Incrementalism

November 24 2019
By: Terry L. Mathis

When we think of improvement, we sometimes overwhelm ourselves. It is often difficult to maintain the status quo much less to make any significant improvement. An approach that can help to overcome both the anxiety and the lack of progress is to simply break down the improvements into micro pieces. There are quotes ad nauseum about how much better you can be if you only improve by 1% per day and how short a time it takes to write a book if you only write one or two pages per day.

There is nothing wrong with setting minute improvement goals, especially if you communicate the cumulative improvement over time. Was it a football saying that "by the yard it's hard, but by the inch it's a cinch?" But the size of the goal is not the only magic. It is the determination to never skip a day making progress. Inertia exists in our mental state as well as in the physical universe. Rome wasn't built in a day and great results are seldom accomplished instantaneously.