The 'chains of habit'

Are they really 'too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken'?

When I go for a run, my mind likes to wander.

It meanders here and there, flitting like a butterfly from flower to flower. Sometimes it goes to weird places, resurrecting old memories, books I’ve read, arguments I’ve had, movies I’ve watched… everything from the state of the world today to John Mulaney’s thoughts on ghost baseball.

(Yes, I know how strange this is… just bear with me 😉)

This past weekend, as I was running along the Chattahoochee River here in Atlanta, my mind drifted back to a conversation my wife and I have been having with our daughter. She’ll turn twenty-one in a few weeks, and while she still has a couple years of college left, she’s already looking ahead to what she’ll do when she graduates.

And that, of course, got me thinking about what it was like when I was about to graduate from college — what was I thinking? Who or what was I paying attention to? What direction did I think I should be going?

Back then, my father was reading a book about the legendary Omaha investor Warren Buffett, which I wouldn’t have thought would pique my interest in a million years. But for some reason it did, and so I picked it up and started thumbing through the pages.

If you know Buffett’s story, then you know his style too — how he sprinkles in folksy, down-to-earth, homespun pearls of wisdom about life into what might otherwise be drearily boring stories about finance.

The book introduced me to the whole cast of characters that populated Buffett’s world, from the 101-year-old Rose “Mrs. B” Blumkin, who founded the Nebraska Furniture Mart despite never learning to read or write, to others like Katharine Graham, with whom he developed a close friendship while advising her in the years after she took over the top job at The Washington Post, one of his then-biggest investments.

You get to know them, and Buffett, up close: their dreams, their vulnerabilities, their hopes for the future. You see where his hard-won bits of wisdom come from, especially ones like this, which he shared with a group of students at a University of North Carolina lecture back around the time the book was published:

The way he frames the question in this short video — it’s an excerpt from the full video, which you can see here — caught my attention for the story he tells about a time when he had to make a big hire for a really important job at his company, Berkshire Hathaway, in a very short amount of time.

He shared what he looked for in the person he was hiring, turning it around to the students in the audience that they could learn from this too:

“If you had an hour to make the decision… what would you think about in that hour in terms of who you picked? Would you think about who had the highest grades in the class? Probably not. Would you think about who had the highest I.Q.? Probably not. You know… the best looking? Probably not.

The interesting thing is that when you think about what's going through your mind, you're not thinking about things that are impossible for you to achieve yourself. You're not thinking about who can jump seven feet, who can throw a football 65 yards — you know, who can recite pi to 300 digits or whatever. What you're thinking about [are] a whole bunch of qualities of character. And the truth is that every one of those qualities is obtainable — they're largely a matter of habit.”

Okay, you’re probably thinking to yourself, that sounds sensible enough. Maybe even obvious. (And you’d be right.)

But the next part of what he said is what made my ears perk up, an anecdote about Benjamin Graham, the investor he started his career working for, who — when he was twelve years old — put together a list of the qualities he admired in other people and the qualities he didn’t:

“When he looked at that list, there wasn't anything there about being able to run the 100-yard dash in and nine seconds or or high jumping seven feet. They were all things that were simply a matter of deciding whether you were going to be that kind of person or not.

When you're young, you really have that opportunity — as you get older, it gets tougher because as somebody has said, the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken.

In terms of behavior, I see that all the time. So, the time to form the right habits is very early — the habits that you would admire in someone else and want to buy 10 percent of [the earnings of] whatever individual that is, they're absolutely obtainable.”

The bolded sentence above caught my attention to the degree I still remember it, all these years later. The phrasing, the image it brings up in my mind — can you imagine what it might feel like to wear shackles and chains that, slowly but surely, over time get heavier and heavier? What that must feel like? What it must do to your sense of what’s possible, of who you are?

Even today, what Buffett said haunts me. Now, of course, it’s not so much because of the image; now, I wonder to myself, could that describe me in a way I’m not even aware of? Have I become set in my ways? Are there thoughts or ideas I dismiss now without even considering them?

On one hand, you do have to develop a sense of who you are; as we grow up, I think we all develop an “operating system” of sorts to get through life. One way or another, you figure out how to discern good from bad.

What’s difficult is how to know when that system — which most of us, myself included, probably are barely aware of most of the time — has become too rigid or doesn’t serve us anymore.

Reading the fantastic music recommendations in

Scott Hines

’s awesome newsletter last week made me realize how little I’m letting new music into my own life. When I saw them, I realized I don’t even know where to look for new music, let alone what to choose. So I just stay in the same little musical ghetto, all the time.

So, this is a long way of telling you that I shared Buffett’s story with my stepdaughter, as they helped me at a time when I was searching. The only thing is, maybe the fact that his words resonate so strongly with me, even today, are a sign that I’m still searching too, you know?

To be honest, I don’t know that we ever really stop. Over the past year, my wife and I have become friends with a couple who are in their eighties. We were having dinner with them one night when the husband said something that’s stuck with me: “When I was growing up — well, I’m still growing up — what I wanted to be was…”

I can’t remember what he said after that because I was so struck by his phrase, “well, I’m still growing up.” He’s 85 years old. So if he’s still searching, I am too.

As always, I hope you’ve had a great week and have gotten some great runs in — stay hydrated and as cool as you can out there, it’s hot 🥵, especially where I live!

Keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell