There’s no way one more rep is going to change the entire workout session and thus change the trajectory of your entire health life. Or one more good day in the gym compared to taking one day off will alter the course of history.
The same can be said for one more drink. Just order up another, it’s only going to add to the grand total of one you already had, what’s one more? Two drinks are going to lead to disaster and ten extra pounds? Sounds alarmist.
Or one more donut. Like a distracting snare set before you, there’s a large tray of them. No one is counting and the tray was brought in by a colleague who attended an event where apparently no one else wanted a donut, so no one will care at all about the one missing donut being offered up and you becoming the lucky donut eater.
One vote in the direction towards progress, one vote in the direction of dereliction. Why would one vote, one choice, one action matter?
Ryan Holiday writes a line in his book Discipline is Destiny which helps us focus on what matters most in contrast to what we need to ignore. The things which will make us succeed vs the things which will make us fail.
He states a person must focus on their own personal daily progress which affords us the opportunity to also avoid the daily commotion (p 190). Focusing on our own progress pushes commotion and distraction to the side, actually giving those no attention at all.
This may sound simplistic and obvious. But there’s usually hidden gold in the obvious if simply applied more in life.
When things are not going well we are typically living distracted lives where commotion is drawing our attention to things like:
- Bad news (or any news from any publication source)
- Social media
- Work gossip
- Family gossip
And so on.
I like Holiday’s usage of the word commotion because we can distinguish commotion from the words problem, or challenge.
We are not to daily avoid the tough problem which drives us to solving it one step at a time, hence leading to daily progress. We are not to daily avoid the challenges we embark on like adding another plate to the deadlift rep or writing a daily blog or finally releasing that EP.
It’s the pursuit of those purpose driven items, working towards daily progress in those items, where we make the difference we desire and avoid the commotion at the same time.
The commotion is the gauntlet of distractions which have nothing to do with our personal purpose. The commotion is the chatter or the problem over there or the frenzied collective panic seeping into every crack of our society and oozing into our precious minds.
But working on one’s daily progress, in a one percent fashion like James Altucher explains, is the freeing discipline we need to avoid the commotion, the distractions ready to pounce on us.
Putting into practice one more rep towards a beneficial action daily will add up in the long run and serve as the obvious antidote to the commotion ready to fill voids in our time.
Even if the filling is a jelly donut.
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