In November 1979, an Air New Zealand DC10 crashed into the 12,000 FT Mount Erebus, killing all 257 people on board. Due to a navigation system input error, the pilots unknowingly flew off course which put them 45KM away from their planned flight path – sending the plane directly into the side of the mountain.
This tragedy would’ve been avoided had the pilots adjusted the flight path slightly by 2 degrees. Over the course of a flight, 2 degrees makes a massive difference on where you end up.
It’s a lesson for all of us.
Our Lesson
For so many of us, we end up in unfortunate places in our lives due to often small navigational misunderstandings. And the effects of these accumulate over time, rarely seen on the day-to-day – until enough of the impact has accumulated and we suddenly realize we’re not where we should be.
And often when we realize we’re not where we should be we want immediate transformational change. We hunt the internet, books, or ask friends for answers or seek products and services that offer satiating promises.
Marketers know this well and play into desire for immediate change in trying to convince you that by switching to their product or service you’ll immediately become more wealthy, more successful, thinner, happier – more of whatever it is you’ve realized or think you’re not. Even more tragically, we believe them.
But in almost all lasting cases change is slow – whether individual, social, or corporate.
As a manager, I have tried to institute neck-breaking change. It fails, ah, without fail. The push-back reaction to the change is equal to the force of the speed of the change itself. Perhaps this might be thought of as a fundamental law, a ‘Newtonian’ law of change: the resistance to change is equal to the speed in which it is imposed.
On a personal level, whenever I come across a new good idea, I want to implement it. But often these changes aren’t small. And if I try to do it all at once, usually after only a few days, I’ve given up or moved on to something more immediately attractive.
There is a better way.
Instead of trying to make massive changes, make small one-degree changes in the direction of your goals.
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, notes in his acclaimed book, High Output Management, that as a manager (and I would argue that we are the managers of ourselves as well), it’s your job to find small leverage that has the most impact. By finding the right levers to pull, you can have a massive impact. This is one of those levers.
How to Take Take Small Steps to Big Goals
1. You want to figure out where you want to be further out.
You can think of this as a straight line out from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. As a couple examples on a personal level, you might think you want to have a savings of $50,000 or perhaps you want to lose 50lbs. These are the directions you’re heading.
2. Adjust your current behaviour by the smallest amount in the direction of your goal.
Say you want to save $50,000. Then maybe all you do is you get up every day, and you put $1 in a separate bank account (perhaps a locked investment account in which you can’t easily withdraw it).
Now you’ll likely think, “Whoa, if I only put $1 per day in an account it’ll take me 136 years to save $50,000. I’ll never get to my goal!”
You’re right! This is because all you’re seeing right now is the limited one degree of change in the right direction. If you were to change and save nothing, you’d be an infinite number of years away from your savings goal. This one small shift is getting you infinitely closer. Just saying.
On the flip side, you can also start by reducing your costs by $1 a day – say that coffee you buy each day. This also gets you in the direction you want. If you watch your direction shifts (toward savings vs toward spending) you’re actually seeing your future. Because behaviour is so hard to modify, the directional line that you’re currently on will generally determine where you end up.
So make careful selections on the very sligh direction shifts toward your intended goal. This is the way you get there. You start with 1 degree of change into a life changing habit and then once you feel like that’s good, you add another one degree of change in that habit.
Eventually you’d notice that you no longer resist the direction shift. One day, you may wake up and realize that that one change you made weeks or months ago doesn’t feel difficult at all. At this point, you’ll know that your life is now on a new trajectory. Just as a plane might need to bank slightly to get to the right navigation path, you’re also doing this.
3. Link and stack one-degree changes.
Once you’ve acclimatized to the small directional shift, you now can add additional shifts, magnifying the impact. Perhaps in 30 days you up the amount to $5 a day (27yrs to $50,000). In maybe 60 more days, you add up to $10 a day (13yrs), then $20 (7yrs).
This works by constantly becoming one degree better today than you were yesterday. Small changes, even tiny ones, can put you somewhere completely different over the long term.
One-degree changes have the power to transform you over the course of a lifetime. Multiple one-degree changes stacked over time will radically alter your life destination. Be the pilot of your own life, don’t fly off-course, and point it in the direction you want to go. Chances are, you’ll get there.
