Boiling Water

Suppose you were out camping – you know, just ‘cause you wanted to see what it would feel like to be cold, wet and covered in bug bites – and you needed to boil some water. You’d start a little fire, get your pot of water on top and slowly start to warm the water.

The water starts at ambient temperature (which is COLD, because you are camping and that’s just how it works) so you don’t notice anything for a while. But that’s okay, you trust the process, so you continue to gather sticks and stoke the fire, gradually increasing the temperature of the water. Still, there is no obvious change and the water doesn’t appear any different than when you started. Undaunted, you diligently search for more sticks and add them to the fire. You notice the fire is burning larger and hotter but there is still no change in the water. It appears exactly as it did when you first started the fire. The other campers begin to ridicule you and you start to doubt the process yourself. You’ve been working hard to build up this fire and have been feeding it for quite some time while patiently waiting for something to happen to the water, yet it still doesn’t boil.

Still, you know you must stay committed to the process. You gather a few more sticks and build up the fire just a little more. Finally, after what seems like forever, you notice some steam coming up out of the pot. A few moments later, the first bubbles appear. From fifty-five degrees up until two hundred eleven degrees, very little change is noticeable in the water. Then, all of the sudden it seems, as the water temperature reaches two hundred and twelve degrees, the entire pot bursts into a frenzy of boiling water.

The other campers gather around and begin commenting on your sudden stroke of luck. They want to know which stick made the difference, wondering what kind of stick it was that would cause the water to suddenly erupt into a boil. What was the “one change” that made it all happen?

But you know different. It wasn’t the last stick you added. It wasn’t any stick. It was all the sticks. They all contributed to the gradual increase in the temperature of the water, one degree at a time. Even though the water appeared to remain unchanged through the entire process until the last moment, you know that energy and momentum – although imperceptible to onlookers – was building the entire time. It wasn’t any one action that made the water boil. It was the aggregated impact of all the work you had done, plus the passage of time, that culminated into “sudden” results.

Progress in life happens much the same way. A sudden explosion of success is the outcome of steady, small actions that build momentum slowly over time. The result looks like an immediate, sudden change to the world, but it was really the patient aggregating of tiny, nearly imperceptible developments that remain unnoticed until they hit a critical stage where the effects become obvious.

Stay committed to building the fire, even when you can’t see the water boil.