To Eat An Elephant, You Cut It Into Little Pieces

99. To eat an elephant, you cut it into little pieces.

This Tool has been described before in many different fashions. Another version you might recognize is, “The Journey of a 1000 miles begins with one single step.” The affirmation I use to help me remember this crucial lesson of life is, “Tomorrow’s results start today.” I think the most important point to understand regardless of how you come to understand it is that the goals we hope to achieve take many little steps and pieces to achieve them. And when all those steps and pieces are put together, they will add up to that distance or become enough pieces to build the like of a giant.

With regard to the system in this book, remember we are building a home that represents our life. This home takes time to build and for many of you it has never gotten off the ground because you were never given plans on how to build it. Step by step the process goes. We decide what kind of custom home we want to build and where we want to build it. Then we work on our foundation, also known as our mission statement. Then we understand the time it will take (21 days) and that we must re-inspect areas before we can move on to the next. We keep in mind long-term goals for the house in our Roman numeral section. We have our goals we are building right now in the S.A.N.E. section, and finally we need to pick Tools that provide us with the greatest likelihood that the project can be built without a hitch.

This Tool can be a little misleading. Remember, there is no end to our journey. We will never arrive at our destination and then have all our work behind us. No matter how many pieces you cut the elephant into, there will always be a section to work on. This is no different than our home, no different from our life.

Reminding ourselves that we need to take steps to build our life and that our life always requires building provides us with two important lessons. First, working on our life is a daily process and when we work on it daily and don’t take days off, it will most likely resemble what we want it to look like. Second, the building process is always ongoing, so while it feels like you are always working to try and stay ahead, you kinda are. As mentioned before, no secrets, no drugs, no shortcuts, life requires daily work; the key is working smart combined with working hard.