chap7.txt

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is
not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have
not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving
success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting
when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not
wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.
When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will
call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event
rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago
—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump
today possible.
It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can
grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building all
the while. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion
they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great. An earthquake erupts.
Change can take years—before it happens all at once.
Mastery requires patience. The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful
teams in NBA history, have a quote from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in
their locker room: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter
hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a
crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I
know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”