In AA there’s a saying, everything you do either takes you one step closer or further away from sobriety.
The day to day trench of adulthood is filled with little battles, the daily struggles to get up, to exercise, to put in the work, to be kind and patient and considerate, to resist temptations and distractions and our default setting to take the path of the least resistance, to do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do.
In Tools of Titans Tim Ferriss mentioned the habit of making your bed every morning. There are two folds of purpose behind this:
- It ensures a small victory, no matter how bad things are, how much exhaustion and despair we feel, we can win one small battle, accomplish one little thing. On real bad days it might be the ONLY battle we win, and that’s okay.
- It conveys a message that the small stuff matters.
Start small, one step at a time, it seems to be the natural way of evolving and learning.
I remember an example of meerkat from Robert Sapolsky’s lectures. This is how mom meerkats teach their kids how to hunt and eat a scorpion without getting hurt: first, the mom meerkat would kill a scorpion, the baby learn how to eat a dead scorpion; once the baby managed that skill, the mom would capture a scorpion but remove its stinger, the kid learns how to hunt the live, unharmful scorpion; after that, mom moves things to the next level by giving the kid a live scorpion with stinger on, and so on.
We learn from small steps of trial and error, of gradual change, and real growth happens quietly in those countless small moments.
It’s those 4-second montage in a movie where the main character grinds hard with inspirational music in the background and falls asleep on their book with a cute face. The reality is usually less pretty, it can be months or years of quiet work and tens of thousands of wanting-to-quit moments constantly pounding at us, and some days we feel lonely as hell.
Don’t underestimate the small battles, and try to cherish the small wins. Don’t give up cause it’s small, play till whistle blows. Because in the long run, success becomes almost indistinguishable from perseverance.
Keep showing up.
99% of success is just showing up.
In fact, most success is just persistence.
Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier