"Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice"
About this Quote
Self-improvement, for William James, isn’t a spa day; it’s calisthenics for the will. “Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice” reads like a brusque prescription, but its real target is subtler: the creeping tyranny of comfort. James is less interested in moralizing your chores than in training your capacity to act when desire isn’t cooperating.
The phrase “just for practice” is the masterstroke. It strips the hated act of any grand justification (virtue, productivity, social approval) and recasts it as rehearsal. That framing makes dislike survivable: you’re not doing the thing because it’s inherently meaningful; you’re doing it to keep a faculty alive. James’s pragmatist sensibility is everywhere here. Habits aren’t decorative; they’re infrastructure. What you repeat becomes what you can do under pressure.
Historically, this sits inside the late-19th-century anxiety about modern softness: an emerging consumer culture, new conveniences, and a professional class increasingly insulated from physical necessity. James, who wrote about “the energies of men” and the need for a “moral equivalent of war,” worried that comfort would atrophy civic and personal resilience. Daily, minor voluntary discomfort becomes a democratic substitute for ordeal: not heroism, but readiness.
The subtext is almost diagnostic: if you only act when you feel like it, you’re not free, you’re managed by mood. Two small hates a day is James’s way of keeping the self from being outsourced to appetite.
The phrase “just for practice” is the masterstroke. It strips the hated act of any grand justification (virtue, productivity, social approval) and recasts it as rehearsal. That framing makes dislike survivable: you’re not doing the thing because it’s inherently meaningful; you’re doing it to keep a faculty alive. James’s pragmatist sensibility is everywhere here. Habits aren’t decorative; they’re infrastructure. What you repeat becomes what you can do under pressure.
Historically, this sits inside the late-19th-century anxiety about modern softness: an emerging consumer culture, new conveniences, and a professional class increasingly insulated from physical necessity. James, who wrote about “the energies of men” and the need for a “moral equivalent of war,” worried that comfort would atrophy civic and personal resilience. Daily, minor voluntary discomfort becomes a democratic substitute for ordeal: not heroism, but readiness.
The subtext is almost diagnostic: if you only act when you feel like it, you’re not free, you’re managed by mood. Two small hates a day is James’s way of keeping the self from being outsourced to appetite.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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