Small Circles: the surprising way you build capacity

Ritesh Bawri

30 Jan 2025 — 2 min read

Photo by Chaitanya Tatikonda / Unsplash

Build small circles.

In the world we live in today, building small circles seems counterintuitive. You could be labelled unambitious.

But nothing ever got done without building small circles first.

Human beings worship outsized, ambitious, outcomes. Man on the moon. Climbing Everest.

But we ignore the trivia that it took 58,000 steps to reach the top of Everest.

Death being the outcome of a single misstep.

So, how can you develop the ability to ensure that every step you take is the correct one?

By building small circles. By understanding, in a deep and fundamental way, what it means to take one step. By breaking down to the smallest detail possible, everything you are doing when doing so.

But that is not how human beings operate. We make instinctive, rapid choices. We automate. We delegate the task to our deep conscious.

Building small circles forces you to do the exact opposite.

It forces you to slow down, think, learn, analyze and understand each micro step and in a deliberate fashion, craft the way you would do it.

Most of us would immediately ask - who has the time?

But that is the inherent problem we are trying to overcome. Distracted, pulled in multiple directions, always in a hurry, we fail to focus on a few things.

The few things we can master. By building small circles.

Is it any wonder that only 7269 people have climbed Everest? Only 230 without oxygen?

So what ever the mountain you wish to climb, do so by breaking it down to the smallest step possible. Master that step and then move on to the next.

Your effort will compound faster than you know it. Someday, all of it will seem effortless. The way grandmasters make it seem on centre court at Wimbledon.

But it took many small incremental actions to get there. It took the repeated mastery of each, on the way there.

Reach out to me on twitter @rbawri Instagram @riteshbawriofficial and YouTube at www.youtube.com/breatheagain

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