THE POWER OF MOVING—ONE STEP AT A TIME

“If you're climbing the ladder of life, you go rung by rung, one step at a time. Don't look too far up, set your goals high but take one step at a time. Sometimes you don't think you're progressing until you step back and see how high you've really gone.”—Donny Osmond

In the powerful book, “EAT THAT FROG,” the efficiency expert, Brian Tracy narrates how he crossed the biggest desert in the world; the Tanezrouft desert of the modern day Algeria with the strategy of taking just one step at a time. 

With this experience, he practically demonstrates to us what all champions know; and that is: there are no shortcuts to victory. So they move, just one step at a time. 

For us to win our own battles too, we only need to be sure that we are on the right path. Once that is clear, there is no need to plan our journey too far ahead. 

No need to burden ourselves with imaginary obstacles that may hinder our progress. Like the accomplished champions, we only need to move, one step at a time.

Below is the excerpt from the book as narrated by the author:

“The desert was 500 miles across in a single stretch, without water, food, a blade of grass, or even a fly. It was totally flat like a broad, yellow, sand parking lot that stretched to the horizon in all directions.

More than 1,300 people had perished in the crossing of that stretch of the Sahara in the previous years. Often, drifting sands had obliterated the tracks across the desert and the travelers had gotten lost in the night.

To counter the lack of features in the terrain, the French had marked the track with black, fifty-five gallon oil drums, FIVE KILOMETERS APART, exactly the distance to the horizon, where the earth curved away as you crossed that flat wasteland.

Because of this, wherever we were in the daytime, we could see two oil barrels, the one we had just passed and the one five kilometers ahead. And that was enough.

All we had to do was to steer toward the next oil barrel. As a result we were able to cross the biggest desert in the world by simply taking it, “one oil barrel at a time.”

You see, the thing is not about obsessing on the entire length of the stretch, the power lies in going only as far as you can see, “one oil barrel at a time.”

This is the trick that “subdued” one of the biggest distances in the world unto the feet of wise travelers of the wilderness; a journey so tough that hundreds of people had earlier perished in its track.

However, the most essential element of this idea is that you must keep moving; you must never stop, if your goal is really to reach a destination. That’s the key to making the most of one step. And that’s why the motivational speaker and author, Og Mandino said:

“Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult... I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.”

Another Chinese Proverb puts it aptly that, “To get through the hardest journey we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping.”

What is true for a physical journey is true for all journeys as well, whether it is emotional or an ambitious career journey. One oil barrel at a time will make all the difference, as long as we do not stop.

So, to go as far as we want to go, we only need to go as far as we can see; and if we do just this, we would see enough to go further until we reach the summit of our own “Mount Everest.” 

Thus, we can prove that John Wanamaker, the American merchant and civic figure, was right off the bat when he said, “One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time.”