Many dreams don’t become reality simply because of inaction.
If someone else is making you stick to your goals (like a parent or a school system) you don’t have the responsibility of this truth. But when you are in charge of making sure your own dreams come true, it stands starkly in the foreground.
Many times ambitious people make lofty goals only to see them fade away as time goes on. They sporadically focus on new projects, but leave them when they hit a rough spot or find a new ambition.
No diet works if you stick to it for a short period of time. Working out doesn’t work if you skip weeks and months on end. In fact, anything worth working toward tends to be lost if the person working grow constantly.
Once again, Aesop’s fable holds true and the person who grinds away every single day reaches his goals much faster than the one who occasionally completes a major quantity of work.
Enter the concept of non-zero days. It’s helpful for anyone who wants to put his ideas into perspective, or get a project complete.
It’s simple: do one thing every day that advances your goal. It’s so simple, many laugh. But they don’t laugh when they are a couple days into their resolution!
It’s actually harder to do one small thing consistently than to complete feats sporadically. But the results are worth the work.
- Non-zero days are awesome for discipline. Even if you do just one paragraph of writing, one stroke of the paintbrush on a painting, or one 30-second wall sit, the exercise teaches you to stick to something you want.
- You’ll get a lot more done than if you hadn’t chosen to do one small thing. Chances are, when you sit down to do the one small thing, your excitement will kick in and you’ll go on for another hour. Either way, you finish one step closer to your desired goal.
- You’ll get perspective on your goal. The more you focus on non-zero days, the more you will find out what you can realistically get done in a day, and the sooner your goals will become reality.
I’ve personally put this idea into action through my daily writing. Some days I only wrote a short paragraph on Quora. Other days I spent 2 hours working on an idea I had. But my simple goal of putting some kind of content out, every single day, has given me the ability to stick this big resolution out.
And here I am, just over a week a day from going 100 days strong. My goal is a whole year of writing every day. Here’s to one blog post a day!
Take a step back. Do one little thing every day that advances your goal. What do you think? Does it seem possible that one simple action a day can advance a big idea?