Phelps started swimming at age seven to channel the overflowing energy that was wearing his mom and dad out. Looking at Phelps's unusually long torso, large hands, and relatively short legs, swim coach Bob Bowman intuitively felt that Phelps could become a world champion.
But Phelps had severe emotional swings. He could hardly calm his mind before a race. On top of that, his parents were in divorce proceedings, which added heavy stress. Coach Bowman bought a book on relaxation training and asked Phelps's mother to read it aloud to her son every night. In that book was a passage: "Clench your right hand tightly and then release it. Imagine the tension melting away in between." Phelps made it a habit, before sleep, to tense and then relax each part of his body in that way. (p. 165)
"As long as our lives take a constant form, our lives are nothing but bundles of habits."
American psychologist William James said this in 1892.
The author says it's easy to see the choices we make every day as the results of careful deliberation, but the reality is far from that. Most of what we "choose," he argues, is actually "habit." And those habits end up having a huge impact on our health, happiness, productivity, and financial stability. In fact, according to a 2006 paper by researchers at Duke University, 40 percent of the things we do every day are not the result of decisions—they are habits.
Olympic swimming hero Michael Phelps. He started swimming at age seven, with excellent physical traits but the weakness of severe emotional swings. Coach Bowman judged that to turn him into a world-champion swimmer, the first thing to do was to form the "right habits."
First, through Phelps's mother, Bowman had him build a nightly habit before sleep: clench the right hand, release it, let the tension melt away. Then, when Phelps had grown into a teenager, he told him, "Go home and watch the videotape before you fall asleep. And watch it again right after you wake up."
It wasn't an actual videotape—it was the "perfect race" drawn in his head. On the coach's instruction, the teenage Phelps every night before sleep, and first thing in the morning, imagined himself plunging from the starting block into the pool and swimming a perfect race in slow motion—right down to how he felt when he pulled off his swim cap at the end. Phelps lay in bed with his eyes closed, watching his race play out from start to finish in his head, over and over. Eventually he could time his own imagined race down to the second.
As time passed, all Coach Bowman had to do before a meet was quietly tell Phelps, "Get the videotape ready." That alone was enough. Phelps could settle his mind and blow his competitors away. The coach's efforts—knowing how important habits are and putting everything into forming "right habits" from a young age—made Phelps the Olympic hero.
The "habits" that look small decide our lives.
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