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"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."\nThat line from Aristotle may be one of the most overused quotes in history.\nBut it's overused for good reason; it's a good quote.\xa0At least the first part. Aristotle was onto something for sure: we are what we repeatedly do.\nI agree with that 100%.\nThe issue I have is with the second part: Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.\nThere\u2019s no such habit called excellence; you can\u2019t wake up tomorrow and start your morning routine with a quick session of excellence before you go grab breakfast.\nI\u2019ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about setting new year\u2019s resolutions or goals for the year, which I think is only natural when the calendar flips, but I\u2019m had a hard time coming up with a SMART goal or set of SMART goals for the year I was really excited about.\nIt\u2019s easy to pick a number out of the sky, like I want to make $1 million, or I want to reach 100,000 subscribers, or I want to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and those kinds of goals are great -- if they motivate you and you can reverse engineer a path to get there.\nBut on the flipside of Big Hairy Audacious Goals like these, to borrow a phrase from Jim Collins, is the micro habit. And that brings us back to Aristotle: we are what we repeatedly do.\nI\u2019ve seen the power of consistent execution first-hand; this podcast is probably my best most recent example of that. It started out as an experiment, it cost less than $100, and over the last 3.5 years, I\u2019m not exaggerating when I say it\u2019s been life-changing.\nSo if you\u2019ve found yourself in kind of the same boat, with everyone around you sharing their resolutions and their ambitious goals for the year and not quite knowing what you should be aiming for yourself, I invite you to consider the micro habit as an alternative.\nFull Show Notes: Micro Habits: The Too-Small-to-Fail Plan for Big Results