Plan for a day, not a year.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is often attributed to saying, “‘Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” To paraphrase Gates, “We often underestimate what we can achieve in a day and overestimate what we can achieve in a year.” We all start the year with 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8760 hours, 525600 minutes, and 31,536,000 seconds deposited in our time account. Our priorities and how we use this finite resource determine how much we accomplish in each calendar year. Make every day a masterpiece, and the year will eventually take of itself. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, ” The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

No matter what your goal for the year is, whether to become financially solvent, read 100 books in a year, listen to 365 podcasts, learn Spanish, learn Python programming language or run a sub-3 hours marathon. It all starts by taking each goal one day at a time, one routine, regimen, page, verb conjugation, concept and training at a time. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. It will get extremely tough on your path to achieve your goals. It will require single-mindedness of purpose, discipline and a brutal focus to achieve your goals daily.

You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.

Somedays are going to be tougher than the others, there would be days that you are going to a miss a session, streak or workout. It is part of the process of being human, things happen. Whatever will go wrong will eventually go wrong (Murphy’s Law). The key is to not go wrong when thing invetibaly go wrong. Make everyday a masterpiece, fail forward, start with why and the end in mind. You don’t have to think too much into the fututure, just keep showing up daily and do what you know is right. It is going to be a roller coaster of ups and downs, good and bad days but one has to dig deep everyday. Plan for a day, make each day count and 365 of them later by the end of the year, you would have come a long way. Plan but be flexible.