On Repetition and Identity
Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do. I keep coming back to what that means for how we build software, teams, and ourselves.
A friend and I were talking about psychology and personal growth. She is Greek, like me, so at some point she mentioned Aristotle. Which happens more than you would expect.
We landed on his argument about virtue: you do not become courageous by deciding to be courageous. You become courageous by repeatedly doing courageous things until it stops being an effort.
We are what we repeatedly do.
The quote is actually Will Durant paraphrasing Aristotle, not Aristotle himself. Its own small lesson about how ideas travel. But the argument is real.
What stays with me is that identity follows practice, not the other way around.
You do not have to be the person first. You just have to act like them, repeatedly, until the acting becomes natural and the distance between who you are and who you are trying to become closes.
This removes a certain excuse I have used on myself: that is just not how I am.
It might just be that I have not repeated it enough yet.
I think about this with code. The engineers I have admired most did not decide to write clean code. They built a reflex. Review by review, PR by PR, until asking "what changes here?" was just how they saw systems.
The habit is the identity. There is no shortcut before it.
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