In life there are the small day-to-day tasks we have to perform, and then there are the daunting tasks, the big projects and the jobs that seem so overwhelming that we don’t know where to start. If asked which category was more important, I assume you would side with the big undertakings, but the small things are important in a way that may not be so obvious.

The way you do the small things is how you train yourself to take on the bigger things. Your weakest standard often defines that area of activity, and if you allow yourself to be indifferent or lax in your standards for things you find unimportant, that creates a habit that seeps into the way you take on big things.

Do you let yourself get away with being lazy with your daily tasks? Are you not giving your best effort in all that you do? Be honest and ask yourself if that same habit of half-assed effort is reflected in how you do bigger things. Treat your actions as opportunities for self-reflection. When you perform tasks, do you work with efficiency and pursue excellence, regardless of whether the task is large or small?

I know that giving everything you do your best effort sounds exhausting, but when the pursuit of excellence becomes a habit, the less energy you have to put into it. Both laziness and excellence can be considered habits, and the way you do things in your daily life is constantly supporting one side or the other.

To ensure you polarize your effort towards excellence, do all that you do to the best of your ability, whether it be accomplishing complex tasks at work or doing things as simple as cleaning your room, do your best at all you do.

In his book, The Book of Five Rings the famed samurai Miyamoto Mushashi wrote that,” a little bit of crookedness in the mind will later turn into a major warp.”

You understand this concept by imagining how a carpenter builds a house. If he is a lazy, and he uses a warped or cracked wooden beam in the supports, although the house may stand for years, eventually the warped beam can become a major problem and cause serious damage to the house.

Maybe that carpenter is lazy because he just wants to get paid and he doesn’t really have any pride in his work. Maybe he cuts corners on materials to save money, or cuts corners on standards because he wants to avoid doing more work. Either way, the choices he makes have a significant impact on the quality of the house and on the living conditions of the residents.

Being lazy now means more re-work in the future. It means living with deficiencies until they become unbearable. Not giving your best effort now means that you will likely have to give more effort in the future to correct what you didn’t do well the first time.

Doing one thing in a lazy manner can eventually become a habit and seep into other facets of life. Walking or sitting with poor posture may seem harmless to the young person who thinks nothing of its importance until they experience muscle imbalances as they age. And if they never correct their posture then they end up bent over and in pain as a result of slouching over years.

Laziness or indifference in physical habits often leads to the habit of negative emotional reaction. People who don’t feel good often think poorly as well. Back to our example of having poor posture, when you develop a clouching habit, other people read your body language as low self-esteem, low energy and weak. That changes the way they engage with you, and that relationship affects how you think about yourself.

That negative feedback from something as simple as laziness in body posture affects more than you might initially think it does. The chain of cause and effect goes deeper than what appears on the surface. The negative thinking that comes from the way people treat you simply by how you carry yourself can damage more aspects of your life than you think, and it all came from a small warp in the mind that began with laziness.

This is all a hypothetical example, however, the example’s purpose was to impress upon you that all things are subject to the the Principle of Cause and Effect and it is thus important to do all things to the best of your ability in order to prevent major warps in your future.

Take time to reflect on your actions and question whether or not you are giving your upmost effort to all of the things that you do, despite how unimportant some of those things may seem.

When I was a sushi chef, a chef I worked with once told me a Japanese saying that her teacher told her that changed my life. Although I cannot recall how to say it in Japanese, in English it roughly translates to, “every cut is better than your last.“

That wisdom had a deep impact on my life and my work because it doesn’t just apply to becoming a better sushi chef, it applies to being a better human being. In everything that you do, do so with the intention of improving over your last effort. If you can make the rule of making every cut better than your last, you will make excellence a habit that will bless everything in your life that it touches.

This brings me back to one of the simplest equations of self-improvement which is: better you= better life. So if you are committed to being better, do all the things that you do to the best of your ability, big and small things alike.

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