When setting your sights on a goal—perhaps you want to clean out your closet, lose 20 pounds, get out of debt, spend more time with your family, wake up earlier, or be a friendlier person—whatever it is, it helps to remember that every little bit counts.
Keep Going
It can be easy to feel overwhelmed when staring at the large gap between where you are and where you aim to be. You may start off with a jolt of enthusiasm, but if progress is harder to come by or slower than you anticipated, discouragement can set in.The key at this juncture is to, of course, not give up. As Thomas Edison once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” To keep going, to stay motivated, you want to home in on any tiny bit of progress that has been made and celebrate that.
Slowly but Surely
If you want to clean out your closet, for example, you might be able to envision a perfectly decluttered, pristinely organized space in which everything you love is beautifully displayed and easy to access. In reality, however, when you begin to assess your closet’s current condition, you may not know where to start or how on earth you’ll ever have the time and energy to push through and reach your goal. The gap between here and there seems too big.Although you may be tempted to empty the entire closet in one fell swoop and power through your task all at once, consider whether this project can be broken down into much smaller chunks to tackle over a lengthened period of time. If you can make small improvements to your closet regularly and consistently do so until your goal is reached, might the end result be better and the process more enjoyable? You may even develop a habit of continuous improvement in the process that allows your closet to not only become clean but also stay clean.
In “Continuous Improvement: How It Works and How to Master It,” author James Clear wrote:
“The typical approach to self-improvement is to set a large goal, then try to take big leaps in order to accomplish the goal in as little time as possible. While this may sound good in theory, it often ends in burnout, frustration, and failure. Instead, we should focus on continuous improvement by slowly and slightly adjusting our normal everyday habits and behaviors.”With some goals, such as losing weight, one fell swoop isn’t going to cut it. You can’t just pull an all-nighter and find yourself down 20 pounds. The road to weight loss, like other goals, is often one of peaks and valleys. You may find you’ve lost weight one week and gained a little bit back the next. To stay consistent along your path and not give up, it can be enough to simply celebrate the overall improvement and tiny wins as you go. If your trajectory is headed in the right direction, you should stay the course.
Eliminating debt is another goal that might take a long time to achieve. It requires sacrifice and discipline to see it through. Shifting your perspective about what counts as a win along the way can keep spirits up and motivation strong. For example, if you’re only going to celebrate when your credit card balance equals zero, you’re missing out on many opportunities to boost your momentum along the way. What if you celebrated every $1,000 or even $100 reduction in your total debt? What if you cheered every time the total debt went down at all?
