An optimist will look at a glass as half full and a pessimist will say that it is half empty, but have either of them considered that perhaps they have the wrong sized glass? Perspective can be a very dangerous thing. A man with a gallon of water might pass by someone with only a pint and think that he has quite a lot of water indeed. But the same man might then cross paths with someone lugging along a ten-gallon bucket and now consider himself quite poor indeed. How many of us have only enough water to fill a thimble, and yet we keep our supply of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool? Adding a few drops a day to a thimble can give us a real sense of accomplishment because we can see the water level actually rising. Throwing the same couple of drops into an empty swimming pool will feel completely useless. When we are measuring the progress towards our goals, it is important that we design our metrics to a scale that is appropriate to our current needs and abilities. It will be much more satisfying and fulfilling to carry around an almost full shot glass rather than just a slightly damp bucket. And if we can keep that shot glass mostly full for a while, then we will have the confidence that we can actually accomplish something, so we move up to a pint glass which isn’t all that much bigger than a shot glass and we had no trouble filling that one up so this can’t be much harder. We can certainly insist on having ambitions that are as big as the whole Sahara desert, enough to pour an entire ocean into, but if we haven’t worked our way up to it, that empty ocean is going to remain bone dry. But if we have gone from thimble to gallon to bathtub to swimming pool to lake and so on, then maybe we can work our way up to filling a whole ocean.
