Dear Reader,

How many times you saw one of your proposals (when it was a reasonable one) rejected because “Yes, but it doesn’t solve the problem straight away”. “Yes, but the problem is bigger than this”. “Yes, but it does not add up fast enough”.

I’d like to kick those people “in their buts“, so to say.

Why?

Because they show a negative attitude: working for finding faults rather than positive aspects.

Because discarding a proposal without showing a clear reason is annoying and silly; it would be more mature and useful to make a list of all solutions and evaluate them later, one by one, one against the other.

Because rarely there is a silver bullet that can solve our problems in one grandiose, masterful single stroke.

Now, don’t get me wrong: in front of every problem my opinion is that you should look for two aspects:

  • the silver bullet (a.k.a. the ingenious solution no one ever thought about)
  • the fatal error that causes a proposal to become impractical (the moot point, the single point of failure, the hard-to-find mistake in the calculations).

However, when none of these is in sight, it may help to consider what follows.

Your work, your craft, your life are typically made up of thousands of small facets, every one of them contributing (alone or in synergy with the others) to the productivity, the quality, your well-being. In the absence of “big things” (or after having set them all in place), “small things” (i.e. what remains) have to add up.

The “small things” in your life are probably just too many to practically keep track of. For sure there are too many to consciously think about all of them in every single moment of your daily life. To write an example would be an exercise in silliness: “Have I greeted Ms Potterson with a smile? Am I walking with the right posture? Is my concentration flickering? Am I breathing at the right frequency? Am I sure this is the route from the door to my desk or do I need to go through my mental map of the floor? Am I putting the right attitude into the matter at hand?”

We, humans, are creatures of habit. Luckily for us, we don’t need to apply mental effort about the aspects described in the example above. I know that I greet people with a smile, that I walk with the proper posture, and I don’t even possess a mental map of my floor!

For me, getting into a habit is a double win: for once, it frees you of the cognitive load of remembering to do pretty much everything. Second, it harnesses the power of time at your service. Every little action, repeated over and over, gets good results. Ten push-ups a day don’t sound like too much? Make them 3650 a year, then tell me how you will feel after those workouts! Write 50 words every day, and come here to say how your writing skill improved! I’m not going into a tirade of silly examples, that you can probably make up of your initiative. However, as a starter, let me point you to the book The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, that explains in details how habits work. Many more books, especially productivity ones, deal with habits, and for a good reason: habits work for you, they can bring fantastic results with little efforts.

I want to conclude with advice that is the results of many failed attempts to get into habits. Sometimes, you will stop developing a habit. You will skip one day, then two days, you get back to it then you skip three, you go on a business trip and… oh shit, I stopped doing it! There is nothing to worry about. You can be hard on you if you feel like that would help, but that is a sort of lamentation that brings nowhere. Instead, do the only thing that you can do: analyse if there is any cause for your dropping out that you can work on, then start again. Over, and over, and over, for as many times as it is needed.

The best habit you can develop is the habit of always starting.

Until next time, take that small step forward.