The Ladder

Everybody loves a success story. What they don’t love is the climb. They’ll celebrate the business after it succeeds. They’ll applaud the person after they lose the weight. They’ll admire the relationship after it survives the storm. They’ll tell you how lucky someone is after years of work they never saw. Nobody takes pictures of the bottom of the ladder. The bottom is where the doubt lives. It’s where the mistakes happen. It’s where you’re tired, frustrated, and wondering if all the effort is worth it. It’s where most people quit because the top looks impossibly far away. I’ve learned something over the years. You don’t climb a ladder by staring at the top. You climb it by focusing on the next rung. When I started making videos, I wasn’t thinking about hundreds of videos. When I started writing, I wasn’t thinking about books. When I started rebuilding parts of my life, I wasn’t thinking about years down the road. I was just trying to take the next step. That’s it. The problem is we compare our first step to somebody else’s hundredth. We compare our beginning to their middle and then convince ourselves we’ll never get there. But every person standing at the top of a ladder started exactly where you are. At the bottom. Maybe your next step isn’t glamorous. Maybe nobody notices it. Maybe it feels small. Take it anyway. Because the ladder doesn’t care how fast you climb. It only cares that you keep moving.