PPI #35: Use Small Habits to Create Big Successes

I get it. You want to achieve big things with your life. But here's the thing. Until you realize that on a daily basis, success looks rather unremarkable. Until you realize that it's about doing the small things day in and day out that lead to the big achievements, the big success, you just simply won't get there. My name is Eric Partaker, and I coach CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders, individuals in peak performance, helping them close that gap between wherever they are and wherever they like to be, not just for their business, but also for their lives. And today I want to talk to you about the power of how small actions on a daily basis can have an absolutely huge transformative effect on your life if you really embrace it. So we're going to go through today what those things are to embrace, and. And then what you can be doing to take advantage of this effect within your life. And it starts by understanding the power of compounding. We know what compounding is when it comes to interest, right? Put some money in the bank at a rate of return, rate of interest, and it grows over time, it gets bigger and bigger. But we don't truly appreciate how powerful that compounding really is. And so I want to start with telling you a story of the magic penny. And you may have heard this story before, but it goes like this. You and your friend each have a choice. You can get $3 million in the bank right now, or I will give you a penny and I'll double that penny every day for the next 31 days. Got to choose quickly. What are you going to choose? So let's say you go for the $3 million in the bank. Boom. You're happy. 3. 3 million. Now what happens with your friend? So your friend goes the other route. Let's say they take the doubling effect and you're feeling pretty good. You know, it's day 10, and you look over and he's got like, five bucks. Day 20, still feeling pretty good. He's got about $5,000. Day 31, that magic of compounding really takes off, because on day 31, just by doubling those pennies, your friend has nearly $11 million in the bank, more than three times what you were given. Now, here's the point. This doesn't just apply to money. This doesn't just apply to this story. This doesn't just apply to interest rates. This power, this power of small things leading to big things over time shows up in every single area of your life.

Let me give you a couple of more examples. So on a given day, you can eat a donut or you could have a salad, let's say, for a meal or a snack. Now, on that given day, right, day one doesn't really amount to much difference. But if we keep that swap going for a long time and 12 months later, if that snack is a donut every day for 12 months versus a salad every day for 12 months, what happens? Well, by the end of those 12 months, we've probably put on a lot of weight. Whereas at the end of the 12 months, had we gone the other route, we could have lost a lot of weight. We could have been, you know, more vibrant, healthy, in better shape. But that only happens over time. I'll give you another quick example, the power of single tasking. So research shows that the average person gets distracted about 37 times an hour, jumping from one task to the next, Looking at an notification, in and out of email, responding to a text message. That accounts for a 28% loss in productivity of their day. 28% of their day, gone. Now that doesn't sound like much, right? 28% of a day, oh, I got tomorrow. But when we string together those average days, what happens? Well, if we take away some holiday or vacation weeks from the year, let's say we just focus on 46 work weeks a year. So 28% loss of the day every day across 46 weeks means that we're losing an entire 13 weeks a year. We're losing an entire quarter or set in another way. The average person is only playing with 3/4 in their year instead of 4. If we extrapolate that out to a 40 year career, we've lost an entire decade because we're not single tasking. We're not working on one thing at a time. Instead we're allowing our distraction to be.

Constantly shaken up.

We're in this distracted state, jumping from one thing to the next, and ultimately not very productive. Compounded over time, it has a massive impact on our lives. What could you do with an extra decade? Because that's what you stand to reclaim if you were to start single tasking in this example, more often. Working on one thing, distraction free, instead of jumping around to lots of different things.

Now the next thing that we can do with regards to really embedding this principle of taking small actions and having that lead to big results, is to get into the habit of focusing on the process, not the outcome. Let's say we have a goal, we want to.

Achieve a certain number of sales. So what we should be focusing on is the process. So how many proposals Can We Be Making by Byron Katie, if you've not come across her work, absolutely fantastic. She says in one of her writings, she says we can have just about anything that we want in life, provided we're willing to go through 1000 no's. So that right there is an example focusing on the process. Just keep sending out those proposals and eventually the yeses will come through. There's another great story here. You may have heard the paperclip story. This is a stockbroker in Canada who achieved amazing results for his firm because he focused on the process, not the outcome, the small daily actions which would eventually lead to the results. And he brought millions and millions in for his firm. And his strategy was quite simply. He had a jar, two jars on his table every day, and he had a hundred paperclips in the one jar. And his workday ended when he made 100 calls. And all he did was for every call that he made, he transferred the paperclip from the one jar to the next. And when all the paper clips were transferred over, his workday was over and he was ready to go home and then ready to start his next day. Very, very simple strategy. All he did was focus on the process, not the outcome. By focusing on the process, the outcome took care of itself. So we understand focus on the process, not the outcome. It's focusing on these small actions that multiplied over time, compounded over time, lead to the big result, the things that we could be doing, ideally even on a daily basis, moment to moment throughout our day. Perhaps number four is, well, what's the number one thing that you should start doing? Within whatever area of life is most relevant to you, what's the number one thing that you should stop doing? There's typically always a start and a stop. In terms of a small action, something that we could start doing, something that we could stop doing, which when compounded over time, will have a huge result. You know, start going to the gym daily, stop eating sugar, for example, break. Both of those things compounded over time will have a massive result.

The fifth and final thing that you can do to really embrace the power of small actions translating to big results to that compounding effect that we're after is by focusing on what are the powerful routines that you could be installing in your life that can embed some of these things that you want to start and stop doing. As an example, just very quickly tying back to what we just talked from a health point of view, make it your routine that you're going to as part of your morning routine, go get your exercise. Or maybe it's your mid break, morning break or after lunch or before lunch. Might be hard to be running or exercising on a full stomach. Or maybe it's your end of the day thing. My preference on that is I like to do it at the start of the day to really spike my energy and generate it.

At the highest level right there before my day begins. And then also for your stop doing, we gave that simple example of eat less sugar. So what's a powerful routine that you could do? Well, bring less of it into the house, right? So when it comes to shopping, whether you're doing that online or just have it as part of your routine, that I won't even buy it, I won't even bring it into the house because guess what's going to happen when you bring it into the house? The compounding begins because you will always find a reason. I deserve it now, I can have it now. So just keep it up. So I hope those are five ways that will help you really understand how you can achieve these massive goals. Not so much by focusing on the massive goals, but by focusing on that power of compounding. Remember that magic penny story? You could take the 3 million today or we can double the penny every day for 31 days and you end up with nearly $11 million. Remember how these examples play in different areas of our lives, right? So you know, you eat poorly on one day versus good doesn't really matter so much in the context of that day. But by the end of the year you put on a lot of weight versus you've lost a lot of weight, right? Or we've talked about that single tasking and we've talked about this in other videos as well. Or if you're listening to this on the podcast, you've probably heard about this in other podcasts episodes as well. But again, extrapolated over time, if we're not focusing and we're allowing ourselves to be distracted, we're losing 13 weeks, a year and 10 years over an entire decade. And just remember, it's all about focusing on that process, you know, not the outcome. Focus on those small daily actions because those things added up, create huge results. Think about what's one thing I could start doing, what's one thing I could stop doing. And then build it into your routines. Powerful routine that can make whatever it is that you want to do easy or more likely to happen. This is your path to reaching your fuller potential. It's by embracing some of these concepts. I hope you found this useful and if you head over to my website@ericpartaker.com you can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter.