I want to share an experience I had in 8th grade.
We were studying the Old Testament in seminary and our teacher challenged us to read the Old Testament that school year.
I love a challenge, so I got pretty hyped about it. However, I had never read the Old Testament before. In fact, I had never even read the BOM cover to cover before and wasn’t reading in the scriptures daily at the time.
Finding the time was a challenge as well. I had school, work right after school, and then homework and dance and friends. Life can get busy as a teenager.
At the time, I woke up at 5:30 to shower and get ready for school, so I decided I was going to wake up at 4:30 every morning to read in the Old Testament for an hour before school. If I was going to read the whole thing, I had to read a lot---The Old Testament is long!
Well, you can imagine how it went. I did manage to wake up that early for awhile. Some days, I would start and fall asleep again while reading. Other days, I was so tired that I didn’t really pay attention to what I was reading. I attempted this habit for about a month or so before giving up and going back to getting an extra hour of sleep in the morning.
It was discouraging, to say the least.
What was I doing wrong?
Lack of motivation? Lack of discipline? Was I simply lazy by nature?
Honestly, it felt like that.
There were some principles I didn’t understand and once I understood them, I was able to make changes that actually lasted. Those principles all come back to small changes.
Alma 37:6
By small and simple things are great things brought to pass
Small changes work. Becoming one percent better doesn’t seem like much, but it can make a big difference over time.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear shares the Sorites Paradox: Can one coin make a person rich? If you give a person a pile of ten coins, you wouldn’t claim that he or she is rich. But what if you add another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him or her so.
The same can be said of small habits.
One reason small changes are so important is consistency. Would you rather try to make big changes that you cannot stick with and end up back at square one in a month, or would you rather make a series of small changes that stick and actually make progress? That’s the question I had to ask myself before I could start making real progress on my own goals.
Henry B. Eyering recently said, “There is power in steadiness and repetition.” Consistently showing up to do something is better than doing a lot in spurts and then other times doing nothing.
Reading a verse in your scriptures everyday is better than reading three chapters every Sunday.
Brushing your teeth every night is better than piling on the toothpaste at the end of the week to make up for days you didn’t brush.
Michael A Dunn, in his talk One Percent Better from this past conference, said, “What if we applied the one percent principle to the very sweet and savory second principle of the gospel, repentance? Rather than being stymied by the churn and dramatic swings between sin and repentance, what if our approach was to narrow our focus? Instead of trying to perfect everything, what if we tackled just one thing?"
Everything we do determines how we see ourselves--our identity. If you eat healthy foods, you’ll see yourself as a healthy person. If you sit on the couch and watch TV a lot, you might see yourself as a lazy person.
Our identity, then, feeds our actions. If you see yourself as a healthy person, you are going to eat healthy foods. If you see yourself as a lazy person, you aren’t going to make much effort to get up off the couch.
This is part of why consistency is so important. Every time you act on that small change, you are voting for the kind of person you will see yourself as. The more you see yourself as the kind of person you want to be, the more you will act in ways that are consistent with that kind of person. The more you act in ways that are consistent with the kind of person you want to be, the more you will see yourself that way. And it becomes a cycle.
This is part of why really small habits can be helpful. In Atomic Habits, James Clear shares what he did when he wanted to build a running habit. He didn't start with a marathon, a mile, or even five minutes. He started really small: by putting on his running shoes. At the same time each day, he would put on his shoes. He wouldn't even go out running--yet.
Once that was a habit he didn't even have to think about, he started to put on his shoes and step out the door. Then he'd come back inside. This helped him to start forming his identity as a runner with small enough actions that he would continue to do them consistently. As those things became easy, he added on more. Pretty soon, he was running miles, but he wasn't pushing himself so hard that he did it in spurts or gave up. By the time he reached that point, it wasn't hard for him to do it consistently.
Uchtdorf shared a story in a past General Conference entitled A Matter of a Few Degrees:
"In 1979 a large passenger jet with 257 people on board left New Zealand for a sightseeing flight to Antarctica and back. Unknown to the pilots, however, someone had modified the flight coordinates by a mere two degrees. This error placed the aircraft 28 miles (so 2 degrees changed their trajectory by 28 miles!) to the east of where the pilots assumed they were.
As they approached Antarctica, the pilots descended to a lower altitude to give the passengers a better look at the landscape. Although both were experienced pilots, neither had made this particular flight before, and they had no way of knowing that the incorrect coordinates had placed them directly in the path of Mount Erebus, an active volcano that rises from the frozen landscape to a height of more than 12,000 feet.
As the pilots flew onward, the white of the snow and ice covering the volcano blended with the white of the clouds above, making it appear as though they were flying over flat ground. By the time the instruments sounded the warning that the ground was rising fast toward them, it was too late. The airplane crashed into the side of the volcano, killing everyone on board.
It was a terrible tragedy brought on by a minor error—a matter of only a few degrees.”
So that’s a pretty sad story. But it’s also really powerful, it really shows how much of a difference a small decision can make.
What is trajectory?
A trajectory is the path of an object through space, or the path of life that a person chooses. It is where you are expected to end up down the road.
Where we are headed is more important than where we are now. If we can make a small change that will stay consistent--and then another, and then another, those changes will ultimately change where our lives end up.
It doesn't mean much to have a million dollars if you are moving towards losing it all. It's much better to have very little money but be heading in the direction of gaining a million dollars ten or twenty years down the road.
Elder Neal A Maxwell taught, “Each assertion of a righteous desire, each act of service, and each act of worship, however small and incremental, adds to our spiritual momentum.”
Small changes compound. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to write novels, but for years, I never could finish one. Then, over the course of the year in 2020, I wrote 500 words a day and made a writing habit. Now I have an 80,000 word novel and am working on my second.
500 words a day added up to an 80,000 word novel! More than that, though, it helped me create a writing habit that I can sustain for the rest of my life.
The small change of writing a little bit everyday changed my entire trajectory in that area of my life.
But, as Elder Dunn says, “For small gains to aggregate, there must be a consistent, day-in and day-out effort. And although we won’t likely be perfect, we must be determined to mirror our persistence with patience.”
It can be hard to be patient with habits. Sometimes it feels like what we're doing isn't actually making a difference. You're never going to improve your heart health, lose weight, get fit, or run a marathon by putting on your running shoes. It takes patient effort to increase your habit in increments and to slowly get better.
It makes me think of the ice cube example from Atomic Habits. If you increase the temperature to 20 or 25 or even 31, the ice cube isn't going to melt. It will stay as frozen as it was at 5 degrees. However, you can never reach 32 degrees without first reaching 20 and 25 and 31. At 31 degrees, it seems as if nothing is happening, but suddenly, at 32, the ice cube melts.
That is exactly how it is with habits. We expect our growth to look like a straight line on a graph, continually making progress, but really it's exponential: At first, our gains are small. But the longer we persist, the more we gain.
Elder Dunn said, “Even if the changes needed in your life are wholesale, begin at a small scale. That’s especially true if you are feeling overwhelmed or discouraged.
This process is not always accomplished in a linear fashion. Even among the most determined there may be setbacks. Having experienced the frustration of this in my own life, I know that it can sometimes feel like 1 percent forward and 2 percent back.
Yet if we remain undaunted in our determination to consistently eke out those 1 percent gains, He who has “carried our sorrows” will surely carry us.”
I love that! I know that as we continue to put in effort, we will blessed for it. I know that as we make small changes, we will see great rewards in our life. And I also know that no matter how hard we try, we will never become the kind of people that God wants us to be without His help. And He will send us His help. He will bless us with strength, courage, and faith.
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