Breaking down big goals into smaller steps is an important move. Ideally spend some time getting clear on your long term goals. Dream big, because if you aim small you’ll only hit small! Once you know what you want, break long term goals into smaller and smaller parts. Eventually you have them broken down into steps you can take immediately, right now, today.
Keep taking those steps and make them part of your daily routine. Unless you do this, and keep doing it, your big dreams will likely stay just that; dreams.
In Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge, he explains that it is the small steps we take every single day which count. We all want the giant leap forwards in life; the breakthroughs, the sudden giant success, but those who achieve in life know that it’s the daily things you do which count over the long term, not the things you wish for.
The breakthroughs come often because of the tiny achievements we have made on a daily basis over time, not from giant leap forwards which comes without any work!
Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing a big goal could be financial and geographical freedom and the ability to quit your job and work from anywhere in the world. That’s a big goal. So you join an affiliate marketing training course and start out promoting something. After a few months you wonder why nothing is happening and so you quit. This is a story which is familiar to many in the affiliate marketing space and around 95% of affiliates quit.
But those affiliates haven’t understood the power of micro habits, or the slight edge. The beginning is always going to be hard. The main problem is people are looking for the “magic bullet” the “instant win” and the giant leap forwards before they’ve put the work in. They want “evidence” that what they are doing will lead them to the promised land of financial abundance and plenty! When they don’t see that evidence, they lose confidence in their direction and stop trying. Quitting is a sure fire method of failure!
Henry Ford said “whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”. So if you’re looking for evidence that something works before doing the work, it probably means you don’t believe you can achieve it. Affiliate marketing does work, but you just have to keep going when everyone else quits to see the first shoots coming through the soil.
Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – The Chinese Bamboo Analogy
The Chinese bamboo tree is a great analogy for affiliate marketing and for breaking down large goals into smaller steps. The plant gestates under the soil for several years. So if you were unfamiliar with the type of plant it is, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s not going to grow! During this time it needs to be fed and looked after and given the right nutrients. After 4-5 years gestating under the soil surface, it can grow 90 feet in a matter of 5 weeks time.
With affiliate marketing this is also true. At first you need to set up your website and your email marketing service. You need to study a marketing method and get people to sign up to your email list and visit your website. Initially, you will only see one or two visits to a website, for example.
See this as a win and celebrate it when it happens. Then you’ll start to see people signing up to your email list. See this as a win, and celebrate it. This is the point where many new affiliates will quit. “What’s the point?” they think, “I’ve not made any money yet and I’ve put in all this work”.
But these are simply the shoots of your Chinese bamboo tree coming through the soil. Most affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 email subscribers on their list. This is because they don’t see the bigger picture. Long term affiliates build email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands. They make sales every single day on complete autopilot. But they stuck at it when they only had a couple of people landing on their website. They kept going because they understood the long term implications of it, and of quitting!
The Power Of Compounding
Taking daily steps towards your long term goals has power over a long period of time. Admittedly, you don’t see the results for a while and it can be tough keeping going when there’s nothing to show. Joining the gym is a good example of this. Most people will join a gym in January after a period of over indulgence in the festive season. They keep up their New Year’s Resolution for a bit, but then there’s nothing to show for it.
Gyms know that most will drop off by March and so they charge a membership fee – see the compound effect of selling subscription products! The main problem is you don’t see results immediately. Even after a few months, your results won’t look amazing. It’s the small daily steps which you continue to do which have a powerful effect over the longer term. Once you start looking for results, you’re in trouble.
The small changes in your body after going to the gym for a few weeks won’t look like much. But compare this to what it would look like if you did nothing!
Summary
Big goals are important because they get your excited, inspired and motivated by a vision of your future you would like to attain. When you choose goals which inspire and enthuse you, they are the right kind of goals. Goals you don’t believe will happen, aren’t good goals because you don’t really believe in them. If you don’t believe in a goal, you won’t take any action in making it happen.
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to attain and written it down, it’s time to start chopping down your large goal into small achievable pieces. If it’s a fitness goal, make a daily schedule you can stick to. But make it so tiny that it would be difficult not to keep it up when you’re not feeling like it. See also what’s better than goals. Micro commitments help you keep the momentum going to achieve your larger goals. They are so tiny, that you can even do them when you’re feeling super uninspired, which will always happen.
For more on goal setting checkout a great book I found online about cybernetic transposition by a guy called Stuart Lichtman.