Are You on an Upward or a Downward Spiral? This Trajectory Makes the Difference
The vortex that helps you direct the flow of your attention — and your life path — on command
Our actions follow predictable trajectories. A single choice begets a web of subsequent emotions, stories, and circumstances.
You can use this pattern to your advantage or to your demise.
The Spooky (Yet Powerful) Domino Effects of Your Choices
Our everyday decisions feel minor. But when combined, they quickly implode, transforming from small choices into entire eras.
In January, I adopted the habit of baking cookies, something I rarely do. While these cookies were ketogenic and simple (made only of nut butter, one egg, and monk fruit sweetener), it wasn’t a habit I felt wonderfully about. It was time and money I could have been spending on more nourishing things.
I noticed that the decision to make cookies led to several other not-so-wonderful behaviors — if I wanted to bake cookies, I also wanted to buy sparkling water to wash them down. Then, rather than do something more creative or enlivening, I’d watch interviews with public figures.
Yet, fortunately, a similar spiral takes place with positive actions. For example, I began this article feeling uncertain about how I’d articulate my ideas, but now I feel alive and clear, and I’ve had multiple ideas for new articles, seemingly out of nowhere.
If you can use this domino effect to your advantage, you can create massive shifts in your life situation without relying on discipline, willpower, or other methods of arm-wrestling yourself into action.
There are two Paradigms of Motivation: Only One Makes Progress Automatic
When we want to create positive transformations, we rely on motivation, thinking it’s a necessary precursor to action.
To an extent, it makes sense: we don’t want to eat in a robotic way, for example. It’s better to eat when we’re hungry.
But when it comes to actions that require skill cultivation, motivation is rarely enough.
As humans, motivation is inherently fickle. Simply by being animals with constantly changing physiologies, we will rarely feel consistently motivated for anything (except for that which directly supports our survival).
Because so much of what we do out of passion and enthusiasm only indirectly supports our bodily needs, it’s helpful to build systems that we can rely on during those days when motivation wanes.
Here is one such system: every day, focus on doing the smallest possible actions to move forward with your goals, no matter how you feel. I’m aware this isn’t necessarily a fresh idea. But it is a powerful one.
If you’re a writer, this could be something as small as changing the fonts on an article. Or making a few word choice changes. If you’re a musician, this might look like practicing spider techniques on the guitar. Anything counts, as long as it’s forward movement.
The Reality-Shifting Benefits of Minor Actions Done Consistently
Small yet consistent action is powerful because it forges identity-level shifts. When you make identity level shifts, your motivation to continue emerges naturally. Instead of relying on willpower to proceed, you create momentum that feeds itself, and action becomes effortless.
Contrast this with the conventional approach. Most people mistakenly assume they should only practice a skill when they’re feeling fresh, energized, and alive.
But when you’re in the habit of only doing things when you feel like it, it becomes a self-fulfilling limitation: you create an identity of someone who must feel a highly specific way before they act.
This sets a super high bar and makes you increasingly precious. You become choosy about the feelings and sensations that will support your action-taking, and then you only rarely act
Choose a Baseline Level of Action You’ll Take No Matter How You Feel
Because low-energy days are a feature, rather than a bug, for most human lives, you’ll want to make this laughably small.
Most days, you’ll go way beyond this baseline. But keeping it small will decrease your resistance on tough days.
For example, every day, I have a baseline of just five minutes of exercise. Normally I feel a natural desire to move for longer, but this keeps me going on days when I’d otherwise skip it entirely.
This approach to self-motivation has two benefits. The first is that it naturally begets motivation.
When you do something every day, even when it’s small, you build a streak that feels self-perpetuating. Then it becomes more emotionally challenging to think about stopping the streak than continuing to act.
This process also reveals motivation as a lever we can pull at will rather than a black-and-white emotion we do or do not have. Even on low-energy days, motivation typically builds a few moments after you start acting.
This is life-changing: you realize, from that point on, that whenever you feel that gap between your capacity and what you feel you “should” be doing, you’re a couple of tiny actions away from feeling naturally motivated.
Who needs these heavy bricks like self-discipline and willpower when you have laughably small actions done consistently?
