The ONE Thing You Can Do To Improve Your Productivity

What's Your One Thing?

This post is, in part, a book review and a personal story about why I write.  Take it for what it is, and disregard the rest as you see fit.

There's a book by Gary Keller called The One Thing.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

 It discusses productivity, management tips and self-improvement.

It preposes we tend to distract ourselves with too many things, too many tasks to do, too many demands on our time and energy.  Wasting too much of our time not only distracts us from the task at hand, but it also acts to form limitations to what we can ultimately achieve.

In simple terms, it breaks down that we should only focus on the ONE thing that we actually care about, and what we can excel. Or as the author states, "extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus."

There are some current myths discussed in the book and exposed as lies.

Multi-tasking? Not a real thing.

Willpower on call?  Not true, it's a finite resource, like any other energy/endurance capacity you may have.

Who is Gary Keller?  He built Keller/Williams Realty into the largest Realty firm in the world.  That's right, #1 position for a Real Estate company in the world.

My One Thing: How I Got Started

When I was a kid, I would spend hours in my tiny bedroom reading.

That is if I wasn't busy running around the street playing games and trying to get the neighborhood kids to compete with me.

Now, keep in mind I wasn't a superb athlete, so I made sure I'd work on my technique longer and more precise than any other kid I played. Beat me, I would work my ass off to make sure I could outlast you next time.

It was just the right mix of hyper-competitiveness, obsessiveness, and spite.

As a teen, I'd close my door to shut out the world and assay through pages of sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, mystery, the "classics" from Thoreau, Whitman, Thomas, Poe.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered existential philosophy from thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.  For "culture," I read the Bible in multiple translations, the Thesaurus, Encyclopedia Brittanica and poured through the dictionary religiously.

Needless to say, that type of shit can really mess you up, especially in your impressionable early teen years.

Surrounded by my imagination, I'd enhance the mood by playing music on a tiny two-speaker boombox.

I'd play cassettes with songs from the Cure, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, rewind them until the tape wore down and drift off into a dreamworld of starships, foreign lands, and superheroes.

While I'd lose myself in the songs, I'd read as if my life depended on it.

And, I felt it did.

See, I didn't have a great home life.

My parents were divorced, my father didn't want anything to do with me and my 3 siblings while my mother remarried to a man who was overworked, drank too much and seemed overwhelmed by taking care of a pack of ungrateful kids.

So I read countless books, stories, and magazines to escape from what I felt in an unjust world.

But mainly I read as much as I did to learn the craft of storytelling and how to get a point across. I discovered that there is something universal about being human.

Part of the uniquely human experience is the desire to share our thoughts and ideas with others.

We're social creatures.

It's part of why we developed language and in turn, societies, cities, states and governments.

It's why we live with other human beings, even when they're screaming at you, or staring at you from out of the corner of their eye, not speaking with you at all.

Long before I had my "reckoning" about life and the human experience, my first victims of all this study and information were my younger brothers and sister.

They're all much brighter than me.

Like I'm a bag of wet cement compared to the genius of my siblings.

Probably in part of my competitiveness, but possibly from spite, I had to prove my greatness to them.

I was the oldest brother, meaning I had to be better.

So, I'd write them stories. This was in the beginning before they were old enough to read, and I barely old enough to write.

My early manuscripts would comprise of two, three or maybe four sentences with some poorly drawn pictures, but the point was to help them learn what I had.

I'm not sure they enjoyed the stories as much as I did in creating them.  Most of the time they were sci-fi epics that included spaceships flying around in a sky full of asterisk-drawn stars, shooting lasers and rockets at each other, while the story usually was text that complimented the pictures.

The point is, from the early beginnings, I knew there was something that I needed to share with others.  I coached for a long time to teach what I had already learned.  I wanted to share ways to think, to act, and to learn.

That's my ONE thing.  To communicate what I learn along this path that I'm walking, about life, about writing.

Well I guess that's two things.  That just goes to show you there's always more to learn.

If you're interested in reading about how you can become laser focused, pick up a copy of The One Thing from Amazon by clicking this link:  The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

(It IS an affiliate link, meaning if you purchase it I'll get a small share of the sale from Amazon)

My Kindle Publishing Lesson: Beg, Borrow and Steal Your Way To Becoming A Better Writer

Finding Your Ideal Reader And Developing A More Confident Voice In Your Writing

If you're like me, doing something you love can be the greatest thing in the world.

When I started my Kindle Publishing Journey, I didn't know what I didn't know.  I've learned a ton over the 6 months I've been writing and self-publishing.

But one thing I do know and have learned along the way is that passion alone, while great, won't suffice. It's like eating a chocolate only diet.  It may sound delicious and you may salivate just thinking about it, but all it will do is constipate you until your clogged arteries make your heart explode.

But doing something you love is also incredibly rewarding.

It could be surfing that really stokes you.

Or perhaps running in the early morning hours is what you find the greatest of thrills.

For some who are more like myself, getting lost in writing is exhilarating.  I can lose track of hours without even knowing that the sun has set for the night.

Like stumbling through a dark, misty forest unsure of what lies in the dense woods is what it's like in the monolog in my head.

Seeing my words on the page is like finding a clearing in the bramble and brush, my vision is more clear, the story is more focused.

It's these moments of clarity that I see why all the images in my head scream that they needed to be written and thoughts to be shared with someone else.

All without having to say a word.

As Stephen King wrote in his "On Writing," being able to write truly is a form of ESP.  It's telepathy with the reader, a way to worm around in their heads, their thoughts, and their dreams.

But writing can also be absolutely horrible.

It's not the fear of the blank page.

No way.  I can ramble with the best of them.

For me, a blank page is like a canvas that I get to paint on.  If it's any good, I'll share it with others.

If it sucks, it's practice in colors, paint strokes and textures for the painting that I will eventually share.

It's part of the exhilaration for me.

Those are some of the important things I've learned through my Kindle Publishing experiences.

Another one?

Writing is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Especially when I re-read the words on the page and they aren't as beautifully erudite as when I heard first them in my head.

The flow of language, the momentum of the story and the way I "heard" it all in my head doesn't have the same appeal once I see it upon the page. I think of it like middle school, when I'd recite a short couple lines that I'd rehearse to say to one of the many girls I had on crush on.  Only, the next day I'd stumble and stutter those lines, more concerned with the new zit on my nose and whether they're focused on it than what I wrote the night before and was now reciting.

When my writing is bad, it's terrifying.

When I think about the readers, I wonder how much they want to choke me out, laugh at me and deride my thoughts.

 That is, if there are any.

I also worry they will see through me, and discover what I fraud I am. It's terrifying that they may find my voice stilted, unimaginative and most terrifying of all, boring.

Everyone who's ever tried their hand at writing knows these feelings.  From school to letters and creatively, it's a challenge not to feel like you're overexposed, naked in front of the cameras, standing pants-less in front of a crowd of people that are our friends.

But how do you overcome the fear of being exposed?  Of being unimportant? Of being seen as a  fraud?

The ABC's Of Developing Your Writing Skills And Finding Your Voice

•  A) First, choose one person who you write for. They could be someone you know, someone you wish to know, or someone you create out of your imagination.  In other industries, it's called an "ideal reader."

Just like in life, you're not going to be liked by everyone equally.  Some will really like and care for you, and that's a lucky thing to have.  Others aren't going to give two shits about you.  Others still may despise you without you even knowing about it.

So creating an ideal reader is important for you to know what to say, how you should say it, and how you hope they'll receive it.  It's a lot easier to talk with a friend, one who knows you intimately and you know them than with any stranger you may try to meet and get to know.

Writing, in simple terms, is sharing ideas with an intimate friend without speaking.

•  B) Second, gain confidence through minor accomplishments.  

Building positive habits is about micro-accomplishments.

In time, those micro-accomplishments allow you to build a foundation that you can then go on and make newer micro-accomplishments.

Think of it as running a marathon.

You have to train for it, but you want to take those strides in micro-phases.  That is, you run aspects of the marathon, building your endurance and stamina over time.  But you also focus on the little things, like your step, making sure you run heel-to-toe.  You work on lengthening your stride, especially when tired. But every step is one more in building a better way to run a marathon for you.

Taken together, your strategy, training and technique, you will form a number of micro-accomplishments that, in time, prepares you to run a full marathon.

Not that I've ever attempted to run a marathon.

It sounds like a horrible experience to me, but then again, I can't run.

Not because of any particular disability, just when I run I look like a gazelle jumping on hooves while their legs recoil underneath their body in a circular, disjointed motion.

If anyone was running next to me, it'd look to an unsuspecting observer that I was trying to kick the person next to me on every jump I took.

•  C) Finally, Beg, Borrow and Steal

Like most innovators, there are three main ways to gain confidence and mastery. The best way to overcome the fear of writing is easily broken into three techniques that I call Beg, Borrow, and Steal.

It's a popular notion that artists - as all writers are - are tapped into some greater universal connection.

That their ideas are floating around in their heads like a swirling, boiling cauldron of ideas. False! Another wrongful trope is that artists are inspired by a muse that only they can hear and they catch bolts of lightning.

What every artist does is looks for ideas that they can incorporate into what they're trying to say.

Andy Warhol famously borrowed from popular culture and popular advertising to make his iconic paintings.

Pablo Picasso is credited with the saying; "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."

Even famous tinkerers in history like Thomas Edison knew this truth - his inventions took gleefully from the thoughts, research, and design of a man named Nikola Tesla.

1. Beg An Expert: If writing is scary for you, think about ways you can get information from another source, preferably someone in that genre that you respect. It could be a friend who's already doing what you want to accomplish, or someone that is so far ahead of the game it's a dream interview. Ask them until they acquiesce - Twitter is a great, easy gateway to find experts you want to connect with. Ask to the point of bothering them.  Beg them for an interview about how they wrote their piece, their story, their book.  For most of them, they were once in your shoes as well.  It will offer some helpful insight and motivation to keep you on track.
2. Borrow From The Chef: Borrow from a well-thought idea.  Develop the thought as your own and write it down.  Like watching a cooking show and trying to recreate the menu, borrow what you like, but embellish it with your own spices. What was it that impressed you, and how would you explain it to your ideal reader?
3. Steal From The Master: Steal from the experts. Don't get me wrong here.  I am not advocating stealing someone else's words; that's plagiarism, and it can get you in a world of trouble, from legal and otherwise.  But steal the idea then develop it in a way that only you could, and in a way that makes sense to your ideal reader.

Remember, there's nothing new under the sun.

There have been billions of people who have lived on this Earth,  all with dissimilar backgrounds from you but with similar thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams.  That means that there's nothing new that can be written, rather, just how you write that is unique to you.

So go ahead, steal the plot line from your favorite movie or book.  Develop the story telling and characters in your way and you'll have a unique story to share and call your own.  In my own Kindle Publishing adventure, I've stumbled upon all of these areas.

So if you struggle with your writing, or confidence in doing anything new, just beg for the knowledge from an expert, borrow an idea or whole-heartedly steal the idea and make it your own.

Just change the names to protect the innocent and guilty.

The 3 Things You Do To Sabotage Success: How To Stop Limiting Yourself!

How Your Beliefs Determine Your Success

It's that time of year!  

The holidays are here and among us like aliens masked as friends. Not the cute E.T. type aliens, more like Alien vs. Predator type, the kind that want to rip your spine out with your skull as a trophy.  

Perhaps that's just how I feel, but I digress from the point...

A New Year means that it's also time for resolutions and grandiose plans for ourselves and our lives.

(Get The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business from Amazon here)

They could be changes in our behaviors, or changes in our jobs, or perhaps an itch to travel that needs to be scratched.

But like a parasitic worm, there's ONE major problem that will destroy even the best resolution.

It's the danger of self-limiting beliefs.

The problem with changing habits or making any substantial changes in our lives is that we are often sabotaging our chance for success without even knowing it.

While we're busy trying to become Superman, we're often wearing a necklace made of Kryptonite.

If you want to make changes in your life, the hardest part isn't getting started or changing negative habits into the ones you desire most.

No, the most challenging aspect of these changes are the ones that can act as the most harmful to whether you succeed or not is: simply your beliefs.

If you believe you'll succeed or not has a large influence over whether you'll effectively make the changes you want.

I'm not talking about faux concepts like "fake it until you make it" or imagine it and it will come to fruition.

But if you do believe that you can do something, all research points to the fact that you should succeed.

The single most influential factor in psychological research about behavioral change is that it is the positive mindset that differentiates between success and failure.

If you doubt you can; you don't have enough training or the right type of schooling, or you don't know how, so you don't even try to get off the couch - whelp - you guessed it!

You have zero chance to succeed.

That's called the power of self-limiting beliefs.

(In the past, we've discussed what is success in a world that judges your outcomes - this is about stopping our tendencies to limit ourselves).

The Power Of Beliefs And The Dangers Of Self-Doubt 

A recent article I stumbled upon got me thinking about the power our confidence and doubts play on our potential for success or failure.

(You can read the article by clicking here)

If you believe in you can accomplish something, you can.

If you doubt you can do it, you can't.

It's the truth of self-limiting beliefs that we can only accomplish what we believe we can.

(Obviously as much as I want to be Superman, it's not going to happen. Unless I'm sent to a galaxy with a red star perhaps)

But in Henry Ford's own vernacular, if you believe you can do something or believe you can't, either way, you're correct.

When we believe we are capable of something, we find mechanisms to overcome any challenges that present themselves along the way.

Get Off The Couch And Get Moving! 

For example, if you just ate waaaay too much this past holiday and feel you want to lose some weight, you probably feel motivated to get started.

You go out and get new running shoes, a new workout outfit, get ready for bed, set the alarm clock to wake up early and when it goes off?  You end up hitting the snooze button, negotiating with yourself that you'll get started in just a little bit, or later in the day, or tomorrow.

Or perhaps you climb out of bed, lace up your shoes, head outside, and begin to run.

You start to breathe heavy; your legs are plodding into the concrete like they're trying to anchor themselves to the ground, and you slow down to a mere walk.

Somehow you've forgotten just how difficult it is to start a workout regime but being reminded by your body loudly just how out of shape you truly are.

You finish your routine and go about your day.  Slowly, you become sore in places you forgot about, stiff in others.

The next morning, you're not as enthusiastic as you were the day before.  You're sore, tired and it takes a little more momentum to begin.  It's harder to lace your shoes, to get outside and start. It becomes easier to quit earlier than the day before and before you know it, you've walked twice the distance from the day before.

The limiting belief is that it's too difficult to lose weight.

So when obstacles appear, you false-start or quit too early.

But if you reexamine the outcome, and your approach is rethought, motivation and follow through are much easier to maintain.

The main problem in the examples above were in the failure to establish more realistic goals with the by-product (outcome) being losing weight.

You can't believe in the outcome solely and have expectations of being successful. You need small, manageable tasks that add up to the desired benefits and goals.

A Quick 3-Step Process To Guarantee Success From The Outset

If the desired outcome is to lose weight, setting more manageable goals while developing a reward system works much more effectively.

Instead of getting motivated to lose weight, try to focus on exercising in a short, limited amount on an every-other-day basis.

In short, the 3 most important things you can do to make lasting change in your life are the result of these conscious acts:

1) Decide On Change: Make a decision on what it is you want to change about your habits.  It isn't until we decide that something needs to change and we are determined to change it that true action and habit development can begin.

2) Create Manageable Tasks: Once you've decided the action you want to take and the desired outcome you want, work backward from that point.  Create a list of small actions and tasks you can make daily.  Small repetitions and accomplishments over time build up to a monumental change.

3) Evaluate Your Beliefs: What you believe goes along way toward success.  Discover what doubts you have; what self-limiting beliefs are you repeating to yourself that are having the negative effect on your changes? It's only through understanding our motivations and mindsets that we can overcome the barriers we create for ourselves.

By making a decisive choice to make a change, creating daily micro-accomplishments toward the end goal and examining what beliefs may be limiting performance is the best routine for you to make lasting, permanent changes in your habits.

Finally, get enough rest.

Often we limit ourselves by stressing our energy resources.  By placing too much stress on our energy stores, we have very little left over for change or resistance as it comes about in our day.  We become creatures of habit, rather than purpose and that is directly correlated with lack of sleep and energy.

There's only so much time in the day and you have only so much energy.

Prioritize your important tasks after you've had a chance to recharge.  Get a proper amount of sleep, setting the alarm for the same time every morning, and take mental breaks throughout the day.  Exercise or meditation are great ways to recharge your brain.

Stick To Your Routine. 

As you start out on making your habits permanent, one of the most important things is to make them routine. Too often we fail by taking a break just when things are becoming more difficult. But if you're serious about the changes you're trying to make, then stick-to-it-ness is critical for success.

A great trick is to post a calendar and mark it for every day you succeed in moderate exercise. (For more tips, you can read my post 5 Tips To Make A Better You)

After the first week, treat yourself to a movie (avoid the popcorn), a show, or some other activity you enjoy.

After a few weeks, if you meet your exercise goals, treat yourself to something you value a little more, say a new pair of shoes or a nice dinner out for example.

The idea is to make your incremental steps more manageable and believable.

And in the process of taking additional steps, we're able to get much further.

If you'd like to make a positive change in your life, your health or habits, get The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg from Amazon by clicking the link.

Truth is, you'll find the paperback, hardcopy or ebook format you want at an incredible price and I'll receive a small commission for helping you find the book.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

5 Tips To Make A Change For A Better You

Small Behavioral Changes That Will Help You Become A Better You

This post is about behavioral modification and habit forming.

We need to define habits and behavioral modification as making subtle changes in our unconscious actions (habits) and learning new behavior through regular conscious activity until it becomes automatic behavior (new habits).

So, how does this apply to you and my writing and Kindle Publishing journey?

It's about ways to overcome challenges that seem too grandiose and too large to otherwise accomplish.

It's about making major changes in how we create and reinforce actions, good and bad, and how we can make small changes for major accomplishments.

It's about learning new tactics, taking shorter decisive actions to achieve greater mastery and improved productivity.

As I've written previously, practice makes permanent.

The trick is about taking small detailed steps that you can build upon.

Slow And Steady Wins The Race

In a popular, well known book by Jim Collins called "Good To Great," he writes a story about two groups of people that are attempting the overcome the same challenge in two distinctly different ways.

What both groups were were attempting to be the first to reach the South Pole during a time when luxury was low and the risk was great.


Get It From Amazon - Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't

One group led by British explorer Robert Falcon Scott would "batch" their efforts.  They would hike as far as they could and for as long as they could maintain it, weather permitting.  Trudging upward of 40+ miles a day on nicer days, they'd hunker down and rest on days where the weather was too large a challenge to overcome.

The other group of four hikers led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen set out on their itinerary with a more manageable, reasonable goal.  The second group chose to hike 20 miles a day, the weather being accommodating or not.

The winner was Amundsen's second group, who beat the British by a full 5 weeks!

So what does that mean for us to improve our productivity?

It's proof that taking large tasks and breaking them into smaller, more manageable tasks is a great productivity tip.

Another example of this tactic is in Major League Baseball (MLB).

 In a recent study, MLB points out that starting pitchers that go the full game, called a complete game in the parlance, is down in recent years.

In fact, in the MLB study, they claim that of all the 2,700+ games or so, only 60 complete games were recorded. That equals only one complete game for every 45.6+ starts.

Of course, there are factors that come into play with these statistics, such as highly specialized relievers or games being broken up by the offensive team in the late innings for examples.

It also means that it's much, much harder to do something of quality over long periods of time.

Sustainability is one of the keys then.

Most MLB pitchers work about 5 innings or have a total pitch count before they're substituted for, with another 4-5 days off before their next start. Simply put, shorter durations of pitching with longer recovery as a tactic is supported by the previous data.

To Make A Change Requires A Conscious Choice

So what do the Antarctic expeditions and Major League Baseball analogies have to teach us about behavioral changes and improve our productivity?

They teach us that having short, obtainable goals can get us further than running to our limits of endurance or trying to do things only when conditions are near perfect.

So how do we make the incremental changes to have monumental gains?

In a recent blog post on the Psychology Today website, they discuss the problems of changing habits and how to make long-term behavioral changes more effective.

The slant of the article was that there are some concrete steps that have to be taken to make positive changes in our behaviors, and that without these steps, behavioral modification - habit formation - can be extremely difficult.

5 Tips To Make A Change For The Better

1. Decide To Make A Change:  

To make a substantial change, you need to make a clear decision that there is something that needs to change.  It could be something life altering such as eating healthier and beginning an exercise routine, or something minor like waking up 15 minutes earlier every day.  The point is that there needs to be something that you recognize as a problem and one that you want to correct.

The next step after deciding you want to make a change is the hardest.  Believe that change is possible.  If your habit is being late for everything, and you believe that you're destined to be tardy to things, you'll never make that change.  So the struggle is to decide that the bad habit is something that needs to be changed, and you need to change your thinking about tackling that problem.

2. Think About Why The Problem Exists: 

If you're chronically tardy, why is that?  Is it you're easily distracted and lose track of time, traffic is poor in your area, or something else?  It could also be a subtle issue of control - controlling the times of other people's involvement with you, placing a subconscious hierarchy that places yourself over others.  Perhaps it's a subtle grab for attention.  Take a hard look at why tardiness is a chronic condition. If it's attention, think about ways to get that attention in other, more positive ways.

3. Inning by Inning or Step By Step: 

Just as it's difficult to win a baseball game from first pitch to final out, making a behavioral change requires a lot of small, adjustable steps to make it permanent. The focus at this point should be to set goals that are closer to where we're starting off rather than where we plan on ending up.  For example, the article discusses a scenario where if the problem is being tardy by 30 minutes, try to set a more obtainable goal of only being late by 10 or 15 minutes.

By establishing shorter goals, you'll see quick victories and that sense of achievement will build momentum toward the next goal. Master one small step then add on a new step, like climbing a set of stairs. It's the process of meeting small goals on a step by step basis that helps you reach your destination much easier, and much more permanent.

The reason for this is that we are hard-wired in our brains to make regular actions into habits over time.  By making small improvements, we're building the neural pathways that help establish a new routine and that routine is what we're doing to establish new habits.

In other words, think about habit formation as a baseball team.  Win the game with a majority of pitchers in each inning rather than relying on one pitcher to carry the team to the final out.

4. Accept Slip-Ups:  

The mistake that most people make when changing their behavior and habits is that they approach it from an absolutist approach.  Absolutism is the "all-or-none", black or white approach.  The problem with this is that there isn't room for mistakes and slip-ups, which is part of the process of behavioral modification.

One of the biggest mistakes dieters make is focusing on the short-term benefits and goals of changing their eating habits rather than the long-term benefits.  We choose to lose 5 extra pounds and are really good for a few days.

But then we slip up.  And then we beat ourselves up about the mess up.

The absolute approach is one of the problems.

Knowledge is experiential.  We learn by doing, but more important, we learn by making mistakes through trial and error.  Making a change in our habits is a process of learning new behavior through regular conscious activity until it becomes automatic behavior.

Diets that stick are ones that follow the guidelines outlined above. Steps that successful dieters take are deciding to make a change, examining why they've adopted the negative behaviors, to creating a process of smaller victories over large changes.

One other thing that helps lifestyle diets make the biggest change is the ability to understand that mistakes are going to happen.  You're changing a habit, which takes time and concentrated effort, and so mistakes are inevitable.

So the best advice is to plan for those slip-ups.

We can convince ourselves that it's ok to have a "cheat day" once a week.  Over time that cheat day isn't so important, and we can eventually limit those days to twice a month and then to never after we achieve new habits.

5. Make Your Habit Accountable: 

After we realize that there’s a need for change, and we decide to take action, the next step is to make our goals accountable.

There are two ways to make your goals and habits accountable within the guidelines we’ve discussed already.

The first is to make a small table or calendar to chart your progress.  For example, as a writer there’s a number of directions each character could go within the plot of the story arc.

If you write each one out, we end up with pages of unnecessary deviations from the central point and waste a bunch of time.

Perhaps it’s the thought of writing the book in your mind that’s limiting you.  By taking small, decisive steps each and every day, the word count stacks up over time.

A good example is to take a calendar and put a large “X” for every day you write.   Jerry Seinfeld spoke about this as his way of holding himself accountable for his creative work.

What it requires is marking a calendar with an “X” every day you write to a word count or duration of time eventually the calendar becomes blotted by all the marks.

It becomes a tool to hold you accountable, one with its own momentum, a chain of action that you can see and reflect upon. In his discussion of his creative technique, Jerry Seinfeld said, “don’t break the chain.”

The second way to hold yourself accountable is to set your goals and tell others about it.  Ask friends and family to give you subtle reminders any time that they see you slipping up or not making headway in your process.

Be careful about this, however.

Asking friends and family to help you can also become annoying if you only tell them the overall goal.  The further you are from where you want to be the more it will appear to them that you may not be working hard enough.

So give them small goals to help oversee with your behaviors rather than the final destination of your goal.

This is an example why business coaching is such a lucrative profession.  Business coaches work with individuals, typically entrepreneurs, to hold them to small goals for their business and professional growth.

The coaches may have an idea of the overall goal for the business growth, but they focus on more manageable steps that the individual can accomplish.  This helps the entrepreneur stay on task and keep clear metrics in mind.

In Conclusion

We all want to improve at something.  From losing weight, playing a piece of music, to writing and business productivity, setting small manageable goals will help create regular actions that will develop into new habits.

And by taking decisive actions with the help of professionals and friends, we're apt to follow through with our plans, making our goals much more realistic.

It's by deciding what we want to change and the small steps we need to take that the impossible becomes possible.  It's true in sports and business, it's true in writing and other creative endeavors, and it's true with health and fitness.

So decide what you want to change and get started now.