All In

It was while serving a mission for my church that I first heard the notion, “it’s easier to give 100 percent than 90.” I’ve heard it a few times since, and a quick internet search tells me that the expression comes from Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor. His exact quote was, “It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”

The idea here is that if you decide to mostly hold to your commitments, but allow yourself a few exceptions, then every moment of temptation becomes a decision point: “Is this one of the times I let myself indulge? Am I allowed to give in?” This causes mental and emotional fatigue, and keeps your mind considering the indulgence longer, greatly increasing the likelihood of giving in. But if you’ve decided that you’re holding to your commitments 100% of the time, then there’s no internal debate, no toying around with the idea of giving in, no trying to gauge how far you can go without going too far. You just bypass all of that and jump straight to, “No, I’m not doing that.”

As you might have guessed, this applies directly to addiction recovery and how we deal with cravings. I myself tried for many years to use the strategy of gradually reducing my slips. I told myself that I’d only allow myself one pornography viewing a week, then once every other week, then once a month, and so on. It never worked.

Each time I was confronted by temptation I went through an inner monologue. “Should this be my indulgence of the week, or should I save it for later?...I already gave in once this week, but what if I do it twice this week and not at all next week?...Well, what if I don’t fully slip? Just enough to get a lust hit, but no further?” Care to guess how many of these internal debates ended in me staying sober? Yeah, none of them. I was inviting justification into the decision process, and that meant I was doomed from the start.

For some people, a gradual reduction might actually work, but pretty much everyone I personally know who has had real success in recovery has only done so from a place of 100% commitment. There is just so much more strength in how one approaches temptation when he can say, “There’s no discussion to be had, the answer is no, I’ve already made my decision.”

Of course, 100% commitment is not necessarily the same as 100% success. The fact is, I have had some relapses since I started wholehearted recovery. I have had to forgive myself for not measuring up, and also accepted the possibility of an imperfect success rate moving forward. That doesn’t mean that I have lowered the bar for my intentions, though, or excused myself to toy around with temptation. I still approach each day with the mentality that I’m giving it my all. As a result, the times I have slipped have been rare, brief, and isolated—what was once the norm has become the exception.

By Abe, Writing Team