Variations of this are a common talking point in the self-help world, and while it's a powerful antidote against "I'm sure some day this giant thing will suddenly be easy and I'll just do it", it's not a silver bullet. Here are some counter-considerations:

- Doing anything usually involves prep work. Want to take a step? First put on your shoes (literally or figuratively, depending). If your attempted habit is 70% prep, your brain will somewhat rightfully conclude "this is stupid" fairly quickly.

- "Just do X every day for [long time period]" has an inherent falsification problem: You aren't "allowed" to argue against it until you tried it. Stopped after 2 years because you saw no change (and 5 was recommended)? You are still not allowed to argue against the strategy!

- You can actually make steps so small that they're useless. I once set out to have (at least) one github commit online per day (going for that green tile!). This led to my brain finding hacks like rephrasing one sentence of an old blog post. Doing that for 20 days is way less effective than one single coding session, at 20 times the emotional cost.

- Doing something daily for a long time is extremely hard to achieve, especially if it's not the main thing you're doing. It's rare in the wild. You will find piano virtuosos who play piano daily, but not piano virtuosos who also go to the gym daily.

> Doing anything usually involves prep work. Want to take a step? First put on your shoes (literally or figuratively, depending). If your attempted habit is 70% prep, your brain will somewhat rightfully conclude "this is stupid" fairly quickly.

Note that this is also something that can be weaponized. Recently I've learned to draw and I found I kept having great difficulty just starting. To get over that I made the agreement with myself that at least once every two days, I would grab a pencil and page through my sketchbook. I'd find myself on the first blank page holding a pencil.

Turns out your brain thinking prep work without actual work is stupid really helps here. Once you've tricked yourself into doing the prep work, you might as well do the work-work.

e.g. for distance running: just make the deal with yourself that putting on your running clothes/shoes/etc and taking one step outside counts as having ran that day. You'll find yourself going for a run anyways once you get outside, because you might as well.

> "Just do X every day for [long time period]" has an inherent falsification problem

Very true, but unfortunately a lot of things worth doing require that sort of investment. When learning to draw I hated every single second for the first ~two months or so. And then like a switch getting flipped I started having fun.

> You can actually make steps so small that they're useless.

You should take the biggest steps you can actually keep yourself to. Maybe that leads to steps that are sub-optimally small, but taking useless steps is still doing more than taking no steps.

> Doing something daily for a long time is extremely hard to achieve

Oh for real, especially once you factor in force majeure. Hence why I went with "draw at least once every two days". That gives you wiggle room to plan around life events.

Turns out building habits is incredibly hard and no amount of seeking advise will do it for you. It's a slog and you gotta overcome that yourself one way or another.

Q: What’s the smallest step I can take towards my goal?

A: Spend a minute stressing about my goal.