Habits

You choose what you are by what you do

July 16, 2026

Our acting teacher, Jon, sends us a daily task. Something small we do as an actor, no more than five to fifteen minutes. Behind it is a simple idea: we are what we repeatedly do. You’re always an actor, and you can signal that to your brain just by doing the task.

What I love about these tasks is that they’re not product-based. We’re not trying to make anything. We’re just edging closer to our craft, building up reference material to draw on later.

That matters because as actors, we’re usually only ever working toward an end product: the audition, the rehearsal, the thing that needs to get done. We rarely get to just play, or sketch. Jon’s tasks are the opposite of that. They broaden our capabilities slightly, sure, but more importantly, they broaden our reference base.

Today’s task was to observe a person in the world through an actor’s lens, and try to figure out what drives them. How are they moving physically? What lens are they seeing the world through? How do they move in relation to the people around them? Then feel into what it would be like to begin playing them: how would you move your body to become this person?

I’m never actually going to play this person. But that’s not really the point. It feeds a longer body of work, a longer collection of references, that might inform something down the line… or might just broaden my reference base as an actor.

Sometimes a decision is necessary

July 13, 2026

And sometimes you just need to change your orientation.

Action can be tempting, because we feel a sense of certainty that there is movement.

But in some cases movement is unnecessary.

If you want to be a better father, you don’t need to buy all your kids kites or suddenly take them out for ice cream.

That action might be a flash in the pan.

But a new orientation could be long lasting.

How does a great father see the world? What situations and occurrences call you in a different way from that new orientation?

How does this new way of seeing the world naturally filter and affect your choices?

Rest but still routine

July 3, 2026

After a giant week of big work days, a rest day is always welcome.

In the past I thought that meant completely letting go, but I’ve actually found if the only thing I change is the amount of work output, then the rest sinks in better.

I’m sleeping a good amount and waking up early on a work day.

I’m eating great food that fuels me and keeps my energy consistent.

I’m moving my body enough to give me energy.

On a rest day, I don’t want to stop these things.

Keeping the fundamentals in place lets my body and mind equalise and truly rest when I don’t need to work.

If the fundamentals are dropped- a rest day actually becomes something you need to recover from.

And being in recovery mode when it’s another work day is not a position any of us want to be in.

Simple plan beats no plan

June 30, 2026

Is ‘winging it’ a real thing?

I don’t think that winging it is having no plan- your plan is to wing it.

AKA- your plan is to be pristinely present, playful and to rely on and trust your inherent abilities.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of having no plan. What do you want to achieve? How do you want to approach this?

Even a simple plan will do: I will focus on X. I will do Y.

A plan doesn’t haven’t to be a multi step opus. It can be an outcome, an orientation or a focus.

It can be simple.

And in the competition between a simple plan and no plan- you know who wins.

Make a little plan. It won’t take long.

How you think about it

June 25, 2026

We all know what we need to do to get what we want, more or less.

The trouble isn’t the recipe, it’s the implimentation.

Our focus then shouldn’t be on finding more recipes, but how to get ourselves to use that ones we have.

The trick is how you think about the thing you need to do.

You want to get fit, you know you need to get more daily steps in, but when you think about walking you think about dying trying to get up a steep hill.

If you can take the thing you want to do and think about it in a way that makes you excited to do it, that’s when life starts getting interesting.

The easiest version is better than the perfect version

June 20, 2026

Have you ever tried tracking your food on a tracking app? If you can get past groans from your friends and family, there are a few other things that might get in the way…

One of those things is wanting to be perfect at it.

This happened to me. Having worked out the macros I needed to be consuming daily, I started my first day measuring every single thing I ate and it took AGES.

So long in fact that every time I tared my food scale I fantaised about giving up completely.

The problem wasn’t the food weighing, it was that I was trying to do the olympic version of it!

I went from NEVER weighing my food to weighing the oil I was about to cook my veges in.

Yeah, I know I’m groaning WITH you!

So instead of giving up, I thought :”Look, I’ll just try my best”

What did my best look like? Well, if I weighed ANY food whatsoever in a day, I won.

Strangely, by lowering my ‘standard’ I had actually raised it. I’ve heard it said that perfection is the lowest standard because perfection is impossible. So you’ve set a standard you know you can’t achieve so therefore you have NO standard!

So I figured my new standard was doable.

And it totally was. I felt zero pressure to weigh the oil (and the fumes it gave off)

I was just weighing the best I could in the time I had.

I was doing my best. You could say it was the easiest version. And if the 80/20 rule is to be believed you could say I was yielding most of the results from this level of efforts too.

The best part? I gradually became more exact in my measurements as time went on- but I did not START there. Where I am now with that particular habit stands on the shoulders of a simpler version of the habit.

Get momentum first, then worry about the details.

So if you’re trying something new, ignore the groaners and do the easiest version for now.

Once momentum gets going, you can weigh the fumes, the condensation and the breath you expel saying the name of the dish you’re cooking.

Short term verses long term planning

June 11, 2026

I had a fancy habit tracker that synced across my computer and my phone.

It had little emojis to represent each habit and a smart piece of code that showed me my progress with across the month.

It didn’t stick.

This week, I stuck half a refill page to the wall and listed my habits for the week. Beside each one was a space for each day of the week. As I did each habit I could colour in the square marking it done.

The refill page is nearly completely full- meaning I’ve done a week of near perfect habits.

I don’t think the secret is lower tech. I think it’s time horizon.

The first incarnation of my habit tracker I tried to create the ‘master document’, the be-all-and-end-all of habit lists. “These are the ones I’ll do for the WHOLE YEAR!”

The refill version is just this week.

The takeaway, I think is to shorten our time horizons. What are you doing just this week? And how can you track it?

Yes, we have to know what it’s in service of, the big goal.

But what makes it actually work is when we can simply do whats right in front of us.

What you like is what you become

June 10, 2026

What are the things you like to do?

The things you find yourself consistently doing.

Now times those things by 365 days of the year that you do them (give or take)

And multiply that by how many years you want to live.

Question- are you happy with the person you’ve become after all that multiplying?

The phone voice

June 9, 2026

Ever notice how people change their voice when they answer the phone?

Have you ever noticed yourself do it? Having a terrible day and then suddenly a phone call transforms your whole disposition.

I guess the stakes are too high to stay in the funk when we’re talking to someone who is completely disconnected from your environment in that moment.

It’s great to remember we can change how we are at any moment.

JUSTIN ROGERS

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