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“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Henry David Thoreau
It costs me thirty-four seconds of cold water a day to stay in a good mood.
The growth I want from my business charges more: thirty-four minutes of marketing a day.
I choose to pay both bills in the same currency: a habit, an action repeated each day. Raw, sporadic effort could cover them too, but sporadic effort runs on willpower and willpower is finite. A new habit costs just as much at first. As it settles, it takes less and less willpower to run.
Bigger goals send bigger bills. Becoming a chess grandmaster, the highest title the game awards, costs years of daily study, a coach and hundreds of tournament games. A bill that size gets paid in several habits at once:
- the morning study
- the weekly games
- the monthly tournament
An hour of chess a week makes you a better player and leaves the title where it was. Somewhere above that hour sits a rate where the title becomes a matter of time.
I call that line the hurdle rate. The goal sets it. My habits pay it.
Above the hurdle rate, extra payments buy speed. A player studying six hours a day reaches the title years sooner. The extra speed has its own price: the heavier the daily payment, the higher the odds you burn out before the title arrives.
A runner who stacks miles on too fast brings race day closer and raises the risk that an injury comes first.
Anthony Trollope paid for forty-seven novels with one habit: two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes, each morning before his job at the Post Office.
Thirty-four minutes of marketing a day is how I pay my own growth bill.
Each goal has a price. You choose how to pay it: in habits or in sporadic effort.
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What’s the daily price of the goal you want most?
