A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. To manage your whole life you just need to manage a day or even smaller than that, just the next 5 mins.
Straw That Broke The Camel’s 🐪 Back
Concept of Weight Scale In Islam
A very good concept in Islam is the accumulation of one’s good and bad deeds. In the end the successful is person is not the one who has not done the sins but the person who manage to do more good deeds than bad. If someone has has a 1000 kg of good deeds won’t enter the paradise because his bad deeds are 1000.001 kg. So every good deed, no matter how small, matters in the end.
Easy To Do
Atomic Habits by James Clear and Tiny Habits by BJ. Fogg, both books advocate for reducing the size of the action you wish to take to a bare minimum. Because the hardest thing is to start, especially when we it’s novel for our mind and body.
If we wish to exercise for one hour, just the thought of it will put us off. But if we reduce that action to just wearing the exercise outfit and then putting it back, is very easy to do. Next day we can improve on it by doing few push ups before taking off the outfit. Soon exercising for 1 hour will also become easy because most of the things needed for it would have become a habit and won’t need any energy.
The 1% Rule and the Grave Consequences of Not Following It
The thing with tiny actions is that they add up overtime, and a time will come when they will result in a very big change or outcome.
There is a very good equation in Atomic Habits: (1.01)³⁶⁵=37 shows the compounding effect of just 1 percent of daily improvement. By improving yourself or one of your action by one percent on a regular basis will result in a 37 times of improvement from where you started at the start of the year.
To improve 1 percent you need to follow the advise of Josh Kaufman on deliberate practice. Know your level first then make the next step a little challenging then that. Not do the same thing that you were doing previously which will result in zero improvement nor make it too difficult that you throw out the baby with the bath water. For example one of my friend bought an expensive DSLR camera but he didn’t even knew that it can also record the video. What he should have done was to use his mobile 📱 camera to take 📸 photos and learn the skills of photography. Only when the time comes to upgrade his gear then he should have done it so that he could fully use the DSLR camera.
Character
You can also judge a person by looking at his small day to day actions. I have seen salesman smiling and talking very sweetly with a customer from whom they would profit off of, but the second the customer goes their real self comes out. Hating everyone around them, shouting at the child labor. Showing no mercy to beggars or anyone below them.
There is chapter in Quran, called Al-Mutafaffin which describes the person who when sells give less than the quantity agreed upon but when buys asks for the full quantity. Just giving few grams less of flour, the buyer won’t even notice; but this shows the corrupt character of the person.
Hope
Small actions seems doable and so they provide us with hope. If we think about the destination and the long journey which lies ahead, the task may seem impossible. But with the outcome in mind and focus on the small action then we will feel good and motivated every time we accomplish the tiny task. These small atomic level actions also act as a vote for the identity we have chosen for ourselves. If I wish to be among the people who have a active lifestyle, then every time I do even a single a push up, I am voting for that person in me. So I would become an active person.
Strengthen the Proactive Muscle 💪
Taking small actions towards your goal also help you in other areas of life too. Because you end up increasing your willpower, self-esteem, self-confidence and integrity. Also increase your proactive power.
Proactivity means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.
Listen to the podcast about this topic, in Urdu: Search T-Syed in your podcast app. Google Podcast, Apple Podcast
