One Step At A Time!

Not as big as the actual guy, but a lot more fun!

Confession time: I am a comic book geek at heart.

This weekend, I had some free time, so I decided to build a new Galactus Lego set that I had just bought. As you can see from the picture, I finished it! It wasn't that big of a set to build at just under 500 pieces, but the instruction book was a monster! There were over 162 steps to follow in creating this masterpiece, and the instructions were almost 60 pages!

It could have gotten frustrating quickly. All I had to do was look at those hundreds of loose pieces in front of me and flip through the 60 pages of instructions. That would have demotivated me in record time, and I probably would have put it all back in the box and set it aside for later. Instead, I just started on page one, took my time, and eventually finished.

When you have a big goal in your life, it can quickly become intimidating if that goal is challenging enough. You can look at where you are and then look at what you hope to accomplish, seeing the big journey that lies ahead. You realize you won't reach that goal today, or even this week or month, and it can be hard to push on. However, I've often written that I'm a firm believer in setting goals, as seen in this article.

Here are three things to keep in mind when facing a stretch goal:

1) Plan the journey carefully. What do you need to do first? What are the vital things that must happen early on in the journey to keep you moving forward effectively? For instance, if your goal was to get out of debt, an early step might be to take an honest look at where you are spending money and what needs to be cut back. Perhaps creating a budget to follow should be one of the first things you do. Or if you want to go on a dream vacation, exactly how much will you need to have saved before you can go? Research plane tickets, hotels, food, and other expenses.

2) Give yourself the freedom to make mistakes along the way and to correct them. For me and that Lego set, I tried to take my time, but I still missed a few important steps along the way and had to backtrack to find exactly where it went wrong. Then I fixed it from that point and continued forward. If you make mistakes along the way, don't get frustrated and quit. You can't give up just because it wasn't easy. Very few people get everything right on their way to reaching their goals. The secret lies in continuing to take that next step forward, even if you just took two steps back. Which brings me to my final point...

3) Take it all one step at a time. And here's where it can get frustrating. We often want to take giant leaps forward and see huge gains all at once, but it seldom happens that way. Reaching your goal will happen through a series of single steps, some big and some small. The key is persistence and progress (here's another article about that at this link). Even if you just feel like you've taken a single step this week, it's still progress!

I know it might seem silly to compare a huge goal journey to a simple toy construction, but the process is similar. Put your eyes on the prize and keep moving toward it. You may not reach it today, but keep going, and you can finish that masterpiece!