What a 72-Year-Old’s Fifty Years of Experiment Taught Me About Habits
Curator’s Note: This post reflects on the author’s experiences with habits over fifty years, revealing that only a few truly lasting habits emerged from countless attempts. The author discusses the common struggle with abandoned habits and emphasizes that these failures should not be seen as weaknesses but as valuable lessons about personal limitations. True success comes from small, manageable habits rather than flashy, ambitious goals, which are often unsustainable. The author encourages readers to embrace the experimentation process, recognizing that the journey itself provides insights into what works in their lives, ultimately fostering personal growth and understanding. This essay was written by Gary Fretwell, an author of multiple books about retirement.
Most habits don’t survive the seasons of real life. The few that do become the quiet architecture of who we are. / Author created image using AI
Can I tell you something a little embarrassing? I have a graveyard of abandoned habits, and I’m guessing you do too.
I want to walk you through mine because I think we need to talk about this. There’s the journal I let die on page eleven. The meditation app whose notifications I finally muted in defeat, because the daily reminder that I’d broken my streak had become its own little source of misery. The productivity system I spent an entire Sunday configuring, color-coded and beautiful, that I never opened again. The diet I started on a Monday with such conviction, and abandoned by Friday at a friend’s birthday dinner.
If any of that sounds familiar, please hear me when I say this: you’re not broken, and neither am I. I think we’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about what’s going on.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, after years of my own quiet failures and a few stubborn successes. The habits that actually stick in my life aren’t the ones I expected. They’re not the flashy ones I was most excited about. They’re not the ambitious overhauls I announced to my friends or wrote about in fresh journals. They’re the small, almost embarrassingly modest practices that I barely noticed taking root.
I can count the habits that have truly lasted in my life on one hand. Just a handful out of decades of trying. And I want you to sit with that number with me for a second, because I think it’s important.
If I’ve spent years intentionally trying to improve my life, reading the books, running the experiments, downloading the apps, and I end up with only a handful of habits that genuinely stuck, what on earth are we doing to ourselves? You and I, with our 30-day challenges, our productivity podcasts, our New Year’s resolution lists with a dozen items on them, expecting to install all of them by March? We’ve got the math wrong, friend. I had it wrong for years.
And here’s the part I want to put in front of you like a gift, because it changed something in me. The habits that survived for me weren’t revolutionary. None of them. And I’ve come to believe that’s precisely why they worked.
Think about it with me. A revolutionary habit demands revolutionary conditions. It needs extra time, extra willpower, a reorganized life, a different version of me than the one that actually exists. It thrives in the honeymoon weeks when motivation is running hot, and it falls apart the first time real life pushes back. A sick kid. A deadline. A rough night of sleep. A dinner invitation. The habits that survive the years have to be small enough to fit into a bad day. They have to ask so little of us that the question isn’t “do I have the willpower today?” but “why wouldn’t I?”
I’ve started to wonder if the experiments most likely to last are the ones I felt slightly underwhelmed by when I started. The excitement of a new system might actually be inversely proportional to its survival odds. Excitement creates expectation, and expectation creates fragility. A habit modest enough to feel almost trivial doesn’t have far to fall.
So here’s where I’ve landed, and I want to invite you to land here with me.
The most generous thing I’ve done for myself, and the thing I want to offer you, is to stop treating my abandoned habits as failures. I treat them now as data. All those experiments that didn’t make it weren’t wasted. They were the process by which the few who survived got identified. You can’t know which seeds will take without planting a lot of them.
I want that to change how you look at your graveyard, the way it’s changed how I look at mine. The journal you let die wasn’t a personal failing. It was information about how you actually live. The diet that broke at the dinner party wasn’t a weakness. It was data about what your real life can absorb. The productivity system you abandoned wasn’t a waste. It was a test result.
So I’m not asking you to never abandon a habit again. I’m asking you something different, and I’m asking it of myself too. Are we still willing to run the experiments? And are we humble enough to notice which ones are quietly refusing to leave?
Because of that, I’ve come to believe, is the whole game. Not the perfect system. Not the revolutionary overhaul. Just the willingness to keep planting seeds, and the wisdom to pay attention to the ones that take root on their own.
That’s the part I want us to borrow from every quiet success we’ve ever had.
If you want to read the habits that stuck, they are detailed in this article.
About the Author
Gary L. Fretwell is a #1 international best-selling author and a student of “Intentional Living.” By blending the rigors of neuroscience with the timeless wisdom of Stoic philosophy, Gary helps creators and leaders build a cognitive architecture of true significance.
Intentional Retirement is a definitive field guide for those ready to move from “Output” to “Influence.”
As the author of #1 International Best Seller The Magic of a Moment, Unlocking the Magic Daily Journal, and Embracing Retirement, Gary doesn’t just write about purpose — he maps the neuroscience of it. Whether he is serving as Board President for Prescott Meals on Wheels or mentoring the next generation of MBA thinkers at Western Governors University, his mission is to help you navigate the “Identity Ghost” and live an intentional life.
- Explore the Second Mile: garyfretwell.com
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