When Progress Means Backward Motion

Progress.

I’ve always liked that word because progress feels like I’m doing something. Something important. Something that matters. Progress means I’m going someplace good.

And making progress is fun because it’s the physical embodiment of that up-and- to-the-right graph that’s prized by researchers the world over.

But thinking about progress can also invoke fear. As a kid, I dreaded the progress report sent home by teachers every four and a half weeks. Was I “on track?” Was I “a joy to have in class?” Did I “spend too much time talking?” That report told me exactly where I stood at that exact moment in time.

So progress is good, but also scary. How much progress we’ve made has implications in a wide variety of fields. We want to see forward movement. That’s why I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when I heard Adam Grant as a guest on Hidden Brain talking about how progress sometimes means going backward.

Wait. What?

Going Back

He said that in order to progress, you need to imagine alternative realities, and sometimes that means you will have to change the way you do things. For example, he said, suppose you want to become a faster typist, but you’ve spent your whole life hunting and pecking. You can hunt and peck all you want, but you’ll never be as fast as the person who learned how to use the keyboard by memorizing the home row and going from there. When you’re introduced to this new way of typing, you’re going to be pretty slow…at first. And that’s okay. You WILL get faster because the new and improved process of learning and the system it utilizes insures a faster typing speed.

Adam said,

Progress rarely happens in a straight line. It typically unfolds in loops. Day by day, it can feel like you're spinning your wheels.

The Downside of Accountability

After a fancy dinner at The Optimist last week, I told my family I was going to “up” my cooking game. No doubt there will be many kitchen disasters on my way to gourmet chef. To be sure, every meal doesn’t have to be a culinary work of art—even though I want it to be! Trying new techniques might feel like wasting ingredients. Taste is nuanced and personal. Everyone in my family can’t be expected to like everything I make.

I used to be a part of a cohort of entrepreneurs. The people in that group proved to be great accountability partners, but our monthly meetings left me feeling pressured to report only what was going well. That wasn’t the intention, of course. My own insecurity is what kept me from being totally vulnerable about the things I tried that didn’t work. But now I know what it means to “fail forward.” What we learn through failure makes the next step possible.

If this is the year that you’ve resolved either to try something new or to get better at something you’re already doing, I hope you find the idea of going backward for a time as a bit of encouragement. I know that doing so feels like the opposite of progress, but when you approach the experience with curiosity about what you can learn through the process, the pain of going backwards feels a little more bearable.

The Science Behind the Theory

I want to leave you with this final thought, and it’s a scientific principle that we can apply to life. A lot of people think speed and velocity are the same thing. The reality is that speed is how fast you’re going, but velocity is how fast you’re going in a specific direction. Adam Grant said that progress can feel like spinning your wheels, and it can if you’re not paying attention to direction.

We all want progress. But..if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.—CS Lewis

Keep going, my friend. Just remember that going backwards might be just the direction you need to take right now.

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How Thinking Small Might Lead to Your Next Big Breakthrough

Happy 2024!

If you’re anything like me, you welcome the new year with open arms. For many, it’s a time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t and to devote at least a day or two to deciding what’s worth taking into the new year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog and what I want my writing life to look like in 2024. While I wrote everyday last year (I have the journal to prove it!), I knew that heading into this year I wanted to be more intentional about what gets shared in this space. To that end, you’ll be seeing some changes. For one, each month will encompass a theme aimed to help you—and me— be more intentional with the work we do. I promise the content will be short, yet helpful.

January’s theme: Goal Setting and Motivation

This week: Think Small

The 1960s ushered in the Creative Revolution in the world of advertising. Bill Bernbach spurned traditional advertising theory and urged marketers to think differently. He said,

“Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.”

— Bill Bernbach

And he didn’t waste any time. His ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle turned advertising on its head by eschewing the flashy pictures and wordy content that had been popular for selling muscle cars for decades. Two words: THINK SMALL accompanied a tiny picture of the Volkswagen surrounded by a whole lot of white space.

This ad campaign, while innovative for the time, might not turn heads today. After all, you and I have grown up in the era of Apple Computers. Minimalism is firmly entrenched, and dare I say—here to stay.

But those words—THINK SMALL—they should cause us to pause. In a world that’s constantly telling us to think bigger, I appreciate someone giving me permission to think small. When thinking big seems overwhelming, take a moment to reflect on the small things that give you life. While you may not be able to spend 2024 going back to school or starting a new business, you might be able to volunteer in a school helping kids to read or maybe you can sign up for a class or workshop to learn a skill you’ve always wanted to try. You never know what big things might be birthed from the little choices you make today.

The Upside of Thinking Small

One of the best things about the Volkswagen campaign was that it was honest. The car was small, slow, and ugly. BUT…it could fit in tight parking spaces, the insurance payments were low, and repair costs were cheap too. Thinking small allows us to be honest about our own imperfections. To be sure, your imperfections are your superpowers!

That last statement may sound trite, but you know how I know it’s true? Because I know people who are facing insurmountable obstacles, who can barely dare to imagine what this next year will look like because of what they already know they are facing down. And yet, by God’s grace, these friends are putting one foot in front of the other and getting through the days, minute by minute and hour by hour. They are thinking small, and by doing so, they are living LARGE.

But I digress.

Why Now

If you wait for the big revelation, just be mindful that it may never come. If you feel like life is busy and that you never have time, chunking down a big goal into smaller daily deposits can be the key to getting you where you want to be in 2024. I know I didn’t do everything I wanted to do last year, but everyday I found time to read one chapter of the Bible, write one page in my daily journal, and practice Spanish for ten minutes. While these small habits won’t win any prizes, they helped me realize that thinking small is about more than habits. Certainly, there’s no shortage of strategy advice about how to make resolutions stick. We don’t need another tip or trick to do that, thank you very much.

This year, when you think small, think about Volkswagen and about how their ad campaign revolutionized the world of advertising. They didn’t do what everybody else was doing, and they changed the world. You can, too.

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A LITTLE NEW YEAR’S ADVICE

Can I have your attention, please?

It’s time for a little New Year’s motivation.

Now, before you groan, complain about yet another email claiming to help you achieve your New Year goals, and delete this email altogether, hear me out.

When I was a kid, spending weekends hanging out at the mall with my friends, there was a store we used to like to visit. Many graduation presents ended up coming from that store. You may remember it—it had the cheesy posters that college students had hanging on their walls. They often took these posters to their first job because—hello— they included such mantras as “There is no I in TEAM” and “The Road to Success is Always Under Contruction.”

My favorite one, though, might be “Your attitude determines your altitude.”

Read that again.

YOUR ATTITUDE DETERMINES YOUR ALTITUDE.

So cheesy! But I can totally see that rocket pointed at the sky and those big words written in a Galactic-like script:

Your attitude determines your altitude.

That was the one teachers liked to drop when anyone started complaining about all those pesky math problems she assigned for homework. “When are we going to use this?” we used to mutter under our breath.

As it turns out, ALL. THE. TIME. (Don’t believe me? Try tripling a recipe to cook for a crowd, comparing prices at the grocery store, or managing household expenses. Just yesterday, Gavin told me there’s no formula he uses more than the one about “percent change.” It’s vital to his business!)

---

ATTITUDE IN SPACE

Anyway, that quote about attitude is more than just a cliche. In the world of aeronautics, attitude isn’t the mood that determines your behavior; it’s the position that determines your destination. To be sure, the sky isn’t even the limit. When you’re riding in a rocket, up and down are totally relative.

When I first heard this, my mind was BLOWN.

Attitude is part of the description of how an object is placed in the space it occupies. Aircraft and spaceships use attitude to determine position. In order for the ship to go in the right direction, attitude must be monitored and controlled. If even a tiny mistake in the way the ship is pointed isn't corrected, the ship can end up millions of miles off course. Expensive equipment would be lost, to say nothing of the astronauts aboard and what that would mean for them!

Behavioral scientists might have hijacked the phrase, but rocket scientists invented it.

An example: Apollo 8 flew more than 580,000 miles and landed just 1.6 miles from its target point in the Pacific Ocean. That mission set the standard for landing accuracy, inspiring eight more Apollo missions that flew all way to the moon and back to land less than two miles from their intended targets. None of this would have been possible without calculations of attitude.

So…let me ask you a question:

How’s your attitude?

Nothing causes remorse quite like the realization that time has run out and you didn’t do any of the things you said you were going to do. Like me, you probably have a general idea about how you’d like this year to go. Maybe you’ve created your own 2023 dream list. But how do you get there?

Let’s get started.

The first and easiest thing to do is to point yourself in the right direction.

Once you’ve got the orientation right, now all you have to do is stay the course. But that’s the hard part. You have to keep going in the right direction. Spaceships stay on course by adjusting attitude with tiny thrusters containing compressed gases. As the thrusters release the gas, the spaceship undergoes micro-modifications to get it back on course.

In my university physics class, we worked a lot of problems that included the phrase “all things held constant” and “without friction.” In real life, though, all things are NOT held constant, and friction, unfortunately, is our constant companion. Something or someone is sure to thwart our best-laid plans. Reading about attitude, however, provides me with encouragement. Even rocket scientists have to continually make adjustments in order to get where they need to be. Mid-course corrections are not only necessary, they are planned.

And that’s good news for us, too.

Constantly evaluating where we are ensures we’re on the right path.

I think sometimes we don’t want to think about the things that might hold us back or the things that could go wrong. But that would be a mistake. As you begin this year, go ahead and plan for the minor adjustments you’ll have to make along the way. When things go off-course, as they inevitably will, what might you need to do in order to get back on track? Planning for setbacks ensures we’re not caught off guard. No one wants to be blindsided by something that could easily be corrected with a tweak here or a nip there, especially when that something could have been anticipated before it even happened.

OK…so how do you do this?

Designate several times throughout the year to check-in with yourself and figure out what needs to change so you can stay on track with your own far-reaching goals. You’ve already heard that writing down and sharing goals increases your chances of achieving them. And that’s true. But don’t just write them down. Review them. Often. Assess yourself. If needed, find an accountability partner. My friend, Jen Soong, and I have been doing this for years. She lives 2,500 miles from me, but once a month we get on a Zoom call and celebrate wins, encourage each other in the places we’ve fallen short, and challenge one another to keep going when the going gets tough.

Every month, Jen helps me adjust my attitude—and in more ways than one!

If you’ve been wondering how I know all this stuff about spaceships and Physics, it’s because I’ve been listening to Michael Collins’ fascinating memoir called Carrying the Fire, about his time as a NASA Astronaut. And if you’ve never heard of Michael Collins, it’s because he’s often called “the forgotten astronaut.” While Buzz and Neil were out frolicking on the moon, he was the guy who had to stay behind, orbit the moon in the command module, and ensure they all got back to earth safely.

I’m cheering for you!

And in the spirit of being cheesy (and space exploration in general), I’ll leave you with a mantra from another poster:

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

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WINSday on Wednesday--Don't Ask "What If?" Do THIS Instead

Who wants to talk about New Year’s resolutions?

Anyone…

Anyone???

I know. It’s not even February, and we’re already sick and tired of talking about our goals.

Hey, I get it.

New year, new you. Whoop-de-doo!

It IS a new year. The new you is up to you.

In fact, one of my favorite questions to ask people—no matter what time of year it is—is
“What is your aspirational future?”

My twelve year-old daughter told me just last week that her resolution this year is to stay exactly the same.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “You’re not allowed to do that.”

Now before you get your pants in a tizzy about me loving my daughter exactly the way she is, let me assure you, I do.
I think she is a wonderful human.
She’s thoughtful, creative, and hard-working.
And I’ve told her as much many times. She knows all this is true.

But she’s also FEARFUL. (And she knows this is true, as well.)

Remember when you were a kid and your teacher would ask a question in class? If you knew the answer, your hand would shoot up in the air. But if you didn’t know the answer or you were unsure or thought your friends were going to make fun of you, then you would look down at your desk or out the window—anywhere you wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact with the teacher.

Questions are scary, and when you operate from a place of fear, all of life feels like one big question:

WHAT IF?

What if it’s too hard?
What if I look stupid?
What if I get hurt?
What if I never figure out how to do it?
What if…what if…what if….

Questions are loaded with anxiety.

So let’s talk about statements instead, specifically what I like to call What I.F. statements.

What I Fear is…

You exercise control over the fear when you frame the fear through the lens of a statement.

Fred Rogers said, “If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.”

Although the emotion of fear is real, the cause may not even be true. That’s why fear doesn’t have to rule your life.

If you can categorize your fear, you can conquer it.

Last year, I interviewed my friend, Jordan Foxworthy. She told me about how when she was a little girl she also lived from a place of fear. She was afraid of so many things! And then one day she just decided to say yes—yes to an overseas missions trip with her dad. Getting on the plane and traveling to a faraway country with customs and language different from her own, she said “YES” and the experience changed the trajectory of her entire life! (You can watch our full interview here.)

Change is scary. Sometimes, I think we actually become more fearful as we get older. Maybe it’s because we can imagine all the ways in which something can go wrong. We know too much. Knowledge isn’t always power.

Sometimes, knowledge is paralyzing.

Jordan, who is now in her late 20s, says she often has to remind herself how far she’s come. Saying “yes” opened her up to the possibility of new experiences.

“My life is more interesting, eclectic, and diverse than my high school aged brain ever imagined it would be.”

Nobody wants to be scaredy-cat., so my daughter and I decided to make a list of a bunch of new things to try this year. She’s learning how to ride a skateboard. This is a big step. After crashing into a mailbox on a bike, I didn’t know if she’d ever trust herself on a set of wheels again. But a bike is not a skateboard. And crashing into a mailbox one time doesn’t mean we’ll crash into a mailbox the next time. Next time, she’ll remember to use her brakes. Problem solved!

We don’t get braver by doing nothing.

What are you scared of?

• Talking to that client?

• Making that career move?

• Ending that relationship?

• Starting a new exercise routine?

• Going back to school?

Name the fear. Surrender to what’s in front of you, and the next step will reveal itself. Resistance is what keeps you where you are.

If your goal this year is to stay exactly the same, then by all means, do nothing. Keep asking those “what if” questions. But if you want the interesting, eclectic, diverse life you’ve always dreamed of, then it’s time to open yourself up to the possibility of saying YES without fear.

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