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 use the expression that we’re in a HURRY. It’s true that we all have quite a lot on our plates—unless, of course, we happen to be working in the tourism sector. Okay, forgive my dark humor. If we’re in a HURRY, does that mean there’s no point in even trying?
Let’s return to the “one million euro” question posed in the headline. As a sharp reader, you’ve probably already realized that this was a trick question. At first glance, it seems that one million euros and one cent are such vastly different orders of magnitude that there’s really nothing to think about here. If you took that one-cent coin, you’d have a mere €5.12 by the tenth day. By the 20th day, you’d have just over 5,200 euros. By the 25th day, even someone satisfied with a million could be smiling, because the owner of the single cent would have 167,000 euros by then. It wouldn’t be until the 28th day that they’d have more than a million, and by the 30th day, the amount would have grown to 5.4 million euros.
If you look at a single pine needle that has fallen onto the carpet during the Christmas season, it’s quite small. If you take the Christmas tree outside on Three Kings’ Day and sweep the needles onto a dustpan with a broom, you’ll end up with a full dustpanful.But if you look at an anthill towering in the forest, how much larger is it than a single fir needle? You can pick up a single brick, but if you set it down and start stacking others next to it, they’ll eventually form a house. You could give endless examples like this—small things do indeed turn into big things in the end. Only the Russian state treasury is a place where you can keep piling rubles on top, yet the treasury keeps getting emptier and emptier.
Let’s now move from oil rubles to our habits. Our small actions eventually lead to big results, and to illustrate this, let’s do a little math
- If you do 50 push-ups every day for a whole year, you’ll burn about 1 kg of fat that year.
- If you spend an hour and a half exercising every day and take 10,000 steps, you’ll burn a total of 20 kg of fat in a year(as a side note, such a change does not qualify as particularly small, however).
- If you eat a large pizza for lunch every Monday, you’ll gain 4 kg of fat (this calculation does not apply to Erik Orgu).
- If you eat just one M&M the size of a tooth cavity every day, by the end of the year you’ll have gained the equivalent of a pack of butter. Women gain it on their hips, and men on their bellies.
Think about these numbers, and you’ll see that even small changes can lead to big results. Skip that pizza once a week and do 50 push-ups, and a year from now, there’s a good chance you’ll weigh 5 kg less in body fat.
I certainly agree that these calculations don’t take your overall lifestyle into account and are based on the assumption that all other aspects of your exercise and diet are perfectly balanced. Such a situation never exists in real life, so don’t take this as an absolute truth, but simply as an example of how making small changes can lead to big results (I’m going to do my 50 push-ups before writing the next sentence).
What happens when you make a lot of these small changes in your life?
Remember when former Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas said that things are going well in our country and we should just focus on fine-tuning? Most people interpreted this to mean that the prime minister was saying our country was finished and that the old man at Ülemiste could basically pull the plug on us now.
I haven’t been inside Taavi Rõivas’s head, so I can’t be absolutely certain what he meant exactly, but I interpreted it a little differently at the time. If we improve life a little in one place, and likewise in a second, third, and even a hundred-and-fourth place, then through all these small improvements we’ll eventually achieve a huge leap forward. It’s the same in our lives. If we make just small changes here and there, we can ultimately achieve a great (excellent) result. Skip two potatoes from your daily meal, take the stairs instead of the elevator at the office, take a walking break every half hour at work, and go hiking in the woods with your family every other Sunday. Put these little 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’d like to download the entire book, do so HERE.
