First time, every time

This is parenting gold here, people. 
Clearly, I'm an expert, so you better take this and run with it.It's this magical little phrase: "First time. Every time."
It was implemented initially with stubborn 3 year old Elijah and has been used extremely inconsistantly ever since.
We brought it out frequently with Cory who had a nasty streak of destruction for a good part of his toddler years.
Then somehow the fourth child sucked every available brain cell out of my soul and made me forget this gem.
By God's grace, we remembered this past week that it had worked magic on the other boys so we decided to give it a shot with the sweet, dear, quiet, obedient baby of the family.
And yes, I know, if we had taken this stance from the get go and not ever let it slide, I would quite possibly not have a uber disobedient, defiant toddler in my house.  But maintaining this high level of involvement is hard and I'm lazy.  Bad combo.

I imagine trauma made me remember this little phrase.  The trauma being Caleb and his little friend removing the screen from an upstairs window and throwing every available item out.  The items may or may not include: shoes, large toys, a mattress pad, articles of clothing, etc, etc...  This all while I was having a lovely conversation with my friend Alex with my back to the downstairs window that these items were flying by.  I, of course, handled it with poise and dignity.
After reining in the absolute FEAR that my child and his friend could have fallen out of that window and DIED, I decided to do what any rational person would do and be super pissed for a few days about what a terror I'm raising.

And then I remembered!!  "First time. Every time."  I explained to dear, sweet Caleb that when I told him to do ANYTHING, he had to hop to it the very first time, every single time or there would be trouble.  Basically I'm going for robotic obedience.  We'll work out the whole independence/personal choice thing later.  As of now, he has no choice in a matter.
I also decided to throw in that he could not scream, "FINE!!" at me whenever I told him to do something.  His response was, "FINE!!"
So about 5 days in, we're going strong.  He's WAY, WAY better.  More often then not when I ask him to do something, it's a cheery, "OK!"  This makes me happy, which is way better then pissed.