I hear lots of people talk about what they are hoping will happen for them in their lives or the positive things that will unfold for them over time. They often talk about the things they are going to do about it or an idea they have to move towards it. Experience tells me they are missing just one small action – a small action!
I have never met anyone that got fit yesterday. I don’t know any people that became great chefs last night. I’ve tried to become a really good dancer and that certainly takes more than one class. But with each class I took I got incrementally better.
There is rarely a goal that is so overwhelmingly complex that we can’t find a little step to take towards it each day. How about becoming a lawyer as a career change? It’s a lofty change and a big step. Now lets take that big step and make it smaller. For starters, lets go online and search for universities that might offer a law program. That one step is good for today. Tomorrow we will look for a comparison of schools and geography so we can narrow it down. The next day we will download an application. The next day we will fill it out. The next day we will look into the LSAT schedule in your area. You get the idea.
Each major breakthrough in your life is rarely a breakthrough but a culmination of the steps you have been taking in that direction for some time. Sure you become a lawyer and walk across the stage and everyone says how it was so fast – but you know it wasn’t. It was hundreds of daily steps.
With each of my major goals I look at them each week and figure out what steps I can take daily to move closer. The timelines for most of my goals have been off, not by much, but still off. The completion rate on my goals is about 96%. Take this approach. Like a staircase, you take one small step at a time and NEVER criticize yourself for how big or small it is. Pursue it today with that little step, and tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Pursue It – Just a little every day
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1 comments:
Hi Marty,
I was recently becoming somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer scale of an application I've been handed responsibility for and what would be required to start a venture moving to a data center business model. There had been a couple of past occasions when I put aside related coding tasks, daunted with the magnitude and not quite sure where to begin.
One day recently I was reading up on Agile methodology and came across a quote from one IT manager who said words to the effect that "My success lies in the fact that I only hire people that produce code. That they produce it consistently." This made me realise the error I was making and got rid of my writer's block.
I simply started writing code. If it is wrong, I will chuck it and rewrite it. I never hesitated at rewrites in the past when needed. If it works then I am at least making progress daily. There is no way I can absorb every aspect of this undertaking until I have moved some distance down that path anyway and I am quite sure I will delegate storage and infrastructure decisions no matter what I do. I definitely can't be an expert at everything and I still can't dance but hope springs eternal.
Regards,
Dave H.
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