Old habits die hard

I couldn't let myself forget Brother Peterson's bishopric youth discussion quite some time back. There were a couple of theories and ideas that struck me hard but here's one good one i jotted down. He quoted from Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis-

"Every time you swing your racket a certain way, you increase the probabilities that you will swing that way again. In this way patterns, called grooves, build up which have a predisposition to repeat themselves. Golfers use the same term. It is as if the nervous system were like a record disk. Every time an action is performed, a slight impression is made in the microscopic cells of the brain, just as a leaf blowing over a fine-grained beach of sand will leave its faint trace. When the same action is repeated, the groove is made slightly deeper." - Groove Theory of Habits

To put this lucidly, the author says that "“Habits are statements about the past, and the past is gone.” Interesting. That's why, "don't practise wrong"! Although mistakes build us up to do the right, it takes extra time to remove the groove left by that action. So if we can do it right once, go on and do it right! Of course this doesn't apply to everything as doing everything correctly the first time will just make us turn into stiff robotic beings. We need mistakes sometimes to stray away from convention and add in some spice in our lives by doing things differently. Yeah that's part of being creative... but i'll write about that soon separately. About habits, the way to get rid of one is by replacing it with another. The groove from the old habit cannot be erased but a new one can be carved even deeper to take over it. So in that sense, the "statement about the past" needs something radically different to substitute it in the present. Fascinating.