Celebrate the Small Successes

As I’ve talked about before, improving is done through a series of small successes. That simple formula, though, can be easy to forget.

Yesterday, while I was driving home, I panicked. I looked at what I’ve done so far with this website, and I’ve looked at where I want it to be. And then the overwhelming avalanche of worry and inadequacy came crashing down.

This led to an evening of contemplation, and a refocused morning.

Pyramid of Goals

Due to a variety of reasons, including but not limited to COVID-19, things have slowed down a bit on this particular venture. I keep working at it, plucking away bit by bit, but it hasn’t gone through the leaps and bounds laid out in the original business plan. So it got me thinking about Angela Duckworth’s Pyramid of Goals, as discussed in her book Grit.

The basic idea here is that we have low level goals, medium level goals, and high level goals. The high level ones are the big things, the one or two primary goals in our life that rarely change.

Most of what we focus on in the low level stuff. Answer emails. Get this or that project done. Things like that.

For a quick example in my life, a high level goal would be taking care of my family. Making The Indiepreneur a success is a mid level goal, a (fun) means trying to make that high level goal work.

In other words, I want to make this website work, but if things take longer to get going, as long as I’m still working towards that high level goal, things are going to be fine.

Small Goals are Small Successes

My panic in the car came from looking at those big and medium goals and realizing I’m not exactly where I want to be now. But that’s how it SHOULD be. If I could just make a big goal magically happen, it really wouldn’t be much of a goal.

Those big, and even medium goals, are there as a guide. A way to assess the list of small goals to tackle in a day and see if they are moving you closer or farther away from where you’re going.

So with that in mind, this morning I went back to the basics. I went back to a method that I started in my OAK Journal of purposely planning out my day so all those low level goals are small successes pointing me towards the bigger ones.

So far, I’m feeling a bit better. I’ll let you know if I can keep it up. At least for now the panic is gone, and I feel that direction back in my life.