Think about a goal you have.
Maybe you want to run a 5k, make your first $1 million, or quit drinking.
When will you be close to achieving it?
You may think you’ll be close when you’re, say, 90% of the way there. In the final stretch.
Most of us view our goals in this way. We imagine our goals along a linear graph, and we track our progress along it. 📈 We think the first few steps toward a goal barely count. It’s simple math, right?⠀
But the math is wrong. It's wrong because it doesn’t take into account the space between doing nothing and doing something.
The space between doing nothing and doing something is infinite, it's the infinite 1%. Going from 0 to 1 is the part most people don’t do, the hardest part. Once you’ve done that, you can just repeat the process until you reach your goal.
1% of your goal may seem minuscule....but going from inaction to action is actually the biggest distance you can cover. The hardest part of anything you’ll do is overcoming the inertia of doing nothing in order to do something. And the hardest part of stopping something you’re used to doing is learning how to stop yourself from doing it the first few times.