chap3.txt

This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss
small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment. If
you save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym
three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour
tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We make a few changes, but the
results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous
routines.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad
habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If
you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you
procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time
to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss.
But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor
decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small
choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a
1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of
shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying
from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the
heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of
New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the
airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United
States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.