Pushing for Easy!
Welcome to Aiming Up! Today we're looking at how we can "Make It Easy"!
Have you ever decided that it would be great to start running? Good for the heart, good for the body, good for the soul! Early Sunday morning and everything aligns and you're ready to go. It's a great run -- for a first run in a long time, anyway! You're back before the family is up and going so your regular routine is uninterrupted. But Monday morning rolls around and you find yourself hitting the snooze button. Again. And again.
Or have you ever considered journaling? You can feel genuinely excited about journaling on Sunday evening but still crash with your phone on Monday night, instead. This, despite being convinced that daily writing would change your life.
The wanting part is there. The doing part isn’t. That’s the gap the third law is built to close. James Clear calls it Make It Easy.
Last time, we looked at Clear’s 2nd Law of Behavior Change, from Atomic Habits: Make It Attractive. We talked about how straightforward it can be to get yourself to want the habit: pair it with something you already enjoy, bundle it with a reward, or start thinking of yourself as the kind of person who naturally does this thing.
Those moves create a spark. The problem is, a spark doesn’t always turn into a fire.
Making it easy rests on something basic about how we’re wired. For most of human history, saving energy was a matter of survival. Our brains and bodies still act like that’s true. When two choices are in front of us, we naturally default to the one that takes less effort. It’s not laziness; it’s biology. Clear calls this the Law of Least Effort. Motivation comes and goes— depending on how you slept, what’s stressing you out, or even the weather! But our appreciation of convenience doesn’t waver! If the good habit is also easy in the moment, you’re far more likely to take it.
An Inconvenient Truth
An incredibly “inconvenient truth” comes early in this section: the difference between motion and action. Motion is everything that feels like work but doesn’t actually move the needle. Motion isn't the actually doing the habit, action is.
Motion is researching the perfect running playlist, buying different journals, watching “how to meditate” videos, downloading multiple habit trackers, and, yes, even reading about the importance of establishing good habits. If feels like progress. It even gives you a sense of progress because your brain releases a little dopamine for “doing something."” It’s not like those things don’t need to be done or shouldn’t be done, but it’s not the same as actually doing the thing!
Only action produces results.
You can spend months in motion and still be exactly where you started. The good news is that action doesn’t have to look impressive. The reps don’t need to be perfect or long or intense. They just need to happen. Every time you show up—even for a short, imperfect session—you’re building the wiring. The skill gets a little stronger, the behavior gets a little more automatic. You can only develop mastery when you start doing, not planning! That’s how mastery actually happens: not through flawless days, but through consistent, repeated effort over time.
The Two-Minute Rule
When you’re starting something new, shrink it until the first step takes less than two minutes. Clear calls this “The Two-Minute Rule”. Focus on the beginning of a habit, not the whole habit. Instead of “meditate for twenty minutes,” you commit to sitting on the cushion and taking two slow breaths.
- Instead of “run 5 km,” you put on your running shoes.
- Instead of “write 1,000 words,” you open the document and write one sentence.
The point is to make starting so easy it feels almost silly to skip it…and virtually no effort to do it. After all, it’s better to do 1 push-up than none.
A Slippery Slope
Starting small doesn’t mean you stay small. The two-minute version is just the entry ticket. The “slippery slope”, if you will! The real goal is to repeat the small, easy habit so many times that it stops feeling like a decision. It becomes part of your day the way brushing your teeth is part of the day. Once it’s automatic, you naturally do more.
- Two meditative breaths turn into five minutes.
- One sentence turns into a full page.
- One push-up turns into a proper workout.
Establishing the habit shifts from something you have to force to something you simply do.
For years, I’ve leaned on a similar approach whenever I start a new exercise or restart an exercise routine. I’m usually optimistic, so I’ll picture what I could reasonably do without being sore the next day…and then I cut that in half, to be realistic!
- An optimistic ten-minute jog starts as five.
- Ten likely push-ups become five.
- 3 full pull-ups becomes 3 assisted pull-ups.
It feels like I’m cheating at first, even a little lazy, but that’s the point. I want the session to be so easy and painless that there’s no reason not to do it again tomorrow. I’m not trying to set personal records in week one. I’m trying to remove every excuse so I can show up on day four, day eleven, day thirty.
The real payoff isn’t the distance or the reps on any single day; it’s that I’m still moving weeks later. Consistency turns a laughably small start into something that actually sticks.
A habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize. Clear puts it this way:
Effortless Commitment
The last key is setting things up so the habit keeps running with almost no willpower. Last time, when we started looking at ways to make it obvious, we touched on setting up the environment with cues. In the 3rd Rule, Clear talks about environment design and commitment devices. The goal is to make one-time changes that keep working forever:
- leave fruit on the counter,
- keep your guitar out on a stand instead of in the case,
- prep your gym bag the night before,
- set up automatic transfers to savings.
At the same time, you make the bad habits harder.
Be as extreme as you need to be:
- Keep the chips in the trunk of your car to make it just a little inconvenient to get them.
- To avoid mindless watching only turn the TV on after you announce the show you’re planning to watch.
- Take the batteries out of the remote when you're done watching TV.
- Delete social media apps from your phone at the end of the weekend or have a friend change the password frequently.
- Put your internet modem/router in a timed-outlet, so it shuts off at a specific time.
Add friction to bad habits, reduce friction on desired habits. When the helpful choice is the path of least resistance and the unhelpful one is annoying, a lot of positive change can happen even on low-energy days.
Businesses take advantage of friction by reducing and increasing friction to get their desired outcomes with things like subscriptions, shortened forms, fewer clicks, bright buttons, ergonomic design, incentives, and above-the-fold messaging. We did a series on the book The Friction Project that looked at friction at-scale. We brought it down the personal level, but Make it Easy brings it home!
The Extended Impact
When you follow through on that two-minute habit—whether it’s lacing up your running shoes, sitting on the cushion for two breaths, or opening the document to write one sentence—you’re quietly achieving two important things.
First, you’re choosing to use those two minutes for something that moves you forward instead of defaulting to scrolling, snacking, or whatever else requires the least resistance and doesn't move you in the right direction. That small decision creates a positive opportunity cost: the brief action becomes the most valuable thing you could have done in that moment.
Second, you’re shaping the direction of your day through what James Clear calls a decisive moment.
By showing up for those two minutes, you’re taking the productive fork. And the more consistently you do it, the more automatic it becomes. Clear puts it this way:
That single, easy start doesn’t just get you going—it sets the tone and makes the rest of a productive day far more likely. It sets the direction.
The bottom line:
Rule 1 - "making it obvious" puts the cue for the habit in front of you,
Rule 2 - "making it attractive" gets you interested, and
Rule 3 - "making it easy" gets you out of planning and into action mode!
Once you’re moving—even slowly, even imperfectly— repetition and consistency do most of the work. Small actions, repeated day after day, build real change over months and years.
So here’s a question to carry with you this week:
What’s a habit you wanted to start but have spent too much time planning for, that you could start today if you made it a 2-minute habit?
Don’t be afraid to press that Easy Button to start (or keep) moving in the right direction!
Make it easy to have lasting change when you’re Aiming Up!
