Just Create the Next Step

Creating the next step

Much of what we want to accomplish in our lives constitutes large, multi-year projects. Anything worth doing generally requires a long-term dedication to achieve. This applies to so many domains. It could be school, fitness, relationships, or art. There are very few projects that both bring long-term and meaningful satisfaction to our lives and also only take a short amount of time to complete in their entirety.

And, to be perfectly frank, we wouldn’t even want these to be easy.

As the saying goes, easy come, easy go. Those things that you work hard for, that you put in a consistent effort for over years, are the same things that bring you the most intrinsic satisfaction and fill your life with a sense of purpose.

The problem is that it’s not just that these tasks are difficult; it’s that oftentimes the end goal is so far removed from our starting point that it doesn't just seem hard to achieve; it seems that the goal itself is unachievable.

Take learning a language, for instance. I’m a Chinese learner, and I’ve been studying for just over a year and a half. When I started studying Chinese, my goal was to become a fluent Chinese speaker (just absurd looking back), to be able to naturally converse in Mandarin, bringing a fresh perspective in as I was able to adjust to a new culture

My current goals are far less ambitious.

 The reason for my shift, from thinking I could be a native speaker to just enjoying the process of being a language enthusiast, truly comes from a place of disappointment. About 6 months into my language learning journey, I realised it was deeply unlikely that one day I would wake up and be capable of speaking fluent Mandarin. In fact, as I got better at Chinese, I began to have a true understanding of just how difficult obtaining this level of competency would be, and I became highly discouraged.

This is a core component of what is known as the Dunning-Kruger Bias, where people who have limited competence in a field vastly overestimate their abilities. My victim to this bias came when I, after only a week of learning a new language, began to believe that native-level fluency would not only be possible but would only take me a handful of years. How embarrassing.

What I did realise, however, was that I could break my learning journey into much smaller, and importantly achievable, steps. Learning languages is interesting in the fact that, at the face of it, you really just need to learn the meanings of lots of words and understand how these words sound and how their combination affects one another. 

This is the most outrageous simplification of what is a highly complicated and highly debated field, but the basic idea is that if I could just master a sentence, and another, and another, and repeat this for years, eventually I’d accumulate enough knowledge to greatly improve my understanding of the language, perhaps to a point where I could speak passable Chinese.

 The idea that I’m trying to communicate here is that the large, difficult goal of language fluency is nothing more than the completion of endless subgoals. These subgoals can be broken down small enough to the point where they are very achievable, and if stacked in enough quantity, will create a very substantive result.

But it’s not just language learning I’ve found this to be true. Learning to run endurance events from a limited athletic background, graduating university, and finishing Ironman triathlons. All of these are significant tasks that seem too large to accomplish when beginning, but in reality they just constitute a series of linked goals.

Embarking on these goals seems to follow a consistent pattern. This is not set in stone, but you might resonate with these steps if you consider yourself an overachiever.

Step 1: Interest

For one reason or another, you become interested in achieving a particular goal.

Step 2: Beginning

You blindly charge into your new challenge, taking beginner steps and getting a rough feel for the endeavour.

Step 3: Ambition

Very quickly, it's not enough to be good or competent. Your limited experience has guided you to believing that you not only can, but need to, become highly accomplished in whatever you are doing. Maybe you set times, or weights, or numbers, or grades that will separate you from anyone else trying the same thing you are.

Step 4: The Wall

Very quickly you begin to understand why people might describe what you are doing as hard. Your motivation falls through the floor as you begin to have the necessary level of competency to understand why what you are doing is hard and gain an understanding of how much work this really will take.

Step 5: The Grind

If you make it past the wall, congratulations. You’re in. The grind is where you accept that the journey is long and difficult, but you are willing to continue going down this path. This is where long-term commitment begins, and this is where you start to see real progress.

What’s interesting is that with our long-term goals, we accept the paradox that what we are trying to do is hard and that many people give up or fail (why would we bother if it was easy?). yet we also want to achieve it fast. It might take 5 years to gain any form of reasonable competency, which is off-putting to us because it seems like such an investment (and crucially we can’t visualise the version of us 5 years in the future who stuck with the task—we simply don’t have the information to visualise that).

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now"

No matter what, the time goes regardless of what you do. 5 years is going to pass, and you can either be 5 years further in experience and competence in your chosen endeavour or not. You must realise that it doesn’t even matter how good you get, because with 5 years of even mediocre work, you’ll be lightyears ahead of the version of yourself that does nothing. Incremental efforts make a huge difference in the game of long-term goals. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

So how then can we get into the grind and avoid falling short at the wall?

1. Accept the difficulty with humility

We must understand that what we are signing up for is indeed incredibly challenging and be willing to go with that. Understand that we might not be able to be very good at it straight away and come at our goals with the mind of a student who is simply looking to improve, not a master who is expressing ultimate performance and complete mastery. Accept the next step in your journey, and don’t get greedy.

2. Don’t be afraid to give up on things after a fair go

The truth is it’s hard to stick with something you don’t like. My general advice here is to stick with something as long as it takes to reap some of the enjoyment from light proficiency and then decide if you want to go further. Stick with an instrument until you can kind of play something you like, or a language until you can kind of understand some content. Things always suck when you are bad, so you won’t know if something really isn’t for you if you don’t give yourself the time it takes to enjoy what being good feels like. You also must free up time for other things to try as fast as possible, so there is no shame in hanging up something that really isn’t for you.

3. You must focus on the next step

It helps to make a plan, almost like a skill tree. When I was beginning to train for my Ironman, I knew all of the habits and skills I would need to learn. I could then put together a rough timeline of when I’d need to attempt everything by and then just start hammering away at the individual skills that would build up to my race attempt.

Did I own a bike? No, so go get one. Great, now I'm one step closer. Do I know how to use clip-in shoes? No, we'll go learn. Do I know how to ride on roads? No. Go find an easy route and get comfortable. Iterate, iterate, iterate, and just focus on the next manageable task. Can I swim more than 400m? No. Focus on that. Is my technique good? No, okay, work on that. Can I run off the bike? No. Okay, time for some brick sessions. The point is that each of these is a very manageable milestone that stacks up on the next task. I didn’t need to focus on the Ironman distance; I just needed to work on the individual steps that I knew were moving me closer to that outcome. Most difficult, complex long-term goals are really just a sequence of very easy and manageable problems that can be solved one at a time.

Achieving these difficult long-term goals is not your problem; the end of a journey of this type of magnitude is so far outside of your current scope and capabilities that, aside from defining your direction, it is almost not worth thinking about. The problem is identifying all of the small constituent parts that go into that achievement, describing them, and then patiently and diligently going through one by one and doing them to the best of your ability. This is what it means to be focused and disciplined.

An Alex Hormozi thought worth considering here goes as follows: “You do not have what you want to have or achieve what you’d like to achieve because you aren't the sort of person capable of achieving that goal. The second you are, you’ll find that these things get done”.

What you need to do is break your global task down, which you currently are lacking the ability to tackle in its entirety, into chunks that meet your current capabilities. I am not fluent in Chinese; therefore, I haven’t mastered the ability of native speaking. I can, however, learn 3000 characters over hundreds of days of studying flashcards and interacting with Chinese material. Achieving this smaller goal will open up my skill tree to more difficult tasks. If I just continue to expand this skill tree, then it’s only a matter of time before I reach that initial grand goal. 

A final example I’ll end on here is that of going to the gym. I started because I wanted to get bodybuilding jacked; I wanted to be big, lean, and strong. From where I started, this was not an easily achievable goal. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was trying to achieve was actually something that would take years to decades to achieve. Hence, as outlined before, my grand ambition led me to a feeling of disappointment when I finally started to truly grasp the scale of what I was trying to get done.

However, this allowed me to redirect my focus. Can I get big and jacked now? Am I capable of that? No, I’m not. Can I learn a better split and write it down, then commit to executing it for 3 months? Yes, absolutely, I can do that. Can I start counting my calories, or even simpler, learn how to count calories and stick to a caloric strategy? Yeah, I could figure that out. I can’t squat properly; can I learn some tips on how to develop that? Yeah, that sounds possible. Again and again and again, I picked the smallest manageable problem and tackled it in isolation, allowing my large overall vision of where I was going to direct how these problems should relate and what the problem would contribute to on the macro scale. Break down the problem, solve it, and iterate. This is the way forward; this is all you need to worry about.

At the end of the day, all you need is the will to continue approaching the next manageable step on the journey. A fianl quote by Alex Hormozi summarises this quite nicely.

“The balls to start, the brain to learn, and the heart to never give up.”