212: Micro Habits: The Too-Small-to-Fail Plan for Big Results

The Side Hustle Show

Nick Loper

Entrepreneurship, Business, How To, Education

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

That line from Aristotle may be one of the most overused quotes in history.

But it's overused for good reason; it's a good quote. At least the first part. Aristotle was onto something for sure: we are what we repeatedly do.

I agree with that 100%.

The issue I have is with the second part: Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

There’s no such habit called excellence; you can’t wake up tomorrow and start your morning routine with a quick session of excellence before you go grab breakfast.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about setting new year’s resolutions or goals for the year, which I think is only natural when the calendar flips, but I’m had a hard time coming up with a SMART goal or set of SMART goals for the year I was really excited about.

It’s easy to pick a number out of the sky, like I want to make $1 million, or I want to reach 100,000 subscribers, or I want to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and those kinds of goals are great -- if they motivate you and you can reverse engineer a path to get there.

But on the flipside of Big Hairy Audacious Goals like these, to borrow a phrase from Jim Collins, is the micro habit. And that brings us back to Aristotle: we are what we repeatedly do.

I’ve seen the power of consistent execution first-hand; this podcast is probably my best most recent example of that. It started out as an experiment, it cost less than $100, and over the last 3.5 years, I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s been life-changing.

So if you’ve found yourself in kind of the same boat, with everyone around you sharing their resolutions and their ambitious goals for the year and not quite knowing what you should be aiming for yourself, I invite you to consider the micro habit as an alternative.

Full Show Notes: Micro Habits: The Too-Small-to-Fail Plan for Big Results

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We are what we repeatedly do.
0:02.0	Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.
0:05.0	This is Side Hustle Show 212 microhabits.
0:09.0	Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:12.0	We're aspiring part-time entrepreneurs learn how to turn their
0:15.6	side hustle dreams into reality. Because your 9-to-5 may make you a living, but your 5-9 makes you alive and now your host Nick Loper.
0:29.5	What's up, what's up Nick Loper here? Welcome to the Side Hustle Show special solo show for you today and I kicked it off with what I think is one of the most overused quotes in the history of history and definitely in the history of online business and it's overused because it's good at least the first
0:44.9	part Aristotle I think was on to something for sure we are what we repeatedly do I
0:50.0	agree with that 100 percent the issue I have is with the second part.
0:53.4	Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.
0:56.6	There's no such a habit called excellence.
0:58.3	You can't wake up tomorrow and start your morning routine with a quick session
1:01.0	of excellence before you go grab breakfast. The problem is we fill our days with a lot of less than excellent things.
1:07.5	And sometimes that's intentional and fully conscious.
1:10.5	Yeah, I'm going to have that donut and grande frapuccino. Yeah, I'm going to have that donut and Grande Frappuccino.
1:13.0	Yeah, I'm going to kill two hours watching the blacklist on Netflix.
1:16.0	Not that any of that isn't excellent in its own right, just for the context of health and productivity and building a side hustle, maybe not so much.
1:22.0	But other times it's more accidental,
1:25.0	like when you find yourself 10 years deep into a career, you're just kind of me about.
1:29.5	Or when you find yourself at 30, 40, 50 years old and you're in debt and you realize a newborn
1:35.9	baby has a higher net worth than you.
1:38.3	I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about setting New Year's resolutions or goals for
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nick Loper, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Nick Loper and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.