On 29 October 1969, at half past ten in the evening, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), programmer Charley Kline, from Leonard Kleinrock’s group, tries to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), more than five hundred kilometres away. He types «l», «o», «g», the start of the word «login». At the other end, over the telephone, Bill Duvall confirms: «Got the l», «Got the o». Then the system crashes and the full word never arrives. About an hour later the connection works. It is the beginning of ARPANET, the network from which the Internet was born: at first two computers, four by the end of the year.
A great beginning can start small, even by stumbling. What does psychology tell us about first steps? In 2010 Phillippa Lally and colleagues, at University College London, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology a study on how habits form. Ninety-six volunteers chose a daily behaviour (related to eating, drinking or an activity) to repeat every day in the same context for twelve weeks, rating day by day how automatic it had become.
The time needed to reach 95% of maximum automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days depending on the person, and missing a single opportunity did not materially change the process. The more consistent the repetition, the better the model described the data.
A note of caution: this is a small study of simple habits; the model fitted well for 39 of the 62 participants analysed, and the study says nothing about ARPANET nor that «stumbling» is always good. It shows that, in that sample, an isolated lapse did not make the habit collapse, and that timelines differ greatly from person to person.
A suggestion of our own, not the study’s: pick a first step so small it feels almost silly (two minutes), tie it to a specific moment of the day and repeat it. If a day slips, do not start from zero: pick up the next day, like the two researchers who, after the L and the O, tried again.
And you, which small first step are you putting off? Tell us in the comments: saying it out loud is already a beginning.
Sources
- Lally P., van Jaarsveld C.H.M., Potts H.W.W., Wardle J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009, DOI 10.1002/ejsp.674.
- ICANN, «The First Message Transmission» (blog, 29 October 2019), for the account of the first ARPANET message of 29 October 1969.
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