CHAPTER V from Marti Soosaar’s e-book *A New Beginning*
“A body remains at rest or moves uniformly in a straight line in the absence of external forces acting upon it.”
Newton’s First Law
Perhaps you, too, have experienced your car’s battery dying in cold weather. It happened to me all the time in the ’90s. Back then, I drove old cars whose batteries were probably the original ones installed at the Nissan factory. To get the car started in such a situation, you have to give it a push, shift into gear at the right speed, and release the clutch. If you do everything correctly, you won’t need a new battery.
You’ve probably noticed when pushing a car that at first it just won’t start rolling, but once the wheels have picked up speed, pushing it becomes pretty easy. Maybe even so easy that if you were planning to jump into the driver’s seat while the car’s moving, that ends up being the hardest part of the whole process.
It’s the same story when it comes to getting yourself moving. If you’re not used to it, you’ll be glued to the couch like a car with a dead battery. Your “tanks” may be full of fuel (and they probably are, if you count excess fat as fuel), but you won’t move a single centimeter from where you are. To get yourself moving regularly, you first need to get those wheels rolling a little.
If you think running 10 km every day is too hard, agree with yourself that, to start with, you’ll just tie your shoelaces and walk a lap around your house or the neighborhood. Once you’ve been doing that for a week, maybe you’ll jog a kilometer. Once you’re used to that, you can increase your distance to two kilometers a week later. You’ll probably make it to ten eventually. Even if you don’t, it’s no big deal. You remember how small things turn into big ones, right? Running 1 km every day adds up to 365 km a year, and that’s definitely much better than eating 365 donuts in the same amount of time. Even if those donuts are covered in chocolate glaze.
I’m pretty sure you won’t be limiting yourself to just one kilometer a day for very long. Just as a mother says to her little baby, “Come on, take one more bite,” you’ll find that, bite by bite, you’ve eventually polished off your bowl of porridge—and so, in the end, a half-marathon or even a longer distance won’t seem like an impossible mission to you.
In his book *Atomic Habits*, James Clear introduces the concept of the 2-minute rule. This isn’t the rule about how long a sandwich can sit on the floor before it’s still safe to eat. Nor is it the 2-minute rule introduced by David Allen in his legendary book *Getting Things Done*. The idea behind that rule is that if you come across a task that would take you less than 2 minutes to complete, don’t put it off—just do it right away. It’s definitely a good rule to live by.
Clear’s 2-minute rule is also very simple. First, you need to start by building a habit. It’s similar to what I described a few paragraphs ago, but the idea is to start with something that takes no more than 2 minutes. Anyone can do this. If you want to start running, begin as I described earlier. If you want to start going to the gym, start by doing 10 push-ups, 10 squats, and 10 abdominal exercises—and that’s your entire workout. It won’t even take two minutes. If you do this every day, you’ll form a habit, and that’s what matters most. A habit is the foundation on which you can start building the rest of the house.
In the same book, Clear told a story about an acquaintance who started by simply going to the gym three times a week and staying there for just 5 minutes. Of course, by doing that, he immediately broke the two-minute rule and turned it into a five-minute rule, but let’s forgive him. The logical next step after those five minutes was that he soon began quietly working out on the treadmill and with weights there as well. What else are you going to do at the gym besides just scratching your belly? The end result was that he lost a whopping 40 kg.
Every beginning is hard, but it definitely gets easier from there. That’s why you should make getting started as easy as possible for yourself, because once you’re up and running, the wheels are already turning and it’s much easier to keep the momentum going.
This was the fifth chapter of Marti Soosaar’s e-book “A New Beginning.” We’ve also published the previous chapters; you can read them on our blog, and you can download the entire e-book HERE.
