Break Big Goals Into Tiny Wins

(sand shaking) (mouse clicking) (bright music) Headspace Studios. Hey there. Welcome to Radio Headspace. It's Dora. So I had this massive project hanging over my head last month. The kind where every time I looked at my to-do list, I just felt physically exhausted. You know that feeling, where just thinking about the thing takes more energy than actually doing it. I kept telling myself, I just need one solid weekend to power through this. But every weekend came and went and I never touched it. I was so resistant to it. I opted to do unnecessary chores instead. I reorganized my closet and bookshelf, washed my baseboards and repotted every single house plant, anything but the thing I actually needed to do. And then during a mentorship session with my teacher, I was talking about it and she said, you're treating this like it's a boulder you have to move in one push. What if it's not a boulder? What if it's a beehive? And I just stared at her blankly. What does that mean? Today, I wanna talk about bees and how they teach us that real progress isn't about dramatic effort, but small steady actions. My teacher explained that a single bee in its entire lifetime makes about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey. That's it. But because the whole hive works together, those tiny contributions add up to something remarkable. And it got me thinking, how often do we put off doing something because we're waiting for the perfect moment to tackle it all at once? When really progress is just a series of tiny steps. And I get it. We live for big dramatic transformation stories. The person who goes from couch potato to marathon runner in three months. But the truth is most real change happens gradually, maybe even so slowly we don't even notice it. In Buddhism, there's a concept called Virya, which loosely translates to effort or energy, but it's not about hustling or burning yourself out. It's about steady, sustainable action. Just enough effort repeated over time. And it reminds me of a parable I once heard about a man who wanted to move a mountain. He stood at the base, overwhelmed. It's impossible, he thought. But an old monk walked by and handed him a spoon. Start here the monk said, the man laughed. You expect me to move this whole mountain with a spoon? The monk shrugged. One day someone will see what you're doing and help then another and another. The mountain won't move all at once, but with time it will move. And there's something so deeply comforting about that idea that we don't have to fix everything right away. That maybe the pressure to get it all done right now is an illusion. Bees don't try to build the hive in a day. They don't rush to make a whole jar of honey. They focus on the task in front of them. One flower, one flight, one...