Every goal in life, from staying healthy to building a business, shares one common truth: you can't get there in a single leap.
Suppose you were planting rice seedlings and you wanted them to grow quickly. What would you do? You probably wouldn't go around tugging every seedling in the paddy a little higher, would you? Do that and they wither and die. You cannot pull seedlings up to make them grow, and chasing a dream works the same way.
If an ideal could be reached in a single step, it wouldn't be an ideal. To reach an ideal, you have to start with the small details of daily life and cultivate a good habit. If you want a healthy body, for instance, you have to exercise every day.
Realising a far-reaching ideal happens step by step. Drawing on personal experience and on theories from psychology, I'll set out how to grow and keep the small good habits that help you reach those bigger ideals.
1. Set a goal that is tiny but unmistakable
There is a difference between an ideal and a goal. An ideal can inspire us, but we only hold a vague notion of it: we're unclear about how to reach it, and we don't know what concrete action to take.
To reach an ideal, you should set a workable goal. When you're trying to cultivate a good habit, set a tiny but precise action, such as "read whenever I take the train" or "do half an hour of exercise every day".
A defined goal must spell out exactly what action you should take. Because a small goal takes little mental effort to finish, it places no great burden on you psychologically, so people are more willing to see it through. With just a little willpower behind it, the goal can be realised, and you immediately know it has been achieved — and I'll explain later why that matters so much.
Many people — myself included — get swept up in the moment and want to change themselves completely overnight. Thoughts like "Starting tomorrow, I'll read, exercise, keep a positive attitude, and begin chasing my dreams" tend to surface in that half-asleep, half-awake state. Most people, once fully awake, abandon these wildly unrealistic plans.
Compared with unrealistic plans, a tiny but unmistakable goal does far more to help a person reach their ideal.
Once you've set a good goal, how do you keep the enthusiasm going? A system of rewards can spur us on, so it pays to reward yourself from time to time.
2. Reward yourself
Experiments on operant conditioning showed that a rat in the lab pressed a lever only when there was a food reward, and would not press it when there was no reward. Psychologists therefore proposed that rewards or punishments can encourage a particular behaviour to occur.
If we were the rat in the lab, pressing the lever would be the unmistakable goal. So what is our "food"? We can't treat ourselves to a feast every time we finish a little something.
But we aren't rats — we can think, so a thought can serve as the reward.
Every time you complete a small goal, give yourself a word of praise. Saying to yourself, "Well done — it was hard, but I got it done," can be the reward. Or you might picture how these actions are bringing you one step closer to your ideal in life. Linking joy with completing a goal makes a person far more motivated.
This kind of self-reward works like a snowball. The happiness that comes from finishing a small goal pushes people to attempt harder tasks.
3. Forgive yourself
No matter how clear the goal is, or how hard we work to encourage ourselves, there will be times we slip — that is simply human nature. Usually it means the whole plan collapses. Say you set a goal of reading every day, but one day you suddenly forget; you'll tell yourself, "Since I didn't manage to read every day after all, is there any point in carrying on?"
This is like the broken windows theory. Suppose a new school has a hundred windows that stay perfectly intact for the first ten years, until one day a mischievous student smashes one. How long would it take for all the windows to be destroyed? A thousand years? No — the truth is that once one window is broken, the rest follow within days.
The broken windows theory reflects our tendency to fix our attention on the part that has been damaged and to treat it as licence to let things deteriorate — since it's already broken, what difference does one more make, and so on.
People who believe "one wrong move loses the whole game" are everywhere. But think about it rationally: does forgetting to read for one day really destroy your ideal of becoming well-read?
If you'd give up over a single failure, you should redraw the line between success and failure and count it day by day. Yesterday's failure doesn't define today's success or failure. Take the long view, and don't let the past knock you off your path towards the goal.
Speaking of habits, I'm guessing you wouldn't give up brushing your teeth just because you missed one tooth? Other habits are the same. To slip up now and then is only human, so go ahead and forgive yourself.
To sum up:
My ideal in life is_________, and the small daily goal that helps me reach this ideal is________________ (step one), which I will begin tomorrow.
When I complete it, I will say to myself______________________ (step two) to encourage myself. And if I feel discouraged over one or two failures, I will remind myself:________________________(step three).
You can print this passage out and fill in the blanks in your own words, because a personal goal is more effective.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" carries its own wisdom. I hope these three steps help everyone stand firm on the path towards an ideal life.
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