"Break any problem into, or make any changes in, small increments"
About this Quote
The line reads like a modest household tip, but it’s really a philosophy of survivability dressed as method. “Break any problem into” offers the calm authority of craft: you don’t conquer complexity by force, you reduce it to workable pieces. The second clause, “or make any changes in, small increments,” widens the target from puzzles to life itself. Problems are external; changes are internal. Grant quietly collapses the difference, implying that the self can be approached with the same disciplined patience as a tangled task.
As a poet writing through the long churn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Grant lived in an era obsessed with improvement: moral improvement, social improvement, agricultural improvement, imperial “improvement.” Her phrasing carries that period’s faith in steady progress, but without the swagger. It’s incrementalism as a counterspell to grandiosity. No heroic breakthrough, no romantic eruption; just the unglamorous power of repetition.
The subtext is almost parental: panic is a narrative you tell yourself when the scale feels infinite. Small increments shrink the story back down to something you can do today. There’s also a pragmatic ethics here. Incremental change is less likely to provoke backlash, in others and in yourself; it’s a way to move through resistance rather than shattering it.
What makes the sentence work is its plainness. It doesn’t promise transformation. It offers leverage. In a world that prizes dramatic reinvention, Grant argues for the slow art of making the future doable.
As a poet writing through the long churn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Grant lived in an era obsessed with improvement: moral improvement, social improvement, agricultural improvement, imperial “improvement.” Her phrasing carries that period’s faith in steady progress, but without the swagger. It’s incrementalism as a counterspell to grandiosity. No heroic breakthrough, no romantic eruption; just the unglamorous power of repetition.
The subtext is almost parental: panic is a narrative you tell yourself when the scale feels infinite. Small increments shrink the story back down to something you can do today. There’s also a pragmatic ethics here. Incremental change is less likely to provoke backlash, in others and in yourself; it’s a way to move through resistance rather than shattering it.
What makes the sentence work is its plainness. It doesn’t promise transformation. It offers leverage. In a world that prizes dramatic reinvention, Grant argues for the slow art of making the future doable.
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