For nearly two years, Brent Underwood made no progress on restoring the buildings at Cerro Gordo, the abandoned mining town he'd bought in the barren Inyo Mountains. He'd sunk his life savings into it. He had high hopes for what he could turn it into. "I had been telling myself," he writes in Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley, "that we just needed to raise the money, hire the contractors and preservationists, and then we'd get it all done in one big frenzied crush of can-do spirit. Not a very good plan. After two years, I made precisely zero progress."
The one thing fools all have in common, Seneca said, was that they were always getting ready to start. It's not that these fools aren't busy. They are. They're running around like crazy, they've got a million ideas, a million things they're doing. The problem is that none of them concretely move the ball forward in any way.
It was only when Brent threw all these plans aside and got serious…and got small, that any progress was made. He stopped thinking big and started working on the front porch of one building. As he writes,
It was a small feat in the grand scheme of things, but it was a start. A good start. The sense of pride I derived from seeing a space go from unusable to usable, the sense of autonomy that accomplishing this small task left me with, felt like life, like rebirth, like my own personal renaissance. I felt competent and effective. That something, anything, had finally happened here, and I was the one responsible for it, gave me my first taste of the satisfaction that comes from working with your hands—from working meaningfully, diligently, patiently, incrementally toward a big goal. My dreams had an integrity now that they lacked before. They weren't pie in the sky. They were boots on the ground, hands in the dirt.
We all tell ourselves some version of what Brent told himself: when I have more time, I'll write my book. When I have more resources, I'll start my company. When the circumstances are just right, I'll make a career change. When I get all this other stuff done first, then I'll be set.
Marcus Aurelius talked about how we can't wait for perfection. Because if you do, that's all you'll do: wait. Instead, he wrote, "Be satisfied with even the smallest progress." Action by action, step by step, he said, that's how we assemble a life. Zeno, well before Marcus, said that these small steps amount to no small thing.
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