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In an article that appeared in Forbes magazine, Warren Buffett has this to say about habits:

“At my age I can’t change my habits. I’m stuck. But you will have the habits twenty years from now that you decide to put into practice today. So I suggest that you look at the behavior you admire in others and make those your habits, and look at what you find reprehensible in others and decide those are the things you are not going to do. If you do that, you’ll discover that you convert all of your horsepower into output.”

Buffett seems to be channeling two memorable quotations. First, from Plato: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” And then, from Samuel Johnson: “The chains off habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”