How You Do Anything

A few weeks ago the cashier at my local coffee shop took my order. I requested a cappuccino to go and she was crestfallen. “Do you have time to have it here? It will taste so much better out of a ceramic mug. I’ll make it for you myself.” I agreed.

She relieved the current barista and made her creation. I received a steaming hot coffee with a beautiful leaf pattern in the foam – perfect, deliberate, created with care. She was right, it tasted wonderful.

Recently, she was promoted to manager. And this does not surprise me.

Because how you do anything is how you do everything.

Greatness isn’t something that shows up out of nowhere. It grows out of the small, invisible, consistent choices we make every day.

The way you answer emails when you're tired. The way you listen when you're busy. The way you work when no one's watching.

These aren't separate from your character. They are your character.

The executive who can't successfully reorganize her company first failed to organize her thoughts. The entrepreneur whose business model collapses often ignored small integrity lapses long before.

We like to imagine there's a special approach we'll magically activate when facing our biggest challenges. A reserve tank filled with discipline, focus, and care that we'll tap into when it really matters.

But our brains don't work that way.

What we're really building in each moment is a neural superhighway – patterns of thought and action that get paved in our brains and become increasingly automatic. The small choices we make daily aren't just preparing us for the big ones; they're determining how we'll approach them.

There's something both terrifying and liberating about this truth. Terrifying because there are no small moments – each one contributes to who we're becoming. Liberating because excellence doesn't require some mysterious transformation. It just requires bringing your best self to the mundane.

Want to change your life? Start by changing how you make your bed. Want to transform your leadership? Begin with how you send a text message. Want to reinvent your future? Look at how you spend the next five minutes.

Big challenges don’t ask us to be different. They ask us to be more of who we already are.