In this blog I would like to talk about a common problem that most of us face either knowingly or unknowingly. The problem that I’m talking about is when we try to do too many things at once and not put proper effort and focus on any of those things. In the process of trying to be the jack of all trades, we often forget to be the master of one. In the process of trying to be great in a lot of things, we half-ass most of our work. Although this may not seem like a big deal for most people, we’ve got to dive deeper into this subject to have a clear understanding of what’s going wrong. All of us have goals and ambitions in life, and we would probably give up anything in the world to achieve them. Having the habit of setting a goal or an ambition is a great thing to do, but what’s really important is to have a PLAN. What do I mean by this? A goal without action is useless. So, to be able to work on your goal, you’ve got to have a plan on how you approach the process. You’ve got to be able to look at reaching your goal as a process. And one of the best lessons that the process will teach you is that you have to take it one day at a time. You cannot expect yourself to complete the journey in a single day. We all have heard the old saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, a saying which emphasizes the fact that it takes time to build great things. The problem with most people is that when they try to build something as great as that, they always have a mental picture of what the final output may look like and try to focus on different things that make up the output. A better option, however, would be to create a step by step process with a clear analysis, and focus on one step a day. The idea is to implement that step as perfectly as possible, and to dedicate all your focus and energy towards it. And by doing so, we would be able to complete each step as perfectly as we can, which will lead to a perfect output. Let me tell you about a lesson that I learnt from the star of blockbuster movies like Bad Boys and Men in Black, actor Will Smith. One of his main philosophies in life is that you don’t have to think about building a wall on the very first day. Instead, your goal should be to lay one brick, and to lay that brick as perfectly as possible. You should dedicate all your time and energy into laying that brick and focus on the process as much as possible. And if you do this on a daily basis, soon you will have a wall. A wall in which each of its bricks are laid with perfection. What a wonderful way to approach our goals ! The process of taking one step at a time can teach us a lot of valuable lessons in life. One of the lessons is that if you spend time and effort on a regular basis(and by time and effort I mean the hours you spend focusing and not spending), any goal is achievable. Any goal can be made possible with this approach. It is not the height of the mountain that is stopping you from scaling it, it is the inability to find the steps. This process is not only for achieving your goals, but this can also be used to break you bad habits. Now imagine that you have a bad habit and you’ve been stuck with for a while. Is it possible for you to wake up one day and just quit that habit and move on ? Absolutely not. If quitting a habit was that easy, we wouldn’t be having a lot of addicts in this world. The best way for you to approach this problem is to work on it little by little and rely on your marginal improvements. When you carry on with those marginal improvements on a regular basis, you can make a tremendous change over a longer period of time. The concept of marginal improvements is a wonderful thing to learn about. Atomic Habits by James Clear is one of the best books I’ve ever read. One of the many interesting topics that he talks about in the book is how marginal improvements can have a big impact in our lives when it is paired up with consistency. How much value do you think 1% of anything would mean to you? Not much right ? But the author says, even though 1% is not a large number, if you add it up for every single day, you can have a lot. He says, if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. 1% improvement may not seem like a lot to us, sometimes it may seem completely unnoticeable too, but such is the beauty of life, that even when such minor changes are made with regularity, it results in big changes. Talking about marginal improvements, I would like to give you another great example, an example that Stephen Duneier gave during one of his Ted Talks(you can look it up on youtube). He was talking about the career of Novak Djokovic, who is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. If you look at his career and see the level of growth that he has had throughout the years, you would wonder how hard he would have worked to do that. That’s completely true. He’s an extremely hard-working and dedicated person. But when you break down his success and analyze it, you will know that the marginal improvements that he has made has helped him win a lot more matches.
Take a look at the picture above. I want you to focus on the %of points won and look at how he has made marginal improvements throughout the years. From 49% in 04-05, he has improved to 52% in 06-10 and to 55% in 11-16. With marginal improvements like that, he has been able to move from being 100+ in the world to being the best player in the world. Focusing on winning a grand slam might look like a big deal, but when he breaks it down to the points he wins, it all comes down to small improvements, and when he works on that everyday, he becomes a great player. I was also talking about the importance of taking one step at a time, and only when you do that, you would be able to have these improvements.
There are a lot of reasons why people try to juggle too many balls at once. Here are some of the reasons:
*Lack of patience
Though it’s much easier said than done, having patience is one of the most important things in life. The lack of patience affects us in a lot of ways, one of those ways is it doesn’t keep our minds steady. In the pursuit of greatness, we tend to force our minds to work a lot of things at once, and we often fail to understand that it takes time to achieve great things in life. We focus on being successful in different areas, and we want that success to happen overnight. We watch motivational videos of great people, and try to replicate the things that took them years to achieve, in a few weeks or so. The best way to achieve you biggest dreams is to take one step at a time, and to do that, you need a lot of patience. The results don’t come in a day, they are the compound interest of our day to day work.
*They don’t understand the importance of consistency
People often underestimate what we could do in a month and over-estimate what we could do in a day. The problem with most people is that they don’t see how much better they can be if they work on it every single day. As talked about earlier, all it takes is 1% improvement a day for you to be 37 times better by the end of the year. We have to know that hard work without consistency is NOT hard work. The people who fail to understand this are the ones that pile up their work for a day or two and fail to focus on the other days. People wouldn’t be putting too much pressure on themselves if they know that they’d have to do lesser work when they have consistency.
*They don’t understand the importance of focus
We should not calculate the amount of work we’ve done with the hours that we have spent working, instead it should be the hours that we focused on the work. There is a big difference between spending time on something and focusing on something. To achieve great things in life, and to be world class in whatever you do, you need to be razor sharp with your focus. You’ve got to eliminate all the distractions and dedicate your mind to the process. When you take one step at a time, it becomes much easier for you to focus on the things that you do, hence, the desired results will be achieved.
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