Aiming Small to Achieve Outsized Results — and 3 Rules to Remember

Two things to keep in mind today: 

1. People make fun of things — until they don’t. 

2. People doubt someone’s potential — until they don’t. 

The dash sitting in the middle of each of those two sentences? That is where consistency comes in. Nothing monumental, epic, or outlandish, but routine. 

Achieving something that garners applause is what many of us look to, but that is secondary to the mundane, daily act of showing up for a simple task. 

When I started writing online in 2018, I could count my entire readership on one hand. Though I knew things wouldn’t happen overnight, the lack of traction and audience viewing my writing discouraged me. I couldn’t even convince some of my own closest friends to peek at my website. 

For months and months, when I would refresh my website’s stats, total page views never seemed to move. I know people close to me still who, at the time, saw my blog as something that would fizzle out. 

Everyone’s making a blog nowadays, people told me. And I said yes, I know, but I want to write. 

So I wrote. Everyday and every week. Still my viewership numbers stayed depressingly low — several times, a story of mine would fail to go above zero — but I shifted my focus to the craft of writing. The simple pursuit of not missing days. 

It is difficult to convince others to believe in something (or you) when you’re not yet a proven commodity. But knowing this ahead of time can ease the anxiety of not having the acclaim or applause you think you deserve. It just takes time.

For me, by ignoring my audience numbers and focusing on improving as a writer, my readership ballooned. But by the time this happened, I had already started to see myself as a “real writer.” Soon enough, others did too.

It was the habit of showing up everyday — not improved website stats — that helped me get over imposter syndrome.

I learned early on to focus instead on the process rather than outcomes. I took on the responsibility and obligation of showing up even when, quite literally, no one else would know or see or care. 

Though I’ve never made a penny from Phil’s Next Stop, inking hundreds of stories and thousands of hours has sharpened my hand as a writer and led to other opportunities (like my travel memoir). 

Like you, of course, I have a job and responsibilities that constantly demand my attention. To ensure I hit my writing everyday, I schedule it into my day after work (I do write for a living, but the other writing I schedule in is for this blog, newsletter, or fiction). 

Currently, I give myself a very manageable goal of 15 minutes of writing per day. If that sounds like a small amount to you, that’s because it is. 

By having a modest goal, I have a far better shot at building this goal into my identity: Be the type of person who writes everyday. 

Replace “writing” with whatever it is you want to get better at, then schedule it in with a very small, unintimidating segment of time.

I wrote about this before (and also talked about it in “Five Ways to (Actually) Optimize Your Life and Win” ) — but I refer back to this often. 

By framing my goals as pieces of who I am as a person and who I aspire to be, I’m far more eager to stick to them and take action when necessary. 

Back to the original two ideas: 

1. People make fun of things — until they don’t. 

2. People doubt someone’s potential — until they don’t. 

And one more thing to keep in mind: 

3. Don’t be disappointed in the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t put in. 

Nothing genius or profound here, but a good reminder to rely on yourself, think about which direction you wish to grow in, and then take action. 

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