Skip to content
GAMSATready

GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Habit

1 GAMSAT-style prompt on habit. Each gives you five comments that disagree, so your job is to find the tension and argue a clear position. Give yourself about 30 minutes per essay.

Task B · ReflectivePrompt 1 of 1

Consider the following comments on habit.

  • We are what we repeatedly do.

    Will Durant

  • A habit is a decision you only have to make once, for better or worse.

  • The routines that once saved me became the walls I forgot I built.

  • We notice the habits of others and call our own behaviour personality.

  • Half of who I am is just the path my feet stopped questioning.

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

A way into this prompt

A reflective approach treats habit as the quiet architecture of a self, the part of us that runs while we are paying attention to something else. Open with a specific routine, a morning ritual, a way of speaking to yourself, a small compulsion, and notice when it stopped being a choice. Then weigh two stances: habit as liberation, freeing the mind from constant decision so it can attend to what matters, and habit as a cage, automating a version of you that may no longer fit. A useful structural move contrasts a habit you deliberately built with one you absorbed without consent, from family, from circumstance, from repetition. Caution: resist the self-help promise that any habit can be swapped at will, since some are woven so deeply into who you are that changing them feels like changing person.

Write this and mark it free