How Your Daily Choices Compound: Health, Career, Family and Future

Good choices, bad choices, no choices. They all have results, or a lack of results. That is the idea behind my book Choices, and it is the idea behind this whole podcast. In this episode I walk through the eight areas the book covers. One of them is personal, and I want to start there, because it explains why I care about this so much.

When my father was 52, he had a stroke. Over the next thirty years his health got progressively worse. It started with some paralysis on his left side. Then came a walking cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair. I was about 19 or 20 when I started asking myself a question I have never forgotten: how many years past 52 can I go before I have a stroke too?

I am not sharing that for sympathy. I am sharing it because it changed how I make choices, and because most of the business owners I coach are making the same kind of trade I was tempted to make, giving their health to the job. The choices feel small on any given day. They are not small over thirty years.

Why do daily choices matter more than big decisions?

Most leaders think about choices as the big ones: buy the land, sign the contract, hire the superintendent. But your life and your company are shaped by the ordinary ones that nobody sees. What you eat at lunch. Whether you take the stairs. Whether you walk the jobsite or sit in the truck. How you respond to a frustrating call. Whether you write down where you are going or just keep reacting.

Those choices add up, quietly, in whichever direction you are pointing. That is why I do not talk about perfection. I talk about the long game, a commitment to keep choosing better over years. The eight areas below are the places where I see those choices stack up.

1. Your past: does it define your future?

Booker T. Washington said success is measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles overcome. Your past might be good, bad, amazing or catastrophic. Either way it does not define your tomorrow. What separates people is not whether they face difficulty, but how they deal with it.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins names this the Stockdale Principle, after Admiral James Stockdale: keep faith that you will prevail in the end, and at the same time confront the brutal facts of your current reality. Both at once. For a builder, that sounds like looking squarely at the numbers and the mistakes while still believing you can fix them. Then watch the voice that says things will never change for you. The hardest voice to manage is your own.

2. Yourself: what happens when you choose to improve?

You do not need to be like anyone else. The experiences that got you here give you insights nobody else has. Your future is full of blank pages, and I believe in writing on them. If it is not written, it is not real. Write down your hopes and dreams, including the ones people told you were impossible, and start taking baby steps. What do you need to learn? A book, a podcast, a conference, a mentor, a coach?

3. Your health: how do you protect it when you are busy?

Robert Urich said a healthy outside starts from a healthy inside. For me, it is all about the choice, and the commitment to the journey. I do not make great choices every time. Sometimes it is pizza and cake, sometimes it is a salad or a protein shake. The goal is not perfection.

• Water. Fill a bottle every morning and take it with you. If you do not finish it, you still did better than not drinking any.
• Food. Choose baked instead of fried, a salad or a shake sometimes. Small swaps beat giving up everything and quitting the first time you stumble.
• Exercise. Park farther away, take the stairs, walk a couple of laps. I lift weights in my basement for 15 or 20 minutes a few days a week and walk the neighborhood once or twice. When I am traveling for clients I miss it, and the day I am home I get back on schedule.
• Sleep. The goal is seven to eight hours. If your season of life makes that impossible, go to bed a little earlier, read to decompress, and treat the goal as the target.

I have watched people make big, unrealistic promises, like giving up sugar, soft drinks and half the menu all at once, then quit completely the first time they slipped. It is a choice, not a punishment. A business owner who cannot walk the jobsite, or cannot think clearly because they are exhausted, will never reach the impact they want to make. You need this body to get where you are going.

4. Growth: how do you get better than yesterday?

Mark Twain said that twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than the ones you did. Nobody will force you to grow. Start by getting the right people around you. If the people around you keep telling you that you are not good enough, find people who say you can do this and offer to help.

Make your goals visible. I have a story board in my office that I started ten or fifteen years ago, with pictures and a few lines underneath, and I have accomplished many of the things on it. There is also a tool in Traction (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) called a vision tracker for the next 90 days, one year, three, five and ten years. The point is to get it out of your head and where you can see it. And remember, faith without works is dead. When the student is ready the teacher shows up, but there has to be motion on your end.

5. Love: how do you choose how you respond?

Your response is a choice. My grandchild told me recently that someone made her mad. I said time out: being mad is a choice. Your words, your attitude, the affection you give or withhold, all of it is yours. Dr. Joyce Brothers said relationships improve by leaps and bounds when we become encouragers instead of critics. For leaders, this is also emotional intelligence: knowing where you struggle so you can support others.

6. Family: who gets your best hours?

Love your family, spend time with them, be kind, serve each other, and leave no room for regrets, because tomorrow is not promised. Depending on your story, this can feel difficult. But your response is still a choice. If a spouse or kids have slipped to second place, that is because we put them there. There is no guarantee how children turn out, but we can commit to the journey. Is there anything more important?

7. Career: are you doing what you were made to do?

Katharine Whitehorn said to find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for it. Many of us end up working where we started and settle. If money were not the issue, what would you love to do every day? Do not wait for a perfect leap. Consider part-time work or volunteering to get experience. I coach a woman who wanted to work in the spa industry with no background. She wrote it down on her vision tracker, took a part-time job at a spa, and now someone else is paying her to learn the business.

8. Future: what will you write on the blank page?

Heraclitus said no one steps in the same river twice, because it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Where do you want to be in three years? In ten? At 60, 70 or 80? I want to be a breath of fresh air in someone else's journey. No matter where you are today, tomorrow is blank. Start writing.

Your past does not define your tomorrow. Take a baby step, and write down where you are going.