Excerpt­ing from his book The Pas­sion­ate Pro­gram­mer, Chad Fowler reveals his phi­los­o­phy on growth (in many con­texts): small, incre­men­tal changes to reach long-term, seem­ingly unas­sail­able goals. The idea is encap­su­lated in the ques­tion, Was today bet­ter than yesterday?

Most impor­tant chal­lenges in life man­i­fest them­selves as large, insur­mount­able amor­phous blobs of poten­tial fail­ure. This is true of soft­ware devel­op­ment, career man­age­ment, and even lifestyle and health. […]

Because of this com­plex­ity, we eas­ily become demo­ti­vated by the big­ger issues and turn our atten­tion instead to things that are eas­ier to mea­sure and eas­ier to quickly fix. This is why we pro­cras­ti­nate. And the pro­cras­ti­na­tion gen­er­ates guilt, which makes us feel bad and there­fore pro­cras­ti­nate some more. […]

The secret is to focus on mak­ing what­ever it is you’re try­ing to improve bet­ter today than it was yes­ter­day. That’s it. It’s easy.

I can’t help not­ing that this feels like the action required to coun­ter­act meso­facts.