Years ago, as an ambitious whippersnapper, I read a bunch of articles about the things successful people do every morning (it was quite the genre for a while there).
I recall one of these articles (link lost to time, of course) mentioned that most successful people stretch every morning.
At 23, I thought: How forward-thinking!
Now, having made a few more trips around the sun, I’ve reached the phase of life where I stood wrong on a riverbank six months ago, and it gave me plantar fasciitis in my right foot. I have a page of exercises (mostly stretches) to do each day to keep my foot’s crabbing to a minimum, and the margins of the day are when it’s easiest to fit in such “discretionary” activities.
From my late 30s, I see this tidbit differently: Much of success is a process of accretion. Because of this, successful people tend to be older. Older people tend to be a bit creaky. Creaky people need to stretch.
At my age, stretching in the morning isn’t forward-thinking; it’s the required maintenance of an aging body.
So much of success is simply adding things to a growing heap—and hoping the heap doesn’t get washed away: one accomplishment, one accolade, one promotion, one raise, one incremental change, one breakthrough. On their own, they don’t necessarily amount to much. But once you start stacking them on top of one another, then put another layer down, and another layer, you really start to build something. Once you build high enough, you start to see things that were impossible from where you started.
And then, from there, you keep building.
In the words of painter Wolf Kahn: “Always gnawing the same bone allows me to have a coherent development. Of course, you know, only after 70 years does that appear.”1
I never thought of it like that!