Goal and Habit

In February 1909 the New York detective Joe Petrosino, the terror of Manhattan’s Italian gangsters, travelled to Sicily in secret. The job was clear: dig through the local police archives for the criminal records of Italians living in New York. Under American law at the time, each such record was enough to send a man back. Petrosino worked like a man possessed: from the morning of his very first day in the Palermo courthouse, then three weeks in the archives of outlying towns. On Sundays, Dash writes, he sat in his hotel typing up his notes. The records piled up.

And all the while he was making what Dash calls elementary mistakes. He opened a bank account in his own name. He gave his real name to the waiters at the Caffè Oreto on Piazza Marina, where he dined with dangerous regularity. He took to walking around town without his revolver, leaving it in the suitcase in his room.

On the twelfth of March, after a downpour, at half past seven in the evening, Petrosino hurried to the Caffè Oreto for dinner. He took his usual table by the wall, where he could see everyone who came in. He ordered pasta, fish, fried potatoes and half a litre of wine, two lire seventy in all. When he had got to the cheese, two men came in, spoke to him briefly and went out. Petrosino left three lire, didn’t wait for his change and went after them. He walked two hundred and twenty yards. At eight fifty, four shots rang out on Piazza Marina.

Habit Saves Effort. It Also Makes You Predictable

I don’t open the chapter on habits with this story to make you afraid of them. Habits are the best thing ever invented for work. They’re things you do without spending decisions or willpower on them. Get up, get dressed, go, do it. The more of what’s useful you’ve turned into habit, the more strength you have left for what needs a head.

But a habit has a flip side: other people can see it. Petrosino saved his strength on dinner so he could spend it on the records, and that was sensible. Only his “usual table” wasn’t known to the waiters alone.

We knew that weakness better than anyone, by the way. Dash tells how twenty years before Petrosino, in 1889 in Corleone, the young Morello was given the job of killing Vella, a captain of the field guards. Vella was investigating a cattle theft. Morello studied his routine: Vella was a regular at the Stella d’Italia café, went there in the evening for a glass of wine, came and went alone, and took a short cut home to his wife through the back alleys. The ambush was laid a few yards from his house.

At the office nobody will shoot you over your routine. But the lesson is the same: your habits work both for you and for anyone who wants to use you. A competitor knows you always cut prices in December. A supplier knows you never check the second batch. Someone under you knows that on Fridays you sign without reading. Keep the useful habits, and every so often check who else knows about them.

Not What You Want, but Who You Are

Now, about goals. The usual advice is to set clear goals: what, how much and by when. The advice is sound. Without a direction, as the old men used to say, any Family turns into a bazaar: everybody running, everybody shouting, and the business going nowhere. A goal is there so that everyone pulls the same way.

But there’s something stronger than a goal, and people talk about it less. It’s who you think you are. A goal ends when it’s reached or missed. Who you are works every day and tells you what to decide.

Pistone puts it in a single sentence: what you really think, underneath it all, is that you’re an FBI agent on duty, and you can’t forget it for a second. For five years he lived as Donnie Brasco, ate with mafiosi, drank with them, drove down to Florida with them, and not for one day did he become Donnie Brasco. He had a goal—evidence—but that wasn’t what held him up. What held him up was who he was. When a goal is far away, it’s easy to lose sight of. When you know who you are, every small decision makes itself.

Bernardo Provenzano, the “boss of bosses”, who stayed one step ahead of the law for more than forty years, held himself up by an image too. In his last hideout they found plain food—ricotta with chicory—a bed with a blanket but no sheets, a Bible, and clothes that, as Dickie writes, a well-off farmer would have been ashamed to wear. The national anti-Mafia prosecutor, Piero Grasso, believed this poverty was a tactical choice: a show of Mafia ethics and of solidarity with the men in prison. Provenzano ruled by being the man people were supposed to respect. I’m not asking you to admire his image. Just look at how the mechanism works: a man who has decided who he is makes thousands of small decisions the same way, without spending any effort on them.

And it all ended, by the way, with a habit. The signal that finally triggered the arrest, Dickie writes, was Provenzano’s hand reaching out from behind a door to take in a plate of ricotta left on the doorstep. Forty-odd years on ricotta. And ricotta is what got him caught.

The Far Goal and the Near Habit

How do you tie a distant goal to today? Only through habits. A distant goal can’t be reached in one go, but every day you can do something that leads to it.

Lefty Ruggiero laid out the road into the Mafia for Pistone in one breath, better than any coach could: keep your nose out of other people’s business, never let the family down, follow the rules, bring in your cut, and one day they’ll put you up to be made. The distant goal is getting made. The daily habits are the rules, the cut, the way you look, keeping your mouth shut in front of your elders. The goal sets the direction; the habits do the carrying.

Only remember that the “one day” in that sentence can stretch a very long way. As you’ll see further on, in the American families they once closed the books for nineteen years. The habits you build for the sake of a goal should be useful in their own right. Then you won’t lose, even if the goal moves further off.

You Become What You Watch

One last thing. The mind tunes itself to what it sees. Watch a gangster film and you’re already walking a little differently. Read about people who’ve achieved a lot and you want to get to work. This is called priming, and it works more strongly than we think.

A veteran of the Naples flying squad told Saviano how camorristi imitate the killers in films: “After Tarantino they all started shooting any old how. Nobody holds the gun straight any more, now it’s flat or tilted, and they shoot like in the movies.” And because of it they hit people in the belly and the legs; they don’t kill, they maim, and then they have to finish the job. The cinema tuned their hand—and ruined their work.

Choose what you tune your head to. Your surroundings, your books, the people you have lunch with, the talk you hear first thing in the morning. All of it quietly changes your hand. Don Vincenzo began every morning the same way: he walked round the laundry, greeted every presser by name and tasted the oil from a new tin. It wasn’t a ceremony. It was tuning: before deciding anything, remind yourself what it’s all about and who it’s for.

The Bottom Line

Turn what’s useful into habit, so you don’t have to decide it all over again every morning. But remember that you’re not the only one who sees your habit. Don’t sit down every evening at the same table by the wall if there are people walking around town who’d like you out of the way.