How Your Micro-Decisions Affect Your Macro-Goals

When we reflect back on our life, we tend to focus on milestones—significant events, achievements or losses. The day-to-day details usually escape us, and we might dismiss them as mundane or unimportant. But in reality, the little details in life are what lead us to the milestones, and shape our entire life. Like words on a page that come together to create a best-selling novel, moments make up the story of our life.

Think of the last time you sat down to write something. You would have had an idea or a goal in mind for what you wanted to communicate and, whether you were aware of it or not, you followed a precise method to articulate yourself properly. First, you find the right word for what you want to say. Then, you create a sequence of carefully selected words to form a delicately crafted sentence that conveys meaning. A series of those nicely crafted sentences make up a paragraph, which accumulates to determine the quality of your writing and sets the direction of the meaning of your email, or essay, or book.

The choice

You might not think that choosing your words carefully is important. It can be easy to not care about which words you select. You might say that being vigilant with your words is overrated, requires too much effort, and decide you won’t bother. But once you think and act like your words aren’t important, what you are doing is that you reject any responsibility. You leave the burden of interpretation on someone else because you do not have to bear the consequences of the words you chose.

Or, you might decide that your words have the power to shape the world around you. By simply choosing even just one word, you become fully attentive to the surrounding words and to the meaning you want your words to convey. Your choice matters because the meaning your words carry has a domino effect that impacts on the one who will read your words in ways you cannot fully grasp.

So, do you choose your words to be meaningful, or meaningless? That is the choice you need to make.

Writing the story of your life

Imagine your life as a string of moments tied together in the way words connect to form a sentence. Your life is something vast, in the sense that it can go in so many various directions that you are not even able to comprehend. And while you cannot predict all the circumstances in your life, within your reach lies the choice of how you react in any given day; how attentive you are to every single moment and how aware you become of your choices in those moments. The importance (meaning) you give to your decisions in those moments is what defines your day. Consequently, your days define your months and your months define your years. And that's your life.

How you choose to design every moment in your life is the same as to how you decide to find the right word for what you want to say. How you spend your days, your weeks, your months, your years, your life; every decision has the power to alter the destination and the meaning of your life.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you design yourself to be.

Each day, gives you 86400 seconds as a chance to orient yourself and your life through your micro-decisions.

So, how attentive do you choose to be in the next micro-decision of your day?