Why Most People Quit Right Before It Works

There are weeks where everything seems to click, not because anything dramatic changed overnight, but because a whole series of small, almost invisible improvements finally compound into something you can feel. Last week felt like that, hey.

It started in the gardens, quite literally. I had the privilege of running an AI training session for the Cape Green Growers Forum at Kelvin Grove, a kind of oasis in the shadow of Table Mountain. The attendees are the nurseries, landscapers and garden wholesalers who shape the spaces we live in, who turn blank canvases into something alive. What struck me wasn’t just their curiosity, but how quickly the penny dropped when they saw what was now possible. A landscaper could walk a client’s garden, record a simple transcript of their ideas, and within minutes generate a polished proposal complete with AI-rendered visuals of what that garden could become. What used to take days now takes hours, sometimes minutes. The reaction wasn’t fear. It was excitement. You could see them recalibrating what “good” looks like in their industry.

Midweek, I was working with a PR consultancy in Kenya. Different industry, same pattern. Using Claude AI, we built a dashboard that tracks influencer and stakeholder movement around specific topics. Not a static report, but something alive, updating, surfacing patterns, helping them engage clients with a level of insight that simply wasn’t practical before. It felt like watching someone move from a paper map to GPS in real time.

And then the week ended in a very different kind of arena. A few days at Fancourt Golf Estate with the family, Caroline and I offloaded the kids at the kids' club and hit the fairways. She got her first par (two in fact), and her efforts are coming along too. As for me, I finally held my nerve. It happened on the Montague course, where I broke 80 for the first time in a year. That number might not mean much unless you play, but trust me, after a year of grinding through high 80s and low 90s while rebuilding a swing, it felt like a massive personal victory. The kind that doesn’t come from one good day, but from a lot of frustrating ones.

Standing on the 17th, managing a birdie (great 8 iron, nailed the tricky left-to-right six-footer), and then closing out the 18th with three disciplined shots over water and a steady two-putt, it wasn’t magic. It was execution. And execution, as always, was built on repetition. I’m quite proud of myself (did it in front of my wife, too). I kept my nerve, closed out the round, even though I was aware of how much it meant. It’s been a slog… and, of course, the next day, I was back to being average. Golf is humbling that way.

If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that improvement rarely announces itself. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly become better at AI, or golf, or leadership. What you do instead is invest, sometimes reluctantly, in the process.

I upgraded my AI tools. Paid for better versions. Spent more time experimenting. Sat through the frustration of outputs that weren’t quite right. The same applied on the course. I changed equipment, added a rescue wood, and committed to a swing that, frankly, felt uncomfortable for months. There’s nothing glamorous about that phase. It’s awkward, inconsistent, and occasionally demoralising.

But here’s the thing. The outputs are now better. ChatGPT and Claude have both improved, yes, but my ability to use them has improved more. The landscapers didn’t just see AI; they saw what AI could do in their hands. The PR team didn’t just get a dashboard; they got a new way of thinking about insight. And on the golf course, the scorecard has steadily been getting better, and Sunday’s breakthrough finally reflected the work that had been quietly accumulating.

This is where Atomic Habits earns its keep. James Clear makes a deceptively simple point: if you improve by just 1% each day, those gains compound. It’s not linear. It’s exponential. The flip side is also true. Neglect small improvements, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be quietly widens.

He talks about the plateau of latent potential, that frustrating phase where it feels like nothing is happening. You’re putting in the reps, but the results aren’t visible yet. Most people quit there because they mistake a lack of visible progress for no progress at all.

Overlay that with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and you get an important balance. Habit two, begin with the end in mind, gives you direction. Atomic Habits gives you the mechanism. Vision without small actions is wishful thinking. Small actions without vision are just busywork.

What changed this week wasn’t that the tools suddenly became magical or that my swing suddenly clicked. It’s that enough small improvements finally crossed a threshold where the results became visible. Then, with a bit of luck (I talk about Return on Luck in last week’s newsletter), I narrowly avoided the bunker, chipped in for a birdie, and got away with an awful shot. Life works that way. Hard work+persistence+a bit of luck… The gardeners could see it in their proposals. The PR team could see it in their dashboards. I could see it on the scorecard. 

PG’s Pro Tip:

If you’re in a phase right now where it feels like things aren’t quite working, where the results don’t match the effort, resist the temptation to declare the whole thing broken. More often than not, you’re just early in the compounding curve.

First, get brutally clear on the outcome you’re aiming for. Whether it’s a better client experience, a more efficient process, or breaking your own version of 80, you need a target that can pull your decisions in the right direction.

Second, identify the smallest meaningful adjustment you can make today. Not a complete overhaul. A tweak. A better prompt. A slightly different workflow. One more deliberate practice session. The kind of change that feels almost too small to matter, until it doesn’t.

Third, stay with it longer than is comfortable. That plateau where nothing seems to be happening is not a signal to stop. It’s often a signal that you’re closer than you think. 

ChatGPT Prompt:

And if you want something practical to anchor this, try this prompt:

“Based on my current goal of [insert goal], what are the three smallest changes I can make this week that would improve my results by 1% each day, and how should I track them daily?” 

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