How Habits are Like Firmware

Res Extensa #52 :: Mastering a craft through automating the repetitive

"Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them." —Alfred North Whitehead

In computer science, a computing system's elements are broken into layers — hardware, software, and firmware in between.

The hardware layer is obvious: the silicon boards, transistors, magnetic spinning disks, solid-state memory, interconnected with copper and connectors.

Software consists of bits stored or flowing through the hardware. The ones and zeroes of information that form instruction sets telling the hardware what to do, telling the CPU to run a computation, or the hard disk to store a value long term. If our own internal hardware is our brain, its neurons, and the nervous system, our software consists of the signals flowing from our senses to the hardware. Our thoughts and decisions moving as signals across the network.

Firmware is unique, and sits in the liminal space between ephemeral software bits and the physical hardware atoms. Most hardware is generalized and can take any instruction. Firmware is like software manifest in a hardware component — a set of instructions built natively in hardware. It's useful where you have repetitive operations to perform. Getting closer to the metal makes operations happen faster, lowering the latency in the system and increasing reliability. In your computer things like bootloaders and peripheral controllers and network interface cards use firmware to execute repeat, rote processes. They embed "habitual" behaviors of the system.

The dictionary says a habit is a "settled tendency", "an acquired mode of behavior that's become nearly or completely involuntary." This sounds a lot like the purpose of firmware: a behavior is found to be repetitive, consistently useful, and worth speeding up, so we practice it repeatedly until it becomes mindless, second-nature.

Consider the positive version of a "habit”, the productive and self-improving variety. Forming a "good habit" of waking up early to write, or hitting the gym every day. But let's look at them more broadly as "useful things you repeat regularly".

Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed. Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks. —James Clear, Atomic Habits

There’s a relationship between habit-forming and the mastery of skills. Oftentimes we want to form habits to enable mastery — in athletics, craftsmanship, writing, art, programming. All skills benefit from certain positive habits.

Part of the process of developing a skill means shaping certain activities into habits: figuring out a scalable way to execute the repetitive, necessary tasks in order to push them into the mental background. You want them to happen on autopilot so you can focus your energy on the uniquely creative and interesting. You want to do the simple parts quickly and leave time to deliberate on the hard parts.

If you watch a master of a craft at work, you'll see these honed habits on display constantly. Take the process of making furniture: sketching, measuring, preparation, setup, making jigs — all of these repetitive steps in service of making a single cut. These are movements the master executes out of habit. The simple act of pulling out the tape to check a number, making clean marks, labeling all their parts clearly, keeping the workspace clean. With repetitions, these actions become instincts. They're things the hands are doing while the mind might be on making the final cut. The cut itself is the irreversible step, and the experienced craftsman knows how to focus attention there. They can work quickly and automatically right up until the part that matters most.

Or think of a chef, and their relentless attention to organization, cleanliness, and tidying-while-working. The mise en place managed carefully but with muscle memory, clearing space (literally and mentally) to focus on the food itself.

For novices, even those of us that appreciate the benefits of preparation and setup (which often we don't), we take a long time and siphon away our attention performing background actions. You might need to pause between prep steps to clean up… but where'd you leave the broom? Or getting out the T-square to check alignment, but which side did I already measure, again? These little frictions pile up. You should see me in the kitchen trying to do anything more complex than 1 thing at a time. I look completely in the weeds. Meanwhile Kenji’s doing 3 things at once, narrating the whole process, and recording video simultaneously.

Through practice, though, we learn how to identify what's worth automating. We get our environment configured for the workflow. We get more adept at the activities to the degree we can just do them without thinking. Through trial and error we figure out the appropriate order-of-operations and carry it out naturally.

Sharpening your good habits relegates the repetitive into the background, so your lizard brain can do the work while your active brain can spend time on the more important parts.