... discipline and consistency!
The secret ingredient for success is straightforward: you need to make small choices to eat well at every meal. If you choose an apple instead of a cookie or a side salad instead of a packet of chips then you will see results from adopting the principles of eating well. And if you can make these small choices over and over again then all these small actions will start to add up and produce big results. Success will come from the consistent, daily application of discipline. Eating well is not actually that hard. The tough part is making the choice to eat well at every meal and to keep on doing that. And you will not achieve your goals without applying discipline and consistency to make good, small choices.
A simple analogy is to think of a shipping tanker. These are huge ships that weight hundreds of thousands of tons but if you turn the ship’s wheel ever so slightly that will set the tanker off on a different direction. And the effect of changing direction compounds every minute that goes by so that what seemed like a small change in direction at first will end up in taking a completely new direction. And this compounding effect is true for many other aspects of life beyond your weight goals, like getting good at a hobby, managing your finances or success in the workplace. By making small incremental decisions in the right direction every day, the effect of those decisions will compound over time and eventually results in large, visible outcomes.
Sounds easy, right? Well unfortunately, there are several caveats. If it was really that simple, we’d all be making small, good decisions every day and would have hit your goals a long time ago but as you know it’s not that easy. The irony is that because these are small actions, they won’t kill us if we don’t do them today and so we often end up delaying them because the results are not immediately visible. And this idea works the other way around so if instead you make a lot of bad, small decisions then these will compound in the opposite direction and result in increasingly worse outcomes.
We are trapped in a culture that expects big, quick wins and so you can feel disheartened by a lack of visible progress and stop choosing those small steps that you need to make to deliver results. But if you can make good, small choices with discipline and consistent then you will achieve success. Just as a side note, all those stories about the great successes never mention all the hard work and failure that made them possible. You cannot expect to get something from nothing and so you have to put the work in. And if you can make those good, small choices day in day out, you will start to see the benefits and will experience days that go something like this…
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