Does you sometimes feel like you’ll never finish?

College and MBA applicants! Does it seem sometimes that you’ll never get everything done in time?

This summer I was sick with bronchitis for much of July and could hardly speak. An old friend offered to read to me on the phone for half an hour every day. Listening intently to Homer’s Odyssey kept me from coughing.

The moral of the story? It’s taken all summer to finish the book—but it’s amazing what you can accomplish if you devote half an hour every day to the task. Suddenly summer is over and so is the Odyssey.

Yesterday we were on Book 22, in which, as I remarked, “Suddenly the Odyssey becomes the Iliad.” The joke is that the slaughter of the suitors in Odysseus’ house is described in such excruciating detail that it seems lifted out of the worst of the war scenes at Troy.

Anyway, if you are facing a daunting task, break it into parts you can finish in half an hour. One day—it’s epic.