Make it easy
Behavioral change is so hard. Books like Atomic Habits have done a great job deconstructing the science and making it a little easier.
But I think many of the books underestimate one critical piece:
Our egos.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear’s third law for building habits is “make it easy.”
The idea is that to build a new habit, you’re best off starting super easy and then making small incremental improvements.
Start too big (i.e. 5 mile run) and you’ll struggle to keep it up (because of a phenomenon that Stanford Professor BJ Fogg calls “the motivation wave”).
The thing that James Clear doesn’t mention is that for many people, especially high performers, starting super easy is actually quite hard.
We’re used to learning how to swim by jumping off the deep end.
We don’t like to, nor identify, with doing “easy” things.
It clashes with our egos.
But here’s the problem with that: we can’t beat the science.
As much as we think we can start our running habit by running 5 miles every day, we will fall prey to the motivation wave.
And so to set ourselves up for success, we actually have to do the hard thing: giving ourselves permission to do the easy thing.
It’s okay to start with a 10 minute walk.
Because eventually that is what will lead to long-term success. The science shows it.