I am not a natural-born rule breaker. This may come as a surprise, coming from someone who wrote a book about breaking rules.
The obvious question for anyone who knew me as a child is, “How did you go from being a shy boy who was afraid of new situations and spent an eternity in swimming lessons to a guy who makes a living speaking in public about breaking rules?”
For years, I’ve tried to come up with a compelling answer. After all, it seems like some sort of magic was involved.
I’d often point to a moment, sometime around college, when I imagined myself as an 80-year-old guy looking back on my life and wondering, “What if?” And yes, that was when I started to experience the fear of regret as more powerful than the fear of trying something new.
Other times, I’d give credit to a retreat I attended after high school that had a profound impact on me and changed the course of my life. But as monumental as that experience was, it doesn’t fully explain the shy-kid-to-speaker transformation.
The truth is, there wasn’t one magic moment that instantly turned me from a timid rule follower into an artist who speaks to strangers for a living and wrote a book about breaking rules.
Earlier in my career, I was always frustrated that I didn’t have a better, flashier story to tell than the boring one that included hard work, persistence, and a lot of help from others.
But then one day, my friend Kelly reminded me that Damascus moments are rare. The Biblical story of Saul experiencing a divine intervention on his road trip to Damascus that included being blinded, getting knocked off his horse, hearing the voice of Jesus, and having scales fall from his eyes before totally turning his life and changing his name to Paul around sure is dramatic.
Stories like that make great theater, but aren’t very common.
Most of the time, change happens one small choice at a time.
Yes, critical “aha!” moments can alter our course (like the retreat did for me), but most of the transformation from who we are to who we want to be can be accomplished through tinkering: little experiments where we try new things, push our limits, and spend time breathing the air just outside our comfort zone.
Looking back, I can see that every time I took a tiny step beyond my comfort zone, it grew. And I noticed that it would stay that new size, forever, or until I nudged it slightly larger again.
Little steps — even the seemingly backwards and sideways ones — add up to make a difference.
Where do you want to go? Who do you want to become? What do you want your life to look like five years from now?
Stop looking for a magic wand. Take a little step, and then another little step, and another.
You may not get knocked off your horse by a blinding light and hear the voice of God. But trust me. After enough little steps in the right direction, the difference between who you’ve become compared to who you used to be will seem a lot like magic.
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