Imagine a room where the temperature is controlled with a precise thermostat. The room is kept at 25 degrees. On a table in that room is a block of ice. Kept at that temperature, nothing about that room will change. One day, someone wants to melt the block of ice, but they’re not sure how much warmer it has to be in the room to do that. So they turn the thermostat up to 26 degrees.
A day later, they come back to check and… the block of ice is unchanged. So they turn the thermostat up to 27 degrees. The next day: still unchanged. So they turn it to 28 degrees. Then 29 degrees. And they adjust the thermostat up one degree every day with no change, until one day they turn it to 32 degrees and things start to change. The next day they turn it to 33 degrees. And then when they come back the next day, there is only a puddle. No more ice.
You probably know where I’m going with this. But I’m going to spell it out anyway.
Often, change happens very slowly, and then all at once. It seems like nothing is happening, and then everything is happening. Because sometimes, slow progress gets fast results.
The habits that you take on in order to get healthy (and any habit we’d recommend at our gym) – going to the gym a few times each week, eating more vegetables, sleeping an extra hour each night – are usually not things that yield shocking results in the first 7 days. But those also aren’t the same habits we keep forever. We build on those habits.
And at first, those habits are like raising the temperature from 25 degrees to 26 degrees. People might not notice. You might not notice. But we’ll build on those habits and raise the temperature to 27 degrees. And then we’ll build on those habits again and one day, the results will be stunning.
Now, that’s not the only way to do it. You could march into that 25-degree room with a torch and melt that ice right away and leave. But do you know what would happen when you came back the next day? The room would still be 25 degrees and the block of ice would now be a puddle of ice. We almost never see quick fixes last. And results that last are the ones we’re most interested in.
But here’s the catch: in order for the habit-building approach, the one-degree-at-a-time approach to work, you have to be consistent, and you have to be patient. And that can be hard. Especially in this world where so much of what we want is available at our fingertips right now. Sometimes you have to wait. And that’s frustrating.
But if you can keep at it, if you can be patient, if you can be consistent, if you can trust the process, you can melt that ice block and have it never freeze again. You can change your life forever. You can completely transform. One small step at a time. And you can start right now.