Yesterday my boyfriend showed me a Ted Talk about applying the concept of marginal improvements to fulfill your most ambitious goals. The speaker was a C student in college, with no discipline or motivation to get his work done. He decided to change his habits so that they would work in his favor, rather than against them. His goal was to get better grades. So, he took marginal steps: read just 10 minutes of a chapter, then take a break, go back and do another 10 minutes, take a break, and so on…soon he would finish all of the chapters, then all his homework, then all his studying, and eventually, ace his exams.
I thought about how I could apply this to my own life. Right now there are goals that I want to achieve, but it just seems so damn hard to reach them. What am I doing wrong? Why have I been stuck at the same position, not being able to make progress on any of my goals?
Here are some goals I had for myself:
Get better grades. Specifically, raise my grades to a B+ average. Work towards all B’s, then all B+’s, and one day maybe all A’s. All A’s just means I score higher than the average on my midterms and finals. A more specific goal would be: score above the average on every midterm and final.
Finish one project. Originally, I opted for a data science project: find a question, pose a hypothesis, do some data science, create some graphs, then arrive to a conclusion. After some thought, I opened my horizons and allowed myself to just start any project: create a product or app, learn Javascript so I can create cooler apps, edit and post one Youtube video on my channel, or even just finish one of my drawings. Since I’ve recently created an app using Glide, I’ll move on to the next goal, which is learn Javascript. More specifically: learn the basics of Javascript to create a simple calculator (which is my current Glide app, but I want to use JS to make it better).
Land an internship. There is a lot of pressure for students my age to get an internship to slap onto their resume. Everyone on LinkedIn is obsessed with landing an internship and posting about their accomplishments and doing everything they can to kiss up to LinkedIn celebrities in hopes of landing an internship and it just makes me cringe. I understand why they do it but agh. Cringe.
Well, I was falling into that trap too, not knowing why I wanted an internship or even what I wanted to get out of the internship. I just wanted a goddamn internship to slap on my resume in hopes that it would improve my changes of getting a job. But then I thought a step further: okay, so I have a “handful” of internships under my belt. What job am I actually going to apply for after college? Are they related to the internships? Do I even have any experience from these internships worth mentioning when it comes down to the job interview? What the f%$k do I actually want to do with my life? I needed to do some soul searching.
I knew one thing about myself: I like to make things. I loved making Youtube videos in high school. I like to code, but only when I am making something that I can see in the end and admire the beautiful result. I enjoy making simple apps and tools that improve everyday life. I love to organize and plan things, maybe a bit more than actually doing the things. I also love finding new products, playing with them, appreciating their aesthetically pleasing design, and thinking about what I could do to make them better. Uhh…there’s no “internship” for this.
So maybe I have set the wrong goal in landing an internship. Maybe I should rephrase it to say: work on mastering your craft. This implies that I can do this through an internship, or I could find other creative ways to master my craft. In this way, I relieve myself the pressure and emphasis of finding an internship, and redirect my goal instead to focus on getting better at what I love to do.
Work out more consistently. Not necessarily work out more, but just more consistently. I’m starting to understand the power of consistency, and I have been a huge practitioner of…not being consistent. It’s like Duolingo. I’m not sure if you’ve ever used it (it’s a language learning app), but there are levels you can unlock after finishing each lesson. If you wait too long, the progress you’ve made on each lesson is lost and you have to start over, probably because they assume you’ve forgotten everything. Well, I’ve been stuck on level 2 in French for 3 years. I would go on streaks and just blast through 10 sections in like 2 hours, then get bored and stop for about 6 months. If I had set a goal to just do 1 section a day (which takes only like 10 minutes), but make myself do them CONSISTENTLY for a year, I’d probably be way past level 2. Hell, I probably would’ve already completed the entire thing, become a master at speaking French, moved to Paris to start a new French life, learned 5 new languages for funsies, and…just kidding. At the very least, I probably would have gotten past level 2.
What was I getting at again? Oh yeah, consistency. So I told myself to work out more consistently. I actually did achieve this goal, but not in the way I expected. In his Ted Talk, the speaker talks about making goals work in your favor, instead of against them. During this quarantine, my friend and I decided to start this 2 week workout challenge from some famous Youtube fitness guru. We Facetimed everyday to work out “together”. This was actually quite effective, as we were able to keep each other accountable through Facetime, and unknowingly formed a habit of working out every day, at the same time. We’re past that challenge now and are doing bigger challenges. Amazingly, after 2 weeks, my body looks and feels better than when I worked out (inconsistently) for 10 weeks.
Sorry, this post has gone on quite a bit of tangents. But getting back to the main point, the secret sauce that the Ted Talk speaker revealed to us was marginal improvements. This means giving yourself smaller and smaller tasks until they are small enough for you to easily do them. Don’t even think about that huge lofty goal— you can think about that when you get there. Think about the first step, the very, very first step. Because once you get past the first step, you can go to the next one, then the next one, and then the next, until your last step is the one right before you achieve that final goal. You get an A in the class. You finished writing that book. You became the #1 tennis player in the world. You are now that successful CEO you had long dreamed of as a kid. It all starts with the first step.
So for my own goals, I’m going to work out backwards to find that first step, from biggest to smallest step. (feel free to skip this, this is more of a journal entry I decided to publish on Medium.)
Get better grades?
Get an A on the final. → Get above the average on the final (in physics, the average is usually around 60% on a test). → Study just the material being tested, but study them well. → Read the textbook, but read it well. Google any concept you slightly don’t understand, and leave no stone unturned. → Read a chapter, but make sure you understand every part of it, well. → Read a sentence, and make sure you understand it, until it makes logical sense to you. Do not skim over it you don’t understand.
So there’s my first step: Read a sentence, and make sure I understand it. That’s doable. I can do that.
Land an internship/Finish a project? Seems like a lofty goal. In fact, it sounds more like a wishful thinking. But maybe there is a way for me to achieve this.
Land an internship. → Get an interview. → Do something to differentiate myself to catch the eye of the hiring recruiter. → Add more projects to my portfolio that I can show to the hiring recruiter. → Have one solid project in my portfolio. → Take one of my in-progress projects and flush it out, all the way. (My one project is a prototype app, but I want to make it a downloadable app on the app store). → Learn JS so that I can create my app OR (for a data science project) finish my Udemy data science course. → Do one video lesson (JS or Udemy) a day, until you know enough to get started on your project. → Open my browser to my video lesson, and click play.
My first step: Open my browser to my video lesson, and click play. Hmm, that’s sort of a weird goal to write down on my goals list. But I know I can do it.
I’ll just do these two goals for now, since this post is getting quite lengthy. Anyway, I hope this article helps someone out there, and if not, I don’t mind speaking into the void either. Thanks for reading.
