"Imagine if you had stuck with it" is a thought I have had about a Land Rover made of Lego for about three years now.
My son got it for Christmas. Massive set, genuinely cool, and he was absolutely buzzing to get started.
So we did. He built for two or three hours straight. Begged me to keep going when it got to bed time, and I said no, we will pick it up tomorrow.
And he did pick it up in the morning. Built for a bit. Then he hit a section he could not get right, it got fiddly, and he asked if we could go outside and play instead.
I said yes. I wish I had not.
The next day he forgot about it. And the day after. And the day after that.
Three years on, that set is still in the box. I have reminded him plenty of times that it is there and it is his to finish. The drive has just gone. And when I ask him why, he says the same thing every time: it was too hard.
That is the bit that gets me. Three hours of loving it, one difficult twenty minutes, and the memory that survived three years is too hard.
There is a name for that
It turns out this is well documented, and it is not a character flaw in my son. It is how memory works in all of us.
Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson showed that we do not judge an experience by its average, or even by how long the good bit lasted. We judge it by its most intense moment and by how it ended. It is known as the peak-end rule.
In their work, people who endured a longer unpleasant experience that finished gently remembered it as better than a shorter one that ended at its worst. More total discomfort, better memory, purely because of how it finished.
So my son has three hours of joy and twenty minutes of frustration, and the frustration is what got saved, because that is where it stopped.
Now think about the last time you stopped training.
Most people stop, and they stop early
This is not a small or unusual failing. It is close to the norm.
Around half of people who start an exercise programme have stopped within six months, with roughly 22% gone inside the first month. January joiners fare worse still, with about 80% gone within five months.
And here is what makes that so frustrating: the timing is often just short of where it would have started to stick.
Work from UCL on habit formation found it takes a median of 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic, but with an enormous range of 18 to 254 days. And only about half the people studied got there at all within the window.
254 days is over eight months. So somebody who gives themselves six months, sees it as not working and stops, may have been weeks away from the point where it stopped requiring effort.
You cannot see progress from the inside
The other problem is that you are a terrible judge of your own progress while you are in it.
Day to day, almost nothing changes. Week to week, barely. The changes that actually matter, energy, sleep, how you feel getting off the floor, how a hill feels, what you say yes to, show up on a timescale of months and years.
You usually only see them by looking backwards. Remembering what you were like 12, 18, 24 months ago, and realising that person is not you any more.
Which sets a bit of a trap. If you stop at 6 months, you never get to see 12. If you stop at 12, you never see 18. So the evidence you needed to keep going only ever arrives after the point where you decided to quit.
Finish well, on purpose
Here is the practical part, and it comes straight out of the peak-end rule.
If your memory of a thing is written mostly by how it ended, then how you end things is a decision worth making deliberately. Not just how much you do.
Here's what to do:
- End sessions feeling capable, not wrecked. Finishing a run knowing you had a bit left builds a memory you will come back to. Finishing every session in ruins builds one you will avoid.
- On a bad day, do the smaller version rather than nothing. Ten minutes and "I did something" is stored very differently from a skipped session and "I failed". Same day, completely different memory.
- Do not finish a training block on your worst session. If it has gone badly, do something short and successful before you stop. That is the note the whole block gets filed under.
- Push a little past the sticky bit, not through the wall. Exactly what I should have done with my son. Twenty more minutes on that tricky section and the memory becomes "we cracked it" instead of "it was too hard".
- Write down where you were. Since you cannot see progress from inside it, keep a record you can look back at. Your own words from a year ago are more persuasive than any chart.
Sticking with it is not the same as flogging it
Now, I want to be careful here, because "just keep going" is unhelpful advice if the thing you are doing is wrong.
Persisting with the goal and persisting with the method are different. If a plan is not working, change the plan. If something hurts in the way we talked about in the piece on discomfort and damage, that is a signal to act on, not to push through.
What I am talking about is the ordinary sticky patch. The bit where you are not good at it yet, the numbers are not moving, and it is not fun. That is the twenty minutes on the Lego. That is the bit worth staying with.
The bottom line
Most of us do not fail at health and fitness because we picked the wrong programme. We stop at the first genuinely hard bit, and then the hard bit becomes the whole memory.
Real change takes longer than the six months you gave yourself. It will not feel like progress while it is happening. And the proof only shows up if you are still there to see it.
So when the next sticky patch turns up, and it will, the question is a simple one. Do you stop there and let that become the memory? Or do you get through it, so that when you come back you remember how good it was going?
Will you come back to the Lego set, or leave it in the box?
You don't have to have a great start, but you do have to start, to be great. And then you have to stay.
If you are in one of those sticky patches right now, don't sit on it, let me know.