"If you’re not willing to start with small, embarrassing steps, you’ll never make it to the big, impressive ones." - Ryan Holiday
Moving the needle just a lil bit…that’s all it takes each day. It doesn’t need to be big leaps or huge sales every day. Just small consistent steps are what moves that needle.
"Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year." - Brian Tracy
You have been lied to. Not by, like, an evil villain in a movie or anything, but by your own brain, which is wired like Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad for the dopamine hits and fast results.
We expect the scale to drop the second we put down the double fist of Middleswarth BBQ potato chips and Breyer’s Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream.
We want that email campaign we “wrote” with a bad prompt in ChatGPT to convert instantly.
But progress doesn’t play like that. It prefers to be more like Droopy Dog than Speedy Gonzales.
A few years ago I switched from disposable coffee filters to cloth, reusable ones. They are supposed to last about a year before it is recommended you change it out for a new one. I recently changed out my current set and was struck by how different the new one is compared to the one I had been using every day.
The color had changed, drastically. The size had changed so much I thought maybe I bought the wrong ones as a replacement. The change was just so insidious I never noticed until I stopped to compare them side-by-side a year later.
“Good leadership is like exercise. We do not see improvement to our bodies with day-to-day comparisons. In fact, if we only compare how our bodies look on a given day to the previous day, we’ll think our efforts had been wasted. It's only when we compare pictures of ourselves over a period of weeks or months that we can see a stark difference. The impact of leadership is also best guided over time.” - Simon Sinek
See, when there are “in it” every day doing the thing, we don’t realize the tiny progress steps we are making towards our goal. It isn’t until we stop looking for the improvement every day and start looking at the progress a month, a quarter, a year later that we can actually see the results.
This is why those small habits are so important.
"Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." - James Clear
Like grains of sand in an hourglass, your small habits build upon each other until they are no longer just one grain of sand you can barely see, but an entire mound that is hard to miss.
Need help building a daily writing or activity habit, but your brain would rather scroll TikTok and eat Apple Jacks for dinner?
Here is a super simple ChatGPT prompt to turn a 3-minute habit into long-term habit momentum:
“Every choice is a brushstroke. No single stroke creates a masterpiece, but eventually the portrait emerges.” - Shane Parrish