Use small accomplishments in your life to fuel the big ones.

Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.

Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration reading from Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins.

The title of today’s reading is “It’s Not About A Trophy.”  Let’s get started:

• It’s funny, humans tend to hatch our most challenging goals and dreams, the ones that demand our greatest effort yet promise absolutely nothing, when we are tucked into our comfort zones.
• When we’re comfortable we can’t answer those simple questions that are bound to arise in the heat of battle because we don’t even realize they’re coming.
• But those answers are very important when you are no longer in your air-conditioned room or under your fluffy blanket. When your body is broken and beaten, when you’re confronted with agonizing pain and staring into the unknown, your mind will spin, and that’s when those questions become toxic. If you aren’t prepared in advance, if you allow your mind to remain undisciplined in an environment of intense suffering (it won’t feel like it, but it is very much a choice you are making), the only answer you are likely to find is the one that will make it stop as fast as possible. I don’t know.
• The Cookie Jar became a concept I’ve employed whenever I need a reminder of who I am and what I’m capable of. We all have a cookie jar inside us, because life, being what it is, has always tested us. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success. It doesn’t have to be a big victory either. It can be something small.
• I know we all want the whole victory today, but when I was teaching myself to read I would be happy when I could understand every word in a single paragraph. I knew I still had a long way to go to move from a third-grade reading level to that of a senior in high school, but even a small win like that was enough to keep me interested in learning and finding more within myself. You don’t drop one hundred pounds in less than three months without losing five pounds in a week first. Those first five pounds I lost were a small accomplishment, and it doesn’t sound like a lot, but at the time it was proof that I could lose weight and that my goal, however improbable, was not impossible!
• If you don’t have any big accomplishments to draw on yet, so be it. Your small victories are your cookies to savor, and make sure you do savor them.
• We all need that, and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment, we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again? Maybe that sounds narcissistic to you. But I’m not talking about bullshitting about the glory days here. I’m not suggesting you crawl up your own ass and bore your friends with all your stories about what a badass you used to be. Nobody wants to hear that shit. I’m talking about utilizing past successes to fuel you to new and bigger ones. Because in the heat of battle, when shit gets real, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, depression, depression, pain, and misery. We need to spark a bunch of small fires to become the motherfucking inferno.
• But digging into the Cookie Jar when things are going south takes focus and determination because at first the brain doesn’t want to go there. It wants to remind you that you’re suffering and that your goal is impossible. It wants to stop you so it can stop the pain.

That leads us to today’s declaration:

The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first. We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones. Think of your small accomplishments as kindling. When you want a bonfire, you don’t start by lighting a big log. You collect some witch’s hair—a small pile of hay or some dry, dead grass. You light that, and then add small sticks and bigger sticks before you feed your tree stump into the blaze. Because it’s the small sparks, which start small fires, that eventually build enough heat to burn the whole fucking forest down.