212: Micro Habits: The Too-Small-to-Fail Plan for Big Results

<p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."</span></em><span style= "font-weight: 400;"><br /></span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That line from Aristotle may be one of the most overused quotes in history.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But it's overused for good reason; it's a good quote. At least the first part. Aristotle was onto something for sure: <em>we are what we repeatedly do</em>.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I agree with that 100%.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The issue I have is with the second part: <em>Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.</em></span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>There’s no such habit called excellence;</strong> you can’t wake up tomorrow and start your morning routine with a quick session of excellence before you go grab breakfast.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about setting new year’s resolutions or goals for the year, which I think is only natural when the calendar flips, but I’m had a hard time coming up with a SMART goal or set of SMART goals for the year I was really excited about.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s easy to pick a number out of the sky, like I want to make $1 million, or I want to reach 100,000 subscribers, or I want to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and those kinds of goals are great -- if they motivate you and you can reverse engineer a path to get there.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But on the flipside of Big Hairy Audacious Goals like these, to borrow a phrase from <a href= "http://amzn.to/2j5jIfm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Jim Collins</a>, is the micro habit. And that brings us back to Aristotle: <em>we are what we repeatedly do</em>.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’ve seen the power of <a href= "http://www.sidehustlenation.com/finding-your-slight-edge/" target= "_blank">co