Daily Repetition

People love events and they love results. What they don’t love is the work and the investment of time and effort required to have the chance to experience great events and results. Most people have an event-mindset. Sports are a perfect illustration of this mindset: every weekend stadiums and arenas all over the world are packed with enthusiastic fans, and televised sports is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

All sports—basketball, soccer, you name it—are event-driven. A game is an event in itself, and every game consists of several sub-events: goals, fouls, scores, and celebrations, to name just a few. Audiences and fans love and crave these heightened moments because they create in us a distinct and intoxicating mix of emotions.

It is easy to forget, however, that events are merely an outcome, a product of the hard work done by athletes, daily, weekly, for their whole lives. The event, then, is the tip of the iceberg; the process—the training—that is required to obtain the skill to “produce” events is not visible to the public. The majority of an athlete’s time is spent training and exercising. Each exciting moment of the game represents only a tiny fraction of the time and effort an athlete puts into it. We act as if the actual events and games themselves are the important part—when in fact they are not. The event is a culmination of years of the long, continuous, and often tedious process of training. Anthony Robbins succinctly describes it like this: “People are rewarded in public for what they’ve practiced for years in private.”

Consistent training is not an event; it is a process of continuous improvement broken up into tiny parts. And in the long run, single events are insignificant because the process of consistent training is what leads to results. A player can be lucky in one game, but to be a star, continuous improvement and hard work is required.

Take soccer—or football as it’s called outside the US. Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably among the biggest soccer stars of our time, has been scoring goals consistently for more than a decade. This is not the result of chance. All these events—or goals—are the result of a rigorous, continuous process. As spectators, we only see the payoff: the 30-yard screamer, the soaring home run, or the three-point shot to win the game. We only see the events, and we assign high importance to them—after all, we fans are watching the game to experience these events.

It’s not only in sports where people have an event-mindset. Take startups and budding companies. People think about the key events or milestones in a company’s growth. They think about a company getting funding or people becoming an instant success or millionaires overnight. We call them “lucky” events, and certainly luck may play a role in those circumstances; however, the process of trying various entrepreneurial endeavors, the strenuous work of contacting investors, and the long hours of developing business strategies remain unseen and therefore uncelebrated.

One reason for overlooking the importance of process is that events are concrete, and therefore salient in our brains, making them more cognitively available. Process, on the other hand, can be rather boring and mundane. Process, by definition, is gradual.

It lacks glitter or flash, but process is the foundation of consistent big events.

The process is what will establish a firm root system, so like the oak tree, everything will be in place for you to reach a high level of growth. Single events, like a home run, can be the result of luck, but a career batting average of .342 cannot be the result of anything but process.

The process-mindset is essential to the HabitSystem because it allows us to keep focus on the process, the habit, even when we are tempted to seek a shortcut to the big event. When we think about habits, it is of utmost importance to focus not on single events, but on developing and maintaining a process-oriented mindset. Embracing the process-mindset means focusing attentively on every task you do, not the intended result.

Because process is gradual, the only way to achieve a process-mindset is to embrace consistency—to do something every single day.

Daily Repetition is the key to mastery. Daily Repetition is the single biggest determiner of long-term success. Daily Repetition embraces a process-mindset. When you do something every day, your focus lies on doing the task, not on the desired result. Over time, results will inevitably come. It may not always be evident. It may seem like nothing is happening. But trust the process, because the results from Daily Repetition, as well as your mindset, are working hard behind the scenes. Boiled down, Daily Repetition is the most succinct summary of the HabitSystem. Consistent Daily Repetition is what the HabitSystem is all about. Jim Rohn put it like this: “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” This is what the HabitSystem is all about.

In the grand scheme of things, one day is insignificant. On the other hand, your life and your success are the sum of every day you have lived. This means two things. First of all, a single day does not matter much when viewed in isolation. Trying to do something big on a single day is a bankrupt idea—it will not work and will put you into a position in which you can’t succeed. One day is not enough to create something remarkable from scratch.

The second meaning to each day being insignificant but over time adding up, however, is that doing something consistently every single day for a year, or even a decade, will produce tremendous results. That’s where success is made. In the grand scheme, the only variable you can consistently control is what you do every single day. If you are consistently unproductive, nothing good will happen in the long term. But, if you consistently put effort into every single day, those efforts stack and compound, and big things are possible. This idea is not new or revolutionary. Aristotle already knew: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We can put it differently and say it like this:

Every person is the sum of what they do each day. If you do good things every single day, something good must happen.

Of course, chance plays a crucial role in everyone’s life, but chance is something outside of our control. However, what we do every day, and how we make decisions, is inside of our control. And if we make good decisions every single day, inevitably, something good must happen. Bad luck may prevent us from succeeding every single time but small setbacks should not affect us in the long run. If we do great things every day, success is inevitable.

Thus, if you want to change your life, you have to develop consistent good habits, every single day—not tomorrow, not once a week, but every single day.