On the wall of my office I put up a Tolstoy quote in 32-point text:

A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’

I find it much more instructive than the standard “big things happen gradually” clichés: Rome wasn’t built in a day, a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step, how do you eat an elephant (one bite at a time), and the rest.

Tolstoy’s twenty-five miles is like the serious version of those throwaway adages. It’s for the person who genuinely wants (or needs) to cover a thousand miles, rather than just have another way to say “Oh well” after a disappointment. When someone says, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it implies that Rome will get built eventually by the way you’re going about things now, but there’s no reason to believe it works like that. Romes don’t get built very often.

Covering twenty-five miles is a serious day’s effort, even though it’s only a tiny fraction of a thousand. It takes a real push, but it is doable, and days like that will add up to vast distances quickly. Note that Tolstoy was talking about hardened French soldiers crossing the Russian steppes; we can scale that twenty-five-mile march down to “A real effort you could achieve daily, but which you’ll only bother with if you’re serious about getting somewhere.”

We should consider bothering with it, because the thousand-mile trek is a thing humans have to do sometimes. They come to us both voluntarily and involuntarily. You might take on an ambitious project, like building an organization or writing a book. Or fate might plunk a long march in front you – cleaning up a huge mess, recovering from serious illness, or paying for some great mistake.

For each such trek, the twenty-five-mile day will be something different, but it’s always a day with a clear standard that requires a push to meet it. It might mean spending the first three hours of each weekday drumming up clients until you’re in the black. It might be yet another day of dutifully rehabbing your injury, achieving a caloric deficit, or staying sober.

To make those days happen one after another and eventually get to the end, you can’t stay fixated on the final destination, or you’ll go crazy. Compared to a thousand miles, twenty-five can seem like nothing. You trudged all day in the cold, and the city won’t even be on the horizon for another 960-some miles. Through great effort, you’ve gone an inch when you have to go a yard.

Considered on its own, such a day is really something though – forty of them gets you to a thousand miles. Those kinds of days (and not even that many of them) really do get the company going, get you to your target weight, or get you past a difficult chapter of life.

What Tolstoy is saying is that to have days like that, your focus must stay on this side of the horizon. The prize can’t be out of sight; it has to be reachable today. When your heart is set on a campfire and canned beans end of the day, you can make it. When it’s set on some unseen thing beyond the mountains, your moment-to-moment efforts will be mostly discouraging.

If you joined a gym in January, especially if it’s not for the first time, you may have already discovered this. You cannot sustain a consistent fitness regimen by thinking about how fit you’ll be six months from now. It might help you for the first session. But when it’s day four, and you’re on the treadmill, lungs burning, watching that red digital timer absolutely crawl from 23:00 down to 21:35, imagining some mythical lean version of you is not going to drive you through the next 21 minutes. It might just make you quit.

This is because from the long perspective, there aren’t only 21 minutes left, there are six months left. And nobody can run on a treadmill for six months, certainly not you.

When you make it your goal – i.e. the best thing you can do — to hit your (figurative) twenty-five miles and rest up, your goal becomes thing you can do. It takes effort, but it’s a choice, not a hope.

The ultimate, thousand-mile-away goal remains relevant, but it can mostly be treated as a map and compass, to keep you creating your twenty-five-mile days in the right direction. It’s not the thing you’re aiming at when you’re getting out of bed, or when it’s mile 15 and you want to quit. You’re trying to get to the next camp and enjoy those beans by the fire. You wouldn’t try to do six months of exercise at once with your body, so you shouldn’t try to do it with your mind.

When I focus on covering the day’s miles and resting up, I get somewhere. When I try to conquer my great personal challenges, I get nowhere. I think the difference is as simple as this: going twenty-five miles is a thing a person can get their mind around, and therefore choose to do, and going a thousand miles isn’t.

So instead of trying to eventually become the person who did the Big Thing, you can immediately become the person who makes their twenty-five miles and rests up for the night.

The rest at the end of the day feels good, but there’s also a hint of healthy disappointment in it. All that marching and your reward is a can of beans. But you can learn to love the can of beans and the sleeping bag, and having twenty-five more miles behind you, and if you do, you will make it to the city.

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Are you a fan of Raptitude?

A few years ago I offered an online mini-course called Raptitude Field Trip.

This is where normal people like you try out some of the Raptitudey techniques I’ve described in classic Raptitude posts.

I choose easy practices that only take a few minutes, and you try them out for a bit in real life, then (optionally) discuss how it went, with me and other readers.

I’m about to run Raptitude Field Trip 2, with a brand-new selection of practices.

These Field Trips are fun and intended to bring some adventure and richness to day-to-day life, without taking much time. People really liked the first one.

More info coming soon. If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re on the list.

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