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Why Everything You Do Matters
Each action you take moves you closer to, or further from, the person you want to be.
We don’t take the actions we perform on any given day very seriously. After all, it’s just one day.
Maybe you look at the pile of clothes on your bedroom floor and think, I’ll do it later. Maybe you snap at your partner for not putting the milk back in the fridge and think, she deserved it. Maybe you binge-watch a TV show and think, I just need to relax. Maybe you put off doing that important piece of work or going to the gym or writing that blog post and think, I’ll start tomorrow.
We’re excellent at justifying our behaviors, which can make us feel good about them. But what we don’t often realize is that nothing we do stands alone. Everything we do is influenced by everything that came before it, and what we do next will influence what is yet to come.
While what we do on any particular day might not matter a great deal in the grand scheme of things, what we do repeatedly does matter. Our minds record our actions and thoughts, and what we’ve done before is more likely to be repeated. We all know humans are creatures of habit — but this has an impact we don’t often consider, which Aristotle expressed millennia ago:
We are what we repeatedly do.