“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

Friends who read this site often ask: “what the hell is wrong with you?”

Or, more specifically, “why would you possibly want to post random details about yourself online?”

And, indeed, that’s a question I ocassionally ask myself as well. But, in stacking up the few reasons to self-aggrandize against the many sensible reasons to not, I inevitably remember that this site, more than anything else, is meant to shame me into regular writing.

Knowing that, somewhere out there in the ether, several thousands of you are inexplicably checking self-aggrandizement every day, I feel compelled to sit down and write something. Which, as every writing teacher I’ve ever had loved to remind, is more than half the battle, the writerly part of your brain, like a muscle, strengthening with exercise or atrophying from disuse.

So, as we careen towards January 1st, and I begin my standard obsessive process of taking stock of the year past and charting the one ahead, I’ve been considering the easily undervalued importance of doing things – like writing for this site – regularly, the power of habits in chipping away, day in and day out, at the things I most want out of life.

Still, I realize that some habits are more easily stuck to than others. Which leaves me glad that, if nothing else, I can probably retain at least one lauded by the Great Emancipator himself: getting rip-roaring drunk.

“I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.”
– Abraham Lincoln

Let us drink to that. And let us do so, like clockwork, each and every day.