The importance of small steps: moving forward without kidding yourself

Life has its ups and downs. Periods when everything moves forward, and others when you feel like you're treading water.

For me, there's a parallel with trading: before trying to win big, you have to be able to stay in the game. If you burn through all your capital, you can't keep going.

In life, that capital is also your energy, your time and your motivation. By trying to change everything at once, you can end up exhausted before you've even really started.

Life is a marathon. You don't need to be the best right now. But you do need to give yourself the means to move forward.

Accept being a beginner, then start again

We'd all like to speak Spanish without searching for our words, play an instrument with ease or run without coughing up our lungs.

What we like less is the period when we're bad at it.

The one where you repeat a sentence three times. Where you keep missing the same note on the saxophone. Where ten push-ups already feel like a lot.

And yet, that's where everything starts.

You learn a little. You start again. You correct. Then you start again. Like when you learned to walk: you didn't wait until you knew how before trying.

Small steps means accepting that stage and giving it a place in your everyday life.

Small doesn't mean insignificant

Practising the saxophone for half an hour. Spending time on Spanish, then trying to hold a conversation. Starting with ten push-ups and gradually doing more, when you're able to.

Over a single day, there's nothing spectacular about it.

But repeating that effort for several months gives you a real chance to make progress. Not necessarily at the speed you imagined. Not necessarily in a steady way. But you're building something.

The problem is that we often judge our efforts too early. We already want the result when we've only just started.

You're not going to dig up a seed every morning to check whether it's growing. To learn, you also have to accept giving the work time.

Beware the illusion of progress

This is where I draw the line with the small-steps talk.

Doing a Duolingo lesson, keeping your streak and closing the app can give you the feeling you've done what was needed. But if your goal is to hold a conversation in Spanish, you also have to ask yourself what you can actually understand and say.

Ticking a box doesn't mean you've acquired a skill.

Five minutes can be useful: to review, to get started or to keep in touch with it on a busy day. What I criticise is asking those five minutes to produce results that require a lot more practice.

For a goal that really matters to me, I prefer to set aside proper time: thirty minutes, an hour, depending on what I'm working on and how much time I have.

The point isn't to watch a stopwatch tick. It's to put in an effort that matches what you want to learn.

Discipline, without drowning yourself

Motivation won't always be there. That's why a habit matters: you don't have to renegotiate your commitment every morning.

But you don't need to turn every day into an exam either.

You can be tired. You can miss a session. You can need rest. That doesn't erase the efforts you made before.

What matters is getting back to it, and looking honestly at what's changing: a conversation you can keep going for longer, a piece you play better, an exercise that gets easier.

Learning a little, regularly, to go to bed a little wiser. Without putting impossible pressure on yourself, but without kidding yourself either.

Small steps don't need to impress anyone else. They just have to take you somewhere.

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