The story is told of an American businessman who took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the 1st morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. Read the rest of this entry →
One of my favorite statistics that I often tell people relates to the Jewish population living in the United States.It illustrates that this nation of people clearly have some type of secret understanding that is resulting in a statistic as follows.
“The Jewish population accounts for 4% of the population of the USA yet controls 40% of the wealth of the United States.”
Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007.
The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. two thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
I believe this simple law to be one of the most powerful forces for creating a life of immeasurable change and progress as you move into the future.
Even better than this is that it is easy enough to achieve today and provides a sense of accomplishment and pride that drives you into a future of bigger and more consistent successes.
What am I talking about?
Simply, (LOLA)The Law of Little Actions…
This is just the name I have given it but you will hear many other acronyms and other little clever teaching illustrations around this law. However for my purposes today in this weekly muse I thought having an acronym of a Brazilian hula hula girl called LOLA would do the trick.
LOLA is simply the understanding…
that the little actions that you make every hour of the day are of paramount importance in the overall scheme of your life. It is a dedication to discipline yourself to take necessary action in all areas of life even the ones that seem almost insignificant and where you think to yourself, “Oh, if I let that slide it wont be that bad.” It is this thinking that we want to discipline ourselves to eliminate as it will cause us to gradually start becoming complacent on higher level issues as well.
An example of this could simply be in the area of personal hygiene for example. The statistics of how many people actually wash their hands after going to the bathroom is appalling. This unfortunate lack of personal hygiene is seen more often in men but serves as one of example. In the moment this little action seems unimportant but it can send a signal of complacency in other key disciplines of your life.
Another great example is Rudy Giuliani (The ex mayor of New York)
Rudy Giuliani became the 107th mayor of New York in 1994 and had control for a period of seven years. He came in at a time when New York was reeling under a massive crime spree that was crippling it. Now you might be wondering how all of this fits into our story of LOLA, well simply because of the strategy that Mr. Giuliani adopted to combat this crime.
In his first term as mayor, Mr. Guiliani in conjunction with New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton adopted a highly aggressive crime combating strategy that was based on the “Broken Windows” approach as first explained by James Q Wilson.
How does Broken Windows apply to LOLA??
Here is an extract as contained on Wikipedia
“
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
”
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book’s authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.
The theory thus makes two major claims: that further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred, and that major crime will, as a result, be prevented. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus only on the latter claim.
Now you can see what Broken Windows has to do with LOLA!
Manage the small actions in your life and notice the effect it has to create an overall larger effect in the way you perceive yourself, interact with others and ultimately live your life. And this my friends determines the results you get. So to end this little look at LOLA I thought this little video might just make this lesson stick even more.
Welcome to the new look www.paultherond.com and I am proud to announce something that has been on my heart over the last couple of months called the Weekly Muse.
For those that know me you will know that I am a deep, philosophical free thinker and get great enjoyment from being able just to focus on some of the more important elements of life that often times in our busy lifestyles we tend to neglect.
The weekly muse will be focused on writings that look at life, business, spirituality and other issues that have a deep impact on who we are as people, how we relate to others and how we impact the world around us.
If you are thinking who on earth is this Paul Therond, I encourage you to go to the about page and find out a little more, I have an interesting story to tell you.
Welcome to my website and I look forward to making friends with you through these writings and conversations we can have.
Paul Therond is a full time Web and eMarketing Entrepreneur & consultant based in Auckland, New Zealand. Paul’s business passion is all things web space and the potential for smart businesses to take hold of it.
Apart from his web guru status he’s also a caped Crusader for the War on 9–5 tyranny!