—ISAK DINESEN
IT HAS BEEN SAID that if you want to be successful in something, then watch those who do that thing well. That is good advice, and I try my best to follow it. So far my déjà vu friends have taught me that life comes from within, and do not hang on to negative stuff. They think of how actions affect the future and ask how they can make things better. But little would I have guessed just who (or what) would show me the fifth of the Nine Ways we need to follow to be successful. I’ll explain.
There was a point in my life when I faced what seemed to be a very difficult task, and I really did not know how I was going to accomplish it. It seemed that I was being asked to leap over the Empire State Building flat-footed.
The task was to write a doctoral dissertation to complete a Ph.D. degree. In my defense, lest you think I am the only flake out there who would think such a task was difficult, there are many people who find it overwhelming. In fact, quite a large number of people go through three to four years of graduate school, complete all the coursework, and end up being A.B.D.s (all but dissertation). They never get their doctoral degrees because they cannot complete a dissertation. I could have been one of them.
Not finishing a degree does not make sense for someone who had always done quite well in school, as I had, until you look at the nature of the work. Most grades are achieved through classroom performance, where there is a lot of structure. You have a teacher breathing down your neck, regular assignments, a schedule, a class that meets at a certain time, papers due on certain dates, and a test or two along the way.
A dissertation is quite a different animal. There are no classes, no assignments, no papers due, no one telling you how to do it or structuring the task as you work on it. There is just this monstrous requirement with its own rules and an end date three or four years out from the time that you finish your classes. The due date itself provides little pressure because it is so “out there” that at the beginning it feels like time is not even an issue. It is easy to tell yourself, I have plenty of time. And many people find out the hard way that time runs out. (This actually is a pretty good metaphor for many people’s dreams in life. Since there is no course helping them get it done, “someday I will” provides temporary relief, but time runs out and the dream is never fulfilled.)
So here I was, looking at this task which involved choosing a topic, researching all the pertinent literature that exists on it, coming up with some question or angle on that topic that has never been addressed before, writing an experimental design that will prove the answer to a significant question or hypothesis, finding the appropriate statistical proofs for that purpose, designing a method to gather all the data that will prove that hypothesis, finding human subjects to participate in the experiment who are a good fit, running the experiment itself, designing the instruments to measure the construct, gathering the data, calculating the results, interpreting them in light of your original hypothesis, making conclusions about the results, integrating those conclusions into existing literature, and then suggesting what would be helpful further study.
If you think that is a difficult paragraph to read, think of trying to accomplish these tasks with a personality makeup that does not think in modes that fit the demands of the process.
I was the kind of person, at that time, who just did not think in terms of sequential tasks without structure. I had no problem with work and study—I always got my work done—but I was not good at developing a structured program on my own to accomplish the many and varied tasks that a dissertation required. Now, many years and over fifteen books later, I am a lot better and actually find unstructured, self-disciplined tasks like writing books enjoyable. (Who says that people cannot change? So take heart!)
But back at the time of my dissertation, the very thought of tackling such a monumental project was so overwhelming that I did not know where to start. So I did what I had learned to do whenever I don’t know what to do: I prayed. I asked God to help me, because I knew I did not have a chance of getting this thing done on my own. At some point I was led to open my Bible. Here is what I found:
Go to the ant, you sluggard;
consider its ways and be wise!
It has no commander,
no overseer or ruler,
yet it stores its provisions in summer
and gathers its food at harvest.
—PROVERBS 6:6-8
I looked at the passage again, wondering how in the world this was going to help me with my dissertation. I noticed the word sluggard, which means “indolent.” I looked it up: “1 a : causing little or no pain; 2 a: averse to activity, effort, or movement: habitually lazy; 2 b : conducing to or encouraging laziness” (Webster).
Thinking that God was trying to tell me something, I pondered the definitions. At first I could make no sense out of them. Causing pain? What did that have to do with it? As to the second, I did not see myself as someone who was averse to activity or effort as I had always been extremely active. I was not lazy. I came back, though, to the first definition and began to see the point. My tendency was to choose paths that caused me little or no pain. In this situation, I was avoiding the pain of tackling the dissertation because the task was too overwhelming. It was so painful even to think about that mostly I didn’t! So I could accept that much as being true about me.
Then I considered the part of the scriptural passage about watching ants. Ants? Watch them? I always just sprayed them. Then as I reread it, the passage got quite interesting. The ant, it said, had no commander, overseer, or ruler—no teacher—standing over it, yet it gets its “dissertation” done by harvest time. Hmmm. That was exactly my problem. I had no boss giving me orders, and I was not getting it done on my own.
I did not know where to start figuring out how to apply what the scripture was telling me, so I decided to do exactly what it said. I would watch the ant and learn.
Where do you watch ants? I didn’t know. I could have solved the problem by leaving a few brownies on the coffee table, but somehow that did not seem quite the way to go. Then a friend bought me an ant farm. I felt a little silly, as most ant farms are probably purchased for eight-year-old kids, but I set up the glass container, and after the ants came in the mail, I poured them in.
They seemed pretty sleepy from the trip, so not much happened at first. When I looked in on the ants later, they had shaken off their jet lag and were busy as—well—ants. Each of them had one little tiny grain of sand in its grasp and was marching from one end of the little green terrarium to the other. I had no idea what they were doing with those grains, but they were marching somewhere with them, one by one. Okay, I thought, this is interesting but it does not seem to be adding up to getting a dissertation done.
I was away for a few days, and when I came back something had happened. The sand between the panes of glass was beginning to take some sort of shape. It had been moved around into clumps, and little tunnels were beginning to form under the surface. But when you looked at any given ant, it carried just one little grain of sand. The activity of any individual ant seemed to have little impact. Nor was it apparent how any single grain had much to do with the big picture of what was forming. But the impact was happening, and form was developing.
Of course, you can guess what happened so I will fast forward. A little more time passed and an entire ant city had been built. It had hills and valleys and a complex network of tunnels, which was amazing. It looked like a team of architects and construction crews had been there for months with miniature bulldozers, trucks, and cranes.
The reality was that many tiny ants had taken many tiny steps— one step at a time, one grain of sand at a time, one day at a time. And voila! A city was built. It hit me and hit me hard. This entire amazing feat was really no more complex than one ant with one pebble. One step at a time, one grain at a time. Suddenly it became clear how to get a dissertation done: one grain of sand at a time; one brick at a time; one step at a time. If the ant could do it, I could too.
I began to think about what the grains of sand were for me. The big dissertation was a mountain and impossible to build. But what if I built it in grains, one at a time? I began to break the mountain into little grains, each small enough for me to carry. Grain one: Call someone about a topic I had in mind for researching. Okay, I could do that. Grain two: Meet with him and get his input. Okay, we could do lunch. Grain three: Go to the library and do a search on the topic. Yes, that was a grain of sand I had lifted many times in two decades of school. Grain four: Call my research teacher and ask him what design he would suggest for the dissertation. Yes, I can do that. Grain five: Meet with him . . . okay. And so on. ... I began to think like the ant.
Could one lonely ant build a city? No, not if you think only about the task as a whole. No more than I could do a dissertation. But the ant could pick up a grain of sand and walk across the terrarium, and I could do little stuff like make a phone call, go to lunch or the library. So I picked up the phone and carried one grain of sand.
Not too long after that, one grain at a time, a dissertation appeared in my hands. What seemed impossible for me had been done. How? Just like Henry Ford said: “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”
IT IS ALL SMALL
What those ants taught me was one of the most important principles I ever learned, and one that successful people follow all the time in love and life. What was still hidden from me at the time, though, was that very fact. I did not know that this was how all successful people accomplished what they did! I thought it was a technique used to unstick people who could not seem to get things done. I thought it was a lesson for people like me at that time, people who found a task impossible that seemed easy for others.
I looked around at other people who had written doctoral dissertations, and it seemed so easy for them that I thought I was the only one who did it the ant’s way. The rest of them probably dashed off the whole thing in an afternoon. I “knew” that was true just as I knew that people who had wonderful marriages fell instantly in love and lived happily ever after and that wealthy people just had a knack for money. It was easy for them—they just did it. Like those guys at the beach with all those muscles that 1 didn’t have. Probably born with them. That was just how successful people were— successful. Some had it and others did not.
If I had examined the few significant accomplishments I had already accomplished in life, I would have seen that they were done in the fashion of the ant as well. But I didn’t. We don’t tend to see such things in our own lives. We look at what we cannot do, or have not done, and somehow think other people are endowed with something special, not remembering that our own successes may cause us to appear that way to others.
It took some déjà vu friends to bring this point home to me. It was certainly a way of doing things that they all embraced and practiced. They all achieved their successes through Principle Five—by acting like an ant.
BUT, I WANT IT ALL...
I was talking to a non-déjà vu client, Jessica, one day about her weight. Frustrated about her dating life, she had decided, again, to lose weight. She had about thirty pounds to go.
“What is your plan?” I asked.
“Well,” she said confidently, “I am just going to go for it. This time I am motivated in a much better way. I want to do it for me and my goals instead of feeling like I am giving in to some man’s demands.”
Jessica had a pattern of resisting getting into shape after a bad experience with a man who had valued her for her body. Her way of rebelling was through ice cream independence, which said, You are going to have to love me just like I am or you can’t have me at all! Unfortunately, even though unconditional love is an essential in life, unconditional approval of her weight did not seem to be coming forth. She realized that she was going to have to give up her demanding stance, get in shape, and accept the fact that a healthy body would make her more attractive. (She needed to learn to pick men who would value more than just her looks. Her choice of men, however, is another issue. The issue before us was how to lose the weight.)
Jessica continued, “I don’t want to mess around. I found a liquid diet that my friend used, and she lost twenty-five pounds really fast. I am so psyched up for this; it really feels different this time.”
I was a little hesitant to rain on her parade. But for her sake, I had to. “Didn’t you do that once before?” I asked.
“Do what, that diet?” she asked. “No, I have never tried that one.
“No, not the diet. Didn’t you lose weight quickly before? Like a lot of weight?” I asked.
“Yes, a few times,” she said. “But when Reese played his game on me, I just ballooned back up. I am stronger now.”
“That is what I was afraid of. You think the only reason you gained the weight back was the dynamics with Reese and the unconditional love thing. I don’t believe that,” I said.
“You don’t believe that I rebelled against his demand for Skinny Minnie?” she asked. “How can you say that? We really worked on that a lot.”
“Oh, I believe that you rebelled against his demand,” I said. “But I don’t believe that is the only reason you gained the weight back. I believe it involved a couple of other things as well.”
“What?” she asked.
“I think it was two things. First, your life did not change, only your weight did. You lost the weight, but at that time you were not growing inwardly and you did not add to your life the kinds of habits, structures, support, and the like that goes with successful weight loss. You just lost weight, but did not change your life. Weight comes from life, not the other way around. Now you have your life ordered much better, and if you integrated all of those structures into your weight-loss program, you would have a much better chance of not gaining it back.
“But, there is also something else, Jessica,” I continued. “I believe in the research, and basically to keep weight off you have to make a lifestyle change and maintain it steadily. It is not about dumping a bunch of weight. It is about changing your life, meaning not only reducing your intake and increasing physical activity, but also keeping those changes going over the long haul, a little bit at a time, each and every day.
“If you lose a bunch of weight fast without changing your life, it is going to come back. But if you focus on changing your habits and allow the weight loss to be a slow result of a truly changed life, then it is going to remain off. A small amount of exercise every day, small cutbacks in calories or points or whatever you are counting, and a small amount of oversight and accountability with others each day and an increased amount every week or so. What that translates to is a pound or two per week, coming from very small steps.”
“A pound a week? Are you joking?” she replied. “That is so depressing. It would take me six or seven months to lose what I need to lose. I can’t wait that long to look better. I want to lose it now. I am ready now!”
“Well, you might want it now,” I said, “but that does not make you ready now. I am telling you that if you lose it quickly, instead of as the result of a changed lifestyle, you will probably gain it back. You cannot sustain that kind of deprivation. It rarely works.
“But, let me ask you a few things. Could you take a brisk walk for thirty to forty-five minutes every day?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“Okay, could you make a five-minute call every day to an accountability partner?”
“Yes, that is not hard,” she said.
“Could you cut back on the bad foods by some percentage?” I asked.
“Yeah, that is not too much to ask. I can do that,” she went on.
I continued with a few more things that are always steps in a successful plan, showing Jessica that each had three characteristics in common: small, simple, and good.
Each of the steps we were talking about was a small thing that was simple to do, but each was also a good idea for improving life in general, even for people who are not trying to lose weight. And I knew that if Jessica took those little steps, she would keep the weight off this time, breaking the hopeless pattern of big crash losses and quick regains.
Jessica began to get excited as we talked. The picture of simple life changes that add up to good results was getting traction. She was picturing it. Then it happened. I saw the wind come out of her balloon.
“What?” I asked, seeing her face crash.
“I was getting into your plan and then I thought about something. Each week I would go weigh myself and see that I had lost only one pound. Or maybe two. That would seem so insignificant that I would just blow it off. That is so depressing!” She was near tears.
“And that is exactly what I meant earlier when I told you I did not believe that it was the dynamics of your relationship with Reese that played the greatest part in your difficulty in keeping it off. I think it was the ‘Jessica All or Nothing’ dynamic,” I said.
“What is that?” she asked.
“That is the manner in which you think about something that you want and do not have: you want all of it. You want the thirty pounds gone—anything short of having it all off right now is depressing to you. Here is what happens in your head: you think of how you will look having lost only a pound. And you get depressed because it is not where you want to be. It is not the end goal. You compare where you are at that moment to the end goal of losing all of the weight, and because one pound is not all of it, it is nothing to you. So you get depressed and give up. Since it is not all, it is nothing.
“But, here is what you miss. Thirty pounds is a sum of a lot of one pounds. No successful person ever lost thirty without losing one. Then another one. Then another.”
I told Jessica that the successful person does not think about whether or not she has lost thirty pounds; she thinks of each day, taking her walk. She thinks of calling her accountability partner, of cutting out a snack, of spending ten minutes journaling. She focuses only on the little steps that add up. She practices something called diligence. She does not judge how she is doing by the goal. She judges by whether or not she is doing the small things.
“I am concerned that until you begin to value the little steps and focus on them, not the big goal, you will always get discouraged and give up. Success will seem too slow to you. You will always see yourself as too fat. You will always feel that since the hundred dollars you save is not enough to retire on, you may as well go ahead and spend it, not realizing that if you saved that hundred, and then did it again and again for years, you would reach your goal. You look to see if whatever step is required will accomplish all of it, and if it will not, you do not value the step. And yet, it is that very step that would get you there. That is what I am worried about.”
Wresting away Jessica’s demand to have it all at once was a hard fight, but we did it. She began to value a little at a time. And as she did, she turned into a person who was not judging herself by the goal, but instead by whether or not she was working the steps along the way.
If the ant picks up a grain, the city will get built. But if the ant looks at the grain and says, “That is not a city! What a waste of time!” there will be no city in the end.
All-or-nothing thinking keeps people stuck in destructive ruts. It certainly is a part of the reason that people fail to join my déjà vu friends. All success is built and sustained just like a building is built, one brick at a time. But one brick seems too small and insignificant for all-or-nothing thinkers. They have to have it all, and one brick, one dollar, one pound, one new customer, is not enough for them.
But déjà vu people are different. They value the little increments, the tiny steps. Several years ago a friend of mine offered me an opportunity to buy into a business partnership. At the time I had my eye on some other investments that had bigger, more aggressive goals. This deal was slow and had a longer pay down in smaller increments. The thing that led me to invest in it, however, was my friend showing me where he was at that time in the deal. Having invested little by little, year after year, he had paid down the debt through his profits. By that time he was retired several times over, enjoying at a relatively young age the fruits of one brick at a time. I liked his result. He was also a déjà vu friend, so I decided to do what he did in this deal. Usually when you do what déjà vu people do, you do well.
Because the payoff in this deal built itself one step at a time, I have to admit that I was not too excited about it. As I made payments into the partnership year after year to pay tax liabilities and pay down debt, the benefits seemed to accumulate so slowly as to be hardly visible. But hey, this was my déjà vu friend’s deal. So I trusted it by proxy. I looked at some documents the other day, and I was shocked! In two more years I will be done paying it down, and it will be paying me! My déjà vu friend was right. One grain at a time and an ant can build a city; one payment at a time and anyone can build a nest egg.
Many people have applied this principle to paying down their mortgages. If you have a home mortgage, talk to your loan officer and ask what happens if you put a little extra into each month’s payment. If there is no prepayment penalty, you might be amazed at what a little more each time does in paying off your house.
Does your garage look like a mess, but the task is way too big to tackle and do all at once? Go in there ten minutes a day and throw something out, or put it in a give-away box, or rearrange it. Do that for three months. Do your closets need a redo? Same formula.
Is your savings account where the financial counselors tell you it should be? Put just a little away each paycheck. It does not have to be much, just something.
Are you out of shape? Start with ten minutes a day. Build up to fifteen minutes a day, then twenty, until you get to your goal.
DO YOU WANT TO BE A NOVELIST?
What if you have a full-time job, and you have always wanted to write a novel? Writing takes a lot of time, you tell yourself, so you give it up. It is an unrealistic dream for someone like you who has to work. Get real.
Well, that is exactly what John Grisham, one of the biggest-selling authors of modern times, did. He got real, meaning he practiced the real way that things get done: one step at a time. While working more than full time as an attorney, he had the dream of writing a novel. Though many people in that circumstance would let their dream die, Grisham went the way of the ant. He got up a little earlier each morning and wrote a little bit. Slowly, one page at a time, over a period of three years, A Time to Kill was completed. Since then he has sold tens of millions of books and is an incredible phenomenon of publishing history.
What did it? Talent? Of course talent was involved. But, so was the principle of one brick at a time. Not having a lot of resources or all the time in the world, he still did not settle for nothing. He wrote a few paragraphs each day. I do not know whether he observed the ant or not. I have no idea where he learned the method. I only know that if you write a little each day, before too long you have a book.
It was the method Tiger Woods used: one practice ball at a time. It was the way my business friend made hundreds of millions: one phone call at a time. It was also the way another friend who built a portfolio of clients did it: one deal at a time. Spend an hour at your flowerbed watching a rose. If the rose had the all-or-nothing attitude, it would cut itself down after the first week! Can you see it grow? No, you cannot, because the steps are too small to be seen. But give that flower a couple of weeks and see what happens. Growth too small even to notice blossoms into one of the most beautiful creations in the world.
It is the method used by anyone who has ever accomplished anything substantial, because that is the way the universe is designed. Things grow one little bit at a time, and it all adds up.
BUT I WANT IT NOW…
Closely related to I want it all is its sister, I want it now! In my first book, Changes that Heal, I wrote that the shortcut is always the longest path. Often when people come to me with a problem, I will listen as they describe it and tell them that it can he resolved. There is hope. We know how to fix this.
“Great!” they say. “How long will it take?”
I will tell them the amount of time I think will be required, and that they need to commit to the process at some prescribed interval, say weekly. (You can see the pattern here: one week at a time, one grain at a time...?) Many commit to the process, pick up their grains each week, and slowly you see a city of wellness being built. It is a wonderful thing to see, and I cannot tell you how much confidence I have in that process. It works. Because of that, I feel so much hope when someone commits to it.
But some do not build that city of wellness. Why? Because they cannot be helped? Because their problem is incurable? No. They do not build that city because they want to construct it in a way that is 100 percent opposed to the process by which growth and change take place: they want it now. When I tell them that what they want will come to them over time but that it will come from doing a little work one step at a time, these people say, That is just too long. I can’t wait that long. Then I tell them that their chances of success are extremely low by any other method, but I will be glad to refer them to someone who does short-term work. They usually take me up on that offer. That is fine, for short-term therapy, retreats, and workshops have much value. I conduct them myself. But I know that for these particular people, short-term work is not going to resolve their problem.
What often happens, however, is they call me back after some period of time and acknowledge that short-term therapy was helpful but that they’re still dealing with their problem. Now they’re ready to undertake the kind of therapy we talked about before, where they come regularly for a longer period and go a little deeper.
That is good news, for then I have more hope for them. The bad news is that in the effort to skip the time involved, they have cost themselves more time. They have lost all the time that passed while they tried to take the shortcut. They could have been further along if they had not wanted the results so soon.
Taking the long road, one tiny step at a time, will actually get you there faster because you will not lose time by trying shortcuts. People who want it now face frequent discouragement because of their many false starts. They think they can do a crash diet, for example. They lose weight only to gain it back. They think they can get rich quick, and go from scheme to scheme when all along they could have been building a solid business or career one brick at a time. All of the attempts fail, and those attempts use up and waste precious time. In the end, the want-it-now people end up back where they started over and over again. That is the great paradox of wanting things quickly. It causes you to miss getting them at all.
One of the best examples of this principle is seen in the experience of some lottery winners. Did you know that nearly one-third of lottery winners become bankrupt? Unbelievable? Maybe not when you understand the principle of one brick at a time. They did not build the ways to handle wealth the life, the character, or the wisdom. Just like those who succeed temporarily on crash diets, they are the same person afterward, so they reproduce the problem that they had before. We see this principle operating in young people who inherit a lot of wealth. They usually lose it because they do not have the skills and character to keep it and make it grow. They walk in the same old ways, not the ways of the déjà vu person.
One brick at a time teaches us that we can have much more in life than we ever imagined. A small-town lawyer can become one of the most widely read authors on the planet. A minority athlete can become the world’s greatest player in a sport where minorities have encountered barriers to success. The sky is the limit. But they all reached it the way of the ant. They did not have to have it in an all-or-nothing way. They were satisfied with one page at a time, one practice ball at a time. Nor did they have to have it right now. They realized that time was part of the equation. By obeying the natural growth order that God created, they got in step with the universe, one grain of sand at a time.
WHAT ARE YOUR ANT FARMS?
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. But too often we get overwhelmed, like Jessica, when the obstacles we see standing between us and our goals loom too enormous to tackle:
• I have never succeeded before, in spite of many attempts.
• The distance from where I am now to where I want to be seems too great.
• The goal is just too big.
• Things are too messed up to have any hope.
• I don’t have the skills.
• I don’t have the resources, like money or help.
• I don’t have the time to accomplish it.
There are other perceived obstacles to success as well. But when we analyze each of them, we can see that they can be overcome, one brick at a time.
But that is not all of the good news of one brick at a time. The other aspect is that it does not just apply to specific tasks, like losing weight or paying off a mortgage. It applies to virtually every human endeavor. Here are some examples of how you can change your life and succeed in areas you never thought possible.
If your marriage is faltering, restore it one counseling session at a time, one act of kindness at a time, one example of not overreacting at a time, one box of chocolates or bouquet of flowers at a time, one doing-something-unexpected-and-sacrificial at a time.
If your relationship with your difficult teenager is strained, build it one moment of connection at a time. Don’t expect instant maturity and then giving up because three hours later he seems impossible again.
If you are in sales, build a portfolio of clients one call at a time. Do not expect instant success. Meet with one prospect at a time. Sell one policy or widget at a time. If you want to start a new company or grow the one you have, get one more customer at a time. Get an advanced degree one course at a time.
If you are out of shape, exercise as we have said for ten minutes a day for one week, then go to fifteen minutes, then on up from there.
If you are single and dating, do not expect instant romance or love to be the immediate prize or answer to your lack of fulfillment. Successful relationships and marriages are built one minute at a time. One act of communication at a time. One conflict resolution at a time. One act of sharing at a time. Instant romance is an oxymoron, and the rocket will come crashing down as fast as it took off.
If you are single and not dating, build your dating life one grain of sand at a time, in the same way we discussed in chapter six. Meet one person at a time. Increase your network one person at a time. Go out on one date at a time, even if you don’t think that person is the end goal.
If you are anxious and fearful about something, take one little step toward it at a time. If you are shy and afraid of meeting too many new people but dissatisfied with the limited social life you have, take one little step of going to a function and just saying “hello” to one person. You can be quiet the rest of the evening; just take that one little step. Next time, speak to two people.
If you are depressed, get out of bed and do one small thing, like going to the park and walking. Or call a friend to do something different one night instead of staying passively at home. Take one small step of calling a psychologist and making an appointment. Take one small step of going to a support group. Then go again. Take one small step of journaling your thoughts and feelings for ten minutes a day and deciding to change one negative belief or thought.
If you have wanted to have a social gathering at your house but it just seems too big a thing to handle, have a little one instead, and choose a smaller menu. Serve hot dogs. It will be a first step toward building a pattern. You will be on your way.
After Christmas or a birthday, when you need to write your thank-you notes but you are the type that can never tackle that big pile, send one note each day. Do your Christmas shopping the same way. Buy one present a month and you will be way ahead at Christmas. Tackle the office clutter in the same way. Ten minutes a day for a month.
Save money just a little at a time. Forget about the balance. That will compound over time and you will be amazed. Do not even look at it. Just make the little deposits.
I could list a million more examples. I am sure you get the idea, though, that whether you are trying to lose weight, build a business, build a marriage, raise a child, overcome a pattern, resolve a depression, or build IBM, it is done the same way: one brick at a time. One grain of sand at a time. One conversation, one lunch, one act of sharing, one sacrifice, one meeting, one new person, and so on.
And as time goes on, you, just like my déjà vu friends, will succeed, and others will look at you and say, I can’t imagine how he or she did that! What an accomplishment! You can just look at the ant and say, Thanks!
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