Tiny, Subtle Changes and Your Personal Tipping Point

Right now, I am making a tiny, seemingly insignificant change in my life to see what happens long term.  What is the change I am making?  It’s almost embarrassing to say….  But I have set an alarm on my Pocket PC to remind me when I get home from the office to hang my keys on the key holder instead of just throwing them wherever I happen to be standing.

What set this process into motion was yesterday morning I took a full 20 minutes searching the house for my keys before I could leave.  .  I finally found them, in a corner of the kitchen counter hidden behind 3 drinking glasses – of all places.  What would Freud say? 

This key scavenger hunt has become nearly a weekly event.  It is frustrating and wastes a lot of time.  It obviously is not a great way to start a day.

In getting frustrated yesterday over having my keys missing, it occurred to me I was wanting the world to change.  It was unfair for my keys to keep getting lost.  (Me?  Denial?  No…Never! )  Obviously, I was the sole cause of my situation, but I wanted to blame others for putting their glasses on that part of the counter.  I wanted to blame a neighboring pile of children’s drawings that might be concealing the keys.  It is easier to blame instead of me changing.  But then suddenly,  it occurred to me if I wanted to stop losing my keys, I was going to have to change the way I handled my key situation.

You might be chuckling to yourself saying, "that’s ridiculous Brad, everyone loses their keys…it’s too small an issue to even mention!" 

Is it? 

Coincidentally, I am currently reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.  Last night, I was reading the chapter about New York city crime and how small changes in how the city dealt with tiny, seemingly insignificant crimes such as graffiti and panhandling actually reduced the number of subway felonies including rape and homicide and helped slash overall crime rate of the city. 

What New York city did was adopt a zero tolerance policy for any graffiti, public urination, cheating fare collection machines and vagrancy.  When this first started, there were subway trains stopped in the middle of their daily runs to clean up graffiti that had been applied somewhere during the ride.  People were arrested and taken to the station "chain gang" style to make it known that if you steal an insignificant 50 cent token, you will be arrested.

Ultimately, what New York found was by cleaning up these small petty crimes, the environment became harder to commit larger crimes in.  The appearance of it being a filthy, graffiti prevalent underground actually caused more crime to occur. 

The same is true with my missing keys.  They are small, yes but the impact of them being missing causes an environment of stress, higher blood pressure and blame.  Think of a messy office, or cluttered house for a second.  Sure, it’s not an illegal offense, but what does that do to our thoughts and our minds?  How do others respond to our clutter?  If you have kids, odds are, they contribute to the already existing clutter.  "Hey," they think.  "There’s already paper on the floor, I can throw this candy wrapper on the floor too." 

As Gladwell so eloquently put it, it is an almost unconscious influence being enacted on us.  Our environments do make a difference, especially the small, seemingly insignificant things. So by making a change with where I place my keys every day, having a zero-tolerance policy for keys on the counter, table, attic, wherever will have an effect that is probably far greater than one would assume.  At the very least, I won’t have the weekly irritation and stress of having to run around like a madman looking for the darn things.

Have you ever made an tiny, subtle change in your life that ended up paying major rewards beyond what you would have ever expected?  Please comment and tell us about it.