I grew up in Finland, so a story about the buses leaving Helsinki caught my attention.
Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen used the Helsinki bus station to explain why people often abandon good work too early.
Several buses leave from the same platform. For the first few stops, they follow the same streets out of the city. From the window, the routes can look almost identical.
Minkkinen compared each stop to one year in the career of a photographer.
Why people return to the station
Imagine spending three years taking photographs. You have worked hard, improved, and started to believe you are developing a style of your own.
Then you show the work to someone important. They point to another photographer whose work looks very similar.
The last three years suddenly feel wasted. You return to the station, choose another bus, and start again.
A few years later, the same thing happens.
Minkkinen’s advice was simple: stay on the bus.
The routes look similar because they are still travelling through the same part of Helsinki. Farther out, one turns north and another heads south. They only become clearly different after travelling together for some distance.
You have to stay on the bus long enough to reach that point.
The first few stops with money
Employee money progress often looks unimpressive at the beginning.
The first $1,000 in savings does not make someone feel financially secure. It may simply mean that the next car repair does not go on a credit card.
Investing can feel even slower because the employee is doing almost all the work at first. Using a simple 8% example, $10,000 invested would produce about $800 in a year. I’ll take it, but $800 does not change much. At $100,000 invested, the same 8% would produce $8,000.
Now the money is beginning to carry a meaningful part of the load.
The difficult period comes before that. The employee keeps making contributions, but the balance still looks small beside the final goal. The work is real, yet the result may not feel rewarding enough to continue.
That is when people are most likely to return to the station.
Make the first stops visible
A distant goal such as paying off all debt, saving six months of expenses, or reaching $100,000 invested can take years.
Employees also need to see what the earlier milestones have already done.
The first $1,000 may prevent one unexpected expense from becoming new debt. The first six months of automatic contributions show that the plan can survive ordinary life. The first meaningful reduction in a balance proves that the number can move.
Those are not the final results, but they are real changes.
There is no announcement when the bus is about to reach the point where the routes separate. Employees may keep travelling through familiar streets for a long time.
Help them see that the first few stops still count.
Progress can be real long before it looks impressive.
Best, Henry
Founder, Wellhana