The Best Self-Help is Free: Incremental Progress

Surrounded by perils as we are, what are we to do? Clearly, the safety of our lives is not just a binary alternative. There are degrees of safety, and some lives in some conditions are safer than others. The life of virtually anyone in a Western country today is much safer and freer from perils than the life of virtually any of his great-grandparents. But how did we get even the prosperity and safety we currently have? Surely, they did not spring up overnight. Indeed, the groundwork for it was laid over the course of centuries. Great scientists, inventors, mathematicians, economists, engineers, architects, doctors, and the people implementing their ideas brought into being better machines, more efficacious cures for diseases, and stabler, freer political and economic systems. The combined contribution of technologies such as the automobile, the airplane, the computer, antibiotics, and the assembly line to our lives cannot be overestimated.

But no one person could have single-handedly developed all of modern civilization. In the brilliant essay, "I, Pencil," Leonard Read shows that no single individual could even have assembled a typical pencil entirely on his own from start to finish without great hardship. But millions of people have made contributions - great or small - to the progress of civilization. More people still work effectively within the framework of systems of human interaction that were either consciously designed or arose spontaneously based on the activities and choices of millions of people. Nobody deliberately initially designed money, markets, or even languages - but these systems have a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Sometimes the idea of a single person will be taken up by others, who will use it in creative and remarkable ways unforeseen by its originator.

The truth of the matter is, none of us can know how exactly our individual work and contributions will affect the progress of civilization and the fight against death, disease, pain, and oppression. As we discussed in Chapter 2, our predictive power can only go so far. Surely, we can have some insights on this matter. If a man, George, decides to assemble a simple table from its basic components and keep it for use in he office, he can have a decent understanding of how that table will serve his purposes. But even then, George might be surprised at the opportunities that table opened up for him. What if George's productivity doubled simply because he - having more space - was now able to lay out all his documents in a more convenient and easily accessible format? Surely, that would have been difficult to predict precisely. And if George were to sell the table to somebody, he would likely have little to no idea of how that person would use it - but it might be critical to the buyer's endeavors and success.

Much of our understanding of the effects of our work - when we can get such an understanding - will be a series of reasonable anticipations of highly specific causes and effects, based on the particular circumstances immediately surrounding our lives. We can see that far, but rarely can we see further. Yet seeing that far is enough for us to systematically plan our own lives and become not the best people we can be - because that presumes an upper limit to our abilities - but rather to become increasingly better people. We cannot plan how our actions will affect the world, but we can certainly plan to a degree how they will affect us personally.

This, then is incremental progress: the continual expansion of our individual skills, knowledge, and efficacy in acting in the world. There is a broad, almost inexhaustible variety of the kinds of skills, knowledge, and actions you can choose to pursue in order to make such progress. What you ultimately end up pursuing as an occupation will depend on a variety of complex factors: your initial skills and interests, the resources initially available to you, the information to which you have access, and the social and political institutions that constrain what you are able to do. No professions are inherently good or bad for all individuals - unless those professions involve hurting oneself or others. But you need to be able to make a reasonable case to your own self as to why your occupation of choice - be it your job or a leisure activity - is the one by which you can make considerable incremental progress.

Remember that any action you pursue will indeed have some direct effects. These direct effects will be the lower bound of the progress you make. Regarding the table George built, the direct effects of his decision to build it are that he now has another table on which he can put whatever he pleases. That is the least he can say regarding the progress he made. Whatever extra opportunities or benefits the table opens up for him will, of course, be contributions to his progress. But it is not wise to rely on benefits that one cannot foresee in advance. It is better to suspend judgment regarding them and to view them as pleasant surprises if and when they come. Of course, if you work hard enough, they will come in some form - but their specific manifestation is difficult to foresee.

So in planning your activities, you can reasonably foresee the least that you will be able to accomplish as a result. If that bare minimum is all that you come to expect, then you will always at least meet your expectations and - in accomplishing the direct products of your effort along with some extra gains - you will always be proud of your efficacy and happy because you continually seem to rise above your own anticipations.

But you cannot reasonably expect to transform or revolutionize any aspect of your life overnight. If you set your short-term expectations too high, then they will be difficult, if not impossible to meet. You will fail to meet them even after an earnest effort - an effort that might have sufficed to meet some less grand objective. The discouragement you will receive from not meeting your grand goal right away might deter you from further pursuits in that direction, even though if you applied yourself consistently over time, you might have eventually attained even the loftiest objects conceivable to you. The key to genuinely progressing in all aspects of your life is to remember the incremental part of "incremental progress." Set goals for yourself every day that you know you have the ability to meet. The goals do not always have to be pleasant or comfortable to pursue; indeed, many of them can involve considerable exertion and delayed gratification. But they have to be manageable, and you need to be able to expect to complete them in advance.

Of course, there are certain minimum requirements for what one needs to be accomplished - set by the negative external pressures of one's environment. A certain amount of work is needed just to stay alive - to be fed, to pay for one's shelter, and to hold back bodily decay. A certain degree of self-support through work, exercise, and common-sense habits of good hygiene and caution is not optional - according to the laws of nature. But the extent of that minimum varies depending on one's environment. In most times and most places throughout human history, people needed to work for ten to twelve hours every day just to assure that they would have adequate food. In the West today, the minimum amount of work needed to ensure that we can stave off death for another day is much less - because we have the benefit of highly productive machines and centuries of accumulated knowledge regarding effective lifestyles and production processes.

Furthermore, a certain somewhat higher amount of work is required to maintain one's present standard of living and set of skills. Alas, material objects do fall into disrepair and abilities atrophy unless they are exercised with sufficient frequency. To achieve incremental progress, it is not enough to just stay alive. It also necessary to stay alive while keeping what one already has and adding something new to what one has all the time. If you do just enough to maintain your present material standard of living and skill set, then you are simply breaking even. Incremental progress occurs when you go beyond just breaking even. That requires work - often hard work - but it is also manageable for anybody. All you need to do to achieve incremental progress is find efficient, easily implementable ways to maintain what you already have and then know yourself well enough to determine what rate of accumulation of objects and skills you can be comfortable with and sustain over a long time.

At the beginning of each day, you should ask yourself these three questions.

Question 1. "What do I need to do today to survive and maintain my current level of health?" This question is fairly easy to answer in most cases.

Question 2. "What do I need to do today to ensure that my current standard of living and skill set are maintained and that I lose nothing of what I already have in terms of material comfort and intellectual ability?" This question is somewhat more difficult, as it requires an understanding of how to efficiently hold on to what you have - within the time constraints under which you operate.

Question 3. "What can I do today to add a little more to what I have, know, or can do?" If you can successfully address Question 2, then answering this question actually becomes easier - especially since there are many additional accomplishments that do not require future maintenance or can maintain themselves. When I publish this chapter on the Internet, for instance, I will not need to do anything else with it, but it will work for me in small ways, spreading my ideas and reputation while earning me a little bit of money.

At the end of each day, do a mental debriefing and ask yourself these questions:

Question 1. "Have I done enough today to survive and maintain my current level of health?" In most cases, the answer will be "Yes," but do be careful regarding the latter part of this question.

Question 2. "Have I done enough today to maintain my current standard of living and skill set?"

Question 3. "What have I done today to add to what I already have or know?"

If you can provide satisfactory answers to all of these questions, then from the viewpoint of incremental progress, you have had a good day. In the future, the indirect benefits from your activities might surprise you regarding just how good a day it was.

Read all chapters of The Best Self-Help is Free.