The Decision is Big; The Action is Small.

If you have a day job it’s wise to learn that although decisions may be big ( run a marathon in 2026; write a novel; win a CrossFit competition; build our own perfect house….) your day job will only allow brief slots of attention to the new goal. The real skills are project management: managing the timeline and scheduling tiny tasks consistently and regularly.

Become the project manager of your destiny: timelines, modest tasks and momentum.

Monday, the 5th of January 2026, is the hardest day.

Since November, you’ve been the architect of your transformation. Drafting goals, some SMART, others deliberately audacious. You’ve felt the intoxicating mix of excitement and overwhelm that comes with imagining a different life. January 1st was meant to be your starting gun, your clean break, your explosive launch. ChatGPT has created timelines, amazon provided a best-selling guide and your sister-in-law, herself a top influencer suggested ‘it would be a piece of cake’.

But life doesn’t respect arbitrary deadlines. The first four days slipped past in a blur of recovering normality, lingering celebrations, and the gentle art of procrastination disguised as preparation.

Now it’s the fifth. Monday. The excuses have expired. This is the day that matters.

Here’s the truth: grand gestures fail. Dramatic transformations collapse. The gym membership bought in hope becomes a standing reproach. The novel starts at a sprint pace and abandons you at chapter three.

Start laughably small.

Your novel? Write one paragraph today. Not a chapter. A paragraph. Your fitness revolution? Walk around the block. Once. Your MBA ambitions? Make a phone call. Five minutes.

Make it so small that not doing it would be absurd. So modest that failure is impossible.

Then record it. Every tiny victory. Daily.

Because momentum is built from microscopically small wins, repeated. Because proving to yourself you can do something- anything-consistently matters more than the size of that something. Because the life you seek isn’t hiding in some future dramatic gesture.

It’s waiting in what you do today. However small.

Start now.

What Did The Beatles Ever Do for Planet Earth?

  1. Democratised Artistic Ambition. They proved that working-class kids from Liverpool could become the most significant cultural force of their era. Every garage band worldwide now believed they could write their own songs, challenge conventions, and matter. They killed the notion that art belonged to the privileged.

  2. Created the Album as an Art Form. Before Sgt. Pepper, albums were collections of singles plus filler. The Beatles transformed the LP into a cohesive artistic statement, a canvas for concepts, experimentation, and storytelling. Every ambitious album since owes them this debt.

  3. Collapsed Cultural Boundaries. They made Indian sitars mainstream, brought avant-garde into pop, and proved you could be both commercial and experimental. They showed that high and low culture were false distinctions; a string quartet belongs in “Yesterday” just as tape loops belong in “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

  4. Accelerated Social Change. Their hair, their irreverence, their questioning of authority; they gave the 60s generation permission to reject their parents' values wholesale. They didn’t start the counterculture, but they made it global, acceptable, inevitable. Every CEO with long hair owes them a nod.

  5. Invented Modern Fame. They created the template for global celebrity: the press conferences, the mythology, the controlled image that cracks to reveal humanity. They showed how to be bigger than Elvis while remaining themselves. Every superstar since navigates the path they blazed.

  6. Proved Pop Music Could Carry Weight. From “All You Need Is Love” broadcast to 400 million people to “Across the Universe” they showed that three-minute songs could carry philosophical, political, and spiritual messages to the masses. They made pop music a legitimate vehicle for ideas.

  7. Gave the World a Common Language. Uniquely in human history, they created songs known by billions across every border, culture, and generation. “Hey Jude” in a Tokyo karaoke bar, “Let It Be” at a funeral in São Paulo; they provided humanity’s shared soundtrack and our collective memory.