al-Raghib al-Isfahani #31 – Transform Through Habit

habit has momentum to it, your actions have a certain momentum. And that's something about us for HANA, he wants us to understand. And he repeats it fairly often, especially in the first section of the book, when you are performing an action, you're not just doing a deed, you are creating a habit, you are transforming yourself just a little bit so that the person that you are after doing that deed, after performing that action, you're not the same person that you were, before you did that deed or perform that action, you now have an increased likelihood to do that action again, usually. And so it's really important to realize this sort of momentum that exists with habit and to try to

harness it and use it for our own purposes, right. So for example, a lot of people they get psyched out when they think about how long the road is, let's say you want to learn Arabic, let's say that you want to memorize the Quran, let's say you're not praying at all right now. And you want to start praying. Okay, one of the things that shaytaan does is that he gets us to focus on how far we have to travel in order to get to our goal, oh, you're never going to do it, it's going to take so long, it's so hard look at you now you're barely doing anything. But the trick and the lie that's in that sort of way of thinking is that you're assuming that you're going to still be the same person that

you are now once you start walking the path. And that's not true, right? The first steps might be hard, maybe you've never walked before, maybe you haven't done this sort of thing before. So it's going to be hard in the beginning, but you're going to change, when you start doing just a little bit, you're going to change, you're not going to be the same person anymore. And that change is going to make the next steps easier. And then you're going to change again. And that change is going to make the next steps easier. And it's actually going to get easier and easier and easier. The further you go down that path, What's hard is taking the first step. And so it was funny, he tells

us he says that, you know, if you take care of the little things consistently, you're going to develop the capacity to take care of the big things. And there was some sort of viral video some time ago, someone was giving probably a graduation speech about the importance of making your bed, right. And we could critique, you know, sort of other things about the video, you could say that, okay, this is all just about taking it back to personal, you know, habits and stuff like that. But there's a point to it, there's a point to it, somebody who finds that the life is in chaos, right? They can't get on top of their work, they can't organize their time, they can't produce the things

that they want to produce, you know, even maintain their relationships. Okay, maybe there's something very, very, very small that that person needs to work on consistently. For example, in this example, making your bed you make your bed every morning, okay? It's not about making your bed, but it's about you're developing a capacity within yourself. You're developing a skill the first day that you try to make your bed, maybe you've never done it before and yours maybe it's horrible. Maybe it takes you a long time. Okay, you've done it for seven days in a row. Now it's easy now it's quick. Now you don't even think about it. Now you start looking around and thinking Okay, what else

can I organize? What else can I do? And that's how the thing works. It works through transformation. It works through habit, and that's how we get to be reformed, refined people.