Small improvements make little noise on a day-to-day basis, because only big changes, extremes, breakouts, etc. are hyped. In a society where immediacy is encouraged, where the goal is not only to achieve improvements, but to achieve them quickly and, ideally, without effort. This combination is a very dangerous cocktail that leaves one of the quietest values in a very bad place, but at the same time one of the most important values to obtain improvements: persistence.

However, persistence will never defend itself, nor will it come looking for you, it will simply treat well those who believe in it. It will also help us to establish new habits, which can later be transformed into new improvements. The problem is that we find it difficult to be constant when we do not see the immediate result, like laboratory rats which only answer to a stimulus-response. Breaking a spear in our favor, it is true that the way in which we are configured as human beings enhances that, and psychological learning theories inform us that the longer it takes for the response to an action to appear, the more complicated it is for our brain associates a relationship between them, but this is when we need to use our ability to reason and think, which we also have, since that does not mean that if I work and still do not see results, it is not serving any purpose.

At this point, is where we need to add other teammates, to be able to let persistence do its job. These are determination and how clear and defined we have our goals, so that our mentality will be the key to continue or to desist, when we do not see the immediate reward. In addition, an important resource will be to assess the small improvements that appear, not just the final result. It is about thinking big but starting and building small (and valuing it).

We overestimate what we can do in 1 year and underestimate what we can do in one month. Let’s see an example:

“If I read 10 pages every day (or 12 if you want not to do it on the weekend), in a month I will have read a book of 300 pages”

It does not seem very complicated, does it?

However…

How many 300-page books have you read in a month?

If in each training session I do, I introduce a mobility exercise, after 3 months, surely I will have improved much more than doing a few sessions of complete mobility.

If every day that I go to workout, before or after, I stay only 10 minutes, doing some shooting, passing balls or kicking fouls, when I have done 30 workouts, I will have already accumulated 5 extra sessions of 1 hour (adding the 10 minutes from each training session). In the long term, this is a lot of extra sessions and a lot of improvement (as long as the work has good quality).

Nowadays, if you do not grow exponentially, it seems that you do not grow. If you do not go from 0 to 100, if you do not change from one day to another, if you do not stand out soon, if you are not advanced or if you are not precocious… And when you are in environments where there are many differences in level, it seems that being constant does not have value, because in the short term, differences may not be realized. However, when everyone is really great in your context, the only difference is in the details, persistence and mentality.

We forget those who prepare each day without making noise, and we cling to them, when they manage to break down the door, when we have beaten the exponentials so much with expectations that we have confused them, they fall down and are abandoned.