The biggest problem with giant goals is that they tend to lack immediacy. They often feel so big and so distant that it doesn’t feel like you can really make significant progress toward that goal any time soon, which leaves you feeling helpless and hopeless and thus abandoning the goal.
The trick is to break that giant goal down into small little steps, things that you can do today that will inevitably lead to the completion of your big goal and the success that you desire.
I personally like the method presented by Gary Keller in his book The One Thing, in which he specifically goes through breaking down a “big idea” goal into daily bits.
Let’s say you have a big five-year goal in mind. What’s the one thing you can do in the next year to make it happen?
Now, you’ve got this big singular thing you can do this year. What’s the one thing you can do in the next month to make that happen?
Now, you’ve got this big singular goal for this month. What’s the one thing you can do in the next week to make that happen?
Now, you’ve got a singular goal for this week. What’s the one thing you can do today to make that happen?
The answer to that last question is the most important one because it focuses solely on today. It centers you on something you can manage to accomplish today, not some big pie-in-the-sky challenge. For example, let’s say your five-year goal is to get your master’s degree.
The one thing you can do this year to move toward that master’s degree is getting into a master’s program and be ready for the start of your classes.
The one thing you can do this month to move toward getting into a master’s program is to prepare application materials for the master’s program at three target schools.
The one thing you can do this week toward preparing those materials is to figure out what materials you need to submit to those schools.
The one thing you can do this today toward figuring out what materials to submit your target program is to find schools with strong master’s programs in your field.
So, right there, you have something you can do today to get you started. It’s something tangible you can do right now. You can find a few schools that you might want to apply to. To achieve that one thing for the week, you’ll have to find the application and admission requirements for those schools and find ones that you’re likely to get into, and then during the rest of the month, you’ll be preparing those applications and getting them ready to submit. The rest of this year can be filled with other steps for getting ready, such as making temporary career changes to make room for this new initiative, and then you’ll move on in subsequent years to nailing that master’s degree.
Let’s take another one–let’s say it’s a weight loss goal. In one year, you want to lose a significant amount of weight.
The one thing you can do this month toward losing weight is adapt yourself to a healthier diet.
The one thing you can do this week toward adapting yourself to a healthier diet is to build a manageable long-term routine of healthy eating that you can stick within subsequent weeks.
The one thing you can do this week toward building a healthier eating routine is to eat healthy meals today and avoid unhealthy snacks.
This breaks the focus down to today. Your focus is solely on eating better today, nothing else. You’ll use the results from that routine over the course of a week to identify what works and build up an eating routine that really works for you through a bit of trial and error. At the end of the month, you should have a better routine in place that you can stick to, and if you focus on sticking to that routine and then gradually adding in some exercise (with later focused goals for a month), achieving that goal becomes inevitable.
Let’s use one more example. Let’s say your goal is to achieve debt freedom in, say, five years.
The one thing you can do this year to move towards debt freedom is to pay off your two biggest credit cards.
The one thing you can do this month toward paying off your two biggest credit cards is to make a big extra payment on the credit card with the highest interest rate.
The one thing you can do this week toward making a big extra payment on a credit card is to trim your food spending significantly. (Yes, of course, you could do other things, but the idea here is to pick a singular focus and this is a pretty good one.)
The one thing you can do today toward cutting your food spending is to make a meal plan for the whole week from the grocery store flyer and the contents of your pantry, make a grocery list from that meal plan, and go on your single shopping trip of the week. (This is effectively one thing.)
Right there, you have a singular action to focus on that will move you directly toward your overall goal. The key is to keep going with step after step after step, but the advantage here is that you have one single thing you can do today to make it happen.
