One Apple At A Time: How Small Actions Have Large Impact

“If you have one apple in your left hand and one apple in your right hand, how many do you have?”

What a stupid question. Two, obviously. Where are we here, in elementary school?

“Now, if I give you three more, how many do you have?”

Five. And my hands full — how am I supposed to hold all these?

“Imagine if I give you one apple every day. What do you have after a year?”

A pile of rotten fruit. Or a vitamin overdose. Or a broke doctor because the apple a day kept him away and left him to starve.

If we do the math properly though, we have 369 apples after a year. Holy shit. That’s a lot of fruit for a single person. In fact, that would probably fill up a significant portion of your closet. If you’re one to put apples in a closet, that is.

What are you supposed to do with all these? Photo by Joanna Nix on Unsplash

The more important point here is: things compound over time. If I get one apple every day, I have a lot of apples eventually. And this is true for every action that is repeated consistently. So let’s move out of elementary school and look at a couple real-world examples.

Physical fitness: Imagine you do 10 push-ups every day. After a year, you have done 3,650 push-ups. Try doing that in one sitting. Or ten. Pretty impossible, eh? But over…