When something’s too hard, break it… down

Photo by Our Life in Pixels on Unsplash

The advice…

When something looks too hard, break it down. The smaller, more manageable, pieces will become your building blocks.

Where it’s coming from…

I was never good at maths. The sight of a sum still causes a shutter in my brain to come down - fast. My brain just closes down. But in my adult life I came to realise one thing: That as a child I was not taught maths well. And because of this, I sort of learned to “fear” it. To me it is hard and this makes me uncomfortable.

What I mean is that, back then at school, I was told to learn the dreaded times tables. But I was not (or at least I don’t remember being) taught the logic behind these multiplications.

Recently my daughter started asking about multiplication.

Panic.

But then I broke it down. I explained to her what I wished someone had explained to me at school: That 5 x 5 is 25 because 5 of something, for 5 times means you have 25 of those things. It sounds so obvious. But it was not to me for a long time.

This got me thinking.

By breaking down something that is perceived as hard, it gets clearer and more manageable. And this can apply to so many situations. Case in point was when I started setting up this website. I was completely overwhelmed by the daunting task. In fact this feeling of “it’s too hard I don’t know how” paralysed me for months, if not years. I did not know how to start.

Then, with help and guidance from friends, I started breaking it down into smaller bits that I had to learn and do. And by deconstructing it - it became easier, manageable and doable.

“Hard” can be beaten into “malleable” with a strong will.

We hear this all our lives: “take small steps”, “one step at a time”, “break it down into tasks”. This is true and valuable advice.

Because when something is too hard and you break it down - before you know it and if you keep at it - you will be smashing it.