One Drip At A Time

An analogy that I like to use all the time for self-improvement is that of a garden hose. How often in our lives can we relate with the fact that we’re working hard and applying pressure, the hose is turned all the way up, yet only a weak stream of water is coming out the nozzle.

Our natural response is to try and pour more on and work harder, turn up the water even more, when logically we know that there’s probably a kink in the hose that we need to fix. When we become aware of the kink and take measures to fix it, our life can very quickly and dramatically start flowing with only minor adjustments.

However, the tricky part is not all of the hang ups in our lives are that obvious or that dramatic. Rather than there being a big bulging kink, maybe there are a few areas that are leaking or dripping out of the hose.

Let me take a step back. As people dedicated to accelerating on our path and in our self-growth journey, we want to do it all. We want to get into a better morning routine and work on our public speaking and spend less time on our phone and experiment with new productivity tactics and learn a new language and… and… and.

And trying to do it all at once stretches us too thin, causing us to make progress on none of it (or holding ourselves to a standard that is unsustainable).

That’s why our approach should be to address one thing at a time, to focus on one drip in the hose at a time. When we patch up our first, then we can work on our second. And we fix that one we move on to our third. 

It’s unnatural for us to be patient in a world that’s trying to hijack our attention at every moment, but you’d be surprised to find how fast you can get many things done when you do them just one at a time.

This is where I think it’s important to have a focus in your self-growth. If someone asks you the question “What are you working on?”, do you have a simple answer?

While it doesn’t make sense to neglect every part of life in service of just one, we make the most progress, fastest, when we have one emphasis that stands out among the rest.

So what’s your focus right now? What’s your one drip that you want to shore up to get personal and professional results to flow in your life?

If you’re looking for a place to start, I recommend you learn about the 9 Super Habits. These are the 9 most high leverage, most impactful, best ‘bang for your buck’ things you can do to fix your hose and get things flowing to the extent that they should be.