Have you ever told yourself that what you’re doing isn’t enough, so you might as well not bother at all? That belief is exactly what keeps you stuck. In this episode, I introduce one of my most powerful concepts for getting out of overwhelm and into action, The Infinite 1%, and show you why doing a little is actually everything.
I break down how your brain thinks you’re only “close” to a goal when you’re almost finished, and why that’s completely wrong. I explain how the real gap isn’t between people doing a little and people doing a lot, but between people doing nothing and people doing something. And I show you how perfectionism convinces you that small efforts don’t count, when in reality, that first step is the hardest and most important part.
If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by how far you have to go or stuck waiting until you can do something perfectly, this episode will change how you think about progress. You’ll learn how to embrace small, consistent action, get out of inertia, and start building momentum in a way that actually creates results.
For the next few episodes, I’m going to be teaching you some of the most powerful tools I have to get you going when you’re stuck. We’re going to be talking about understanding procrastination and how to stop procrastinating. We’re going to be talking about a brand new concept I’m really excited to introduce you to called the Last 5%. And this week, I want to revisit one of my best teachings on this topic, which is the infinite 1%.
One theme throughout all of these several episodes we’re going to be doing is the way in which our story about what we’re doing, our conceptualization of what we’re doing, is the biggest defining feature of whether we actually take action or not. Whether we actually take action doesn’t really have to do with our circumstances. It doesn’t really have to do with what quote unquote kind of person we are. It’s not about our failings, our character, our personality, our star sign, our human design, or anything else like that. It is our thinking about the thing we have to do.
And the infinite 1% is a concept, a tool, a mind hack, a genius reframe that helps you go from being overwhelmed by the enormity of a large task or project or even change of direction in your life. To seeing it as something eminently doable and recognizing the impact of small compounding actions in a way that will get you over that inertia and get you out of that overwhelm and motivate you to actually take action.
So if there’s anything in your life that you are not taking action on or you’ve taken some action, but like the end feels so far away and you feel overwhelmed by the distance between where you are and where you want to be, then this episode is an absolute game changer. So make sure you give it a listen, and then next week, I’m going to be teaching you all about the other end of the spectrum, which is the 5%, a reframe, a hack that’s going to help you when you’ve gotten most of the way somewhere, but you think it’s not working, right? Or you don’t even realize how far you’ve gotten because you think it’s not working and you want to give up.
So this week, we’re starting at the beginning and next week we’re ending at the end. These two episodes together are the key to accomplishing anything you want to accomplish in your life. Give it a listen.
Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.
I want to teach you a brand-new concept I’ve come up with, which I am obsessed with. I only like to teach you things I’m obsessed with. It’s a huge mental reframe that can create enormous results in your life if you implement it, and it’s called the infinite 1%.
So that sounds weird, right? 1% sounds tiny and infinite is infinite. They kind of seem like opposites, but it totally makes sense, I promise. When we think about doing big things in our lives, I think that we assume, certainly lizard brain assumes it’s going to be a lot of work.
And the way we think about it, we think we aren’t close to the goal until we’re close to the goal. So if we want to make $100,000 as a life coach, we think we aren’t close to making $100,000 until we hit like, $90,000. If we want to run a marathon, we think we aren’t close to the goal until we can run 20 miles, let’s say. Or even if we want to run a 5K, we think we aren’t close until we can run 4K.
If we’re getting a PhD, we think we aren’t close to the goal until we’ve almost finished our dissertation. If we want to learn to drink less or stick to a budget or stop biting our nails or any other habit, we think we aren’t close to the goal until the habit is almost gone.
We think that the first few steps barely count, that they’re just like, barely more than nothing. That they are so far away from the goal. We think $10,000 is closer to zero than it is to $100,000. We think running half a mile is closer to not running at all than it is to running a marathon. We think making a drink or meal plan and then only following it 20% of the time is closer to just not following it at all than to following it 100% of the time.
It seems like basic math. But this math is wrong. Because the difference between doing nothing and doing something is the biggest difference there is. From zero to one is exponential growth. From zero to one is the part most people never do. From zero to one is the hard part.
Once you’ve gotten from zero to one, it’s just rinse and repeat. Doing 100 podcast episodes in a row every single week for 100 weeks was not actually that hard. What was hard was getting over my own bullshit to do the first one. After that, it’s just rinse and repeat.
Making more than a million dollars a year, not actually that hard. The hard part was getting out of my own way to make that first $20,000 that first year. The last two thirds of a run, not hard. The hard part is getting myself out the door and moving for that first one third. That’s always the hardest part.
Remember that your brain loves to save energy and it’s scared of doing anything new. Newton’s first law of motion, thank you to my classic studies at Yale – I may be the only person who went through the directed studies program at Yale and is now a life coach. I wonder if that’s true.
Okay, still though, listen, classical learning is important. Even if I’m the only life coach who talks about Newton. So Newton’s first law of motion is that a body in motion will tend to stay in motion, and a body at rest will tend to stay at rest. What is hard is overcoming the inertia of zero to get to one. What is hard is to be in a state of not being in motion, a state of rest, and go into being in motion. That’s where you need effort.
When you want to take a new action, you have to get over the inertia of not being in motion to get in motion. But after you’ve done it once and you know how, it’s just rinse and repeat. What’s hard is going from being in motion to being at rest. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. When you want to stop taking a certain action you have, like you have a habit you’re trying to change, the inertia is actually to just keep repeating it.
Just keep taking the same motion, keep doing the same thing. And the effort is that you have to get over the inertia of just repeating the habit, the same way you always do to change it, to be at rest. But after you’ve allowed an urge without acting on it once or twice, just rinse and repeat.
The big difference in the world isn’t between people who have done a little versus people who have done a lot. It’s between people who do nothing and people who do something. And this is the tragedy of perfectionism because perfectionism keeps us thinking that doing a little is pointless. But doing a little is everything.
If you spend five minutes doing thought work every day, after a year, you will have spent 30 whole hours working on your brain. Now, 30 doesn’t sound like a big number but really think about 30 whole hours. That’s almost a whole work week of nothing but working on your thoughts. All day at work.
If you don’t spend those five minutes because it’s too little and it doesn’t count, a year later, you will have the exact same thoughts and results you do now. You will have gotten nowhere. A body at rest stays at rest. A mind in chaos stays in chaos. Unless you use your energy to overcome that little bit of inertia, that first 1%.
The exponential difference is not between you who are spending five minutes a day on thought work and someone who’s spending an hour a day on it. You are actually very close together next to each other. The exponential difference is between both of you and someone who doesn’t do thought work at all.
On the spectrum of change, if you want to think about it visually, the person spending five minutes and the person spending an hour are so close together you can barely see between them. It’s like if you think about those timelines of like, the development of the Earth, and it’s so long and then when human history started and where we are now are very close together because it’s like, billions and trillions of years.
And then it’s like, a few thousand years of recorded history and then infinity out in front of us. That’s what it’s like. On the spectrum of change, the person spending five minutes a day doing thought work and the person spending an hour a day doing thought work, so close together, you can barely see the space between them.
But the space between them and someone spending no time on thought work or whatever habit or goal you want to plug into this, I’m just using thought work, the space between the person doing nothing and the person spending five minutes and an hour, five minutes and an hour are so close to each other. The space between them and the person doing nothing is all the space in the world.
When you’re despairing about how what you can do is not enough, you know what you aren’t doing? You’re not actually doing it. You just sit around thinking about how it’s not enough and so you do nothing. But if you believed the biggest difference in life was between those who do nothing and those who do a little, then you’d have no excuse not to try because you would understand the infinite 1%.
That even doing something 1%, the difference between nothing and 1%, the difference between one minute or one hour, however you want to think about that time or effort, the difference between nothing and 1% is infinite. So you’d have no excuse not to try doing at least 1%. And that would change everything for you. Pick anything in your life and do it 1%. Embrace the infinite 1%. Have a beautiful week, my chickens. I will talk to you next week.