How to Accomplish Incredible Things According to an Old Chinese Adage
By: Mathias Barra
Tags: Education, Self Improvement, Productivity, Life Lessons, Learning

The expression 水滴石穿 (Shui Di Shi Chuan) comes from this story. The characters mean, in order, “water”, “drop”, “rock”, and “penetrate”, therefore giving the meaning of “water drops penetrate a rock”.

With enough time, something as small as a drop of water can cut through hard rocks. This is what we now often call the compound effect.

Small Things Add Up

The compound effect follows a simple principle: to repeat the same small things enough times to create results. As Darren Hardy writes in his book of the same name,

“Success is doing a half dozen things really well, repeated five thousand times.”

In high school, I spent a year watching TV series with a purpose: bringing my English to fluency. I watched a few hours a day and up to 8 hours on weekends, slowly eliminating subtitles. After thousands of hours of videos, watching without subtitles stopped being tiring and became easy.

When I started learning the trumpet, I spent years focusing on my breath and my lips’ position on the embouchure. I spent the following decade never having to focus on it again. It had become automatic and allowed me to reach both higher and lower notes.

If you were to save 1 dollar a day, you’d have 3,650 dollars in 10 years without ever feeling a burden. If you were to make one origami a day, by the time you can make a wish, at the 1,000th one, the precision with which you use your fingers will have increased manifolds.

To get on someone’s nerves, doing something grand doesn’t work that well. Bother them a bit every day and, before you know it, they’ll despise you like a pest. I wouldn’t advise it but, hey, you do you.

If you spent 10 minutes a day learning a new skill, you would reach the 20-hour mark Josh Kaufman talks about to reach a comfortable level in any skill in 120 days. That’s about 3 months. Spend 20 minutes and it’ll take you only 1.5 months. Spend 5 minutes a day and it’ll take you half a year.

If you wanted to reach the average “expert level” that takes 10,000 hours of practice, you’ll reach it in 3 years and a half with only 10 minutes a day.

Find the Smallest Common Denominator

There are things for which it’s easy to find the smallest common denominator and others for which it isn’t.

If you want to save money, you know $1 is the smallest possible. If you want to walk more, you know a 1-minute walk will be better than nothing. To grow your vocabulary, one more word a day is more than none.

But what about more general tasks?

Learning a language, how to dance salsa, how to run a marathon, how to make incredibly complicated origami, are all harder to reduce to simple tasks.

To do this, you need to dissect each into sub-categories.

Let’s take learning a language. You’ll need to know how to speak, write, and understand both what you read and hear. You’ll need to understand the grammar, vocabulary, conjugation (if there’s some), how to distinguish the gender of nouns (if there are some), and so on. Then, reduce each further.

To practice your listening, you need to expose yourself to the language. How about a 5-minute podcast? To increase your vocabulary, you need to encounter new words. How about a daily 1-min read? You can even use it to practice new grammar patterns. To improve your writing, you need to practice it. How about writing 50 words a day on a platform like Journaly and get feedback?

Then focus on these small tasks day after day.

Time will do the rest.