Add an inch

Adam told me this story.  There was a man who walked past a beach every day.  The beach was littered with trash and no one seemed to be taking responsibility for cleaning it up.  One day the man decided to take a trash bag with him on the way to work and fill it with some trash.  He did this every day.  After a month of filling one trash bag a day the beach was noticeably cleaner.  After three months of one trash bag a day the beach looked beautiful and the locals started to enjoy the beach again.

This is a classic “add an inch” story.  It doesn’t take much time to fill up a trash bag.  After a couple days it can even become a habit, making it even easier to find time for in the future.  While it may feel like you haven’t done very much that day, when you multiply it by months you can make some serious damage.  Think about throwing (as I always do).  If you find time to throw 100 passes a day* and you do it Monday through Friday (take weekends to do nothing!) and you do it for 25 weeks (the number of actual school weeks at Northwestern before Regionals) you will have thrown 12,500 throws.  If it takes 7,000-40,000 reps to master something then this puts you firmly in that range by the end of one year.

I had a pile of books to read.  After I finished my spring quarter of school I wasn’t able to rationalize not digging into them anymore.  However I was still holding back.  “Reading takes a long time!” or “Reading takes a lot of energy!” were my base complaints.  I was intimidated by the size and denseness of the book on top of my pile.  Finally I got fed up with myself and decided to just read 10 pages a day.  At first it was hard to find time to read.  I had to force myself to make time for reading (much like Will.I.Am makes time for the Wall Street Journal).  Soon I discovered that  making time was easier and easier.  Eventually my brain just started dragging me toward reading.  I read 10 pages a day and after a week I had chipped away 50 pages.  In week two I decided I could get 15 pages a day, at the end of that week I had 75 pages done for a total of 125.  (125 pages is 20 percent of the book.  After about 5 weeks I had finished a book that I had been putting off 5 months.  The only question that remained was why did I wait so long?!?)  My reading obviously got faster.  More importantly, by simply not procrastinating, I got through my reading pile faster than I thought I would. 

Think about lifting.  “It’s hard to go over there!” “It takes too much time!” “I can’t lift a lot!”  All classic excuses, but if you just go to the gym and spend 20 minutes squatting and you do this regularly you can turn it into a habit.  Once it’s a habit you can find that spending an extra 10 minutes to do some pull ups isn’t that hard.  Once that’s habit you will find that you have another 15-20 minutes to do some other lifts. 

By making time (less than an hour) and forcing yourself to do something a couple times you can create a habit.  Then just let your habits guide you toward the person that you want to be.

(*Sidenote: 100 passes takes Yngve about 5 hours, it takes me about 20 minutes.  Double-disc toss can make 100 go by in a snap!)