Have you ever looked at a domino, or a box of dominoes and thought, “I wonder what I can learn from you?”
No? Great, me either!
So I was stunned when recently I did learn a thing or two from dominoes that fundamentally changed my life. Yes, you read that right…the principles that dominoes teach have changed how I live my life.
Here are the two biggest lessons I’ve learned from studying the domino effect:
1. A little action, when repeated, can generate massive force
Did you know The Netherlands has a Domino Day each year? In 2009, on Domino Day, a company in The Netherlands set up for a world record domino fall – lining up 4,491,863 dominoes.
When the dominoes where tipped and allowed to put on their show, an incredible discovery was made. This display unleashed the same amount of energy it would take for the average male to complete 545 pushups.
That’s a lot of energy! And all from little blocks of wood repeating the same action over and over again (over 4.4 million times to be exact!).
Life Application: We live in a world of instant gratification where people want to do 10 crunches, eat a salad and then wake up with a 6-pack. And yet, this is not how the world works. Instead, recognize that consistency matters!
Whether it’s with making sales calls, doing live videos on social media, scheduling date nights with your significant other or daily exercise – the results of each repeated effort stack up over time to create powerful changes and outcomes.
2. Small steps compound to have substantial impact
A single domino has the capacity to bring down a domino 50% larger than it. If you understand the implications of this, it’s MASSIVE NEWS! If you haven’t quite processed it’s meaning, lets look at it closer:
If domino #1 was only 2 inches tall…
Domino #8 would be 3 feet tall…
Domino #10 would be as tall as Peyton Manning (the NFL quarterback)…
Domino #18 would be as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa…
Domino #23 would be as taller than the Eiffel Tower…
Domino #31 would be taller than Mount Everest…
And Domino #57 would almost touch the moon!
Life Application: One of the biggest challenges I see with people who are not achieving their goals is they believe they need to take a massive first step to reach their goal. Or they become overwhelmed with how big the gap is from where they are to where they need to get to, to achieve their goal.
Dominoes teach us, however, that any step forward to our goal will allow us to start a compounding effect and gain momentum to reach our goal. Looking at dominoes we can see that any forward progression will have an impact.
As we move into the New Year (and new decade!) and you begin planning your new goals, reverse engineer your goals to create small, manageable steps towards your goals.
For more tools on how to reprogram your mind for success, get my FREE course The Limitless Playbook by visiting www.limitlessplaybook.com