Small Habits Add Up
A few years ago, one of my friends on Facebook proclaimed that she successfully read 25 books in that calendar year. 25 books!?!? That seemed absolutely absurd to me. My immediate reaction was to DM her and ask the secret of her ways. She explained how simple it was. "I read 20 pages every morning." Great. What else? "That's it. 20 pages a day." Skeptically, I pulled out my calculator and did the math. If the average book is 300 pages, it will take 15 days to finish an entire book at 20 pages per day. That's two per month.....or 24 per year. Boom! I was shook.
On January 1st, I started a "do 1 more" pushup challenge with a bunch of other guys. The rules are simple. On the first of the year, do one pushup. On the second day of the year, do two pushups. And so on.....each day, do one more. By New Year's Eve, you'd do 365 pushups to end the year. If the plan is followed, you'd have completed approximately 67,000 pushups throughout the entire year. I fizzled out due to a shoulder injury, unfortunately (somewhere around day 45). I'm looking forward to trying again in 2024.
I also think about my dream of writing a book. The idea seems unattainable and far-fetched. After all, that's a TON of writing! Where will I find the time and the energy to write an entire book? Similar to the two examples above, small steps can produce tremendous results. This blog is a great example. On the heels of yesterday's one-year anniversary of publishing this blog daily (365 posts in 365 days!), my assistant, Alyssa, completed a project of aggregating all the posts into a single source document. What she found was staggering. It summed up to more than 156,000 words. 156,000!!! Considering the average non-fiction book is 50,000 words, we just published the equivalent of three entire books in a single calendar year. That's absurd! Well, there goes my false notion that writing a book is unattainable. I literally and unknowingly just did it.....three times in one year.
Small habits add up. This concept applies to most things in life. Financial goals, career goals, creative goals, content goals.....lots of goals! Paying off debt is the same concept. Saving up for a car is the same concept. Giving away a million dollars is the same concept. Feeding 100,000 hungry children is the same concept. Saving up for retirement is the same concept. Being promoted from entry-level to the C-suite is the same concept. Most things worth accomplishing require this concept to fully materialize.
Small habits, consistently applied for long periods of time, lead to massive results. It's a universal truth, and it's accessible to each of us. Figure out what yours are, and let's get started!