Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

How to you accomplish a big task? One thing at a time. Sorry, I wish there were magic here, but I have yet to see any of that.

I recently removed 6,000 pounds of items from a home. Given each item weighed half a pound on average, that is … a whole lotta’ items.

How do you remove 10,000 or 20,000 items? One at a time. Pick up one item. Remove it. Repeat.

There must be a better way. If there is, I have yet to find it.

I was in the third of four semesters of Calculus in college a few decades ago. The professor explained it something like, “We take a problem we don’t know how to solve, break it down into parts that we don’t know how to solve, and repeat this until we have problems we do know how to solve. Then we start solving.”

This approach of break-it-down and do one thing at a time worked then, it has worked over the decades, and it still works. Seemingly impossible tasks are possible. How do you write 1,526 blog posts? One keystroke at a time. How do you remove 20,000 items? One item at a time.

Magic? I doubt it.