Mark the Occasion

People often have big epiphanies or major breakthroughs that don’t actually lead to any changes in behavior or lifestyle. The inertia of your daily life is a powerful force.

If you think about it, most of what you’ll do each day is set. You’ll sleep, probably in the same spot you slept the night previous. You’ll wake up and do some amount of “morning routine” that doesn’t change. You have to spend X hours a day feeding and grooming yourself. You probably have a schedule of work. And so on.

And in order to do any of these things with even a prayer of efficiency, you probably do them in a relatively stable order. So you don’t have a whole lot of time left over to begin with. And now you’ve had this huge epiphany, but it might not affect most of the stuff I just mentioned. Did your major breakthrough change the fact that you have to sleep and eat and shower and go to the bathroom and dress yourself and talk to your children and pay your bills? Maybe it changed how you do some of that, but if 85% of your day stays the same, how do you expect the new idea to stick?

So… move your desk.

Or your bed. Or park your car in a different spot. Or get a radically different haircut. Do something that you’ll see every day and will remind you that you did that thing specifically to mark the occasion of a major idea that you want to act on. Disrupt your own routine without abandoning what it gives you. So that the idea has something to grab onto, to stick to, and grow.