Repetition is the act of repeating or restating an action more than once. In reprogramming your subconscious mind, or changing your life, repeating new activity over and over impresses the subconscious mind and helps it to find ways of accepting the new activity. If you repeatedly give your subconscious mind the same information over and over, it will begin to store and use it. Note that our brains are designed to protect us from what’s unknown or uncomfortable to us, and it is only through repetition where the unknown and uncomfortable become known and comfortable.
Human beings are creatures of habits, good or bad. Habits control our lives as they form the people we are, the things we believe in and the personalities we portray. To change your life for the better, if you are not happy with the results from your daily activities, you must replace your habits with new habits. And habits are formed through repetition and not from once-off application.
To run a marathon, you must first become a runner by running small distances (e.g. 5km) repeatedly until your body is fit for a marathon. To read books, you must first become a reader by reading at least 10 pages a day until your system is used to reading. And to be financially free, you must become an investor by investing a portion of your income on monthly basis until your investment portfolio is big enough to cover your monthly expenses without having to work. All these are achieved by consistently doing a few simple things over an extended period of time.
Have you ever asked yourself why some people succeed in anything they touch and others don’t? Why is that about one person in twenty is able to achieve their goals and others are either failing or falling short? What is this person doing that others are not doing? I think successful people are good at doing simple and insignificant things that are easy to repeat, day in and day out. If you think about it, saving R1 a day is simple, insignificant and easy to repeat as compared to saving R30 a month. Successful people break their big goals down to small actions that can be carried out every day until their goals are accomplished. They also know that time is an important ingredient in accomplishing their goals.
One may ask, if simple things take successful people to the top, why do others fail to do the same? Fundamentally speaking, successful and unsuccessful people take pretty much the same actions every day. They eat, sleep, think, feel, talk and listen. They all have 24 hours in a day and all fill these hours with simple and insignificant tasks and actions. Gold medal marathon runners eat and sleep. So are overweight people. Successful people have relationships with other people. So are unsuccessful people. People who make money online spend data to access social media and so are those who don’t make money online.
The successful and unsuccessful people both do the same basic things in their lives, day in and day out. Yet the things successful people do, take them to the top, while the things unsuccessful people do, take them down and out. The difference between what’s done by successful people and what’s done by the unsuccessful people lies in those simple insignificant things done every day. Healthy people eat healthy food while others eat unhealthy food. Rich people spend their money on assets while poor people spend their money on liabilities. Successful people read personal development and financial education books while unsuccessful people read celebrity news and gossip magazines.
The repetition of daily activities done by both successful and unsuccessful people is the vehicle that delivers both successful and unsuccessful people to their destinations. So, it’s important to watch your daily habits. Even better, it’s important to make sure that your daily habits are taking you to the top; to where you want to be. There is no secret to success. There are only daily activities that are repeated over a significant period of time that will lead you to your desired life.
Repetition can either work for you or against you. It’s all about what you do repeatedly. Repetition works like a compounding effect. Spending 10% of your monthly income on assets once will not make you rich. Spending 10% of your monthly income on liabilities once won’t make you poor either. The difference will be in repeating one of these activities (spending on assets or on liabilities) every month for a long time. If you eat a healthy meal for one day, you won’t see any health benefits from that meal. But if you eat healthy meal every day for, say 6 months, you may enjoy good health benefits. On the other side, eating unhealthy meal for one day, won’t cause your health to deteriorate. But eating unhealthy meal every day for six months, may bring some health complications in your life.
What you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters.
Those little insignificant things you do every day, will make you successful in life. They will secure your health, your happiness, your fulfilment and your dreams. Those things are simple, subtle and tiny, and nobody will see, will applaud or even notice. Those things will, at the time you do them, often feel like they make absolutely no difference, like they don’t matter. Truth is, they do.
Living a desired life is all about what you do repeatedly, every day. Use the power of repetition to create daily habits that will lead you to your desired life.
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“THE BEST WAY TO DESIGN YOUR TOMORROW IS BY CONTINUOUSLY INVESTING IN YOURSELF THROUGH EDUCATION”.