Habit

I have read many articles which criticize people for sticking to their habits every day without deviation. Yesterday I read one such article. It talked about a diamond shop which tried to promote its merchandise by sending letters to its old customers, with sample of real diamonds inside. Unfortunately all its old customers saw the letters as junk mail so they got tossed into the bin without even being opened. The conclusion was that sticking to habit causes us to miss many valuable things in life.

However, let's look at the flip side of things. What if after hearing of this story, everyone became determined not to miss anything in life due to habit? The first step would be to open and read every piece of junk mail. This would certainly take up a lot of time that could be used for work or relaxation.

Not only that, everyone would have to open and read all the junk emails just in case one of them was actually a good promotion. Never mind the viruses and the Nigerian emails, there might be an opportunity there!

Obviously this is not viable. Too much time would be wasted in total to be worth it even if a diamond comes in the mail once in twenty years, which I doubt.

We follow our habits in daily life because they save us time. Time is money. Spending time every day on a very low-percentage possibility is simply not sensible. Say we would need 20 minutes every day to check through junk mails and junk emails. That would come up to 7300 minutes a year, or 121 hours, or 15 work-days. Clearly spending so much time on something so unlikely is ridiculous.

I'm not going to buy lottery tickets because the percentages are not worth it. Same with other things.