All The Small Things

By Travis Terrell Co-Founder & CEO of Soundstripe

“Success is a few simple disciplines practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment repeated every day.” — Jim Rohn

We love to talk about work, life, and success as a single event, like how we dropped twenty pounds, built a successful business, or won the Super Bowl. The truth is, that most of the significant things in life aren’t single events, but rather the sum of all the small decisions we choose to make. Small tasks turned into tiny habits will compound over a long period of time and can bear monumental gains.

I’m going to step out on a limb here and say that small things are the only things that really matter. Those small things are the make or break. They are the difference between winning and failure. They are the fulcrum point that turns an apprentice into a master. Small things are what change whole industries.

Stephen King has written nearly 60 novels that average somewhere between 350 to 700 pages. He’s been quoted to have a goal of writing 2,000 words a day. In a 45 year career, he averages just over a book per year. For comparison, it took J.R.R. Tolkien 17 years to write Lord of the Rings, which clocks in at around 1,200 pages. Whether you consider either of the authors works literary classics, in terms of sheer output Stephen King is a monster. In his infamous how-to memoir On Writing, King lays out his mental process: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Whichever creative endeavor you choose to pursue will initially seem like an impossible task to complete, but the key is making the task manageable. It’s ironic how difficult taking action on the small things can be, though. They aren’t flashy. They don’t reward you with a gold star and they can get repetitive and boring. You usually don’t get noticed, and you can’t see an immediate loss if you miss a day: If you want to build Rome, you have to lay the first brick, and that is hard.

Let’s switch things up and look at this theory from a business perspective.

If your business does just 1% better every week over a year’s time (which is very doable), your business would be 52% better, and that isn’t quantifying in terms of just revenue. It’s much better than spending 20 hours a day for 3 months straight until you inevitably burn out from exhaustion for the rest of the year.

When my co-founders started Soundstripe from the back bedroom of my house, we honestly didn’t have a clear vision for it. We knew there was a better way, but we weren’t even sure what that way was going to be. We didn’t have it all figured out, and we didn’t have all the answers, and we certainly weren’t qualified business people.

Instead of focusing too much on the big vision, we focused on what we could do daily to work up to our goals. Every day was a push to see what we could accomplish by hammering out the details. One small decision after another. One tiny step forward.

Progress is not doing BIG things every once in a while… It’s about doing very small things over and over and over. What small things are you doing today that are going to better your life and career today? In your journey to reach your goals, those seemingly insignificant small things may be not so insignificant after all.

Small things over time can become very, very big things.