One of the biggest mistakes people make when crafting goals is they name a goal that is so unreasonably big that their mind can’t grasp it as real.
Making $1,000,000 this year is the perfect example of that. For most people 1,000,000 is just a one followed by a whole bunch of zeros. The number isn’t real. At least for me, once we get over $10,000 it is hard for me to have any real concept of what we are talking about.
Once numbers get to a certain size they seem similar. In my mind $300,000 isn’t much different than $1,000,000.
It’s nearly impossible to work towards a goal we can’t comfortably imagine.
As un-useful as big, ill-defined goals can be, micro-goals can be powerful and useful.
I was first introduced to the idea of micro-goals when I read about the Japanese idea of “kaizen”.
Kaizen is the idea of taking lots of very small steps which over time add up to something big.
The first example I was taught was of a man who wanted to eat more healthily. Every day he ate at a fast food place near his office. He decided to start with his french fries. After buying his meal he threw away one french fry and then ate his meal as normal. The next day he threw away two fries. Each day this continued, deducting one fry at a time until he had slowly worked his way to a healthier diet without missing the greasy food he loved.
Eating healthily might seem too big a step to take all at once, but the micro-goal of eating one french fry fewer than the day before is so trivial that it seems easy.
Here is an example from my own life. A number of years ago I wanted to get up 90 minutes earlier every day in order to do more writing. There was no way I was going to find changing my wake up time from 7:00am to 5:30am easy. So what I did instead was to set my alarm for 6:58am. I wasn’t going to miss two minutes of sleep. The next day I set it for 6:56am, and the next for 6:54am.
In six weeks I was getting up at 5:30am without much effort. Today, it has become so much of a habit it’s unusual for me to sleep past 5:30am even without an alarm.
I want you to give kaizen a try. Pick one of your goals and break it down into the smallest possible step and commit to doing that today. With each successive day add another small step.
Change will happen before you know it.
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