The Insurmountable Mountain
What if I told you that you could easily run 10,000 miles? It almost seems insurmountable, doesn’t it? 10,000 miles. I’m sure the idea of running 10,000 miles seems crazy to many.
For those old enough to have watched Forrest Gump, it probably brings to mind images of someone doing a run from one side of the country to the next, which makes sense. 10,000 miles would be akin to running across the country 3 times.
But despite this, it’s not insurmountable. In fact it’s easily achievable. Not only can it be achieved easily, in a way it can be done in the amount of time it might take you to read this.
When it comes to achieving tasks that appear insurmountable, one of the things that seems to stop most people in their tracks is feeling overwhelmed. They have some big insurmountable goal or project in front of them and they can’t see how they can possibly achieve it. They look at the whole of the work and not just the next step.
A Messy Kid
When I was a kid, I went through a few phases. When I was really young, probably under 8, I had a messy room. My mom would ask me to clean it and I would hem and haw and complain and do everything to avoid it.
After I turned 15 or so, I did a pretty good job of keeping my room clean. But in-between 8 and 15 I became really good at cleaning up the giant mess my room would become. I actually began to enjoy it. I had come up with a system that worked really well.
I simply went through the room and took everything that was out of place and put it in a specific pile. There were piles for dirty clothes, for clean clothes, for books, for toys, and for a lot more. When the piles were finished, I took the items from a specific pile and put them where they went. I took the dirty clothes to the hamper, the clean clothes to the closet, the books to the bookshelf, the toys to the toy box, etc.
A Cleaning Machine
So how did I clean the tornado that was my room? One item at a time. There was something enjoyable about just getting things from disorganization to organization. I didn’t look at the whole of what I had to do. I didn’t look at the entire room. Instead, I looked at the item in front of me on the floor, and I cleaned my room one item at a time.
When I was in my messy phase, cleaning my room took hours. Why? Because I avoided it. I did anything but clean. I saw the catastrophe and saw an insurmountable mountain.
When I was in my cleaning phase, I could clean the disaster area I called my room in less than half an hour, and I became faster as I went along. It was a quicker operation because I didn’t look at the mountain, but the one item in front of me. Before I knew it, my room was clean.
It Takes Just 10 Minutes
In a similar way you can run 10,000 miles easily by running just 10 minutes a day. A moderate pace for running is 10 minutes a mile, and if you run just one mile a day, that’s 365 miles a year. In 3 years that’s over 1,000 miles. In 30 years you will have covered well over 10,000 miles. In fact most people who begin to run a mile a day typically increase their daily run, making this an easily attainable goal.
But this isn’t just about running. If you realize that you have the ability to run from one end of the country to the other and then back again easily in your lifetime, you will realize the potential you have in yourself. Find something you really want to do: get in shape, learn an instrument, write a book. If you start to look not at the whole of what you want to do, but at just doing the one thing in front of you, you can accomplish way more than you ever thought imaginable. You simply need to start. Do it now.
