“Faith is taking the first step even when you do not see the whole staircase.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
There are quotes you read once and quotes you live with for a lifetime. This quote is one that has lived with me. It has been my guide.
I have used this quote when coaching first-time marathoners who had never run a mile. I have used it when I committed to triathlons I had no business signing up for. I have used it before standing in front of rooms full of people, sharing my story and asking them to fund a fight against cancer. I have used it when I was scared, when I was grieving, when I was lost, and when I was tired of telling myself I could not do something.
It has never failed me.
And I want to share it with you today, because I suspect — if you are reading this — there is a step you have been afraid to take.
What the quote actually means
Faith is the bridge between where you are and where the staircase begins to show itself.
The staircase is never visible from the bottom. That is not a design flaw. That is the whole point. If you could see every step before you took the first one, faith would not be required. You could simply calculate the path and walk it.
Real first steps do not come with a map. They come with fear. They come with the voice in your head telling you that this is too much, too hard, too late, too risky. Every meaningful thing I have ever done in my life has begun on the other side of that voice.
You will not silence the voice. That is not the goal. The goal is to take the step anyway.
And sometimes, even after the first step, the staircase feels challenging for a while. But movement changes you in ways standing still never will.
Why first steps are scary
We are not afraid of the staircase. We are afraid of what we cannot see.
When you stand at the bottom of something — a decision, a change, a new beginning — your mind does not show you the destination. It shows you everything that could go wrong between here and there. The failures. The embarrassments. The wasted effort.
But here is what your mind does not tell you: taking that first step is the win. Falling short after starting is still infinitely closer to where you want to be than staying still ever was. The people who never try are the ones who stay exactly where they began.
Fear is not your enemy in those moments. Fear is information. It tells you that what you are considering matters. We do not feel fear about things that do not matter to us. Fear is the marker, not the warning.
The trick is to stop using fear as a reason to stay still. I have told everyone that will ever listen to me that, if fear is the only thing between you and a key decision, you absolutely must take that first step. Move that brick wall standing in front of the staircase out of the way and take that step. You will not regret it.
The principle applies everywhere
This is not just about marathons or career pivots or grand life decisions. The first-step principle shows up in nearly every meaningful change a person makes.
It is the person who has been avoiding their financial reality for years and finally opens the credit card statement. The numbers are scary. The truth is harder than the avoidance. But the moment of opening that envelope is the first step toward financial freedom.
It is the person stuck in a career that is slowly hollowing them out, who finally updates their resume and applies to a new job. They have no idea if they will get an interview. They have no idea if they will get hired. But the application is the first step.
It is the person who has been carrying grief for too long and finally calls a therapist. The conversation will be hard. The work will be harder. But picking up the phone is the first step.
It is the parent who has been distant from a grown child and finally writes the text. It is the person who finally laces up the shoes. It is the writer with a story inside them who finally opens the blank document.
In every case, the staircase is invisible. In every case, the first step is the hardest. And in every case, the first step is the one that changes everything that comes after it.
What I learned from coaching
For years I coached first-time marathoners through Team in Training, a program that combines endurance training with raising money to fight blood cancer. People arrived at the program for all kinds of reasons. Some had lost a loved one to cancer and wanted to fight back. Some were overweight and needed a goal big enough to change their life. Some were in a rut and needed a jolt. Some had simply decided it was time to do something meaningful with their time.
Most of them had never run.
And almost every single one of them, in week one, looked at me like I was going to ask them to do something impossible. The thought of 26.2 miles was overwhelming. Some of them could not run a mile without stopping. Some of them had not exercised in years.
I would tell them — every single season, in my first weekly email — about Martin Luther King’s quote. About the staircase. About faith.
And I would tell them the only thing they had to do that week was take the first step. Show up to one practice. Run one minute. Walk if they needed to. Trust the process. Trust the coaches. Trust the program that had taken thousands of ordinary people across marathon finish lines.
Almost all of them finished. Not because they were extraordinary athletes. Because they took the first step, and then the next, and then the next.
The staircase revealed itself.
When the staircase felt impossible
In late 2013 I was nominated for the 2014 Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s (now Blood Cancer United) Man and Woman of the Year campaign for Greater Los Angeles — a fundraising competition where candidates have ten weeks to raise as much money as possible for blood cancer research. The candidate who raises the most wins.
Every part of my being wanted to say no.
I had already been involved with the organization for years. I had already raised significant money. I had built relationships with the same donor community I was about to ask for more. If I accepted the nomination and didn’t do well, that is what people would remember. Not the years of hard work before. They would remember the campaign that did not work.
The fear was specific and real. I could see the failure scenario clearly — that is the cruel thing about fear, it is so good at painting the downside in detail. What I could not see was the staircase.
I said yes anyway.
Prior to the campaign, some of the same friends I was afraid to disappoint joined me to help. Then, for ten weeks I asked the same people who had been supporting me for years to step up again. I asked friends. I asked family. I asked strangers. I asked corporations. I asked people who had every reason to say “I have given enough” — but that is not what they said. They gave. People showed up. The community that had been built over years of work became the engine that carried me.
I raised $126,000 in ten weeks. I won the campaign.
But winning was not the point. The $126,000 was the point. The fight against cancer was the point. The army of people who came back to support a cause they believed in was the point. Together we made a difference in this world because I did not let fear make the decision for me.
I took that first step.
The deeper truth
Here is the pattern I have noticed over the course of my life — and I have lived enough now to see it clearly:
Everything I have accomplished that I am genuinely proud of came on the other side of fear.
The first marathon. The first triathlon. The first Ironman. The first ultramarathon. The Man of the Year campaign. The Ironman World Championships. Starting this blog. Writing a book about losing my daughter, losing my father and walking beside my wife’s cancer diagnosis in less than two years. Asking strangers for money. Asking myself to keep going when everything in me wanted to stop.
Every single one of these accomplishments required pushing past fear. Every single one of them was scary at the start. Every single one of them gave me something I could not have received any other way.
Fear is not the obstacle. It is often the location of the gift. It is what makes everything after it meaningful.
If something does not scare you a little, it is probably not going to change you. The size of the fear is often a clue to the size of what is waiting on the other side.
What is your step?
I want you to think about this honestly.
What is the thing that has been living in the category of things you tell yourself you cannot do? It might be financial. It might be physical. It might be emotional. It might be creative. It might be a relationship you need to repair or a goal you need to chase or a truth you need to face.
You know what it is. You have probably known for a while.
The staircase is not visible from where you are standing. It never is at the beginning. That is not a reason to wait. That is the whole point of faith.
The first step does not require certainty. It does not require a plan. It does not require a guarantee. It requires one reason — one person you love, one promise worth keeping, one fear big enough to know it matters.
Take the step.
The staircase reveals itself.
It always has for me.
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I tell the full story of my own first step — and what it taught me — in my upcoming book, Blessings From The Dark. But your first step does not require my story. It requires your willingness to push past fear.
“Faith is taking the first step even when you do not see the whole staircase.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
