Every journey begins with a single step. All of us do take that first step. Its the one after that is equally important…and the one after..and then the next.
Yesterday doesn’t matter.It’s always the next step that is important.
The tough part is committing to the next step with no guarantees of success. It happens when we start working out in gyms. It happens when we start working on products, or starting our own companies, or committing to a diet plan. It happens when sports teams chase a big score to win. It happens when you want to start a blogging site!
The opponent, competitor or the problem is always bigger or better.
The idea is not to beat big demons in the first shot. The idea is to beat your urge to give up taking the next step.
We end up defeating ourselves by not committing to the next action that needs to be taken. By shifting our focus on the magnitude of the competition, we need to redirect it to small, incremental step that needs to be taken to move one step towards beating it.
- Don’t plan on going to the gym for the year. Plan on doing it tomorrow. Plan out how you will reach the gym. Achieve that goal. Repeat
- Don’t plan on making the next facebook. Plan on what feature / product will delight your customer tomorrow. Build it today. Delight your users tomorrow. Repeat.
- Don’t plan on beating the other team’s score in the next hour. Plan on how to increase the chances of scoring the next point. Score it. Repeat.
- Don’t try and write all the blogs for year today! Try and write couple of words tomorrow. Write them. Repeat.
This incremental approach works to our advantage in multiple ways.
- An incremental approach builds a habit. If you commit to doing one thing tomorrow and you commit to this everyday and achieve it, you eventually end up building a habit. Once you build a good habit, you develop an addiction towards it. That will put you in auto-mode.
- You de-couple your actions from the result. If you don’t see results quickly you won’t be disappointed. This is because your metric for success now is only whether you have managed to take that incremental step or not and not the end result.
- It’s easier to measure and analyse. Your metric is a daily goal of having done the action for the day or not. Its a binary one or zero. So either you have achieved your daily target or you haven’t and then you can easily re-organise yourself for tomorrow.
- You won’t get overwhelmed. The number one cause for giving up on something is the size of the problem. If you focus on the small tasks at hand then you won’t get overwhelmed and will stay on target.
- Your wins will be go up. By focussing on smaller targets, your wins will be more and your confidence will go up. That will empower you to take on a larger action item for the next day. Each incremental win will exponentially give you the confidence to increase your target for the next day.
- If you lose today, it’s easier to get up again. This is because the next opportunity to succeed is tomorrow! Your next incremental goal is tomorrow. You can refactor your initial plan and try plan B — tomorrow.
- It will remove distractions. Once you know the one, two or three things that you wish to do tomorrow, and you base your success metric on that, you will automatically end up removing distractions and start focussing your time and resources on working on things that will move you towards your goals.
You will find more positives than the above points once you begin this journey. Even if you don’t, at least you got started with something.
See some of the projects I’m working on: