A Small Pivot Can Bring a Big Reward

Two great people that I follow (Joel Marion & James Clear) shared the same idea in different words: A small pivot today can make a HUGE difference in the future.

This concept is so powerful. First I’ll give you an example from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits: If a plane taking off in Los Angeles, California that is headed to New York, shifts its position 3.5 degrees south, it will end up instead in Washington D.C! That’s a shift of a few feet of direction, and you wind up halfway down the country.

The same goes with your life. And I’ll give an example of my own life to further illustrate this: I dedicated roughly 1 hour per day to creating a brand on Amazon (Zulay Kitchen) back in 2015. This was simply an additional activity instead of mind-numbingly being on social media, or watching T.V., I just spent at least 1 hour on learning Amazon, figuring out how to produce a product, creating a brand name, researching a good product, etc. etc. etc.

It became a habit of mine to just add 1 hour per day to do something to move forward in this venture. Eventually our first product (A lemon squeezer) became the best seller on Amazon, and now has over 27,000 reviews.

The small idea of a company formed in the time of a small time at night, the decision to work on creating something useful for people, in hopes to be valuable and be rewarded monetarily for it, paid off. 1 hour per day dedicated to anything consistently could pay off big.

In my case, I was able to replace my day job income in about 2 years after starting that 1 hour per day habit. For my birthday in 2017, I gave my notice at my computer programming job, which was a fantastic work place where I learned a lot and had fun.

1 hour per day became something big enough where it paid off to put a bit more time and effort into it, and eventually became my full time job. That company which was born out of a small habit change has just hit the Inc 5000 list, coming in at #159 in the top growing 5000 companies in the U.S. We even made a huge life-size working model of our Milk Frother for fun.

That was never my goal, but simply making the decision to dedicate time and continually progress has paid off in ways that I hardly ever dreamed of.