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The consequence of the inconsequential

You look all around you and everyone is racing ahead at breakneck speed. Kevin just got a much-coveted promotion. Sarah's fashion blog is taking off. Mike's new fitness regime really played well on his abs. There is something everyone has that you don't and you can't help but believe you're falling behind, that everybody is doing better than you, and that in the game of life, you've been cheated on by the universe; somehow, you got dealt the suckiest hand to play with. Sound familiar? I'm sure it does. Been there. Am there.

No matter how strongly I decide that I need to start working on myself, I end up falling head-first on this quest for self-improvement; as a pronounced pattern, I would give up even before I began. So many times had this happened, that I was convinced at one point that humans are by nature self-sabotaging. This was before one fine day when the Divine Revelation came to me during a hot shower that there's a chance that this inability to take action and turn my life around stems from my feeling overwhelmed at the sheer number of things I wanted to change about myself. In retrospect, that made sense. Whenever I would discover something new I needed to work on, my first reaction would be something akin to: “Yep, that's about right, sigh. Another brick on the wall, I guess,” — and those bricks stacked up to form towering wall, one that had become too formidable to look at. To go further with that metaphor, crossing that wall and expanding my horizons had become an insurmountable challenge (pun certainly intended).

What came with that knowledge was the painful recognition that I did not like who I was, and that I needed something of the scale of a house-remodel to fix myself. And what did I choose to do with that knowledge? — I drank a glass of water.

I know what you’re thinking, how does that help anything? As silly and as inconsequential as that sounds, it worked! It set the ball rolling, and contrary to the proverbial rolling stone that gathers no moss, small actions aligned in the correct direction snowballs into something massive and positively unstoppable! Let me explain how that works. The first day all that you need to do is drink enough water. This is a simple challenge; sitting next to a bottle of water would do the trick. Every once in a while your attention will be drawn towards it, you’ll be reminded of your agenda, you’ll take a sip. By the end of the day, the odds are hundred is to one that you’ll have drunk more water than you usually do and you’ll feel good about yourself. In comes the beauty of the feedback loop of accomplishment. This minor victory fuels a drive to keep going. Tomorrow, you’ll drink more water and take a ten-minute walk. Day after, you’ll drink more water, take a ten-minute walk and dust off the old gym equipment that hadn’t seen the light of day in many months. Each little step you take would invariably contribute towards the ultimate goal of attaining satisfaction in our being.

Trying to tackle this challenge head-on is setting oneself up for failure. Change doesn’t happen overnight; it takes sweat, labour and it takes its sweet time in coming to you. Instead, breaking it up into smaller sub-goals makes it actionable and each sprint up to the finish line less intimidating, drastically increasing your chances at succeeding. The glass of water is just a placeholder, you could substitute it with any other easily-achievable aims that you have in mind. All that matters is you start small and slowly build momentum to plough through the bigger, more demanding issues on the list. If you stick sincerely to this strategy, there is no force on Earth that could trip you up.

As I conclude this unsolicited soliloquy, there are two things I would want to remind the readers. First, this isn’t a magic formula that solves everything. It would demand a sizeable amount of dedication, effort and energy from you. It is also not fool-proof; there will be hitches along the road, sure as the sun. There will be set-backs, days when you go back to square one, that’s life. Before you start making faces, let me clarify, that’s not such a bad thing. When we operate under that prevision, we’re eliminating the necessity to succeed every single day; we would feel less pressured to perform and less afraid to fail. We would take it for granted that failing was a part of the process and that doesn’t imply we need to start over allowing us the liberty to resume normally next day onwards. Second, it is no lie that starting takes a lot of initiation energy, which is one of the principal reasons why we procrastinate. The metaphorical glass of water masterfully eliminates this problem. It takes little to no effort to do, nor a symbolic dawn, a new beginning. Why wait for the next day, when the next hour, next minute, next second are equally good? Thus, the readers are advised to keep this attribute in mind while picking their substitute for drinking more water (if you can think of nothing else, this itself would do just fine!).

Everyone is capable of change, believe in yourself. Start today, start now! Because the grass is greener where you water it.

#self #self-improvement #self-help #small-steps