“When the music changes, so does the dance.”
Hausa proverb
I love to bike. But I run instead.
Drivers here rarely yield to pedestrians. On foot I feel safer than on a bike.
I gave up the habit I love for one that fits my environment.
As cars spread through the Netherlands in the 1960s, the average Dutch person went from biking 1,500 km a year to about 800.
In 1971, cars killed more than 3,000 people in the Netherlands, 450 of them children. A journalist named Vic Langenhoff lost his daughter, killed while biking to school.
The next year he published an article headlined Stop de Kindermoord: stop the child murder.
The article caused an uproar across the country.
His first idea was to bus children to school. Other campaigners won him over to a different fix: make the roads safe to bike on.
Over the following decades the Dutch built about 35,000 km of bike paths separated from cars.
Today 27% of trips in the Netherlands happen on a bike.
The Dutch kept biking and changed their environment instead.
Habit harmony is when your habits and your environment support each other.
The better your habits suit your environment, the more likely the habit (and sometimes you) will survive.
🎶
Which habit could you swap for one your environment supports?
