When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of…

Paulo Coelho (Author of The Alchemist)

I can tell you that it’s in our toughest times that our decisions make the biggest impact. There are days where we feel overwhelmed, lost in our own lives, and think small things we do can’t possibly make a difference. Now, when a lot of us are quarantined inside, this may even be more prevalent. The days when we feel like it won’t matter is when we find the most profound growth in each small step we take. This is how you can take charge of your life. Simply do the little things.

I’m a strong believer in the idea that we are either moving toward or away from our best self and with each decision I take a step forward or one step back. The phrase I look to is “The Power of Small Compounding Decisions (SCD).”

I’ve found on the days where I’ve been in the most pain, either physical or mental, is when I’ve learned the most about who I am and what I’m capable of, simply by doing the little things right. So regardless of if you are just cleaning up your apartment during quarantine or are writing the cover letter to job openings in the field you’d like to be working in, I promise you the actions you take now will pay dividends and you’ll soon gain momentum to accomplish the bigger things in your life.

The primary idea behind SCD is that we constantly have the choice between something I know will be good for me or something that will be detrimental. By choosing the better option, these decisions begin to compound. For example, choosing to meditate (the healthy option moving toward the best version of me) or scrolling through social media (taking a step backward).

In addressing our own habits and tendencies, we sometimes think, “Oh it won’t matter if I skip this day at the gym or my meditation session today” but that is just setting the precedence for days to come. The days we find the strength to stick it out and continue to work on ourselves to create new healthy habits, like a morning routine or a new workout regiment, are when we begin to understand what we really are capable of.

These choices may not seem like a big deal at the time but when you expand this thinking to all the decisions you make over an hour, a day, a year and a lifetime, it adds up. In a couple of years you could be someone completely different from who you are now, living out your dreams with contentment and pure happiness, but the time to make that happen is now. Here’s an exercise that can help you keep track of this (and also keep you more entertained in quarantine).

+1/-1 Exercise:

This is a practice from a guy I absolutely love, Brian Johnson. The idea is simple. When you wake up, you start counting. Each action you either add 1 for an action you take toward a better you (such as getting out of bed right away or eating a healthy breakfast) or subtract 1 for something that may not be in your best interest (such as going on social media for the first hour of the day or missing a workout). At the end of the day, you will have a total count of what you’ve done and you can see just how your decisions have added up.

Unsurprisingly when I first did this my scores were in the negatives. It’s incredible what we choose to doing subconsciously. However, over time my score began to change just by bringing awareness to my habits. This was something I gained from meditation (+1) and soon they were consistently positive.

As a competitive guy, when I could physically see the results add up like this I was even more motivated to beat my previous day’s score and consequently I was feeling better about my life and more confident in who I was becoming. Try doing this for just a week and you’ll see that it’s these SCD that often determine if we have a “good” or a “bad” day. I can tell you now almost every day I have now is fantastic and I’m so much more appreciative of when I come across challenges as they’ll help me practice this even more. They test me to choose +1 options.

To quote Lao-tzu, “A Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Each day, find the strength to take that small step forward and you’ll soon find the know-how and momentum to tackle the bigger problems in your life, your community, and even the world.

I’m going to leave you with one of my favorite videos of all time. This is a speech that sums up the power of doing the little things right!

If you’d like to learn more about this, check out any content by Brian Johnson as well as his “Optimize” App. Also “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho is great to give you confidence in your destiny in life.

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