Compounding Consequences

What is perceived as “small” or insignificant often stays out of our awareness (and therefore goes unaddressed). But it is these seemingly small things that compound over time to create the major outcomes in our lives. By helping someone to see the true significance of these small things, you can often motivate them to take some sort of positive action.

Examples:

• Eating a small snack every day is just a few hundred extra calories, but eating just 100 calories in excess of what you burn adds up to approximately 10 pounds of weight gain per year. Small consequences in the short term equal huge consequences in the long term.
• Writing 300 words per day might not seem like much. That's about 20 minutes of writing for the average person. But if you did that every single day, you would write the equivalent of two full-length books every year.
• Reading just 10 pages of a book each day adds up to over a dozen books read each year, which is more than the majority of people read in a lifetime after graduation from high school or university.
• A small amount of daily stress isn't too difficult to handle. But stress experienced day in and day out for years can lead to chronic illness and shave decades off your lifespan.

How to Use This Principle In Your Content

• Illustrate the common experience of living out a particular habit that seems relatively insignificant in the short term. Open with a curiosity-inducing title such as "Your harmless snacking habit isn't so harmless after all" or "How lazy people can out-perform the vast majority."
• Paint the picture of how this small, harmless or seemingly insignificant habit turns into something much bigger over time (positive or negative).
• Use personal stories or examples from your own life or someone else’s to inspire the audience to see how major positive changes can happen one tiny step at a time.