Isn't achieving goals impossible unless you take action?

Hello, this is Toru.

In conclusion, breaking things down, breaking them down, and breaking them down further makes achieving goals easy.

Things often said in self-help books, such as

"Write your goals on paper and post them up" or

"Visualize your goals strongly"

are words that only people with extremely strong willpower can actually use to achieve their goals.

And most people will likely forget their goals within three days and return to their original lives.

Humans are lazy creatures.
We immediately think, "I want to take it easy" or "I don't want to struggle."

That is something humans have as an instinct, so
it can't be helped.

Of course, I am the same.

I used to be a restaurant manager, and among the administrative tasks a manager has to do, I absolutely hated making the shift schedule.

This is because I had to adjust the requested hours of part-time staff while
creating the schedule,

and it was a tedious task, like trying to fit pieces of a puzzle with no reference image into a frame while checking each one to see if it fit.

Also, the schedule had to be created and published every Sunday for the week after next, from Monday to Sunday, so for a manager, Sunday was a day when I would get home late regardless of how busy the restaurant was.

There is a junior colleague at the company I currently work for who became a manager this year.
The other day, they contacted me saying they wanted me to teach them something.

When I asked, they said they were having trouble because making the weekly shift schedule was taking too much time.

When my junior colleague asked other store managers,
they told him, "Just do it in your spare time,"
but he said,
"In the first place, the only spare time I have on Sundays is my break time,"
so that didn't work.

So, he wanted to know how I used to create shifts when I was a store manager.

What I taught him was to stop trying to create the entire week's schedule on Sunday, and instead to create a plan based on the five days excluding his days off.

To explain it simply:
・Day 1: Get a grasp of the part-timers' schedules.
・Day 2: Create only for Monday.
・Day 3: Create only for Tuesday.
・Day 4: Create for Wednesday and Thursday.
・Day 5: Create for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

By doing this, the work on the first day becomes incredibly easy, and the resistance to the work on the second and third days also decreases.

Furthermore, since you have already completed the work for the second and third days, the resistance to the work for the fourth and fifth days also decreases.

By breaking down the shift-making process in this way, and by starting with light tasks that only take about 10 minutes, you can reduce the psychological burden of the subsequent work.

When my junior colleague put my shift-creation method into practice, he was happy to tell me that his overtime on Sundays had been cut by more than half.

This method is extremely effective when starting something new.

It is a method of starting with something truly small that has little resistance, and gradually increasing it.

For example, let's say you decide to read a 200-page book in 30 days.

Many people make the mistake of breaking it down incorrectly here. They distribute it evenly, thinking, "It's 30 days, so I'll read 7 pages a day."

This is a method that will definitely not last.

People cannot keep going unless the initial hurdle is set incredibly low.
After all, people are lazy...

So, for the first day, just reading the table of contents is fine.
Then, on the second and third days, read one page a day, and on the fourth and fifth days, read one page a day as well.

On the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth days, read two pages; in this way, you gradually train your brain to get used to reading the book.

Then, on the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th days, read three pages, and on the 14th and 15th days, read four pages.

By the 15th day, you have only read 32 pages.
But your brain has become accustomed to reading the book every day.

All you have to do after that is increase the number of pages you read by one page each day.
16th day: 5 pages, 17th day: 6 pages, 18th day: 7 pages... 30th day: 212 pages.

To achieve a goal, it is important to break it down. And by starting with a small half-step and gradually raising the hurdle, you can more reliably approach your goal.

For those who have tried to start something new in the past but gave up quickly.
I think you probably divided the things you needed to do to reach your goal into equal parts.

With that first half-step, it feels like you're still so far from your goal, and you end up thinking there's no way you can actually achieve it.

But by stacking those half-steps, the next hurdle becomes lower, and the path to achieving your goal becomes much shorter.

When you look at this on the scale of a lifetime, a daily half-step might just be an ant's step. But if you really want to achieve a big goal, taking even an ant's step is the right answer, and it increases the probability of achieving your goal.

I recommend that you don't look down on taking an ant's step toward achieving your goal.

P.S. I teach how to earn money on your own, which I learned by stacking up ant's steps.
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