Bypass Your Lack of Skills & Focus to Achieve Big Things
The Curation Series: The Power of Marginal Improvements
It is common for us to believe that a seemingly unattainable goal takes an effort or level of talent that is equally if not more unattainable on our part.
We see the finished product in our mind and it’s so overwhelming that we immediately write it — and ourselves — off.
This is self-talk is further exacerbated if we have a hard time focusing, if we think of ourselves as undisciplined and if we’re older.
But as Stephen Duneier shows us, we can achieve big things with just the smallest improvements and minimal talents.
Power of Marginal Improvements
“What stands between us and achieving even our most ambitious dreams has far less to do possessing some magical skill or talent and far more to do with how we approach problems and make decisions to solve them. Even a marginal improvement in our process can have a huge impact on our end results.” — Stephen Duneier
How you beat a lack of focus and discipline despite your age or a minimum of any apparent talent is to break your goals down into manageable decisions.
It’s not a matter of being a genius, but of making a bunch of simple, small improvements over time.
(By the way, this works on small goals that overwhelm you too)
From 680th to 1st by Improving Just 6%
Novak Djokovic, will go down as one of the greatest tennis players to ever live.
But when he entered the professional tour in 2004, he was ranked #680 in the world.
Three years later, he was #3.
Five years after that, he was #1.
And how did he do it?
By increasing the amount of points he won from 49% to 55% — only 6 percentage points.
Don’t Mistake the Standard Way for the Only Way
Like Duneier, I also have a hard time focusing.
When I was a kid, I would stay up until 2am working on a project that many other children would finish quickly. It made me think I was bad at that subject.
But in actuality, I just had a hard time focusing.
I still have difficulty focusing, but instead of feeling terrible because I can’t seem to change, I work with it to design a schedule where I thrive.
If you can’t sit and focus for 90 minutes, just try 10. If that doesn’t work, try 5 minutes, or 2 minutes. Break it down into the smallest increment of effort and start there.
A string of those small slivers of time repeated over and over will build out into a full day.
Don’t think you have to do your thing like everyone else. Don’t think you have to combat every one of your perceived weaknesses. Sometimes, you just have to design your own plan.
Conclusion
Ambitious goals do require ambitious effort.
But ambitious effort can be broken down into small, unambitious actions.
Make enough of them and you may find you’ve met that ambitious goals you previously thought unattainable.
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This article is Day 17 of the 30-Day Fishbowl Series
You can start the series by clicking HERE.
