John Reese has a great reminder for anyone trying to achieve big goals. He writes:

In order for you to accomplish anything in life you have to learn the power of INCREMENTAL SUCCESS. Let me explain how it works…

It doesn’t matter what you want to accomplish… making a million dollars, losing 50 pounds, learning to speak French, etc. In order for you to accomplish what it is that you want you MUST achieve your goal incrementally. There’s no other way for it to happen – it’s IMPOSSIBLE.

Later on in his article, he gives this very practical advice:

If you are trying to accomplish anything… you must do something every single day towards accomplishing your goal.

As web workers, I’m sure we have goals and some of them are probably pretty big. We have goals that can, at times, seem daunting.  We review our goals and they can seem to big. Will we ever reach them?  Can we reach them?

The Answer is Not Motivation

Many people look for tips to get them motivated.  But motivation is not the answer. John C. Maxwell, a leadership expert and prolific book author, is quoted as saying:

The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what. After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.

That’s why I like John’s advice of doing something daily to move your goals forward.  This allows you to build momentum and start achieving progress.  Even if your progress is small, at least you’re actually going somewhere.  Plus, you’ve learned something along the way, which you can leverage to do more effective work.

Finally, don’t worry if your daily effort is small.  You might’ve had a busy day so you weren’t able to do much towards reaching your goals.  Yet, small efforts consistently done over time have a way of adding up to something substantial.

So, what are you going to do today?

Or, better yet, what have you done today?