are definitely not-great behaviors I do every day that I think I repeatedly do enough to contemplate. I get fired up at my kids for being a******s. I give big thumbs down to many drivers on the road along side me, and I have written before about my disdain when I see someone shove their shopping cart into the middle of the lot for the next guy to hit with his car.
But all in all, I repeatedly do more of the right stuff than the bad stuff. So the key is, I need to repeatedly keep doing the good stuff and own the bad behaviors when they start to flare up.
One last thing about that famous Aristotle quote: It wasn’t actually Aristotle, apparently. It comes from a writer named Will Durant, who wrote a famous philosophy book that interpreted and contemplated earlier writings from people like Aristotle. Oh well, it’s the thought that really counts, right?
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
How do you set up a drunk in a nice, small business? Set him up in a nice, big business, and then wait.
(Credit: Grapevine)
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