Don’t Be A Hero

Having that utopian vision of the world is important though. And being optimistic about making enormous change is important, too. But I’m learning that the truly wise folks hold that vision in their minds whilst making tiny incremental progress in that direction every single day

This reminded me of my experience learning to play the piano. You want to start out playing the incredible pieces written for piano—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”, Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”—but you quickly realize you can’t. So instead you practice over and over and over. Every day. And every day you practice, you can barely notice any improvement from when you started that day. But as time goes by, you notice drastic improvements week over week, month over month, year over year. Tiny, incremental, accumulative progress towards a goal is a powerful thing.