Everyone Needs Their Special Pens

As all three other members of my nuclear family can attest, I’m at my most childish and petty when my special journaling pens go missing. I’m now going to try to make the case that these sporadic tantrums should not only continue to be tolerated but are actually completely reasonable.

How to build good habits and break bad ones is endlessly fascinating to me. I eagerly devour any book I can find on the topic. I spent a year experimenting with a different habit each month to remind myself that I can do hard things and learn about how to identify habits that are worth mindfully cultivating. I’ve badgered my friends to participate in two habit swaps, where people share one of their beneficial habits and agree to try out someone else’s randomly assigned habit for a month. The most meaningful thing I learned from this reading and experimentation is how powerful developing the right handful of habits can be.

One of the most transformational habits I’ve found is my five-minute journaling practice (write three goals for the day every morning and the three best things that happened that day plus one way I could have made the day even better before bed). I’ve decided that I want to maintain this habit forever. It makes me more focused, productive, and optimistic, and best of all it helps me to slow down and capture the major and minor joys of each passing day. It is one of a select few behaviors that not only has value in and of itself, but also supports and enhances many other positive aspects of my life.

When you find a habit that has the potential to kick off one of these virtuous cycles, you owe it to yourself to do everything possible to bulletproof it. An important, but often overlooked step is to find a way to make it special. Elevate it from just something you do every day to a ritual.

Routines get stale and boring. Rituals have meaning and weight.

I turned my journaling habit into a ritual by finding pens that write like a dream and trying and tossing ten different journals until I found one that has the creamy paper quality and perfect line spacing that my soul craves. These tweaks make me much more likely to maintain my habit because it feels special every time I do it.

Is the quality of my journaling habit improved in any way by using only a certain pen on a certain notebook? Of course not! But by adding these small enhancements, I’m increasing the chances that I continue one of my best habits and in this case, the net benefit to me and everyone else who puts up with me is significant. 

In short, my family should continue to put up with my childish petulance about lost pens because they know how much more of a petulant child I would be without my journaling habit.

Yours truly shortly after learning prime shipping wasn’t available.

You may be thinking that if a particular habit is such a positive force multiplier, you shouldn’t need special support or incentives to get it up and running. You should just do it because it’s so beneficial, right? The truth is, it can be devilishly hard to consistently do even the things we genuinely want to do! Don’t pass up any opportunity to make a good habit more attractive or pleasing.

So buy the special pens. Or the overpriced work-out clothes that fit like a dream.

Block off one corner of your house for yoga and only yoga.

Claim sole ownership of THE mug for your Saturday morning coffee chat with your sister.

But first, there are two important ground rules to follow:

#1. It’s critical to share what habit you are trying to build or strengthen and why it is important to you with your friends and family. Don’t skip this step, otherwise they could be caught off-guard by your seemingly borderline insane reaction to something that would typically be completely innocuous. You also must be open to the possibility that you are going too far. If instead of asking my family to keep an eye out for my journaling pens, I insisted on a simultaneous foot and scalp massage during every journaling session, it would be fair of them to tell me to get real.

#2. You can’t apply this to more than a small handful of critical habits. No one should give you permission to be an uber-finicky pain in the ass about more than a short list of behaviors. But if you sincerely believe that a particular habit can be a game-changer and pay dividends across multiple areas of your life, your loved ones will agree to put up with the occasional tantrum when you find a Pilot-G2 in the junk drawer instead of sitting atop your notebook.

Asking this of your tribe comes with a price tag, however: you have to return the favor! The meta life-skill that this helps develop is to expect, tolerate, and sometimes even support behavior that seems deeply strange from your nearest and dearest. Be vulnerable by acknowledging your innate pockets of strangeness and expect to find the same in others.