One Small Step For Man

Why incremental progress takes us further than giant leaps

I used to think that significant things in life were done in large chunks as sheer acts of will. Study cram sessions, Spring Cleaning, hackathons. But a single step doesn’t finish the marathon, nor does a single battle win the war. I’m now a fan of small, but consistent, progress.

So much of our progress in life comes from setting and achieving goals. James Clear suggests that if we truly want to achieve, we should focus less on the goals and more on our process. When we talk about the Tortoise and the Hare, I think we often overlook a key concept. While the Hare moves quickly, the Tortoise, “slow and steady”, wins the race. I’ve always fixated on the quick versus slow dichotomy, what I’ve overlooked is the word steady. Steady means consistent progress. Sure, it’s incremental, but it’s linear. It’s predictable.

Stanford professor John Ousterhout is credited with the advice, “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept.” For me, this is incredibly motivational. In January of this year, I decided that I wanted to complete a sprint triathlon. I had been running and biking for years, but I wasn’t a very good swimmer. So I joined the YMCA, and began swimming several nights per week. When I started, I could barely swim a lap without stopping to take a break. But each day, I got a little better. I watched YouTube videos about swimming technique and talked with friends who swam competitively in college. Some days it was barely noticeable, but I got a little bit better. After three months of small, but consistent, progress, I was able to swim well over 400 yards (8 laps, or 16 lengths, in a 25-yard pool), and completed my first triathlon.

If you do just 30 pushups each day, you will do 10,000 pushups in a year.

While I’ve enjoyed using incremental progress for personal endeavors, it’s also great for business, health, and relationships. If your goal is to grow revenue by $100k over the next fiscal year, landing one big deal sounds intimidating. What if you called one more customer each week? If you’d like to lose 20 pounds this year, you won’t do it all in one meal. What if you went on one more walk each week? If you want to grow closer with some friends or family members, don’t start by planning week-long visits. What if you shared one 15-minute call on your commute home each week?

The challenge with incremental progress is discipline. It’s actually much easier to take big steps. Getting married is easy; you can do it in less than an hour in Vegas or Gatlinburg. Choosing to stay married each day for the next 50 years is hard. Competing in my triathlon was easy. I signed up, paid the fee, then showed up on race day. That was done within a few hours. The hard part was setting aside time each day to go to the pool, then actually going, even when I didn’t feel like it. Sometimes, I simply forgot or lost track of time. Discipline is hard when we try to accomplish it solely through willpower. Kelly McGonigal’s book Willpower Instinct talks about willpower as a finite resource. Over the course of a day, we make tough decisions, avoid unhealthy foods, stay focused at work, and our willpower reserves become depleted. After a long day, with most of my willpower gone, how did I make sure that I still got my swim practice each evening? I created a habit.

Habits are systems that protect human beings from themselves. We get distracted. We get tempted. We forget about our goals. But habits are more powerful than our whims. Forming good habits allows us to make incremental progress toward our goals without trying as hard. Since we know that willpower is finite, we must have something more reliable than willpower, and habit fits the bill. Changing your habits can be difficult, but there are lots of ways to make the process easier. My secret weapon is theLift app, combined with the Lift team’s blog posts about habit formation. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit is interesting as well. The short list: find triggers, take small steps, track your progress, and reward yourself. Habits are how I read the Bible in a year, increased my sleep from six hours to eight hours per night, and learned to meditate.

So, is all this worth it? For me, learning how to make incremental progress has been the most worthwhile lesson in my adult life. As Dustin Curtis reminded himself with his life remaining clock, our time is always running out. My friend Aalap Majmudar talks about his plans on the order of decades. I’m almost finished with three decades of life. I have an estimated five decades remaining. Most of the positive, meaningful experiences and achievements that I’ll have in those remaining decades will come not from single incidents like winning the lottery, going to a party, or visiting a place. Building a career, staying healthy, and maintaining relationships all happen in daily, small steps. Even this blog post is an example of the power of incremental progress. I’d like to write a widely-read book someday, but I’m not going to start and finish it tonight. Yet, with a little progress each day, we can do mighty things.

Originally published on Medium