All It Takes Is One Piece of Work to Change Everything in Your Life Forever

A story to inspire the heck out of you, and take you from ordinary to extraordinary

Photo by Siarhei Nester via Pexels

The average person will never create one piece of work that changes their life.

It makes me sad. I’m writing this Substack to make sure you’re not one of those people who dies with regrets. We know we must show up every day for results to happen. Even Johnny-Come-Lately knows that.

What’s misunderstood is what showing up daily means. Let me break it down.

One piece of work that changed my life forever and bent the arc of history

The work that changes everything starts with the work that changes nothing.

I started my writing hobby talking about the latest startups. They read like fanboy press releases. They sucked a**. A year in, on a quiet Sunday, I went into a rage. There was madness inside of me.

I went to my desktop computer and let my hands type while I watched. It was an out of body experience. Angelic on every level. I get chills thinking about the experience. For 1-2 hours I sat there and typed out how I changed my life.

I listed every detail. I wrote with enormous emotion. I didn’t give a f*ck.

Once I was done I hit publish and returned to watching back-to-back Star Wars movies. The next day I woke up. The essay got 84,000 shares on Facebook. Not likes. Not comments. Shares.

This moment might seem like a miracle. Like I’d just won the lottery or been blessed on my nipples by Barack Obama at a cocktail party. That’s how progress looks to average people. One big moment. One strike of luck.

But it wasn’t a sudden blast of energy that produced this work. It was 365 days of feeling like sh*t, grinding out, late nights, and believing no one would ever read a thing and I’d be stuck in my banking call center job forever.

The madness built slowly.

So did the energy.
So did the progress.
So did my writer’s voice.
So did my life story.

This one piece of writing put me on the map. It opened doors. I got my first readers. A few of my work colleagues read it and loved it.

It was the moment I believed I could do anything.

This essay changed the arc of history because it made me want to help normal people have the same experience with writing. I’ve sinced worked with 1000s of writers. And I’ve indirectly inspired hundreds of thousands of other people to write.

The butterfly effect of this movement spreads beyond me. Yesterday someone told me they were in a remote part of Brazil and an essay I wrote was being talked about in a small village. I almost punched myself in the face because I’m a nobody.

I don’t tell you this to impress you because I know you don’t give a damn. I don’t want an Oscar. You can keep the champagne and the millions of followers.

I tell you this because all of us have the power to create one piece of work that changes everything.

Consistency happens when you show up, even when it makes no sense

The dark art of obsession is what drives us to be consistent, almost to the point of madness. It turns on our psychopath mode. It makes us trade social events for quiet nights alone.

Obsession is knowing your work will lead somewhere even when the results don’t show it. It’s not delusion. It’s quiet confidence. Sometimes, I wonder whether it’s a higher power that none of us can explain.

Most people can’t be consistent because they need results to validate themselves, to feel like they matter and have a place in society. They need the dopamine hits. They need to be told “I love your work” or else they slowly burnout.

Burnout isn’t a sign of exhaustion. It’s a sign you’re working on the wrong thing, expecting short-term results you haven’t earned.

When I hear burnout I think “you don’t know how the world works, amigo.”

The world is simple when you break it down. We choose to do one thing. We go all in. We do it every day. We make a difference. We create our legacy in the process. We follow our curiosity. We go from beginner level to mastery.

Every other model of the world is broken. This misunderstanding of how the world works is why society as we know it is broken. I’ve lost faith.

“You touch the pinnacle a few times in your life, at most. And those moments are what make you.”

(Zach Pogrob)

Throughout life there are defining moments.

We intuitively know when we are facing one, but it feels like fear instead of opportunity. So what most do is try to numb the fear or make it go away. Or worse, postpone the fearful decision.

But these moments are what define us.

I watched a movie recently called “Mountain Queen.” It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. I had tears in my eyes at the end. A mother named Lhakpa Sherpa climbs Mt Everest multiple times.

No one cares.

In-between mountain adventures she works at Whole Foods in America. Her husband is a tyrant and beats her. She has three kids with him. To escape his abusive behavior she leaves him and ends up in a homeless shelter with the kids.

To deal with the pain she climbs Mt Everest. The mountain is her therapy. Being on the edge of death is what unlocks her craziness. She makes climbing Mt Everest seem easy. You’d never know thousands of people die trying to do it.

On her 10th summit of Mt Everest her hobby finally changes her life. She gets the type of opportunity she could only dream of with unlimited financial abundance attached.

News and social media saw this one moment. They failed to see her other nine summits of Mt Everest.

The difference is when Lhakpa’s one defining moment came she grabbed it by the bull horns and rode it. She realized she had to make the most of it.

Being face to face with a defining moment isn’t enough. You have to have the self-awareness to back yourself and not psyche yourself out.

Don’t wait for the moment. Engineer it to happen.

Waiting for the right time never works. You’re never ready.

What’s within your control is to show up every day and put the work into your big goal regardless of the current results. You can engineer that one piece of work that changes everything to happen.

Vision + Habit + Consistency + Obsession + Iteration = Life-changing moment

If you leave out any of those parts, especially iteration, your defining moment never happens. You stay stuck. You fall for the evils of luck, hope, someday, and maybe even tearing others down because you couldn’t figure out the game of life.

We all have one piece of work that changes everything. It works out if you do the work and chase your obsession to the point of madness. It’s an unreasonable ask but it makes you into an unreasonable person who gets unreasonable freedom and wealth.

Tell me whether this big idea resonates with you and why in the comments.

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