Five Minutes a Day Beats One Big Hour

By Paul Gordon

Five Minutes a Day Beats One Big Hour

Here's the whole architecture of getting good on camera, small enough to fit on a sticky note: continuous, daily discipline for five minutes is far better, in nearly every way, than one big hour once a week.

Why small and daily wins

Expressive skill compounds between sessions. Five minutes is short enough that you'll actually do it, and long enough to produce a real rep. The transformation comes off the back of the daily math, not the intensity of any one sitting.

Stop looking at the big picture

I swim in the cold Danish sea most of the year, and I don't even like cold water. The only thing that gets me in is a list — forty tiny steps, from "assess the wind" to "duck under" to "socks on as fast as possible." With the list, I never look at the bigger picture. I only look at step seven, then step eight. That's how you get past the easy out.

Call them nibble steps. Break any hard thing into a five-minute version of itself, build the backbone of your own step-by-step, and flesh it out over time. That's how you stop stopping yourself.

Take it further

Pick the on-camera thing you keep avoiding, and find its smallest possible first step. Notice how much easier "step one" is than "the whole thing."

The full system — every exercise and the 36-day practice — lives in the book MEAN IT. and the 5 Minute CEO program. Work with Paul →

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