The Best Self-Help is Free: Habit and the Elimination of the Quality-Quantity Tradeoff

This is Chapter 10 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

A common fallacy presumes that there is a necessary tradeoff between the quantity of work produced and the quality of that work. By this notion, one can either produce a lot of mediocre units of output or a scant few exceptional ones. While this might be true in some cases, it overlooks several important factors.

Over time, by engaging in certain activities, individuals form habits relating to these activities. A habit is a default pattern of functioning with regard to an activity; people follow their habits in the absence of explicit internal or external stimuli to the contrary. Habits do not require undue discomfort to sustain once established; the individual perceives them to be the natural, "easy" course of action. Thus, habits provide a baseline for productivity: a person cannot, on the whole, be less productive than his habits make possible. He can be more productive, however, by deliberately exerting additional effort and perhaps stretching the limits of his comfort - in order to gradually raise his habits to a new level and make it comfortable for him to produce higher amounts of output.