There is a saying that the future is judged by what happened in the past. You must have to understand that the present will soon one day become the past and what you do today will actually reflect in your tomorrow. It is worthy of note that you tomorrow actually start from today.
You should absolutely set long-term goals and plans, but to be successful in accomplishing them, you need to take it step by step. In a way, it’s the opposite of “don’t miss the forest for the trees.” You don’t want to get too caught up in meaningless details that you can’t finish anything. But by zeroing in on what you can feasibly do in any given day, you’re lessening the stress of thinking about all of the things you must do, and just, well, doing them.
This is particularly true of financial goals, which almost always seem overwhelming and actually make a difference in our lives each and every day. Taking for example, you are working on ratcheting up your emergency fund. If you think about the total number you want to reach—$20,000—it’s overwhelming and can even be a deterrent. But by breaking that down into daily or weekly actions, you’ve been able to make some headway. And it feels pretty good.
Now consider something like retirement. If you’ve read an article that says you should have $1 million to retire comfortably, you might be put off from saving all together. It seems like such an enormous, out-of-reach figure, one that’s even a little hard to comprehend fully. But if you can put that aside for a moment and think about a small, concrete step you can take today—say, open a Roth IRA and invest $100 to get started—you’re closer to reaching that goal than you were.
That means forgiving yourself when and if you mess up, or if it’s taking you longer than you’d like to get started progressing toward a goal. So maybe you don’t have nearly enough saved, or invested—who cares? If you focus on what you can do today to get to where you want to be, and you keep doing that day after day, you’ll accomplish what you set out to. If you slip up one day, well, it’s not the end of the world. You can just pick back up tomorrow. For today, focus on today. Then, when tomorrow comes, focus on tomorrow. You can only take it one day at a time.
