The magic trick that will make everything click

I’m sitting here at 11.32pm unwilling to go to bed. Not until I have a new, killer idea to inspire me for tomorrow; a new strategy that will finally get my business to where I want it (because I just know there’s a cracker shortcut to my goal out there somewhere).

It’s fun to spend time thinking and dreaming about that breakthrough isn’t it?

The magic trick that will make everything click.

There’s only one magic trick

On a recent podcast with James Altucher I heard Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) divulge that every magician has only one trick. And that ‘trick’ is that he works harder on his craft than anyone would ever imagine he would.

Yes, it turns out that even in magic itself the big ‘trick’ is to do something over and over so often that the skills developed allow you to do something so surprisingly well that it appears impossible (i.e. magical).

Which makes me think that when we’re looking at successful people in all fields of life, wherever we are seeing genius – it’s the result of that same trick.

So what’s your trick?

Podcaster John Lee Dumas’s ’trick’ is producing a podcast interview (Entrepreneur On Fire) every day. His earlier podcasts were pretty ordinary – he just read out some basic questions and waited for the answers. But he showed up every single day, hit record, then hit publish.

Fast forward to now and, more than 1000 interviews later, he’s become very good at what he does. And he’s made $4 million (mostly from selling a podcasting course) since he began exactly three years ago today.

Your magic trick is right in front of you

Most of us likely have some kind of plan in front of us already, waiting to be actioned. I’ve had a great plan that I’ve been putting off for three months now, because I keep looking around for a better trick and finding plenty to keep me distracted.

But it’s dawning on me that taking a forward step every day IS the trick. And it doesn’t matter much which strategy you choose, because the genius isn’t in the strategy, it’s in the doing of it every day.

Sound too simple? Well it is and it isn’t.

Doing something every day is much harder than it sounds. Just like exercising every day and eating healthy; because they sound easy, we tend to utterly underprepared.

So let’s acknowledge that tomorrow’s trick, however miniscule, will be extremely difficult and will require us to go to war on anything that threaten to stop us. After all, it’s our life goals that are under threat. Our dreams!

So if you want progress tonight stop searching and start defending what’s important about tomorrow.

If a lack of time and energy are threats, then prepare your lunch for tomorrow now and get to bed early. If your demons are email or phone calls or Facebook, go to extreme lengths to eliminate them from one critical hour of your day.

The people who get surprising results all have the same magic trick. They lay a tiny brick today, and then they do it again tomorrow, and they figure out how to keep going against the odds.

The rest is details.

Have you found a way to lay a brick each day? If so, what lengths do you go to to protect your ritual?