Rules of Three

There are all sorts of ‘Rules of Three,’ ranging from survival heuristics (you can last roughly three weeks without food, three days without water, about three hours in extreme heat or cold, and around three minutes without air) to a clustering rule that’s often applied in storytelling that advises having things happen in threes so that the listener’s/reader’s pattern-recognition intuitions are activated and satisfied.

In design school I was taught that three of something can often visually represent the concept of ‘many,’ so if you’re designing a logo or other graphic, you needn’t use a bajillion objects to represent the concept of ‘multitudinous,’ you can stop at a trio rather than trying to cram as many little doodads as possible into a finite, downscaled space.

The rule of three I probably use most frequently, though, relates to habit-building.

If I want to do something regularly, I’ve noticed that the third successful repetition tends to signal to my brain that this is a thing I do now: this is the new norm.

When the seasons change and it’s once again warm enough to run outside, I have to build back up from the shorter maintenance runs I perform on the treadmill during the winter months, back up to the three-to-four outdoor miles I like to do a few times a week when the weather allows.

That build-up process is indeed a process, and every time I up my range, adding a few more blocks, another quarter-mile, there’s an initial sense of ‘well maybe that was just a fluke—next time it might be too difficult and I’ll return to where I was on the last run.’

Then (hopefully) I do that new, longer distance again, and my brain starts to wonder if maybe this is something I should get used to. It’s only after three successful runs of that distance that I finally allow myself to believe that this is the real thing, this is what I do now, and that realization then becomes reality. My new default is set.

There’s nothing magical about threes, but when establishing new habits, at least, the third repetition of something is often where you transition from ‘Huh, maybe this is a one-off,’ to ‘Oh, okay, so this is clearly a thing now.’