“Success is Something You do Every Day”
Andy Harrison
Picture yourself as a toddler standing on the platform of your life. It’s like you are just learning to stand and keep your balance on this huge board that stretches out to either side of you and out into the future before you.
Underneath the platform directly under your feet is a thin pole that runs the entire length of your life holding up the platform from below. As you put more weight on either side of this pole, the platform shifts to whichever side more of your weight is on. It’s like you are standing on a huge see-saw and learning how to keep from falling off.
On one side of the platform is the law of atrophy. If you lean too heavily on that side, your life begins to deteriorate from lack of attention. On the other side of the platform is the law of diminishing returns. If you lean too heavily on that side, your life begins to deteriorate from over work. You discover the only way to stay standing and moving forward in your life is by staying directly above the pole, putting an equal amount of weight on either side – but it’s still wobbly.
As a toddler you had older people there to help you as best they could to stand up and walk into your future. As you grew up you saw many examples of how well other people were balancing on their life platforms and you copied and learned and experimented for yourself.
Depending on what these examples were and how your experiments turned out, you developed patterns of putting your weight more to one side than the other in different areas of your life. This shifting of your weight more to one side than the other at certain points as you walked through your life created some consistency to the results you got in each area. Even if you didn’t like the results you kept getting, you could at least count on them being pretty consistent and that was probably a relief knowing how wobbly the whole platform was anyway.
As an adult you had many experiences of putting too much of your weight on both sides of your life’s platform at various times. In fact there were at least a couple of times where you walked completely to one side and nearly fell off one side, having to run back to other side quickly just to stay alive.
These “near death” experiences caused you to wake up and ask “why did that happen and how do I keep that from happening again?”
Finally after enough of these experiences you discover that in order to move forward on the platform of your life you need to keep your balance everyday. You also discovered that there were certain things that you can do to help you keep your balance each day. You learned that what you do every day consistently counts, not just for today but for the rest of your life.
You learned hat once you do something consistently (for 21 days) it becomes a habit and you no longer have to think about it, it just continues to deliver the same results day after day.
You also discovered that certain positive habits in each area of your life acted as stabilizers for your entire life’s platform as long as you did them consistently. It was as if these habits widened the pole under your platform.
The pole was now more like a solid block growing wider with each new habit. You could then walk easily into your future and your life stayed consistently balanced under the widening structure of what you did every day.
One of the best habits you learned to develop was the habit of paying attention to what is new and different every day and feeling how that affects your balance. This habit helped you to notice when and how much to shift in each moment.