Repetition

Hey Team, all right, so here we are. Can you believe it’s the last Wednesday, the very last Wednesday of the month, of January? We only have 11 months, and it’ll be 2025. Okay, all right, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So, I wanted to read you a quote by Zig Ziglar. Zig Ziglar said “Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”

Repetition. When I think of that, I kind of agree. In a lot of different ways, both good and bad. But I think of my boys, right, when they were learning to crawl, when they were learning to walk. It’s that repetitive motion of constantly, consistently doing the same thing over and over.

I know that when I was learning how to do certain kinds of spreadsheet formulas and use a computer, typing. It’s the repetition of the consistency of memorizing where the letters are on the keyboard and using my fingers and my brain to focus on those kinds of things. It’s that repetition of doing something over and over and over again.

Same thing with reading, right? Continually reading to myself over and over and over. And learning new words and learning what the meanings of words were. All of a sudden, my comprehension, my vocabulary, all the things increased. It’s the repetition; happens to be, again, the mother of learning and the father of action. You have to have the repetition; you have to have that action to continue to move forward.

It helps you create good habits when you do something over and over and over. We get up, my wife, my boys, we get up every morning, and we have a certain routine of repetition that we do every morning. Spending time together as a family, doing a little bit of reading, a little bit of prayer, a little bit of worship music. We do that every morning, and we focus on those things. It’s a repetition, something that we look forward to. And it helps build us up and prepare us for our day.

There are a number of things that I can think back on that repetition has helped breed in me. A consistency that helps me learn, helps me act, and helps me accomplish the things that I’m trying to do. However, if you learn to do the wrong things, or you have a repetition and a consistency of negative, the same is true. And that’s the yin and yang, right, that chaos and order thing that happens in our lives.

If your consistency is to do the wrong thing. I’ve seen this in baton training, training around the United States, even around the world, and I’ve seen people do something wrong. If you do the wrong thing in a repetitive way, then what you’re doing is you’re creating a bad habit to do it the wrong way over and over and over.

Same thing with firearms trigger control. If you do it the wrong way on a consistent basis, you become repetitive. You’re still learning it wrong. You’re still acting it out incorrectly, and so, therefore, your accomplishment is not what you desire. But it is based on the same principle that you are accomplishing the thing that you repetitively done. That you learned how to do, and that you created an action to accomplish, and the result just happens to be not what you want.

We all have the same thing; maybe it’s with language, right? Some of us have a potty mouth. Maybe it’s because of the people we hang around. Maybe it was because we were in the Marine Corps, maybe it was because we grew up around uncles and aunts and stuff. We consistently have a consistency of doing it. It becomes a habit-forming thing where all of a sudden, that potty mouth gets worse and worse and worse, and every other word that comes out of your mouth is negative, is not so great.

It’s not uplifting. It’s not beneficial to the group or the society or even to yourself, but it becomes a repetitive thing that you keep acting out, that you keep doing, and you have the accomplishment of being known as the guy or the gal that has a potty mouth. And it can work for you or against you. But it is about repetition. The more you do it, the more it happens.

Same thing with saving. If you take your check every single, and I do this. So, if I take my paycheck, and before I even get it, a certain dollar amount flows over into my vacation fund. When I get ready to go on vacation, and I go over to the bank. It happens to be at a different bank. So it’s not even the bank that I normally have it at. I have it at a different credit union, have a little bit of money that flows out of my paycheck.

I don’t even think about it. Repetition, well, the father of action. That action it grows, and the accomplishment is I get to go on vacation because I have, in a repetitive way, told my bank account to put money someplace else. And it grows and it grows and it grows because that’s what happens because of the repetitive action that I’ve done.

I can do this all day. So, on this Wednesday, what are your repetitions? Are they good or bad? Are they building habits and forming habits in you that are positive for society and for yourself, or are they building negative, and are the actions creating an accomplishment that you’re happy with, satisfied with, or not satisfied with? And to change those negative habits, all you have to do is start becoming repetitive in a different way. All you have to do is change that repetition to a more positive way of acting, and your accomplishment will also change; it will increase for your benefit, for the society’s benefit, for the team’s benefit, for the family’s benefit. All right, God bless you guys, have a wonderful Wednesday; I’ll see you next week.