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“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
Leo Tolstoy
You can wreck a good habit by trying to improve it. This morning I took that risk with my marketing, a part of the business that’s working. My hand was on the dial to go from twenty-one minutes a day to thirty-four. I stopped to check whether I’d earned the turn.
Each goal has a price and I pay for most of my goals with habits. Call that price the hurdle rate. Underpaying towards a goal works like a credit card that charges eighty dollars a month in interest while you pay fifty: you pay each month and the debt still grows.
A habit paying below the hurdle rate burns effort the same way. You show up each day and still lose ground.
Above the hurdle rate, your effort compounds. My marketing cleared it weeks ago. Twenty-one minutes a day was enough and the results kept improving.
I take cold showers mainly for a better mood. The hurdle rate on that goal is thirty-four seconds. I pushed the shower toward a minute, then two and started skipping it on the hard mornings.
By then my bottleneck, the limiting factor holding everything else back, sat somewhere else entirely. The shower was aimed at mood and mood was paid in full. Pushing it was easier than staring down the real constraint. And the push cost me twice:
- The longer showers bought nothing. Only work on the bottleneck improves your condition.
- The willpower and attention they burned came out of the work that needed them most.
Above the hurdle rate, the only threat to your habit’s survival is your own hand. Holding becomes the job and holding is harder than pushing.
You still put in the same effort each day. What makes it hard is wanting the results to come faster and feeling like you have capacity to spare, the same hurry that cost Rick Guerin his Berkshire shares.
So you get restless and reach for a bigger floor.
The man who runs the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund calls doing nothing the hardest part of the job.
Nicolai Tangen manages two trillion dollars for Norway and runs a check he calls the inertia analysis: take the portfolio from January 1st, work out what it would have returned untouched, then set that against what the year of decisions actually produced. His own verdict from running it: “you actually have detracted from your performance by the things you’ve done.”
Almost always the right call is to hold. But three things can move the hurdle rate itself.
Your environment can move your hurdle rate. A company measures each investment against its hurdle rate and that rate is set by the cost of borrowing money. When interest rates jumped in 2022, projects that cleared the old bar suddenly fell short. The work was the same. The ground under it moved and each project got re-graded. The day your own market gets harder, your rate climbs the same way.
A sharper competitor can move your hurdle rate. Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters by twelve strokes, a margin the tournament never saw. The people who run Augusta answered by lengthening fourteen of its eighteen holes, twenty-one times over the years that followed. One golfer got so good the course itself had to get longer to stay a contest. When a rival gets that good in your field, the level you already reached stops being enough.
Your ambition can move your hurdle rate. Nicolas Cage made about a hundred and fifty million dollars acting. He spent it on fifteen homes, two European castles, a Bahamas island and a seventy-million-year-old dinosaur skull, then owed the government millions and took any role he could to dig out. Raise your own aim and the level you were proud of last year stops counting.
Kevin Hart spends in the other direction: after a project wraps, he buys a watch. He associates each watch with the work he put in.
Marketing is my current bottleneck. The limiting factor where a push actually improves my condition. Thirty-four minutes a day should pay materially different returns over time than twenty-one. So I’m raising the floor to thirty-four today.
Cage’s floor rose on appetite alone, past what the hundred and fifty million could fund. My floor comes up after proof. I’ve banked a deep surplus of days above twenty-one, the way a poker player builds a bankroll. And a player with money to burn still doesn’t move up stakes: they move up when their game can survive the swings at the bigger table. So before thirty-four becomes my floor, I have to hit the new bar: eighty-nine minutes in a single session.
Most days, the answer is that the thing is working and you should leave it alone.
The urge to act that put my hand on the dial this morning never turns off. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation: each level you reach resets what enough feels like. We can’t switch it off. We can be aware of it.
Default to riding your winners. Move the bar only when the ground under it moves, the habit is aimed at your bottleneck and you’ve proven the capacity to clear the new floor.
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What in your life is already growing that you won’t stop pushing?
