Small goals are Goals too
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together” — Vincent Van Gogh
As I launched my financial advisory practice, one of the biggest hurdles I faced was to actually ask my clients for money in return for my work. All my life, I was used to getting salary at the end of every month without ever having to ask for it. I never even asked for any specific compensation hike at year end appraisal cycles. I just accepted whatever was given. Before asking for my fee, I struggled greatly. It required me to deliberate and muster courage. Finally, when I did do the deed, I felt a comforting sense of relief and also felt a strong sense of accomplishment. It was a small goal, perhaps even tiny, but the sense of confidence and positivity it created was tremendous.
There is enough and more talk and material on setting and achieving big goals — the big hairy, audacious ones that could transform your being. Big goals beguile our mind — they are alluring. Stories on people achieving extraordinary goals tend to captivate our imagination like very few other things in life. These goals and the people who achieve them are the main reasons behind most of humanity’s progress. No wonder big goals get all the press. All power to those folks who are able to aim and achieve big. But such people are generally exceptions — either they are built that way or circumstances turn them that way or perhaps some other reason but surely they are rare to come by.
The transformative power of small goals is the biggest casualty at this altar of big goals. Small goals simply have no chance of appeal. Without any intention of diluting the significance of big goals, my focus in this blog is on the transformative power of small goals.
“Big Things Happen When You Do the Little Things Right” ― Don Gabor
I can think of a number of powers of small goals. One of the biggest such powers is the accessibility of achieving them. Small goals don’t overwhelm. They are relatively easy to accomplish. Once you accomplish something, anything, it emboldens you with confidence. It also gives you a sense of relief and accomplishment. This could make you eager to look for your next challenge, likely a bigger one. This creates positive momentum. If care is taken to sustain this self-reinforcing cycle, this can become a pathway to take on your biggest goals.
Small goals do not feel like external impositions that somehow have to be dealt with. They can become organic part of your regular life. They can be taken on in your everyday stride. Although you may start out dealing with them at behavioural level, they could be pushed down to the structural level of your life. For example, you may have a small goal of waking up 30 mins before your regular wake-up time — say at 5:30 AM instead of 6AM. You start out treating this small goal as an inorganic imposition and set up alarm for 5:30 AM. You will definitely feel some discomfort through most of your morning due to 30-minute deficit in your sleep. However, with time, you will likely end up incorporating this into the structural setup of your life by going to bed half an hour early. Perhaps, you may not even rely on an alarm clock after some time. This way, in small, almost invisible ways, small goals can cause sticky structural changes to your life — they create positive operational leverage.
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” — Confucius
Big goals can be thought of as a series of small interdependent goals and you may focus on one small, achievable goal at a time. Accomplishing big goal is a tough, painful project. In contrast, a small goal is not a burdensome curse but an everyday task or an errand. Small goals can spur you into action while big goals could scare you into excuses. Small goals take advantage of our propensity for instant gratification whereas big goals rely on tenuous willpower to delay gratification. Small goals increase bias for action whereas big goals increase bias for procrastination.
Bottomline
“Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.” — Adolphe Monod
Small goals are not just easy to accomplish but also hold potential to transform your life. Over time, the habit of taking on small goals and accomplishing them consistently could get embedded in your attitude and therein lies its power. A much more accessible and reliable approach to achieve big things in your life, is breaking down your big goals into byte sized smaller goals and then building a habit of achieving them on daily basis and eventually pushing down these habits into your disposition. While your conscious brain may rationalize that big goals help you focus energy and resources on the right priority items and thereby help you make progress, it is actually the subconscious attitude underlying your everyday actions that get you real progress.
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Thanks for taking time to read this. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals and desires. I share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, please do share it with others — of course, only if you do not mind it.
A bit on my background
I worked in India and the USA with most of my work experience with large global organizations. My last corporate role was the Head of Technology for “Treasury and Trade Management Solutions” for Citigroup South Asia cluster. At Citi, I set up from my Business Unit and grew it from a team size of 1 to over 1900 Citi employees in a span of 7–8 years.
I quit Citi in 2021 to focus exclusively on my interest area of improving decision making. In the last 2 years, I studied this topic closely and developed a training course to systematically improve decision making ability. I’m also an Investment Advisor (RIA) registered with the Securities and the Exchange Board of India (SEBI). As an RIA, I analyze and prepare financial plans to help people achieve their financial goals.
I have done MBA in Strategy and Finance from Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota and B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.
More about me
Rama on Linkedin (CV and Blogs)
