Other than wanting to avoid sharing a keyboard with him, how does the odd habit of the guy sitting opposite you make you feel? You know, that thing he does just before starting to write some code, when he scratches his ankle, pulls at his underwear, then rubs his nose on the back of his hand and only then gets to smashing away on his keyboard. Are you grossed out by his laissez faire approach to hygiene or, for that matter, public decency, or do you think that he may be to Javascript what Rafael Nadal is to Grand Slam tennis? After all, he’s just going through some of the same motions that Nadal does before every serve, and when the tennis star does it, it’s in front of an audience of millions.

According to a new book by Harvard professor Michael Norton, The Ritual Effect, these strange personal tics might just be part of the reason that he’s such a frustratingly good coder (your colleague, that is, not Nadal).