When I was 23, I was living with my wife and infant in a shitty series of triplexes in Pinellas Park, a neighborhood which was filled with people as poor as myself, but which I recall fondly. While none of us had much, we shared camaraderie, music, and food regularly, and treated each other with dignity. I was doing my very best to be a productive, mostly law abiding citizen, however, as a young, unskilled ex-con, opportunities were limited at best. I bounced from one minimum wage job to the next, barely making enough money to keep the lights on and the rent paid. The times when I didn’t have a job at all, I made some short cash working day labor.
If you don’t know, day labor is like temp work’s uglier little brother. You have to show up for a cattle call by around 6 in the morning, get your number, and wait around for an hour or so while the daily assignments are rounded up. Then they call your number, you get assigned to a work crew, and sent out in a van or truck to the job site. Since I didn’t have a car, and the day labor office was about four miles from my house, I would have to wake up around 4:30AM, then leave by a little after 5 to make it to the office on time.
One morning, I was sent out to work at a local waste management company’s site, where they were both cleaning the incinerators, and building new facilities. It was a 7-7 shift, which meant I was getting four more paid hours than usual, which seemed like a blessing given my need. I would find that thought ironic later.
For the first part of the day, I was on soot cleaning detail, scrubbing equipment and facility walls clean of the oily black char given off by burning garbage. It was 90 degrees outside that day, and with hoisting a heavy brush broom sometimes over my head, it didn’t take long before I was sweating heavily while being coated in soot. The work was back breaking. By the time I sat down for a quick lunch break to eat a baloney sandwich around 1:30, I was coated in a filthy black sheen which smelled like burnt trash and exhaustion.
After lunch, I was moved over to a team working with concrete, which seemed like a break at first. They had a barrel that had water being mixed into it, and every five minutes or so, I had to grab a 50lb bag of concrete mix and break it open over a serrated edge mounted on the top of the barrel to empty the concrete powder in for mixing. Each time I did, a little cloud of dust puffed out, which promptly glued to the oily char coating my skin. Over time, it began to build up into concrete sludge, working its way into the folds of my skin and around my eyes, making everything chafe and burn. As fast as I was sweating under the blazing heat of the sun, the concrete dust would suck it up, leaving me progressively hotter and heavier as time went on.
The hours between lunch and the shift end at 7PM felt like days.
Finally, the end of the day was called, and we trudged back towards the truck we’d come in, and rode in exhausted silence back to the day labor office, where we lined up to collect our checks. By the time they were processed and we were finally finished, it was a quarter of 8. My compensation for 12 hours of hard labor with a four mile walk on either side of it was $78, which was demoralizing in itself, but I still had that long walk in front of me before I could even start to clean up and recover.
My work boots were in terrible condition, and my socks were dripping wet with the same mix I was coated in, and my feet felt like I was walking over broken glass when I began the trek home. While I had made a brisk 15 minute mile pace in the morning, now I was moving at half that speed, every step causing a fresh explosion of pain. By the time I reached the halfway point, I could feel where the chafing had become blisters, and in some cases, bleeding cracks in my skin. My feet had become swollen inside my shoes, which served to magnify the pressure and pain, and I began to moan softly in time to my pace.
By the time I reached the final mile, I was openly crying, and my brain was screaming at me to just give up, sit down, die. I had been walking for an hour and a half, at a shambling pace, and by the startled glances from pedestrians passing in the other direction, I knew I looked and smelled like a crazy homeless person. Logically, I realized I couldn’t just sit down in a parking lot and go to sleep, but I was blinded by agony, and logic was slowly losing control.
So I made a deal with myself: instead of sitting down, I was going to walk two more steps.
Two more steps wouldn’t get me home, but it would get me two steps closer. And two steps was a number I could achieve. Any more than that was too much to think about, but I could do two. Just a first step, and then a next step.
When I finished the second step, I made the same deal again. First step, next step.
There are around 1,760 steps in a walked mile, and although my head was hanging down and my entire focus was on seeing my feet and the sidewalk dimly lit between streetlights, as long as I could do two steps at a time, that didn’t matter. I counted them and reset, over and over and over again.
One. Two.
One. Two.
One. Two.
All other thoughts were gone. I couldn’t even visualize the cool water and hot shower waiting for me at home. All I could think of was that first step, and then the next. Nothing else mattered, not the pain, not the exhaustion, nothing was important aside from just putting one foot in front of the other.
And suddenly, I was turning the corner on to my block.
My neighbor Juan saw me coming from about halfway down the block, and jogged out to meet me with a bottle of water. “You look like you could use this”, he said as he handed it to me, and I smiled gratefully and chugged it down while walking my two steps just a little bit faster. He walked next to me in silence as we approached our complex, and veered off to his own house calling “Get some rest!” as I headed up to my front door.
I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror as I got ready to shower; I looked like the black and white photos of coal miners who have returned to the surface after a long day deep underground digging out the black rocks that powered our industries. But as I finally collapsed onto the couch with a plate of food, I felt the way that marathon runners must feel when they stumble across the finish line. My two steps at a time had gotten me home.
When I’m advising people with complex business problems, who are overwhelmed with the daunting path ahead of them, I often ask them a question:
“How do you eat an elephant?”
The answer is, “one bite at a time”. An elephant is too much to swallow, but a bite is not, and by taking small iterative steps, we bypass the sense of being overwhelmed, and make slow but steady progress towards the goal.
Sometimes, however, life is too hard to even acknowledge there’s an elephant. And in those times, when I’m blinded by the agony of pressure, hard times, obligations, and the various curve balls thrown at us, I make a deal with myself:
Take a first step, and then a next step.
And it’s never failed to bring me home.