People say, “Changing your life isn’t easy. It takes years.”

I disagree. 

Because I changed mine in three hours. And by the end of this email, you’ll know how to do the same today—right here, right now.

Ready?

Tiny Decisions, Massive Results:

I know, you’re probably expecting a huge, satisfying moment of realization after I just told you I changed my life in three hours. Something like a coming-of-age movie, perhaps, where I’m standing on the beachfront with the perfect skyline behind me, staring into the vast depths of the ocean with a certain, happy look on my face that says, “I am…home.”

I’ll admit it, that’s a cool story to fantasize about. But the real one will surprise you (probably in an underwhelming way).

Instead of the beachfront, I was sitting in my bedroom.

2191 days ago, I looked at my calendar app and the date read, “July 14^th, 2019.”

I was a twelve-year-old kid in the sixth grade who had just completed all his homework. I still had a good six hours before going to bed, though. So, I did the second ‘normal’ thing a twelve-year-old does: I followed my curiosity on the internet.

And my mom accompanied me. As we jumped from one interesting article to another, we came across one titled, “21^st Century Digital Skills.”

I thought, “That sounds cool.” So, we read the whole list, and one term popped out: Blogging.

Once again, I thought, “That sounds cool.”

And I dived head-first.

My mom got busy with a phone call, and I took the laptop to my bedroom. I scrambled through a few, “How to start a blog” articles and typed in this URL: www.wordpress.com.

I signed up, picked a neat-looking theme, and created my first-ever website.

As I navigated through all the different backend sections, I saw a tab labelled “Posts.”

“Oh, so this is where I write the blog posts. Cool.”

The next moment, I was hacking away at the headline of my first-ever blog post.

Three hours and 752 words later, I walked out with my laptop in hand and announced, “By the way, I just started a blog today.”

My mom read the post, enjoyed it, and probably thought, “It’s nice he found a new hobby.”

But little did she (or I) know that this ‘new hobby’ would change my life and make me the youngest non-fiction self-published author in the world just 18 months later.

I could never have predicted on that summer evening that this ‘21^stCentury Digital Skill’ would change the trajectory of my life. I could never have thought that six years later, I’d be building a business based on the skills this ‘new hobby’ taught me, or that 2191 days later, I’d be writing about that day for my email newsletter.

And that’s the thing about life. We can’t predict anything. But that doesn’t mean we can’t control where that unpredictability leads.

That’s our superpower. A simple decision today could have a massive impact on our lives five, ten, or twenty years down the line.

My decision to start a blog six years ago was certainly one of those. The action took just three hours, yet it changed my life forever. A tiny decision; a massive result.

But enough about me. Now that I’ve shown you what’s possible, the only question that remains is, “Can you change your life today?”

Yes. A Thousand Times Over.

Because our lives are non-linear.

Logically, a single blog post cannot be deduced as the cause of a world record being broken one and a half years later. The cause is too small, the effect is too big.

Yet, that’s what happened. And that’s what happens every single day in the life of every single human being.

Simple, small, seemingly inconsequential actions have huge effects on our lives down the line.

In fact, I think we can put it into a simple equation:

(SMALL ACTION * CONSISTENCY)^TIME = MASSIVE + LIFE-CHANGING OUTCOMES

Any small action that’s multiplied by consistency and raised to the power of time will snowball into a big, possibly life-changing outcome.

Consistency ensures you improve at what you’re doing and makes it easy for you. And the longer you do it for (the factor of time), the more you improve at it, the more it starts to affect your life (and the direction it takes).

This equation is too crude for any scientific journal to accept, but it helps us make sense of why small actions matter so much.

They have a cascading effect on your life.

The good thing is, you can now control what that cascading effect leads to—not by predicting what the future holds, but by consciously choosing your small actions and letting consistency + time do their magic.

And that’s a comforting realization, if you think about it this way: You don’t have to sort everything out to take back control of your life. You don’t have to make big, loud, impossible changes to make your dreams a reality. You don’t have to believe that just because you’ve spent years living a certain way, you can’t change now.

All of those are false beliefs. Because you can change, you can live your dreams, and you can do it in a non-disruptive way. And you can restart on any day, at any age, at any stage of life.

You just need to ask yourself, “Would I like the life I have when this action gets multiplied by consistency and time?”

If the answer is no, just pick a different small action—one that would have a positive cascading effect on your life.

Then, just do it consistently and give it enough time. You’ll be amazed at how well this formula works.

Make a new choice. Right here, right now. And allow me to say, “Congratulations! You’ve just changed your life—in a way you want!”