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One of the most powerful, and also simple ideas to help you improve any set of practices that you're choosing to engage with is to set both a minimum and a maximum.
And each of them have their own magic.
So a minimum establishes the smallest unit of practice that you can engage with, even on your worst day, that constitutes meaningful progress. And that's dependent on the practice itself.
So for example, if you are a writer, and you're trying to establish a practice of writing every single day, then the smallest unit of progress might be a single sentence, or possibly even a paragraph. So that means that every day you commit to coming and doing a single sentence and or a paragraph, or for example, whatever you choose in that context is appropriate. And then the maximum might be five pages of work, the minimum establishes an entry point, it reduces the friction for you to actually come and sit down. Because even on your worst day, you can say, well, I can sit down for a few minutes to write a single sentence.
And that keeps a thread of practice flowing throughout your life. There's a saying in Chinese cultivation, that if you always take the pot off the stove, the water never boils. This smallest unit, this minimum is about keeping the pot on the stove.
And what ends up happening is it oftentimes when you come and you write the single sentence, or you write a single paragraph, then you end up finding capacity where you had none. And then you end up being able to work more within the context of moving towards the maximum.
The maximum is the safest amount that you could do on that day, without overloading your system, and then needing additional recovery beyond a single day. So in some senses, it's about not doing more on one day than you can recover from fully in that day. Because if the practice is to do something daily, that means that if you have too much work on any given day that disrupts that rhythm, then you can't engage the next day. So by establishing a minimum and a maximum, you set yourself up for continuous progress that is also sustainable.