The 5% Rule: Matthew Hussey on Why Small Changes Beat Dramatic Reinvention
Matthew Hussey
Matthew Hussey opens this video from a storage cupboard, a joke built on the saying "wherever you go, there you are." His question is why people who change their circumstances so often end up with the same fears and reactions. His answer is that moving, changing friends, dating someone new, or starting a new job leaves the person unchanged. His proposed alternative is not a technique for becoming a new person overnight. He calls it "the 5% rule."
Stuck With Yourself
Hussey describes a feeling many people will know: whatever you do, you are stuck with you. You can rearrange your whole life, but the first time you are triggered in the old way, you are back where you started, "feeling out of control of your mind and your emotions."
He says this can make people hopeless. They start to believe that wishing for a different life is pointless. In dating, they know they are always "just a few hours away" from anxiety and uncertainty when someone doesn't text back. In dealings with people generally, they are "one fawning moment away" from shame at not standing up for themselves, and from wishing they had said what a more confident person would have said.
Why He Distrusts Promises of Instant Transformation
Hussey says he has coached tens of thousands of people over 18 years, and millions more online. That experience, he says, has humbled him about "how hard and how scary change actually is." Over time he has become "allergic" to language suggesting an anxious person can learn one special technique and never be anxious again.
He presents the 5% rule as something more modest. He has coached it and used it on himself for the last few years. In his experience it is one of the surest ways a person can grow into a version of themselves who enjoys life more and creates more of the opportunities they want. Before explaining the rule, he introduces the idea it responds to, which he calls "the wall."
The Wall: Your Car Goes Where Your Eyes Go
Hussey quotes Mario Andretti's advice about racing: if you don't want to crash, don't look at the wall, because the car goes where your eyes go. He admits this idea has been used in self-development for a long time. He thinks it has become such a cliché that it has lost its force, even though he considers it one of the most important concepts there is.
In his view, everyone learns at some point that life works a certain way, and the nervous system adapts to that. His first example is growing up with parents whose mood "could turn at any moment." A person raised that way may later second-guess every move their partner makes. They may try constantly to keep the partner happy and ask "Are you mad at me?" whenever the partner goes quiet. They may never fully relax into feeling safe in a relationship.
A Client Who Expected Abandonment
His main case study is a client who had learned from experience that people always end up abandoning you. To protect herself, she pushed people away before they could deliver "the final blow of rejection."
Hussey says this showed clearly with a man she was seeing, which "by all accounts" was going well. He arranged a small get-together with friends and didn't invite her. Feeling left out set off her fear that he didn't feel the way she did. While he was at the gathering, she sent him an abrupt, angry message: "Why didn't you invite me?" He replied that it was just an overdue catch-up with old friends and asked if he could call her afterward. She answered, "Don't bother." When he didn't call over the next couple of days, she took it as proof of her belief that everyone would eventually hurt her.
Hussey uses the story to show how the belief creates the outcome it predicts. He returns to it later to show what the 5% rule would look like.
Hussey's Own Wall
In a segment he calls "the Book Nook," Hussey reads from a piece on "staring at the wall" in his own book, on page 94. It describes a night out with his brothers. He nearly got into a fight with someone he saw as a threat to one of his brothers, until someone he knew stepped in and stopped it. Afterward he was angry at his brothers. He wondered why they didn't see the danger and why he was the only one who saw what was about to happen.
In the passage he reads, he says he used to wonder how his brothers survived without him around. Then he realized they didn't end up in situations like that. For him, such situations had always been everywhere. For them, they weren't, because he was staring at the wall and they were not. Even when no wall was in sight, he writes, he still scanned for one. He was looking for anything that would support his "ongoing public service announcement" to the people he loved: that they were not safe and had to watch out all the time. He writes that he wasn't only experiencing a different reality from his brothers but creating one. The passage ends with the lines that sum up the idea: "Whatever you're looking for, you'll find it," and eventually "you won't even realize it's a wall anymore. You'll think it's just life." He adds a warning to be careful about "the normal we are creating for ourselves," and to not "let your wall become your world."
Hussey names his wall as constant threat-scanning and hypervigilance. He notes the problem wasn't that the threat was imaginary: there is always someone in a room with bad intentions. The problem was that he went out looking for that person and put all his attention on them wherever he went.
When a Wall Becomes a Worldview
Hussey says walls often stop looking like walls and start looking like truths about life. He gives the example of a saying the older women in his family repeated: "A man is only as faithful as his options." To them, he says, this was simply a fact. He compares it to men who take it as objective truth that a woman will leave for someone taller with more money. Other examples he lists are "Women are crazy," "They only care about money," and "Men care only about sex or looks." At that point, he says, the belief has become an entire worldview.
He repeats the central problem: whatever wall you look for, you will find, and you will see it even where it isn't there, as his client did about the gathering. The wall costs us "the many other versions of life that we could be living" if we widened our focus. Having crashed into the same wall so many times, people stop believing anything different is possible.
The Two Beliefs and the Rule
Hussey says two beliefs are tied up in the wall. One is about what the world and life are like. The other is about our own limitations. The 5% rule is his response to both, and he states it roughly like this: change is hard, and I can't just magically feel differently or become a different person. If it were that easy, I would probably have done it already. But I do have the agency to do something slightly different from what I would normally do in this situation.
The rule does not ask you to become confident or stop being anxious. It asks for a small departure from your usual response. Hussey argues that "a lot different is hard." If you are very anxious in a situation and someone tells you to just be confident instead, it will probably feel impossible. What you can do is remind yourself that your reality isn't the only one. It comes from "the train tracks that I have been on my whole life," which feel fixed but aren't. In his words, "different will lead to different."
Replaying the Client's Situation
Hussey goes back to his client's day and describes what happened in her body. Her nervous system was fully activated. A fight-or-flight response, which he describes as a sympathetic nervous system reaction that releases adrenaline and cortisol when the brain perceives danger or high stress, had taken over. She wanted to tell the man how she felt. Instead of saying it vulnerably, it came out cold and abrupt as "Why didn't you invite me?" Hussey calls this the fight instinct. When his reply, even with the offer to call later, didn't calm her, she switched to flight with "Don't bother." In his reading, she was rejecting him before he could hurt her further, and avoiding that hurt mattered more to her than getting close to him.
His 5% alternatives are deliberately imperfect. She could have answered the offer to call with a passive-aggressive "Sure." He admits that would still be abrupt, cold, and "not a great response." But it might have led somewhere different, because they would at least have talked on the phone. Or, after sending "Don't bother," she could have realized she had overreacted and later written, "Hey, I'd like to talk if you're still free." Neither response needs her to stop being triggered. Each is only slightly different from what she actually did.
Two More Everyday Examples
Hussey asks viewers to think of a situation where their usual response hijacks them, and to imagine what 5% different would look like. He gives two examples.
The first he says applies to him: being prone to overwhelm from work stress. The usual pattern is to catastrophize: thinking you can't possibly cope, you'll never get everything done, bad things will follow, and it all shows your inadequacy as a person. The 5% shift is to remind yourself that not everything is as urgent as your brain says, and that there is more time than you think. Some things probably need doing today, he says, but many can take "maybe the next 5 or 10 years of your life," which gives you a bit more time than your overwhelmed mind claimed.
The second is assuming the worst when someone doesn't respond the way you'd like. It might be a new love interest slow to text back, a friend who ignored an invitation, or a colleague who sent a curt message. The usual reaction is to go cold and assign bad intentions such as rudeness, arrogance, or untrustworthiness, or even to diagnose a personality disorder. The 5% shift is to hold off on those conclusions. You might send one more text to check in, call to hear their tone of voice, or remember times you came across as abrupt without meaning anything by it. Hussey describes this as a "marginally generous lens," or at least saving your anger until after "one more call."
Why 5% Changes the Trajectory
In the final part, Hussey explains why he thinks small shifts matter so much. Being 5% less reactive, 5% more generous in reading others, 5% more candid, or 5% braver does more than change one moment slightly. He says even that small change is a revelation to a brain that assumed only what it had gotten before was possible. Learning that different is possible is, in his words, "a miracle" in itself.
His larger claim is that a 5% shift now can change the whole path of your future. He uses an image: two motorcycles leave the same starting point but head in directions 5 degrees apart. At first the gap barely shows. If they keep going, they end up in completely different parts of the country. He concludes that a 5% shift in how you show up is enough to change your life.
He closes by asking viewers to comment with one thing they want to do 5% differently in a situation on their mind, hoping those answers will give others ideas for their own shift.
There's a famous saying we've all heard: wherever you go, there you are. And here I am in a storage cupboard.
What are you doing in there?
I'm filming a YouTube video.
In a storage cupboard? Why?
It's unorthodox.
Okay, well, we had a whole box of Uncrustables. Have you seen them?
No. No. I don't think I haven't seen them. Sorry, is there something I can do for you? Because I'm trying to...
Look, you can move to a new country, change your friendship circle, date a new person, get a new job, hide away in a storage cupboard, but who you are didn't change. So, the moment you get triggered again in the old way, you're back to where you started, feeling out of control of your mind and your emotions, and stuck with the one person you can never get away from, yourself.
These are my Uncrustables. Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, you are stuck with you? This can make us feel hopeless, like wishing that one day life is going to be different for us is futile, that we will always struggle to feel like we are in the driver's seat in our dating lives because we are always just a few hours away from feeling uncertain and anxious again when someone doesn't text us back, or we know from past experience that in our dealings with people in general, we are always just one fawning moment away from being ashamed at our inability to stick up for ourselves, and wishing that we had said something different in the moment, something a more confident person would have said.
I am Matthew Hussey, and I've been a coach for tens of thousands of people in the last 18 years of my life, millions online. And when you have coached people for that long, you become humbled by how hard and how scary change actually is, real change. Over time, you learn to become allergic to the kind of language that suggests that someone who is anxious is going to learn one special technique, and they'll never be anxious again. For real this time.
But there is a rule that I have been coaching and using for myself for the last few years of my life that has been one of the surest ways I've found that any of us can genuinely evolve from the person we used to be to a version of ourselves who is having a better experience of life while creating more of the opportunities we want. I call it the 5% rule.
By the way, if you've made it this far into the video, please subscribe and like this video. It really helps us get it to more people who need it.
Before we learn what this rule is and how we apply it, we need to talk about the wall. Mario Andretti famously said of Formula 1 driving that if you don't want to crash the car, don't focus on the wall because your car goes where your eyes go. This is a concept that has been used in self-development for a very long time, but I think it's become so cliché that it's lost its potency, and it happens to be one of the most important concepts there is.
All of us learned at some point in our lives that life is a certain way. If we grew up with parents who could turn at any moment, our nervous system became programmed for that reality. We may find ourselves later in life second-guessing every move of our partner, trying to make them happy, intermittently asking them, "Are you mad at me?" anytime they go a little bit quiet, and we might feel ourselves unable to ever truly relax into a feeling of safety in a relationship.
Or you could be like my client who learned through her experiences that people always wind up abandoning you. So, in order to protect herself from getting hurt, pushed people away before they could ever deliver the final blow of rejection. Now, this manifested very clearly when a guy she was seeing, who by all accounts it was going well with, arranged a small get-together with friends and didn't invite her. This moment of feeling left out by him ignited all of her fears that he didn't feel the same way she did. So, she sent him an abrupt and angry message while he was with his friends at the gathering saying, "Why didn't you invite me?"
Now, he responded by saying it was just an overdue get-together with some old friends, but could he call her later after it was done? She shot back, "Don't bother." When over the next couple of days he didn't call her to resolve the situation, her belief was confirmed. Everyone would always eventually wind up hurting her. There's a phenomenon at play here that is best explained in the Book Nook.
Welcome, friends, to the Book Nook with me, Matthew Hussey. Don't worry, I'm not going to read from my own book in every Book Nook moment, but I did happen to write an entire piece on staring at the wall in this book. Feel free to turn to page 94 if you have it.
I talk about an experience I had on an evening out with my brothers where I almost got into an altercation with someone who I perceived to be a threatening presence to my brother. Luckily, someone I knew with my best interests at heart came over and stopped anything from happening. But what was interesting about this moment is I felt angry afterwards towards my brothers because I thought, "Why aren't you seeing the danger here? Why am I the only one who sees what was about to happen?"
Here's what I wrote about that. "I used to wonder how my brothers survived without me around. Then I realized they didn't find themselves in situations like this. For me, historically, these situations were everywhere. For them, they weren't. Why? Because I was staring at the wall and they were not. At least, not the wall I kept staring at. And when there was no wall in sight, I still unconsciously scanned for it. For any situation that would validate my ongoing public service announcement to anyone I love: we are not safe and we all need to watch out all the time.
What I didn't realize was the extent to which I wasn't just experiencing, but creating a different reality than the ones my brothers were a part of. Whatever you're looking for, you'll find it. And sooner or later you'll have spent so much time staring at it that you won't even realize it's a wall anymore. You'll think it's just life. We have to be extremely careful about the normal we are creating for ourselves. There are so many different realities, yet our focus and our choices trap us in one we don't want. Don't let your wall become your world."
My wall, I suppose, was my constant looking for threats, for danger, and the hypervigilance I had that was constantly scanning for some sign that there was someone around that meant me or someone I loved harm. And that was a problem because there's always some in a room. There's always someone with bad intentions, but I was going out scanning for that person and putting all of my focus on that kind of person wherever I went. Now, one of the things...
What if you don't know what your wall is?
I distrust you inherently, Wall. But what you've said intrigues me.
What if there's a subconscious belief system that's directing our behavior in dating and keeps leading us to crash into the wall, but we don't even know what the heck it is? We just know that every time we go out there and try to find love with another wall, it never seems to go our way.
Have you got a date coming up, Wall? Another wall?
Yeah, and they're quite the catch. I'm a little intimidated, actually. They're load-bearing. But I keep thinking it's going to go the same way as all my other dating experiences.
Well, Wall, what you're really talking about is having a destructive narrative in your love life, but you don't even necessarily know what that narrative is. But my guess is that it leads to you over-investing too quickly.
Oh, yeah.
And probably getting attracted to some of the wrong qualities in someone, but you only realize it when you're too deep in and emotionally invested and now primed for heartbreak.
You're reading me like a book, Matthew.
Wall, and anyone out there who relates to this, I need you to go and watch something for me. It is called Dating with Results.
Dating Wall Results? That's perfect for me.
No, no, Dating with Results. You can find it at datingwithresults.com, and it is designed to help you overcome the three biggest blind spots in early dating today, so that you can finally get rewarded for all of this effort you're putting into your love life with a genuine love story instead of feeling like all of that energy is for nothing.
Well, I got a date with myself, your video, and a tube of grout.
I think you're going to be the first wall who has ever watched this free guide of mine. We've had over a million people watch it, but never a wall.
Walls need love, too, Matthew. Walls need love, too.
Yes, they do.
What? Matt, what are you doing?
I'm just talking to the wall.
Sorry. Sooner or later, we will have spent so much time staring at our particular wall that we won't even know it's a wall anymore. We'll think it's just how life is.
Jerry, these are load-bearing walls. They're not going to come down.
There was a phrase that older generations of women in my family used to say regularly: "A man is only as faithful as his options." To them, this wasn't a wall, it was a truth about life. Not unlike men who think it's just an objective truth that a woman will leave you if they find someone who's taller and has more money. It has become more than a wall. It has become their entire worldview. We see this everywhere. Women are crazy. They only care about money. Men care only about sex or looks. Producers need constant validation.
I don't know if this joke works, Matt.
No, no, no, it definitely does.
Isn't that too meta?
No, David, this is funny. It's really funny.
Really?
Absolutely.
Thanks. Thanks, Matt.
The problem is that whatever wall you're looking for, you'll find it. We will even see it where it doesn't exist, like my client who didn't get invited to the gathering of the guy she was seeing. And our wall is costing us the many other versions of life that we could be living if we could only widen our gaze and therefore broaden our experience of life. The problem is that we have crashed into a certain wall so many times that we no longer believe anything different is possible for us in life.
So, how on earth do we go about changing it? There are two things tied into the wall. The first is a belief about what we think the world is like, what we think life is like, and the second is a belief about our own limitations. This is where the 5% rule comes into play.
The 5% rule says this: "Change is hard. I cannot necessarily just magically feel a different way than I do or be a different person than I am. If it was that easy, I likely would have done it already. But I do have agency to do something slightly different than I would normally do in this situation."
So, what does the 5% rule actually look like in action? Take the example of my client on the day of the gathering that she wasn't invited to. Her nervous system in that moment was fully activated. A fight-or-flight response had taken over, which is a sympathetic nervous system response that gets triggered when the brain perceives danger or high stress, and the system pumps adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream to prepare you to react.
She obviously had a desire to communicate with him what she was feeling. But instead of that coming out in a vulnerable way, it came out in an abrupt and cold way when she said, "Why didn't you invite me?" This was the fight instinct in action. Then, when she got his response and it didn't soothe her enough to calm her fears or take her out of that triggered state, despite him offering to call her later that day, her response system switched to flight. That was when he offered to call and she said, "Don't bother." This was her rejecting him before he had the chance to hurt her any further, which was what she wanted to avoid even more than she desired to be close to him.
But what if instead she had just done something different? It wouldn't even need to be a lot different, just not quite what she would normally do. A lot different is hard. If a situation makes you really anxious and I tell you to just stop being anxious and be confident instead, it will probably seem impossible. But what if instead you just thought to yourself, "My reality clearly isn't the only reality. It can't be. There are other ways of being in this world. There are other ways to experience this life. My reality is a result of the train tracks that I have been on my whole life, which have felt fixed, but they are not actually fixed. I can do something different, and different will lead to different."
So, what if instead of her saying, "Don't bother" when he offered to call later that day, she passively aggressively said, "Sure." Now, that would still be abrupt. It's not a great response. It would be cold, but it might create a different result because they would actually get on the phone. Or, what if later on, having done what she did do, she realized she overreacted and then reached out to him to say, "Hey, I'd like to talk if you're still free."
I want you, my dear viewer, to think about a situation in which you feel you get hijacked by your normal way of responding to a situation. What would doing something 5% different look like? Maybe you're someone like me who is prone to overwhelm from the stress of work. And maybe your normal response to this overwhelm is to go to a catastrophic place in your mind about how you can't possibly cope with everything that's on your plate, how you'll never get it all done, how bad things are going to result from you not getting it done, and what all of this says about your inadequacies as a person.
I like my fifth one of these. I just want to point out for clarity that this video is not sponsored by Uncrustables. We have not benefited from a single dime of that sweet, sweet Uncrustable money. But if you are an exec at Uncrustables and you happen to like these videos, you know where to find me. In this storage cupboard. Obviously.
What's the 5% shift? Instead of going to catastrophe, maybe you remind yourself that not everything is nearly as immediate as your brain is making it, and that there's actually more time than you think. Some things should probably get done today, sure, but a lot of things can take, I don't know, maybe the next 5 or 10 years of your life, which perhaps gives you just a little more time than your overwhelmed mind told you you had.
Maybe you're someone who finds it difficult not to assume the worst anytime someone doesn't respond the way that you would like them to, whether it's a new love interest who is taking too long to text you back, a friend who didn't respond to your latest request to hang out, or a colleague who sent you a slightly abrupt message. Normally, you'd find yourself immediately going cold on these people and ascribing the worst intentions of rudeness, arrogance, untrustworthiness, or even attempting diagnosis of a personality disorder.
5% shift. Rather than coming to any or all of these conclusions immediately, you tell yourself, "I'm going to send one more text to check in, or I'm going to call them so that I can hear the tone of their voice, or simply think about the times when I might have come across a little abrupt without meaning anything by it." In other words, you apply a more marginally generous lens than you normally would have, or you at least reserve your ire for the other side of one more call.
When we are 5% less reactive in life, 5% more generous in our interpretation of others, 5% more candid, 5% more brave, 5% different to what we normally do, we don't just create a marginally different result in the moment, which in itself, by the way, is a revelation to a brain that had previously assumed that all that is available to us is all we have ever gotten in the past. That alone is a miracle to learn that different is possible, but it's bigger than that. A 5% shift in the present has the potential to change the entire trajectory of our future.
When two motorcycles leave the same starting point, but their trajectory is 5° apart from one another, the difference may not look like much to begin with, but continue their progress and you will find that they wind up in completely different parts of the country as a result. And a 5% shift in the way you
show up to situations is enough to change your life.
Thank you for watching, everybody. Leave me a comment below about something you want to do 5% differently than you normally do in a certain situation that you have on your mind right now. I can't wait to read them. And you know what? They're going to give everybody ideas about what their 5% shift could be, too. I will see you again next week, right here.
Huh! I knew I smelled peanut butter. Give them to me.
You don't know what you're doing. Stop it. I'll keep one. I'll keep one. I'll keep one.
That was actually 5% better than she normally does.
Mhm.
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