Brain Food #701

Doing just a little every day compounds

Thoughts of the day

Yesterday, I mentioned how I will not be setting myself any resolutions for 2022. In a world that goes against planning, focusing on daily tasks that are within one’s control, and allocating smaller, more realistic goals to smaller portions of time, may be a better strategy.

Doing just a little every day compounds. The value of small, incremental investments of our time and effort will add up to something great in the future. Remembering this can enable us to be less hard on ourselves for our seemingly insignificant achievements, but also to not fail to recognise progress, if that progress is not meteoric.

James Joyce wrote the modernist masterpiece Ulysses at the rate of roughly 100 words a day (for reference, the post you are reading now is twice that length). The novel, at 265,000 words, is anything but short. But after 8 years of writing, even at Joyce’s seemingly slow, unproductive rate, the book was done. Where you can, set your own pace.

So if it feels that you are not heading somewhere, think of the story of Ulysses, or Odysseus. Like him, it may take some more time to get there. As the famous quote goes from the book, maybe from time to time we just need to say to ourselves, “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Diagram by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, visualising how small, incremental improvements can have a compounding effect in the long run

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