Whenever you begin a new routine for a healthier lifestyle, you will typically notice a huge change in the very beginning. This is both very encouraging for your efforts, as well as very deceitful for the long-term success of your endeavors. The key to pushing past the realization that the huge change in the beginning will not continue is making the little things count.
Heck, the same can be said for tabletop wargaming hobbies, right? What if we try and equate this to being akin to learning or getting into a new game?
Whenever we get into a new game, we do so in a huge avalanche of money and enthusiasm. Just like when I started to lose weight and eat better, everyone encourages you and gets you pumped up to play the new game, right? So much happens in a flurry of time and excitement that you often find yourself deep into the new game without seeming to have expended much effort at all. This is very much like what happens when you first start losing weight. People even use the expression of it just "Falling Off" at times. Is this a bad thing? Well, that depends on how it affects you when it stops being so easy. Let's keep going with the example...
You get excited and show up the first day for playing the new game with your freshly-assembled models, only to get your face stomped. You shrug it off the first time it happens because you didn't know the rules very well, and hey you're new, right? But what happens when you get beaten the next three weeks in a row? Don't lie to me or yourself, you're going to get discouraged and you know it. Even with the best attitude of "It's not whether you win or lose…", because that's a bunch of crap, we still get discouraged. We all like to win once in a while, right? Is it really worth putting the models together, trying to paint, playing the game if you didn't win at all? The same thing happens when you begin to see the huge numbers slow down to smaller numbers of weight loss. Sure you dropped 20 pounds in 3 months, but in the entire last month you only lost 3? Well that's not a lot, is it? What is going wrong? Is it you? Is it something else? Is it worth the hassle and work for only 3 pounds?
Yes. Yes it is.
Sure you maybe lost the last 3 weeks in a row, but what did you learn? Did you learn to deploy better maybe? Did you learn a new way to deploy so you can't be shot at? Did you learn the turn order better so that playing your turn doesn't take as long, or maybe even just how to figure out what your target number should be after modifiers? Ask yourself, "What did you learn?"
If you say nothing, you are lying to yourself. Not only are you lying to yourself, you are actively discouraging yourself to the detriment of your own enjoyment of a game!
So maybe you only lost 3 pounds. Or heck, maybe you didn't lose anything and plateaued for the month. What did you learn? Nothing? Bull crap. Maybe you learned you ate too much of one thing, or didn't exercise enough. Maybe you learned that you need to switch up your routine to get off that plateau. Whatever it is, you learned something.
Maybe what you should learn is that the little things count. Maybe learning how to not deploy one way is a good thing. Maybe you learning the turn order better helps you play two games instead of one. I don't care what it is, but the little things you learn add up to a friggin big thing that means you get to play that new game and have fun doing it!
Maybe you should learn that the little things count. That 3 pounds isn't a lot, but it is 3 pounds less than what you weighed last month. That you didn't gain weight instead of lose. That for every 3 pounds a month you lose, in 10 months you'll have lost 30 pounds and only be 9 more away from your ultimate goal and that EVERY POUND MATTERS.
I weighed in last night at 239.8 pounds. That means I lost a total of 2.8 pounds for the entire month of April. It also means that I'm officially past the halfway point to my goal of a total weight of 200 pounds.
And every single one of them counts.
- Tim