https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5opJK4kNJVg
The Butterfly Effect
If you’ve ever been a fan of sci-fi movies you’ve no doubt heard about the butterfly effect. In essence, the butterfly effect states that time travelers need to be extremely cautious as the killing of even a single butterfly could have massive implications on present day.
Of course time travel isn’t yet possible, and even if it was you could argue that one’s mere presence in the past would be enough to alter it thus making time travel an inconceivable paradox.
Perhaps, but like I’ve said before, just as today’s past is yesterday’s present the same can be said of today’s present being tomorrow’s past. A small decision you make today can have an astronomical effect on your future.
Trajectories
The Butterfly Effect is what I’ve used to wrap my mind around the importance of seemingly small decisions, but I’ve been known to make things more complicated than they need to be so here’s a summary of a more simple example I heard from Tony Robbins.
Imagine you’ve just began playing golf. You’re frustrated because you keep hitting the ball into the water. You’re not expecting miracles as you’ve only been playing for a couple months, but you think at the very least you should be at a consistent level of suckiness.
In your frustration you yell at your coach to which he calmly responds to you, “You’re only missing the sweet spot by a few millimeters.”
He helps you make a small adjustment to the way you approach the ball, and you begin to consistently hit it into the green. Although the angle you hit the ball is only one or two degrees different than before, the slight change in trajectory is the difference between failure and success.
Precedents
Tyler of RSD has often joked that before he discovers pickup a guy thinks little of being unable to approach a hot girl. He’s always cowered away from her, and social conditioning says it’s strange to talk to strangers so being unable to approach her isn’t a big deal to him.
However, after a guy goes on a run, and becomes an approaching machine he begins to feel a genuine guilt if he sees a hot girl at Starbucks and is unable to approach her.
Why? Because he’s setting a precedent for himself. If he didn’t talk to that girl what’s going to stop him from being unable to talk to the next girl?
Similarly, if you don’t write a blog post today what’s going to stop you from skipping tomorrow as well? If you decide to skip the gym today what’s going to stop you from skipping tomorrow?
It’s easy to rationalize with yourself that skipping one blog post or gym session is irrelevant to your success. Perhaps, but forcing yourself to do things when you don’t feel like it is a huge characteristic of success, and moreover skipping once gives you the permission to skip again.
Compound Time
It’s easy to justify maintaining an Instagram or Twitter. Spending 15 minutes per day on them is nothing right? Wrong. Time is like money. Small payments continued over a lengthy period of time compound quickly.
15 minutes per day compounds to 91.25 hours within a single year. Now I’m not going to say that social networking is never a good investment of time, but you’ve got to be conscious of just how quickly seemingly small periods of time compound.
91.25 hours per year is enough to maintain a weekly blog, do two 50 minute workouts per week, or even pay for a nice weeklong vacation ($1,825 assuming you work 91.25 extra hours and make 20$ per hour.)
Time is your most valuable resource, and it’s important you constantly become more aware of how you’re spending yours. The most successful people are those who spend their time most consciously.
I realize this post has been all over the place, but I thought hammering things in from several different angles may be helpful in showing the large results small decisions can eventually amount to.
I don’t want you walking around paranoid because I’m saying that nothing is too small to matter, but on some level there’s an element of truth to that mindset.
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