Life can be difficult. Perspective helps.

Victor Frankl, neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, phrased it as follows: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

The choice we have in how we view and respond to circumstances we find ourselves in, has the potential to be, everything. This empowering perspective on perspective is applicable in nearly, if not every, aspect of being. Good news, right? No matter how out of control your situation might seem, you always have control over one thing: your attitude towards it.

Coming back to the issue of life being difficult, the fact is, we’re still alive (presumably, if you are reading this). Since we’re living, we might as well live a life that is at least tolerable – however we choose to define ‘tolerable’. In fact, many of us have the luxury of being able to rely on more than just perspective to make our experience of living more than tolerable. Even a minute share of time, freedom, resources, people or skill can nudge us towards a better place than we were in yesterday.

So, we know that many of us have more choice than solely choice of attitude. More often than not, there is much that we can do to improve ourselves and our overall circumstances. The best part: we can start small.

Small is significant. Small is valuable. Incremental change – whether towards improvement or decline – is underrated. The reassuringly fathomable, tackleable and indeed, worthy goal, is not to be perfect, but to be better than before. It doesn’t matter where we start as long as our graph is inching towards the top right hand quadrant.

Fractional and consistent improvement is worth celebrating. So, might as well begin to scratch away at the surface, and try, right?