One Year and a Decade

I’ve read that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade. Does this make sense?

Broadly and generally speaking, what have I accomplished in the past year? I’ve had two surgical procedures on my heart and my wife gave birth to our second daughter. Not really accomplishments, though. I’m at the same job, in the same position, for the same pay. I’m driving the same car, and I go home to the same house. We did have the basement renovated and I turned my wife’s old office into our eldest’s bedroom. I’ve read about a dozen books. As far as writing goes, I’ve done this blog, just about a post every day, for eight months. Other than that, I’ve completed no short stories or drafts of larger works.

How about ten years? What’s gone by in a decade? Just this: got married, moved a couple of times, bought a house, repainted every room in the darn thing, had a daughter, bought an SUV, had five jobs in different fields at different salaries for varying lengths, wrote two novels and fifteen short stories, quit smoking, fiddled about with weightlifting and running and golf, made a couple of new friends, spent a couple of annual vacations in Cape Cod, read close to a hundred and fifty books, plus all that good stuff in the preceding paragraph.

I’m sure you can fill two large paragraphs with accomplishments / major life events. I encourage it; it’s a little exercise that’ll make you feel a little bit better about yourself.

Now, interpretation about the original point.

After my first child was born, I thought a lot about goals. Never having truly put pen to paper before concerning such a subject, I did a bit of soul-searching. As I mentioned elsewhere I came up with over a hundred goals, grouped them into major objectives, listed sub-goals, etc.

Biting a tad more off than one can chew, dontcha think? But the point I want to make is that that year, 2005, I really accomplished more than I had any other year of my life. I think; I’m biased. But I think I did. This proved to me the old maxim, what get’s measured get’s done. Still, though, I only accomplished a fraction of what I wrote down in the Excel spreadsheet.

So, yeah, I think we overestimate what we can accomplish in a year. For me, make that “way overestimate.”

But the second part of the opening assertion is the real interesting part, in my opinion. Why? Well, it meshes with that image I find so attractive, that of a ship making a one degree course correction. After a fair amount of time’s passed, the change in course is so great that it boggles the mind to think it was only 1/360th of a circle change in direction.

There’s a philosophy of life that one can adopt that has no official name to my knowledge but is, simply, constant progress. Otherwise known as baby steps. It’s what I’ve been doing this past month. Baby steps. Slight, small, tiny changes in behavior, minute changes in habitual thought, little things done on a daily basis that might not have been done otherwise. It has tremendously revamped my mood of late. Yes, I have a ton of responsibilities and a ton of urgent matters to attend to, along with all the requisite worries in this recession, but I actually feel good about myself now that I’m adhering to this slight but constant progress. Just do a little thing every single day.

Who knows: in ten years I may even be living the life I imagined I’d be living at 40!