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“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.”
James Baldwin
I sat down to meditate for one minute a day, fifteen years ago. The sitting now runs up to two and a half hours. Each minute made the next one easier.
A business grew the same way. Over five years ago I started publishing weekly reports on my personal site. Readers kept coming back, so I registered the trends.vc domain.
The company people see today came out of a writing routine, repeated for years.
My outcomes are the results of my daily actions, averaged over time. One day barely counts. A year of days decides the result.
A Post Office official named Anthony Trollope wrote at 5:30 each morning, watch on the table, 250 words each quarter hour, then left for a full day of work. The mornings added up to forty-seven novels. “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules,” he wrote.
Organizations run on the same math. Toyota’s workers have submitted improvement ideas for over seventy years, around a million a year in recent decades, most from the factory floor and most of them small fixes to the work in front of them. The daily trickle compounded into the biggest carmaker in the world.
Eat processed food each day while believing in health and the food decides the result. Spend each evening scrolling while valuing creativity and you get better at scrolling. The output follows the actions, good or bad.
Your life is the average of your days.
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What daily habits does the life you want require?
