I've been getting this message loud and clear lately: It's what we do every day that makes the difference.
Today Donald Miller tweeted it this way...
Get up day after day and plow a field. Plant seeds and pray for rain. The desire for instant victory is akin to playing the lottery.
— Donald Miller (@donaldmiller) July 24, 2015
Whether you want to write books, draw comics or master an instrument, the advice is always the same.
Do it every day.
If we can keep it up over time, bit by bit it changes us. We get better.
But the vision changes too. It has to. We're older and wiser by the time we're good enough to finish it.
Unless there's the luck of the lottery, like Miller says, it takes longer than we imaged. Who has the patience to wait and work for it? Who will want to keep working when it doesn't look the same or it no longer seems worth it?
On the other hand, look what we become when we give up. Day by day, step by step, we forget how to dream. We don't learn how to chase an idea to the end and share with people who need to see it.
Instead of dreams, we chase other things. I'm sure we all have our list--the next thing I want to buy, the next place I want to visit. Making lists, letting other people make lists for us, that's what we do every day.
I wonder sometimes if the steady flow of new--the movies, the thousands of gizmos and gadgets in every hobby you could find yourself, the good and bad news stories that dominate our conversations--is really just some distracting filler. Is it keeping us from the new we were meant to become and the new we were meant to create?
What voices will I listen to every day?
