In this series of articles I want to talk about the principles that you can use every day to create more beautiful things and experiences in your life.
They are all extracted from my experience and I am using them each and every single day.
It's 10 am.
I am starting my business day.
Checking my WorkFlowy (by the way that is a really cool app that doubled my productivity).
I see what tasks are on my pipeline.
I do some prioritisation. I delete some and then move some in front of the line.
But what do I put first? And how do I make decisions on what to address today?
There was a South African cleric Desmond Tutu that once wisely said something that is very used by highly achievers:
"There is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time"
And this is the first principle I am going to talk about today.
What makes the difference between what society calls achievements and usual results?
From my experience the biggest factor is the goals you choose to obtain.
If they are having a low barrier to entry then everybody can do them and society will call them usual results. A low barrier to entry means there is no need for special skills, or resources in order to obtain that result. If everybody can do it, then it is not regarded as a success.
Let's call them "valuable goals"
What is a valuable goal
A valuable goal is something that usually takes a lot of time and resources to achieve. This is the kind of goal that makes you feel you want to abandon it at every moment because it seems impossible to get. I tend to choose these kind of goals. If they are too easy to achieve, I don't involve myself with them. If I look at my selection process of my goals I can see clearly that it is a process in which I don't really care what society thinks, but I tend to choose what I think it would be hard for me to achieve. It might seem a painful process, but actually when I reach the end of a valuable goal the level of satisfaction is greater.
Of course I need to see some light at the end of the tunnel.
I don't choose very unrealistic goals, but unrealistic enough. And yes, in the end the society tends to appreciate the final result, but this is not a criteria in choosing them in the first place.
Examples of hard-to-get goals
In order to better understand let's move from theory to some typical goals in my life. At some point I wanted to loose weight: from 104 kg, I went down to 79 kg. At age 21 I started learning playing guitar which seemed an impossible task at that age. At age 25 I started learning piano. At age 40 I started playing saxophone during COVID lockdown. This year I started studying clarinet. On the business side, I launched 3 software products in 20 years from zero to hero, having thousands of customers from the travel industry. I have 2 degrees one in computer science and one in psychology (bot of them over 10 years of college education at different stages in my life). I give these examples not to brag about myself, but to give a glance of what is possible by following these principles.
Now, back to the main theme of today.
How to achieve a valuable goal?
In order to keep yourself motivated during your way to the goal it is very important to have small victories on the way. Otherwise if you have only failures at some point you will abandon as the goal will seem too unrealistic. This is why a valuable goal needs to be split in smaller goals which are easier to achieve. This is why you can eat an elephant one bite at a time.
Examples of little bites
Let's go back to examples. In loosing weight this is backed by science that establishing smaller milestones actually increases the probability to loose weight. If you want to loose 30 kg of fat it might seem a huuuge goal, what about 500 grams in 2 weeks? This is the key to move closer and closer to the desired valuable goal.
In business, when launching a software product I always start with a market research, then with a minimum viable product and then with incorporating feedback into a better version of the product. Each of these steps can be broke down in smaller and smaller pieces. My first product took me 7 years to profit. The next ones shorter and shorter. Looking in hindsight I can see each product as a step in the bigger picture. Let's see another one.
One month ago I started learning "Flight of the bumblebee" song on clarinet. That is a very fast song. It is played at a 144 BPM speed with 4 notes / beat. That makes an average of 9 notes in a second. Seems impossible? It seems to me each week that next step will be hard to achieve, but here I am one week later doing it better and better. I broke down this song in to very small sequences and I am focusing at a small sequence at a time.
Next steps...
Now I just realised I am so new to PEAKD platform and I don't know where to upload a video to show you my progress with that, to understand what I mean.
But if you are curious you can start to follow me and I will post it in the future.
I have 4 more articles in this series which I will publish in the following days. Still getting used to the ecosystem.
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