The Power of Little

Most of us are constantly looking for bigger, better, "more bang for our buck," etc. And yet we often underestimate the power of doing the little things. Because doing the little things seldom results in immediate visible results, we tend to ignore them. And yet over time, these little things add up to results that are BIG!

Here are a couple of examples. Last year at the suggestion of one of my clients, I started using the Mozilla Firefox browser. No big deal in and of itself. However, one of the things that I really like about this browser is that it supports multiple add-ons that make my computing life easier and more productive. One of those add-ons is a word translator that once installed, allows you to see the meaning of the word in a foreign language as your mouse hovers of any word on a given page (see Spanish example on the image below)



Since I installed this nifty little program I've been learning 2-5 new words a week in French. Since I already have a pretty good foundation in this language, these additional words are building my vocabulary quite effortlessly. At the end of 1 year, this could mean anywhere from 100-250 new words. Not bad for very little effort.

Another example has to do with riding my bike around town. While I haven't been doing any long rides lately, I pretty much ride all over La Jolla. This means that I ride my bike anywhere from 1-3 times/day - to grab lunch, work out, run errands, etc. These rides range from 1.5 to 5 miles round trip.

The result is that I typically end up riding some 30-50 miles every week this way. While it isn't much, it still adds up. Not only do I get some exercise that I wouldn't otherwise get, but I also get to save money on gas, help the environment (those short trips are very polluting) and I even save time - that's because if you've been to La Jolla you know what parking can be like.

Mao Tse Tung once said "A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step". If you embrace this concept, you will notice your productivity will soar (thought it probably won't be easily visible right away.)

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