The Cumulative Effect
You know the old adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Cumulative, adj. Formed, or becoming larger, by successive additions (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 5th Edition)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cumulative effect of little changes.
(And as I start this post, the snow is just beginning to fall, a few flurries scudding across the ground. This is important. Keep it in mind.)
Maybe it’s all just part and parcel of my recent reflections on the last year; maybe it’s the fresh calendar and a new year, pregnant with possibility and the idea of New Year’s Resolutions.
Jen’s Brand New Planner - 1st week of 2026. No crinkled pages, no coffee stains…yet.
Sure, sometimes we grow, suddenly, by leaps and bounds. But most of the time the biggest changes in our lives happen over time, incrementally, with faithful, tiny, even boring application.
Take learning a foreign language! Learning a language takes constant, diligent application. And it can be really, really boring. A new word here, another page of grammar work there, another sentence mangled, another YouTube video trying frantically to follow the subtitles, looking a word up for the 7th time because you forgot what it means. Again.
What I’ve noticed over the years of studying German and French (with occasional dabblings in Swedish) is that when I start a new book, I’ve got to look up word after word after word. Perhaps I can make my way through a sentence, a paragraph, but it’s a long, long time before I can make it through a whole page, much less a whole book. Yet if I keep plugging away at it, day after day, week after week, and year after boring year, one day I notice that I can sit down and read 20 pages at a clip. How did that happen?
Cumulative effect. Line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.
THE 2-MINUTE CHALLENGE
Stop now. Stop RIGHT NOW and give yourself two minutes to think. I’ll bet in two short minutes you can think of at least 15 places in your life that you’ve experienced this. Go.
Here’s mine:
Herbs (learning them, experiencing benefit)
Feet (going from constant pain and weakness to strength and resilience)
Yoga (increased flexibility and strength)
Learning to roast coffee
Finishing quilts
Increasing wisdom and experience
Reading the Bible in German and French
Learning to add cheese, butter, yogurt-making to my daily life
Gaining customers - one at a time
Building soil and compost
Clearing woods on our property
Trimming fruit trees to proper shape
Finishing Advanced Math
Homeschooling 5 children
Whoops…Time’s up!
Think of this from the perspective of taking on “the simple life” and “homegrown skills” in WHATEVER capacity. In a blog post called Practical Skills a few months back I said,
“Right now as I raise my eyes from this computer screen, I see 2 1/2 gallons of grape wine fermenting on the shelves in front of me…a pint of cream culturing into sour cream…a gallon of sliced jalapenos fermenting…a crockpot of chicken stock simmering…a pint of homemade mustard fermenting…two pints of herbal oils “steeping” for use in cooking and in lotions.
But those skills? I learned them a little at a time. It’s a gradual process, really enjoyable, really satisfying, and suddenly you think in surprise, ‘When’s the last time I bought THAT at the grocery store?’”
The practical application to this is to break projects - and personal changes - down into bite-sized pieces. If I, as a homesteader, tell myself I’m going to “improve my soil,” I quickly become overwhelmed. What exactly do I mean? How MUCH soil? ALL of my soil? Improve HOW? So I start with a soil test. I get the results and find out what they mean. Do I need to add MORE manure, or do I need to skip the manure for a few years? Unless I want to succumb to the short-term benefit and long-term detriment of chemical fertilizers, this can’t be done in one day. This process will take months and years of diligent, faithful work.
(Snow update: Just about 30 minutes later, and the grass is still showing, but there’s a nice coating of snow on the ground. Wait for it.)
I was talking to a friend yesterday about starting to bake her own sourdough bread. Honestly, she’s a little overwhelmed. And I get it: when I first started baking sourdough, it didn’t even work. I mean, I was SO excited. I loved the whole process. My bread actually didn’t even rise, and I still loved it! The whole thing was foreign to me, and I did it really, really badly. But I just kept plugging away at it, putting it on the shelf when my father-in-law got sick, brushing the skill back off when things calmed down…and little by little, one loaf at a time, I figured it out. Now I have no hesitation whatsoever in taking a bread recipe - ANY bread recipe - and modifying it for sourdough. What made the difference?
The cumulative effect. One loaf at a time, I learned how bread felt. I learned how sourdough worked, and how it differed from storebought yeast.
And I accepted that failure is the path to success.
How about herbs? I’ve been dabbling in herbs for nearly 5 years. At first, I read “all the books” and harvested “all the herbs.” I made lists and charts of which herbs work for which problems, and every time I felt a twinge, I researched which herbs to use. But now? Oh, I still study herbs; in fact, I’m working my way through an herbal course. But what I notice is that I don’t even NEED as many herbs as I used to. I don’t have as many “twinges.” I’m just generally healthier, and I’m confident that part of that is because over the last few years, I’ve added daily herb teas to my life, harvested at the peak of freshness from my own yard. It hardly matters WHICH herbs…just whatever I feel like. Kind of tense? Lemon balm with apple mint is always nice. Feeling a little “puny”? Alfalfa and comfrey draw nutrients from DEEP in the ground. Cold outside? Roasted dandelion root is absolutely delicious...free in your yard all year long. But this deep knowledge AND this deeper core of strength grow gradually, one cup at a time.
Cumulative effect!
Money? Now there’s something we can all relate to. I recently read a book on business finance called Profit First. Now there’s an unusual concept! Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the available time, also applies to money, in that expenses ALWAYS expand to fill the income. Well, we all know that from personal experience and more or less successful attempts at budgeting! What does Profit First teach you to do? To ALWAYS take your profit, and to take it first, before you allow expenses to come in and eat it all up. BUT if you haven’t been taking a profit (oops! 😬), to suddenly insist on a 10% profit won’t work, because you haven’t acclimatized your business to it. So you start with 1%. Increase profit by 1% and decrease expenses by the same. Now THAT anyone can do! The next quarter, bump it to 2-3%, and decrease expenses by that amount. The next quarter…you get the picture.
You can do this with profit in a business, and you can do this with personal savings in a family.
Cumulative effect!
Let’s talk meal planning! Yay! If your meal planning is non-existent, pick ONE simple meal your family likes and commit to that ONE meal every week. This is especially helpful if there is a night that’s ALWAYS busy - maybe your kids have practice every Tuesday. Just knowing what’s for dinner - no thought required - removes about 20 pounds of stress from your shoulders. Experience talking here! ONE meal, ONE decision pre-made…
So as we find ourselves standing on the brink of 2026, with all of the potential New Years Resolutions: “I’m gonna lose weight, join the gym, get my finances in order, finally finish that book, and be a nicer person (whatever that means!),” remember that quite often making ENORMOUS changes all at once doesn’t stick. Commit to little changes, tiny improvements, be okay with boredom and even failure.
(And it’s been about an hour. Remember that the beautiful snows that coat the ground don’t usually drop straight out of the sky a whole foot at a time. We see a little snow scudding across the ground, the next time we look out it’s a little thicker, and by the end of the day we’ve got a few inches. And that glory happens…a few snowflakes at a time.)
Cumulative effect!