I used to think creating new habits meant overhauling my entire life. I’d make these elaborate plans with color-coded schedules and expensive planners. And like clockwork, I’d abandon them within days. The disappointment was crushing, and that familiar voice would start up again: “See? You can’t even stick with something simple. Why bother trying?”
It wasn’t until I hit a particularly low point that I realized something had to change. Not my goals—those were fine—but my approach. I stumbled across this concept of “tiny habits” in an old podcast, where the host mentioned starting with just one minute. Not ten minutes of meditation. Not thirty minutes of exercise. One single minute.
At first, I was skeptical. How could one minute of anything make a difference? But I was desperate enough to try. So I picked one thing—just writing a single sentence in a journal each morning. Sometimes that sentence was profound. Usually, it was mundane. “The coffee tastes bitter today.” “Cat woke me up again.” But day after day, I wrote that one sentence.
After two weeks, something shifted. That one-sentence habit had become so effortless that I found myself naturally writing more. Some days it would stretch to a paragraph, sometimes a full page. I hadn’t planned this expansion—it just happened organically because I’d removed all the pressure.
That’s when I realized the fatal flaw in my previous approaches: I’d been overwhelming myself with expectations. By shrinking the habit down to its absolute minimum viable form, I’d made it impossible to fail. And when you remove the possibility of failure, you create space for natural growth.
Now whenever I want to build a new habit, I start ridiculously small. Want to read more? Start with one page a night. Want to exercise? Begin with a single push-up. It sounds absurd until you experience how these tiny ripples eventually create powerful waves of change in your life. The key isn’t finding more willpower—it’s requiring less of it in the first place.
Ripple Habit 