Plasticity
This is the capability to change. It also implies that once a change has been made, your new form will hold until a subsequent change is made; you won’t revert to your old status. Consider the difference between modeling clay, which is malleable but holds the shape it is given, and mercury, which can take any shape for a moment but will never keep it. You can be changed by environmental influences or by your own decisions.
Frequency of Impression
Repetition is the mother of habit. One of the factors affecting the speed with which a habit can be adopted is how often it is consciously repeated. Your ability to do this may vary with circumstances. Your job may require enough concentration on the task at hand that you have to pay attention only to it and develop your habits is your spare time. Personal initiative also comes into play; if you’re lazy, you won’t knock yourself out developing a habit. This can definitely slow down the process of acquiring it.
Intensity of Impression
You can go through the motions of an activity, or you can concentrate on doing it; concentration builds the habit quickly. You impress the habit on your subconscious mind, and it becomes a part of everything you do.
Here’s an example of these three essentials at work. A woman working the swing shift at an electronics assembly plant was allowed two ten-minute breaks, one at 6:00 P.M. and one at 10:30. Most of her coworkers used these breaks for cigarettes. She didn’t want to cultivate a bad habit that would affect her health and make her a less pleasing personality, so she decide instead to have a snack. Her garden was in full bloom, so she would have a carrot, an apple, or something else she had grown herself. Being human, she already had plasticity; it’s part of everyone’s nature. Every day, throughout the summer and fall, precisely at 6:00 and at 10:30, she would have her snack. This gave a definite frequency of impression.
The element of intensity varied according to her relative hunger. Sometimes she ate with relish because her meal at home had been small. Sometimes she skipped a meal before coming to work, and the intensity of her hunger was even greater. But whenever the break came, she ate, no matter how hungry she was.
As the months passed, she realized that regardless of what she had eaten, she got hungry before her breaks. She watched the clock, waiting for a chance to eat. Sometimes it seemed the time would never come. And when her garden was no longer producing good, fresh food, she switched to anything else she had at home: a candy bar, a doughnut, cookies.
This is a clear example of the voluntary establishment of a habit. But it wasn’t really a good habit. She began to put on weight and found she was distracted from her work for half an hour before her breaks.
So she decided to break her habit and stopped bringing food. This wasn’t the answer because there was food in the vending machines at the plant, and she just started buying that. Not only was she still eating, but she was now spending more money to do it. At this point she really had to seize possession of her mind, inspire it with a strong motive, and take definite action. She set a definite minor purpose to break her habit. She did this by reading, substituting the desire for knowledge and inspiration for the desire for food. When her break came, she reached for a book instead of a candy bar. The same frequency of impression was there, of course. The only thing different was the intensity. At first the feeling of hunger persisted, but after a few days she acquired an appetite for reading which overwhelmed the old physical desire. She established a new habit to supplant the old.
Any worthless, superfluous, or harmful habit can be broken and replaced with a more desirable one if you want it to be so. The nucleus of the entire science of personal achievement lies in this concept. Cosmic habitforce is the means for incorporating every one of the Seventeen Principles of Success into your life. Control your mental attitude, keep it positive by exercising self-discipline, and prepare your mental soil so that any worthwhile plan, purpose, or desire may be planted by repeated, intense impression. Know that it will germinate, grow, and find expression, bringing you whatever it is you want from life.
WHATEVER YOUR MIND CAN CONCEIVE AND BELIEVE, YOUR MIND CAN ACHIEVE.
Source: Keys to Success by Napoleon Hill