Sometimes You Need to Go Big, Not Start Small

You want to change your career. The advice says start small: update your resume today, reach out to one connection tomorrow. Six months later, you’re still in the same job doing the same tiny actions that lead nowhere.

Or you want to transform your health. The advice says start tiny: just do one pushup. A year later, you’re still doing one pushup and nothing has actually changed.

The “start small” advice works brilliantly for building sustainable habits - but some changes require momentum and commitment that small steps can’t generate, and starting too small can become an excuse for never doing what actually needs to happen.

The Problem

The atomic habits philosophy has taken over behavior change advice: make it tiny, make it easy, just show up. Do one minute of meditation. Write one sentence. Exercise for two minutes. The promise is that small, consistent actions compound into major change.

This is true for many things. But it’s not true for everything, and the universal application of “start small” has created a new problem: people taking actions so small they never generate the momentum needed for real change.

You want to learn a new skill. You commit to five minutes a day. It’s so easy to maintain that you never miss. But five minutes is also too short to actually learn anything meaningful. You’re being consistent without being effective. The habit exists, but the outcome you wanted doesn’t.

Or you want to make a career change. You do tiny networking actions - one email per week, one coffee chat per month. It feels manageable and sustainable. But it’s not enough activity to actually create opportunities. You’re avoiding overwhelm but also avoiding the level of effort that would generate results.

The small-habits approach can become a way to feel like you’re changing without actually changing. You’re maintaining the behavior, checking the box, but the tiny action is insufficient to create the transformation you claimed to want. You’ve optimized for consistency at the expense of impact.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: some changes require disruption, discomfort, and going all-in. Starting a business doesn’t happen in tiny increments. Leaving a toxic relationship doesn’t work with small steps. Moving to a new city isn’t a gradual process. These changes require decisive action, not atomic habits.

Why this happens to freelancers

Research suggests that the effectiveness of small habits depends on whether the behavior is additive or transformative. Additive changes - building something new alongside your existing life - work well with small steps. Transformative changes - fundamentally altering your situation - often require concentrated effort and disruption.

For freelancers trying to build or grow a business, the small-habits approach can be actively counterproductive. You can’t build meaningful client relationships with five minutes a day of outreach. You can’t develop deep expertise with one hour per week of learning. You can’t create substantial work with tiny time commitments.

Many people find that starting too small gives them permission to stay comfortable. They’re “working on” their business or their career change, but the actions are so minimal that nothing actually shifts. The small habit becomes a way to avoid the scary commitment of actually going for it.

The freelance context particularly exposes this because results are concrete and measurable. If your tiny networking habit isn’t generating clients, if your small content creation habit isn’t building an audience, you can see that it’s not working. But the habit framework tells you to just keep being consistent, even when the scale of effort is clearly insufficient.

The psychological comfort of starting small is real - it feels achievable and low-risk. But that same comfort can be a trap. You’re taking action small enough that failure doesn’t hurt, which also means the action is small enough that success isn’t possible.

What Most People Try

The first response when small habits don’t create change is usually to do more of them. Instead of one tiny habit, you build three or five or ten. You’re meditating for one minute, doing one pushup, writing one sentence, making one networking call - all in the same day.

This creates a busy feeling without meaningful progress. You’re maintaining many small habits but none of them are substantial enough to create real change. You’ve multiplied the quantity while keeping the quality and intensity low.

Some people try to stick with small habits longer, believing the compound effect just needs more time. They tell themselves that one pushup per day will eventually become a fitness transformation if they just maintain it long enough. Years later, they’re still doing one pushup and nothing else has changed.

Others try to scale up gradually. Start with one pushup, next month do two, eventually work up to a real workout. This can work, but it assumes you need to earn the right to do more through consistency. Often, you’re ready for more from the beginning - you’re just scared of committing to it.

The productivity-culture version is to track everything meticulously. If you’re doing small habits, at least make them visible through streaks, charts, and accountability. The tracking becomes the accomplishment rather than what the habit was supposed to enable.

Some people recognize that small habits aren’t working and abandon them entirely. They decide behavior change doesn’t work for them, or that they need to just accept who they are. They’ve concluded the methodology failed when actually the methodology was wrong for their specific goal.

The underlying issue is that everyone’s applying the same framework - start small, be consistent, compound over time - to all types of change, when different changes require different approaches. Sometimes you need to start small. Sometimes you need to go all-in. Confusing which is which wastes time and energy.

What Actually Helps

1. Distinguish between habits and projects, then choose the right approach

The confusion happens when you try to build a habit for something that’s actually a project. Habits are repeated behaviors you want to become automatic. Projects are time-bound efforts to create a specific outcome. They require different strategies.

If you want to build a daily meditation practice that lasts for years, the atomic habits approach makes sense. Start small, be consistent, let it compound. You’re trying to create a permanent lifestyle change through gradual integration.

But if you want to change careers, that’s not a habit - it’s a project. Projects require concentrated effort, deadlines, and substantial action in a defined timeframe. Treating career change like a habit - doing tiny actions indefinitely - is using the wrong tool for the task.

The question to ask yourself: am I trying to build a permanent behavior that should become automatic, or am I trying to accomplish a specific outcome that requires focused effort? If it’s the first, start small. If it’s the second, commit to a project with appropriate scope and intensity.

Many people find it helpful to be explicit about this distinction. “I’m building a writing habit” means daily practice, starting small, no deadline. “I’m writing a book” means a project with a timeline, milestones, and whatever level of effort it actually requires.

This also means some things need both. You might have a daily writing habit (small, consistent) and also a project to write a specific book (intensive, time-bound). These are different commitments that coexist rather than conflict.

Start applying this now: Look at your current “habits” and ask whether they’re actually projects in disguise. If you’re trying to “build a habit” of job searching or starting a business or learning a complex skill, you might need to reframe it as a project with appropriate intensity and timeline.

2. When transformation is the goal, commitment beats incremental progress

Some changes are transformative by nature - they fundamentally alter your circumstances, identity, or lifestyle. These changes often work better with decisive commitment than with gradual incrementation.

Moving to a new city isn’t something you do in small steps - you commit and move. Ending a relationship isn’t something you do gradually - you make the difficult choice. Starting your own business isn’t something you dabble in - you commit resources and time.

Research suggests that transformative changes often require what psychologists call “discontinuous change” - a break from the past rather than an evolution from it. Trying to make these changes gradually can be harder than making them decisively because you’re living in the discomfort of transition indefinitely.

The atomic habits approach optimizes for sustainability through low barrier to entry. But transformative changes often require unsustainability - a period of intense effort, disruption, and discomfort that you commit to enduring because the outcome is worth it.

For example, if you want to leave your job and freelance full-time, doing tiny freelance work on the side indefinitely keeps you stuck between two worlds. You’re not fully committed to either. Sometimes the better path is saving money, setting a date, and making the jump - accepting the temporary chaos of full transition.

Many people resist this because decisive commitment feels risky. It is. But gradual incrementalism for transformative change carries its own risks - primarily the risk of never actually changing while feeling like you’re working on it.

The practice is recognizing when you’re facing a transformative change and asking: would decisive action serve me better than incremental steps? Sometimes the answer is yes, and the small-habits framework becomes procrastination disguised as progress.

3. Start with enough intensity to create momentum and feedback

The problem with tiny actions is they often don’t generate enough momentum or feedback to sustain motivation. You need to start at a level that creates noticeable results, not the minimum possible effort.

One pushup per day doesn’t create fitness feedback. You don’t feel stronger, you don’t see changes, you don’t get the positive reinforcement that makes you want to continue. It’s too small to matter, which makes it hard to care about.

But a 20-minute workout three times per week creates feedback. You feel your body changing, you notice improvements, you get the reward that motivates continuation. It’s a bigger commitment, but it’s also actually effective.

Research on motivation suggests that visible progress is crucial for sustained effort. Small habits that are too small to create noticeable results often fail precisely because you never experience the benefits that would motivate you to continue or scale up.

The question isn’t “what’s the smallest thing I could do?” but rather “what’s the smallest thing that would actually create the outcome I want?” These are different questions with different answers.

For many goals, the answer is bigger than atomic habits advice suggests. If you want to learn programming, an hour a day of focused practice will get you somewhere. Five minutes won’t. If you want to build an audience, creating substantial content weekly will work. One tweet per day probably won’t.

Many people find success by asking: what level of effort would create results visible enough to keep me motivated? Then commit to that level, even if it feels bigger than the “start small” advice suggests. The results create the motivation loop that sustains the effort.

This doesn’t mean going unsustainably large - burnout helps no one. It means right-sizing your effort to actually achieve the goal rather than minimizing it to feel easy. Sometimes the sustainable path is the one intense enough to generate momentum.

The Takeaway

Small habits work brilliantly for building permanent lifestyle changes, but they fail when the goal requires momentum, transformation, or project-based effort. Stop applying atomic habits to everything. Instead, distinguish between habits and projects and choose the right approach for each, recognize when transformation requires decisive commitment rather than incremental steps, and start with enough intensity to create visible feedback rather than minimizing effort to the point of ineffectiveness. Sometimes the right path is to go big, not start small.