When you have a young puppy, like I do right now, you learn a lot about habit forming. Puppies learn from positive reinforcement and play. But most of all, they from repetition.
It takes a puppy weeks to learn commands and house training. Weeks of scheduled repetition. Incentives and rewards. Day after day. We know how to exploit this with dogs, yet our own habit forming systems aren’t all that different.
I think it’s because we try and shortcut this process. We assume the new habit will just “stick”. Instead, we should learn from the puppies for once, and embrace the fact that learning anything worthwhile takes repetition and time.