or CHAPTER V of Marti Soosaar’s e-book “A New Beginning”
“An object remains at rest or moves at a constant velocity in a straight line unless acted upon by external forces.”
Newton’s first law
Perhaps you too have had your car battery die in cold weather. It happened to me all the time in the 1990s. Back then, of course, I drove old cars whose batteries had apparently been installed as original equipment at the Nissan factory. To get a car started in that situation, you have to push it up to speed, put it in gear at the right moment and release the clutch. If you do everything right, you don’t even need a new battery.
If you have ever pushed a car, you have probably felt how reluctant it is to move at first. But once the wheels get rolling, pushing becomes fairly easy. Perhaps even so easy that if you planned to jump into the driver’s seat while the car was moving, that turns out to be the hardest part of the whole operation.
The same applies to getting yourself moving. If you are not in the habit of exercising, you sit there with your backside stuck to the sofa like a car with a dead battery. Your tanks may be full of fuel—and probably are, if excess fat counts as fuel—but you will not move an inch. To get yourself moving regularly, you first need to get those wheels rolling, even if only a little.
If you think running 10 km every day is hard, make a deal with yourself that, to begin with, you will simply tie your shoelaces and walk just once around your house or block. After a week of that, perhaps you can jog one kilometre. Once you are used to that too, you can increase the distance to two kilometres the following week. You will probably work your way up to ten eventually. Even if you do not, it is no big deal. Remember how small things grow into big ones. Running 1 km every day adds up to 365 km a year, which is certainly much better than eating 365 doughnuts over the same period. Even if those doughnuts have chocolate icing.
I am fairly sure you would not stick to just one kilometre a day for long. Just as a mother says to a small baby, “Go on, have one more bite,” you too will find that, bite by bite, you have eventually finished the whole plate of porridge. Before long, neither a half marathon nor an even longer distance will be mission impossible for you.
In his book “Atomic Habits”, James Clear introduces the idea of the 2-minute rule. This is not a rule about how long a sandwich can stay on the floor and still be put in your mouth. Nor is it the 2-minute rule that David Allen introduces in his legendary book “Getting Things Done”. That rule says that if you come across a task that would take less than 2 minutes to complete, do not put it off—do it immediately. It is certainly a good rule for life.
Clear’s 2-minute rule is equally simple. The first step is to build a habit. This is similar to what I described a few paragraphs ago, but his point is that you should begin with something that takes no more than 2 minutes. Anyone can manage that. If you want to start running, begin as I described earlier. If you want to start going to the gym, initially do 10 push-ups, 10 squats and 10 ab exercises, and that is your entire workout. It does not even take two minutes. If you do this every day, you will form a habit, and that is the most important thing. A habit is the foundation on which you can start building the rest of the house.
In the same book, Clear tells the story of someone he knew who started by simply going to the gym three times a week and staying for just 5 minutes. Of course, that meant he immediately broke the two-minute rule and turned it into a five-minute rule, but we can forgive him. Those five minutes naturally led to the man gradually starting to use the treadmill and weights as well. After all, why go to the gym just to stand around scratching your belly? The end result was that he lost as much as 40 kg.
Every beginning is difficult, but it certainly gets easier from there. That is why you should make starting as easy as possible for yourself: once the wheels are already turning, building momentum becomes much easier.
This was the fifth chapter of Marti Soosaar’s e-book “A New Beginning”. We have also published the previous chapters, which you can read on our blog. You can download the complete e-book HERE.
