The Power of Small Steps: How Incremental Progress Leads to Big Results
There’s a line in John Green’s novel The Fault in our Stars that describes a lot more than it’s application in the story. The narrator says, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” It’s a very similar concept to the quote from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Barnes asks Campbell how Campbell went bankrupt, and Campbell’s response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.”
We see this concept played out all around us in both positive and negative ways. We saw small, incremental changes in technology, inching toward something we couldn’t even imagine, until 2007 brought us the iPhone. In that same era, in the years leading up to 2008, what we didn’t see clearly enough to really comprehend was the gradual buildup of risky loans bundled into mortgage-backed securities. It was the failure of Lehman Brothers in September of that year that had us looking back and seeing that steady accumulation of bad actions. Most unfortunately, we often see it in our own health conditions. A long period of poor dietary habits and a lack of physical activity may abruptly trigger a health crisis such as type 2 diabetes, coronary problems, or respiratory issues.
Both the two quotes and the examples I gave might also be illustrations of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” We an often know that our habits are taking us in a particular direction, but we don’t always know where that straw is that will be the undoing or the doing. We may not know that that next candy bar will be the thing that will combine with years of low activity and junk food to trigger a diabetic episode. We may not know that the next shopping trip will be the one that takes the budget beyond our ability to repay. Perhaps we should know these things, but the reality is that we don’t always.
“Slowly and then all at once” and “Gradually and then suddenly” don’t always mean bad things happen, though, do they? I remember back when I was at the Presidio of Monterey spending eight hours a day trying to learn Russian. We laboriously pored over vocabulary lists, painstakingly learned how to form the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet, practiced making the verbal sounds that don’t exist in English, making what felt like pitiful progress. Then, one Saturday morning, my roommate and I were on a bus on our way to a mall to spend some of our soldier’s pay when we overheard a conversation between two women sitting close to the front of the bus – in Russian. Much to our surprise, we not only recognized it as Russian, but we understood it! We were able to follow the conversation until the women got off the bus at a stop in the town. Without giving it a thought, we began to recap what we had heard from the women – in Russian. At some point, we realized – WE SPOKE RUSSIAN! Months of baby steps, months of incremental, microscopic progress synthesized in a reasonably full conversation in a language that we didn’t grow up speaking.
That’s how we learn, isn’t it? Slowly, then all at once. That’s how a house is built. That’s how life progresses much of the time. We make plodding progress that doesn’t look much like anything until we pick our heads up and see that things have happened in our presence that have brought us to a point that is much farther down the number line that we believed ourselves to be. Incremental progress is important! When we’re working toward a goal, sometimes we feel like we’re not getting anywhere, but these small victories count.
THE POWER OF SMALL STEPS
I have small goals, which someone may call tasks, like getting the secretary cleared off in the entryway. Believe me, because of my inattentiveness to that lovely piece of furniture, it’s not a task anymore. It’s a goal. But it’s a part of a larger endeavor to get my whole house organized. Now, all of a sudden, I have this huge, overwhelming objective that is too big to wrap my head around. The reality, though, is that you don’t work a whole goal. You work steps toward that goal. Any goal is that way. You don’t just do the goal, you do the small steps that take you to the goal.
I also have big goals, like writing my book, getting my house organized, earning a certification for my career. I didn’t just sit down and write my book. I did a braindump on paper to identify everything I wanted to cover. I organized those items into broader categories. I wrote a web on paper that showed how I wanted it to flow. I wrote an outline from that web. Then, I sat down for an hour every day and wrote. But, even sitting down to write every day was a huge undertaking, until I saw that the accumulation of completed chapters started piling up. One day I looked at the two columns and saw that the list of completed chapters was longer than the list of remaining chapters. From then on, I was able to maintain a momentum that carried me through to completion.
I did the same when I was finishing my college degree. I knew at the beginning of each term exactly what I needed to complete for the term. I scheduled it all out so that I knew what I needed to accomplish each week. If I had a large project due at the end of the term, I was able to add each week to the final submission based on what I learned or accomplished each week.
Those are examples of “chunking” – breaking the task down into small, manageable tasks. However, it’s important to remember that your small steps inevitably provide a compounding effect as well. By the end of the project, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Each note of a symphony is just a note. Even a single measure is just a single measure. Each note, each measure, is a critical component to the final product, but the complete symphony provides so much more value than any single measure in the score.
STRATEGIES TO STAY MOTIVATED
I don’t have just one way to keep myself moving on a project, but I don’t always use all of my methods either. I’ll show you several of the ways I keep myself going, and you can pick the ones that work for you. You’ll have to try several and keep and use the ones that work for you. You need to understand, though, that what works on one project may be ineffective on another, even if they’re going on at the same time. Do what works for everything you do. Here are my most forceful motivators.
I’m a list-maker. I get a lot of satisfaction in seeing something crossed off my list. For a particular savings goal, I used a bar chart to show how close I was getting. I also fill I charts, I move items between columns in a spreadsheet. Scrivener has a way to sort things into “to do,” “doing,” and “done,” and there are Kanban board apps that provide the same visual markers. I sometimes use Post-It notes on my wall to show what I’m doing if that’s what works on that project. Visual progress markers can also show you where you need to go next, and they can give you clues that you’re struggling on something.
I don’t always use accountability partners, because I haven’t found that to work well for me, but some people swear by them. I think if I had accountability partners that weren’t afraid to call me out when I make excuses, I might find it a more motivating concept. If I paid a coach or trainer to not be just a cheerleader, it would probably be something that works for me. However, I do use accountability in a different way. I may share a goal with someone I want to impress, and I ask them to check with me on it periodically. Knowing that they’re going to do that, and knowing that I don’t want to look bad when they ask me about it, I will at least try to make some progress. The other thing to realize is that if all you need is encouragement to keep you going, an accountability group or partner may be just what you need.
My third method for staying motivated is to celebrate my small wins. Not every baby step, of course, but when I can see that I’ve hit a milestone or accomplished a particularly difficult part of the overall task, I take a break and crow about it to my cheerleaders. Sometimes you can use rewards as incentives, so that when you are in a difficult part of the process, you promise yourself that when you get it done, you will do something you really want to do, and you make sure you don’t do it until you meet that objective. This is only effective, though, if the reward has value for you. One place this might work is in fitness or weight loss. When I hit a certain weight, my clothes should be starting to feel big on me, so I’ll need to replace at least some of them. So, when I hit that point where I’ve dropped, say, 20 pounds, I’ll get one new outfit at a really nice store. Now, this is only effective if it’s something you wouldn’t normally do, and you need to make sure that the reward is also doable. That is, I’m not buying a $1,000 outfit, but I’m also not buying a pair of jeans from Walmart. If that 20 pounds is only a small part of what I’m looking to lose, I don’t want to completely replace my wardrobe, but having something nice to look forward to can make it worth putting in the effort to get there.
OVERCOMING DISCOURAGEMENT
There can come a time in any project, especially in a huge project, when you become discouraged, burned out, or overwhelmed. It’s important to remind yourself at the beginning of a project that there will be plateaus. There will be days, even weeks when progress seems slow. That’s normal! It’s part of the “messy middle.” If you know ahead of time that these things happen, it’ll be easier to deal with them when they do.
I want you to take a look at another post I wrote a while back, Change the Frame. Sometimes you just have to think about things differently when you’re in that space where it feels like your wheels are spinning and you can’t get traction. There are times when you can’t make progress because you have to learn something. Well, guess what – that learning is progress! I’m in the middle of learning how to market my artwork. I’m not making a lot of sales right now. I’m trying to market my book, and I’m not making a lot of sales right now. I have several battles going on on different fronts, and it feels like I’m not “progressing” on any of them, because on each one of them, I’m at a spot where I have to learn how to do something or get a foundation put down before I can start gaining traction again. It’s frustrating on one level, but it’s part of the process.
One more thing that is really helpful when your wheels are spinning is taking some time to reflect on the success you’ve already had, either on this project or on past projects. This helps to reinforce confidence in the process. You don’t often see me pushing journaling, but in this case, it’s helpful, especially if you’ve been doing it even intermittently. You can go back and see where you’ve made progress through difficulties before, and make sure you document this struggle as well, so that on your next run through the messy middle, you can look back on this one and see that you got through it and succeeded.
SLOWLY, THEN ALL AT ONCE
Overnight sensations are extremely rare. Champions aren’t born in the heat of battle. CEOs don’t wake up in executive positions. Muscles get stronger through the exertion. Every step you take in your difficult projects is preparing you to succeed. You take one step. Then you take another step. Then another. You proceed slowly, painfully slowly. All progress is incremental progress, and therefore, incremental progress counts. Then, all at once, you find yourself on the peak of the mountain.
YOUR TURN
Drop a comment and tell me about a time when you’ve experienced success through incremental progress. Let’s share our victories!
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