The most famous sentence in the book is in this chapter and it is usually misquoted. It says that a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet, not that it begins with a single step.
The difference matters. A single step is an act of will, and the popular version turns the line into an exhortation to get started, which is how it is printed on posters. Beneath your feet is a location. The line sits between a tree that grew from a downy shoot and a nine-storey terrace that rose from a basket of earth, and all three images are about the smallness and nearness of a beginning rather than about resolve.
Read in place, the sequence is doing the same work as chapter sixty-three: great things are already under way in a form too small to notice, which is both an encouragement and a warning. The chapter takes it as a warning first. What is at rest is easy to hold, what has not yet shown is easy to plan for, what is brittle is easy to break, what is fine is easy to scatter. Act on it before it comes to be; order it before it is in disorder.
The chapter then reverses itself in the standard way: one who acts on it spoils it, and one who holds it loses it, which is chapter twenty-nine word for word. The two halves are only compatible if early attention and forceful handling are different things, which is the distinction the whole book turns on.
It closes with the observation that people usually spoil things when they are nearly finished, and the instruction to be as careful at the end as at the beginning.