Mini Habits: The More You Want to Change, the Lower You Should Set the Bar
A 30-minute workout felt like climbing Everest. One push-up got me through a 10-minute ab session. Don’t set goals big. Set them so small that failure is impossible.
Objectively you keep succeeding, yet subjectively you keep failing: because you’re no longer competing against the goal, you’re competing against your own personal best.
The feeling of completion is a paycheck that should arrive after the work is done. Get paid up front, and you won’t feel like working for the rest of the month.
That night, I had planned to do a 30-minute workout in my room. I stood there with zero motivation. Pep talks, fast-paced music, fantasies of a perfect body — none of it worked. Thirty minutes of exercise felt, to the me of that moment, like climbing Mount Everest.
Then I changed the goal to: do 1 push-up.
I got down, pushed myself up, and after that one, I naturally did a few more. Then a few pull-ups. Then I rolled out the mat, found an ab workout video, and followed along for 10 minutes. Original plan: complete.
That’s “Mini Habits.” The core is one sentence: don’t set goals big, set them so small that failure is impossible. One push-up a day, 50 words a day, 2 pages a day. So small your brain doesn’t resist. So small you can finish even on your worst day. Then momentum naturally carries you past the target.
It’s simple to practice, but there are two hidden traps to watch out for.
Trap One: Don’t Compete With Yesterday’s Self
I have a friend who started a blog last year. His goal was “write 50 words a day.” In the first month, he wrote one or two thousand words almost every day. By the third month, he told me he wanted to quit, because “lately I can’t hit my target.”
I asked him: “Isn’t your target 50 words? How much did you write yesterday?” He thought about it: “A bit over eight hundred.”
Stephen Guise has a name for this in the book: the hidden goal.
Think about it. If you’ve written 1,500 words a day for the past 20 days, your brain quietly registers 1,500 as the “normal level.” From that moment on, the goal still says 50 words on paper, but you’re no longer competing against 50 words. You’re competing against your own personal best.
The most grinding part is this: objectively, you keep succeeding, yet subjectively, you keep failing. That chronic frustration, laced with self-doubt, wears you down far more than outright failure does. Give it enough time, and you don’t abandon the goal. You abandon the whole endeavor.
Next time you feel discouraged because “I didn’t hit it today,” pause and ask yourself: did you miss the goal, or did you miss your previous self?
Trap Two: The Feeling of Completion Is Itself a Reward, and It Steals Your Real Execution
Last year I resolved to read 20 books in a year. I bought an annual membership for a reading app. Every time I came across a highly rated book, I added it to my “Want to Read” list. Whenever a book blogger I followed posted a reading list, I saved it locally too.
At the year-end review, 87 books were sitting in “Want to Read.” The number I had actually finished: 1.
There’s an experiment in “Mini Habits” that explains this. Researchers split dieters into two groups — everyone was actively losing weight. They told only one group, “You’ve been dieting successfully,” and said nothing to the other. Then both groups got to choose a reward: an apple or a chocolate bar.
In the praised group, 85% chose the chocolate. In the unpraised group, 58% chose the chocolate.
A 27-percentage-point gap, caused by nothing more than one sentence: “You’re doing great.”
The moment I added a book to “Want to Read,” the app told me “You’re doing great” once.
The feeling of completion is supposed to be the paycheck you receive after the work is done — not the paycheck deposited before you’ve done anything.
Get paid up front, and you won’t feel like working for the rest of the month.
The human brain is remarkably bad at telling “doing the thing” apart from “looking like you’re doing the thing.”
The logic of mini habits is plain: do a little every day, let repetition rewire the brain, let momentum carry you past the target.
But this plain method has two traps: you’ll unconsciously choke yourself with your best day’s score, and you’ll mistake “looking like you’re doing it” for “having done it.”
Doing one push-up is the easiest thing in the world. Just don’t let yesterday’s high score ruin today’s mood, and don’t let your bookshelf read the books for you.