How To Trick Yourself Into Completing Your Biggest Goals

We all dream of that one big success: writing a book, going viral, etc.

But almost every time we take that first step towards completing those big, meaty goals, it can immediately seem daunting because of their sheer enormity.

“Where the heck do I even start?” “Why should I even try?” “There’s no point.”

Sound familiar?

Then, even once you’ve started, you hold that first step to such high standards, that if it’s instantly perfect or breakout-successful, you abandon all hope and the castle crumbles before the first brick is laid.

This can happen with any big project—and it’s definitely happened to me.

But, in the past year or so, I’ve developed a new mindset towards these types of goals and have found a clever three-step way to trick myself into achieving even my loftiest goals.

For the purpose of this post, let’s pretend I wanted to write a book.

These are the three key ways you can trick yourself towards success:

1. By forgetting the end goal (we’ll come back to this).
2. By embracing habit over perfection.
3. By believing in the aggregate, not the singular.

Step 1: Forget The End Goal

Metaphorically speaking, many people can’t get past the first few lines. Whether it’s what causes writers block or not, the impending wall of work that stands between them and the last page seems insurmountable.

What if you didn’t think of a book as a single entity?

What happens when you start breaking it down into its pieces. In fact, this first step is all about forgetting the enormity of your big goal in the first place. Let yourself off the hook a bit and start bottoms up, word by word, paragraph by paragraph.

Step 2: Embrace Habit Over Perfection

This is where the next step comes into play. Focus on habitualizing the work that you need to do in order to complete those much smaller pieces.

Sacrifice perfection for the sake of consistency. If you set a goal each day of writing three paragraphs, you now must work to engrain this habit into your daily process. Building a daily habit means you’ll have to sacrifice perfection for the sake of consistency. This is absolutely crucial at this stage.

Step 3: Believe In The Aggregate, Not The Singular

The final step is to believe in the aggregate, not the singular.

No one section (or in this case, three paragraphs) will be so perfect that it can or should stand alone without the others, and that is completely ok.

In fact, this is a much healthier approach and is exactly what you should be striving for.

You’ll ultimately finish the book not because it miraculously appeared on your printer one day as a single, finished object. No, this book will have been the result of an aggregation of many much smaller acts of daily work that in aggregate will create a beautiful mosaic.

The Moral Of The Story

I hope I didn’t lose you too much with the book analogy.

The moral of the story is to start believing in the power of daily habits as your best bet towards completing your biggest goals.

So many of our loftiest ambitions stay just that—ambitions, not reality, mainly because we fail to let ourselves create smaller less-magnificent individual pieces in exchange for waiting for lightning to strike and a burst of superhuman productivity and perfection to hit us.

News flash: it’s not going to happen.