turning a cliche into self-awareness and habit change
Recently I re-encountered the old chestnut: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” This felt to me a little too much like high school football coach wisdom – something that holds true when the rules are clearly defined, there’s a literal level playing field, and the game is time-bound. In other words – great for sports, maybe a little shaky for the vagaries of real life.
Then I thought about it some more and was like, “let me not be so smug. Let’s at least test the proposition.” Then I ran a rough version of the test below, which I’ve now turned into an exercise you can do, too. This can be a pump for your self-awareness that can spark habit change or habit deepening, as needed.
1. Choose one of your current endeavors. I loosely define “endeavor” as “something that requires inputs from you over more than a few days.”
Things that count: a work project, a hobby, a big international trip.
Things that don’t: a meeting, one instance of disciplining your child, making dinner.
2. Now break down “how you do [endeavor you chose]” by completing the prompts below that are relevant to your endeavor (there might be some that don’t make sense):
A) Operational Moves
When I start, I naturally…
I postpone ______ until ______.
My default with tools/tech is…
My pattern of communication and updates to others looks like …
I decide I’m done when …
B) Relational Moves
With collaborators, I usually…
When conflict looms, I…
My go-to way of contributing to relationships with collaborators is…
My interaction with my broader network or community tends to look like …
C) Decision & Resource Moves
My budgeting approach is…
My risk appetite is…
…and I can see that because I …
I’ll happily spend time and/or money to …
I’m very reluctant to spend time and/or money to…
I learn and grow by…
E) Energy & Boundaries
When I get busy, I drop…
I protect time by…
I draw energy from…
I feel enervated by…
3. Transfer to other projects
Now you can pressure test the cliche in your other endeavors. For each of the moves you identified above, ask yourself:
Where else does this move appear in my life?
Is this move helping me or holding me back?
As a follow up to 2: If I really “overdid it” with this move, like 10x’d it, what, if anything, would break? What would get super duper good?
As with any exercise like this, you can feed data, like emails, calendar events, and google docs you’ve written, to a state of the art LLM like Claude Opus 4.1 or GPT 5 Thinking and have that LLM take a crack at this for you. The AI version can serve as a point of comparison with the version of the exercise that you write on your own, helping you see some things that may escape you when you’re looking in the mirror.
-eric
