Continuity Beats Strength — Steadiness Pays off

“Constant dripping wears away the stone,” the vernacular says. But what does that have to do with you?

In the face of significant challenges, we often speak of a Herculean task. This suggests that we can only achieve our goal with the most enormous effort.

A clenched fist or a pinched face are the images we associate with it. But when we look around in nature, we see that the most impressive results are not the result of sudden acts of violence, but have developed over long periods.

A watercourse can form a gigantic canyon in millions of years, and evolution has created a breathtaking diversity in almost unmanageable periods. If we apply this knowledge to our lives, fascinating insights arise which often contradict our intuition.

Who exaggerates, gets the short end of the stick — What we can learn from long-distance runners

Beginners always make the same mistake during running training: they run off without being able to assess their strength, feel fantastic and invincible for the first few hundred meters and then break in after a while all the more brutally.

Lousy five kilometers were targeted, and suddenly at kilometer two one notices that nothing works anymore and one stands struggling for air at the roadside. You can’t recover from a breakdown like that anymore. The rest of the way can only be covered at snail’s pace, if at all.

Experienced runners know this and don’t make this mistake so often anymore. They start the race at a pace that they know they can easily keep up throughout the course.

But even the beginner can profit from this knowledge. Those who don’t yet know how their fitness is, always run in such a way that they can talk effortlessly while running.

This increases the probability of mastering the full distance many times over. In fact, analyses have shown that personal best performances and, above all, records in long-distance running are set in the vast majority of cases at a constant pace over the entire distance.

What this teaches us for other areas of life is obvious: Whoever takes on too much at once will fail with some certainty. But not even starting the road to a goal is not the solution. It can be achieved — only with a different gait.

But there is one more thing that needs to be considered: Only when these slow runs are repeated continuously do they have a training effect. Only then will they make us faster over time or allow us to run longer distances.

What would be possible if… — A few thought exercises for the benefit of continuity

Suppose you want to write a book. A really thick tome with four hundred pages. How do you proceed?

Suppose you already have the story in your head and are familiar with the technical aspects. So you know how to write a novel.

Now what? You will start full of energy and will probably wholly overestimate your time possibilities. You set yourself utopian goals and try to write five or ten pages a day. If you are working, this can perhaps work for two or three days in a row if you work into the night after work.

But sooner or later you will collapse under this stress and not reach your daily goal. In most cases, this is the beginning of the end.

So what is recommended in such a case instead? Suppose you decide to write one page a day? Then how long does it take to produce four hundred pages? Well, if you really write every day, four hundred days.

And if you decide to write only on weekdays and not on holiday? Then it will take correspondingly longer. But as long as it takes: In the end, you will have reached your goal without having spent all your time completely.

Another example: You sink into chaos at home. All documents are hidden in some drawers, useless household goods take your breath away, and the cellar is full of junk. You can now either apply for a two-week holiday and start to bring order into your life in violent action, or you can use the insights we have already gained above. Which is better?

You got it: The tour de force must be avoided. Firstly, two weeks of the holiday will be gone, and secondly, you will be so annoyed that you won’t be able to lift a finger for the next few months.

If this happens to you, you can be relatively sure that the apartment and cellar will look like they did before the big action after two years at the latest.

But what if we better portion the task? Suppose you simply do a little more than before, but that every day? Every day you take two or three documents from one of your drawers and staple them sensibly away.

Or you could throw away an item every day that you no longer need. It is clear that in the first days and weeks, it will hardly be noticeable that your situation is continually improving, but eventually, you will reach a state that catches the eye.

There will inevitably be an exemplary order in your home at some point. When the time comes, you will hardly be able to tell how it came to this.

The few steps you had to take every day will have become so much flesh and blood that you hardly remember them. Above all, however, you will not have to look back with horror on an exhausting force action.

These were now two short thought games that illustrate the advantage of continuity over the feat of strength.

And now it’s your turn

What task do you seem to be facing that exceeds your powers? What goals do you have that you believe will always remain dreams? Can you see if and how the previous considerations could help you?

I am looking forward to your feedback!

do you want more of this?

Receive weekly email and don’t miss any of my articles.

suscribe here http://bit.ly/ReneJunge

Read also: