Have you ever played with dominoes? What's the longest number of dominoes you've ever lined up? The world record for the most dominoes toppled by a group is close 4.5 million! It happened on November 13th, 2009 at the WTC Expo Center in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. They lined up all these dominoes in an amazing display and just toppling the first one led to the sequential fall of the rest thus releasing about 94KiloJoules of energy. This is the energy equivalent to what an average-sized adult male needs to do 545 pushups!
“Every great change starts like falling dominoes” – BJ Thornton
Every domino that is placed has a certain amount of potential energy and the more dominoes that are placed, the more potential energy is accumulated. As an analogy to your life, placing a domino could be accomplishing a small goal or task. It could be finishing an article, creating a video, finishing one chapter of a book, writing one page of a book, working out for 30 minutes, practicing the guitar for an hour or any other thing that is insignificant on it’s own but that when combined with several other insignificant actions will yield massive results. These tasks should be in line with your vision or purpose. In real life however, dominoes can’t just be so easily lined up. For that to happen, you must do the right things. You can’t just do anything and expect the dominoes to be lined up perfectly.
There’s something even more amazing about dominoes. They can also topple objects larger than them. Lorne Whitehead in 1983 discovered that a single domino can bring down another domino that is 50% larger. What if you place dominos in that fashion, with the next one 50% larger than the previous? This will form a somewhat geometric progression of dominoes. If a linear progression with all dominoes having the same size could produce that much energy, what more of a geometric progression? In 2001, an experiment was carried out based on this discovery in which 8 dominoes were created. The first was barely an inch high while the 8th was almost 3 feet high. The resulting fall ended with a loud SLAM which all started by just pushing the first one. Imagine for a second that you were to continue creating dominoes of this sort. This means that the 23rd domino will be as tall as the Eifel tower, the 31st domino will go higher than Mount Everest by 3000 feet, and the 57th domino could be used as a bridge between the Earth and the Moon!
What does this mean? You can get extraordinary results by doing the right things. If your priorities are straight, you can even reach the moon! This can be done by creating a domino effect in your life. You need to find the first domino and topple it. This first domino is your one thing, what you must prioritize. Success is not an event, it’s a process. As you do the right thing each day, you’re lining up the dominoes one by one. As one domino topples another, that’s how success builds on success. One success leads to bigger success which leads to even bigger success. Success happens over time. Anyone who has achieved something remarkable did it over time. The best part is that you don’t have to be right all the time. You need to be right just once and all doors that were previously closed will be open to you. All dominoes that were ahead of you will go down with a loud SLAM.