Good morning, John.

Preface: I just, I don't know when this is gonna end but I did just get my first vaccine shot so I'm feeling good. I'm starting to wonder what a lot of people are wondering, which is, like, what do we keep do we keep and what do we not keep?

I don't know why this stuck with me but this is something my boss said to me when I worked at Walmart.

He said it's ten or a hundred times easier to keep somebody coming to the same store than to attract them to a new store.  

Which was him saying, like, we need to treat our customers really well because we if lose them, it's very hard to get them back.
The point is, our behavior is sticky. We are creatures of habit. 

And doing the same thing-- like going to the same store-- has, like, benefits to it. I know when it's gonna be busy, I know where the ketchup is and where the peanut butter is. The peanu-- peanut butter is put all over different stores! No one can agree where it goes.

Every activity has built in costs of switching, and we incurred a lot of costs switching to this new way, and now, like, a lot of this seems pretty normal.   There's a lot of behaviors that have changed, and I'd like some of them to go back to the way they were, and I'd like some of them to stay the way that they are.  Like me wearing a mask on an airplane.  Why wasn't I doing that before?

But there's another dimension to this.  It's not just the things that I'd like to keep doing versus the things that I'd like to go back to how they were before the pandemic.  There's also whether or not those things are actually gonna happen.  Like, I would like to never travel for business again, and that's been a nice thing for me this year.  I'm going to, though, and so, with what is possibly an overabundance of hope, I have created my personal post-Covid behavior-change alignment chart.  Things that I want to go back to that will definitely happen: including hugging, hugging people other than my wife and son.  And then on the opposite from that, there's the things that I would frankly like to keep but will not, like never traveling for business.  Also in that quadrant: I'm afraid Zoom calls with old friends.  Like, we started doing this because of the pandemic.  I'm not sure that we'll be able to keep it up, even though I do like it.

There's only one thing in my want to go back to but may not be able to quadrant, and that is feeling, like, safe around strangers in the way that I used to.  I'm not sure how long this is gonna take, but like, right now, I think I would be pretty uncomfortable in a big crowded room.  The nice thing about this is that it also sort of like, lets you experience the extremes of these things.  Like, I kinda want to go see a movie, but not that bad.  Like, I'm gonna go see movies again, but if we're being honest, and like I know I've got a four year old, so that's a little more complicated for me, but like, ehhh?  

And there is stuff that I'd like to keep the same and I think that I will. Like, I want to do more telemedicine.  Now, I'm not sure if I'll be able to, if my doctor will provide that option, but it's been great.  It's hard for me, a person who has a lot of advantages and privileges, to get to the doctor's office.  Why would we make a single mom, like, get childcare so that she can get to the doctor's office and wait there in order to get a prescription for a UTI that will require the exchange of like 15 words?  That's not an efficient system for anyone, but a less extreme thing and more likely to actually happen, a lot of my favorite restaurants started doing delivery when they didn't before, and I kinda like having a night in, where I don't have to do dishes but also don't have to go anywhere with a four year old.

I've posted a blank version of the post-Covid behavior change alignment chart if you wanna fill out your own and post it on Twitter.  You can use a hashtag, I'll put it in the description, but I think the most important part of this exercise for me has been, some of these things are gonna be my choice, and some of them aren't, and it's nice to think what might happen, what I might do, but it's also possible that I'll be wrong, and I will end up not doing the thing because behavior is really sticky, but a message to future Hank, if you're watching this, if you're not having your friends over to like, hang out as often as possible, what are you thinking?  Get your butt together!  This Hank misses it so much.  Do me a favor.  Give 'em a call.  Make 'em some margaritas.  John, I'll see on Tuesday.