Dominos have a certain magic, and not just the deliciousness of their pizza. The simple action of tipping one domino ever-so-slightly causes all the others to fall in a cascade of rhythmic movement that’s both calming and gratifying. This domino effect is also known as “chain reaction,” and it’s a great way to understand how we can make positive changes in our lives.
A domino is a small rectangular block of wood or plastic, with one face bearing an arrangement of dots or pips (like the ones on a die) and another blank. The domino is used as a base for building or playing various positional games, such as matador, in which players try to match an adjacent domino edge to edge with another, or muggins, in which players place dominoes so that the open ends of their pieces form some specified total. In the early 20th century, dominoes were introduced into England and Italy from France, and since then they’ve become an international pastime.
Lily Hevesh started playing with dominoes when she was 9 years old, and her love for the game has grown ever since. Now, the 20-year-old professional domino artist has over 2 million YouTube subscribers and creates spectacular domino designs for movies, TV shows, and events, including a Katy Perry album launch. Her largest installations use up to 300,000 dominoes and can take several nail-biting minutes to complete. Hevesh describes the forces that affect how a domino falls: “When you put a domino in a line, it has a lot of inertia – it’s going to resist motion until you push on something else.”
As soon as you touch a domino, it starts to move around in a circular pattern. This is because the squares on each side of the domino are arranged in a specific way to allow for that circular motion. The pips in each square are evenly spaced and are divided into two groups, the outermost group having one dot, the innermost having four dots. The outermost group of pips on each domino is referred to as the apex. The apex is the most important domino because it allows for the circular motion of all the other apexes.
In order to build a domino structure, you have to first lay out all the apexes of the domino and then connect them together with lines. When you want to play a positional domino game, you then place the apex domino on top of all the other apexes and push it down so that it causes them to move in a particular direction.
Similarly, we can think of our goals and dreams in terms of domino actions – high leverage actions that have a dramatic impact. For example, a small victory right after you get out of bed drastically increases your chances of being motivated and excited about what the day might bring. These small victories are like domino actions because they are single actions that serve as triggers for a series of following actions. The process of setting up these domino actions is similar to the process of coding: one command triggers a series of commands.