A new start: small things become big things

or CHAPTER II of Marti Soosaare's e-book "A New Beginning"

In the previous chapter, I wrote about time pressure. We often use the phrase that we have HATE. The truth is that we all have quite a lot to do, unless we happen to work in the tourism sector. Oh well, forgive my black humour. If you are BAD, does that mean it's not worth trying?

Let's come back to the question of the million euro, which was raised under the heading. Obviously, as a steel reader, you already realised that it was a trick question. After all, at first glance it seems that a million euros and 1 cent are such different orders of magnitude that what is there to think about. If you were to take this charm, you would have only €5.12 on the tenth day. On day 20 you would have just over €5,200. On the 25th day, even a millionaire would be happy, because the owner of a one-cent would have €167 000. It would only be on day 28 that he would have more than a million, and by day 30 the total would have grown to €5.4 million.

If you look at the Christmas tree that fell on the carpet at Christmas time, it's quite small. If you take the tree out on Epiphany and shovel the thorns with a brush, you'll get a shovelful.But if you look at the ant nest in the woods, how much bigger is it than a single spruce bough? You can take one brick in your hand, put it down and start piling up the others next to it, and they'll eventually become a house. The examples are endless, little things eventually become big things. Only Russia's Treasury is a place where you can keep throwing roubles at it, but the treasury keeps getting emptier.

Let's now move on from the oil bubbles to our habits. Our small actions eventually grow into big results, and to illustrate this, let's do some maths.

• If you do 50 crunches every day for a year, you will burn about 1 kg of fat in that year.
• If you commit to an hour and a half of exercise every day and take 10,000 steps, you'll burn as much as 20 kg of fat a year (although, as a side note, this change doesn't qualify as very small).
• If you eat a big pizza for lunch every Monday, you will gain 4 kg in fat (this calculation does not apply to Erik Orgu).
• If you eat just one toothpick-sized M&M every day, by the end of the year you'll have gained a packet of butter. Women on the hips and men on the stomach. 

Think about those numbers and you'll see that even small changes can make big things happen. Skip that pizza every week and do 50 arm curls and in a year's time there's a good chance you'll have lost 5kg of fat.

No doubt I agree that these calculations don't take into account the rest of your lifestyle and are made on the assumption that the rest of your exercise and diet is exactly balanced. There is never such a situation in life, so don't take this as an absolute truth, but simply as something that illustrates how making small changes can lead to big results (I'm going to do my 50 arm curls before writing the next sentence).

What happens when you make a lot of these small changes in your life?

You remember the former Prime Minister, Taavi Rõivas, saying that things are fine in our country and that we should just do a tune-up. People largely understood the Prime Minister as saying that our country was ready and that the Ülemiste wreck could basically now be our water.

I haven't seen the face of Taavi Rõivas and I can't be sure exactly what he meant, but I understood it a little differently at the time. If you improve life a little in one place, and a little in another, and a third, and a hundred and four places, then all these small improvements add up to a very big leap forward. So it is in our lives. If we make just small changes here and there, we can eventually achieve a big (great) result. Skip 2 potatoes from your daily breakfast, take the stairs at the office instead of the elevator, take a break from walking every half hour at work, and go hiking in the woods with your family on a Sunday during the week. Put these little things together and your health will improve quickly.

This was the second chapter of Marti Soosaare's e-book "New Beginnings". You can read the first chapter HERE and if you'd like to download the whole book, please do so by. HERE.