or CHAPTER II from Marti Soosaar’s e-book "A New Beginning"
Would you take a million euros from me today, or 1 cent that doubles in value every day for the next month?
In the previous chapter, I wrote about time pressure. We often say that we’re BUSY. It’s true that we all have plenty to do—unless, of course, we happen to work in the tourism sector right now. All right, forgive my dark humor. But if we’re BUSY, does that mean there’s no point in even trying?
Let’s return to the million-euro question posed under the title. As an astute reader, you’ve probably already realized that it was a trick question. At first glance, a million euros and 1 cent seem so vastly different that there’s hardly anything to consider. If you chose the magic cent, you would have just €5.12 on day ten. By day twenty, you would still have only a little over €5,200. On day 25, the person who settled for a million could still afford to smirk, because the owner of the one-cent coin would have accumulated €167,000 by then. It would not be until day 28 that they had more than a million, and by day 30 the sum would have grown to €5.4 million.
When you look at a single fir needle that has fallen onto the carpet at Christmas, it seems quite small. When you take the tree outside on Epiphany and sweep the needles into a dustpan, however, you end up with a whole dustpanful. And when you look at an anthill towering over the forest floor, how much bigger is it than one fir needle? You can hold a single brick in your hand, but put it down and start laying more bricks beside it, and eventually they become a house. The examples are endless: small things eventually become big things. The Russian state treasury is the only place where you can keep throwing in rubles while the coffers grow emptier and emptier.
Now let’s move on from oil rubles to our habits. Our small actions eventually grow into big results, and to illustrate this, let’s do a little math.
- If you do 50 push-ups every day for a year, you will burn about 1 kg of fat over that year.
- If you devote an hour and a half to physical activity every day and take 10,000 steps, you will burn as much as 20 kg of fat in a year (though it should be noted that a change like this hardly qualifies as small).
- If you eat a large pizza for lunch every Monday, you will gain 4 kg of fat (this calculation does not apply to Erik Orgu).
- If you eat just one tooth-cavity-sized M&M’s candy every day, by the end of the year you will have gained the equivalent of one pack of butter. For women, it goes to the hips; for men, to the belly.
Think about those numbers and you’ll see that even small changes can lead to big things. Skip that pizza every week and do 50 push-ups a day, and there’s a good chance that a year from now you’ll be carrying 5 kg less fat.
I readily admit that these calculations do not take the rest of your lifestyle into account and are based on the assumption that all your other physical activity and your diet are perfectly balanced. That never happens in real life, so don’t take this as absolute truth. Treat it simply as an illustration of how small changes can produce big results (I’m off to do my 50 push-ups before writing the next sentence).
What happens if you introduce lots of small changes like these into your life?
You may remember former prime minister Taavi Rõivas saying that things were going well in our country and that all we needed to do was fine-tune them. Many people took this to mean that the prime minister thought our country was finished and that the Old Man of Lake Ülemiste could now, in principle, flood us.
I can’t see inside Taavi Rõivas’s head, so I can’t be absolutely certain what he meant, but at the time I understood it a little differently. If we make life a little better in one area, and then do the same in a second, a third and even a hundred and fourth area, all those small improvements will ultimately add up to a huge leap forward. The same applies to our lives. By making just a few small changes here and there, we may ultimately achieve a big—indeed, great—result. Leave two potatoes from your daily special uneaten, take the stairs instead of the lift at the office, take a walking break every half hour at work, and go hiking in the forest with your family every other Sunday. Put those small things together and your health will improve quickly.
This was the second chapter of Marti Soosaar’s e-book "A New Beginning". You can read the first chapter HERE, and if you would like to download the whole book, you can do so HERE.
