Building your tower

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m never going to succeed.”

“This is a huge waste of my time.”

Yep, I’ve said them all. You’ve said them all too.

I run into bouts of self-doubt all the time. The key is making them more infrequent. 

To do this, you must remember WHY you are doing what you do.

With no purpose, there is no progress.

When I first started lifting weights I became extremely discouraged. I was a shrimpy 16-year-old kid. Every single person in the gym was bigger than me and lifted more weight than me. I had no business being in the gym. 

But I had a goal in mind: get stronger. It was a simple goal. As I developed this goal I attached a WHY to it. It went like this:

I want to get stronger so I will have more confidence in what I say and what I do. I want to get stronger to be more attractive. I want to get stronger to be able to protect those who I love. I want to get stronger to help people in need.

I never wrote these things down, but these were the exact reasons I started lifting weights. It’s not because anyone told me to, but I knew that doing it would let me achieve those goals.

The days where I am tired or demotivated, these are the things that make me continue.

Each day you wake up, you have the decision to be better or stay the same.

Each time you do something that aligns with your WHY, you are getting better.

Sometimes you look right past the progress that you have made. You are upset that you aren’t further along on your journey rather than looking back to see how far you’ve come.

You ignore the old pictures and focus on the image you see in the mirror. You are disappointed that it doesn’t look better. What you don’t realize is that it does look better. You have become better. 5 years ago today, you would be wishing you could see the person you see now. I sure as hell would.

Some days it sucked to look in the mirror. I wasn’t happy with who I was. But things only started getting better when I figured out I could change it. If I was tired of seeing the same person in the mirror each day, then I had to change who that person was. 

At first you see no progress. You get discouraged. You lose sight of why you started in the first place. 

But a strong WHY will guide you along on your exploration. 

Each day you wake up and choose to follow your WHY, you are making small, atomic changes. They are not seen right away, but in time they pile up. Soon enough, they are so obvious that they can’t be missed.

Imagine you wake up every morning and lay down one brick. At first, you would have a measly tower of bricks, maybe a really basic foundation, but nothing noticeable. Each brick you lay, the tower becomes bigger and bigger. After a year that tower would be pretty hard to miss. After 5 years, even harder. 

Compare your person to a tower. Each day you do something that leads to your overall purpose, you are stacking a brick on your foundation. The difference between days is insignificant. But in months, years, decades, the changes are apparent. 

Appreciate how far you have come.

Celebrate the small wins. 

The more you celebrate how far you’ve come, the more you’ll want to keep going.

Each success can be broken down into a million smaller, positive decisions that were made in the past.

You know what you have to do, are you doing it?

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Thank you for reading!

My goal is to inspire self-improvement in others through my personal stories and experiences.

This is The Exploration.