“One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time.”_John Wanamaker
In case you are wondering, ‘What does he mean by ‘the royal steps of life?’
It’s actually nothing strange, it is something you have already done a long time ago: it is how you learned how to walk. It is commonly known as ‘the baby steps.’
And in this article, I only want to remind you of its importance in our lives as adults. It as a potent strategy of success that we can use and reuse throughout life.
Forgetting or dismissing this idea is one of the reasons why a lot of people fail at turning their lofty ambitions into awesome realities. They set big goals at the beginning of every year but they eventually give up before the middle of the year for one reason or the other.
The cause of failure in many cases is not because of lack of discipline but because of their sole reliance on willpower to tackle their biggest challenges head-on. This usually fails because willpower is a darn limited resource.
So, let’s be humble enough to relearn a timeless principle from determined toddlers. Yes, infants can teach us how to set tiny targets in pursuit of a big goal one step at a time.
As Tom Baker, an English writer personally discovered: “I've learned it's the important little baby steps, which teaches us, how to grow. Moving up just one small notch, will help us more than we know.”
To be clear, I am not telling you not to dream big. You are free to think as big as you can, but when it comes to progression towards the dream, nothing beats baby steps in the long run.
In this sense, your direction is more important than your speed. From the angle of progress, reliable frequency beats occasional intensity, every time. Therefore, choose to be bias for baby steps, and not for the giant leaps.
In the words of a best-selling author of ‘Happy for Reason’ Marci Shimoff. She says:
“To make the quickest progress, you don't have to take huge leaps.
You just have to take baby steps-and keep on taking them.
In Japan, they call this approach kaizen, which literally translates as 'continual improvement.'
Using kaizen, great and lasting success is achieved through small, consistent steps.
It turns out that slow and steady is the best way to overcome your resistance to change.”
If you can master baby steps, then you can facilitate progress toward your most challenging goal and be on the right side of momentum.
Since we learn how to walk by taking countless baby steps; we can succeed at our most daring goals by following the same— simple but powerful— strategy.
We just need to keep taking those steps until our objective is actualized.
