"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten"
About this Quote
What makes it work is how it recruits your own pattern recognition against you. “Always” and “always” create a trapdoor: if the outcome is familiar, the cause must be your habits, not your circumstances. That’s a powerful bit of psychological jiu-jitsu. It shrinks the mess of modern life into a single lever you can pull today, and it flatters the listener with agency. The subtext is a mild accusation delivered as empowerment: you may not be responsible for everything that happened to you, but you’re responsible for continuing it.
It also reflects Robbins’ broader context as a late-20th-century self-help entrepreneur, speaking to a culture hungry for control amid layoffs, divorces, and the dull panic of “Is this it?” The quote’s genius is its portability: it fits a boardroom, a rehab circle, a gym wall. Its weakness is the same. By treating repetition as the main villain, it risks moralizing structural limits and randomness. Still, as motivational rhetoric, it’s a perfectly engineered irritant: simple enough to remember, sharp enough to sting, and open-ended enough that you can pour any desired transformation into it.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Robbins, Tony. (2026, January 15). If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-do-what-youve-always-done-youll-get-what-26401/
Chicago Style
Robbins, Tony. "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-do-what-youve-always-done-youll-get-what-26401/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-do-what-youve-always-done-youll-get-what-26401/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.







