Goals

What if instead of making big goals around the new year or during a life change, we focused instead on making small, incremental changes? At the New York Times, I outlined three steps to get you closer to your goals.

This column, titled A Plan for 2012 That You’ll Actually Follow, originally appeared in The New York Times on December 26, 2011.

For 2012, I have a challenge for you: make financial decisions on purpose. Too much of what we do is based on habits and assumptions instead of a thoughtful plan. During the next year, see what happens when you do these three things:

1) Define your current reality. I used to think this was the easy part. Turns out I was wrong. Most people don’t know where they actually stand financially.

After the last few years, it’s tough to face the reality of our situations. Even if you have a sense that things have gone well for you financially, building a personal balance sheet doesn’t rank very high on the fun meter, but it has to be done. It makes it hard to reach any goal if you have no idea where you are starting from.

2) Set some goals. This step hangs people up because often we have no idea what we will be doing in five days, let alone five years. Still, it’s really hard to get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going.

Let go of the need for precision. These are guesses, so make the best guess you can and move on. How important is paying for college for your child or children (or grandchildren)? Define it a bit. How much will it cost, what can you save, when will it happen?

Be honest. Be realistic. Of course part of this process will involve making some assumptions about rates of return you will earn. Be conservative and focus instead on having realistic goals and saving more. If you can’t save more, maybe spend some time trying to earn a bit on the side.

3) Commit to course corrections. Plan on then, in fact. Break down what you have to do into quarterly action steps, and then revisit the plan every three months.

If you are off course, make changes while you’re only a little bit off. If you leave Los Angeles on a flight to New York City and you’re a half inch off course, it’s much easier to adjust when you are over Nevada than it will be a few miles outside of Miami.

Planning for a better financial future is a continuing process, not a single event. It is also short-term boring but long-term exciting.

In 2012, commit to doing small, simple things consistently and over time. It will be the opposite of what we’ll hear in the news every day about making enormous changes, so part of the challenge will be to ignore the constant call for rash actions and sweeping reform.

Let’s make 2012 about subtle, small actions so we can make progress towards our goals over a long period of time.

Let me tell you a little story. 

It’s the story of a consultant who had a scary idea. She wanted to publish a cookbook. She had no background in writing, publishing, cooking, blogging, or anything related to that goal. 

In this tall tale, the consultant left her job to follow her dreams, as the cliché goes. And the next thing you know, the story unfolds just as you would have hoped. The universe conspires — magically! — to give her a helping hand. She finds an agent and snags a contract with a top publisher. She even gets the television personality Anthony Bourdain, a famous chef, to do the blurb on the book cover. 

Cool story, right? But we all know stories like this one don’t really happen. You need a degree from the literary star-makers at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a successful stint on “Iron Chef,” or at least 10,000 Instagram followers before you can even dream of doing something like that. 

But wait! This story is actually true. The woman who made it happen is Reem Kassis, and her cookbook is “The Palestinian Table.” I know the story because she wrote me to share it after she read a column I wrote about overcoming whatever fears that get in your way when chasing big ideas. 

So why share the story? Not because it is so crazy, but because it is so sane. The way Ms. Kassis pursued her scary thing is practical and repeatable. She did things that anyone can do, as long as you have the nerve to try to do something hard and scary in the first place. 

Ms. Kassis grew up in Jerusalem but came to the United States to pursue an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She eventually worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company before leaving to have her first child. 

It was around then that she decided to give this far-fetched cookbook idea a shot. She was not dabbling in writing at the time. She didn’t have a side hustle making food at a restaurant. She didn’t have a blog or an Instagram account. All she had was a stake in the ground and a direction she wanted to go. 

Oh, and she had those roadblocks. Enough roadblocks that most people would have labeled such an idea unrealistic and given up. 

But one pattern I’ve noticed in people who do scary things is that once they see the roadblocks in their way, they take a specific kind of action to begin to break them down — a micro-action. Having figured out the big goal, they focus on the next, smallest action that will get them a bit closer to it.

Because Ms. Kassis wanted to publish this book in a traditional way, the most obvious roadblock was her lack of a publisher. To get one to take you seriously, you generally need an agent. To get an agent, you need to send what’s known as a query letter. (See how we’re moving from big, insurmountable roadblocks to smaller actions?) 

But first, you need to figure out which agents to approach. So here’s what Ms. Kassis did first: She went to the bookstore, picked up a cookbook and read the acknowledgments section. She noticed that the author thanked an agent in the acknowledgments, and she wrote down the name of the agent. 

There is more to this story, but please note how micro this action was: a trip to the bookstore. Having noted the name of one agent in one cookbook, the next smallest step was to pick up another one. She repeated these steps with every cookbook she could find until she had a list of agents. 

The next smallest step was to go home and research those agents, one at a time. That allowed her to write each of them very targeted emails. Because she was so thorough in her research, she got an almost unheard-of response rate. Eventually, she landed an agent, and now there’s a published cookbook with her name on it. 

Once you’ve identified the scary thing you want to do, don’t obsess over all the reasons you can’t do it. Get quiet and ask yourself one simple question: What is to be done next? Then look for the next smallest action you can take. Do that thing. Ask again. Repeat. 

I can’t guarantee that if you follow the Next Smallest Action Formula that you will succeed. But I can guarantee that if you don’t take any steps at all, nothing much will come of your idea.

This column, titled A Story of a Big Dream and a Single, Small Step, originally appeared in The New York Times on November 21, 2017.

The contagious nature of micro-actions is magic. 

Micro-actions are actions so small, so easy, that they hardly feel worth doing. When we think of things like this (if we ever do) we often think about how taking one small action, repeatedly, over long periods of time, adds up. It’s the compounding effect of incremental change, and it’s awesome. 

But what I’m talking about is different. Maybe an example will help. 

When I travel, I often don’t feel like exercising, but I know I’ll feel way better if I do. So, I take a micro-action. I put on my gym clothes and commit to walking to the hotel gym. That’s it. The trick I use to make it happen? I just say to myself, “I wonder what the gym in this hotel is like?” 

Most of the time I arrive and decide to jump on the bike for five minutes. I tell myself that I’m doing it to get my body moving. That often turns into 20 minutes or more. I’m already there, so why not? 

Then I think, since I’m warmed up, I might as well stretch. So there’s some more physical activity that’s good for me. 

Afterward, when I go to breakfast, I find myself avoiding the sugary garbage and eating healthy. After all, I just went to the gym, so why ruin the good feeling? And at work, I find myself more focused and feel more confident in meetings. 

Everything that happened at the gym itself is exactly what we’d expect. But the fact that I eat better and I’m more effective at work — that’s magic! And it isn’t just any magic. It’s the contagion that comes from taking a micro-action in one area of your life and watching it spread to other areas. 

And all this just because I changed clothes and walked to the gym.

This column, titled The Magic of a Single Micro-Action, originally appeared in The New York Times on November 6, 2017.

Being in over your head may be the best way to learn what you’re capable of. Consider the following example of someone we’ll call David. 

David doesn’t know if he’s capable of swimming, so he stands in the shallow end of the pool and splashes around a little. Cautiously, he moves to chest-deep water and tries kicking his legs. When he gets scared, he stops kicking and stands up again. 

Then, someone grabs him and tosses him into the deep end of the pool. David figures out quickly how to swim (while that someone stands by just in case).

Luckily, most things in life won’t cause you to drown if you fail. You might end up embarrassed and scared. But there’s also the chance that you might suddenly find yourself swimming. 

I’ve had this experience over and over again. In fact, I’ve learned to prefer being in over my head. It’s definitely scary; that never changes. But it also forces me to perform in ways the shallow end never does. I go from thinking I’m capable of “x” to very quickly performing twice or three times that amount — and sometimes even 10x. 

Think of being in over your head as a little magic box. In one side goes the old you and out the other side comes a 2x or 10x version of yourself. 

This column, titled Want to Get Smarter Fast? Get In Over Your Head, originally appeared in The New York Times on September 25, 2017.