chap6.txt

Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room
is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so
slowly, the room begins to heat up.
Twenty-six degrees.
Twenty-seven.
Twenty-eight.
The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you.
Twenty-nine degrees.
Thirty.
Thirty-one.
Still, nothing has happened.
Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift,
seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a
huge change.
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which
build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up
everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over
the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it
builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the
air within six weeks.
Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical
threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages
of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make
progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem
during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going
anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful
outcomes are delayed.
This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last.
People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop.
You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any
change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good
habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits
need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the
Plateau of Latent Potential.