You can only take one step at a time

I watched about 80 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey earlier, before my wife woke up and wanted to watch something different.

The half of it I did get to watch blew my mind… yet again. And it made me think about the conundrum that faces everybody with ambition.

We are somewhat grandiose – we want to create something in the world that is as grand and epic in scope as 2001 is. It feels like anything less than that is futile. And yet if we even make an attempt, we seem to inevitably fall short of our great ideals.

One possible solution is to reduce the size of our ambitions – to take on something we are more likely to succeed at. I think this is a terrible idea.

We should make our aims as grand and epic in scope as that film. But we should also realise that both the most enormously magnificent projects and the most mundanely shit ones proceed in exactly the same way – one step at a time.

Assuming that aliens didn’t build the pyramids, human beings did. Brick by brick. Until they were done. Yes, they took planning and strategy, but that was also undertaken one step at a time. It can be done no other way. Nothing can.

Today marks the first day I am including a song recommendation in my daily meditation. I have created a playlist on Spotify, and I’m going to be adding to it every day.

Today’s song is “The Crystal Ship” by The Doors.

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