Incrementalism

You witness the greatest endeavors of mankind and think that sort of thing is impossible. There's no way I can do it, you may think to yourself. And then you wallow in your own mediocrity and settle for what is easy and comfortable. But that's because great things are overwhelming. But life is simply a transition from state to state and only a certain amount of stuff can occur in that transition. You don't climb Mount Olympus in a single leap. You start by taking a step.

The tallest mountain in the world

At some point in my life I weighed 220 pounds and the thought of running a mile was somewhat daunting. I knew that I could do it, but it was a struggle. Today, I weigh 165 and run four miles every other morning with little effort. But that change didn't happen in a day. It's been four years.

With running, I started small and gradually increased the distance I would run each week. I also started out alternating between running and walking on the longer trips until I was comfortable running the whole time. And I consistently ran and kept to a schedule to get better. There was a period of time where I ran everyday for four months.

Now running and exercise is something natural. I've run five marathons and have run 10+ miles on countless occasions. But when thinking about these distances, I don't think about the whole distance, I take things one mile at a time. Although nowadays I often don't think about the distance anymore but focus on thinking or listening to some podcast to learn something.

But running takes little mental thought. Sure it may take a lot of mental willpower, but running is a rather menial task that isn't very complicated. You quickly put one foot in front of another. What about projects at school or work? What about coding a website? What about building a business? What about becoming a leader or becoming a better person? These require more thought and perhaps appear to be harder to achieve.

But the ability to separate these grand tasks into smaller pieces makes things easier and can be applied to almost anything. You want to build a website but don't know how to program? Write a simple program. Is that too much? Find out which languages are used in web design. Still too much? Enter a question into Google about how to learn programming. Once you take that first action things start to roll a lot easier. But you can't overwhelm yourself from the start.

I get a lot of stuff done everyday. I have a full time engineering software and working with experimental hardware. I run into a lot of obstacles. When I first started I knew very little about low-level programming and hardware. But by dissecting the large project I work into smaller pieces I am able to get more stuff done while at the same time not stressing myself out with a giant monolith that I have to complete.

And after my full-time job, when I have the time, I like to spend an hour programming on the blockchain and exploring its structure and building different projects and experiments to work on a different type of software than I do at work. Building a web application with a full-time job may seem daunting, but I simply recognize that any progress on my application is going to be really slow and any day where I can get something done is a good day.

And some people might make the excuse that the reason successful people are successful is because they have a deep and burning passion. And that is certainly true in some cases. But I wouldn't call software a passion of mine even though I spend so much time on it. But software gets me to places and things I want to work towards. So I do it anyways.

In fact the best feeling in the world is when you reduce your tasks to simple things and keep your expectations low. You'll find that it takes little effort to meet these smaller goals and you can accomplish so much more which you expect little of yourself. But you always need to set goals and make some attempt at moving towards it. After that point, all it takes is a single decision. To take the first step.