Your routine could be traveling to a different country every month. It could be being routinely un-routine. The point is not what the routine consist… - Brianna Wiest

The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.

The people you smiled at on the street this morning, the people whom you text regularly, the family you could stand to visit more — all the little bits of genuine human connection that you overlook because they’ve become givens.

As writer and media strategist Ryan Holiday has noted, epiphanies are not life-altering.9 It’s not radical moments of action that give us long-lasting, permeating change — it’s the restructuring of our habits. The idea is what science philosopher Thomas Kuhn dubbed a “paradigm shift.” Kuhn suggested we don’t change our lives in flashes of brilliance, but through a slow process in which assumptions unravel and require new explanations. It’s in these periods of flux that microshifts happen and breakthrough-level change begins to take shape.

Defensiveness never precedes growth, it stunts it.