Time doesn’t stop moving forward, does it?
Its pace may be gradual, yet its arrival and departure are inevitable, often going unnoticed until it’s gone. Time creates an illusion, causing our best moments to fly by and our worst moments to drag on. Still, each person is allotted the same 24 hours daily, repeating 365 times a year. We look at the same clock and live by the same time.
“If you keep doing what you are doing, you’re only going to keep getting whatever you’re getting. It would be insane to expect different outcomes while you continue to live the way you do.“
Stephen R Covey
We keep waiting for the right moment. But we lose so much time waiting for that right moment. It’s easier to look back and identify what changed our lives. But when we’re living through the historic moments, they always seem ordinary. If only we could appreciate life for what it is, with the accumulation of everyday moments. Maybe then we could enjoy the ordinary days a little more.
Change is not linear, but exponential. Just think how different our lives would be if we got 1% better every day we tried.
1.01⁶⁰ = 1.816 (2 months of growing at 1% makes you nearly 2 times better)
1.01¹⁸⁰ = 5.995 (6 months makes you 6 times better)
1.01³⁶⁵ = 37.78 (1 year makes you 38 times better)
We are so caught up with instant success that we discount the power of compounding. We forget that a tiny gain could go a long way if we continue to give it time. But the same can be said for becoming 1% worse every day when we are led astray.
0.99⁶⁰ = 0.547 (2 months of losing 1% makes you half the person you are)
0.99¹⁸⁰ = 0.163 (6 months makes you 10 times worse)
0.99³⁶⁵ = 0.0255 (1 year makes you 50 times worse)
It’s easier to get worse than it is to get better with time. It’s easier for us to destroy than to build. And that is how life is. Good things always take time, bad things take less.
But we cannot draw lines and create sides. There are good days, bad days and normal days. Either we’re getting faster or slower or staying the same. We cannot grow every single day, yet we can try. We can lose ourselves several times a year, but we can try not to let it last. There is a balance everywhere in this universe, and we need to find ours.
(0.99⁶⁰) * (1²⁰⁵) * (1.01¹²⁰) = 1.805
2 months of becoming 1% worse and 4 months of trying to be 1% better can nearly make us twice the people we are.
(1.805)⁵ = 19.159
Compound that for 5 years and we become unrecognizable(20 times)
This is ordinary to some and extraordinary to others because 1% is relative. If you are starting from nothing, 1% is almost inconsequential. But when we get from 1 to 2 and 2 to 4, 1% starts to get bigger and better. Things start to change dramatically and everything begins to make sense.
Like a challenging hike in the mountains, it’s okay if we cannot see the summit from where we stand. We start where we are and continue moving forward even if it takes us longer than the rest. Everything begins to happen when we want it to happen.
If we cannot make space in our lives for half an hour today, then maybe we’ll never be able to make enough space later on.
If we can’t get ourselves to believe in our dreams, we’ll never get anyone else to believe in them either.
The world is a panorama of colours and we can get overwhelmed and distracted if we don’t know what we’re looking for. Everything seems enough when our hunger is small. It takes little to be happy, but much to be fulfilled. So it falls upon us to decide how we want to spend the 24 hours of the day.
Some of us are pushing harder every day, while the rest of us are exactly where they were a few years back. It may not feel like a big difference at first, but the moment our paths diverge, no amount of catch-up is going to bring us together. If our desires are not going to stop growing, why should we, no?
When the year draws to a close and we reflect on the past year, let our efforts depict growth, even if it is half better than who we were before. It doesn’t take much to improve, just 1% every day we try.
1% every day we try.
“If you want to be more, you’ve got to do more.”
Hi. This is Harsh, the author of this blog.
I’m glad you read my article and hope that there was something that you could resonate with at a deeper level.
I write about things that I think I’d like to tell myself. I attempt to collate all my dispersed thoughts into a single flow of thought. With every article, I try to dig into a certain thought or feeling to make it more comprehensible.
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