2 Texas words signal you can count on me: ‘You bet!’

Goals many of us share are to become more productive in our pursuits, more adept at our jobs, more fulfilled in our lives. But how to do that—by working harder? Delegating more? Relying on automation (i.e., artificial intelligence or AI)? Good guesses all, but not quite right.

Where can we seek and find wisdom for our quests? All our current self-improvement gurus, along with their expensive seminars and books, can’t go toe-to-toe with the simple yet profound insights from our collective past.

‘Excellence . . . is not an act but a habit’

Here is one such insight from English poet, dramatist, and literary critic John Dryden from the 1600s: “Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.” The quote, in turn, appears to be a play on Aristotle’s observation that “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Dryden’s and Aristotle’s wisdom can be summed up in a two-word Texas expression, “You bet!” I had never heard the phrase until I moved to the state in 1981, and it is now part of my linguistic speech patterns. For me, as with the poet and the philosopher, the words mean you can count on something or someone, there is value in regularity, and success is often an incremental process.

3 tips for self-improvement