If you try to tackle everything detail, you will never succeed in anything. Instead, winning lots of small battles leads to overall success.
However, letting all the small battles get to you will tear you apart.
Seems a little bit contradictory, doesn’t it?
For the last few months, I’ve been speaking relatively openly about the fact that I’m writing a book about OKCupid. However, little projects here and there keep tearing me apart from it – if I’d just focused on the book for the last two months, I’d have it all down on paper already. Instead, I launched a new website with some friends (no regrets), half-assed a couple other website ideas, and tried to get back in the habit of blogging reasonably consistently. There have not been a lot of dividends on the other projects, but I did set a new monthly views record in November.
The small battle every day is sitting down to work on that book. Every day is a grind…
Step 1, sit down at laptop, open Word document.
Step 2, start to write. 500 words.
Step 3, hey this is actually not so bad…maybe I’ll go past 500 words.
Step 4, wow…I just cranked out two thousand. Not bad.
It’s that battle to start step 1 every single day. I mean, it’s not like I have tons of other things to do. The 500 words takes me maybe ten minutes, although it’s usually not too polished. But ten minutes a day is just so much of a battle that so far I’ve written 250 fucking words about it.
Now, let’s flip the table. Small battles will wear on you. Your boss yapping at you for nothing. Your girlfriend nagging about something, or (again) nothing. An issue with your neighbor. All of these little things will wear you down. You’ll burn out on life.
Learn to tackle battles one at a time, moving towards goals each day. At the same time, don’t sweat the small stuff.