Brain Food #786: Everything is additive
On the pleasure of minimal progress
Thoughts of the day
Today’s post is about the pleasure of minimal progress.
Deadlines and external commitments can be invaluable procrastination killers. Otherwise, we might never start, especially in projects that feel so big the point of their beginning is no longer obvious, or in projects that get put off because of what we wish we could be achieving, as opposed to what is immediately possible, or in projects that do not have a final form or purpose fully formed in our heads yet, the reason and motivation for their existence slowly beginning to dissolve.
Some of these projects, the ones without deadlines, can be personal ones, and sidelined perpetually. But this is where minimal progress is better than no progress at all.
Similar to the principle of Atomic Habits, every small step in the right direction will still lead us down the right path. There will be no draft to revisit later without any words to edit. Our expectations are the problem, much in the same way we succeed in turning our wants into needs.
In truth, everything is additive. If you write a sentence down right now, that sentence didn’t exist before. The lines on the page are beginning to be filled. And this applies to any field possible: music, drawing, painting, film-making, fashion, entrepreneurship. We start with a blank canvas, metaphorical or not. The moment you have created something out of nothing, you have just created something new. It transitioned from the realm of the imagination to the realm of reality:
“That's how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something.
You have a wish.
You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does.”
― Wim Wenders
19 lignes parallèles et 21 lignes parallèles avec 1 interférence is an oil painting by self-taught minimalist artist François Morellet. Sometimes the line itself does not even need to contain any words. And, more often than we think, the perception of beauty remains highly subjective.
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