Excerpting from his book The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler reveals his philosophy on growth (in many contexts): small, incremental changes to reach long-term, seemingly unassailable goals. The idea is encapsulated in the question, Was today better than yesterday?
Most important challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure. This is true of software development, career management, and even lifestyle and health. […]
Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is why we procrastinate. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and therefore procrastinate some more. […]
The secret is to focus on making whatever it is you’re trying to improve better today than it was yesterday. That’s it. It’s easy.
I can’t help noting that this feels like the action required to counteract mesofacts.