Liftoff

On a trip to the moon, a space shuttle requires two huge rocket boosters to power it out of the earth’s atmosphere and into space. After about two minutes, the rockets burn out and are released, leaving the shuttle to rely on its three main engines for the remainder of the journey to the moon and returning it safely to earth.

Out of the one-week round trip expedition, the rockets are used for merely 120 seconds. Here’s what’s even more amazing though, in that two minutes, the rockets provide over 70% of the total power required to get to the moon and back! The round- trip distance traveled by the shuttle during that excursion will be about half a million miles, but well over two thirds of the energy is spent over the initial 27 miles.

Changing your own behavior is similar in that a huge percentage of the effort must be spent in the very early stages of “lift off.” Whether it’s breaking old, bad habits or creating new, positive ones, changing your behavior relies on a tremendous amount of willpower to overcome “psychological gravity” – those forces pulling you back to your old way of doing things. However, once you break through that initial stage, maintaining the new behavior is not nearly as grueling. You just have to expend enough effort to push you out of your normal processes and thought patterns, the atmosphere of your current state of being.