Make Daily Progress.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said, “We often underestimate what we can achieve in a year and overestimate what we can achieve in five years.” To run a marathon successfully, you need to increase your run mileage by running consistently. To finish a 700+ page book, you can read 20 pages per day, and you would be done in 30 days. Most of our biggest goals seem overwhelming and out of reach, but if you take one step towards achieving your goals daily, the incremental progress will increase your confidence, and ultimately, you will achieve your goal. As author and motivational speaker Les Brown often said “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”

We all have greatness in us, and the only way to unearth our hidden potential is to make progress continuously. As American Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher once quipped, ” Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength.” Daily progress breeds confidence, the confidence to dream bigger; success breeds more success. Progress, not perfection. I have been learning to speak French since 2010, and it has been tough mastering the language, but I am committed to mastering the French Language. In the past 13 years, there have been periods where I have left the language but all through the years, I have stayed committed to daily progress toward achieving my goal of impeccable French.

I am not where I want to be but I am not where I used to be with my spoken French. I try to listen to one hour of French podcast daily, read French books, watch French interviews, watch French movies, speak to a native speaker among other strategies. The daily consistent practice has been tough and sometimes it even feels like I am not making progress. But I kind of understand the process of mastering any skill, at the beginning it feels awkward but with consistent and deliberate practice, progress shows up eventually.

In The Compound Effect: Jumpstart your income, your life, your success ^1, former publisher of Success Magazine, Darren Hardy describes the power of making daily progress. He writes:

With enough practice and repetition, any behavior, good or bad, becomes automatic over time. That means that even though we developed most of our habits unconsciously (by modeling our parents, responding to environmental or cultural associations, or creating coping mechanisms), we can consciously decide to change them. It stands to reason that since you learned every habit you have, you can also unlearn the ones that aren’t serving you well.

Since your outcomes are all a result of your moment-to-moment choices, you have incredible power to change your life by changing those choices. Step by step, day by day, your choices will shape your actions until they become habits, where practice makes them permanent.

Too many people want to come out of the gate with a clear understanding of their life’s mission. There is no one thing that you are wired to do, and there are many ways you can add value to the world, while operating in your sweet spot. However, these opportunities will only become clear over time as you act. They will develop slowly like film in a darkroom, giving you clues as you experiment, fail, and succeed. You have to try different things, and devote yourself to developing your skills and intuition, before you will begin to see noticeable patterns and understand your unique value.

Patience is required. This is a long-arc game, but it must begin now. You must plant seeds today for a harvest later. What you plant today you reap tomorrow, or further down the road. You must structure your life around daily progress based on what matters to you, building practices and activities that allow you to plant new seeds each day, with the knowledge that you will eventually see the fruits of your labor.

On your path to achieving your goals, it is going to get dark, tough and even overwhelming. You need to build self-confidence daily in order to continuously follow through on your objectives. The incremental small wins will eventually hard up, compound and yield result.

Meditation

• Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Biting the Hook
• Sometimes fragments of thoughts appear in the foreground; sometimes, we get lost in the stories we have told ourselves a thousand times over; we are used to giving the mind a lot of power; we follow every train of thought and get swept away by it.

• American Tibetan-Buddhist Pema Chödrön, Biting the Hook: A habitual response to triggers that catch us, and it is extremely hard to pull away from. Each time we react in a certain way, that response becomes more engrained, and over time, our reactions become habits.

• The more often we catch ourselves when we are triggered, the more we find that our reactions don’t hold the same power over us, and that is when we become free.

• Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – The Power of “Yet”
• The language that we use is powerful; it not only shows our approach to life, but it can also shape it. The words we use matter because they can mould your mindset. The power of yet is that it changes how we characterise our circumstances, and it does this by shifting where we are in time.
• Remember, just because a door is closed does not mean that it is closed forever. It just means you haven’t found a way to open it Yet.

Podcast

• CREATOR of “THE SECRET” Reveals How The LAW of ATTRACTION Actually Works! 🤯 | Rhonda Byrne

All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with passion.