How to Repeat Small Wins (2) — Break It Down and Focus and Calm Follow

So what happens if, to reach a big goal, you break it into a number of smaller goals? As long as you don't lose sight of the overall direction, quite a few advantages emerge.

Focus gets easier when you only look at the next step

The first is short-term focus. Put "finish the product" in front of you, and it's hard to fully immerse yourself in any single thing, because your mind stays gripped by the whole. The product has to satisfy this condition and that one, the price has to be this while the cost comes out to that — conditions, worries, and problems never let up, so it's hard to concentrate on solving any one of them. Worries chain into more worries, and often you can't even get started before time slips away. But once the scope narrows to "let's just implement this one feature today," your field of view gathers onto that single square, like a racehorse's blinders. Work whose end you can see is easy to immerse yourself in, because it looks relatively achievable and simple. Split a day into several small finish lines, and you end up sprinting flat out between them.

Most worries never happen

The second effect was even bigger. As mentioned earlier, worrying over problems that haven't even happened yet decreases. Look at the big goal as a whole, and every future risk surfaces all at once. "Will this scale?" "What if that problem blows up later?" "What if I finish it and it doesn't sell?"... Most of these are worries about problems you can't touch right now — problems that may never happen at all. But that worry is what scares people off, keeps them from even starting, or makes them keep hesitating and unable to stay focused.

Focus on the one square right in front of you, and this noise quiets down. In practice, a good many of those future problems changed shape once the previous square was solved, and never arose at all. Worry isn't something to do in advance — it's something to do once you arrive at that square. Breaking things down advances the work while also lightening the mind. People who generally have no experience looking at and carrying out work at a large scale, when told they have to take on a large-scale project, often end up doing nothing but worrying, or fretting themselves sick and burning through time without accomplishing anything. As in the Nike ad line, most things you can just go do. If you keep the big direction steady and the goal clear, it's far better to divide things into parts, focus without worry, and solve them one at a time.