The Best Part of Habit

Julio Anthony Leonard
2 min readOct 16, 2018

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” — Bill Gates

Trying to remember my past few years, along with what have I done and what have I learn. I try to remember how was the math in my elementary school, junior high, even senior high, or calculus in college. I realize that they are not as hard as when I first encounter it. Nowadays, I can solve the similar kind of problems easily. This is also happening with other courses I took like programming, software engineering, and others, I feel like whatever I have past is comparably easy to be done.

Then I to guess why is it so? What makes me easier to learn it now compared to previously? I look around more on the habitual things I do in life like in the past I ride my motorcycle everywhere I go. It is becoming a habit like even after I don’t ride the motorcycle for one year, and try to ride it again it is easy for me to remember all the things that I have done before. Same things happen with the course that I had taken, after learning it in a considerable amount of time, it is become easier to think about the problems.

Of course, we do have an experience like this right? Everyone had a different story about their hobby that has become their habit and it is hard to forget it. If it is a good habit then that would be beneficial but if it is a bad habit? Doomed!

So the question is, what is the good part of habit? It is like walking. Humans are not born able to walk, we train ourselves to be able to walk since a toddler, and trust me, it is hard to use your feet to walk when you are kids compare to now and since that, we always walk everywhere it becomes part of our life. We can walk without wasting too much energy, we don’t think to think about what we do.

So now, how to grow habit? The key is discipline when we do something over, and over, and over, and over(4 times intended). It is impossible to forget how to do it. Like saying your name, it is almost impossible for someone to forget who their name is because we always say our name.

“Want to master an algorithm? Implement it over and over, rule of 10, implement it 10 times” — Juan

What is the point of this blog then? If you want to be good at something, just do it over and over. Again and again. Do you want to learn Programming? Just try to implement quicksort more than 10 times, not looking at the documentation, just write the code over and over. Later you realize that you won’t forget about quicksort anymore. You can do this technique, basically, this is my secret technique for learning anything, I call it Rules of 10(Copying from 10 commandments haha)

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