This Is Your Day

Is it possible for a tiny decision to make a big impact? Surprisingly, infinitesimal self-help practices can be effective, when bigger commitments will fail.

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Key points

• Concerted efforts to change make sense, can work, but sometimes fail when we can’t meet expectations.
• In some cases, seemingly insignificant efforts can be paradoxically useful.
• The butterfly effect, from chaos theory, explains how small nudges can lead to big changes.
• A small change in mindset early in the day could alter the course of one’s life, over time.

Perhaps the way we start out the day, even a tiny decision or practice, could change the course of one’s life. Nonlinear science-chaos theory to be specific-identifies the butterfly effect, which has become a popular if misunderstood buzzword. The concept originated with MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz, who serendipitously discovered the phenomenon while running some weather simulations. He noted that in theory, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world could cause a typhoon somewhere far distant.

Little decisions we make can reverberate profoundly. Movies and books are full of this kind of story, but we…