5. Tiny Steps

In 2014, I almost gave up on writing my first book.

The book was called Mobile Design Book. I had a co-author. We had a deal. We had an outline. We had everything except time, which is the polite way of saying I had everything except discipline. The book was the third or fourth priority on my list, and a third or fourth priority is not a priority. It’s a wish you keep telling yourself you will get to.

My co-author was about to travel to Europe for the summer and asked me to visit her in Prague to write together. I agreed and immediately needed pages. I decided to wake up one hour earlier and write nothing but the book during that hour.

The first morning I sat down at 7am, typed, and immediately tried to talk myself out of it. This is nonsense. Who is going to read this? What about thorough research? I kept typing. The hour produced nearly a thousand words, most of which were bad. The next morning I sat down and couldn’t produce a sentence. I left with two long sentences and a bad mood. The morning after, I wrote a few hundred words. The morning after that, more.

A couple of weeks in, my part of the book was nearly done.

That was the lesson, and I have been running it ever since. The thing I couldn’t do for hours, I could do for one hour, every morning, badly. The hour did most of the work. Wanting to be in the mood did none of it.

Easy Mode shrinks the commitment until it’s hard to refuse. One email. One page. One workout. One feature. One call. The version of you who shows up tired and distracted has to be able to complete it without negotiation. Otherwise you are designing for a person who only exists on your good days.

Three things happen when the step gets small enough.

It lowers resistance. The brain will fight you over an hour of writing. It won’t fight you over five minutes. Five minutes opens the door, and once the door is open, you usually keep going.

It increases repetition. Anything you can do today, you can probably do tomorrow. Compounding only starts when the thing happens often.

It creates feedback. A tiny shipped thing tells you what to do next. A large unshipped thing tells you nothing.

The trap is that small steps feel beneath you. They are not. Small steps are how you stop being fragile. The person who can write for five minutes a day in any condition writes more books than the person who waits for the perfect three-hour block.

If you can’t write for an hour, write for five minutes. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t ship the feature, ship the button. If you can’t call ten customers, call one. Daily small beats heroic occasional.

What is the version of your current commitment you can do on your worst day?