I’ve noticed that when you ask successful people what advice they might give to a young person trying to chart a similar path, they give one of three answers:
Option one is they give a meaningless platitude, saying something like 'work hard' or 'believe anything is possible'.
Option two is they assume there was only ever one path and dictate that you should follow predictable steps to get a predictable outcome.
Option three is that, with humility, they acknowledge that a large proportion of their outcome was due to an element of luck, however intentionally they may have pursued it, and if they rolled the dice again taking the same actions they could end up in an entirely different position.
The last one stands out because I think people underestimate how ubiquitous it is.
The butterfly effect
Anyone who has achieved an unusual amount of success has benefited from an unusual amount of good fortune. But being able to capitalise on those chance occurrences is what separates winners from the pack.
Most of us passively acknowledge the butterfly effect, but don’t fully believe it applies to us.
A butterfly flaps its wings over here, setting off a chain of seemingly random events, leading to a hurricane on the other side of the world. Sounds a bit fanciful. What does that have to do with my hardass of a boss and the tough financial situation I’m in?
Here’s the thing. Most people assume that to change their lives they have to do something massive.
We want to get fit and decide it won’t work unless we’re in the gym 5 times a week and drinking a gallon of water every afternoon.
We want the dream job but assume we can’t get it unless we jump through 16 hoops.
But here’s the paradigm shift.
How to change the future
In one of my favourite film trilogies, Back to the Future, Marty McFly goes back in time and encounters his parents.
But every time he interacted with them, something drastic changed in the future.
He bumps into his mother, and suddenly he was never born. Any little thing that changed had knock-on effects throughout the lives of everyone involved.
If you travelled through time yourself, you might be extra careful because you know if you make the tiniest change, even by accident, the future could change forever.
But why don’t you act as though your actions today have the same significance?
Why don’t you act as though any tiny action you take now could ripple out into the future, changing your life in unimaginable ways?
Follow the Marty McFly rule, and you’ll see molehills that move mountains. Start small. Make changes that matter. Do things that compound.
