Repeatable<\/u><\/strong>: Repetition is key. While some sub goals are one-shot deals (\\”Enter motocross competition,\\” \\”Introduce myself to world leader\\”), the best sub goals are the ones that you can turn into a regular habit, a flywheel of success. \\”I will go to one support group this week,\\” \\”I will study for half an hour today,\\” \\”I will practice my concentration game this morning,\\” are all tiny goals that will be immensely powerful if repeated over time, like a LASER.
\nAn easy way to get started with these tiny goals is to simply ask, What\\’s the next step? If you want to get free of your anxiety, what\\’s the next step? (Practice your concentration game today.) If you want to start your own llama grooming business, what\\’s the next step? (Spend an hour researching competitors this week.) If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, what\\’s the next step? (Get rid of your semiautomatic weapons.) Then run them through the LASER test, and act.
\nYou already know the laser-like power of these tiny goals, because you\\’ve been practicing them for years. When your fourth-grade teacher gave you daily multiplication drills, when your boss asks you for a weekly status report, when a social media website encourages you to \\”make your profile 100% complete,\\” they\\’re all leveraging the power of tiny goals. In mind hacking, we\\’re now managing ourselves, setting tiny goals rather than having others set them for us.
\nTo paraphrase former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams, \\”How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.\\” Sir Tim Berners-Lee didn\\’t try to swallow the entire World Wide Web; he just took the tiny bite of drafting up a proposal for his boss. Day by day, piece by piece, he built the tools needed for the Web to flourish. You can eat the elephant too, if you focus on taking one bite at a time.
\nPsychologist Richard Wiseman created a large-scale scientific survey involving over 5,000 participants trying to achieve big goals like the ones we\\’ve been discussing: losing weight, starting a business, or learning new skills. One of the key findings was that people who broke their goal into a series of tiny goals were far more successful — in essence, creating a step-by-step plan for getting to their goals. \\”These plans were especially powerful,\\” Wiseman reports, \\”when the sub goals were concrete, measurable, and time-based.\\”141 Focused, in other words, like a LASER.
\nSkillfully defining these tiny goals, then acting on them, gives you a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction. Tiny goals give you confidence to tackle bigger goals. Like a cartoon snowball rolling down a hill (I\\’ve never seen a real snowball do this, but it looks fantastic in cartoons), these little goals accumulate. Doing just a little bit builds your momentum to do more.
\nBut there\\’s another reason to think in terms of tiny goals: it\\’s fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A laser is focused light. Light is all around us: in the sunlight outside, the fluorescent lights overhead, the screen that you may be staring into right now. A laser takes that light and focuses it into a high-powered beam that can cut through steel, destroy missiles from space, or accompany the Allman Brothers. In …<\/p>\n
Focusing Your Mind Like a LASER<\/span> Read More \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifesomeday.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}