Almost everything you have today — your health, your money, your business, the shape of your marriage and life — traces back to a surprisingly small number of decisions.
Two or three, often.
The rest was downstream.
Most people never do that trace.
They can’t tell you which of their thousand moves actually mattered and which were noise, because they’ve never sat down and followed the chain backward to find out. So they keep optimising the noise and neglecting the few things that were load-bearing the whole time.
People give this idea different names — first things first, fundamentals, foundations, the lead domino. The label doesn’t matter. The discipline does: find the one move that everything else depended on. The move that, if you pulled it out, would collapse everything stacked on top of it.
I’ll show you mine, because it’s more useful than the theory.
Tracing my own
The life I have now — a therapy business that grew enough to be acquired, the freedom to choose what I do with my time — traces back to two decisions.
Neither of them was clever.
The first domino fell when I was a student. Between 2002 and 2005 I was studying to be an occupational therapist, and I was, honestly, at best, an average one. Strong on basics, not the kind who spends evenings watching technique videos to become elite.
Sheerly by chance, I saw and borrowed a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad from a classmate, and the thing that burned in wasn’t a money tactic — it was a single sentence about myself:
I have to be a business owner.
I knew it because I knew my limits. A starting salary around SGD 1,700 with a hard controlled political ceiling above it wasn’t going to take me where I wanted to go, and I wasn’t built to win the corporate game — the one where the person who networks best gets promoted first. I wanted control more than I wanted a ladder.
So I tried things.
Got fleeced by internet schemes.
Wasted time on a couple of MLMs.
Chased higher-paying career switches that went nowhere.
None of it worked — until the decision that actually was the first domino: deciding to start a therapy business myself first, then marrying my better half who would join me later.
The second domino isn’t a moment. It’s a decade. We started in 2008, and we did not stop until it was acquired in 2014 and I served my bond out to 2017.
That’s the second decision, and it’s the one people underrate: persist, and grow it sustainably, through everything.
The part nobody sees
People look at the acquisition and see the fruit.
Like seeing the top of an iceberg, that’s the most visual, about 15-25% of the entire iceberg. But they don’t see the roots, and the decade of growing, refining downwards, the roots, the bottom 80% of the iceberg – because the roots were ten years of unglamorous difficulty.
- Landlords who cheated.
- Corporates that outright lie, cheat, promised the world and delivered little.
- People who pushed because they wanted something out of us.
- Health I let slide because cashflow came first.
- We didn’t take a honeymoon until we were five years into the business.
- So. Many. More.
It was genuinely hard — every knock, every scam, every lesson learned the expensive way.
But that’s the whole point about a lead domino: it is almost never the clever, sophisticated, impressive move. It’s “started,” and it’s “didn’t quit.” Two boring decisions. Everything I have downstream depended on those two and not on any of the smart-sounding things I tried in between.
That’s the part the backward trace teaches you, and the part most people avoid feeling: when you follow the chain honestly, you usually find the clever stuff was noise and the boring stuff was load-bearing. That’s a hard thing to sit with if you’ve spent years priding yourself on the clever stuff.
Looking back is how you learn to choose forward
Here’s why the trace is worth doing, beyond nostalgia.
Once you can see, in your own past, which one or two moves everything actually cascaded from, you stop mistaking motion for progress. And you can run it forward. For any goal you’re holding right now, the question changes from what are all the things I could do to what is the one domino that, knocked first, makes the rest easier — or makes most of them unnecessary?
Then you knock that one, and you let the others wait until it falls.
It worked on my health, too.
After my father died suddenly in 2014 and my kids arrived, I traced my health collapse backward and found the single domino — I’d let the foundation go during the grind — and I rebuilt around getting that one thing back, rather than chasing ten habits at once.
- Eat less junk and bad carbs.
- Eat more simple eg whole foods especially meat and vege.
- Dont drink calories (got this from Tim Ferriss).
- Exercise 2-4x per week, with more emphasis currently on strengthening.
- Rest and sleep consistently.
- Supplement.
These “stacked” one domino, then the rest followed.
The framework generalizes because the structure of every outcome is the same: a few decisions carrying the weight of a hundred.
Find the key domino
You don’t need a hundred right moves.
You need to find the two or three that everything else falls from — and most of what fills your days isn’t among them.
Look back honestly enough to see which decisions in your own life were actually load-bearing. It will humble you, because the real ones are rarely the impressive ones. Then look forward and ask the same question of whatever you’re trying to build now: what’s the first domino? Knock that. Ignore the rest until it falls.
For me it was two decisions, fifteen years ago, neither of them clever: start the thing, and don’t stop.
Everything I have came from those.