Slow and Steady Wins the Race

You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don't let that concern you. It's your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.- Anton Chekhov

Consistency is key in making non-drastic changes. Not perfection, but consistency. If you are trying to improve your body by working out several times a week, don’t beat yourself up if you miss one of your times. If you continue on with your plan and pick up where you left off, then you are being consistent. Not perfect, but consistent. And consistent will get you where you want to go. Perfect is too hard to keep up, if not impossible to achieve in the first place. To change your Future, you need to make changes consistently. It may feel like you need to do something huge in order to get any change, but that’s your perfectionism talking. We all have it. “If I can’t have it perfect right now, then there’s no point.” “There’s no point in doing just a little. What does a little do? Let’s do it big!” But big isn’t always possible, and if you do make a big change, will you be able to keep it up? Or deal with the consequences? Sometimes, you need to lay a solid foundation of consistent steps before you make a large change. Weight gain is a good example. Let’s say there’s and overweight woman. She did not go out and consume an entire buffet or a whole cow’s worth of beef or thirty-seven pies at once. She did not gain weight overnight. It took years of consistently putting in more calories than she took out in order for her to gain the weight, and that is true whether she weights 5 pounds more than she’d like or 100 pounds more. It was consistent steps that put the weight on, and it is consistent steps that will take the weight off. Homework is another good example. The person who studies a little bit of a text book every school night will have an easier time of the final exam than the one who tries to read it all in a single night. Also, a person doesn’t get their high school diploma or their general equivalency degree in a single day’s time. It takes work done consistently over a period of time. Work steadily towards your goal. It may seem like your goal is impossibly large, that you can only do it all at once, but that’s doubtful. Take a look at it again. Perhaps there are small steps you can take to prepare.

A novel? A novel is written one word at a time. Even the people who participate in National Novel Writing Month still have daily word counts and small goals to reach the 50,000 word mark. The majority of the people who succeed in reaching the goal are the ones who work a little every single day, not the people who decide three days before the deadline that now is the time to start.

A business of your own? Do you have the money you need to support yourself while your business starts up? Do you have the room for your business, wherever you decide to put your office? Have you thought up a name? Have you taken small business courses or seminars to help prepare yourself for what’s coming up? There is a lot of preparation that goes into “an overnight success”.

Leaving your spouse? Do you have a checking account of your own? Your own money? A means of supporting yourself? Do you know where your important papers are – birth certificate, social security card, marriage license, will, etc.? Do you have a place to go? Are you mentally prepared to do this? Have you looked up divorce laws to see what you need to know? Have you looked into divorce lawyers, perhaps even selected one already?

Leaving your abusive spouse? Get out as quickly as possible. Do the things I listed above, if you can (get your important papers first), and leave. You are worth more than that. There is no excuse for you to be abused, and you shouldn’t abuse yourself by putting up with it.

Even huge, important things can be accomplished with slow and steady steps. You will make mistakes. You will not be perfect. But you can be consistent and steady, and you can succeed. You can make your Future as you want.