What a Minute Can Do

I have been trying to learn bellydancing for a long time.  I took a class a few years ago, but the instructor was so terrible I didn't learn anything.  At the library, years later, I found a book on bellydancing and copied all the instructions into a Powerpoint Presentation (yes, I am a big nerd), only to lose that file.  Finally, I searched on Amazon and found a wonderful bellydance DVD (if you're interested, it's called, "Luscious -- The Bellydance Workout for Beginners").

This DVD breaks down each move for you and explains how to do it slowly and accurately.  Still, even with this great tutorial and the ability to learn at my own pace, I found many of the moves really really hard.  I went through the whole tutorial just to get an idea, and then I made it my goal to be an expert in one area of the moves each month, i.e. one month was "Circles".

I thought this strategy would work, but it didn't.  I ended up barely looking at the DVD for about a year.  But I didn't give up yet.  I then made it my goal to workout every day.  However, that also did not work out.  And then recently, one day, while my computer was loading (and it takes a while because I have Vista), I turned on the DVD and did one exercise.  It was really very quick, less than a minute it felt like; and after I was done with it, my computer had loaded.  I began to do this each day, practicing just the moves that I couldn't get before, a different one each day.  After many days, as you might guess, I had gone through the whole DVD again.  And so I restarted it again.  And amazingly enough, this time the steps that I had found the hardest to do became doable.  I actually even was able to follow the dancer with ease when she did a combination routine, a thing I had found impossible and confusing to do before.

Now of course, if you practice something long enough you get better at it.  But the thing is, I barely practiced it.  A minute or so is all I gave it, and yet I have improved to the point where I can follow some of the dancing.  That's amazing if you think about it:  Just a minute a day and you can get better at something.  And that minute you can waste on watching TV or surfing the net or doing nothing, but if you actually applied yourself, you could learn how to do something in just that one minute.

It is really true what I learned from Jack Canfield ("The Success Principles"), that work builds upon itself and becomes better the longer you do it.  After all, that minute a day becomes 30 minutes a month.  You could do just 30 minutes a month, but I don't think I would learned as much doing one session of 30 minutes as I did doing 30 sessions of 1 minute.  I think, like a bank, your brain puts in interest after you put in something.  So even though time-wise you spend 30 minutes a month doing something, in reality, with all the interest your brain puts in it, you might actually get 300 minutes of results for that 30 minutes.  That's a pretty good investment.

The other reason I wanted to blog about this is because the reason I started working out -- if just for a minute -- on a daily basis was because it kept me from waiting for my computer to load.  Before, I would just be sitting there bored, letting the time pass me by as my computer slowly came to life.  Now I actually make use of that waiting time, and I don't wait at all, because when I'm done, my computer is loaded.  Now just think about it:  Before, that time would have been completely wasted.  But now, in the time that it takes my computer to load, I have learned something great and become healthier in the process.

I'm hoping that if this can work for me, it can also work for others.  But not only that, I am hoping that we can start a revolution.  That instead of just waiting for things to happen, we use that minute to do something; i.e. instead of just waiting in line bored out of our mind at the bank, we can workout while we stand there waiting.  We can stretch or run in place.  I know, people might look at us funny because it's not the usual thing to be doing in line at a bank, or anywhere, but if enough people started to do it, we could start a revolution of healthier, fitter people.  All that wasted time would have been put to use to make us better, smarter, stronger.

And then we would realize, we do have enough time to do things.  We just need to see that it doesn't take that much effort to make a difference.  As long as we keep building on it, we'll get better.