Which of your daily habits are quietly making your life easier -- and which are quietly making your life smaller? Are your routines the scaffolding that holds up your creative work, or the walls of the comfort zone?Today, let me share a distinction I have been sharpening lately -- one that builds on James Clear's wonderful book Atomic Habits while adding a complementary layer the book itself leaves out. Clear has done the world a service by mainstreaming the science of habit-building. The creative leader, however, needs both habit-building and habit-breaking.
For most of my career, I treated "habit" as one word. Then I noticed I was running two very different kinds. One made my life easier and my mind sharper. The other made my life smaller and my thinking duller. From the outside they looked alike; what they did to my creativity was opposite.
I now call them habit keepers and habit breakers. Habit keepers are foundational supportive routines -- the daily rituals that simplify life and free up mental energy for the actual creative work. Habit breakers are the comfort-zone-locking patterns that need to be regularly disrupted so fresh stimuli, new people and unexpected dots can find their way in. The creative leader's job is to know which is which -- and to be ruthless about both protecting the first kind and breaking the second.
