There’s a story about an old man walking down a beach. He sees a child picking up starfish and throwing them into the water. The man asks the child what he’s doing, and the child says that these starfish are stuck on land at low tide. They can’t survive out of water, so he’s throwing them back in the ocean to save them.
The old man says, “But surely you know that there are millions of starfish just on this one beach. And there are thousands of beaches all around the world. And this same thing happens at high tide day after day, forever. You’ll never be able to make a difference.” And the child just picks up another starfish, throws it into the ocean, and said “Made a difference to that one!”
I don’t think people properly appreciate that you’re allowed to stop doing good things.
Let me explain that. Sometimes there’s this expectation that, if you start some good project or do something good once, that you’re going to keep doing it forever. When you put it like that, maybe it sounds obvious. You can exercise by going for one walk around the block, you don’t have to run a mile. You can pick up one piece of litter on your walk, you don’t have to clean up the whole street. You can give to charity this year, without committing to giving every year for the rest of your life. It’s allowed.
Sometimes we look at the state of the world and everything going wrong, every place we’re falling short, and think that the work will never be complete. How can we stop when the next starfish is right there? But sometimes that sense that the work is never ending discourages people from doing anything. Or the sheer scale of the problem leads people to making grandiose claims to Solve Absolutely Everything, to picture going from zero to sixty as one leap of progress. That’s one of the ways people predictably mess up New Years Resolutions, with unrealistic goals. You can, if you want, resolve to do one pushup instead of working out for an hour a day. You’re not hurting anything if you only donate five bucks.
You helped. It mattered to that one.
It makes me think of nets. A net is woven together from many strands, each one very thin. I don’t know how modern nets are made, but the old fashioned kind were made out of short strands that wove together to create something longer than any individual strand. You could use longer threads if you had them, but you didn’t need to.
We’re all at different levels. Some of us might feel like we’re starting from level one, and everyone else is more impressive than we are. Some of us are advanced in our careers with lots of accomplishments under our belt. I don’t want to convince anyone to be less ambitious! Wherever you’re at, whichever direction you’re pointed, the message I’m sending is that taking one small step is better than doing nothing at all. You might not have a very fast time on the hundred metre dash if you take it at a walk, but you are outrunning everyone on the couch.
The most important step is the next one.
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