“Hard in training, easy in battle.” Alexander Suvorov. The Science of Victory (Наука побеждать), 1795.
I ran for half an hour and ten minutes became my new normal.
Most people treat a habit as one number. You hit the number or you miss it. The better way is to put the habit on a range. The floor is what you do on a normal day. The ceiling is the highest you’ve reached.
To raise the floor, you reach a new ceiling. Running thirty raised my floor to ten. Thirty became the new ceiling above it. Ten settled in as the normal because I’d already done thirty.
Life has volatility. A bad night of sleep. A travel day. A week of stress. When your floor sits right at your ceiling, the streak breaks. When your floor sits below a ceiling you’ve already reached, a bad day stays inside the range.
The ceiling gives you room to deal with volatility without breaking your habit.
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Which habit of yours would survive a bad day if you had room above it?
