Appreciating the Small Beginnings
Finding the big benefits on the small starts
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the vision for what the city could be probably took a lot less time to create in the minds of the architects and engineers who were given such a great task. And we humans are captivated by our visions, wanting them to materialize before us in an instant. Unfortunately, this sense for immediacy — to see things realized quickly — can become a pitfall for us. When the progress doesn’t meet the high expectations we demand on the things we cultivate, it can leave us feeling defeated, or uninspired, or it can lead us to doubting and questioning our vision all the way to the point where we stop building. The solution to this sudden dilemma may not necessarily be to work harder or dream up smaller/more easily accomplished dreams, but rather to learn to appreciate the small beginnings we so often want to skip.
The Challenge
It’s easy to be ungrateful about small beginnings. We live in a world where comparison is very easy to fall into. With our increased access to information (the internet, social media, TV, and movies) we more visibly see the things other people have. What makes it worse is the fact that we’re often exposed to the results and not the progress that happened behind the scenes.
And also, we just have a superiority complex. We don’t want to feel like we’re at the bottom of the food chain. We don’t want the smallest house, the flabbier body, the least amount of money, the most dysfunctional family, the worst behaved kids, the less meaningful degree, or even the least amount of followers.
People see where you’re at as a reflection of success and one of the biggest snares is the idea of “overnight success” stories. Social media and self-help books flood markets with how to get what you want fast.
The reality is this: when you dream big, it’s hard to see your dream come to fruition when you don’t have all the pieces yet. Dreams, visions, and goals take time to come into reality and not knowing the amount of time it’s going to take can be very discouraging.
The Reward
But ultimately, we need to embrace the small beginnings. There are great benefits to starting small and then growing. I would even dare to say that starting small is more likely to help you grow in a healthy way. Someone into exercise or fitness might be able to relate in the sense of understanding that someone doesn’t immediately go into strenuous or difficult exercises without first starting light and then progressively increasing the difficulty or weight with time.
Babies and children do this well. They embrace the small beginnings and rarely fear failure or comparison. When babies are learning to walk, they’ll crawl, stand up, stumble, walk, and even begin running. Kids, too, are okay with starting small. Their joy is often found by what’s in front of them. They don’t really need the lavish toys and gifts we give them. They can do well with just a ball or building blocks, making the most out what they having an inserting imagination where there may be gaps. It’s only when they’re exposed to what they’re without either through TV or through their friends that they begin to lose sight of what’s in front of them, see what they have isn’t enough, and almost inevitably ask for more. Imagination also goes out the window because the things they want are oftentimes flashier than what they have.
The small starts also allow us to better engage in troubleshooting a problem. It’s easier to fix mistakes and hone your craft when the project is small. When a project is too big, it becomes a little more difficult to manage.
It’s also good to have a starting point that you can look back to. Sharing your success from humble beginnings gives people hope and makes chasing a dream or vision a more attainable thing for others who might feel their dreams, visions, or ideas are too big or impossible.
Comparison kills
If you want to see your dreams die fast, then keep looking from side to side comparing yourself to all the people who have more skills than you, who have more resources than you, who have more intelligence than you do, and who’ve just been doing it longer than you. Dreams don’t thrive off comparison, and even if you’re one of those people that uses competition as a motivator, you’re operating off a source that doesn’t offer much in the way of committing to your unique vision. You run a greater risk of having your thing look like another person’s vision instead of your own.
Instead, keep your dead down, focusing only on what it is you need to get done in order to make whatever incremental progress you need to make, and occasionally look up to your original goal as a reminder as to why you’re doing what you’re doing. Being inspired from the world around isn’t wrong, please don’t leave here thinking that’s something I’m saying, but it’s important to retain a unique vision.
Your Rome isn’t going to be built in a day, but that’s okay because what actually might be more beautiful than the end product is seeing the thing you’re working on grow and transform into the something great along the way.
