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I still remember the evening I logged on to social media for the very first time. I had just got back from work at the bank and sunk into my sofa. In my hand was my brand-new smartphone, the first one I ever owned.
My first Twitter account (back before it was called X) had a handle nobody would recognise. There was no name on it, only a long string of numbers, so I could practise safely and no one would know it was me.
Then I started replying to famous people, and suddenly they were only one tweet away. It felt like a big networking party where you could talk to anyone! I was buzzing with excitement. I also had that feeling you get when you’re learning something new for the first time, and you’re not sure what to do next.
One thought kept coming back to me. This is really interesting, but this will probably change the way we show up online forever.
The friends I graduated with didn’t see it that way, but I kept experimenting and learning anyway. A few years later, I took a massive pay cut to move into digital media. Most of them couldn’t understand why I would give up so much for something so new.
That move eventually led to a dream role at Google, designing and delivering digital training programmes.
What I couldn’t see from that sofa was that my first real domino was just around the corner, and it would look like almost nothing.
And that’s this week’s idea: big changes start with one small domino.
Speaking of first dominoes, a lot of good ideas never leave our heads because we can’t picture how to show them to anyone. As someone who isn’t a designer, turning an idea into something people can actually see used to be the hardest part for me.
Now I use Gamma. I type out my idea, and it turns it into a clean, well-designed presentation that I can edit and share. I’ve used it for training proposals for corporate clients, outlines for my AI programmes and even my media kit. The last strategy plan I made took me about 15 minutes from first draft to finished.
If you have an idea you’ve been meaning to pitch, share or teach, it’s a simple way to get it out of your head and in front of people this week. You can start for free.
In their book The ONE Thing, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan show that extraordinary results come from narrowing your focus to one thing at a time. If you’ve ever felt pulled in ten directions at once, that’s harder than it sounds.
They explain it with a picture I couldn’t stop thinking about, a line of dominoes.
Here are three ideas from the book, and how they played out in my own life.
1. Small dominoes knock over big ones
In 1983, a physicist called Lorne Whitehead showed that a falling domino can knock over another domino about one and a half times its size. That doesn’t sound like much until you keep going. Start with a domino two inches tall, and the 13th would be as tall as a two-storey house. By about the 57th, the line would reach the moon.
My first domino was my website. I spent a whole weekend pulling my hair out, patching together HTML and CSS that looked like a strange language to me. Somehow, the site ended up looking like what I wanted. It felt like an accomplishment, even though nobody was reading it yet.
Takeaway: Your first domino will probably look too small to matter. Start with it anyway.
2. Success is sequential
Keller writes that “success is sequential, not simultaneous.” You don’t get everything at once. Each step makes the next one possible.
Looking back, that is exactly how my career unfolded. The website gave me a place to teach myself social media and publish blog posts for a year.
After that, a big global advertising agency hired me because they wanted someone with a financial background for their business clients. From there, Google recruited me. Two years later, I launched my own digital training business, and Meta and Microsoft became clients. YouTube came next, as a natural place to share what I’d learned with more people.
I planned none of those steps. Each one only became possible because the one before it fell.
Takeaway: You don’t need to see the whole line of dominoes, just the next one.
3. Ask the focusing question
So how do you find your first domino? Keller gives one question to ask, and I love how simple it is.
What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
He suggests asking it at every level, starting with your someday goal, then this year, this month, this week, today and right now. Working backwards like that turns a huge goal into one small thing you can do before dinner.
Takeaway: If your answer feels too big to start today, ask the question again for this week, then for today.
This Week’s Experiment
Pick one goal you care about and ask the focusing question for this week. Write down your first domino, then do it before anything else gets your attention.
For me, that weekend fighting with HTML was the start of everything that came after it, and I had no idea at the time.
What’s the first domino you’ve been putting off? Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one.
My new video is all about small dominoes at work. These are the seven habits I picked up from my years in Big Tech and running my own business, plus one bonus lesson to help future-proof your career.
Most of them take less than five minutes a day, and they changed how I protect my time, prove my value and keep growing. If you’re looking for your first domino at work, start here.
Laurie is an award-winning digital marketer who gets businesses seen by audiences that are hungry for their products or services. Her knowledge and understanding of the digital landscape have benefited an eclectic mix of clients from young start-ups to FTSE 100 giants, from Google to global advertising agency Ogilvy. In 2017, she was named by the British Interactive Media Association as a top Rising Star in the Digital industry.
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