You Only Need To Take One Step

“Always I will take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.”
– Og Mandino

Have you ever played the “just one more lamp post” game? If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s how it goes: you start by running around your neighborhood. Maybe your personal best is a couple blocks, or a couple miles, or five miles – whatever it is, at some point you’ll get close to that personal best. And your legs will feel tired, and you’ll be breathing hard, and you’ll start thinking “Hey, that’s pretty good for today – maybe it’s time to turn around?”

But you don’t turn around. Instead, a little voice inside your head says…

“How about we just go one more lamp post?” And so you think to yourself, well, one more lamp post, that’s not so bad, I can do that…and then if you make that, you do another, and another.

What Is Success?

There are a number of definitions of success, but let’s talk about one type specifically. How would you describe a formula for successfully accomplishing your goals? If you break down success for accomplishing any goal, for me, I think a few things come into it

Making a life changing decision
Putting together a plan
Taking the small steps daily to bring it to fruition

So, if you’ve already got goals, and a plan to accomplish them – what’s the one step that’s currently stopping you?

What’s The One Step You Need To Take?

Very often in my life when I’ve been stuck on a goal, there’s been one of two things that’s happened:

I’ve Been Prolonging Taking The First Step. You know how this goes – you get caught up in planning, in metawork, in thinking about all the possible things that might go wrong, and about all the different contingencies that you want to plan for. Oftentimes this comes down to one specific thing: procrastination, and specifically, procrastinating putting off the decision to take action. When we’re afraid and unsure of what to do, we often hide behind the comfort of “well, I just don’t have enough information yet – let me research it some more.” If you’re in this situation, I recommend you do not spend time aimlesssly researching. Instead, outline what specific pieces of information you need to acquire to make your decision, and then acquire them and take action. If you can’t acquire them, make an educated guess. Take the first step.
The Next Step Is Too Difficult. If you think your next step is too large, or too difficult, then I think you’ll enjoy this solution. One of my favorite things I learned from Getting Things Done was the concept of next actions. Briefly, rather than writing large projects on your task list, such as “Write Chapter for Novel” (which then stares at you and mocks you, as it’s a large task that you can’t help but put off), you instead write down the precise next action that you can take – as granular as necessary. So instead of “Write Chapter” it might just be “Write single paragraph: description of living room to start chapter.” Just like when I’m running, I don’t tell myself another mile, or another block – just one more lamp post.

So, I urge you to ask yourself: What’s the one step you need to take? And why haven’t you?

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