Start Small, Achieve Big: The Power of Incremental Progress

I visited the world of coco-cola factory very recently. The factory was all about how their history was, how they started selling coke in a pharmacy and they could simply sell 9 bottles of coke every single day. That was too less to start with, now that we think about the scale that they have reached. But after the 9 bottles of coke everyday, they gave a contract of bottling to 2 people who would bottle 350 bottles of coke everyday and the distribution of coke happened into every gas station, every shopping mall, movie theatres, etc later on. The distribution happened in 1929 and that's how they became a very big business. So when I think about this, I realise that even something like Coke, that is such a big company today had to start really small. That's the topic of this article, start small. 



Think about it for a while, what does this really mean? Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. What the author really means out here is that, we all think that a huge project, for a simple example, let's take a look at how a building is made, the foundation is laid first, then they start designing the building and how it will look like when it's built. After that they start with construction of the first floor, then the next floor and then the next floor. Even within each floor they construct each house in the same fashion, and that's how the building is really formed. So in order to build a building, it's all the small steps that are accumulated together and then it looks great. That's what is the point out here, great things are not done by impulse but by a series of small things brought together. What we can learn from this is that whenever we look at great things that are done, don't look at the great things by themselves, think about the small things that were done in order to build the great things. 



Ideally we want to take a small step towards our goal every single day. Now there are many benefits of such small steps every day. Here I am listing a few benefits of taking small steps. 

Let's take an example. Let's assume that you are cooking a meal of avocado toast. If you think about creating an avocado toast out of nowhere it's difficult. But if you make small steps of that, for example, collect all the ingredients, avocados, tomatoes, green chillies, onions, pepper, butter and bread . Once you have collected the ingredients you need to go and toast the bread. At the same time, you can cut vegetables like tomatoes, green chillies, and onions. You have pepper as a seasoning and you can also cut avocados make a paste and then use it in the avocado toast. And finally serve the avocado toast. So in a way it's a very simple recipe if you know what steps are involved in it. Similarly, bagel and cream cheese is an easy recipe. What I am trying to say is that you can easily learn cooking if you do things step by step.

1. Reduced overwhelm: As you can see what we have said is that, we can reduce overwhelm when we reduce break a larger goal into smaller steps. It's difficult to create an avocado toast, but it's easier otherwise cut vegetables and keep them ready. 

2. Consistency over intensity: It's easier to do something for an hour a day, rather than doing everything all at once. It's all about being consistent. For example, if you want to gym for an hour every day it's easier, but if you want to gym for 4-5 hours a day, then it's tough.

3. Continuous improvement : Small daily actions help you improve yourself every single day and you can also keep track of your improvement.

4. Boosts confidence: When we continuously make small steps, we keep increasing our confidence with it. For example a small achievement, gives you the confidence to do the next step and so on. So celebrating small wins is also equally important. 

5. Enables flexibility: When we consistently take small steps, it gives us the flexibility and we can recalibrate as and when required to reach the goals that we need to. 

6. Compounds over time: Small actions do accumulate and this will lead to significant progress over time. This compound effect is a very powerful thing. For an example, even 30 minutes of daily learning when multiplied by a factor of 365 gives 10950 minutes of learning per year. This multiplied by 2 years means 21,900 minutes in 2 years. 
Now multiply that for 30 years. 3,28,500 minutes in 30 years.

The amount of growth you get with compounding is stupendous. 

7. Focus is on the process: When you are studying something for only 30 minutes, 

you realise it's your process that becomes a focus. You will be less distracted by other thoughts when you focus on the 

process. With result oriented thoughts you will always do the job for the result and that leads to poor quality of 

work done. But focusing on the process will definitely give you some great results. 

8. Encourages long term success: Taking small steps means that you understand that growth will be compounded over time 

and this will ensure that you think more about the long term success than the short term success. More importantly, 

a laser eyed focused on the long term goal will also help you stay on track with short term failures. 

So what I encourage you is that you need to think 5 years from now. Think about what you wish to achieve, whether in terms of

health, money or relationships. Now think about small steps you can take to achieve what you wish to achieve.

It's not impossible, in fact with the usage of chatGPT and other tools it's become even more easier. 

Exercise: Write down your goal for the next 5 years. Think what you want in 2029, now make a list of small steps 

you would need to accomplish in order to reach there. Think of every single small step as possible that can be done 

every day for 30 minutes or 50 minutes in order to achieve that. 

Now keep your life simple and just do those things 30 minutes a day and see where you reach. 

PS: The alignment is a bit weird in this due to some updates that I made. Please bear with that ! Thanks :)