Konstantinos Karypidis

The Domino Effect

Konstantinos Karypidis

The Domino Effect

Hello! Some short thoughts I wanted to share…

Every year during November at Leeouvarnten Netherlands, the “Domino Day” takes place. On November 13, 2009 a group called Weijers Domino Productions, managed to shed 4,491,863 dominoes breaking the previous record and producing energy more than 94,000 joules which is – more or less – the energy produced by a normal sized man if he does 545 push-ups!

To put it differently… The whole energy I am talking about, was produced by the fall of a single piece of domino. What the group Weijers Domino Productions did, was to set up millions of domino pieces in the right place and in a perfect way and then pushed the first piece. To this idea add the following fact that Lorne Whitehead wrote in 1983 in the American Journal of Physics; a piece of domino, can bring down another piece, which is 50% larger. You can watch a video of this demonstration right here.

Can you imagine the applications that these ideas could have into our lives? Everyone tries to succeed in big plans, huge goals, hard challenges. We all try to achieve something which is great and more often than not, is as if we try to push – metaphorically speaking – a huge piece of domino, something which is neither necessary nor feasible. We all know that there are walls far too big to push them directly. So why not taking advantage of the domino effect concept? An approach to success – any kind of success – could be the following: Align perfectly all the pieces that you can manage easily with all the pieces you want to bring down. Then push the first piece.

What are the pieces you can manage? The fundamentals as I call them. Your diet, your sleep and the exercise you are having are the most important ones. Then there are your thoughts, your self-talk, the images you keep on your mind, the vocabulary you are using and the people you are spending your time with. Your habits in a single word. We all are the product of our habits, of what we repeatedly do.

Of course in life, things are a little bit more complicated than in domino competitions, because nobody tells you from where to start and what to do, but taking care of the fundamentals is a starting idea. Focus on them. Then find what you want, acquire productive habits according to your desires, set priorities and make the small everyday things perfectly for a long period of time. This strategy works because success is never instantaneous, but the result of small building blocks that you have put them perfectly for thousands of days. What starts linear becomes exponential and doing the one right thing after the other, creates a chain reaction with a tremendous force which is far greater than the pieces that compose it.

Enormous success, is built on doing perfectly the fundamentals. Those small, tiny everyday things.

All my best,
Konstantinos Karypidis

Note
Our brain is unable to capture how a geometric progression unfolds. To get a sense, imagine a piece domino 5.1 cm high, which falls and throws a piece that is 50% larger. Now imagine that a second piece does the same and on, an on… Do you know that the 18th piece that will fall will have the height of the tower of Pisa while the 23rd the height of the Eiffel tower? The 31th will be taller than Mount Everest while the 57th will have covered almost the distance between Earth and Moon!

(The whole post – including the final example – is inspired from Garry Keller’s magnificent book called: The One Thing. You can buy on Amazon here, or you can visit this page which is entirely dedicated on the book).

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