Moving Glaciers Is Difficult, So Move Ice-Cubes

photo credit: stevendepolo

Glaciers are huge chunks of moving ice.  They are far too large for any of us people to move using our bare hands.  On the other hand, we can easily pick up an ice-cube and drop it into our beverage.  A glacier is made up of frozen water, just like an ice-cube, but it is out of our grasp to move it.  This is why you need to stick to working with the ice-cube-sized features of your problem.

Computer Organization

Organizing all the files on your computer is difficult.  Organizing the files in one folder you have is doable.  You might be thinking you should just wait until you have a big surplus of energy before you try to organize all your files, but this is not a reliable strategy.  You might not get a surplus of energy for a long time.  What you can do, however, is delete a file, or label a file, or reorganize a few files in a folder.  These things are doable.

Seeking World Peace

Let’s say you are a political activist who wants world peace.  That is a glacier.  The phrase “world peace” includes all of the people across the world.  Going for it is about as easily doable as looking to move a glacier.  Something that could be done, however, is contacting a local congressman about how you feel that a certain area of the world does not appear to be peaceful.  This may seem smaller, and like less of an accomplishment, but the small things we do turn into the big things we get if we keep handling them.

Business Advertising

Not only do you want to avoid trying to move the glaciers around you, as it is a loss of time, but you want to look for ice cubes, or easier tasks, that you have the potential to work on.  If you see that you can improve your business’s advertising efforts with billboards, purchasing them can be your next move.  Using billboards is well within your hands, while buying electronic advertising time in New York might be too much for you.  There’s no need to try move that glacier, and you could always save it for later, when you might be able to then purchase that ad space.

Prepare For Large By Doing Easy

While moving a glacier may be out of your hands today, you might be ready to move one at a later time.  This is why you stick to smaller, as well as more manageable, tasks and efforts.  If you stick to big thinking like this today, you will get to do big actions tomorrow.

Reading A Book

As a final example, take reading a book.  Reading a huge book like War & Peace is very difficult, like moving a glacier.  However, if you break this issue down into smaller pieces, it is no longer a glacier.  You can separate the book into 10 chapters based on skimming part of the writing, and then read chapters one-at-a-time, contacting people along the way to discuss the book.

Make sure you differentiate the tasks you have before you into whether they are nearly impossible objects(glaciers), that we have set up incorrectly, or are manageable tasks(ice-cubes), ready to be placed into a cup of water.

Tagged as: Action, changes, effort, large tasks, small