One Step At A Time...
Following on from last week's newsletter on ‘The Magic of Thinking Big’, one of my favourite lessons was the ‘Next Step Principle’, which I believe deserves a whole newsletter to itself...
Happy New Week,
Following on from last week's newsletter on ‘The Magic of Thinking Big’, one of my favourite lessons was the ‘Next Step Principle’, which I believe deserves a whole newsletter to itself. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard this enough times but success is a gradual process. It can get overwhelming when you have such a huge goal and it just seems so far away or hard to reach.
That’s why you have to take things one step at a time.
The book repeats the story of “The Last Mile”, by Eric Sevareid, an author and correspondent. During the Second World War, Sevareid was forced to parachute from a damaged transport plane into the jungle on the Burma-India border. Sevareid and the other survivors knew that any rescue attempt would take several weeks so they had no option but to start walking.
They faced a daunting task – tropical heat, monsoon rains, and a painful, 140-mile march over mountainous terrain. The tortuous route to civilised India seemed almost impassable. The dream of salvation seemed almost impossible.
Eric Sevaried reported in Reader’s Digest in 1957:
“In the first hour of the march I rammed a boot nail deep into one foot: by evening I had bleeding blisters….on both feet. Could I hobble 140 miles? Could the others, some in worse shape than I, complete such a distance? We were convinced we could not. But we could hobble to that ridge; we could make the next friendly village for the night. And that, of course, was all we had to do…”
“When I relinquished my job and income to undertake a book of a quarter of a million words, I could not bear to let my mind dwell on the whole scope of the project. I would surely have abandoned what has become my deepest source of professional pride. I tried to think only of the next paragraph, not the next page, and certainly not the next chapter. Thus, for six solid months, I never did anything but set down one paragraph after another. The book ‘wrote itself.’”
Schwartz says, “progress is made one step at a time. A house is built one brick at a time. Football games are won one play at a time…Every big accomplishment is a series of little accomplishments.” To make your dreams come true, you must take action, but that action doesn’t have to be grand.
“Little by little becomes a lot.” Tanzanian Proverb
The next-mile principle focuses on achieving small goals which then build toward your overall aim, vision, or dream. It helps to build your belief in what you can do by focusing on short steps, taken one at a time. This is a very effective way of overcoming the barriers to goal setting, which sometimes arise from thinking big.
Take that first step towards your goal today then the next step and the next step and don’t stop. Before you know it you would have achieved everything you set out to.
Something interesting to watch - I just dropped a new Hustle Smart episode, check it out!