Why 100% Is Easier Than 98%

Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of these things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. That instinct to focus on marginal costs hides from us the true cost of our actions.

The first step down that path is taken with a small decision. You justify all the small decisions that lead up to the big one, and then you get to the big one and it doesn’t seem so enormous anymore. You don’t realize the road you are on until you look up and see that you’ve arrived at a destination you would have once considered unthinkable.

I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in my own life when I was in England, playing on my university’s varsity basketball team. It was a fantastic experience; I became close friends with everyone on the team. We pushed ourselves all season, and our hard work paid off—we made it all the way to the finals of the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament.

But then I learned that the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. This was a problem.

At age sixteen, I had made a personal commitment to God that I would never play ball on Sunday because it is my Sabbath. So I went to the coach before the tournament finals and explained my situation. He was incredulous. “I don’t know what you believe,” he said to me, “but I believe that God will understand.” My teammates were stunned, too. I was the starting center, and to make things more difficult, the backup center had dislocated his shoulder in the semifinal game. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule, just this one time?”

It was a difficult decision to make. The team would suffer without me. The guys on the team were my best friends. We’d been dreaming about this all year.

I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away to pray about what I should do. As I knelt to pray, I got a very clear feeling that I needed to keep my commitment. So I told the coach that I wasn’t able to play in the championship game.

In so many ways, that was a small decision—one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, I realize that resisting the temptation of “in this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay” has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.

And it turned out that my teammates didn’t need me. They won the game anyway.

If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful, because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you from doing it again.

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.