How you do anything is how you do everything. (The importance of meticulousness)

Have you ever stopped and thought about how you approach the small tasks that you do every single day? If not you are probably never going to become successful at anything. Let me explain why with an example:

Do you know where your keys are at this very moment, have you put them back in a place where you know you could grab them without thinking? When you use something, do you put it back in the right place straight away, or do you just throw it on the floor hoping you will magically find them when you need them again?

This is a problem I see most of you having, you are not meticulous with the small things you are doing, you are not careful and precise in the small tasks you do each day, and it ensures that you will never achieve your bigger goals.

The reason is simple: the way you handle small tasks is an indication of how you will handle the bigger, more important tasks.

Let me tell you how you can start being more meticulous with the small things in life, and how this is going to help you achieve every big goal you have.

'How you do anything is how you do everything.'

This blog is based on the simple concept: how you do anything, is how you do everything. By this, they mean, how you do small things indicates how you will do the big things.

So if this is true, the simplest way to ensure that you will handle the bigger things well is to be more careful, more precise, and more meticulous with the smaller tasks. It’s about the tiny things you do every day that you think don’t matter, but do.

Meticulous is the word of the day here, you need to understand what it means and why it is so important, so here is a definition:

Meticulous: Showing great attention to detail; very careful and precise.

So let me give you an example of how sloppy behavior (the opposite of being meticulous) with small tasks indicates how you will perform when it comes to bigger ones:

Right now you have a sim card in your phone. When your sim card would be blocked for any reason and you need to type in your Puk code to activate it again, would you be able to find that code within two minutes?

I can guarantee that for most of you, the answer would be no. You would have to turn your entire room upside down to be able to find it, you would take an hour out of your day to search for it and you’ll end up not finding it anyway.

Yes, I know you could make a call or go to a store and eventually fix it, but this would also at least take 30 minutes to a couple of hours out of your day, just because you couldn’t put something simple somewhere where you knew you could find it.

This is complete amateurism and indicates that you will not be able to run a successful business, let me tell you why:

How can you run a multimillion-dollar company and find order in the chaos that comes with it, if you don’t even have order in your day-to-day life?

So you're saying that you can be chaotic and unorganized in your daily life but extremely organized when it comes to important matters? This is a complete fallacy and you will only make it harder for yourself than it needs to be.

How you execute small tasks indicates how you will perform the big tasks. If you can’t even clean your room and you throw all sorts of stuff on the floor all the time, then this indicates a certain sloppiness in your character that will shine through in anything you do. It quickly becomes a pattern that is difficult to disrupt because your mind is so used to performing actions in a sloppy manner that it will automatically do the same with other, bigger tasks.

Start by executing small tasks meticulously.

To get better and more meticulous with bigger tasks, you first need to start small. Do you know where your keys are, or are they lying all around the house and do you have to look for them every morning? Is your own room a mess and do you have to swim through a pile of garbage just to get to your desk? Is your food in order and do you have an idea of what you’re going to eat that day, or are you just sporadically cracking open a can of beer and eating some easy-to-access food here and there? Do you have everything you are going to do in your calendar all planned out from when you’re going to the gym, working, studying, and having small appointments like at the barbershop?

These things may seem unimportant to the ordinary short-sighted human, but looking at the big picture they show a pattern, and it will bleed into other parts of your life such as reaching your goals, how you do things for others, and what your future will look like.

So it is important to start small. Make sure you have a clean room, make sure you leave your keys in the same place, and put them back there every single day. Make sure that you don’t go on food binging or sporadically eating foods you know you shouldn’t eat, plan out what you’re going to eat for the entire day. Make sure your calendar is all planned out and that you are not behind schedule, missing appointments, or wasting precious time.

How will this improve your life in general?

Being more meticulous in the small aspects of life will improve every big thing that you do and make sure you perform better on more important matters.

But being more meticulous also has two other advantages that you’re going to experience the benefits of for the rest of your life.

Firstly, It will remove distractions.

Because if you clean up after yourself and handle everything with care, your house or whatever will be less messy and you will have less stuff distracting you from what you want to do. Your mind will easily get distracted when you have all kinds of stuff laying around. Maybe you’ll fidget with one of your pens laying around, maybe your mind will wander off thinking about something unrelated to what you were doing.

All of this is keeping you from doing the stuff you're supposed to do. So keep your eyes on the prize and don’t let yourself become distracted by being sloppy with your stuff.

Clean up your room and get back to your focus.

Secondly, it will give you more time.

You may think that it will give you less time because you have to spend more time thinking about what you are doing and you need to spend extra time putting your stuff down in a neat manner instead of just throwing everything on the floor, which seems easier.

But just think about how much time you will spend looking for stuff you didn’t put away with care. Now you have to look for that small thing and you can’t find it and you have to spend an extra 10 minutes or more just trying to find one small thing. And if this happens to you a few times a day, you will lose at least 30 minutes up to an hour searching for things.

In addition to this most people just make a mess of things by being careless and then end up taking a whole day out of their lives just to clean everything up and put everything in order, just to be careless afterward and repeat the same process. This is such a monumental waste of time and you should avoid this at all cost.

Just take those extra 5 minutes every day to and that little extra effort into putting everything where it belongs and where you can find it, cleaning up after yourself, and not only saving you the time of having to clean that schedule a day off to clean everything up, or just to save time by not having to look for things.

It also takes energy away from you and disrupts your focus if you have to search for things, even if you have to look for something for one minute. It disrupts your flow, your focus and distracts you, and makes you perform less in other tasks.