08th June, 2022
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
“It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on a path to success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current result.”
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.
They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.
It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment.
If you save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire.
If you go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape.
If you study French for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learnt the language.
If you reduce your diet by only one chapati every meal or reduce the portion size, you still haven’t lost any weight at the end of the month.
We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines.
But, the impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees.
Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York.
Such a small change is barely noticeable at take-off—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet— but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination.
Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
I have this famous quote near me all the time to remind me about continuing with good habits: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”
Start small, Change the bad habit today & stay blessed forever.