Seed by seed - small and easy

Photo by Richard Bell

Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it isn’t good for you. Writing just 500 words every day was enough for Ernest Hemingway, and nobody’s frowning at his work. I wonder if he was onto a secret – the immense power of small, easy things.

By encouraging “easy,” I don’t mean sit around and do nothing. I mean do something, but something that seems almost insignificant in its smallness. The Tao Te Ching says to “Do big things while they’re small” (Verse 63). Anne Lamott says to attack writing projects “bird by bird.” Even the book Atomic Habits advocates doing easy things like 10 push-ups here and there, whenever you get the time. They must all have had a hunch about the power of small and easy, but we tend to reject the notion that such small, easy things could ever add up. We think that only grand, effortful gestures are important. Something like sitting down and writing 40 words we dismiss as impossibly small, as not even worth our time.

I would argue that we have both the time and the brains to do some incredible things, but we often put too much pressure on both of those resources by overloading them with heavy expectations. When we tell ourselves that a workout isn’t worth doing unless it’s 45 minutes, when we believe that only 1000 words merit our attention, when we make ourselves sit at a desk not for 20 minutes but for 4 hours until the report is done, we are overlooking the secret opportunities in the small windows of time before us.

Do something small, just a little step forward, and the brain delights in it. The mind is not lazy – it relishes small, surmountable challenges. If you don’t believe me, just look at the incredible popularity of Candy Crush Saga. It’s only when the challenges before us seem insurmountable that our mind digs in its heels, which we mistakenly call “laziness.”

To get back into writing, I’m thinking even "bird by bird" might be too much for me. I need to go even smaller and easier than that. I might have to lure that first bird, seed by seed.