Essentialism (XXVII): Execute: Progress

 "Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow."

- Doug Firebaugh

Greg McKeown suggests, as an example to this chapter, that there are two ways to seek compliance. The first is enforcement - catching someone when they are noncompliant and punishing them (as anyone that has received a speeding ticket can attest to).  The second is to seek to reward the behavior that we seek compliance with.  

Rewarding good behavior for compliance is a stronger pull than we likely suspect; even I have been known to get excited for the smallest of things which are simply an output of me doing something differently or better.  Over time, those small rewards add up to large progress - much like weight training:  you seldom see a session to session increase; you definitely can see a month to month or year to year increase.

The Nonessentialist, posits, McKeown, gets trapped in the idea of going big and full bore on everything:  "The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground."

The Essentialist, by comparison, "...starts small and celebrates progress.  Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don't really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins that are essential."

Research suggests that the most effective form of human motivation is progress - and the most effective form of that is progress which could be called "everyday progress", those small wins that build a stepladder to larger successes instead of the huge planned win, which is like forcing a block of stone from behind.  McKeown here quotes Henry B. Eyring:  "My experience has taught me this about how people and organizations improve:  the best place to look for is for small changes we could make in the things we do so often.  There is power in steadiness and repetition."  We have a choice, McKeown suggests:  "We can use our energies to to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy; or we can resign ourselves to a system that makes it harder to do what it good."

How, then is this to be done?

- Focus on Minimal Viable Progress:  There is a concept in industry of "minimum viable product, the simplest product that is useful and valuable to the customer or what essentially needs to be in place to move forward" (we use this in my industry as well).  McKeown suggests a similar exercise here:  "What is the smallest amount of progress that will be useful and valuable to the essential task we are trying to get done."  He gives an example from his life, the writing of the book Essentialism:  He started with a Twitter post, then a blog post to find out how viable his idea of the book was.  At each step, he refined his idea and built on the progress of how many people engaged on the idea.

- Do the Minimal Viable Preparation:  There are two ways to start a project, says McKeown:  early and small, or late and big.  Late and big many of us know from last minute preparations for things like tests and college exams - possible, but not viable long term.  The second, early and small, asks the question "What is the minimal amount I could do right now to prepare?"

This manifests itself in preparation, but when one starts preparing early enough, the steps can be small and manageable.  McKeown quotes the example of a well know speaker who prepares big speeches months before delivery. His first act of work?  Creating a file and writing down ideas for the speech.  The initial activity takes four minutes or less - but he has started on the road to progress.

-Visually Reward Success:  Everyone, I suspect, can remember a time as a child where at school or at home there was a visual tracker - a thermometer, a tree - that tracked progress on a task or something like fund raising.  Every day, you would look at that chart and see the progress that was being made.  Turns out that we, as adults, are no different.  Says McKeown "There is something powerful about visibly seeing progress toward a goal.  Don't be above applying the same technique to your own essential goals, at home or at work."

"When we start small and reward progress, we end up achieving more than when we set big, lofty, and often impossible goals.  And as a bonus, the act of positively reinforcing our successes allows us to reap more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process."

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Application:

There is an old saying that goes "Nothing succeeds like success".  Understood in the context of McKeown's comment above, it is an excellent path for progress (and success).

I cannot count the number of grandiose projects I have started and then fallen short on.  The ones that have stuck with me and which I have really succeeded in are the ones that had small, steady wins.

I noted weight lifting as an example above. The same is true of writing and Iaijutsu and yogurt making and a host of things I have also done: I have made progress, because I have seen small acts of progress in everything.

If I fall short in this regard, it is that I am not good at visualizing success in these matters where I can do so.  To McKeown's point above, there is something about seeing improvement made writ in visual form that drives me to do even more.

My challenge?  Start smaller, make progress more visible.