“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu

Single Step

So true.

Do you ever have ideas that excite you only to find the excitement fizzle as time elapses without any steps taken? Do you ever have a dream that pulls at your heart strings but the tasks of making it a reality seems so enormous that you never get started?

The words ‘journey’ and ‘thousand miles’ can feel daunting. While dreams and vision are fun to imagine and create in our minds, the steps to make it a reality becomes the ‘work’. And faced with work, we either gravitate towards it or away from it.

If we are to pursue anything, it helps to break it down and think about a single step we can accomplish each day. Each single step is ‘the work’. And over time, the collection of a thousand single steps results in a transformational journey of a dream to reality.

It helps to make the single step something achievable within a short period of time such as within a day. Our attention span can only hold a certain period of time before it loses interest. It helps to make the single step to be part of the morning period of our days. As our day plays out, our mind is filled with so many other competing interests that the single step falls to the wayside. It helps to make a plan of single steps so we can see the overall vision while having the focused vision of steps to get to the overall. It helps to make our single step as part of our routine so that it gets done and we can get on with the rest of our day with a feeling of triumph and accomplishment.

When we don’t take steps towards a goal, it remains only within our dreams. Without achievable small steps, we can feel deflated, lost, discouraged or even regret. Time is a forward moving concept. We can’t turn back time. We can make up for lost time. We can use the time that we have remaining.

It helps to focus on our ‘WHY’ when we do the mundane of the single steps. Why did we come up with the idea in the first place? What is it that forces us to take small actions?

Sharing with you my own experience:

As you are reading this page, this page was created as my daily single step. My bigger vision was to write a book with a collection of topics that have held meaning to me over time. I’ve often spoken about the topics in this book to my children, to my spouse, to friends, and even to strangers. These words contained in this book are an expression of my heart where my soul resides. Very often, I would get excited about some topic found within this book and start talking about it in an excited tone! The listener would tell me, “you should write this down somewhere to make a book” to which I would forget what I said because the task seemed daunting.

One day, after many years of having these words stuck inside me, I got a download in my mind. I saw in my mind’s eye the cover of my book. I saw all the topics written as an index. I saw how it needed to be written. I saw what I needed to do on a daily basis to achieve this.

My WHY was not for the sales. It was for my way of giving back – to be of service. It would be a compilation of my words and lessons that I’ve often discussed about with my children. It would be written for them. It would be for my future unborn generations. It could be for those needing to read something like this. It could be applied to schools, to homes, to work and to the world. I saw the need for it and it was my contribution to hopefully address the need.

And I started. I began by scribbling all the topics that spontaneously came to mind. There were 50 of them. I decided I would write 50 topics in 50 days. Each day, I would address a topic. This would be my single step. No matter how tired, or how busy I was in the day, I would write at least a page on one topic. This page was day 8 out of 50.

Every morning, it would be the first thing that would drift into my mind, and while I tried to stay asleep, my mind held all the words waiting to get typed out. And most mornings, I would sit at my computer to type out all the words that came rushing out to be finished usually within an hour.

So, the content of this book was written in approximately 50 days or 2 months. They were words that resided within me for years, and with dedication and perseverance, landed on a typed page to be used by others if so need.

Turning it over to you:

What dream, idea, vision or goal seems so lofty to you that hasn’t yet been initiated?

How would another human being benefit from its completion?

What small step could you take on a frequent basis towards your why?

What will you do when you don’t feel like doing it (because that is going to happen too!)?

Your life to date is made of a whole series of small steps. What series of small steps remain ahead of you?