That crusty intellectual rag Harper’s magazine once printed an exchange between a retired English teacher and the marketing department of Coca-Cola about their slogan for Dasani water, which confused the word “everyday” with the two words “every day”. The company’s response was pretty funny and luckily someone else scanned it in: http://www.laurajmackay.com/everyday.pdf
Lately I’ve been working on changing my behavior, and that’s brought me around to seeing Coca-Cola’s point. It’s easy to list some ideas for ways to take care of oneself: flossing teeth, getting more exercise, stretching, going to bed earlier. But it’s hard to follow through and actually adopt those behaviors and persist with them, as many people who make New Year’s resolutions discover. Recently I’ve had some better success, and I think the words “everyday” and “every day” can explain why.
Let’s take flossing teeth. At first I tried to floss about 3 times per week, but this lasted for only about 2 weeks before I stopped. By failing to floss up to my goal, I thought of myself as someone who just couldn’t stick with it, flossing wasn’t for me. Flossing was too hard to remember and too easy to put off until tomorrow - why get up out of bed to deal with such a small matter? A few months later I decided to try again, but with a target of every day flossing. This worked, and I’ve been flossing (almost) every day since. Why? It doesn’t make sense that a more ambitious goal would work, when seen through a lens involving the tradeoff between cost and a benefit with diminishing returns. But this isn’t a matter of selling a benefit for the price of a cost; it’s a matter of identity: I started with the attitude that one is a “daily flosser” and then just did it; no excuses were acceptable, I did it every day. To use Coca-Cola’s word, flossing is now everyday, and that’s the only way that works for me.
