The Power of Small Choices: How Small Decisions Create Big Wins
There’s a scene from an older South Park episode that sticks out to me when it comes to how our mind gets easily loses its train of thought.
Chef is talking to a scientist to ask him what is going on with Earth. The scientist says, “Chaos theory. It was developed in the 1960s. Sixty? That’s how many episodes there are of Punky Brewster. Cancelled? Don’t you see? The show was canceled. The aliens are canceling Earth!”
Think about how your mind works. You’re in bed, scrolling through your phone to check the weather tomorrow. Then checking the weather prompts you to check a post that someone made. That post reminds you of another topic that you want to check on. Two hours later, you got a heavy dose of blue light and ended up getting a horrible night of sleep because you let your mind go on autopilot and do what it wants.
All it took was the simple decision to break that habit by plugging your phone in the kitchen or bathroom instead of next to your bed. That small decision may have led you to gain two more hours of sleep.
Those extra two hours of sleep may have impacted you to be a better at your job the next day or gave you that small edge of will power to stay on track with your diet.
We are in constant battle with our mind, and setting ourselves up is critical.
Sometimes pure discipline isn’t enough. It’s about setting yourself up to be disciplined. Being disciplined in the small decisions will make it easier to be disciplined in the bigger decisions.
Summon Your Courage
Sometimes, having the courage to make the correct small decision can be harder than summoning the courage to make the big decisions.
Big decisions are usually right in front of our faces. We know what we have to do.
Smaller decisions, on the other hand, are easy to blow off. It’s simple to let go of the small decisions and say, “I can do it tomorrow.”
Small decisions are easy to procrastinate.
When You Don’t Want To It, That’s When You Should
Discipline is a weird thing. The days when I work out, write, eat healthy and keep all my stuff organized are the days when discipline seems to come easy for me. Then there are other days when I say no to doing one of those things because, of whatever reason, everything in my life seems to derail.
I was listening to a podcast with Andrew Huberman and David Goggins recently. One of the things that stuck out to me the most was when Huberman was talking to Goggins about how there is a new study that came out how when you intentionally do the things you don’t want to do, you will change the part of your brain that is involved with discipline.
Discipline is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it atrophies.
It looks like all those silicone valley executives were wrong when it came to “conserving” willpower. As it appears with the new literature, they were diminishing their will power by trying to limit the number of decisions they had each day.
There were also some other studies on will power that showed that the people who believed that will power was limitless, had more will power themselves versus the people who thought will power was a limited resource.
Whatever you think about it, there is something to be said about believing in yourself.
The Butterfly Effect Of Small Decisions
Everyone hates doing taxes, but it’s one of those things in life that we have to do. It’s also easy to procrastinate. Last year, I procrastinated doing my taxes until the 3rd week of March, and then I had to force myself to do them when it was inconvenient.
I missed a workout. I missed out on writing. I missed out on taking the dog to the dog park.
When you procrastinate doing something, it will eventually catch up to you. You will have to do it when it is not your decision to do it anymore, and more valued things to you will be moved to the side.
Even with things outside of taxes, like keeping your place of living clean. If you neglect it for months on end, eventually the work will pile up, and you will spend an entire Saturday morning cleaning your place. This could have been solved with 10 minutes of maintenance a day, but you decide it wasn’t relevant because you would rather not do it.
Take The Stress Away
Do you know some people who seem to walk around with a cloud of stress around them? Maybe you’re one of them.
The stresses of life will never fully go away. However, there are ways to mitigate how you react to them.
Stress becomes a problem when you cannot stop thinking about the things that are causing you stress, consciously or subconsciously.
I would rather not label stress as a good or bad thing when talking about it, though. Sometimes stress can be a good thing.
Working out is a stressor on the body. Stress can prompt us to continue our goals when we feel like we haven’t achieved them.
The things that cause us stress are the things that we tie to our identity. A body builder who stuck somewhere they cannot work out will start to feel stressed because they feel like they are losing a part of their identity and self by not continuing to train.
A sales person might feel stress when they are not hitting their sales goals because being a successful sales person is tied to their identity.
For me, it’s writing. I feel stress when I don’t write because I have tied the act of writing to a part of my identity.
Is this a bad thing? It can be, but it doesn’t always have to be.
The stress of not writing, prompts me to write. However, writing isn’t all of who I am. I’m a runner, a son, a fiancé, a friend, a coworker, a former collegiate athlete, a former actor, etc.
If something tragic happened to me where I could never write again, I would have to accept that and move onto something else.
The main issue many people have with stress is when a large part of their identity gets woven into one thing.
It’s the surgeon who works 80 hours a week, never sees their family and has no friends.
If they lost their ability to be a surgeon, what are they?
The Antidote To Stress
Make it a priority to take a sliver of time for yourself each day. This isn’t a perfect antidote as nothing will be. It’s important to take some time each day for yourself. If you have a break at work, make sure you take a break from doing everything. Do not spend the 10 minutes you have to doom-scrolling on your phone.
If you’re in a work environment that frowns upon taking breaks, it might be time to look for a new job. If you do start a new job, set a precedent that you’re going to take a break. If you do not do this in the beginning, the rest of the team may start to expect your someone who works through lunch. I would rather stay at the office an hour later than miss my break, but that’s me.
If you need to, put it in your calendar to call or text people. Maintaining relationships with friends and family is a two-way street, but that means you have to hold up your end of the bargain. If you do put it in your calendar, make it a negotiable.
If you’re one of those people who read texts and forgets to response, a simple trick is to unread them. Then you will have a notification show back up on your messages and prompt a reminder to respond.
The reason that this is important is that you need to maintain the other foundations of your life to make sure that when stressful times come, it does not consume you. The stakes of your stress aren’t the cost of your identity. That’s when stress begins to consume you. Build your shield around it.
Go to social events even if you don’t want to. I can be a fairly introverted person most of the time. However, the times I feel the most stress is during times I feel stagnant. The way to break free of stagnation is to get out in the world.
The most fun that I’ve had were in times that I wasn’t preparing for it. If you never leave your house, you’ll never have an opportunity to experience those moments.
Summon your courage and continue to grow at Running Relentless. Several times a week there are new articles published with practical advice that will help you unleash your potential.
