I want a word for this.
There’s a quality I keep seeing in habits, systems and businesses that last. Something beyond hurdle rate. Hurdle rate asks, “Is the input big enough to count?” Tardigradity asks, “What are the odds it keeps going?”
A 5K every morning that ends in week two cleared the hurdle and went to zero. A push-up every Sunday for a year is too little input to build strength. The first one dies. The second one falls behind. Compounding needs both.
Tardigrades survive radiation, vacuum, boiling, freezing. Five mass extinctions. So do sharks, horseshoe crabs, nautiluses, sponges and ostracods. The pattern: survivors are small, slow, low-metabolism, flexible in diet, tolerant of weird conditions. They won by asking the least of the world.
Tardigradity is the probability a thing keeps going.
Every requirement a habit has is a place it can break. Speed, intensity, equipment and willpower each add to the list. A tardigradic practice keeps the list short.
A gym habit needs:
- Motivation
- Time
- A drive
- Working knees
- Clean laundry
- A gym that’s open
Six things can stop it. A push-up in the kitchen needs one: you, for ten seconds. Same muscle group. Radically different tardigradity.
Intensity is seductive. It depends on peak conditions you can’t guarantee. Tardigradity looks like weakness because it asks for so little. That’s what makes it survive your worst weeks, your traveling months, your sick years.
Ask if the habit is ambitious? Wrong question. Ask if it clears the hurdle. Ask if it’s tardigradic.
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Which of your habits would still hold during your roughest stretch?
