Tiny Actions Lead to Massive Outcomes

Read time: 6 minutes

Welcome to The Ascend Archives, a weekly newsletter where I share a story about a transformation, revelation, or change in thinking that has helped improve an aspect of my life. Today is the third (and final!) essay from my writing cohort, Write of Passage.

Moving forward, I’m going to continue sending one new story per week. Please reach out with any feedback or if a story resonates, I love hearing from folks!

The band on stage is starting to do their mic checks.

I look at the bottom right hand corner of my laptop…6 PM.

I was here 4 hours ago when this place was still a coffee shop. Now it’s Friday night and this place is turning into its nighttime persona of a bar.

But I’m nowhere close to finishing my to-do list.

I came here to get a change of scenery and be productive but all I’ve done is send a few emails and watch some YouTube videos… procrastination at its finest.

What I really should have been working on is the outstanding work for my 3 clients and figuring out if I really want to take on a 4th client next week.

But hey it's Friday night. It's the weekend. Nobody is going to be expecting anything from me until Monday anyways. I tell myself that I’m not going to solve these problems tonight. So I pack up my stuff and head home.

With no food left in the fridge, I get on DoorDash to order my favorite dish from my favorite Thai spot - Chicken Pad See Ew…doesn’t get better than that. It’s been a long week and I’ve been traveling the past several weeks so I deserve a night in. 

I pop onto the sofa to watch one episode of HBO’s Industry, which quickly turns into 4 episodes. I go from devouring my Pad See Ew, to grabbing the mini chocolate peanut butter bites from Trader Joe’s out of the freezer and crushing 5 servings of those. Before I know it, it’s 12:30 PM and I’m scrolling through LinkedIn because it’s the only social media I have on my phone.

This supposedly chill Friday night went from getting ahead on work and rest to waking up Saturday morning restless and unmotivated as if I spent the night at the bars - so much for a productive weekend. 

A few months later, I was driving home from the gym after an evening workout and couldn’t get my mind off a conversation I knew I needed to have. 

It’s one of those conversations that just feels heavy. A conversation about a serious topic that if brought up in the wrong way could go terribly bad, but if brought up in the right way will lead to a better, stronger relationship. 

I knew something had to be said, but I didn’t know exactly what to say or how to say it.

However, it was time for a more urgent decision: what do I eat for dinner?

Chipotle is on my way home.

Or I did have leftover chicken and vegetables in the fridge.

My mind started weighing the pros and cons, spending way too much energy on a simple decision like a random Thursday night dinner. Yes, Chipotle would taste better and is easier, but I just finished a tough workout, I already have healthy food cooked at home, and I didn’t want to spend any more money… 

I drove past Chipotle and warmed up the leftovers.

There I was sitting home alone at the kitchen table with this heavy topic on my mind but my thoughts about it scattered.

Time for another decision.

Usually when I’m stuck, I turn to one of my “board of advisors” - people in my life I look to for guidance and support. I owed a phone call to my sister that night and could have asked for her advice. But I didn’t want to throw all my jumbled up baggage onto her.

Another option could be to turn on the TV for a few hours. Watching a bunch of crazy deckhands and stewardesses interact with rich folks on private yachts on the trashy reality show Below Deck always puts me in a good mood. But that’s just avoidance at its finest. 

The last option and the least fun sounding would be to stare at a blank page and write out my thoughts. I could sit in the silence and try to make sense of the situation.

I opted for option 3. I told myself to just start writing for 15 minutes to see where it takes me. 15 minutes turned into 30 minutes of messy writing. But I started to connect some dots. I figured out what was bothering me and why. I knew what point I wanted to get across in the conversation but I didn’t know how.

So I decided then would be a good time to call my sister to talk through it. I could practice having the conversation with her to see how it would come out. She answered on the first ring and I got her up to speed. During the first practice run, my thoughts came out clunky and didn’t make sense.

But my sister listened. She didn’t judge me for my mess of thoughts. She understood that my intentions were good and she helped me sort through it.

“Maybe you could phrase it like this” and “I just spoke to a friend in a similar situation and this is how she handled it”.

These perspectives helped me shape what I was trying to say and settle on something that I was confident in. After taking another 20 minutes to write down my takeaways, I figured out how to have this conversation.

When I finished writing, I looked up to see it was 10 PM. I finished the dishes, slipped into bed, and was fast asleep within 15 minutes.

Final Thoughts

What was different about these situations?

The obvious answer is my decision to sit down and write about my thoughts in scenario 2 vs my decision to sit down and watch TV in scenario 1. Yes that impacted the outcome, but it really came down to decisions I made hours, days, and weeks before each of these moments that impacted my behavior.

In scenario one, I had spent the majority of the day alone at my laptop. I didn’t exercise and didn’t socialize with anyone. I didn’t have any healthy food at home and didn’t have any pressing deadlines.

In scenario two, I took many small positive actions leading up to that stressful Thursday night. At the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to my health. On Monday of that week, I signed up for a new gym - I bought a $150 trial membership and committed to 3 workouts per week. So even though I was busy and stressed, I was showing up to that workout class. Since I was getting back into an intense workout routine, I meal-prepped healthy food for the entire week. Therefore when I left that class, having just released a ton of endorphins, I was more likely to choose the healthy food option waiting for me at home than the unhealthy easy option.

Good decisions compound into an upward spiral (setting intentions → exercise → healthy eating → better mental clarity → better decisions), while poor decisions can create a downward spiral (no intentions → no exercise → no healthy food prepared → worse mental clarity → worse decisions).

Eating those chocolate peanut butter bites while watching TV gave me a quick surge in dopamine in the moment, but I’ll take the dopamine hit that I felt at 10 PM on that Thursday night after gaining clarity about my ensuing difficult conversation every single time.

Thank you for reading! As always please reply and let me know what resonated, what didn’t, or what you question. I love chatting about this stuff!

Cheers,

Andrew