The power of small changes

It is very difficult to make changes in our life. Once we do master the required energy and motivation, we prefer to do dramatic actions. We may get a huge success, but then find it very hard to maintain this success for a long time. Small changes reduce the risk and increase the success rate. For the enthusiastic readers of this post, I suggest further reading here, here, here and here.

Completion bias

When we need to make a big change in our life, it often consists of many small on-going changes. In theory, we can write a plan consisting of several tasks and then remove these tasks from the list one by one. Many of our students ask for this: a huge schedule to follow that will lead them to full success. This methodology is risky.

There is a completion bias which makes us enjoy removing methodologically items from the to-do list. Each time we remove an item we feel satisfaction. This causes us to focus on the items we remove rather than on what we achieved. If we need to redo the tasks we removed, or skip a task that is irrelevant now but may be relevant after some more training, even if we need to change the list – we feel frastrated.

Some tasks are predictable, and progress in these tasks is easy to aticipate: each step takes a known amount of time and brings us that closer to success. These tasks tend to be mechanical. The high-level creative tasks are by their nature unpredictable. They are influenced by our personality, motivation, inspiration and some luck we cannot even parametrize. One day we will get great results and the next day we will get no progress at all. Planning in this situation is a matter of dynamically revising the plans and finding the best balance between complex trade-offs. Simply crossing away half-baked items will generate too many unfinished tasks, too shallow a fundament to build upon.

Adding and removing tasks within the task list makes us run in place for a while and then fail. We feel we complete many tasks, but that does not bring us closer to our target. As we increase the rate of task list updates we loose control, and eventually risk failing.

Repeating tasks

By doing repeating tasks, revisiting the same subjects several times, we slowly gain mastery of these subjects. Eventually, after a while, we shall cross these training subjects from our diary with a true sense of accomplishment. The focus here is not on finishing a job but learning to do the job better each time we do it until we  ace the job. There is no glory and very little satisfaction during the slow progress. There may be setback and frustration involved. The job will require just enough grit to keep going, and a lot of creativity not to get stuck. Yet these jobs that feel like we are doing the same thing forever, are the jobs that generate huge returns on investment with very low risk.

Writing this blog is just this sort of repetitive hard work for me. Researching is fun. It is not necessarily fun rereading the research results and writing a journalistic article about them. However, there are hidden benefits. Both my research methods and my writing methods improve. I become much better managing my time. The materials I gather will become the backbone of the books I am writing. Interesting people notice me and we generate interesting communication. I would prefer to write a book or a course instead, occasionally I do just that. Very few books that I write pass my go/no go criteria, they become slowly mutating projects for years before they are released. The articles get immediate response quite soon, and this response improves me.

Do not try harder, try different

Creativity is very important part of the progress. If we do the same thing over and over, we will eventually hit a plateau. We will get bored, lack insight and passion, and eventually loose motivation. Passion is fueled by creativity. If we try something different there may be several results:

• We may succeed. Then we should start learn from the success and modify the methodology. We can get a huge breakthrough that we can share with others, or just a small success that will empower us.
• We may fail. Our trust in the current methods will grow, as well as our willingness to use them.
• We may get compatible results. Then we will have alternatives, and gain new understanding regarding what works and what does not work. During my PhD, I generated 3 very different algorithms, which provided similar results, all beating the algorithms then available. When I followed this insight deeper I found that mathematicians cannot always write good papers on empirically proven algorithms, but I found a great job by showing off the results.

Simply practicing is not enough, it is important to gain new insights from the practice. Each time we try something different we may get new insights. Hence fun and passion we get from practice are quite often a welcome side effect of creativity.

You live now, not in the future

If we build a big plan for the future and go step by step, this does not ensure we will successfully finish the plan. Things change all the time, and all of our planning may be futile. A plan is needed so we understand where we stand and where we intend to go, yet on a daily basis, the focus should be on the task ahead. It may be best to modify the plan if we cannot finish the task we do sufficiently well. Small things tend to accumulate. Do get right the small things: the rituals that make our daily habits, the efficiency with which way we perform daily tasks, fulfilling physical and spiritual needs, learning each day something new, daydreaming. All of these things will take away from your “to do” list, but in the long run they will make you more productive. You live now and do what you can to improve your current performance. Your future self will enjoy the accumulative effect of all the good things you do right now. If you happen to finish some “to do” list, simply a new list will come along. In other words, focus on how you do things even more than what you actually do.

Before you reject something, take 5% you agree with

Quite often we reject things that do not conform with our plans and schedules. This is a healthy behavior if your goal is finishing the “to do” list. However, if you really want to improve and learn new things, it makes sense to use all the help we can get. Agreeing to 5% of the thing we want to reject is an interesting creativity exercise. We open up to learn new things and step out of our comfort zone just a bit. With time, 5% changes will build up.

Along our journey, we meet many people. Genuinely agreeing with 5% of what they offer we makje friends and allies. Even if the other 95% do not agree with us, focusing on the instrumental 5% enable healthy brainstorming.

Summary

Making big changes is risky, small changes build up. Creativity is important even in repetitive tasks. Focus on how you do things. Small changes accumulate. They provide huge returns with very low risks, so they are a great investment.