One Repeated Action: The Key to Your
Next Breakthrough is Shockingly Simple

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #535: One Repeated Action: The Key to Your Next Breakthrough is Shockingly Simple

Jeff Sanders
What if I told you that running a marathon is actually easy?

All you have to do is take one step.

Oh, and do that again and again and again about 40,000 times.

That's it.

Have fun.

Okay, you might call me crazy or you may have caught on to a principle of success that honestly evades most people.

Achieving many grand goals comes down to nothing more than doing one thing as many times in a row as it takes to get what you want.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 535.

One repeated action.

The key to your next breakthrough is shockingly simple.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

In the episode this week, I'll break down the surprisingly simple strategy of repetition, why doing one thing over and over again is so effective, and how you can nearly guarantee your next breakthrough without overthinking, perfectionism, or simply working too hard.

Let's dig in.

Sales and Trails.

This is the mantra of my health and wealth, my fitness and my business.

This is the heartbeat of my daily life.

Sales and Trails.

It's a simple phrase that embodies my daily mission.

Hit my numbers over and over again.

Now in my case, sales equates directly to the growth of my business and yes in terms of actual dollars.

Trails is my time in nature, that's hiking and running and time outside.

It's the health component of my life.

What is your heartbeat?

What is your daily mantra?

What speaks to the heart of what you're striving to achieve?

Our goal here on this podcast is to identify not just your grand goals, not just your daily routines, but your specific area of focus.

A goal you want to achieve or a problem you want to solve.

And then, according to the episode's idea this week, is we want to find one repeated action to move you forward with more speed and efficiency than anything else ever could.

Now I'll be honest, this is not the first time I have thought this kind of process through in terms of what if there was one repeated action to do over and over and over again and get the results I want.

But I've never really broken down this process before on this podcast.

If you've heard my show any time in the last 10 years, you've definitely heard me at some point mention this idea that a marathon is 40,000 individual steps.

I love to use that phrase and that stat all the time because it just speaks to me.

It really says, "Wait a minute.

A marathon is not a marathon.

It is a group of smaller activities."

In the case of this actual event, actual physical steps.

And those physical steps, when taken in repetition in a confined amount of time, add up to what we call a marathon.

But that's just a pretty arbitrary title for what that is.

Individual steps is you moving yourself forward.

In the case of a marathon, it's hopefully about your fitness and your goals to be healthier and more energetic and all these great things that you get from running.

But what else in your life could use that same mentality?

We'll go back to my mantra here, sales and trails.

Well, the sales of my business ultimately comes down to repeated business, repeated sales, repeated actions.

It's the same things over and over and over again.

In the case of what I do, yes, that involves public speaking and podcasting and online courses and all these great things I'm involved in.

But in your life, in your business, in your work, with your personal goals, odds are whatever it is you're focusing on could be broken down ideally into one or two very simplistic concepts that when repeated can scale.

The compound effect kicks in and the magnificent potential for success becomes realized because you did the work.

So let's break down one repeated action.

Why this next potential breakthrough for you is so simple, of course, in theory, but yet potentially so challenging in execution.

Let's begin by discussing this surprisingly simple strategy.

I'm going to begin with this idea of repetition and how this could scale for you.

The first example we'll break down is going to be running.

I use this all the time because it always works.

So if you know me, you know that I love to use this.

Running a marathon is a goal that a lot of people set for themselves.

It's a bucket list item.

I have run dozens of marathons in my life, none recently, but a whole bunch of my late twenties and early thirties, and it's a fantastic goal to have.

Now, if you ask any running coach, any fitness coach, how do you track your progress?

What does it mean to train for a marathon?

Let's forget the actual race day itself.

We all know that if you run 26.2 miles and cross the finish line, you get a medal, you've run a marathon, ta-da.

That's not the question.

Our question is, where are you now and what does it take to get there?

And what it takes is training.

What it takes is repetition.

And when you're going to be training, there's a specific way you can define what that means, depending on what your goal happens to be.

In the world of fitness, in the world of running, it is very common to track your progress in terms of miles per week.

That is how many miles you ran in seven days.

Now you may track it in miles per day if that's where you're at or maybe miles per month, but it doesn't really matter.

You're going to track miles.

Why miles?

You could also track other things.

How much did you stretch?

How many weights did you lift?

How many books did you read about running?

These are all great things, but they're not directly targeted towards the goal you have set.

I want to back this up for a second.

When I'm talking about one repeated action, we're talking about a goal you have set and a specific action to take to get there.

What I am talking about is direct forward motion.

If you were to set a marathon as a goal, you could choose dozens, if not hundreds, of possible strategies and tactics and ideas, all of which could support you running a marathon, but most of which would not actually push you directly to the finish line.

When you track miles per week, you are actually asking the question, "How do I train directly for the end result I have set?"

Because let's be honest, running a marathon involves running.

Shocker, right?

It doesn't involve hiking, although you may be walking some.

It doesn't involve weightlifting, although you do need good strong muscles.

It does not involve stretching, although you should be flexible.

There is one specific action.

In the case of a marathon, the action is running, which means what you're going to be tracking in the most important sense is how much you run.

That's it, right?

How much do you run as you train for the race?

Once again, all the other strategies are helpful and good and possibly necessary, but the most important measurement, the most important thing to track is how many miles you ran.

And as that number grows, you get closer and closer to your goal.

So with any goal you have set, you have to ask the question, "What is the one thing such that by doing it over and over and over again, I am most likely to move directly towards my finish line?"

Yes, once again, in the case of running, you can stretch, you can read books, you can hire coaches, you can go for a hike, you can go mountain climbing, you can do a thousand other things that are not running.

But guess what?

The strategy, the skill you need to gain is the ability to run a long distance.

And so if you're going to do anything on any given day to train for this race, it's going to include running, you're going to track those miles, and you're going to improve how many miles per week you can do over time.

That's it.

We don't want to overcomplicate this.

The intentional simplicity of this episode is probably annoying, right?

You probably think, "Well, Jeff, you're saying the same thing a thousand times in a row."

I kind of am, and I'm doing so for a reason.

We, and by we, I mean me, tend to overcomplicate things.

We overthink things.

We are perfectionists.

We want to make sure we do everything just right.

Like that's how I tend to operate in so many ways.

But that's a silly waste of time in most cases.

In most cases, for the goals you have set, you could break it down to a single activity.

And if that single action, which becomes a habit, is then repeated over time, and you just nail that one thing over and over again, and you improve that main skill set over and over, get really good at that thing over and over, you're going to make faster progress than by doing the 10 other things you could be doing all combined together.

That's where the potential lies.

So this first example of simplicity and repetition, we'll use fitness because it's a great example for most people.

Most of us have trained for something.

We have tried to lose weight, build muscle, run a certain race.

All of that can be tracked with a single simplistic metric.

In this case, miles per week.

Now, another example could be growing a business.

And if you're trying to make money, you're trying to enter a new industry, you want to grow something to make it profitable for you and your teammates.

Well, ultimately, you could probably track those actions down to a single action that you do on repetition.

And that single action, usually with a business, is going to involve some kind of a sales call or marketing system, something that when repeated brings in the leads you need to turn those leads into prospects, those prospects become clients and those clients pay you money.

In a general sense, it's kind of how it works, right?

The sales and marketing process ultimately comes down to a few key activities that you do in repetition, in mass over time.

And when scaled, they produce the business that you need to become a profitable enterprise.

I don't want to oversimplify business.

Business is a lot more complicated than that.

Or is it, is it actually more complicated than that?

I don't think it has to be.

I think that when we tend to overthink things, we might think, well, I need to be on social media all the time.

I need to be doing X, Y, Z activities because I read 20 books last month about growing a business and I've got 10,000 action steps.

No, no, you don't.

You do not have 10,000 action steps.

You have 10,000 distracting ideas.

That's what you have.

You read 20 books that have now distracted and confused you.

I'm talking from experience here.

This is what I have done to myself so many times over the years where I'll take a certain goal that I have and I will just bombard myself with information.

I'll read every book, watch every YouTube video, just consume content left and right.

And you know what happens?

Yes, I'm more knowledgeable, but guess what?

I'm also overwhelmed too.

I know too much.

I have too many ideas and therefore I do nothing or very little.

The goal of all of this is not overwhelm.

It's shocker, right?

It's not overwhelm.

It's not inaction.

It's not paralysis by analysis.

That's not the goal.

The goal is simplicity.

The goal is to specifically identify the finish line that you want.

So let's say it's growing a business.

You might set a certain revenue goal.

I want to have six figures in sales in the next year.

Awesome.

What are you going to do every single day to hit that goal?

What is the one repeated action you're going to do every single day to hit that goal?

It's going to be one thing.

It might be two.

Okay, fine.

But it's going to be a very small number of activities that you're going to do a thousand times in a row.

And then it works.

You ultimately end up growing a business and making the money you wanted because you did the work that got there.

Third example.

Let's move now towards daily routines.

This podcast, the 5a miracle, of course, is all about your habits and what are habits, repeated actions, doing the same thing a billion times in a row.

And knowing that if you did that, you're going to get better results than the other repeated actions you may have been doing that were not producing the results you want.

All we're talking about here is a slight pivot in your daily actions, whether it's your morning routine, your fitness routine, your work routine, your sales calls routine.

These are all based on repeated habits.

So this third example with your daily rhythm, you may ask the question, well, how do I improve my morning routine?

I want to adopt Jeff Sanders 5a miracle.

So what do I do to make that happen?

Well, of course, the very first thing you could do is adopt a 5am wake up call.

Now let's say, for example, you wanted to improve that routine over time.

Well, then you need to track somehow some metric that indicates whether you are successful or not in that goal.

So an example of 5am miracle, you may ask the question, how many days per week did I wake up successfully at 5am and did something with my life at 5am besides just roll over and fall back asleep?

That becomes the metric, your wake up time and the activity you did when you first woke up.

In the most simplistic sense, that's what the 5am miracle is asking of you.

What time will you wake up and what will you do right away?

When you track that metric over time and you see your progress, you can see, well, you know, last Tuesday was five 30 and then Wednesday was five 15 and Thursday was five Oh five by Friday.

I had a five o'clock wake up and I went and did my morning run and had a little bit of yoga and a coffee and off I went to work that day.

And then that same process, that same rhythm and routine was reestablished on Saturday and Sunday.

That's right over the weekend too.

And then again on Monday and Tuesday, I saw myself waking up earlier and earlier until I hit my ideal time and I did my ideal activity and look at this chart.

Look at this graph, look at this spreadsheet.

You can see my progress over time of the wake up time when it happened, the activity that I did, the results I got from that activity.

Maybe I worked on a book that I was writing.

Maybe I had a personal project or hobby.

I did something valuable with that time and here it is measured, managed on paper.

You can see the results as they stack up.

This is not complicated.

This is a very simplistic measurement system to ask these very basic questions.

What is the goal?

What is the one, maybe two activities that directly move you to where you want to be?

Fourth example, let's imagine you're a student and your goal is to graduate with your next amazing degree.

Well, what is graduation from an educational program anyway?

Well, ultimately it comes down to studying, doing academic work.

My wife is a professor.

She works with doctoral students all day, every day.

And ultimately what they have to do is a set of classes and then they write a big paper, a huge research paper, their dissertation.

And what it comes down to with the classes is you go to class, you do the work required and you get the grade.

But the second half, that dissertation is independent study time.

This is when things get really tricky, right?

I'm not going to oversimplify my wife's job here, but ultimately when she's helping students, it's those two big phases.

Pass your classes and then write this big paper.

And when you're passing classes and you're going to class, you're taking tests, you're writing those papers for class.

Well, ultimately you're just kind of reactive to the teacher, right?

The professor gives you an assignment, you complete it.

But the independent study time, this dissertation, when time is really up to you, how much work you do this week or next month or next year, it's really on you.

So then you have to be the one to say, here's my system.

Here's the paper I'm going to write.

Here are the sections that are included.

Here's the exact deadline for me to hit.

Here are the key daily habits to spend time studying, writing, researching, doing the work to get to the result I want.

So in this case, in this example, to graduate with your next degree, you need deliberate study hours per day or per week.

And deliberate study hours is your metric, right?

How many hours did you spend not just doing the work, but doing deliberate, intentional, focused work towards your goal.

There's a big discussion you could say about activity versus productivity.

Activity is just doing stuff.

Productivity is doing stuff that matters.

Effective productivity is doing stuff that matters, that adds up to something meaningful.

We're trying to get you to a point where the time you spend is focused, it is deliberate, it is intentional, and it sends you in a direct path from where you are to where you want to be.

So in this example, once again, you want to graduate with your next degree.

You will track how many deliberate study hours that you are doing on a recurring basis.

Fifth example.

Let's imagine you want to copy people like me who have spent time writing and publishing books in the past.

And you want to write your own book.

You want to be an author.

Well, any writer will tell you that there is a very common metric to write more, whether it's a paper for class, an article, a whole book.

And that metric is word count per day.

Word count is your one repeated action.

And so on a Monday morning, if you're going to write, let's say 500 words a day, well, then your five-day miracle on a Monday might include an early wake up time.

You then write your 500 words for the day.

The day is done.

You check that box.

You move on.

On Tuesday, you do the exact same thing again.

You're up early.

You're writing.

You put in your 500 words.

You check the box.

You move on.

Wednesday, wake up early, write 500 words, check the box, move on.

You see how this gets kind of exhausting, but also that's the rhythm we're trying to establish.

Now, hopefully, whatever system you're building here is sustainable.

It's reinforcing.

It's energizing because you're choosing activities that bring life back into you, not activities that just burn you out.

So if your goal is to become a writer, to put that time in to write 500 words a day as an example, well, that's a good goal to set because 500 words is not that many.

It's manageable.

And also it's a heck of a lot more than zero words a day, which is how many words a day most writers write.

Yeah, most writers don't write very often.

And so if your goal is to become a writer or a published author or anything in that same spectrum, you're going to have to track how much quantity of writing you're doing.

Now, this is another good pausing point here.

In this process, we're not talking about quality.

Not really.

We're really talking about quantity.

Now the last example about deliberate study hours.

Yes, that does increase the quality over time, but it starts with a lower quality, high quantity metric.

I'll also go back to the example of exercise.

Yes.

If you're extremely in great shape, you're awesomely fit, you've run and lifted weights your whole life, then the intensity and the quality of your workouts are probably top notch.

But if you're a beginner or you're out of shape or you've been injured or you're restarting, well, the quality of the workout might be kind of poor, but the goal is quantity.

How many workouts are you doing?

How long are you putting the time in?

You've got to get back to the gym again and again, back to the trail and back into the pool, back to the workout.

Quantity wins.

Word count per day as an author is just about repetition.

Show up again and again, do the work again and again.

Put in the time.

Do the work.

Do it again.

Do it again.

Do it again.

Initially, the goal will only be quantity.

Over time, it will include quality because you're going to get better at this.

Your skills are going to improve and then all of a sudden, it's not just 500 words.

It's 500 really great words. 500 amazing words.

Then maybe over time, it's 750 or a thousand words a day.

You can get a little more ambitious as you go along, but you've got to start somewhere that is manageable and that focuses initially on quantity and the successful checking of that box to go on to the next day.

Example number six.

Now, let's imagine you want to become a YouTuber.

Your goal is to get into social media, hot and heavy, and you want to make sure you are recording awesome videos to put onto the internet as often as possible to grow your personal brand, to build your business, whatever the case may be.

Well, once again, the same thing shows up.

Quality over quantity.

I cannot tell you how many videos on YouTube I have watched that were recorded with some of the lowest quality you could possibly imagine.

Terrible lighting, terrible audio, no real thought going into these videos, and yet for some reason, I watched the videos anyway.

Why?

The answer is because the person who recorded the video did something right.

They hit record and then they published what they recorded.

That might sound like there's a bunch of low quality nonsense on YouTube, and yes, that is true.

However, if your goal is to become a better YouTuber, a better videographer, a better performer, broadcaster, podcaster, whatever the case may be, you're only going to get better by doing the thing poorly and doing it a lot, being bad a lot, and publishing you being bad a lot over and over again.

Once again, quality will come later.

Quantity is first.

You've got to produce a lot of nonsense, and then you're going to get better.

The quality will improve.

You'll figure out lighting.

You'll figure out better cameras.

You'll have a better script.

Everything will improve.

If you heard this podcast when it first launched, and you may have, it wasn't very good.

Yeah, it was kind of rough.

I mean, heck, even this episode right now that you're hearing in a few years, I'm going to look back and be upset.

I'm going to be mad at myself for producing a low quality episode, even if this episode is by definition higher quality than what I used to produce.

That's the goal.

Improvement over time.

If I'm not mad at myself in a few years about the quality of this episode, I didn't do my job.

I didn't get better.

The whole goal of this is improvement over time, and repetition makes that possible.

All right, example number seven.

Now let's imagine you want to improve a relationship.

It could be with a spouse, a partner, someone you want to really get to know in a more intimate way.

Well, the goal here is to define a metric that really exemplifies your relationship getting better.

This is not as clear cut as improving sales in a business or miles per week in a marathon training plan.

Relationships and emotion and love and all these things are less tangible, right?

They're a lot more emotional, a lot more kind of up in the air.

So what does that mean for you?

It doesn't mean it's a goal you can't pursue.

It doesn't mean you can't get better at this.

It just simply means you define what it means to have a great relationship with some clarity, with some specificity, and then you nail down what could I do on a consistent basis, whether it's once a day, a few times a week, whatever the case is, where you're going to improve what you have.

So in the case of a relationship with a spouse or partner, you might simply say, "Let's establish a date night once a week.

Let's establish one-on-one time to guarantee it's just you and me making this happen.

A lovingly focused one-on-one time once a week.

You can start there and let that grow over time."

That's really all this is, but the consistency and the commitment to it, that's where the magic happens.

It's not one date night that was wonderful.

It's the consistency of saying, "I'm going to be here every week for you.

I'm going to always show up for you.

I'm going to always be here because I'm committed to this and I want this to be better and be as good as it possibly could be."

So an intentionality around that just simply says, "I will identify certain key activities that allow us to be better as a couple, and then we're going to commit to doing those things, or at the very least, I will commit to doing my part in these things as often as possible to make sure that I'm getting my half of this relationship in the best way I possibly can."

Years ago, I heard a speech from Darren Hardy, who is the author of The Compound Effect and was the former publisher of Success Magazine.

I remember this one talk he gave that I still have a mental issue with, but I get his point.

I'll just break it down for you.

What he did was he asked an audience he was talking to, "Who is responsible for your marriage?

How much are you responsible?

Is it 20%, 50%, 75%?"

Ultimately, the answer that Darren gave was 100%.

You are 100% responsible for your relationship, which literally allows for 0% on the other side.

Now, the point was not to say that it's not a give and take.

The point was not to argue against a partnership or a yin and a yang.

The point was to say, "If this matters to you, you are ultimately responsible for it."

Now, that could be a relationship, it could be a business, it could be a personal goal.

The intention behind this was responsibility.

It was owning what you want and saying, "I'm going to do everything in my power to make this the best possible scenario that I can."

From that perspective, it's going to change, most likely, how you approach all of your goals and relationships and other things going forward where you say, "This is on me.

If this is not where I want it to be, I'm going to do what it takes to make it happen."

There are potential flaws with this line of thinking, but this was Darren's point.

I pretty holistically agree with it.

I think there's a lot of potential here for massive growth, especially if you've been the kind of person to point fingers, to blame, to find fault in others.

If we turn that around and we look at ourselves and ask the question, "Can I do better?"

The answer is always, "Yes."

That becomes the focus.

What's a positive action I can take to move myself and others forward?

Then you wind up with better relationships, better businesses, better health, all these great things.

All right.

Finally, example number eight.

Let's imagine you want to improve your diet.

You want to lose some weight.

You want to finally take care of your nutrition.

Well, the same thing is true here.

You need a metric to measure every single day.

Now, depending on what kind of health coach you work with or what your personal goals happen to be, yes, you could be looking at how much weight you're losing per day.

I don't take that same approach though.

The way that I tend to think about weight loss in this example is that it's a side effect of the actions you're taking per day.

The question really is, what are you doing?

Not what happens because of what you're doing.

That's a result.

That's a lagging indicator.

We're looking for what you are committed to controlling.

What are you doing every day?

You could argue that one of the metrics you could track would be how many nutrient dense calories per day do you consume?

Is it in the range that you have set for yourself along with you and your health coach, you and your doctor?

You're looking at this and asking the question, what is the target goal per day?

What do I control?

What am I trying to achieve?

Then you set out to hit that goal.

In that example, if you were to hit the target range for nutrient dense calories per day, you would most likely see a side effect of weight loss.

From that perspective, once again, we define the goal.

I want to improve my diet.

I want to lose 20 pounds or whatever the case is.

Therefore, here's what I'll do each and every day.

Here are the measurements I will have, what I will track.

If I hit those goals each and every day, then over time, I will eventually get where I'm trying to go in a direct path towards that finish line.

Everything here is a series of repeated habits.

Every example here is a goal broken down with a single repeated action that will absolutely provide results.

Literally all you have to do is repeat that one action until you get what you want.

And if along the way you decide, you know what, this one action I chose isn't quite working, well then you just pivot, make a new choice, and then move in that direction.

We're not quitting.

We're not going to give up on this.

We're just going to make a small tweak and off we go.

But we have to begin with something, a clear finish line and a clear repeated action to get there.

Now if you want to dig in a lot more into this concept, there are definitely some great books to read.

The first of which is The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papazan.

It's a phenomenal book about identifying the one thing that makes an incredible difference.

Now in those examples, it may not be a repeated action.

It may be a single finite choice, but just keep in mind the idea here is repetition and habit building and use the one thing strategy to take you in that direction.

Another great example of course is Darren Hardy's book, The Compound Effect, which definitely leverages this concept of taking those repeated actions over time that eventually scale, have massive growth eventually when the big hockey stick moment kicks in.

Now from that perspective, you may say, well, that's awesome.

I can read some books, but what if I still don't know what the one action is for the specific goal that I'm trying to achieve?

What if the goals I have are not the ones that Jeff listed here on the episode this week?

Well, the best thing to do to start this process, take your best guess.

Just guess.

I say that because odds are you probably already have some good guesses in mind.

You may not know the exact perfect one, but you probably know a good one.

You probably have an idea of where to start and that's all we're asking for here.

You start now with your best guess and you just see what happens.

You are willing to do some trial and error to do some experimentation to find out what works, what doesn't and why.

It's not very scientific, but of course your gut is wiser than you realize and you want to be able to leverage what you have going for you and just start because the actions are going to result in the experience and the knowledge that's being gained from all that work.

That's where the magic happens.

It's in the arena, doing the work on the court, on the field, whatever sports analogy you want to use here.

Get in the game, right?

That's the goal.

Get in the game.

If you have to guess to do it, fine.

Guess away because you're going to learn a lot very quickly.

You're going to pivot and move forward.

Now, yes, you can shorten the learning curve quite a bit by hiring a coach.

Yes, read a few great books, talk to a smart friend or mentor or mastermind group or whatever the case is.

Those are all great things, but of course you need to get in the game to learn what to do and then pivot from there.

There is one more clarifying point I want to make sure that I mentioned that I probably forgot earlier, which has to do with what the specific tiny action is you're going to do per day.

That's the key point.

Tiny.

Think of the one step in a marathon or one sales call in a business.

By themselves, those actions are very easy.

I mean, literally a single step forward, a single phone call, those aren't hard.

The goal here is not to shoot too far and choose something that's overly complicated or difficult or would take a tremendous amount of effort to do.

No, in fact, it's exactly the opposite.

The action here needs to be able to be scaled over time in mass, large quantities, which means the individual action is tiny and easy and almost so easy, it seems impossible not to do it.

When that's the case, you're so much more likely to actually do it and then do it again and again and again.

So don't overcomplicate this.

Don't make it too difficult.

In fact, go the exact opposite direction and intentionally ask yourself what is so easy that it would be impossible to not do it.

Start there and scale.

Now, of course, the long term goal here is to build your life around this one action to the best of your ability, especially if you believe in its potential.

So you want to build your calendar around your guaranteed execution of this repeated action.

And then, of course, over time, you're tracking that progress, you're tweaking, you're pivoting as needed, and then eventually you get the rewards.

But for all this to be true, we have to first know what the action is and then build a life around the guaranteed execution of it.

The calendaring component here is critical.

You have to be able to make sure it's on your calendar and it will happen over and over again.

And if you can't put it on your calendar, it's probably not going to work.

So keep tweaking and keep modifying until it can fit there and fit there well.

Over and over again.

Now, as a final few thoughts here, I just want to remind you that what gets measured gets managed.

That tracking is everything here because the data tells you a story.

When you track the habit you want to improve, you can forget your other habits for now because you're tracking the habit that matters the most.

And you focus on that one area until you master it and then and only then can you bring in additional habits.

And to keep things even more simplistic, use a tracker like a very basic Excel spreadsheet.

Could be an app on your phone you use every day, a notebook on your desk.

It doesn't matter what the tracker is.

It just has to be consistent and baked into your life with whatever system you choose to use.

And then if you want to go the full Monty here, you want to review this on a regular basis to, of course, improve over time.

The way that I view this is I don't want to get married to the original idea too strongly.

If the system needs to be tweaked and reviewed and improved, I'm going to do it because pivoting is part of the process.

That's it.

Choose your goal.

Guarantee the goal in the calendar.

Track the goal.

Put it into a system you're going to use every day.

Review that system.

Sounds like a lot.

It does.

But when you choose something you care about, a goal that means something to you, none of this is hard.

None of this is work.

This is just part of the process of making it happen.

And honestly, it's a lot of fun.

So just get to it, make it happen.

And I'm excited to hear about your results.

If you want to email me what you're working on, I'd love to hear about it.

jeff@jeffsanders.com.

Yes, I read every email.

Yes, I would love to hear what you're up to.

And for the action step this week, identify your one action to repeat and get to it.

In your pursuit of your grand goal, there is likely a single action or small set of actions that when repeated to the extreme, will bring about extreme and extraordinary results.

Your mission is to identify that action and build your life around the repetition of it.

It's not that sexy, I know, but it's a solution that absolutely works.

Now be sure to subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app or become a VIP member of the 5am Miracle community by getting the premium ad free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

And that's all I've got for you here on The 5 AM Miracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and all that fun begins bright and early.

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