I have a 32-point text of Tolstoy’s quote posted on my office wall:
A man who walks a thousand miles must forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning: “Today I will walk twenty-five miles and then rest and sleep.”
I found it more enlightening than the standard “big things happen gradually” clichés: Rome wasn’t built in a day, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, you eat an elephant (one bite at a time), etc.
Tolstoy’s Twenty-Five Miles is like a serious version of those throwaway aphorisms. It’s for people who really want (or need) to go a thousand miles, rather than just another way of saying “oh well” after being disappointed. When someone says “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it means that Rome would eventually be built the way you’re handling things now, but there’s no reason to believe it works that way. Rome was not built often.
Twenty-five miles was a day’s effort, even though it was only a fraction of a thousand miles. It takes a real push, but it’s doable and days like this quickly add up to a long way. Note that Tolstoy was talking about the tenacious French soldiers marching across the Russian steppes; we can reduce the twenty-five mile march to “You made a real effort” Can Achievements will be achieved every day, but you will only worry about it if you are serious about achieving something. “
We should consider disturbing it because traveling thousands of miles is something humans have to do sometimes. They come to us voluntarily or involuntarily. You might take on an ambitious project, such as starting an organization or writing a book. Or fate may have a long march ahead of you – cleaning up a huge mess, recovering from a serious illness, or paying for some huge mistakes.
A twenty-five mile day will be different for every trek like this, but it’s always a day with a clear standard and a push to reach it. This might mean spending the first three hours of every workday on recruiting clients until you become profitable. This could be another day where you dutifully rehab an injury, achieve a caloric deficit, or stay awake.
In order to make those days pass and eventually get to the finish line, you can’t keep focusing on the final destination or you’ll go crazy. Twenty-five miles pales in comparison to a thousand miles. You’ve trudged all day in the cold, and for over 960 miles, the city is no longer on the horizon. With great effort, by the time you have to move a yard, you’ve moved an inch.
In and of itself, such a day is truly remarkable—forty days can get you a thousand miles. Those days (not even That Many of them) can really get things going, get you to your goal weight, or get you through a difficult phase in your life.
What Tolstoy is saying is that to have days like that, your attention must be on this side of the horizon. The prize cannot be out of sight; it must be reachable today. When your heart is on the campfire and cans of beans at the end of the day, you can do it. When it’s happening to something unseen outside the mountain, every moment of your effort can be frustrating.
If you joined a gym in January, especially if it wasn’t your first time, you may have discovered this. You can’t maintain a consistent fitness regimen by thinking about where your health will be six months from now. It may be helpful for your first meeting. But by day four, you’re on the treadmill, lungs burning, looking at that red digital timer absolutely crawl From 23:00 to 21:35, imagine a fabulous, lean version of you no will take you through the next 21 minutes. It might just make you give up.
Because in the long run, there are only 21 minutes left and six months to go. No one can run on a treadmill for six months, certainly not you.
When you make it your goal to run a (figurative) twenty-five miles and rest – the best thing you can do – your goal becomes something you can do. It takes work, but it’s a choice, not a wish.
The ultimate thousand mile goal is still relevant, but it can be viewed primarily as a map and compass to keep you creating twenty-five mile days in the right direction. That’s not your goal when you get up, or when you finish 15 miles and you want to quit. You’re trying to get to the next campsite to enjoy those beans by the fire. You wouldn’t try to do six months of exercise with your body right away, so you shouldn’t try to do it with your mind either.
When I focus on running the miles for the day and resting, I gain something. When I tried to overcome huge personal challenges, I got nowhere. I think the difference is as simple as this: traveling twenty-five miles is something one can think about and therefore choose to do, whereas traveling a thousand miles is not.
So instead of trying final Become a person who achieves great things. You can immediately Be the one who drives twenty-five miles and rests at night.
It feels good to rest at the end of the day, but there’s also a healthy dose of disappointment in it. All marching and your reward is a can of beans. But you can learn to like cans of beans and sleeping bags, and there’s still twenty-five miles behind you, and if you do that, you’ll make it to the city.
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Are you a fan of Rapture?
A few years ago I offered an online mini-course called “Raptitude Field Trip.”
This is where regular folks like you can try some of the Raptitudey techniques I described in my classic Raptitude post.
I choose simple exercises that only take a few minutes, then you try them out in real life and (optionally) discuss how it goes with me and other readers.
I’m about to do a Raptitude Field Trip 2 with new practice options.
These field trips are fun and designed to bring some adventure and enrichment into everyday life without taking up too much time. People really liked the first one.
More information coming soon. If you don’t want to miss out, make sure you’re on the list.
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