Guy Reams (00:03.054)
This is day 50.
By small things will great things happen.
Day 50 is pretty important. When I first started my 365 commitment eight years ago, every year I would set out to do a certain number of habits that I would try to keep for the whole year. And that was the genesis behind my 365 commitment. The first year, day 50 became very significant because it was on day 50 that I realized that I had been going about habit creation wrong my entire life.
I realized that true habit formation comes by finding the smallest increment that you will actually do. If you start with small increments as the foundation, you can build lasting value and meaningful progress over time. Right now in my company, we are worried about marketing. We finally got our product to the point where we're ready to launch a production version of our software.
that is commercially viable. And now we're really starting to think about how and who we're going to market to and by how much and by how much quantity. We really need to get into a consistent and habitual practice of releasing content to the right audience every day. So we have lots of grand schemes and grand plans on how we're going to accomplish this.
Guy Reams (01:36.098)
But I think this idea of figuring out what the lowest common denominator is for habitual practice applies to not only my personal life, but also applies to business. You must start small to secure long lasting life improving habits. you take on too much or try to be too big all at once, you'll inevitably fail.
The key is to find this thing called the lowest common denominator, the smallest amount of work that you will actually be willing to do every day until it becomes a habit. I think that applies to both personal and business. If you can get your team in your company following something, even if it's small, consistently every day, the magnitude and the volume that they will produce over time will far out exceed what they could do in any one individual effort.
I think there's an irrevocable law here. That law is that improvement only comes in small increments. This is counter to my initial thought process when I was younger. When I was younger, I thought I could take dramatic leaps forward and take shortcuts to succeed in life. And although that may occasionally occur, the allure of shortcuts and dramatic leaps is definitely a fool's errand.
What I've learned over time is that you can make gigantic progress in life with small incremental efforts rather than one grand gesture.
Incremental progress is transformative. It's really how change actually occurs and how behavior, whether it in your own life or in your business, actually happens.
Guy Reams (03:28.001)
People that are worried about achieving results might have actually already solved their problem if they would have instead just made a little bit of progress each day instead of wringing their hands in constant worry. So you can build sustainable value. You can produce and build a sustainable value with incremental progress. Small steps that you can incorporate into daily routines will less likely lead to burnout.
of people that are overwhelmed. Building smaller consistency will have regular steady progress, which will produce a consistent result. When you have things broken down into manageable tasks, it reduces stress and anxiety and causes people to be less overwhelmed. Finally, when you have small incremental progress,
you create winds that are frequent and therefore there's greater motivation because people feel like they're actually having a positive impact. Incremental progress or doing the small things over time actually builds over time and compounds. As you do small things, what seems inconsequential at first starts to actually compound upon one another.
until you finally get to the point where it's an overwhelming accumulation of progress.
I've had lots of times in my life where I've tried to accomplish some great, great things, some transformative thing in my life. And oftentimes I've tried to do it all at once or figure it out all in one day. But that has never been successful and never been long-term or never consistent and long-lasting.
Guy Reams (05:22.859)
I've learned that by doing things small, the smallest thing that I will actually do every day, and then repeating that every day for long, consistent period of time, is how actual life changing habits are built. I think this is something I need to think about for our marketing efforts as well. We can think about these grand sweeping ideas of what to achieve in our marketing effort, but in reality, what we need to be working on is what can we...
do consistently a small amount every day so we can build, so we can take advantage of this compounding effect.