Progress between perception and reality

As kids, time is irrelevant to us, our goals alternate between being able to get home in time to watch our favorite cartoon, and having enough pocket money to buy a snack on the way to school.
As kids, we play the guitar or basketball. We engage in different activities for the positive effects they have on us, not for any distant and blurry goal that our changing mood might dictate. 

As adults, progress seems to be excruciatingly slow. By the time we start noticing changes, our habituation mechanism catches up, making those changes familiar to us. 

We get used to them and they become our new "normal" almost before noticing that they were an improvement on a previous state.
This rapid switch, at least in perception, between our old self and our improved self, expecially for short lengths of time,  causes the emergence of the stagnation feeling that we all experience at some point in our lives.
Actions suffer from the same myopic perception. 

One less bite at a buffet, skipping the dessert, taking the stairs instead of riding the elevator, all these seemingly small, innocuous actions and decisions are negligible when we look at them individually, repeated over time their strength is indescribable.

Humans also overestimate what they could do in a short amounts of time and underestimate what they could do in a long periods of inconsequential, repeated "micro-actions".
Our body is not a microwave, it needs time to process food, information or any other kind of input, and because this process is slow and cumulative, we don't usually notice it until its here, and usually, we give up even before reaching that point.
What if we tried to use the ability our body has to change radically over time with small, negligible and daily actions.

The untiring waves relentlessly hit the shore and bring down momentous cliffs one speck at a time.