The Domino Effect
TL;DR: Progress is almost never blocked by your program. It is blocked by one habit sitting still. Find the single domino that makes everything else easier, make the first push small enough that skipping it would be embarrassing, then build momentum from there.
I want to talk about dominoes.
Not the game. The one domino in your life that, when it finally moves, knocks over everything sitting behind it.
Because here is what I see constantly. Someone feels stuck, so they go hunting for the answer in a better program. A new supplement. Some protocol they read about at 11pm. Something big enough to match how far behind they feel.
Then they try to change eight things at once, last about four days, and quietly decide the problem is them.
It is not you. You just picked the wrong domino.
An object at rest
Newton sorted this out in 1687. I do not think he had training in mind, but he may as well have.
"Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon."
Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687.
Read that again, but put yourself in it as the object.
Nothing in your life changes because you finally understood it. It changes because a force got applied. And here is the bit everyone skips straight over: the law says nothing at all about the force being big. It just says it has to actually happen.
Understanding is not a force. Good intentions are not a force. Getting the Session in the calendar is a force.
One domino, 64 times the size
This is my favourite piece of research, and it is real.
In 1983 a physicist named Lorne Whitehead published a short paper in the American Journal of Physics. He showed that a standing domino can knock over another domino roughly one and a half times its size. In every dimension.
So he built a chain of thirteen. Each one half again as big as the last. The first was under 10mm tall, so small that he tipped it over with a piece of cotton.
The thirteenth was 64 times taller than the first. And it fell.
He put in 0.024 microjoules. He got out 51 joules. That is an amplification of roughly two billion, off a nudge you could do with a bit of thread.
He did not push harder. He just put the small thing in the right spot.
Archimedes made the same point a couple of thousand years earlier, or so the story goes.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
Most of us are not short on force. We are short on placement.
And if you are reading all that thinking there is no chance, someone built one and filmed it. Stephen Morris, a physicist at the University of Toronto, lined up thirteen of them. His first domino is 5mm tall, roughly your fingernail. His last one is a metre tall and weighs 45 kilos.
Watch what the fingernail does to it.
Seventy seconds, and it will stick with you longer than anything I write here. Watch the start of it properly. The early ones are so small that almost nothing appears to be happening, and it looks like a waste of time. That is exactly the part where people quit.
Here is the bit I actually want you to take from it.
The small size is not a compromise. It is the mechanism. A tiny action does not give you a tiny result. It gives you the next action, and the one after that is slightly bigger, and thirteen of those later you are knocking over something you could not have shifted on day one.
You do not have to be impressive. You do not have to be ready. You just have to start.
So what is yours?
Everyone has one. It is the thing that, when it moves, quietly sorts out half the other stuff without you having to think about it.
Sleep. Water. Food. Training. Alcohol. Your phone after 9pm. Whatever yours is, I promise you it is not exotic, and it is definitely not a peptide. It is one of the boring ones you already know about and have been avoiding.
Let me give you mine, honestly.
Sleep is what I am missing right now. I know it. My coaches know it. My family very much know it. When I sleep well I am better at every single thing I do, no exceptions.
But I cannot just decide to sleep well. Nobody can. Sleep sits downstream of everything else.
The domino that actually moves my sleep is training. When my training is on track, I drink more water. I take my supplements. I eat like someone who trains, rather than someone in a hurry. I am tired in the right way, at the right time of night. And then I sleep.
So my first domino is not sleep at all. It is a Session in the diary.
That is the whole point of this article, so I will say it twice. The domino you need to nudge is usually not the outcome you want. It is the thing sitting one step behind it.
Three questions to find it
Give these an honest two minutes.
- If one thing on my list got handled, what would make half the rest easier, or just irrelevant?
- What am I doing badly right now that I already know how to do well? That is the low hanging fruit. Nothing new to learn, you just have to do it.
- What could I start today, in under five minutes, without buying anything or asking anybody's permission?
If your answer to number three is "nothing", the domino you have picked is too big. Go smaller. Whitehead's first one was 10mm.
Make the first push embarrassingly small
Friction beats us far more often than motivation saves us.
Motivation turns up when it feels like it. Friction is there every day, and you can actually measure it. Every step between you and the thing is another opportunity to not do it.
So make the first push so small that skipping it would be embarrassing.
Not "train five days a week". One Session, booked, this week.
Not "fix my nutrition". Protein at breakfast.
Not "get eight hours". Phone on the kitchen bench instead of the bedside table.
You are not trying to look impressive. You are trying to make the object move.
Then keep it moving
The second half of Newton's law is the half nobody ever quotes. An object in motion stays in motion, in the same direction, until something stops it.
That is the whole game. Once the first one is down you are not fighting inertia any more, you are just staying in line. Add size slowly. Hold the direction. Let the chain do the amplifying, because that is what chains are for.
Two things will try to stop you.
The first is the impressive domino. The one that sounds good when you tell people about it, instead of the one that is actually true for you. Nobody is handing out points for degree of difficulty.
The second is treating a missed day as a verdict instead of a gap. It is a gap. Stand the next one up and tip it over.
There is a line on the wall at Virtus that says it better than I just did.
"Decide on the person that you want to be, prove it to yourself every day."
You do not need the perfect program. You need to know your domino, and you need to nudge it today.
Find it. Push it. Let the rest fall. Build momentum from there.
Want a hand working out yours?
Honestly, this is the conversation our coaches have every day. Half of coaching is helping someone see that the thing they are chasing is not the thing they need to move first.
If you are not training with us yet, start with a Free Intro. Thirty minutes, a look around the place, a proper chat about what is actually going on, and an honest recommendation. No pressure, no obligation, and we will tell you if we are not the right fit.
If you would rather see the detail first, everything is on the memberships and pricing page. No joining fee, no lock-in.
And if you are already part of the Virtus Family, grab your coach on the floor this week and put those three questions to them. That is exactly what they are there for.
Lachie