Crawling Your Way to Success
One of my former directors used to make a big deal about small wins. One time we were working late preparing for a big presentation the next day. It wasn’t going to be normal late like 9 o’clock, but crazy late like 2 a.m. At 10 p.m., she got a text from our client. “Our 11 a.m. meeting has been pushed to 6 p.m”, she said. There’s a little win.
“Oh WhoopDeeDoo!”
But it’s still 10 p.m. I’m still tired. And we’re still going to be here for a few more hours. At 2 a.m. in the office, little wins don’t seem to matter. But they do. Little wins means getting the critical nap time you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. They can mean making money you wouldn’t have made. They can mean pounds you wouldn’t have dropped. Optimist seek out little wins everywhere. They’re compounding.
“Little wins turn into big wins when you string them together over time.”
Why? Winning makes you feel good, no matter how small the victory. When you feel good, you start to crave feeling good again. When you start to crave feeling good, the actions you take become habits and you want to do it more. What if you could develop a system for accomplishing goals that build on little wins of your own design?
Here’s an idea of how it might work:
1. Set Tiny Goals
“You can do anything for 5 minutes a day” – Matt Mullenweg
I was listening to an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show the other day and he had Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress on as a guest.
He talked about how he was trying to integrate meditation and fitness into his life more. For meditating, he talked about starting with just 5 minutes a day. He made the site Calm.com his home screen to ensure it was top of mind and that became his starting point.
Regarding fitness he started with just one push up everyday before he got in the shower.
He said, “No matter how late you’re running, no matter what’s going on in the world, you can’t argue against doing one push up. There’s no excuse.”
Starting with a tiny goal that you can’t fail at will get you started on the right track. You can steadily increase that goal over time and build towards the larger goal you really want to accomplish.
2. Start Early
“If you had started doing anything two weeks ago, by today you would have been two weeks better at it.” – John Mayer
Most of us aren’t naturally patient. We can’t wait for our web pages to load, so how can we endure the extremely indolent path to success?
“By beginning right now.”
Let’s assume you started with one push up per day for one week. Every week, you add one more push up. By the end of the year, you’ll be at 52 push ups every day, 7 days a week. That’s 9,646 push ups in a year if you started on January 1. How many have you done so far this year? Yeah, I thought so.
3. Anticipate Obstacles
But once things get tougher, how do you make sure you stick with it? By anticipating that there will be obstacles (because there will be) and preparing a plan to deal with them.
In Charles Duhigg’s, The Power of Habit, we learn that companies like Starbucks train their employees on how to deal with disagreeable, but inevitable situations in advance. It’s called the LATTE method.
“We Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred”
By planning ahead for how to deal with setbacks and obstacles when they come up you’re not caught off guard. In football, it’s like knowing the other team is going to run instead of pass before the ball is snapped.
When you want to set out to achieve something try starting with a tiny goal and scale it over time. Start as soon as possible and prepare for the obstacles that will inevitably get in your way.
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