In This Episode…
In today’s episode I reflect on a how the small decisions to do things when you don’t feel like doing them will, over time, add up to be either the source of success or the cause of failure.
Episode Transcript…
Hi and Welcome to today’s episode of the Profit Productivity Podcast. It’s your host, Michael Tipper – Who else would it be?
Now today’s episode is going to be called “Keeping The Pedal To The Metal. It’s The Small Decisions That Count”.
Now, yesterday I had my medical and it’s a thing I do every couple of years just to make sure things are still ticking over well. Health is such an important a priority for me, in fact it’s my highest value.
And so in order to have the medical, I had to give all sorts of samples, which meant I had to fast in the morning. I then spent all afternoon at the hospitals doing the medical being prodded and probe and checked and measured.
I came away with a really good result and very happy for the state of health that I’m in. So when I got home – by the time I got home it was five o’clock – I was famished.
I was really, really hungry because I hadn’t eaten for 18 hours or so. And so the natural inclination for me at that point was to get straight into preparing something to eat and just satisfying the hunger that I had.
However, I knew that if I ate, I would sit down, I would enjoy the food having cooked it, I’d relax, maybe do some reading and get sucked into catching up on stuff.
I knew that if I did that I would lose momentum. It’s what I really wanted to do because I so wanted something to eat.
But I still had things I needed to do. I still had to do yesterday’s podcast episode. I still had to catch up from the previous day’s episode and do the show notes.
And I didn’t really want to do them. I just wanted to eat and just chill.
But I thought, no, I can’t let that happen. It wasn’t so much about maintaining the momentum. It was just as much about knowing that if I chose to do what I wanted to do, what I felt was the easy thing to do, I knew I would lose progress.
I knew I would lose track.
So what I did is I got through yesterday podcast episode and I caught up on the show notes from the previous day, which I’d let drift. Only then when I had done that did I give myself the luxury of preparing some food and then eating and allowing myself to relax a little into the evening.
So what are my thoughts on that?
Well, I’m only two days into this year and I’m pleased with myself that I focused on doing the right thing and not the easy thing.
Now you might say, no, it’s not a difficult thing just to do something before I have something to eat. You’re right, it’s not.
But if I allowed myself to make simple decisions like that and take the easy route continuously over the year, that’s going to build up.
So simple decisions like that of choosing to focus and just going that little extra yesterday has meant I’m that little bit further forward.
I’m only three days into the new year, and if I continue making little decisions like that continually throughout, over the next 363 days, then I’m going to have a much better year than if I allow myself to slip when I am faced with those sorts of decisions.
So it’s just a small thing. It’s an attitude. It’s a way of doing things.
And it can be the difference between success and failure or the difference between being good and being outstanding or even being good and failing.
So I’m raising my awareness of it by saying, look, well done to myself, but also recording it here because I think it’s important to know that it’s not just simply a case of doing things when we feel like it.
It’s by doing the right things at the right time, regardless of whether we feel like it or not. So that’s today’s episode.
Until tomorrow…
