this is section 2.5 of introspect.

“I always love it when people say ‘baby steps!’ to imply they’re being tentative, when actually baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown.” – @OliveFSmith

It can be useful to compare and contrast different domains in your life, particularly ones where you are successful in contrast to ones where you are unsuccessful. I’m successful at writing. It comes easily to me, it feels abundant, I can write tremendous volumes of text. And a large part of this has to do with the fact that I’m always happy to “just start”. I write lots of tweets. I used to write lots of Facebook status updates, answer questions on Quora, post on forums.

In contrast, I think some of the areas of my life where I’m most embarrassed and ashamed of my are – my many failed attempts at trying to sustain a fitness habit, and my failures with scheduling. And when I think about it, in both of those cases, I get into a silly cycle where I feel really bad about not having done very much for a long time, and I feel compelled to try and “make up for lost time” by going as hard as I can. And this is always a bad idea, because I push myself too hard, and the experience is unpleasant. And while my conscious self might be rah-rah about trying to do more, I’ve come to suspect that it’s my subconscious self that protests the torture, and flinches away from it. And in any drawn-out battle between the conscious and subconscious, the subconscious invariably wins, because the conscious eventually falters.

So I’ve come to believe that a big part of the power of baby steps is about teaching your subconscious that doing small little things is simple, pleasurable, fun.

What people struggle with:

“Basically, you can’t skip steps,
you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time, there are no shortcuts,
but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.”

– Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin

The shame of doing something “too small”.

The funny thing about baby steps is that people very often feel that they’re “too small”. I’ve had many extremely roundabout conversations with people about this. They just feel in their hearts that they should be doing something “big”, even though they haven’t yet actually accomplished anything “small”.

This can be a very tedious conversation to have because people will insist for months and years that, no no, they don’t need to use the light weights, they’re not that weak, they’re not that pathetic, they’re not losers. Just give them the heavy weights and tell them how to lift it. It can’t be done! You can’t lift heavy weights before you first lift the “baby” weights. There is no shame whatsoever in lifting lighter weights.

If anything, if we had to use shame for some reason – and I don’t think it’s helpful, really – mayyybe we should be relatively less ashamed of lifting light weights, and more ashamed of being so arrogant and willful about the weight that we’re “supposed” to lift, that we prevent ourselves from making the progress that we want to see. But honestly, shame isn’t even necessary in this entire operation. We can do without it.

What you can do:

“Life is a series of baby steps along the way and if you add up these tiny little steps you take toward your goal, whatever it is, whether it’s giving up something, a terrible addiction or trying to work your way through an illness. When you total up those baby steps you’d be amazed over the course of 10 years, the strides you’ve taken.”
– Hoda Kotb, NBC news anchor

1. Make a todo list.

[[Journal]]. Quickly put one together in a sketchy draft on a piece of paper or your favorite notes app. If you already have one, you can use that too, although I’m personally always a fan of starting fresh.

2. Investigate each item on the list.

[[Ask questions]]. How big of a task is it? Some people fall into the trap of listing entire projects as todo items. That’s like putting “slay dragon” on your todo list. You want to figure out what the sub-tasks are, which might be “acquire sword”, “practice slaying 10 smaller beasts”, “acquire armor”, and so on. Make the tasks as small and specific as you can. Get into the habit of persistently, repeatedly asking, “What’s the first step?” And then do it.

3. Do lots of little things and articulate what you’ve learned from them.

[[Do 100 things]]. People tend to underestimate how much they can learn from doing small things. If you think that you didn’t learn anything from doing something, try doing it again, a little bit differently. And then pay attention to what was different. That’s where the learning is.

4. [[Celebrate your wins]], however small.

This can seem counter-intuitive. The conventional assumption seems to be something like, celebrations are for big milestones – getting a promotion, getting married, winning a medal or trophy. And certainly, those are things worth celebrating. But small wins are worth celebrating too! In fact, I would argue that they are more important to celebrate, because things are more precious and fragile when they are small. They need encouragement and nurturance even more.

Take Baby Steps

Recognize that cathedrals are built one brick at a time.
Every Olympic gymnast had to first learn how to walk.
They then kept learning.
It might not be realistic to expect yourself to become an Olympic gymnast. But that’s not the point.
The point is to take the next baby step in front of you.
Release any shame or disdain you might have for the “small”. Simple doesn’t mean easy.
You want to measure your progress against what you’ve done so far. Not against what you think you might someday be capable of doing. Done is better than perfect.
It’s okay to make mistakes. You can learn from them.
The only thing that matters is that you take another step.
And then another one.
What’s the next step?