Let me begin this video by telling you a little story. This is Mike. One day he decides to go for a walk in the woods.
As he's walking down the road he sees this huge rock that blocks the path he's taking. No big deal, he'll just go around it. But there's also a man with a hammer there, chipping away at this rock.
He pays no attention to it and goes about his day. A week later Mike goes for a walk in those same woods again. And the same guy is hitting the same rock.
This time he decides to stop and ask the man what he's trying to accomplish here. The man says that the rock has been blocking the path for years, so he wants to move it. But because it's too big and too heavy to move, he first needs to split it in half to lessen the load.
Mike asks the man, how long he's been hammering away at that rock, and the man says that he's been doing it for almost a month now. Mike looks at the rock and sees there isn't a single crack on it. He thinks to himself, "What a fool.
He hasn't managed to make even a single crack. He should just give up. " However he doesn't say that, but instead wishes the man best of luck with his goal and leaves the woods.
A month later, Mike goes for a walk in the woods again. He sees that the giant rock is still there, but this time the man isn't. "Good.
" he thinks to himself, "He finally came to his senses and gave up. His hammering obviously wasn't working. " Just as he's about to go around the rock he sees the man approaching with his hammer.
Mike obviously doesn't want this man to waste any more of his time with this rock, so he says: "Maybe you should just give up, you haven't managed to make even a single crack the whole month! " The man just laughs. And begins to chip away at the rock.
Just as Mike is about to leave angrily, he hears a cracking noise. He looks at the rock and suddenly there's a huge crack all over it and the rock splits in to two. Mike is happy for the man, but this all came as a surprise.
He asks the man what changed to finally split the rock. Did he use a different hammer? Or did he use more force?
The man simply replied; "I didn't do anything differently. The progress might have been slow and invisible for the first few months, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there. " What did I want to tell you with this story?
Nowadays we all want results and we all want them now. However what we forget is that results often take time to show. If you were to go to the gym today, workout, come back and look in the mirror, what would you see?
Nothing, right? And if you were to go the gym the next day and you came back to look in the mirror, again you would see nothing. Clearly there are no results.
Going to the gym and working out seems to be ineffective. So what do you do? You quit.
But was working out really a waste of time? No. It's just that the results never seem to come quickly enough for us and that's why we give up.
The man hit the rock with his hammer thousands of times, with no visible effect. Was his effort wasted? Of course not.
Even if the results weren't yet visible, it didn't meant the work was ineffective. The work was just stored. Too often we convince ourselves that big results, require massive action.
For example to clean our room we believe we have to take 3 hours of our time to polish it properly. We hold the same beliefs for losing weight, building a business, writing a book, or achieving any other goal. It's like we have to do it all at once.
We overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. What if instead of taking a whole day off to clean your house, you would take 15 minutes each day to clean a different section? One requires massive amounts of action and time, but presumably gets everything done.
While the other doesn't take long, but it barely makes a difference in the moment. For example; if you save $30 of your money today and invest it somewhere, you're still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym three times this week for 30 minutes, you're still out of shape.
And if you learn 3 French words tonight, you still haven't learned the language. All these small improvements, are really small and don't seem to matter very much in the moment. That's why we dismiss them.
But the effort isn't wasted. What if you were to be consistent with those tiny little improvements for 1 year straight? What about 5 years?
Suddenly you have thousands of dollars in your portfolio. Seemingly out of nowhere you're in great shape. And guess what?
You can speak French. Did all of this happen overnight? Was it a particular day that got you those massive results?
Of course not. It was those 3 French words, that seemed like nothing, that eventually added up. And guess what: going to the gym for 8 hours doesn't get you into shape.
Working out every other day for 30 minutes does. Big results are the product of small daily actions, not once in a lifetime moments. Unfortunately, there's also a dark side to all of this.
Because results take time to show, it also becomes easy to let bad decisions slide. If you skip the gym and eat an unhealthy meal today, you're not going to wake up fat tomorrow. If you decide to mindlessly watch TV, instead of reading 5 pages of a book, you won't suddenly turn stupid.
And if you decide to spend some of your money on new clothes, even if you don't need them, you're still not poor. What's the difference between eating vegetables for lunch or eating a burger and fries? Not a whole lot on any given day.
Your body looks basically the same in the mirror at the end of the night, and the scale hasn't really changed. But it's only when you compound those choices over two years, five years or even ten years, that's when you finally realize: "Wow those daily choices actually really mattered. " That's when the value of good decisions and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
When we repeat poor decisions and rationalize little excuses, day after day, our small choices compound into toxic results. It's the accumulation of many missteps that eventually leads to a problem. That being said, it doesn't matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now.
What matters is whether your daily choices are putting you on the path toward your goals. You might be a millionaire right now, but if you're spending more than you make, you're on a bad path. Your bad spending habits will take you to a financial ruin, if they don't change.
Perhaps you have six-pack abs, but again if you think because of that, you can eat anything and not go the gym, you just might end up becoming fat. We all deal with setbacks, but in the long run the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our choices. You can still eat a piece of chocolate cake one day and you can skip a day or two in the gym.
There's nothing wrong with that. There will come a day when that happens. But what's important is that you stick with the right track more often than with the wrong one.
Whichever path you're more consistent with, that's the path you'll eventually end up taking. I want to end this video by saying that even if the results of your decisions are not yet visible, when you give them enough time, they will eventually show. Don't forget, small steps in the right direction lead to remarkable results over time.
At the same time, small steps in the wrong direction, eventually lead to undesired outcome. Which direction you take is up to you. Thank you for watching till the very end.
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