In some ways, this is a corollary of Einstein’s theory of relativity – everything is relative. While pretty well known, it can be hard to appreciate how this axiom applies literally everywhere in life – time, distance, size, wealth – you name it.
A phone is a “small thing” for humans, while an airplane is big, and a planet is enormous. For an ant though, each of these is enormous. Similarly, for T-rex, a phone is tiny, and an airplane is moderate, and a planet is still enormous. Everything is relative, and scale depends on the frame of observation.
The reason why thinking about this is important (or rather, can be important) – as humans, we may think that something is taking super long and hence get put off from doing it, when in reality it is taking however long it will take. We just think it’s taking long because of our perception of time.
If something takes 1 day vs 1 year, that can be the deciding factor in whether or not we will pursue it. But on cosmic scales, 1 day vs 1 year is almost the same compared to, say, a billion years.
If you remove your dependence on human scales of “long” or “short” durations of time from the equation, it gets easy to appreciate how all growth / change is just a summation of actions over time.
As an oversimplification,
- Thing_Level0 + 6months = Thing_Level1
- Thing_Level1 + 10months = Thing_Level2
- And so on
If you think 6months is long, then fuck you, that’s your problem, don’t blame the task. The task at hand is not “impossible” or anything – you just need to put in the time.
Leave a comment