Incremental Progress

There’s a song by Queen called I Want It All. The chorus is: “I want it all, and I want it now.” I’d say there’s an addiction in modern society to immediate gratification. We don’t want to wait. We want what we want – and we want it right now. There’s a movie you want to see? You can find it streaming somewhere. Music? Ditto. New widget? Walmart and Amazon can deliver it to you in 2 days. Hell, we can even order a car online and have it delivered to our front door.  

While there’s a certain level of convenience and a dopamine rush associated with instant results, I’d argue we are forgetting about the value and importance of incremental improvement. The “I didn’t get what I want right now, so I’m not going to bother” syndrome. Most of our pursuits in life (and many of them that really matter) are all about small steps toward a greater achievement.

When my wife and I first started saving for retirement and sought a financial advisor, we invested $2,000. Today, we are comfortably (mostly) retired. That didn’t happen overnight. It took years and years to achieve this milestone. I’ve mentioned our feral dog, Evie. When we first got her in April, she didn’t leave my wife’s office for nearly 4 months. Now, we take her to the park and let her run off leash. That didn’t happen overnight. It took many months of steps forward and steps backward.

It’s sometimes easy to look at a moment in our lives and be frustrated that we haven’t made further progress on this, that, or the other. Living incremental improvement on a daily basis can feel tedious and disheartening at times. It can sometimes feel like we haven’t made any progress at all and we beat ourselves up. For example, we still can’t pet Evie (she does NOT want to be touched), which is a bummer and sometimes makes us feel like we haven’t really moved forward with her. But if we take a moment to step back and look where we were when we started our journey with Evie vs. where we are with her today, it’s mind-blowing.  

It can also be easy to take incremental progress for granted. It’s a little chunk each day that doesn’t seem to have any real measurable impact. I walked another 30 steps today. I did 3 pushups instead of 2. I learned 2 more Spanish words. I ate one less cookie. But each of these little steps have real, meaningful impact. They compound and grow into something amazing. Here’s an example (and you may have heard this before). If you take a penny and double its amount each day (day 1 = 1 cent; day 2 = 2 cents; day 3 = 4 cents; day 4 = 8 cents…and so on) for 30 days, you will have about $5M. For real.

Don’t overhype the immediate gratification, and don’t dismiss the incremental improvement. Take a breath, take a step back, look at how far you’ve come through incremental progress, and celebrate.

Until next week.

Andy

(All written content created the old-fashioned way.)